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The purpose of the present paper is to examine a selection of macro- and micro-linguistic features (at text and sentence/word level respectively) of the South-African Green Paper 'National Climate Change Response' from 2010. Our overarching assumption is that the Green Paper needs to handle competing interests, beliefs and voices in a narrative structure favouring specific courses of action. How does the government portray the complex natural and societal phenomenon of climate change, and how does it take into account the many and often competing national and international views and interests which come into play? Our hypothesis is that the Green Paper constructs a narrative and that it relates to a number of voices other than that of the authors, through linguistic markers of polyphony, such as negation, sentence connectives, adverbs and reported speech. Thus we propose a narrative and polyphonic analysis of the Green Paper, at the level of the text as a whole (macro-level) but also with attention to linguistic constructions of polyphony or 'multi-voicedness' (micro-level). We find that the narrative-polyphonic properties of the Green Paper contribute to a strategy for building consensus on climate change policy. The South African government assumes the role of main hero in its own climate change 'story', and there are subtle forms of interaction with different and typically non-identified voices, such as concessive constructions and presuppositions. These results support our overarching interpretation of the whole document as striving to impose a South African consensus on the issue of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a global trend away from delivering 'climate information' towards producing 'climate services' for decision-makers. The rationale for this shift is said to be the demand for timely and actionable climate knowledge, whilst the means of its delivery involves a shift from public good to more privatised forms of climate science. This paper identifies important implications of this shift to climate services by examining the role of consultants, drawing on an in-depth study of adaptation consultants in Australia. The role of consultants is instructive, not just because these private sector experts are engaged in climate services, but also because publicly funded climate science agencies are increasingly encouraged to behave as consulting firms do. Four imperatives of knowledge businesses—to be client-focussed, solutions-oriented, resource-efficient and self-replicating—are described. The paper argues that an emphasis on climate services shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit. There is a subsequent diversion of effort away from publicly accessible and transparent climate information to private knowledge for discrete clients. Climate services also emphasise knowledge for climate solutions as opposed to the politically charged identification of climate risks. The paper concludes with a warning that the trend towards climate services undermines the knowledge required for societies to adequately respond to the scale, speed and severity of climate change. At the heart of this issue is a climate services paradox: how to achieve customisation without exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With recent growth in funding and research on "resilience building", interest in climate services has risen dramatically. Included in this trend is an increased emphasis on the use of climate and weather information for a range of purposes across multiple scales. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other non-state actors across Africa have responded accordingly, and are increasingly acting as brokers, and sometimes producers, of climate services as part of their activities. Drawing on research from Burkina Faso and Ethiopia as part of the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme, this paper critically examines the evolving climate services landscape and raises questions about what the future holds for climate services in sub-Saharan Africa. We ask two questions: How have national climate services in these countries evolved since the early 2000s when they first came to prominence? And how have NGO contributions to these services evolved over time? Our findings highlight a considerable evolution in the aims and capacities of climate service systems over this period. NGOs have contributed to this progress on multiple fronts, but we note that important opportunities for innovation remain. We also raise concerns about how the current financing and governance models may influence priority setting and the sustainability of "projectised" services. Accordingly, we call for a better understanding how power and politics shape the development and deployment of climate services. This paper provides insight on the evolving landscape of climate services, actors involved in its provision and implications for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes five sets of regions intended for use in summarizing extreme weather over Earth's land areas from a climate perspective. The sets differ in terms of their target size: ∼10 Mm2, ∼5 Mm2, ∼2 Mm2, ∼0.5 Mm2, and ∼0.1 Mm2 (where 1 Mm2= 1 million km2). The regions are based on political/economic divisions, and hence are intended to be primarily aligned with geographical domains of decision-making and disaster response rather than other factors such as climatological homogeneity. This paper describes the method for defining these sets of regions; provides the final definitions of the regions; and performs some comparisons across the five sets and other available regional definitions with global land coverage, according to climatological and non-climatological properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this final paper, the guest editors identify and discuss ten guidelines emerging from the papers in this Special Issue on Decision-Support Tools for Climate Change Adaptation. The guidelines are arranged under three headings: foundational, design and construction, and supporting sustainability in the long term. Under foundational, we address the need for co-operation with end users of decision-support resources, the contribution these resources can make to the formation of thriving communities of practice, and the match between the different types of decision support and user needs. Under design and construction, we point to the risk that policy settings will change over the multiple years required to build and publish complex decision-support resources, reducing the relevance of the final product. We discuss the need for innovative approaches to ensure visibility, credibility and hence uptake. Developers should be mindful of the requirements, resources and capabilities of potential users at all points in the design and build. We also suggest that decision-support resources may be transferable between sectors and locations, but the motivation should be around achieving excellence, and not just cost savings. Under supporting sustainability in the long term, we stress the need for evaluation and comparative studies of performance, leading to carefully documented updating and improvement of decision-support resources. Finally, in the conclusions, we look to the future. Can decision-support resources evolve successfully to meet the information and guidance requirements of the increasingly sophisticated adaptation practitioner community? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal structures for evaluating climate change risk are important components of adaptation decision-making. In this paper, we present an accessible, cost-effective and user-tested climate change risk assessment framework which allows organisations to systematically apply a risk management process aligned with international standards to identify and manage their climate change risks. It is delivered through 'CoastAdapt', a resource supporting climate change adaptation in Australia. This three-tier framework offers four benefits to the adaptation process. First, it allows organisations to identify climate change risks and integrate them with their mainstream risk management process. Second, it makes optimal use of an organisation's limited adaptation resources by taking a tiered approach, so allowing an organisation to start from a low knowledge base using minimal resources and, only if required, then move to more complex and resource-intensive risk assessment processes. Third, it introduces a time-dependent vulnerability rating which recognises the particular characteristics of climate change risks—that they are long term and associated with a considerable degree of uncertainty. Finally, it takes into account business inter-dependencies that can exacerbate impacts but be overlooked in a sector-based impacts evaluation. In this paper, we highlight the appropriate context in which to use each risk assessment tier, explore key technical differences among the three tiers, describe performance testing and present one case study of application. We discuss the benefits of this tiered risk assessment approach in the context