Assessing climate change impacts on sustainable development at the regional level a case study of the province of Medenine southeast of Tunisia

This paper presents the way that multiple analytical and empirical methods are used to calculate a composite indicator for an ex-ante impacts assessment of climate change on sustainable development in the context of arid zones in Tunisia. To quantify the composite indicator, a static Computable General Equilibrium model (CGE) was adapted to the regional context. The Regional Social Matrix building (RSAM) building procedure was based on a set of techniques and approaches of regionalization. The national supply and use matrix has served as a starting point. A bottom-up approach has been used to build a regional supply and use matrix for the agricultural sector that take into account natural resources (land and water) as intermediate inputs. The regional SAM includes ten (10) production factors, eighteen (18) production sectors producing twenty two (22) goods and services, two (2) households, one representative enterprise, two (2) public sectors (Government and regional administration), seven (7) taxes, two (2) capital accounting accounts, the rest of the world and the rest of the country. The SAM has been used to calculate the regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Two simulations have been run i) the decline of natural capital due to the induced effects of climate change and ii) the regional climate change adaptation strategy. Based on the outputs of the CGE model the impacts of climate change and adaptation strategy on the main regional economic indicators were analyzed. Finally the multi-criteria analysis method (MCA) was used to calculate the aggregated regional indicator of sustainability Results showed that the regional climate change adaptation strategy has a positive impact but it’s not sufficient to maintain sustainability level as in the current situation.