4° C + or more: Swiss landscapes under climate change

According to current climate scenarios for Switzerland and for the 21st century, strong changes in temperature and precipitation patterns are anticipated. These changes are likely to profoundly transform existing landscapes, which calls for caution as these landscapes and their diversity represent a key resource for Switzerland's life quality and economy. Thus, transformations in typical (cultural) landscapes induced by changes in climate can have undesirable social and economic consequences, which in turn are exacerbated by the fact that public policies are typically sectorial.

Despite the importance of landscapes for Switzerland, their possible modifications in response to climate change have so far only been the subject of a limited number of studies. To date, the necessary knowledge and tools are therefore lacking to raise public awareness about the evolution of Swiss landscapes in response to climatic changes. Such tools would also help the formulation of cross-sectoral public policies likely to contribute to the preservation of unique landscape features that are essential for Switzerland. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to develop tools to understand, track, and anticipate landscape transformations as well as the changes in the services these landscape offer to society. In this context, the landscape indicators are interesting because they describe the evolution of landscapes in an objective manner and thus constitute decision-making aid instruments. This project developed scenarios about possible effects of climate change on the most important landscape types of Switzerland and enabled the animated visualization of these effects for communication and awareness raising purposes. The scenarios included two different strategies how politics and society could adapt to climate change: a) slow and reactive adaptation, and b) anticipatory and proactive adaptation. The project focused on two case study regions of typical Swiss landscapes: i) Entremont (VS) as a mountain region in the Swiss Alps, and ii) Seeland (BE) as a lowland region on the Swiss Plateau.

The project the following products: - Storylines based on literature and expert consultations conveying perceived landscape changes (published in a WSL Report in German and French); - Interactive maps predicting landscape changes for the periods 2050 and 2100 for the two case study regions using projections of landscapes as well as biophysical indicators and landscape services; - Visualizations of the potential landscape changes in interactive 360° panorama pictures and teaser videos for the two case study regions.

This project is a collaboration between the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mountain Research of the University of Lausanne (ICMR), the Fondation Jean-Marcel Aubert in Champex-Lac, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment, the Swiss Foundation for Landscape Conservation (Fondation suisse pour la protection et l'aménagement du paysage), and Ikonaut GmbH.

See how Swiss landscapes will look like in 2100.

Download land-use/land-cover maps of Switzerland for the future.