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Climate change is expected to bring potentially significant changes to Washington State’s natural, institutional, cultural, and economic landscape. Addressing climate change impacts will require a sustained commitment to integrating climate information into the day-to-day governance and management of infrastructure, programs, and services that may be affected by climate change. This paper discusses fundamental concepts for planning for climate change and identifies options for adapting to the climate impacts evaluated in the Washington Climate Change Impacts Assessment. Additionally, the paper highlights potential avenues for increasing flexibility in the policies and regulations used to govern human and natural systems in Washington.

In Sweden’s Norrbotten County, a “green transition” driven by market demand and new normative structures is underway, creating a regional mega-project designed to put Sweden at the forefront of emerging green industries. These industries, such as carbon-neutral steel fabrication, battery production, and data center hosting, all require large amounts of energy, land, and minerals. This paper applies the regional environmental governance framework to Arctic data to examine which stakeholders have the capacity to impose their agenda on the Arctic environment and the points of conflict and collaboration during this period of accelerated growth. The paper tests the assumption that regional governance accommodates a plurality of interests. A case study examining Norrbotten County’s industrial mega-project centered around Luleå, Sweden, identifies a dominant coalition uniting government and industry that supports norms seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this region. However, the existing regional governance model does a poor job of integrating the local Indigenous Sámi preferences for land use. At the core of the difference between actors advancing the green economy and the local Sámi reindeer herders are divergent conceptions of nature and sustainability. Validerad;2023;Nivå 2;2023-03-30 (joosat);Funder: United States National Science Foundation (2127364)Licens fulltext: CC BY License

This paper presents the results of a detailed review of the research literature on how nomadic pastoralists are being affected by climate change, how they are adapting, and challenges with using traditional knowledge in adaptation. It focuses on research that investigates local, and particularly traditional, knowledge of water, pasture, their variability, and livestock. This knowledge underpins nomadic livelihoods, so is a foundation for effective adaptation. Changes in the total amount of precipitation, and particularly shifts in its timing, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, are having the greatest impacts on herding livelihoods. Herders in drylands worldwide face common adaptation challenges: declining traditional water sources and pasture degradation. Herders’ adaptation strategies fall into five major categories: movement to areas with better water and pasture, improving seasonal access to water, improving seasonal access to feed, shifts in herd composition, and livelihood diversification. Movement is central to nomads’ adaptation, yet, as climate change takes hold, restrictions on movement are increasing for both socio-economic reasons and climate reasons. Many papers emphasised the importance of combining traditional knowledge and current science to guide adaptation decision-making at household, locality, and national levels. There is widespread concern about the decline in traditional knowledge. All the papers reviewed emphasised the need to support passing on traditional know-how. Herder women’s know-how, in particular, is marginalised in the research literature, so their traditional knowledge should be a focus in further research. Herders’ adaptations are mostly localised, incremental, and have a relatively short-term focus. As nomadic pastoralism moves further outside the range of historical experience, the possibility of more profound transformations looms.

Moving beyond technocratic approaches to climate action, climate justice articulates a paradigm shift in how organizations think about their response to the climate crisis. This paper makes a conceptual contribution by exploring the potential of this paradigm shift in higher education. Through a commitment to advancing transformative climate justice, colleges and universities around the world could realign and redefine their priorities in teaching, research, and community engagement to shape a more just, stable, and healthy future. As inequitable climate vulnerabilities increase, higher education has multiple emerging opportunities to resist, reverse, and repair climate injustices and related socioeconomic and health disparities. Rather than continuing to perpetuate the concentration of wealth and power by promoting climate isolationism’s narrow focus on technological innovation and by prioritizing the financial success of alumni and the institution, colleges and universities have an opportunity to leverage their unique role as powerful anchor institutions to demonstrate climate justice innovations and catalyze social change toward a more equitable, renewable-based future. This paper explores how higher education can advance societal transformation toward climate justice, by teaching climate engagement, supporting impactful justice-centered research, embracing non-extractive hiring and purchasing practices, and integrating community-engaged climate justice innovations across campus operations. Two climate justice frameworks, Green New Deal-type policies and energy democracy, provide structure for reviewing a breadth of proposed transformational climate justice initiatives in higher education.

