Climate change impacts and implications: An integrated assessment in a lowland environment of New Zealand

New Zealand's mixed economy includes a range of sectors (e.g. primary production, energy, tourism) that depend heavily on the state of natural resource capital. This makes the economy heavily dependent on future global climate change and the global economic situation. In this paper, we present a framework to evaluate socio-economic and environmental impacts of future climate and land-use change, and give results for one scenario in a typical lowland environment in New Zealand. The future scenario was designed as a combination of global climate and socio-economic assumptions, along with New Zealand-specific policy assumptions. We evaluated the impacts and implications of this scenario through an integrated assessment using both a quantitative and narrative approach. The quantitative results were obtained using biophysical models operating at a sector (primary production) and landscape level (e.g. water supply, pest risk, wetland vulnerability). These results were then interpreted and projected in a narrative form for different elements of the scenario (e.g. population, economic development, environmental factors, and technological development). This framework is very flexible and can be applied to the evaluation of a wide range of other scenarios and assumptions.