of broader adaptation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential for transferring and translating existing adaptation to climate change decision-support tools for use in different settings provides both opportunities and challenges to those wanting to support such decisions in or for the targeted community/organisation. The opportunities are related to being able to build on an existing credible and tested tool and its supportive resources and foregoing the costs associated with developing such themselves. The challenges relate to taking advantages of the strengths of an existing tool whilst adapting it and its supportive resources such that they are fit for purpose and accepted within the targeted community/organisation. This paper identifies and explores these opportunities and challenges through those revealed as a result of transferring and translating the UKCIP Adaptation Wizard for use within other parts of the world and in different communities and organisations. Whilst drawing on a number of different examples of where the Wizard has been translated, this paper particularly focuses on the transfer and translation for use in Portugal and in Brazil. General lessons learnt related to transferring adaptation decision-support tools are identified and used to develop a practical framework. The intention is to provide insights that have broader implications for those considering transferring similar adaptation decision-support tools, but also for tool developers who want to see their tools being used more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on using climate information has often focused on the interaction between users and producers and the technical fit of information for real decision-making. However, due to resource and capacity constraints within both user and producer communities, this approach will not always be feasible or indeed necessary depending on the decisions at hand. These contexts have been relatively under-explored by scholars, and this paper provides an original empirical contribution using three case studies of sub-national governments in India, Kenya and Uganda. In the paper, we analyse how social learning supports changing the usability of climate information and the role of intermediary organisations in these processes. Firstly, the paper shows that intermediaries often choose to build the commitment to project aims rather than using climate information as an entry point to working on climate change, and this allows them to instigate challenging learning processes. Secondly, there are barriers to iterative processes and critical reflection with government stakeholders but these processes can gain traction when built into institutional practices such as formal M&E processes. Lastly, social learning can broaden the framing of climate change from a single sector issue to a multi-sectoral one. We conclude by arguing that bringing together scholarship on social learning with that on the usability of climate information can deepen understanding of the dynamic context in which the information becomes usable. The evidence from the case studies shows that learning processes can alter this context across scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper distinguishes between bridging and bonding social capital to assess their roles for individual farmers’ adaptation strategies taken through technology adoption. Based on primary data collected in Langcang River (LCR) basin area in southwestern China, the paper finds: (1) adaptation measures have been widely taken by surveyed households, but non-infrastructure-based measures are more prevalent than infrastructure-based measures and (2) surveyed households have strong social capital while having weak bridging social capital. Their bonding social capital has significantly positive relationship with their adaptation decisions, but bridging social capital does not have such statistically significant relationship. It recommends that the governments contemplate carefully how to help the poor to get a good combination of bonding and bridging social capital when designing policies to help the rural poor to improve their long-term adaptive capacity and achieve sustainable rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the growing demand for climate change information to guide national and local adaptation decision-making in the Philippines, the climate science and services community is producing an increasing volume of future climate data using a range of modelling approaches. However, there is a significant methodological challenge in how to best compare and combine information produced using different models and methods. In this paper, we present the landscape of climate model data available in the Philippines and show how multi-model, multi-method climate projections are being used and communicated to inform climate change policy and planning, focusing on the agriculture sector. We highlight the importance of examining and communicating methodological strengths and weaknesses as well as understanding the needs and capabilities of different user communities. We discuss the assessment of projections from different methods, including global and regional downscaled simulations, and discuss ways to summarise and communicate this information to stakeholders using co-production approaches. The paper concludes with perspectives on how to best use an “ensemble of opportunity” to construct defensible, plausible and usable climate projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy security is one of the main drivers of energy policies. Understanding energy security implications of long-term scenarios is crucial for informed policy making, especially with respect to transformations of energy systems required to stabilize climate change. This paper evaluates energy security under several global energy scenarios, modeled in the REMIND and WITCH integrated assessment models. The paper examines the effects of long-term climate policies on energy security under different assumptions about GDP growth and fossil fuel availability. It uses a systematic energy security assessment framework and a set of global and regional indicators for risks associated with energy trade and resilience associated with diversity of energy options. The analysis shows that climate policies significantly reduce the risks and increase the resilience of energy systems in the first half of the century. Climate policies also make energy supply, energy mix, and energy trade less dependent upon assumptions of fossil resource availability and GDP growth, and thus more predictable than in the baseline scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) is a collaborative effort to provide professionals, decision makers, and the public with information about how climate change affects state and local interests throughout Indiana, USA. This assessment effort has three interrelated goals: (1) analyze and document the best available climate change impacts research, (2) develop and maintain a network of stakeholders and experts, and (3) start a dialog about climate change throughout Indiana. The project adopted a process that prioritized stakeholder engagement, re-envisioned traditional dissemination approaches, and that had limited state government involvement, setting the IN CCIA apart from most other state climate assessments (SCAs) in the USA. This overview describes the motivations, principles, and processes that guided the IN CCIA development, explores how Indiana's approach compares with those of other SCAs, and briefly summarizes the papers presented in this special issue. As interest in SCAs grows in non-coastal and politically conservative locations, the IN CCIA serves as one example of how a bottom-up assessment with limited funding can deliver credible climate science to diverse stakeholder groups in the absence of state-level mandates or direction and attract public attention over an extended period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use and water management have considerable impacts on regional climates. This paper proposes that in humid regions with low wind patterns the construction of hydropower storage reservoirs contributes to the increases in the probability of precipitation in the regional climate. This observation has been tested with a methodology that calculates the cumulative influence of reservoir construction in the basins surrounding with a proposed index named Cumulative Impact of Existing Reservoirs, and compares this index with the historical flow of the rivers. It was found that the construction of reservoirs in Brazil had a considerable impact on its river flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International assessments of evidence on climate change (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) or national climate change risk assessments (e.g. UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, CCRA) do not offer a sufficiently granular perspective on climate impacts to adequately inform governance of resilience to climate risks at the local level. Using an analysis of UK decision-makers managing and responding to