Editing IPCC:AR6/SROCC/Chapter-6 (section)

=== 6.7.3 Risk Management and Adaptation ===

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The numerous potential impacts of AMOC weakening (see Section 6.7.2) require adaptation responses. A specific adaptation action is a monitoring and early warning system using observation and prediction systems, which can help to respond in time to effects of an AMOC decline. Although it is difficult to warn very early for large changes in AMOC to come, notably due to large natural decadal variability of the AMOC (Boulton et al., 2014), the observation arrays that are in place may allow the development of such an early warning system. Nevertheless, the prospects for its operational use for early warnings have not yet been fully developed. In this respect, developing early warning systems that do not depend on statistical timeseries analysis of long observational record might be seen as an important research goal in the future.

Decadal prediction systems can help fill this gap. Skilful prediction of AMOC variation has been demonstrated on the multi-annual scale (Matei et al., 2012) and retrospective prediction experiments have demonstrated that the large changes in the SPG seen in the mid-1990s could have been foreseen several years in advance (Wouters et al., 2013; Msadek et al., 2014). The World Climate Research Programme’s grand challenge of launching decadal predictions every year (Kushnir et al., 2019) is an important step towards anticipating rapid changes in the near term and can drive decadal-scale climate services. For example, a few studies have already shown that small variations anticipated by decadal predictions (e.g., Sheen et al., 2017) can be useful for the development of climate services, notably for agriculture in south and east Africa (Nyamwanza et al., 2017). Decadal predictions also match the decision making time horizons of many users of the ocean (Tommasi et al., 2017b) and are expected to play an increasingly important role in this sector in the future (Payne et al., 2017).

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