Impact of climate extremes on ecosystems and human health in Brazil: PULSE-Brazil

Resumo

The general aim of this NERC-FAPESP joint proposal is to create the PULSE-Brazil system (where "PULSE= Platform for Understanding Long-term Sustainability of Ecosystems") for analyzing, visualizing and understanding the interactions between climate, ecosystems and human health in Amazonia. Our mission, in developing this system, is to facilitate the analysis and interpretation of complex data, by academics, the general public and policymakers. PULSE-Brazil will enable these stakeholders to explore the consequences of different policy options for adaptation and mitigation of environmental change in the Brazilian Amazon. Specifically, the objectives of PULSE-Brazil are to: 1. support collaboration between UK Universities, the Met Office, FIOCRUZ - Brazil, the University of Minas Gerais - Brazil, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) - Brazil, Brazilian State Governments and the wider international community on topics related to the impact of climate extremes on ecosystem and human health and potential mitigation and adaptation strategies; 2. develop and evaluate a spatially explicit database of recent climate extremes and their impacts on ecosystems and human health to establish the relationships between climatic variables and environmental and human health data; 3. provide future climate change projections for Amazonia using state-of-the-art regional (Eta) and global climate models (MBSCG and UK Met Office-Hadley Centre models), covering a range of emission and land-use scenarios (through an associated Brazilian-funded project); 4. develop a user-friendly GIS-based tool capable of integrating information of recent extremes and their impacts on ecosystems and human health (02) with relevant physical climate variables and metrics from future climate projections (03), supporting stakeholders (i.e. the public in general, government officers and decision makers) and educators to develop their own understanding of the interactions between climate, ecosystems and human health in Amazonia, and ultimately, explore the consequences of different policy options. (AU)