heatwaves and flood risks, this paper argues how more robust local evidence is needed to inform decision-making regarding adaptation options for enhancing local resilience. We identify evidence gaps and issues relating to local climate change impacts, including sources and quality of evidence used, adequacy and accessibility of evidence available, ill-communicated evidence and conflicting or misused evidence. A lack of appreciation regarding how scientific evidence and personal judgement can mutually enhance the quality of decision-making underpins all of these gaps. Additionally, we find that the majority of evidence currently used is reductively based upon socio-economic and physical characteristics of climate risks. We argue that a step change is needed in local climate resilience that moves beyond current physical and socio-economic risk characterisation to a more inclusive co-constitution of social and politically defined climate risks at the local scale that are better aligned with the local impacts felt and needs of stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of 'everyday climate cultures' can mean many things, including reductions in the resource intensity of everyday life. This paper considers efforts to influence current and future patterns of water use in the Global South. This is a significant challenge for environmental policy and for companies that seek to reduce environmental impacts during the use phase of their products. Challenges such as these often give way to debates about the potential for developing countries to bypass resource intensive phases of development and 'leapfrog' directly to more sustainable pathways. This article contributes to the literature on environmental leapfrogging by applying social practice theory to better understand the significance of users and 'lifestyles'. Drawing on a research collaboration with Unilever—involving a rapid review of relevant evidence—the analysis considers mobile (cell) phones as an exemplar of 'user-led leapfrogging'. A number of lessons are drawn out of this case study that inform thinking about the task of leapfrogging to more sustainable patterns of water use in the Global South. Attention is paid to the adoption and appropriation of products, the broader societal impacts of new technologies, and alternatives to the logic of efficiency. Crucially, it is argued that technologies are limited in their ability to steer processes of positive change and that attention must be paid to existing cultural patterns, ways of doing things, and social structures. The conclusion reflects critically on the concept of environmental leapfrogging, the merits and limitations of social practice theory, and the broader implications of the analysis for understanding everyday climate cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid pressure for climate action worldwide, processes of deliberative democracy are being called upon to address public policy complexities, include citizens in decision-making, restore faith in public institutions and enhance governance processes. The citizens' assembly model is lauded internationally for the much-needed structure it provides to support bottom-up governance efforts as well as the potential for effective citizen engagement on complex topics. The Irish Citizens' Assembly, which took place from 2016 to 2018, is heralded as an example of best practice in design and execution. Yet, there is a dearth in analysis of its form, structure, impact and content, particularly in the climate crisis context. This paper examines one element of the deliberative democracy process that aimed to include a wider breadth of publics beyond the 99 citizens randomly selected to take part: the public submissions invited as part of the Citizens' Assembly process. In total, 1185 submissions were received on the topic of climate change. Our study undertakes a comprehensive content analysis of these submissions. Specifically, we explore (1) the content and concerns foregrounded within the submissions, (2) the frames and rhetorical strategies employed and (3) the stakeholders and scales called upon for climate action. The study identifies trends, preoccupations and salience within the corpus of written submissions and expands our understanding of citizen perceptions of climate science and policy. We offer both operational lessons for others aiming to enact similar deliberative forums as well as communications lessons for wider efforts to deepen public engagement on the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While international cooperation to facilitate the transfer and uptake of climate technologies in developing countries is an ongoing part of climate policy conversations, international collaborative R&D has received comparatively little attention. Collaborative R&D, however, could be a potentially important contributor to facilitating the transfer and uptake of climate technologies in developing countries. But the complexities of international collaborative R&D options and their distributional consequences have been given little attention to date. This paper develops a systematic approach to informing future empirical research and policy analysis on this topic. Building on insights from relevant literature and analysis of empirical data based on a sample of existing international climate technology R&D initiatives, three contributions are made. First, the paper analyses the coverage of existing collaborative R&D efforts in relation to climate technologies, highlighting some important concerns, such as a lack of coverage of lower-income countries or adaptation technologies. Second, it provides a starting point for further systematic research and policy thinking via the development of a taxonomic approach for analysing collaborative designs. Finally, it matches characteristics of R&D collaborations against developing countries' climate technology needs to provide policymakers with guidance on how to Configure R&D collaborations to meet these needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change impacts are already happening through the world, and it is now clear that there is the need for an adaptive response from global institutions down to the local level. Reducing vulnerability to cope with climate variability might be more challenging in tropical countries than in North America or Europe. The ten papers of this special issue were presented during the Adaptclim conference that was held by the Sinergia Project, the CLARIS LPB project, and the GeoData Institute in Asunción, Paraguay, in 2010. All papers, except one regarding the Brahmaputra Basin in South Asia, present studies from South America. These studies are first contextualized geographically and then are related one to another by a simplified vulnerability concept linking climate stress to sensitivity and adaptive capacity of natural and human systems. One half of the papers focus on actual or future climate change and the present-day causes of the vulnerability of natural and agrosystems. Droughts are and will be the main source of stress for agriculture in South America. Increasing fragmentation of forest of the center of this continent is aggravating their vulnerability to dry spells. Another half of the studies of this special issue deal with the adaptive capacity human populations to system perturbations produced or enhanced by climate change. The studies point out inclusion of traditional knowledge and involvement of local actors in their own vulnerability assessment to increase adaptive capacity. These elements of climate justice, giving voice to those less responsible for carbon emissions but bearing their most severe consequences, allow the particular needs of a community to be considered and can direct adaptation policy toward preserving or rebuilding their specific capabilities under threat from climate change. The special issue also made clear that a basin analysis of the climate change problem could provide information, results, and methods more readily of use for the local population and decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political leaders can influence public beliefs about climate change, and climate beliefs can influence climate actions. But, much is still unknown about (1) whether changes in political landscapes influence public's climate beliefs and (2) the psychological process through which climate beliefs influence pro-environmental sentiments and actions. Achieving a better understanding these influences are the dual purposes of this paper, we investigated during the unique setting of the 2016 US presidential elections. First, we explored to what extent the American public's belief in the anthropogenic origins and negative impacts of climate change were influenced by the 2016 US presidential election and earliest administrative days of a climate-skeptical political leader, Donald Trump. We found Trump's influence on public climate beliefs may have increased after his election in such a way that may have polarized public climate beliefs. Compared with pre-election levels, supporters' climate beliefs grew weaker and, further, opponents' climate beliefs grew stronger