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This two-part paper details the arguments and evidence that have been marshalled by both climate scientists and social scientists to critique the current procedures and methodologies deployed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to represent the risks of anthropogenic forcing and a continuation of business-as-usual. In the first part, the rationale for moving from an atmospheric stabilisation target to an average surface temperature target is explained. This is followed by a discussion of the IPCC’s representations of nonlinear behaviour in relation to climate forcing, and the problems associated with using a single temperature target in assessing climate risk. An outline is then provided of efforts to define what can or should constitute physical, biological and socio-economic indicators of dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI). The paper reviews the IPCC’s representations of sea-level rise to illustrate the argument that it continues to take insufficient account of the paleoclimate record and improved methods of modelling. Part 1 concludes by arguing that the IPCC continues to under-represent the risks associated with DAI. In the second part, the rationale and methodologies for reconfiguring international climate governance are discussed in more detail. Part 2 argues that the currently dominant model of international policymaking is primarily an outcome of compromises made by governments under pressure from powerful polluting industries and their business allies. It is argued that the political economy of international climate governance has produced systematic biases in the kinds of expertise and evidence that national governments deem appropriate for consideration via the IPCC and UNFCCC frameworks, along with the relative importance that is ascribed to them. Drawing on the research of climate scientists and social scientists, some suggestions for how to restructure and refocus the activities of the IPCC, UNFCCC and climate governance more generally are canvassed, including the necessity of creating far more interdisciplinary and democratically accountable structures of expertise for climate policy-making at the national and supra-national levels. Part 2 concludes with a discussion of the kinds of reforms which could be undertaken to reduce the ability of incumbent actors to shape climate policy and politics to their advantage.

This two-part paper details the arguments and evidence that have been marshalled by both climate scientists and social scientists to critique the current procedures and methodologies deployed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to represent the risks of anthropogenic forcing and a continuation of business-as-usual. In the first part, the rationale for moving from an atmospheric stabilisation target to an average surface temperature target is explained. This is followed by a discussion of the IPCC’s representations of nonlinear behaviour in relation to climate forcing, and the problems associated with using a single temperature target in assessing climate risk. An outline is then provided of efforts to define what can or should constitute physical, biological and socio-economic indicators of dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI). The paper reviews the IPCC’s representations of sea-level rise to illustrate the argument that it continues to take insufficient account of the paleoclimate record and improved methods of modelling. Part 1 concludes by arguing that the IPCC continues to under-represent the risks associated with DAI. In the second part, the rationale and methodologies for reconfiguring international climate governance are discussed in more detail. Part 2 argues that the currently dominant model of international policymaking is primarily an outcome of compromises made by governments under pressure from powerful polluting industries and their business allies. It is argued that the political economy of international climate governance has produced systematic biases in the kinds of expertise and evidence that national governments deem appropriate for consideration via the IPCC and UNFCCC frameworks, along with the relative importance that is ascribed to them. Drawing on the research of climate scientists and social scientists, some suggestions for how to restructure and refocus the activities of the IPCC, UNFCCC and climate governance more generally are canvassed, including the necessity of creating far more interdisciplinary and democratically accountable structures of expertise for climate policy-making at the national and supra-national levels. Part 2 concludes with a discussion of the kinds of reforms which could be undertaken to reduce the ability of incumbent actors to shape climate policy and politics to their advantage.

Climate change increases variability and uncertainty of crop performance. Process-based crop growth models represent the complex spatio-temporal interactions between plants, atmosphere, and soils and enable realistic climate risk assessments of future crop yield. But they require continuous, detailed daily weather data. Probability distributions of crop model results provide risk profiles of yield and serve to assess the impacts of long-term climate variability and change on crop yields. This paper tests to what extent a simple method for adjusting daily weather data using seasonal and monthly factors can produce robust estimates of risk profiles at a continental scale.We examined the predictability of risk profiles of modelled wheat grain yield across the Australian grain belt. Snowtown, in the middle of the South Australian grains belt (33.8°S, 138.2°E) was selected as the reference site, and 49 wheat-growing sites spanning from 23.5 to 42.8°S of latitude and 115–151.8°E of longitude were used for testing the adjustments of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperatures and global solar radiation. Adjustment factors were calculated as the difference in long-term average of a given climate variable between a test site and the reference site. For each test site, we compared risk profiles modelled with observed weather data with step-wise adjusted weather data.Simple adjustments of both rainfall and temperatures produced good matching of risk profiles (root mean square error, RMSE

