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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]

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]

Climate change is a potential threat to achieving food security, particularly in the most food insecure regions. However, interpreting climate change projections to better understand the potential impacts of a changing climate on food security outcomes is challenging. This paper addresses this challenge through presenting a framework that enables rapid country-level assessment of vulnerability to food insecurity under a range of climate change and adaptation investment scenarios. The results show that vulnerability to food insecurity is projected to increase under all emissions scenarios, and the geographic distribution of vulnerability is similar to that of the present-day; parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are most severely affected. High levels of adaptation act to off-set these increases; however, only the scenario with the highest level of mitigation combined with high levels of adaptation shows improvements in vulnerability compared to the present-day. The results highlight the dual requirement for mitigation and adaptation to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and to make gains in tackling food insecurity. The approach is an update to the existing Hunger and Climate Vulnerability Index methodology to enable future projections, and the framework presented allows rapid updates to the results as and when new information becomes available, such as updated country-level yield data or climate model output. This approach provides a framework for assessing policy-relevant human food security outcomes for use in long-term climate change and food security planning; the results have been made available on an interactive website for policymakers (www.metoffice.gov.uk/food-insecurity-index). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many early career researchers (ECRs) have the capacity and drive to contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation solutions. Strategic investments in training and support, especially in broad-based efforts that span traditional disciplinary boundaries, can help ECRs meet this potential and become emerging leaders equipped to address pressing climate-related challenges throughout their careers. In 2018, the inaugural USDA Northeast Climate Hub's Graduate Climate Adaptation Partners (GradCAP) Program was launched to provide professional development opportunities and a platform for collaboration to graduate students studying climate resilience in agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture. This essay represents the unified voice of this consortium of emerging leaders. Here we offer perspectives, experiences, and recommendations for building capacity among ECRs, specifically with regard to interdisciplinary research, long-term research, and community engagement. We discuss these three tenants, which we term Convergence, Continuity, and Community, as essential elements in the development of successful leaders prepared for the complex challenges ahead. We encourage institutions, particularly universities and government agencies, to commit resources and pursue structural changes to provide support for mentorship and training that span these focal areas. As a result, more ECRs will have the capacity to engage in meaningful solution-oriented research and make lasting societal contributions toward the sustainable production of food and other natural resources in a changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change will significantly impact the future viability and security of food production systems, with increased frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms and other extreme climatic events predicted in many regions. In order for food production systems to remain viable and resilient under a changing climate, novel approaches, which integrate risk management (i.e. adaptation) and risk transfer strategies, such as insurance, are required. We argue that the coordinated integration of risk management and risk transfer approaches will support greater resilience of food production systems under climate change. Conversely, if risk management and risk transfer strategies are not carefully integrated, there is potential to undermine adaptive capacity (e.g. insurance subsidies may dissuade farmers from investing in climate adaptation) and ultimately reduce the capacity of food production systems to cope with and recover from the adverse impacts of climate change. Here we propose a resilience-based conceptual framework for integrating risk management and risk transfer strategies along with four key principles, which we believe could underlie their successful integration and thus enhance food production system resilience under climate change. These are as follows: (1) pro-active investments in farmer climate adaptation rather than re-active disaster relief, (2) structuring of government subsidies around insurance and climate disaster relief to incentivise farmer climate adaptation, (3) rewarding farmer efforts towards climate adaptation with cheaper insurance premiums for those farmers that invest resources into climate adaptation and (4) recognising investments in the integration of farm climate adaptation and risk transfer schemes within the broader context of future climate disaster risk management and global food security. Such an integrated investment approach could substantially reduce future economic losses for farmers while also enhancing food security under climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into the needs for adaptation will continue to grow as our sophistication in how we think the myriad of issues improves. The framework here is created to help organize our thoughts about how to proceed in a world dominated by uncertainty and confounding factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) has emerged as a major influence on the practice of and discourse about climate services, which aim to reduce the vulnerability of society to climate-related hazards through better provision of climate information and engagement of users of climate services. Yet, there is little research into the relations, practices, and discourses produced and institutionalized through the GFCS. The treatment of vulnerability in climate services, and by the GFCS in particular, remains understudied. To address this gap, we conduct a document analysis of key GFCS reports to interrogate framings of vulnerability and examine their implications for the development and practice of climate services for adaptation. Although we see attention to vulnerability in official GFCS discourse, we find that, with a few exceptions, identifying climate vulnerabilities is largely a cursory exercise that does not meaningfully engage in the complex social processes that contribute to differential vulnerabilities. To meet its own objectives, and the larger vision of climate services, we propose that the GFCS draw upon a rich literature on vulnerability and promote the global development of climate services that considers the coupled physical and social dimensions of vulnerability and prioritizes climate services for the most vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]