Addressing energy provision and access in Sub-Saharan Africa is a key global challenge. This paper builds a deep understanding of how fair and just energy policies and realties are in this context. It qualitatively assesses the perceptions of stakeholders in Malawi, where electricity access remains amongst the lowest in the region. Insufficient and unreliable systems of grid energy generation and distribution limit access to electricity in both urban and rural settings. Using wood fuel remains high for meeting cooking, heating, and lighting needs. Responding to these dual challenges, of lacking electricity access and ongoing wood fuel use, must be rooted in notions of equity, fairness, and justice. This paper argues that energy justice provides key insights into how best to respond to complex and interconnected issues of energy generation and access in low-income settings. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders in policy and Malawi on addressing these challenges, this paper also outlines recommendations for policy. Overall, a just response to these energy challenges is possible, but only if it is built on local inclusive governance with fairer and effective systems of investment.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are amongst the costliest natural hazards for southwest Pacific (SWP) Island nations. Extreme winds coupled with heavy rainfall and related coastal hazards, such as large waves and high seas, can have devastating consequences for life and property. Effects of anthropogenic climate change are likely to make TCs even more destructive in the SWP (as that observed particularly over Fiji) and elsewhere around the globe, yet TCs may occur less often. However, the underpinning science of quantifying future TC projections amid multiple uncertainties can be complex. The challenge for scientists is how to turn such technical knowledge framed around uncertainties into tangible products to inform decision-making in the disaster risk management (DRM) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) sector. Drawing on experiences from past TC events as analogies to what may happen in a warming climate can be useful. The role of science-based climate services tailored to the needs of the DRM and DRR sector is critical in this context. In the first part of this paper, we examine cases of historically severe TCs in the SWP and quantify their socio-economic impacts. The second part of this paper discusses a decision-support framework developed in collaboration with a number of agencies in the SWP, featuring science-based climate services that inform different stages of planning in national-level risk management strategies.

Previous studies have projected a significant role for bioenergy in decarbonizing the global economy and helping realize international climate goals such as limiting global average warming to 2 ˚C or 1.5 ˚C. However, with substantial variability in bioenergy results and significant concerns about potential environmental and social implications, greater transparency and dedicated assessment of the underlying modeling and results and more detailed understanding of the potential role of bioenergy are needed. Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) initiated a 33rd study (EMF-33) to explore the viability of large-scale bioenergy as part of a comprehensive climate management strategy. This special issue presents the papers of the EMF-33 study—a multi-year inter-model comparison project designed to understand and assess global, long-run biomass supply and bioenergy deployment potentials and related uncertainties. Using a novel scenario design with independent biomass supply and bioenergy demand protocols, EMF-33 separately elucidates and explores the modeling of biomass feedstock supplies and bioenergy technologies and their deployment—revealing, comparing, and assessing the modeling that is suggesting that bioenergy could be a key climate containment strategy. This introduction provides an overview of the EMF-33 study design and the overview, thematic, and individual modeling team papers and types of insights that make up this special issue. By providing enhanced transparency and new detailed insights, we hope to inform policy dialogue about the potential role of bioenergy and facilitate new research.

This paper explores stakeholder perspectives on the drought discourse in the UK, where climate change is predicted to increase drought risk. This study took a co-productive, mixed-methods approach to investigate drought risk communication issues through repeated engagements with local advisory groups in seven catchments across Britain and a national stakeholder competency group. These data were enriched by in-depth interviews with 17 statutory and non-statutory stakeholders working in a variety of capacities from water supply to habitat management. Codes were divided into contextual factors (cultural or drought specific factors) and individual factors (individual attributes relating to the person receiving the communication or factors within the control of communicators). The paper considers the implications of these contextual and personal factors for approaches to, and the framing of, drought risk communication (DRC). We conclude by proposing a framework for thinking about DRC in maritime climates where drought risk may not be readily perceived by some publics. This framework explores the role of heuristics in risk perception, and proposes a way of conceptualising publics that may more readily engage with DRC. In proposing the framework, we seek to stimulate new ways of thinking about DRC.

In this paper, a systematic literature review was conducted to synthesize understanding on farmers’ perception on climate change. Farmers’ perception of climate change is conceptualized as comprising of three dimensions—first, as farmers’ “awareness”; second, “conceptual understanding”; and third, the “experience” of climate change. The review included 162 papers published during the period January 2000 to July 2019. The highest number of studies was conducted in Africa, followed by Asia. A large majority of farmers report being aware of climate change. However, only a few studies elicit the difference between climate variability and climate change from farmers. A negligible number of studies attempt to identify the role of agricultural activities in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Furthermore, authors compare farmers’ perception with meteorological evidence, which is more aligned in terms of change in “temperature” rather than “precipitation.” The insights from the review provide guidance on conceptualization and operationalization of the variable “farmers’ perception of climate change” for future studies.

