For the upcoming Fourth Climate Change Assessment, California will use EPA’s updated climate model, the Integrated Climate and Land Use Scenarios (ICLUS) version 2 (v2), as a basis for land use scenarios in California, with minor modifications as necessary. These scenarios will be used across multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral research that informs the Fourth Assessment.
“It is extraordinarily beneficial to climate planning in California to be able to rely on tools, like ICLUS v2, to provide a federally-vetted baseline for coordinated climate assessment research,” said JR De la Rosa, Special Assistant for Climate Change, California Natural Resources Agency.
ICLUS v2 uses the latest census, land use and land cover datasets to model population growth, residential housing changes, and commercial and industrial development nationally to the year 2100. Projections use information on fertility, mortality and international immigration rates, that are consistent with global storylines (e.g., Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) used in climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation assessments. In addition, ICLUS v2 projections use information on domestic migration, including how future climate may make certain places more desirable. Combined with expanded land use classifications and allocations, the updates represented in ICLUS v2 will help the state of California better assess potential future impacts from climate change and prepare adaptation and mitigation responses.
EPA researchers developed national population, land use and impervious surface projections that the state of California used in its Third Climate Change Assessment.