Climate change, population growth, and environmental pressures, pose challenges for water resource management. Many countries, like the UK, are projected to experience regional variation in the risk of droughts. One solution is to use inter-basin transfer (IBT) schemes to move water from where it is abundant to where it is scarce. But what are the first steps in studying the feasibility of such schemes as a solution? How can we ensure an IBT brings more resilient water future under the rapidly changing climate and not have a detrimental impact elsewhere? This paper develops and demonstrates a framework for a preliminary climate impacts assessment for IBT schemes. The framework evaluates negative hydrological and ecological impacts of IBTs to the exporting basin. A hypothetical IBT scheme, delivering water from the northeast of England to London in the southeast, is tested. Three transfer scenarios are analysed under 100 future climate scenarios generated from the driest member of UK Climate Projection 2018 (UKCP18). The framework shows there would be no ecological harm for the exporting basin under any scenario. However, the hydrological risk is sensitive to the IBT operation. Constant and low flow operation of the IBT would lead to supply deficits of up to 60% in the exporting basin by the 2080 s. Transferring larger volumes, but only in winter months, allows the IBT to meet the projected water resource deficit in London whilst not increasing hydrological risks in the northeast – even under the driest UKCP18 climate scenario.

Since the impacts of climate change will be felt most directly through changes in water availability and water security, adequate tools are required to support water resources management decisions for the medium and long term. The Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) provides a pathway for more localized vulnerability assessments of water resources under climate change, while encompassing the uncertainty of current global climate projections. Within this framework, this paper demonstrates a climate stress test to identify changes in key performance indicators defined through local stakeholder consultations using a bottom-up approach. When applied to a case study in the Limari River basin in Chile, the stress test highlights the vulnerability of the reservoir system to climate variability and change, through a comprehensive analysis of 43 Global Circulation Models, of which 34 were retained. The Level of Concern (LoC) was defined as high, due to a high plausibility for entering into adverse water security conditions, that are expected to provoke a significant impact in the highly productive areas of the watershed. As demonstrated by the case study, the climate stress test provides a relevant assessment tool for potential climate change impacts on critical components of the water system in vulnerable catchments. Keywords: Risk management, Water security, Climate change, CRIDA, Chile

Despite the potential of weather index insurance as an innovative climate risk adaptation instrument for farmers in the developing world, there is a major barrier to its widespread uptake, namely “basis risk”. In this paper, we focus on the spatial dimension of basis risk by analysing rainfall patterns over three years at six villages of Vidarbha region in Maharashtra, India where low-cost automated weather stations were installed. In order to test whether basis risk has salience in farmers’ decision making about weather insurance, we present evidence from a field experiment involving 361 farmers in the region where the weather stations were installed. We find that informing farmers about basis risk significantly reduces farmers’ willingness to buy a hypothetical rainfall insurance product. Combining information on basis risk and premium subsidy lowers the negative effect whilst effects of subsidy information are not robust. Our findings suggest the need to address basis risk in weather insurance design as well as climate risk management communication to farmers. Keywords: Basis risk, Weather insurance, Field experiment, Risk communication, India

Farmers’ perceptions of climate risk reflect their subjective probability weighting bias, which are the prerequisite for their adaptation decisions and thus shape their actions. As an adaptation strategy, farmers prioritized the technological measures of chemical input as the most simple and convenient for climate risks. However, this is little evidence of empirical work on the mechanism between farmers’ perceptions and chemical use behavior. Based on 1080 households’ survey data from 4 leading rice provinces in China, this study develops a theoretical framework that considers adaptation decisions of heterogonous farmers within a perception-decision- action (PDA) analytical framework, and further estimates the effects of farmers’ perceptions on chemical use behavior by utilizing endogenous switching regression model. The results indicate that under ceteris paribus, the key variables “perception of climate risk” of farmers have significant effect on their claim of increase in the quantity of chemical use. Farmers who perceived very obvious climate risk increased by about 13% in the quantity of chemical use, while farmers who perceived obvious climate risk increased by 8%. We find evidence of crowding-in of farmers’ perceptions on chemical use. The paper concludes by offering some policy implications for the presented results. Keywords: Perception of climate risk, Chemical use, Rice farmer, Endogenous switching regression model, China

The 2015–2017 summer rainfall seasons in both South and southern Africa saw drought and heat stress severely impacting the livestock production sector, as well as agriculture more broadly. Although the region has a longstanding operational forecasting system; tailored forecasting, including that designed for the livestock sector, has declined in presence and operational use in recent years. The potential use of such information to enable the livestock sector to better cope with difficult seasons such as those of 2015–17 is clear. A range of promising initiatives attempt to move South Africa (and the broader southern Africa region) in the direction of improved tailored forecasting, integrated, in part, into the operational system. A number of gaps in application remain, however, and the paper concludes with a discussion as to how the field might move forward, particularly in the light of possible increased frequency of drought and heat stress in the future.