In 2013, the Arctic Athabaskan Council representing the Arctic Athabaskan peoples filed a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The Council sought relief for violations of their rights resulting from rapid Arctic warming and melting caused by emissions of black carbon by Canada. The aim of the paper is to show legal complaints and arguments of a particular indigenous people, Arctic Athabaskans—arguments intended to enforce Canada’s obligation to reduce or eliminate black carbon emissions, which negatively affect numerous rights of indigenous Athabaskans. Additionally, the article will point to the new legal developments and potential success of those arguments and litigation itself. The article analyses issues at the intersection of human rights, indigenous peoples and climate change. The concluding remarks attempt to answer the research questions and offer some reflections on the potential to protect indigenous peoples’ rights offered by this type of advocacy strategy and, more specifically, the petition in particular. The research method adopted is that of legal-institutional analysis as well as content analysis of relevant literature (analysis of the discourse). This paper moves forward existing climate litigation literature which focuses on human rights. As Osofsky and Peel (2018) highlight, human rights-based climate litigation is a new development in the field, and this paper expands it further.

The cranberry, a commodity of social, cultural, and economic importance to New England, is under threat due to climatic change in this region of the United States. Yet, previous research reveals that cranberry growers have mixed attitudes about the anthropogenic roots of climate change, with many being skeptical. Building on the researchers’ analysis of the personal and ecological conditions that affect climate change attitudes among cranberry growers, this paper examines the effect that key actors in the growers’ social networks have on those attitudes. Through statistical analysis of survey data and content analysis of two important cranberry newsletters, the paper finds that cranberry growers’ perceived importance of two key cranberry growing institutions, the “sociopolitically focused” Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association and the “technically focused” University of Massachusetts Cranberry Station, as well as connections to other cranberry growers, is associated in nuanced ways with growers’ climate change attitudes. Drawing on the sociological theory of “social capital,” the paper examines how these social ties to key actors/institutions may result in greater threat perception or worry about climate change. It then considers how “green ties,” if harnessed and supported by these important actors in the cranberry grower network, might significantly mitigate climate change in the future. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10584-020-02808-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The tangible progress to address climatic change remains painfully slow. As a result, practices to deliberately manipulate the Earth’s carbon and energy cycles to counteract climate change have gained traction and they are increasingly incorporated into mainstream debate. This paper examines one of the less documented examples of climate geoengineering, namely the creation of ‘super low carbon cows’. Driven by the public’s desire for a low carbon pint of milk or beef burger, I show how a combination of bioengineering, technological fixes and management practices have resulted in, and are informing, everyday changes to the way in which animals are bred, cared for and eaten—and in turn, how it affects the food that we consume. Thus, the role of the cow within the Anthropocene now extends from meat machine and sentient being to climate change saviour. I seek to show that super low carbon cows represent part of a wider climate ‘responsibilisation’ in which business interests and corporate storytelling are governing and enacting everyday mundane practices of climate engineering as part of the corporate carbon economy. Yet, as with other climate ‘fixes’, this paper shows that the super low carbon cow provides, at best, an imperfect correction. Critical gaps in the evidence of the efficiency of the solutions being advanced remain whilst manipulating an animal to be more climate friendly evokes unease when considering the wider sustainability and ethical impacts. Perhaps most critically, reliance on climate engineering to provide cheap and easy ways to control our climate fails to question, far less address, the ever-increasing demand, production and wastage of food. It also potentially undermines the already weak political will for other essential and more radical responses to climate change. In doing so, I contrast the extensive efforts to change the everyday behaviours of a cow with the limited attempts to meaningfully challenge the everyday practices, consumption lifestyles and dietary choices of the general public.

