Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

With a warming rate twice of the global average, Canada is at the forefront of Climate Change (CC) impacts. Regardless of the problem in hand, the process of Climate Change Impact Assessment (CCIA) relies on certain mathematical tools called Impact Models (IMs) that link the relevant climate and non-climatic drivers (e.g. temperature, precipitation, reservoir operation) to the impacts under consideration (e.g. streamflow). Despite progresses made, still major gaps remained in CCIA due to limitations in current IMs. First, for some hydroclimatic processes, there might be no suitable IM available, at least at some relevant temporal and spatial scales. Quite contrary for some others, second, there might be several competing IMs that remain unfalsifiable relative to one another; however, their future projections under the same future scenario can be significantly different. Even if the single best IM can be identified for a problem, third, the established IM may be too complex due to existence of several internal variables and/or feedback processes. The complexity in IMs limits communicating the findings of CCIA with decision makers, and accordingly, the uptake of adaptation and mitigation strategies identified by the CCIA. Here a transformative research agenda is suggested for implementing the theory of causal reasoning for developing, validating and communicating IMs and shifting the current CCIA toward an integrated framework for a Causality-based CCIA (CCCIA). This long-term ambition will be pursued in this Discovery Grant through revisiting some of the ongoing activities in the Principal Investigator's lab around understanding CC impacts on landscape FT, natural and anthropogenic hydrologic processes, and Coupled Land-Atmospheric Functions (CLAFs) in urban lakes and wetlands. Using these three testbeds, new tools will be developed for (1) representing causality between drivers and impacts; (2) validating inferred causality in competing IMs; (3) communicating causality represented by complex IMs; and moving towards (4) representing causal feedbacks using a generic system-based approach. An integrated 5-year research program including three Work Packages (WPs) and total of fourteen tasks and thirty two milestone, which involves twenty two HQPs partially funded by this proposal and recruited across all university levels by rigid consideration of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) principles, is designed to pursue these four objectives. The envisioned activities have real-world implications for identifying CC adaptation and mitigation strategies in considered testbeds. Together, activities envisioned in the three WPs provide a unified framework for CCCIA that can be used in other problems and/or different regions. HQPs trained in this research program will be acquired with a niche technical expertise and will be mindful of EDI principles. These hard and soft skills enable them to perform well as CCIA experts in a warmer and everchanging world.