OpenCLIM: A national scale framework for evaluating the effects of climate change for socio-economic scenarios and adaptation policies
Authors: Butters Olivia , Robson Craig , Smith Ben 
Published: February 2023

Evaluating the impacts of climate change, be that on health, critical infrastructure, biodiversity, agriculture, economic impacts or any other sectors, requires a multi-sector, multi-scenario analysis.&#8239; Such analysis is only possible though integrated impact assessment models within a framework architecture&#8239;that can handle the associated complexities of generating harmonized results from a heterogenous set of models and drivers. Addressing these challenges, the&#8239;OpenCLIM framework has been developed to collate existing models from across sectors to form an open,&#8239;extensible&#8239;framework, which explores the impacts of climate change in a consistent, -scenario and -scale approach, using Great Britain as a case study.&#160;Domain-based,&#8239;siloed approaches are no longer suitable for assessing climate change impacts and integrated assessment platforms where&#8239;compound&#8239;cross-sector risks can be assessed are&#8239;now integral and expected. To this end,&#8239;the OpenCLIM project has developed a novel, open framework, enabling the hosting of models for assessing climate hazard risks and&#8239;potential impacts. The nature of the framework enables the coupling of disparate models to explore&#8239;challenges considering trade-offs between possible&#8239;interventions, such as the change in risk from increased temperatures when flood management&#8239;infrastructure&#8239;policy is applied to reduce flood&#8239;risk, or&#8239;the density of new&#8239;buildings is changed.&#160;Implemented on the&#8239;DAFNI (Data and Analytics Facility&#8239;for National Infrastructure) platform, the framework uses the concepts of workflows in which models can be coupled&#8239;and run with data and parameterisation passed between models while datasets are available&#8239;within a shared data archive.&#8239;A set of tools, or adaptors, to support coupling&#8239;enable the ease of use and integration of new models into existing workflows, new workflows, or coupling of existing workflows. This&#8239;flexible framework creates a powerful integrated impact assessment model,&#8239;and when coupled with accessible data resources, such as climate scenarios and socio-economic datasets, offers a platform for assessing the impacts of&#8239;climate change across domains.&#160;An example of the&#8239;OpenCLIM platform is the assessment of the impact of flooding using the City Catchment Analysis Tool (CityCAT). Climate projections suggest a global increase in extreme rainfall events and the&#8239;subsequent impact of flooding. Considering socio-economic changes to the urban environment, the&#8239;OpenCLIM workflows&#8239;couple&#8239;future narratives for the urban landscape&#8239;with flooding events of varying durations and intensities. Cost damage curves are then applied to assess the indicative economic cost of damages,&#8239;facilitating comparisons between population density changes, climate extremes and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies/adaptation options.&#160;The OpenCLIM&#8239;framework exemplifies an open, extendable, flexible integrated assessment model for climate impacts enabling cross-sector&#8239;and compound risks to be assessed from human,&#8239;nature, and economic aspects.&#8239; The concepts&#8239;and tools&#8239;explored and&#8239;resolved within the framework, although initially with&#8239;a GB focus, are&#8239;applicable beyond these bounds where models and data exist.&#8239;&#160;