Greenhouse gas removal (GGR) techniques appear to offer hopes of balancing limited global carbon budgets by removing substantial amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere later this century. This hope rests on an assumption that GGR will largely supplement emissions reduction. The paper reviews the expectations of GGR implied by integrated assessment modelling, categorizes ways in which delivery or promises of GGR might instead deter or delay emissions reduction, and offers a preliminary estimate of the possible extent of three such forms of ‘mitigation deterrence’. Type 1 is described as ‘substitution and failure’: an estimated 50–229 Gt-C (or 70% of expected GGR) may substitute for emissions otherwise reduced, yet may not be delivered (as a result of political, economic or technical shortcomings, or subsequent leakage or diversion of captured carbon into short-term utilization). Type 2, described as ‘rebounds’, encompasses rebounds, multipliers, and side-effects, such as those arising from land-use change, or use of captured CO2 in enhanced oil recovery. A partial estimate suggests that this could add 25–134 Gt-C to unabated emissions. Type 3, described as ‘imagined offsets’, is estimated to affect 17–27% of the emissions reductions required, reducing abatement by a further 182–297 Gt-C. The combined effect of these unanticipated net additions of CO2 to the atmosphere is equivalent to an additional temperature rise of up to 1.4 °C. The paper concludes that such a risk merits further deeper analysis and serious consideration of measures which might limit the occurrence and extent of mitigation deterrence.

Developing country case studies have thus far been under-represented in conceptual models attempting to theorize energy transitions. This paper explores the role of climate finance in the process of Madagascar’s planned transition to renewable energy sources as envisioned in the country’s New Energy Policy in order to demonstrate the different experience in developing countries when compared to hegemonic transition narratives. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with energy finance providers and focus groups in recently electrified rural communities, this paper reveals that Madagascar’s transition is dependent on the financial resources mobilized by the government’s technical and financial partners. Climate finance emerges as a critical lever to implement environmental legislation. The interview findings were correlated with census data to evaluate how current financing strategies are directly connected to energy justice issues, namely the equality in access to affordable and clean energy. Through an analysis of projected energy finance flows and key financiers’ financing strategies, this paper exposes a shift from grant-based climate finance to financial instruments with clear return profiles, such as concessional loans and private capital, and finds that the choice of financial instrument impacts the provision of complementary social services in rural electrification schemes. Grants are linked to higher investments into complementary social services, while private financiers focus on innovation and scale. Purely private financed electrification projects were found to negatively impact social cohesion by increasing the inequality in access to energy. This study concludes that if only commercially viable energy projects were to be financed going forward, up to 19 million Madagascans might be excluded from future electrification efforts. Consequently, this paper urges researchers to consider social justice implications when evaluating climate finance strategies.

Climate change impacts and their consequences are determined not only by the intensity and frequency of different climatic hazards but also by the vulnerability of the system, society or community exposed. While general agreement exists about the importance of assessing vulnerability to understand climate risks, there is still a tendency to neglect global and regional vulnerability patterns because they are hard to quantify, despite their value in informing adaptation, disaster risk and development policies. Several approaches to quantifying global vulnerability exist. These differ in terms of the indicators they use and how they classify countries or regions into vulnerability classes. The paper presents the structure of selected approaches and explores two indices in depth. The aim of this paper is to assess the level of agreement between selected international indicator-based assessments of vulnerability, at the level of climate regions. Results suggest that the two major global vulnerability assessments analysed largely agree on the location of the most and least vulnerable regions when these assessments are aggregated to a regional scale using the IPCC’s climate regions. The paper then discusses the robustness of the information derived and its usefulness for adaptation, disaster risk and development policies. Measuring progress towards reducing vulnerability to climate change and hazards is key for various agencies and actors in order to be able to develop informed policies and strategies for managing climate risks and to promote enabling conditions for achieving the SDGs and building resilience., Projekt DEAL

This is an extended editors' commentary on the topical collection "Historical and recent change in extreme climate over East Asia", which collects a total of 15 papers related to the change and variability of extreme climate events in East Asia over the last few hundreds years. The extreme climate events are broadly classified into three categories: temperature and extreme warmth/coldness, precipitation and floods/droughts and western North Pacific typhoons. This commentary briefly summarizes the main findings presented in each paper in this topical collection, and outlines the implications of these findings for monitoring, detecting and modeling of regional climate change and for studying climate change impacts and adaptability. It also assesses the uncertainties of these studies, as well as the remaining knowledge gaps that should be filled in the future. One solid conclusion we can draw from these studies is that there was a marked decadal to multi-decadal variability of extreme climate events in East Asia in recent history, and the extreme events as observed during the last decades of the instrumental era were still within the range of natural variability except for some of those related to temperature. More severe and enduring droughts occurred in the early 20 th century or the earlier periods of history, frequently leading to great famines in northern China. Uncertainties remain in reconstructing historical extreme climate events and analyzing the early instrumental records. Further research could focus on the improvement of methodology in proxy based reconstruction of multi-decadal variations of surface air temperature and precipitation/drought, the recovery, digitization, calibration and verification of the early instrumental records, and the mechanisms of the observed multi-decadal variability of extreme climate in the region.

