For possible climate related health impacts characterised by ignorance, adaptation policies that focus on enhancing the health system's and society's capability of dealing with possible future changes, uncertainties and surprises (e.g. through resilience, flexibility, and adaptive capacity) are most appropriate.
Therefore, the epidemiological characteristics of China can be helpful for a worldwide study and may help predict possible future changes in undeveloped areas as they undergo development.
The resulting management approach seemed to be one of watching and waiting, while doing everything possible to increase resilience to a wide range of possible future changes, and, in some cases, increasing knowledge about possible management.
Under such conditions, in the available present it is harder to select those indicators that with more certainty correlate with possible future changes, and to do it just in view of systemic anticipatory reactions.
Having a central focus on public drinking water supply, its purpose is to correctly simulate the present day system of water extraction and distribution and the related costs, but also to allow meaningful response to possible future changes of boundary conditions, first and foremost changes in water demand or water availability and quality.
Integrated over a century, this is the same order of magnitude as the cost of transferring our global energy system onto a renewable path as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - and that sum does not even include possible future changes in the intensity of weather extremes as they are likely to develop in a warming climate.
If, as our results suggest, active grandparent-hood has benefits for older Chileans' mental health it is important to assess whether possible future changes in family and household patterns may have adverse effects on older people, especially as co-residence with grandchildren is currently both common and a strong influence on grandparental help.
Using species distribution models, we assess possible future changes in the diversity and climatic niche size of an unprecedented number of species for the region.
However, Global Climate Models (GCMs) do provide some measures of confidence and intensive speculation through the use of the best available current and future bioclimatic data may help to plan for possible future changes in a species' distribution.
