The Study: Design, Methodology, and Limitations
• Which of the potential responses do you view as the most desirable and feasible? • What kind of additional information might be helpful about these options? The second workshop was conducted in October 2012 following the analysis of climate change impacts. It focused on providing stakeholders with the opportunity to share their thoughts and concerns about the proposed adaptation and mitigation responses. It also included a discussion of the relative ranking of the responses. The criteria used to evaluate the different adaptation options included feasibility, political and social acceptance, robustness against possible climate futures, and cost-effectiveness. The workshop was organized around the following set of questions: • What do you think are the most relevant criteria by which to judge these options? • Which of these criteria are most important? • How would you rank the various adaptation options against each of these criteria? • Once the ranking is done, are there logical ways to group the options, for example, most important to least important? • Looking over the prioritized lists, do you have any comments or concerns about the rankings?
Limitations The Study was carried out with three key limitations: (i) lack of data; (ii) difficulties and limitations regarding projections; and (iii) limitations regarding modeling. Lack of data: A study of this breadth, conducted under time and data constraints, is necessarily limited. In particular, in order to look broadly across many crops, areas, and adaptation options, particularly options that may be relatively new to Armenia, in many cases general data and characterizations of these options must be relied on. While the Expert Consultant Team has taken care to use the best available data, and applied state-of-the-art modeling and analytic tools, analysis of outcomes 40 years into the future, across a broad and varied landscape of complex agricultural and water resources systems, involves uncertainty. For Armenia, a wide range of historic meteorological data was available through public sources, including global data from the World Meteorological Organization. As a result of concerns expressed by the Hydromet Institute, however, some additional locally available hydrologic and meteorological daily timescale data was not made available to the Expert Consultant Team. The effect of this limitation on the overall study results is not clear. Limitations regarding projections: Such limitations involve: (i) changes in water quality; (ii) future construction schedule for irrigation and storage projects; (iii) future storage capacity of reservoirs; (iv) development of national agricultural Reducing the Vulnerability of Armenia’s Agricultural Systems to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0147-1
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