Authors: Several
Year: 2020
Content: IV Cross border conference on climate and coastal change. Extended abstracts
Contactt: biblioteca@azti.es
Download: Descargar RIM_27_1 (12MB)
Summary:
Uhinak is a cross-border climate change and Atlantic coastal symposium promoted by Ficoba and AZTI, and its first edition was held in 2015. Since the 2016 edition, the conference is biennial and addresses how climate change and extreme phenomena impact the coast. It focuses in understanding the needs of stakeholders and decision makers and putting forward solutions with the contribution of the scientific world. To this end, Uhinak aims to establish and strengthen a network between experts, managers and users of the sea and the coast that facilitates the search for solutions for mitigating the effects of extreme climate. Maintaining its central theme, Uhinak has been growing in its territorial area, first centred on the Basque coast, and then encompassing the entire coast of the Bay of Biscay and now the Atlantic arc. Since the 2018 edition, a special issue dedicated to the congress has been published in the Journal of Marine Research (RIM), edited by AZTI.
Since the last edition of the symposium in 2018, three major milestones have marked the advancement of knowledge of the effects of climate change on the seas and coasts. First, the publication of the special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019 on “The Ocean and the Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. This report warns about scenarios of global sea level rise higher than estimated in previous reports and a transition to unprecedented ocean conditions. Secondly, the greatest recognition given to the carbon stored in marine sediments, the so-called “blue carbon”. Recently, knowledge of the role of certain coastal ecosystems as large carbon sinks has been transferred to managers and politicians as “nature-based solutions” for climate change mitigation, through the conservation and restoration of these habitats. The third of the milestones is local, but of great importance. It is the beginning of Urban Klima 2050, an Integrated LIFE climate action project that brings together 20 entities from the Basque Country over the next 6 years. This project is launching a marine and coastal climate change observatory and is implementing 40 measures to adapt to climate change throughout the territory.
These three milestones are the context on which most of the presentations of Uhinak in its fourth edition will be discussed on the 4th and 5th of November. We will have 11 invited expert seminars and more than 40 communications, structured in four sessions covering the challenges of the climate emergency of the Atlantic coastline by 2050, adaptation measures to extreme coastal events, the role of blue carbon in climate change mitigation, and global governance as a management tool.
