How will global warming affect Sweden?

Radio Sweden
Posted: Thursday, November 26, 2015 at 14:10 — Last Updated: Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 16:38
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A rain-swollen river has washed away the road and felled trees in Kristinehamn, western Sweden, on August 22, 2014. Emergency workers at the time said floods had reached catastrophic levels after heavy rains. (Johan Nilsson/AFP/Getty Images)

The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute has launched a new service that gives a glimpse into how different aspects of climate change could affect Sweden in years to come.

The website allows the curious to explore how precipitation, wind, frost and vegetation patterns could be affected in Sweden and other parts of the world, depending on whether global emissions increase or decrease and to what extent.

Gustav Strandberg, a climate scientist at SMHI, describes one of the key changes that he believes Sweden will undergo with the rising global temperature.

“In the big cities, I think the large change will be that we will have more heavy rainfalls that will cause flooding, so the water system is not large enough to handle those amounts of water,” said Strandberg.

Big changes expected

Problems with harvests in other parts of the world could also affect Sweden’s imports of food.

Strandberg hopes that by using the new service, people “will see that climate change is for real, and that it’s not only a thing that will affect undeveloped countries or other countries than ours. Climate change is real in Sweden also. In some cases, the change will be larger here than globally.”