This paper proposes an assessment of long-term climate strategies for oil- and gas-producing countries—in particular, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states—as regards the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the increase of surface air temperature to 2°C by the end of the twenty-first century. The study evaluates the possible role of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies under an international emissions trading market as a way to mitigate welfare losses. To model the strategic context, one assumes that a global cumulative emissions budget will have been allocated among different coalitions of countries—the GCC being one of them—and the existence of an international emissions trading market. A meta-game model is proposed in which deployment of CDR technologies as well as supply of emission rights are strategic variables and the payoffs are obtained from simulations of a general equilibrium model. The results of the simulations indicate that oil and gas producing countries and especially the GCC countries face a significant welfare loss risk, due to “unburnable oil” if a worldwide climate regime as recommended by the Paris Agreement is put in place. The development of CDR technologies, in particular direct air capture (DAC) alleviates somewhat this risk and offers these countries a new opportunity for exploiting their gas reserves and the carbon storage capacity offered by depleted oil and gas reservoirs. This paper was made possible by NPRP grant number 10-0212-170447 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The first author acknowledges support provided by FONDECYT 1190325 and by ANILLO ACT192094, Chile. The fourth author also received support provided by the IFP School Chair on Carbon Management (CARMA). The last author also received support provided by the H2020 European Commission Project “PARIS REINFORCE” under grant agreement no. 820846.

Home insurance for extreme weather events is a significant security mechanism not only for individual households but for global finance. As extreme weather events become more frequent and intense, home insurance has been identified by governments as a critical tool for climate adaptation and disaster resilience. However, the growing research literature on the interactions between household insurance and extreme climatic events has not previously been systematically reviewed. In this paper, we analyse 175 original peer-reviewed empirical research papers on this subject, published between 2009 and 2018. We identify areas of research focus, themes, spatial and temporal patterns, and knowledge gaps, and examine policy implications of these findings. We find that an overall focus on flood insurance leaves unanswered questions about the different insurantial challenges posed by storms and wildfire. We suggest existing technocratic and calculative insurance narratives obscure the political and moral assumptions embedded within them, and that these assumptions warrant further investigation in the context of socially legitimate insurance against the impact of extreme weather events.

There is now no doubt that current global production-consumption-disposal systems are threatening the fundamental conditions of existence on this planet. In response, the pressing need for total system transformation has gained civic and political traction, feeding into long-standing debates and interventions that are aimed at recalibrating prevailing economic and social practices. One such debate and intervention is that of the circular economy (CE). Here, advocates argue that current linear resource and energy use systems must be reconfigured into loops of re-use, repair, refurbishment, and recycling, displacing primary production and lessening greenhouse gas emissions in the process. This agenda has potentially profound implications for aspects of daily social practices. Yet, to date, little attention has been paid (politically and in research) to how the CE does and will interact with everyday habits, norms, and meanings. In response, this paper explores some of the conceptual assumptions underlying the CE ‘consumer’. It argues that mainstream CE debates are underscored by an impoverished view of our relationships with complex material cultures, which in turn is creating barriers to transformation. Drawing on empirical research into responses to the CE in the UK and the Netherlands, this paper contrasts the challenges of inciting consumers to take up new, resource-efficient business models in contexts of hyper-consumerism, with a more hopeful ‘small story’ of overt, small-scale circular spaces, that nevertheless embed the CE and its underlying impetuses more clearly into the everyday.

Climate information and agro-advisory services are crucial in helping smallholder farmers and pastoralists in East Africa manage climate-related risks and adapt to climate change. However, significant gaps exist in provision of climate information that effectively addresses the needs of farmers and pastoralists. Most farmers and pastoralists, therefore, rely on indigenous knowledge (IK), where local indicators and experiences are used to observe and forecast weather conditions. While IK-based forecasting is inbuilt and established in many communities in East Africa, coordinated research and systematic documentation of IK for weather forecasting, including accuracy and reliability of IK is largely lacking. This paper documents and synthesizes existing IK for weather forecasting in East Africa using case studies from Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. The results show that farmers and pastoralists use a combination of meteorological, biological, and astrological indicators to forecast local weather conditions. IK weather forecasting is, therefore, crucial in supporting efforts to improve access to climate information in East Africa, especially in resource-poor and vulnerable communities. The paper draws valuable lessons on how farmers and pastoralists in East Africa use IK weather forecasts for making crop and livestock production decisions and demonstrates that the trust and willingness to apply scientific forecasts by farmers and pastoralists is likely to increase when integrated with IK. Therefore, a systematic documentation of IK, and a framework for integrating IK and scientific weather forecasting from national meteorological agencies can improve accuracy, uptake, and use of weather forecasts.