after his election. Second, we tested a novel conditional mediation model that proposes climate beliefs interact to exert their influence on climate actions via moral behavioral sentiments. Specifically, we found people's origin and impact climate beliefs interact to influence climate actions by activating moral sentiments about their own environmental behavior (i.e., guilt, striving to be a better person), with the particularly weak moral sentiments reported by those with both weak belief in climate change's anthropogenic origins and its negative impacts. Moral sentiments, in turn, predicted respondents' willingness to save energy to reduce climate change and their support for the Paris Climate Agreement. These results suggest the election of climate-skeptical political leaders can impact the public's climate beliefs. Moreover, climate beliefs interact to influence the moral sentiments people feel about their own behavior, and consequently, influence their climate-friendly behavioral intentions and policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The previous two decades of scholarship devoted to the role of social justice in climate change adaptation have established an important theoretical basis to evaluate the concept of just adaptation, or, in other words, how the implementation of climate adaptation policy affects socially vulnerable groups. This paper synthesizes insights from relevant literature on urban climate change governance, climate adaptation, urban planning, social justice theory, and policy implementation to develop three propositions concerning the conditions that must occur to implement just adaptation. First, just adaptation requires the inclusion of socially vulnerable populations as full participants with agency to shape the decisions that affect them. Second, just adaptation requires that adaptation framings explicitly recognize the causes of systemic injustice. Third, just adaptation requires a focus on incremental evaluations of implementation to avoid timeframes inconsistent with advancing justice. We then integrate the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) with the just adaptation literature to develop a framework to evaluate the implementation of climate adaptation. We present two novel modifications to the ACF aimed at fostering policy analysis of the previously presented three propositions for implementation of just adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With global action being outpaced by climate change impacts, communities in climate-vulnerable countries are at increased risk of incurring climate-induced losses and damages. In the last few years, disasters from extreme weather events such as typhoons have increased and have breached records, with typhoon Haiyan being the strongest ever typhoon to make landfall. Such an event solicited global compassion and altruism where Canada and the USA, apart from doling out traditional humanitarian aid, also offered immigration relief opportunities to typhoon Haiyan victims who have familial connections to their residents. Drawing from these immigration relief interventions, this paper uses a sociopolitical approach in proposing a climate humanitarian visa that would be offered to climate change victims on the basis of transnational family networks and skilled labor. Noting that several countries such as in Europe have demographic deficits and labor shortages, such a scheme would benefit both climate change victims and receiving countries. To counter the risk of selective compassion against economically trapped populations, potential receiving countries could provide skills upgrading geared toward addressing their labor shortages through their existing development programs. While migration is only one strategy in a spectrum of responses to climate change impacts, a climate humanitarian visa could provide climate change victims a legal choice for mobility while invoking altruism, hospitality, and compassion from potential receiving countries, whether or not they historically cause climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though a small fraction of the US citizenry, agricultural producers are directly responsible for the stewardship of almost half of the country's land. This group is therefore an especially important one to understand from the standpoint of how they process and respond to science as it relates to agroecological phenomena. Data from a sample (n = 111) of farmers and ranchers located in the US state of Colorado are used to expand our understanding of how food producers process scientific claims. These insights, I argue, help us think through public understandings of science more generally. Using semi-structured interviews, the paper unpacks an identified asymmetry in how respondents perceive climate science and the science associated with genetically modified food and seed. These tensions are interrogated with the help of a novel methodological design that generated data converted to shading matrices—also known as heat maps. The heat maps illuminate certain cultural values among respondents, which were reinforced by motivated reasoning. This allows for an interrogation of tensions and inconsistencies in respondents' remarks about a variety of scientific claims. The heat maps, coupled with the qualitative data, allow for an exploration into how respondents perceive certain salient socio-technical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public education system can play a pivotal role in creating an electorate that is well informed of the consensus around climate change and its anthropogenic causes. In particular, more states have education standards that specifically address climate change today than ever before. However, previous research raises concerns about the discretion teachers have in if and how particular types of content are presented. The effectiveness of new state standards and the extent to which such state-level standards are coopted by teacher discretion has received minimal attention. Therefore, using a nationally representative sample of 1500 middle school and high school science teachers, this research examines the effectiveness of such state-level standards and the extent to which teacher ideology and knowledge mediate the relationship between standards and actual use of a consensus-informed approach to teaching climate science. Results show that teachers in states with any type of standards around climate change spend significantly more time on the topic in the classroom. However, teachers in states that have standards that require teachers to present "both sides" of climate change are significantly less likely to use a consensus-informed approach. While teacher characteristics (knowledge and ideology) can weaken their effect, standards continue to be important predictors of the time spent on climate change in the classroom and how content is presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of climate science standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global warming potential (GWP) is widely used in policy analysis, national greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, and technology life cycle assessment (LCA) to compare the impact of non-CO2 GHG emissions to the impact of CO2 emissions. While the GWP is simple and versatile, different views about the appropriate choice of time horizon—and the factors that affect that choice—can impede decision-making. If the GWP is viewed as an approximation to a climate metric that more directly measures economic impact—the global damage potential (GDP)—then the time horizon may be viewed as a proxy for the discount rate. However, the validity of this equivalence rests on the theoretical basis used to equate the two metrics. In this paper, we develop a new theoretical basis for relating the GWP time horizon and the economic discount rate that avoids the most restrictive assumptions of prior studies, such as an assumed linear relationship between economic damages and temperature. We validate this approach with an extensive set of numerical experiments using an up-to-date climate emulator that represents state-dependent climate-carbon cycle feedbacks. The numerical results largely confirm the theoretical finding that, under certain reasonable assumptions, time horizons in the GWP of 100 years and 20 years are most consistent with discount rates of approximately 3% and 7% (or greater), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate adaptation decisions are difficult because the future climate is deeply uncertain. Combined with uncertainties concerning the cost, lifetime, and effectiveness of adaptation measures, this implies that the net benefits of alternative adaptation strategies are ambiguous. On one hand, a simple analysis that disregards uncertainty might lead to near-term choices that are later regretted if future circumstances differ from those assumed. On the other hand, careful uncertainty-based decision analyses can be costly in personnel and time and might not make a difference. This paper considers two questions adaptation managers might ask. First, what type of analysis is most appropriate for a