A Climate for Change

Human Development Report - Croatia 2008 Vulnerability to Climate Change in Croatia – a Summary^181

In agriculture, much of the adaptation will comprise
changes in management practices that will generally
be autonomous in nature, based on private market in-
centives. However, the Government may have a role to
play here by sponsoring and disseminating the results
of research about management techniques for coping
with climate change and climate variability to farmers.
Moreover, as agricultural regions in Croatia are already
suffering from a lack of moisture, irrigation is becom-
ing a more attractive alternative. As mentioned earlier,
the Government is sponsoring a major initiative aimed
at irrigating farmland and the public sector is in the
process of helping to finance related projects. How-
ever, the cost/ benefit analysis of irrigation is currently
unavailable. Any irrigation projects designed to cope
with climate variability will probably take the form of
strategic adaptation and will need to be thoroughly
researched – especially the links between planned ac-
tions and ones taken by the private sector. In Chapter 8,
several measures, including irrigation, were identified
for increasing soil moisture. The private sector is often
unwilling to finance this type of research, preferring to
wait to acquire the research results, at a low cost, instead
of undertaking the research at a high cost. Therefore,
it may be prudent for these options to be investigated
further by the Government and the results passed on to
farmers at a very low cost.

To address the risks and capitalize on opportunities
within the fisheries and mariculture sector, further re-

search into probable changes in fish populations, mi-

gration patterns, and primary productivity is needed.

It is also important to note that risks to biodiversity

may have an impact on fisheries, tourism, and other

sectors. This risk to biodiversity has not been analysed

in this Report, but it could be a very important impact

of climate change.

11.3.3. Adaptive capacity

While this Report has not carried out a full analysis of

the adaptive capacity of each sector to deal with climate

change, it has identified a number of issues that should

be addressed. The first issue is that current climate vari-

ability and future climate change should be further inte-

grated into the strategic planning of the various sectors.

Currently, most plans and ministries have just begun to

think about the impact of climate change on Croatia, as

with most countries. However, this Report has shown

that climate variability is already having an impact and

climate change may cause dramatic impacts in the fu-

ture. The real challenge, as outlined above, will be for

the public sector to take the existing capacity it has de-

veloped to cope with developmental pressure, climate

variability, environmental quality issues, etc. and apply

this to coping with climate change. This will mean en-

hancing the existing capacity to enable society to cope

with the more significant climate variability that will be

experienced due to climate change.