Page 68 - Ecuador's Banana Sector under Climate Change

ecuador’s banana sector under climate change: an economic and biophysical assessment to promote a sustainable and climate-compatible strategy
2.3 El Niño
The relationship between higher global temperatures and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is not clear. The following is the conclusion of a recent review of the literature on ENSO and climate change.
“Despite considerable progress in our understanding of the impact of climate change on many of the processes that contribute to El Niño variability, it is not yet possible to say whether ENSO activity will be enhanced or damped, or if the frequency of events will change” (Collins et al., 2010:391.)
The IPCC (2012) report on the risks of extreme events supports the conclusion that ENSO may change with higher temperatures. The results of climate model simulations, however, are so varied with regard to ENSO that it is not possible to conclude how it will change.21 At first glance, the conclusions appear to be incomplete and provide little positive information. There is, nevertheless, an important positive finding in that there is increasing uncertainty and that the expected range of future ENSO activity will be wider than its former range. Despite this, there is no reason to suggest that future average activity will be greater or less than the current average. Figure 14 illustrates one way in which to illustrate an increase in uncertainty. It plots two normal probability density functions (bell curves) that have the same mean but different variances. The shorter, wider distribution has twice the variance of the taller, narrower one. The wider distribution has longer and fatter tails.
The study by Pindyck (2011) contends that climate change analyses generally fail to emphasize sufficiently that the tails of the future distribution of the climate are becoming fatter. The IPCC grants its highest confidence to results for which there is a high level of agreement among climate models. When model results are widely dispersed - as with those of ENSO - there is less confidence and, therefore, less attention is given to the outcomes. Extreme events, however,
are becoming more probable but will be less frequent than they used to be. Pindyck (2011) argues that the fattening of the tails should cause individuals and governments to consider how to ensure against the increased risk of extreme climate changes.
3. The increasing impact of climate change on Ecuador
Ecuador’s climatic conditions are influenced by its location on the Equator
and the presence of the Andes mountain range, the Amazon and the Pacific Ocean. The combined effects lead to marked spatial and seasonal climate variations in the different natural regions of the country. According to Ecuador’s
21 ENSO is particularly difficult to model because it is a composition of several oscillating systems. Katz (2002) explains the discovery of the Walker Circulation relating to how the analysis of ENSO required new statistical methods. ENSO modeling is an active area of research, with recent key contributions including Emile-Geay et al. (2013a, b) and Li et al. (2013).
52