particular adaptation decision? We answer this question by proposing a six-step screening procedure to compare the usefulness of predict-then-act analysis, multi-scenario analysis without adaptive options, and multi-scenario analysis incorporating adaptive options. A tutorial application is presented using decision trees. However, this procedure may be cumbersome if managers face several adaptation problems simultaneously. Hence, a second question is how can managers quickly identify problems that would benefit most from thorough decision analysis? To address this question, we propose a procedure that ranks multiple adaptation problems in terms of the necessity and value of comprehensive analysis. Analysis can then emphasize the highest-ranking problems. This procedure is illustrated by a ranking of adaptation problems in the Chesapeake Bay region. The two complementary procedures proposed here can help managers focus analytical efforts where they will be most useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous studies that have estimated the number of deaths attributable to heat and cold using city-level or provincial-level data. However, none of these studies have assessed temperature-mortality relationships using meteorological climate zones and data that covers an entire population/country. This analysis uses a national data set of death records to create time-series data for different regional aggregations. Temperature-mortality relationships are estimated using this data set of 1,717,224 deaths, which covers the whole of Australia between 2006 and 2017. This paper finds that the majority of deaths related to temperature in Australia are caused by heat. It also finds that the reference temperature used to separate impacts into heat-/cold-related mortality has a notable impact on the magnitude of these estimates. Previous studies (using the same methodology) found that most of the temperature-related mortality burden in Australia was attributed to cold temperatures. This led to studies that associated this with a net benefit from climate change. This analysis indicates that studies that found net benefits from climate change need to be re-assessed, especially for Australia and warmer climate zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Putting Climate Services in Contexts: Advancing Multi-disciplinary Understandings" edited by Sophie Webber. It is these power laden contexts that can constrain or enable the potential for producers and users to engage in collaborations to produce climate services, as well as the climate change adaptation decisions and actions that such "co-produced" climate services are intended to encourage. The papers in this special issue are situated along and throughout the "value chain" of climate services: from the construction of diverse forms of climate information, brokering, and intermediary work to the use of climate services and governance across the chain itself (see Harvey et al. this issue). [Extracted from the article]

Scientists need to acknowledge the inherent social contexts that drive the scientific process if they want their research to improve complex societal problems such as vulnerability to climate change. Social interactions and relationships are essential elements for conducting use-inspired research, creating usable knowledge, and providing climate services. The Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) program was founded on theories of use-inspired research and co-producing knowledge with non-academic partners. A recent program evaluation illuminated gaps in these underlying program models and led to the inclusion of social learning systems theory and communities of practice. Using grounded examples, we demonstrate the CLIMAS program's ongoing role in fostering, maintaining, and expanding a climate resilience social learning system in the U.S. Southwest. Broader implications from the evaluation focus on the importance of establishing and maintaining relationships, increasing institutional and individual flexibility in response to change, and improving the practice of transdisciplinarity. These findings inform new program evaluation metrics and data collection techniques. This paper contributes to current theory and practice of use-inspired science and climate services by identifying and demonstrating how social interactions inform climate knowledge production. The reconceptualization of the CLIMAS program as part of a growing regional social learning system serves as an example for similar types of programs. We encourage climate services and use-inspired research programs to explore applications of this framework to their own operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in climate service efforts continues to grow. However, more critical analysis could enhance how well climate services align with the needs of society. Collaborations between Native American Tribes (Tribes) and Climate Science Organizations (CSOs) providing decision-support for climate change planning accentuate the potential for climate services to have social justice implications through either deepening or softening existing inequities. This paper compares 30 Tribe-affiliated and 36 CSO-affiliated individuals' perceptions about potential harms and benefits associated with their collaborations with one another. The importance of the potential benefits of collaborations listed outweighed the potential harms listed for both groups, but while climate science organizations rated the potential benefits listed slightly higher than Tribes did, the potential harms listed were much more salient for Tribes. This finding highlights concerns that, without proper training and management, these collaborations may reinforce unequal relationships between settler and Indigenous populations. While CSOs appeared cognizant of their Tribe-affiliated colleagues' concerns, transitioning from a focus on building trust to establishing and sustaining shared systems of responsibilities might help these collaborations meet the needs of both groups more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation planning includes contextualizing global and regional climate data within specific decision-making processes. As such, planners are increasingly interested in climate services. Climate services involve the expert production of forecasts, scenarios, economic analyses, and other data products to help users meaningfully address local changes and variabilities. For instance, in the US state of Louisiana, modelers tailor 50-year storm, precipitation, and sea level rise predictions to help planners select adaptive ecological restoration projects. Modelers do so by downscaling the data, combining it with other social and biophysical information, and framing results in terms of stakeholder interests. In this paper, I question what it means to develop adaptation information that is geared towards specific users and stakeholders. Given the growing recognition that adaptation planning can prove maladaptive, I ask, when do climate services actually exacerbate existing vulnerabilities? To answer, I draw on three cases from Louisiana's coastal Master Plan and highlight political economic factors informing climate services: influential stakeholders, funding dynamics, the framing of planning decisions, and differential harms and benefits. I argue that when climate data is made relevant to existing interests, budgets, and plans, it can reproduce vulnerabilities and foreclose transformative adaptation. However, marginalized stakeholders can also pressure experts to contextualize data in ways that mitigate vulnerabilities. I conclude that climate services research and practice should expand user-centered approaches by asking climate services for whom and by assessing the winners and losers from climate variability, change, and adaptation actions themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most deliberations on climate policy are based on a mitigation response that assumes a gradually increasing reduction over time. However, situations may occur where a more urgent response is needed. A key question for climate policy in general, but even more in the case a rapid response is needed, is: what are the characteristic response times of the response options, such as rapid mitigation or solar radiation management (SRM)? This paper explores this issue, which has not received a lot of attention yet, by looking into the role of both societal and physical response times. For mitigation, technological and economic inertia clearly limit reduction rates with considerable uncertainty corresponding to political inertia and societies’ ability to organize rapid mitigation action at what costs. The paper looks into a rapid emission reductions of 4–6 % annually. Reduction rates at the top end of this range (up to 6 %) could effectively reduce climate change, but only with a noticeable delay. Temperatures could be above those in the year of policy introduction for more than 70 years, with unknown consequences of overshoot. A strategy based on SRM is shown to have much shorter response times (up to decades), but introduces an important element of risk, such