Editing IPCC:AR6/WGI/Chapter-Atlas (section)

===== Atlas.2.4.2.5 Dedicated Climate Change Assessment Programmes =====

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Communication aimed at informing the general public about assessed scientific findings on climate change have a different purpose and format than if intended to inform a specific target audience to support adaptation or mitigation policies ( [[#Whetton--2016|Whetton et al., 2016]] ). The growing societal engagement with climate change means IPCC reports are increasingly used directly by businesses, the financial sector, health practitioners, civil society, the media, and educators at all levels. The IPCC reports could effectively be considered a tiered set of products with information relevant to a range of audiences.

The Interactive Atlas does provide access to a collection of observational and modelling datasets, presented in a form that supports the distillation of information on observed and projected climate trends at the regional scale. Access to the repository of underlying datasets enables further processing for particular purposes. As noted above, it is not the intention nor the ambition of this IPCC assessment and the Interactive Atlas component to provide a climate service for supporting targeted policies. For this an increasing number of dedicated climate change assessment programmes have been carried out, aiming at mapping climate change information relevant for adaptation and mitigation decision support.

For instance, [[#EEA--2018|EEA (2018)]] provides an overview of European national climate change scenario programmes. Most of these use CMIP5 (or earlier) global climate change ensembles driven by an agreed set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios, followed by downscaling using RCMs and/or statistical methods, in order to generate regionally representative hydro-meteorological indicators of climate change. In some cases, output of selected downscaled global and regional models is provided to users ( [[#Whetton--2012|Whetton et al., 2012]] ; [[#Daron--2018|Daron et al., 2018]] ). Uptake by users is strongly dependent on providing justification of the selection or for the downscaling procedure and if further steps are needed to tailor the information to local scales ( [[#Lemos--2012|Lemos et al., 2012]] ). More comprehensive programmes provide probabilistic climate information by careful analysis and interpretation of ensembles of model outputs ( [[#Lowe--2018|Lowe et al., 2018]] ). The information is generally tailored to professional practitioners with expertise to interpret and process this probabilistic data. This top-down probabilistic information chain is not always able to highlight the essential climate change information for users, and alternative bottom-up approaches are encouraged ( [[#Frigg--2013|Frigg et al., 2013]] ). [[IPCC:Wg1:Chapter:Chapter-12#12.6.2|Section 12.6.2]] assesses climate services including the national climate assessments and user uptake.

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