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.

The assessment of the impacts of climate change at different levels of global warming helps inform national and international policy discussion around mitigation targets. This paper provides consistent estimates of global and regional impacts and risks at increases in global mean temperature up to 5 °C above pre-industrial levels, for over 30 indicators representing temperature extremes and heatwaves, hydrological change, floods and droughts and proxies for impacts on crop yields. At the global scale, all the impacts that could plausibly be either adverse or beneficial are adverse, and impacts and risks increase with temperature change. For example, the global average chance of a major heatwave increases from 5% in 1981–2010 to 28% at 1.5 °C and 92% at 4 °C, of an agricultural drought increases from 9 to 24% at 1.5 °C and 61% at 4 °C, and of the 50-year return period river flood increases from 2 to 2.4% at 1.5 °C and 5.4% at 4 °C. The chance of a damaging hot spell for maize increases from 5 to 50% at 4 °C, whilst the chance for rice rises from 27 to 46%. There is considerable uncertainty around these central estimates, and impacts and risks vary between regions. Some impacts—for example heatwaves—increase rapidly as temperature increases, whilst others show more linear responses. The paper presents estimates of the risk of impacts exceeding specific targets and demonstrates that these estimates are sensitive to the thresholds used.

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?

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.

Indicators have been proposed as critical elements for sustained climate assessment. Indicators provide a foundation for assessing change on an ongoing basis and presenting that information in a manner that is relevant to a broad range of decisions. As part of a sustained US National Climate Assessment, a pilot indicator system was implemented, informed by recommendations and (Kenney et al. 2014; Janetos and Kenney 2015; Kenney et al. Clim Chang 135(1):85–96, 2016). This paper extends this work to recommend a framework and topical categories for a system of climate indicators for the nation. We provide an overview of the indicator system as a whole: its goals, the design criteria for the indicators and the system as a whole, the selection of sectors, the use of conceptual models to transparently identify relevant indicators, examples of the actual indicators proposed, our vision for how the overall network can be used, and how it could evolve over time. Individual papers as part of this special issue provide system or sector-specific details as to how to operationalize the conceptual framework; these recommendations do not imply any decisions that are made ultimately by US federal agencies.

With high certainty, extreme weather events will intensify in their impact within the next 10 years due to climate change-induced increases in hazard probability of occurrence and simultaneous increases in socio-economic vulnerability. Data from previous mega-disasters show that losses from disruptions of critical services surpass the value of direct damages in the exposed areas because critical infrastructures [CI] are increasingly (inter-) dependent. Local events may have global impacts. Systemic criticality, which describes the relevance of a critical infrastructure due to its positioning within the system, needs to be addressed to reduce the likelihood of cascading effects. This paper presents novel approaches to operationalise and assess systemic criticality. Firstly, the paper introduces systemic cascade potential as a measurement of systemic criticality. It takes the relevance of a sector and the relevance of its interdependencies into account to generate a relative value of systemic importance for a CI sector. Secondly, an exemplary sectoral assessment of the road network allows reflecting the spatial manifestation of the first level of cascading effects. It analyses the impact of traffic interruptions on the accessibility of critical facilities to point out the systemically most critical segments of the municipal road network. To further operationalise the spatial dimension of criticality, a normative assertion determining the worthiness of protection of system components is required. A nationwide spatial flood protection plan incorporates this aspect in Germany for the first time. Its formal approval process was initiated in February 2020.

There is increasing concern that climate change poses an existential risk to humanity. Understanding these worst-case scenarios is essential for good risk management. However, our knowledge of the causal pathways through which climate change could cause societal collapse is underdeveloped. This paper aims to identify and structure an empirical evidence base of the climate change, food insecurity and societal collapse pathway. We first review the societal collapse and existential risk literature and define a set of determinants of societal collapse. We develop an original methodology, using these determinants as societal collapse proxies, to identify an empirical evidence base of climate change, food insecurity and societal collapse in contemporary society and then structure it using a novel-format causal loop diagram (CLD) defined at global scale and national granularity. The resulting evidence base varies in temporal and spatial distribution of study and in the type of data-driven methods used. The resulting CLD documents the spread of the evidence base, using line thickness and colour to depict density and type of data-driven method respectively. It enables exploration of how the effects of climate change may undermine agricultural systems and disrupt food supply, which can lead to economic shocks, socio-political instability as well as starvation, migration and conflict. Suggestions are made for future work that could build on this paper to further develop our qualitative understanding of, and quantitative complex systems modelling capabilities for analysing, the causal pathways between climate change and societal collapse.