as ocean acidification and the risk of extreme temperature shifts in case action is halted. Above all, the paper highlights the role of response times in designing effective policy strategies implying that a better understanding of these crucial factors is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we extend the work of Goes, Tuana, and Keller (Climatic Change ; GTK) by reexamining the economic benefit, of aerosol geoengineering. GTK found that a complete substitution of geoengineering for CO abatement fails a cost-benefit test over a wide range of scenarios regarding (i) the probability that such a program would be aborted and (ii) the economic damages caused by geoengineering itself. In this paper, we reframe the conditions under which GTK assumed geoengineering would/could be used. In so doing, we demonstrate that geoengineering may pass a cost-benefit test over a wide range of scenarios originally considered by GTK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scenarios exist so that decision makers and those who provide them with information can make statements about the future that claim less confidence than do predictions, projections, and forecasts. Despite their prevalence, fundamental questions remain about how scenarios should best be developed and used. This paper proposes a particular conceptualization of scenarios that aims to address many of the challenges faced when using scenarios to inform contentious policy debates. The concept envisions scenarios as illuminating the vulnerabilities of proposed policies, that is, as concise summaries of the future states of the world in which a proposed policy would fail to meet its goals. Such scenarios emerge from a decision support process that begins with a proposed policy, seeks to understand the conditions under which it would fail, and then uses this information to identify and evaluate potential alternative policies that are robust over a wide range of future conditions. Statistical cluster analyses applied to databases of simulation model results can help identify scenarios as part of this process. Drawing on themes from the decision support literature, this paper first reviews difficulties faced when using scenarios to inform climate-related decisions, describes the proposed approach to address these challenges, illustrates the approach with applications for three different types of users, and concludes with some thoughts on implications for the provision of climate information and for future scenario processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a fundamental challenge for which agriculture is sensitive and vulnerable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified relevant information as key to enabling appropriate climate adaptation and mitigation action. Information specifically directed to farmers can be found, for example, in specialized farming magazines. While recent studies examine how national news media frame climate change, less-if any-studies have addressed climate framings and coverage in specialized media. Media framings are storylines that provide meaning by communicating how and why an issue should be seen as a problem, how it should be handled, and who is responsible for it. This paper analyses the framings and coverage of climate change in two Swedish specialized farming magazines from 2000 to 2009. It examines the extent of the climate change coverage, the content of the media items, and the dominant framings underlying their climate change coverage. The study identifies: increased coverage of climate change starting in 2007; frequent coverage of agriculture's contribution to climate change, climate change impacts on agriculture, and consequences of climate politics for agriculture; and four prominent frames: conflict, scientific certainty, economic burden, and action. The paper concludes that climate change communicators addressing farmers and agricultural extension officers should pay attention to how these frames may be interpreted by different target audiences. Research is needed on how specialized media reports on climate-related issues and how science-based climate information is understood by different groups of farmers and which other factors influence farmers' engagement in climate mitigation and adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how transportation sector managers perceive and utilize climate science, and subsequently, how they appropriate the climate change problem. The analysis focuses on which devices they qualify as useful for translating between knowledge, policy and practice concluding with a discussion of what this suggests in the development of efficient climate adaptation strategies. The paper demonstrates that although transportation sector managers accept the findings of climate science knowledge presented to them, their understanding of the climate change problem and the range of qualifying anchoring devices used in the development of climate adaption strategies are differentiated according to where they are located in the institutional context. For transportation sector managers on the regional and district level, the climate problem is largely perceived through the occurrence of extreme weather rather than through climate science. However, this knowledge basis is not considered sufficient to support 'knowing how to act' and has resulted in waiting for the authorities to make standards and regulations that would translate climate change knowledge into methods of practice. We argue that the development of standards and regulations might be underestimated in relation to user demands in climate adaptation work that involves reconciling scientific information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the impacts of climate change is ever increasing. This is particularly true of the water sector where understanding potential changes in the occurrence of both floods and droughts is important for strategic planning. Climate variability has been shown to have a significant impact on UK climate and accounting for this in future climate change projections is essential to fully anticipate potential future impacts. In this paper a new resampling methodology is developed which includes the variability of both baseline and future precipitation. The resampling methodology is applied to 13 CMIP3 climate models for the 2080s, resulting in an ensemble of monthly precipitation change factors. The change factors are applied to the Eden catchment in eastern Scotland with analysis undertaken for the sensitivity of future river flows to the changes in precipitation. Climate variability is shown to influence the magnitude and direction of change of both precipitation and in turn river flow, which are not apparent without the use of the resampling methodology. The transformation of precipitation changes to river flow changes display a degree of non-linearity due to the catchment's role in buffering the response. The resampling methodology developed in this paper provides a new technique for creating climate change scenarios which incorporate the important issue of climate variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate scientists currently predict there is a small but real possibility that climate change will lead to civilization threatening catastrophic events. Martin Weitzman has used this evidence along with his controversial 'Dismal Theorem' to argue that integrated assessment models of climate change cannot be used to determine an optimal price for carbon dioxide. In this paper, I provide additional support for Weitzman's conclusions by running numerical simulations to estimate risk premiums toward climate catastrophes. Compared to the assumptions found in most integrated assessment models, I incorporate into the model a more realistic range of uncertainty for both climate catastrophes and societal risk aversion. The resulting range of risk premiums indicates that the conclusions drawn from integrated assessment models that do not incorporate the potential for climate catastrophes are too imprecise to support any particular policy recommendation. The analysis of this paper is more straightforward and less technical than Weitzman's, and therefore the conclusions should be accessible to a wider audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate governance that outline what each country intends to do to combat climate change. Often, these documents contain headline greenhouse gas percentage reduction targets that appear to summarize countries' contributions to mitigation. This is a boon for comparative climate policy research. However, I show in this paper that the Paris pledges require detailed interpretation to be comparable. I demonstrate the risks in comparing these targets by re-visiting a recent studying linking national public opinion to the stringency of countries' mitigation goals. I develop new indicators that better account for the structure of the targets and show in replications that the original finding is inconsistent with the underlying data. I conclude by drawing lessons for studying the Paris pledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on recent research