Assessment of Natural Capital asset exposure to current and future meteorological drought Deliverables 2.1d and 2.3c for the Project D5-2 Climate Change Impacts on Natural Capital

This report is a product of the Scottish Government Strategic Research Programme project JHI-D5-2 ‘Climate Change Impacts on Natural Capital’. This is a joint report for Deliverable 2.1d: “Drought risk” and Deliverable 2.3c: “Assessment of habitat maps for distinguishing between high and low risk habitats”. The purpose of this report is to assess exposure levels of Scotland’s Natural Capital assets, to the threat of meteorological drought expressed by the Climatic Water Balance (difference between precipitation and reference evapotranspiration), as calculated in Deliverable 2.1a (Rivington and Jabloun, 2022).

The aim of this report is to provide assessments of the exposure of Natural Capital assets, expressed as mapped habitat types, to meteorological drought for observed (1990 – 2019) and future projected (2020 – 2049 and 2050 – 2079) Climatic Water Balance. This work builds towards the development of the Risk and Opportunities Assessment Framework (ROAF) being developed within the D5-2 project, in relation to the assessment of meteorological drought threat as part of the concept ‘Risk as a function of Vulnerability, Exposure and Threat (R=VET)’ (see Deliverable D1.5). We provide a national assessment using the spatial distribution of main habitat types in relation to the direction in Climatic Water Balance change. We also present an improved quantitative assessment of exposure severity using Climatic Water Balance ratios in a case study in the Spey catchment.