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.

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.

The phenomenon of ‘climigration’ is an emerging and increasing challenge to human settlements. Climigration refers to community relocation undertaken in response to climate change impacts. This paper adds to early but critical scholarly discussions by providing a land-use planning framework for organising and responding to the governance, policy, institutional and cultural implications of climigration. This paper argues that land-use planning will be increasingly required to manage climigration events over the coming decades and will rely on input and guidance from other disciplines to do so effectively. Climigration is conceptualised as an end-point of climate change adaptation in this paper. Empirical content derives from a multidisciplinary systematic quantitative literature review of international case studies of community relocations. Planning factors with critical, moderate or negligible influences on relocation success are synthesised. These are linked to the roles and functions of land-use planning systems to provide a framework for approaching climigration. The paper provides three interlinked conclusions. The first is that spatial planning systems have potential and capacity to respond to climigration as an extreme form of climate change adaptation. The second is that anticipatory policy frameworks offer the greatest advantages for successful climigration planning. The third conclusion is that maladaptation is a potential but avoidable threat connected to climigration planning.

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.

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.

This paper introduces the Special Issue “Hydrological Model Intercomparison for Climate Impact Assessment”. We describe the river basins used as case studies, the input data, the hydrological models, and the climate scenarios applied in the multi-model framework. We also summarize the main results of the papers contained in this Special Issue.

Understanding how households, ranging from poor to wealthy differ in levels of vulnerability to hazards, such as floods and heat waves and knowledge of the mechanisms creating this difference is fundamental to enhancing resilience, fairly, across urban populations. A complex problem exists, however, in determining the relative influences of various attributes of wealth and vulnerability. In this paper we apply a livelihoods framework to characterize urban households by the resources or assets that comprise their livelihoods. We then combine a fuzzy logic approach with an analytic hierarchy process (ANH), to examine the relative influence of wealth (poverty), exposure, sensitivity and capacity on vulnerability to climate hazards in Mumbai, India. While research on urban resilience has grown considerably in recent years, this paper belongs to the few studies that have examined the relative influence of wealth and capacity on differences in vulnerability within and across household classes in cities. We find that under current climate change conditions, differences in wealth and capacity largely account for the high household vulnerability levels in Mumbai. While this pattern might change in a future (warmer) world, without a profound transformation, it is hard to imagine that the change would be for the better.

Seasonal climate forecasts (SCF) provide information about future climate variability that has the potential to benefit organisations and their decision-making. However, the production and availability of SCF does not guarantee its use in decision-making per se as a range of factors and conditions influence its use in different decision-making contexts. The aim of this paper is to identify the barriers and enablers to the use of SCF across organisations in Europe. To achieve that, we conducted 75 in-depth interviews with organisations working across eight sectors (including energy, transport, water and agriculture) and 16 countries. The majority of the organisations interviewed do not currently use SCF. This was due to the low reliability and skill of SCF in Europe but also with other non-technical aspects such as the lack of relevance and awareness of SCF in the organisations. Conversely, the main enabler to the use of SCF was the interactions with the providers of SCF. In addition, the level of organisational resources, capacity and expertise were also significant enablers to the use of SCF in organisations. This paper provides the first empirical assessment of the use of SCF in Europe. Such insights provide not only an overview of the existing barriers and enablers to the use of SCF in Europe and how these can be overcome and negotiated to enhance the usability of SCF, but can also help inform the broader and emerging context of climate services development in Europe. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-016-1671-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

One of the most important interactions between humans and climate is in the demand and supply of water. Humans withdraw, use, and consume water and return waste water to the environment for a variety of socioeconomic purposes, including domestic, commercial, and industrial use, production of energy resources and cooling thermal-electric power plants, and growing food, fiber, and chemical feed stocks for human consumption. Uncertainties in the future human demand for water interact with future impacts of climatic change on water supplies to impinge on water management decisions at the international, national, regional, and local level, but until recently tools were not available to assess the uncertainties surrounding these decisions. This paper demonstrates the use of a multi-model framework in a structured sensitivity analysis to project and quantify the sensitivity of future deficits in surface water in the context of climate and socioeconomic change for all U.S. states and sub-basins. The framework treats all sources of water demand and supply consistently from the world to local level. The paper illustrates the capabilities of the framework with sample results for a river sub-basin in the U.S. state of Georgia.