Human responses to climate change are continuing to evolve. At one time, mitigation (reduction) of human emissions of greenhouse gases appeared to offer the best response to prevent the worst impacts of a changing climate. It soon became clear, however, that the world would not be able to reduce emissions quickly enough or to a level sufficient to prevent, in the words of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Climate change is already altering the frequency and severity of extreme weather events worldwide, and these trends are expected to increase in the foreseeable future. Accordingly, it is well recognized that adapting in place to the changing climate is necessary. Yet, that may not be enough. An additional step in responding to climate risks is emerging, one that requires fundamentally and permanently changing the human interactions with nature in parts of the world. This strategy is often referred to as “managed retreat,” but that term has become controversial, and other terms are needed that express inclusion of the positive societal benefits that can emerge from proactive action. This paper provides a review of the emerging themes within the literature of managed retreat as a climate risk management approach, uses examples from the transportation and infrastructure sector, collects and identifies important nomenclature and definitions, key decision-making considerations, and research gaps that warrant immediate attention. The results of this review are intended to be useful to academic climate change adaptation researchers and infrastructure practitioners alike.

This paper presents a consistent series of policy-relevant indicators of changing climate hazards and resources for the UK, spanning the health, transport, energy, agriculture, flood and water sectors and based on UKCP18 climate projections. In the absence of explicit adaptation, risks will increase across the whole of the UK, but at different rates and from different starting values in different regions. The likelihood of heat extremes affecting health, the road and rail network and crop growth will increase very markedly. Agricultural and hydrological drought risks increase across the UK, as does wildfire danger. River flood risk increases particularly in the north and west. Demand for cooling energy will increase, but demand for heating energy will decline. Crop growing degree days will increase, benefiting the production of perennial crops. In general, the risks associated with high temperature extremes will increase the most in warmer southern and eastern England, but the rate of increase from a lower base may be greater further north and west. Reducing emissions reduces risks in the long term but has little effect over the next two or three decades. The results provide evidence to support the development of national and local climate and resilience policy. Measures to enhance resilience are needed alongside policies to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Resilience policy should recognise the variability in change in risk across the UK, and therefore different local priorities. Explicit choices need to be made about ‘worst case’ emissions scenarios as they can influence strongly estimated changes in risk: the increase in risk with RCP8.5 can be considerably higher than with a pathway reaching 4 °C by 2100.

Despite efforts and investments to integrate weather and climate knowledges, often dichotomized into the scientific and the local, a top-down practice of science communication that tends to ignore cultural consensus knowledge still prevails. This paper presents an empirical application of cultural consensus analysis for climate risk management. It uses mixed methods such as focus groups, freelisting, pilesorting, and rapid ethnographic assessment to understand farmers’ knowledge of weather and climate conditions in Barangay Biga, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines. Multi-dimensional scaling and aggregate proximity matrix of items are generated to assess the similarity among the different locally perceived weather and climate conditions. Farmers’ knowledge is then qualitatively compared with the technical classification from the government’s weather bureau. There is cultural agreement among farmers that the weather and climate conditions can be generally grouped into wet, dry, and unpredictable weather (Maria Loka). Damaging hazards belong into two subgroups on the opposite ends of the wet and dry scale, that is, tropical cyclone is grouped together with La Nina, rainy season, and flooding season, while farmers perceive no significant difference between El Nino, drought, and dry spells. Ethnographic information reveals that compared to the technocrats’ reductive knowledge, farmers imagine weather and climate conditions (panahon) as an event or a phenomenon they are actively experiencing by observing bioindicators, making sense of the interactions between the sky and the landscape, and the agroecology of pest and diseases, while being subjected to agricultural regulations on irrigation, price volatility, and control of power on subsidies and technologies. This situated local knowledge is also being informed by forecasts and advisories from the weather bureau illustrating a hybrid of technical science, both from the technocrats and the farmers, and personal experiences amidst agricultural precarities. Speaking about the hybridity of knowledge rather than localizing the scientific obliges technocrats and scientists to productively engage with different ways of knowing and the tensions that mediate farmers' knowledge as a societal experience.

Climate risks pose a threat to the function of the global food system and therefore also a hazard to the global financial sector, the stability of governments, and the food security and health of the world’s population. This paper presents a method to assess plausible impacts of an agricultural production shock and potential materiality for global insurers. A hypothetical, near-term, plausible, extreme scenario was developed based upon modules of historical agricultural production shocks, linked under a warm phase El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) meteorological framework. The scenario included teleconnected floods and droughts in disparate agricultural production regions around the world, as well as plausible, extreme biotic shocks. In this scenario, global crop yield declines of 10% for maize, 11% for soy, 7% for wheat and 7% for rice result in quadrupled commodity prices and commodity stock fluctuations, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences and major financial losses worldwide. This work illustrates a need for the scientific community to partner across sectors and industries towards better-integrated global data, modeling and analytical capacities, to better respond to and prepare for concurrent agricultural failure. Governments, humanitarian organizations and the private sector collectively may recognize significant benefits from more systematic assessment of exposure to agricultural climate risk.

