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The article presents an analysis on the focal Concepts and Synthesis paper of Kevin D. Lafferty on climate change impacts on infectious diseases. Lafferty's paper strongly summarizes the impact of climate change on mosquito--transmitted human infectious disease, as well as the inability of the people to detect climate drivers. The paper also failed to discuss the importance of climate warming and changes in host migratory in the spread of infectious diseases, the impact of climate change on disease dynamics, and the interaction between wildlife hosts and their communities of parasites.

India has good reasons to be concerned about climate change as it could adversely affect the achievement of vital national development goals related to socio-economic development, human welfare, health, energy availability and use, and infrastructure. The paper attempts to develop a framework for integrated impact assessment and adaptation responses, using a recently built railroad coastal infrastructure asset in India as an example. The framework links climate change variables — temperature, rainfall, sea level rise, extreme events, and other secondary variables — and sustainable development variables — technology, institutions, economic, and other policies. The study indicates that sustainable development variables generally reduce the adverse impacts on the system due to climate change alone, except when they are inadequately applied. The paper concludes that development is a vital variable for integrated impact assessment. Well crafted developmental policies could result in a less-GHG intensive future, enhanced adaptive capacities of communities and systems, and lower impacts due to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transport sector is consistently responsible for around 30 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions in developed countries and is one of few sectors where emissions continue to increase as a result of apparently insatiable demand for road and air travel. This paper examines how the formulation of transport policy fits into the exposition of UK climate policy, focusing on three principal areas of tension: policy priority (congestion and carbon reduction); strategies to reduce emissions (technological and behavioural solutions) and timescale (short- and long-term vision). We suggest that in overcoming such tensions government ministers will need to devolve significant policy formulation and implementation powers to an appropriate scale of governance – in this case the city-region – to fashion a ‘convergence space’ capable of promoting meaningful action with regard to transport's climate impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expectation that atmospheric warming will be most pronounced at higher latitudes means that Arctic and montane systems, with predominantly organic soils, will be particularly influenced by climate change. One group of soil fauna, the enchytraeids, is commonly the major soil faunal component in specific biomes, frequently exceeding above-ground fauna in biomass terms. These organisms have a crucial role in carbon turnover in organic rich soils and seem particularly sensitive to temperature changes. In order to predict the impacts of climate change on this important group of soil organisms we reviewed data from 44 published papers using a combination of conventional statistical techniques and meta-analysis. We focused on the effects of abiotic factors on total numbers of enchytraeids (a total of 611 observations) and, more specifically, concentrated on total numbers, vertical distribution and age groupings of the well-studied species Cognettia sphagnetorum (228 observations). The results highlight the importance of climatic factors, together with vegetation and soil type in determining global enchytraeid distribution; in particular, cold and wet environments with mild summers are consistently linked to greater densities of enchytraeids. Based on the upper temperature distribution limits reported in the literature, and identified from our meta-analyses, we also examined the probable future geographical limits of enchytraeid distribution in response to predicted global temperature changes using the HadCM3 model climate output for the period between 2010 and 2100. Based on the existing data we identify that a maximum mean annual temperature threshold of 16 °C could be a critical limit for present distribution of field populations, above which their presence would decline markedly, with certain key species, such as C. sphagnetorum, being totally lost from specific regions. We discuss the potential implications for carbon turnover in these organic soils where these organisms currently dominate and, consequently, their future role as C sink/source in response to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]