The private sector’s role in climate finance is increasingly subject to political and scientific debate. Yet there is poor empirical evidence of private engagement in adaptation and its potential contribution to the industrialised countries’ mobilisation of USD 100 billion of annual climate finance from 2020 onwards to support developing countries to address climate change. This paper analysed 101 case studies of private sector adaptation under the Private Sector Initiative (PSI) of the UNFCCC Nairobi work programme, and examined these against ten ‘adaptation finance criteria’ that were distilled from UN climate negotiation outcomes. Results show that private adaptation interventions complement public adaptation activities. Yet the ten adaptation finance criteria are not met, which demonstrates that the diplomatic UNFCCC conceptualisation of financing adaptation is dissonant from the private sector reality. For example, while the case studies’ investments are ‘new and additional’ to Official Development Assistance (ODA), their ‘predictability’ remains unclear. And despite some commitment for ‘up-scaling’, plans and associated costs for doing so remain undisclosed. Developed countries’ role in ‘mobilising’ private financial resources under the PSI seems limited. It is unrealistic to expect that the UNFCCC alters existing criteria to suit private initiatives, or that the private sector aligns its initiatives to meet existing criteria. This paper advocates monitoring and reporting only of those private investments that principally finance adaptation. This practical way forward would allow private finance to meet criteria such as predictability, transparency, and mobilisation, but would drastically reduce the amount of private investment that could contribute to reaching the USD 100 billion climate finance target.

This paper introduces the special issue of Climatic Change on the QUEST-GSI project, a global-scale multi-sectoral assessment of the impacts of climate change. The project used multiple climate models to characterise plausible climate futures with consistent baseline climate and socio-economic data and consistent assumptions, together with a suite of global-scale sectoral impacts models. It estimated impacts across sectors under specific SRES emissions scenarios, and also constructed functions relating impact to change in global mean surface temperature. This paper summarises the objectives of the project and its overall methodology, outlines how the project approach has been used in subsequent policy-relevant assessments of future climate change under different emissions futures, and summarises the general lessons learnt in the project about model validation and the presentation of multi-sector, multi-region impact assessments and their associated uncertainties to different audiences.

“Societal teleconnections” – analogous to physical teleconnections such as El Niño – are human-created linkages that link activities, trends, and disruptions across large distances, such that locations spatially separated from the locus of an event can experience a variety of impacts from it nevertheless. In the climate change context, such societal teleconnections add a layer of risk that is currently neither fully appreciated in most impacts or vulnerability assessments nor in on-the-ground adaptation planning. Conceptually, societal teleconnections arise from the interactions among actors, and the institutions that guide their actions, affecting the movement of various substances through different structures and processes. Empirically, they arise out of societal interactions, including globalization, to create, amplify, and sometimes attenuate climate change vulnerabilities and impacts in regions far from those where a climatic extreme or change occurs. This paper introduces a simple but systematic way to conceptualize societal teleconnections and then highlights and explores eight unique but interrelated types of societal teleconnections with selected examples: (1) trade and economic exchange, (2) insurance and reinsurance, (3) energy systems, (4) food systems; (5) human health, (6) population migration, (7) communication, and (8) strategic alliances and military interactions. The paper encourages further research to better understand the causal chains behind socially teleconnected impacts, and to identify ways to routinely integrate their consideration in impacts/vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning to limit the risk of costly impacts. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1328-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This paper applies an ontological politics approach for studying how complexity, uncertainty, and ignorance are being dealt with in the Netherlands by looking at how knowledges are produced and incorporated in decision-making on uncertain climate change. On the basis of work done in the Netherlands, this paper shows two things in particular. First, how decision making responses historically have been subject to change under the influence of floods and how the emergence of climate change has significantly changed these floods. Second, based on the analysis of processes dealing with a blue-green algae problem in a lake, climate change not only changed decision making responses but also changed the very reality that is being enacted. Consequently, this brings an ethical dimension to the fore, related to the intrinsic tension between the growing awareness that “all is interconnected” on the one hand and the realization we cannot take all into account.