Climate risks pose a particular set of challenges to electrical utilities, who must manage the direct impacts of climate and weather, as well as how related effects might propagate through networks of interconnected social and environmental risks. In this paper, we present a case study example of climate services development, co-produced between a regional electrical utility and researchers at the University of Arizona, that integrates and adapts a climate risk management framework to better connect university climate expertise with utility needs for climate risk management and planning. We detail the process by which our project team partnered with the utility to identify primary areas of concern for the electrical utility sector in the Southwest, and craft a qualitative assessment of these climate risks with the utility. We describe the iterative engagement process where operational implications associated with climate risks were identified including points of intervention for the utility, as part of their integrated resource planning process, and the cascading impacts that play a part in the larger decision context. We emphasize the role of novel analyses and curated data and information in the development of tailored climate services, as well as the importance of cultivating collaborative relationships between university researchers and community stakeholders and practitioners early on in research projects in order to better include their values, perspectives, and insights in the research process.

Under pressure to ensure national food security, China’s rice sector needs to adapt to changing climatic conditions. By investigating the effect of farmer’s risk preferences, adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices and use of crop insurance on technical efficiency of rice production, this paper explores climate-smart agriculture as a strategy to cope with climate risk challenges. The empirical investigation adopts a stochastic frontier analysis approach which allows simultaneous estimation of a production function and identification of factors associated with technical efficiency. Data for rice plots of 873 farmers in the Jianghan Plain of China are used to fit the model. Farmers’ risk preferences are measured using a standard experiment approach. Most respondents are found to be risk averse, and greater risk aversion is found to significantly decrease technical efficiency. Using climate-smart practices – crop rotations and conservation tillage – have the extra benefit of improving technical efficiency; crop insurance has no significant effect on technical efficiency. Overall, the results shed new light on the negative role of risk aversion on China’s agriculture, and the multiple benefits of climate-smart practices in creating a stronger agricultural production system that is resilient to climate risks.

Organizations and institutions managing built heritage have to make use of increasingly detailed, elaborate and complex climate change impact assessments. It is a challenge to determine how, when and by whom climate predictions should be translated into risk estimates usable for decision-making. In this paper results from the Climate for Culture project are used to study how heritage decision-makers interpret future indoor climate-related risks to Swedish churches. Different sets of risk maps were presented to ten engineers, ten building conservators and five experts on indoor climate related risks. Interviews were used to understand how the interviewees made sense of the presented information and if they associated it with a perceived need for adaptation. The results show that the risks were interpreted and assessed largely dependent on their pre-understanding and familiarity with the individual risks. The magnitude of change and the lack of uncertainty estimates were subordinate to the overall impression of the information as being credible and salient. The major conclusion is that the dissemination of risk information, also from projects which at the outset have aimed at producing knowledge relevant for end-users, should be both customized and tested in collaborative efforts by stakeholders and scientists.

Co-production is increasingly recognized as integral to appropriate use and uptake of climate information into decision-making. However, the success of co-production is contingent on an innate understanding of the context in which it is being implemented. Climate knowledge co-production in Africa is unique and requires a nuanced approach because of the immediacy of a myriad of decision challenges on the continent, thereby making it more challenging to engage decision-makers in co-production processes around climate. Given these challenges, the process described here, referred to as “co-exploration”, was designed to complement the multi-stressor decision-making context of various African cities. Users and producers of science work together in an equitable framework to co-explore the urban decision-making space. While the dialogue has potential to inform the development of the science, it is not an explicit expectation of the process. The paper describes the context for a place-based co-exploratory analysis of climate risks, the elements and steps incorporated in the approach, reflections on the effectiveness of this approach in addressing multi-stressor, place-based decision-making and the challenges that still remain in further refining the approach. The co-exploration approach is complementary to the objectives of the Global Framework for Climate Services and provides lessons for uptake of climate information into urban adaptation planning in Africa.

Nitrogen fertilizer is one of the most important inputs to corn production and farmers manage their crop by deciding how much to apply, when to apply it and how to apply it to maximize their yields and resulting profit. There is risk inherent in crop fertility management because once nitrogen is applied to the soil it is no longer immobile and cropland is subject to loss of this costly input under different weather conditions. Days suitable for field work, a farm’s machinery set, and weather conditions determine when field preparation and planting activities are completed each year. This paper documents the methods and data used to evaluate the economic costs and benefits of the agronomic practice of “splitting” nitrogen fertilizer—applying some at or just before planting and a second application after the plant has already emerged and is in greatest need of nutrients. An example of how to use the free online decision support tool Corn Split NDST (splitn.agclimate4u.org) to evaluate the climate risk and economics of post-planting N applications is developed to illustrate the application of methods described.