on polycentric governance and the Ecology of Games to understand climate politics in the USA. Complementing previous work from 2005 to 2009, we map out the ideological networks of political actors engaged in the climate policy network using data from the US Congress as an arena of symbolic interaction. Our analysis identifies polycentric sites of ideological congruence and conflict in the discourse network on climate change. Political actors from different levels and including several actor types formed multiple centers that became bipolarized between the 112th and 114th sessions of the US Congress. This process took place in tandem with the increased participation of subnational actors in the polycentric system. By the 114th session of the Congress—during which the 2016 election took place—subnational policy actors, along with a diversity of other actors, contributed to an extremely polarized discussion of one of the central policies in the Obama Administration's Climate Action Plan: the Clean Power Plan. This finding is remarkable as the concept of polycentricity tends to be normatively associated with policy innovation, rather than stagnation. Our longitudinal analysis demonstrates, using Discourse Network Analysis, how increased multi-level participation can be associated with policy blockage of progressive climate policies rather than enabling policy innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of using climate metrics to estimate carbon dioxide equivalent emissions has long been subject to scientific discussion. One strand of this literature has analysed whether the choice of metric affects the relative cost-effectiveness of options for climate change abatement, but there has been little discussion on the effect of metric choices on cost-effective abatement of near-term climate forcers (NTCFs). These NTCFs are air pollutants primarily regulated by policies outside the climate policy arena and their estimated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are not typically considered in the evaluation of cost-effective abatement. However, the attention to NTCFs as climate forcers has increased during the last decade. The objective of this paper is to identify whether the relative cost-effectiveness of different NTCF abatement options is robust to climate metric choices. We assess nine plausible NTCF abatement options available in Sweden (with negligible effect on long-lived GHG emissions) and evaluate the robustness of the ranking of these, according to their estimated cost-effectiveness. Different metric designs are considered as well as climate impact uncertainty of NTCFs, with corresponding uncertainty in metric values. The results indicate that the choice of metric has little effect on the ranking of the options according to their cost-effectiveness, with options affecting NOx indicated as an exception. This suggests that the choice of metric utilised when calculating cost-effectiveness of NTCF abatement options is likely to have minor effect on which NTCF abatement options should be targeted for policy interventions (if NOx emissions are not significantly affected). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a decision support framework (DSF) to enable effective decision-making in climate change adaptation, it is important that stakeholders are involved in its development, in order to ensure that it is usable and useful. More specifically, stakeholder involvement may help to ensure that the DSF better meets user needs and expectations, as well as providing legitimate, relevant and trusted information. Involving users also helps to support social learning and build a community of adaptors. This paper describes a case study in Australia of the development of a DSF, called CoastAdapt, for coastal decision makers to adapt to the impacts of climate change, in particular sea-level rise. We use the IAP2 Spectrum to outline how stakeholders were involved. We also describe the specific activities undertaken in developing the DSF, according to how they contribute to conditions of legitimacy, credibility and saliency suggested in 'boundary' work. We conclude with some practical suggestions for considering these attributes in development of a DSF, noting that each attribute is important and requires consideration both separately and together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change adaptation is increasingly concerned with how organisations develop capacity to adapt to uncertain futures. A participatory action research project conducted in Victoria, Australia, examined how health and social service organisations developed their organisational adaptive capacity through the use of adaptation decision-support tools. It can be challenging for any organisation to select and apply a decision-support tool, but this is particularly the case where resources and capacities are limited. For most organisations, climate change is only one of a complex set of dynamic stressors they must consider in meeting organisational goals. This paper shows that while decision-support tools can help co-generate knowledge and facilitate customised organisational adaptation processes, for them to be practically helpful for organisations with limited resources and capacities, intensive collaborative and discursive processes are needed to adjust such tools to fit specific organisational contexts and needs. Facilitators and participatory approaches that enable co-inquiry can play a critical role in supplementing scarce resources and initiating adaptation processes that go well beyond the scope and purpose of the decision-support tool used. Organisations working effectively with decision-support tools to adapt to climate change will need to feel ownership of them and have confidence in modifying them to suit their particular adaptation needs and organisational goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between long-term climate goals and short/medium-term emission targets forms crucial information for the design of international climate policy. Since IPCC's 4th Assessment Report (AR4), a large number of new scenario studies have been published. This paper reviews this new literature and finds that there is more flexibility in the timing of short-term emission reductions compared to the earlier scenarios assessed by the AR4. For instance, the current literature suggests that a peak of emissions in 2020 and even 2030 would be consistent with limiting temperature change to about 2°C in the long term. The timing when emissions peak depends on whether negative emissions in the long-term can be achieved. The recent scenarios further indicate that global emissions by 2050 should be 40-80% below 2000 levels. Above all, the paper argues that there is no clear, single 'law' that would directly determine the required emissions levels in 2020, but that instead policy-makers need to consider trade-offs between the likelihood of achieving long-term targets, the short-term costs, and their expectation with respect to future technologies (and their possible failure). The higher flexibility might be important in finding acceptable agreements on international climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major transformation of the global energy system is required for climate change mitigation. However, energy demand patterns and supply systems are themselves subject to climate change impacts. These impacts will variously help and hinder mitigation and adaptation efforts, so it is vital they are well understood and incorporated into models used to study energy system decarbonisation pathways. To assess the current state of understanding of this topic and identify research priorities, this paper critically reviews the literature on the impacts of climate change on the energy supply system, summarising the regional coverage of studies, trends in their results and sources of disagreement. We then examine the ways in which these impacts have been represented in integrated assessment models of the electricity or energy system.Studies tend to agree broadly on impacts for wind, solar and thermal power stations. Projections for impacts on hydropower and bioenergy resources are more varied. Key uncertainties and gaps remain due to the variation between climate projections, modelling limitations and the regional bias of research interests. Priorities for future research include the following: further regional impact studies for developing countries; studies examining impacts of the changing variability of renewable resources, extreme weather events and combined hazards; inclusion of multiple climate feedback mechanisms in IAMs, accounting for adaptation options and climate model uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the last 200 years of colonisation has brought radical changes in economic and governance structures for thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living in remote areas of northern Australia, many of these Indigenous people still rely upon, and live closely connected to, their natural environment. Over millennia, living ‘on country’, many of these communities have developed a sophisticated appreciation of their