16 Accounting for Health Impacts of Climate Change Box 3 Constraints to Identifying and Quantifying the Impacts of Climate Change in Nepal The data and information on climatic events and health impacts in both soft and hard forms are limited, which pose the crucial problem and challenge for health planning in Nepal. If available, the data is either limited or generated for specific project purposes and therefore cover limited areas. Owing to a lack of adequate information, most of the planning and decision making is taking place on an ad-hoc basis with limited concerns to long-term outcomes. The following basic constraints with regard to climate change events and health impacts have been identified: • There exist limited stations for recording data on weather, hydrological, and environmental phenomena. They now are available only for major urban areas. Rugged topography, remoteness, and drudgery of movements have further aggravated the problems of gathering data. • There is a lack of solid and reliable information and analysis relating climatic events and human health. As a result, it is difficult to establish cause-and-effect relationships between them. Projecting the future impacts of climate change on health is difficult. • Various government ministries (health, environment, water resources, home affairs, etc.) have collected data on climatic events and health, but there has been a lack of integration and coordination to link the data nature, size, quality, and methods among these bodies. The most general constraint with all these organizations is the very limited budget allocated for establishing databases, as well as limited research activities to generate information on climate phenomena and health. Few studies on adaptation measures for weather- and climate-related disasters have been undertaken. Climate extreme indices and indicators for monitoring, regional climate modeling, glacier risk reduction, etc., do not provide adequate information for climate change adaptive measures. Source: Pradhan, B. 2010. Key Sector Analysis: Health Adaptation in Nepal. Mimeo. Kathmandu. Quantifying the future health impacts of climate change requires a number of different steps, each fraught with its own difficulties, uncertainty, and incomplete information. This report proposed a methodological approach, presented in Figure 9. Without being exhaustive, these steps include: (i) (ii) Selecting an emissions scenarios. The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios was prepared by the IPCC for the Third Assessment Report (2001), on future emissions scenarios to be used for driving global circulation models to develop climate change scenarios. There exist 4 broad families of emissions scenarios (A1, A2, B1, and B2) with the A1 emissions scenario comprising 3 different subsets (A1F1, A1B, and A1T). These scenarios differ as to the assumptions pertaining to economic growth, population growth, the adoption of new technologies, and the degree of integration among nations of the world. Different emissions scenarios provide different estimates of changes in climate, and (all other things being equal) different estimates of climate changes will provide different estimates of the future incidence of health impacts. In a recent study of the potential impacts of climate change in Southeast Asia, ADB (2009a) used the A1FI and B2 emissions scenarios. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, A1F1 represents a high emissions scenario (rapid, fossil-intensive economic growth), and B2 represents a medium-case scenario. A World Bank study (2010) uses the A2 emissions scenario. Recent empirical evidence indicates that actual greenhouse gas emissions tend to follow emissions levels projected by high emissions scenarios of the A1 family. Selecting a global climate model or general circulation model (GCMs). GCMs are computer models used to simulate the earth’s climate systems. GCMs are the main tools used to project future climate changes due to the continued anthropogenic inputs of greenhouse gases. The major advantage of using GCMs as the basis for creating climate change scenarios is that they estimate changes in climate for a large number of climate variables in a physically consistent manner such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and solar radiation. However, (a) GCMs typically provide projections at a scale in the order of hundreds of square kilometers, which in