local ecosystems and the climatic patterns associated with the changes in them. Some of this knowledge is recorded in their oral history passed down through generations, documented in seasonal weather calendars in local languages and, to a limited degree, transcribed and translated into English. This knowledge is still highly valued by these communities today, as it is used to direct hunting, fishing and planting as well as to inform many seasonally dependant cultural events. In recent years, local observations have been recognised by non-Indigenous scientists as a vital source of environmental data where few historic records exist. Similar to the way that phenological observations in the UK and US provide baseline information on past climates, this paper suggests that Indigenous observations of seasonal change have the potential to fill gaps in climate data for tropical northern Australia, and could also serve to inform culturally appropriate adaptation strategies. One method of recording recent direct and indirect climate and weather observations for the Torres Strait Islands is documented in this paper to demonstrate the currency of local observations of climate and its variability. The paper concludes that a comprehensive, participatory programme to record Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge of past climate patterns, and recent observations of change, would be timely and valuable for the communities themselves, as well as contributing to a greater understanding of regional climate change that would be useful for the wider Australian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his paper in Climate Monitor, TML Wigley uses basic probability arguments to illustrate how a slowly changing climate could potentially affect the frequency of extreme events. In the time since the paper appeared, there has been increased interest in assessing how weather extremes may be altered by climate change. Much of the work has been conducted using extreme value analysis, which is the branch of statistics developed specifically to characterize extreme events. This commentary discusses the advantages of an EVA approach and reviews some EVA techniques that have been used to describe climate change’s potential impact on extreme phenomena. Additionally, this commentary illustrates basic EVA techniques in an analysis of temperatures for central England. In parallel to Wigley’s analysis, a time-varying EVA analysis is compared to a stationary one, and furthermore, the trend from the EVA analysis is compared to the trend in means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peru experiences recurrent ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) events during which the Peruvian bay scallop ( Argopecten purpuratus) undergoes substantial changes in its stock size. In the North of the country strong warm ENSO events are synonymous with floods and river discharges that negatively affect scallop biomass, while in the South increased sea surface temperatures lead to an increase in stock size. This paper explores how formal institutions respond to climate variability and resource fluctuations in the scallop fishery, and what role they play in the maintenance or erosion of resilience. The research shows that formal institutions are slow to learn, self-reorganize and respond to climate variability while fishermen’s responses are spontaneous, ensuring a rapid process of individual adaptation. Institutional responses are mostly ex-post, and are not strongly shaped by past experience, thus eroding the resilience of the system. However, fishermen’s responses sometimes lead to negative outcomes such as local stock overexploitation or ‘invasion’ of natural scallop habitats for scallop grow-out, and formal institutions play an important role in resilience building through the control of effort and entry in the fishery. In this paper causal loop diagrams are used to conceptualize the fishery system to highlight key variables and processes. The study thus provides the opportunity to explore the usefulness of causal loop diagrams and conceptual models combined with participatory approaches in the exploration of the resilience of a system. The case study also illustrates that individual adaptation, a feature of resilience, is occurring and will occur spontaneously, changing property right regimes and responding not only to climate variability but also market forces. In order to maintain and build resilience and engender positive management outcomes, formal institutions not only need to shape fishermen decision-making, they must also contribute to knowledge building as well as the adoption of innovative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this paper demonstrated the existence of bias in GCM-derived precipitation series, downscaled using either a statistical technique (here the Statistical Downscaling Model) or dynamical method (here high resolution Regional Climate Model HadRM3) propagating to river flow estimated by a lumped hydrological model. This paper uses the same models and methods for a future time horizon (2080s) and analyses how significant these projected changes are compared to baseline natural variability in four British catchments. The UKCIP02 scenarios, which are widely used in the UK for climate change impact, are also considered. Results show that GCMs are the largest source of uncertainty in future flows. Uncertainties from downscaling techniques and emission scenarios are of similar magnitude, and generally smaller than GCM uncertainty. For catchments where hydrological modelling uncertainty is smaller than GCM variability for baseline flow, this uncertainty can be ignored for future projections, but might be significant otherwise. Predicted changes are not always significant compared to baseline variability, less than 50% of projections suggesting a significant change in monthly flow. Insignificant changes could occur due to climate variability alone and thus cannot be attributed to climate change, but are often ignored in climate change studies and could lead to misleading conclusions. Existing systematic bias in reproducing current climate does impact future projections and must, therefore, be considered when interpreting results. Changes in river flow variability, important for water management planning, can be easily assessed from simple resampling techniques applied to both baseline and future time horizons. Assessing future climate and its potential implication for river flows is a key challenge facing water resource planners. This two-part paper demonstrates that uncertainty due to hydrological and climate modelling must and can be accounted for to provide sound, scientifically-based advice to decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing consistently with risk and uncertainty across the IPCC reports is a difficult challenge. Huge practical difficulties arise from the Panel’s scale and interdisciplinary context, the complexity of the climate change issue and its political context. The key question of this paper is if the observed differences in the handling of uncertainties by the three IPCC Working Groups can be clarified. To address this question, the paper reviews a few key issues on the foundations of uncertainty analysis, and summarizes the history of the treatment of uncertainty by the IPCC. One of the key findings is that there is reason to agree to disagree: the fundamental differences between the issues covered by the IPCC’s three interdisciplinary Working Groups, between the type of information available, and between the dominant paradigms of the practitioners, legitimately lead to different approaches. We argue that properly using the IPCC’s Guidance Notes for Lead Authors for addressing uncertainty, adding a pedigree analysis for key findings, and particularly communicating the diverse nature of uncertainty to the users of the assessment would increase the quality of the assessment. This approach would provide information about the nature of the uncertainties in addition to their magnitude and the confidence assessors have in their findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a framework for evaluating how prepared California resource managers are for risks of continued climate change. The framework presented suggests three critical dimensions of preparedness - awareness of climate-related risks, analytic capacity to translate such climate risks information into specific planning and management activities, and the extent of actions taken to address the risks. We illustrate the application of this framework in this paper through preliminary research of California coastal managers where we identify limited awareness of climate-change related risks, limited analytic capacity, and significant constraints on the abilities of institutions and individuals to take adaptation actions. Our analysis suggests that for California to realize its significant adaptive capacity and be able to manage the unavoidable impacts of climate change, resource managers need to be engaged more effectively in future discussions of managing climate risks in the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]