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An interview with a Republican mayor, James Brainard on city level climate action is presented. Topics discussed include views on personal or political reasons to participate in the issue of climate change; policies on global carbon emissions; and climate-change impacts on sea level in coastal areas and forest fires in other regions.

As temperatures and sea levels rise, among other issues, environmental change is becoming an increasingly important driver of both internal and external migration across the globe. The loss of livelihood that these changes engender, and will increasingly cause in the coming decades, is forcing larger and larger numbers of individuals and groups to seek opportunities in other areas. As this phenomenon becomes more prevalent, it is imperative that communities, governments, NGOs, and other interested parties put in place policies to mitigate and adapt. This paper looks at the intersection of environmental change and migration. More specifically, it discusses the changing climate and environment and then looks at how this will, and already is, affecting migration patterns around the world. It then will provide a number of guiding principles for policymakers, academics, and others to think about when dealing with this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study models shoreline retreat due to sea level rise by using geographic data and applies the model to future projections of decreases in beach area for 806 beaches in Japan. The model uses a foreshore slope (angle) based on data from a digital elevation model, and influence of the present simplified method for estimation of the shoreline retreat is examined through comparisons with previous studies at typical locations. The proposed method gives a distance of shoreline retreat due to sea level rise similar to that predicted using the Bruun rule for minimal retreat less than 30 m, but the difference becomes substantial for more extensive decreases. The decrease in beach area is projected for different sea level rises based on four Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The decrease in beach area becomes more severe for the RCP8.5 scenario, and the proposed method predicts that a third of current sandy beaches in Japan will disappear. The extent of the decrease depends not only on the sea-level-rise scenario but also on the SLR projection model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistent pressures from water-related threats – sea-level rise, soil and water salinization, and flooding due to embankment overtopping and failure – have made the West Bengal Sundarbans a challenging place to live, and effects of global climate change will only worsen conditions. Four alternative policy directions are examined: business as usual; intensive rural development; short-term out-migration of residents; and embankment realignment and facilitation of voluntary, permanent out-migration. The last of these is the recommended approach. Study findings have informed ongoing deliberations to build consensus on future policy directions for reducing the region’s vulnerability to natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Local residents, businesspeople, and policymakers engaged in climate change adaptation often think differently of the time available for action. Their understandings of time, and their practices that invoke time, form the complex and sometimes conflicting temporalities of adaptation to environmental change. They link the conditions of the past to those of the present and the future in a variety of ways, and their contemporary practices rest on such linking explicitly or implicitly. Yet the temporal connections between the present and distant future of places are undertheorized and poorly considered in the science and policy of adaptation to environmental change. In this article we address this theoretical and practical challenge by weaving together arguments from social and environmental geography with evidence from small coastal communities in southeastern Australia. We show that the past conditions residents’ imagined futures and that these local, imagined futures are incongruent with scientific, popular, and policy accounts of the future. Thus we argue that the temporalities of adaptation include incommensurate and unacknowledged ways of knowing and that these affect adaptation practices. We propose that strategies devised by governments for adapting to environmental change need to make visible—and calibrate policies with—the diverse temporalities of adaptation. On this basis, the times between the present and the long-term future can be better navigated as a series of short and negotiated policy steps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cities are increasingly recognised as places in which climate change risks coalesce and from which climate change adaptation efforts are most likely to be mobilised. In an effort to reduce damages from storm surges and sea-level rise, the City of Cape Town municipal government set out to establish a coastal set-back line. This paper describes the process and highlights the potential for unanticipated conflict and resistance when notions of ‘best practice’ fail to consider local institutional interests and pre-existing legislation. This insight is important as coastal municipalities in South Africa look to implement set-back lines in compliance with the Integrated Coastal Management Act (Act 24 of 2008). McKenna et al. [McKenna, J., Cooper, A., & O'Hagan, A.M., Managing by principle: A critical analysis of the european principles of integrated coastal zone management (ICZM).Marine Policy, 32, 941–955. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2008.02.005] elucidate the potential for conflicts and contradictions when applying the principles of Integrated Coastal Zone Management in Europe. Developing and a applying a set-back line for Cape Town's coastline was anticipated to be difficult given that the city remains socio-economically unequal and spatially segregated and that the coastline provides multiple different communities with amenities, resources and opportunities at the same time. What was not anticipated was the encountered resistance from within public sector directorates operating under the same policies. The paper suggests that differences in mentalities, technologies and resources (following Wood, J., and Shearing, C., (2007)Imagining security.Devon: Willan Publishing) make for subjective policy interpretations and applications by local officials. Recognising and managing these differences is critical if notions of ‘best practice’ prescribed at higher governance levels are to prove useful to climate change adaptation measures at the local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Changing climates are affecting biodiversity and natural systems, causing extinctions, range shifts, and phenological shifts. Efforts to forecast the spatial distribution and magnitude of these effects, however, have focused largely on direct effects of changing climates on species' distributional potential; recent work has considered secondary effects of warming climates via rising sea levels. Here, we present a first integration of the two dimensions of climate change effects on biodiversity, examining joint effects of marine intrusion and climate change on the distributional potential of seventy-six species of Mexican birds. The two phenomena are not related to one another—that is, a species seriously affected by one is not necessarily seriously affected by the other; however, the areas affected within species' distributions by the two phenomena tend to be complementary, compounding the negative effects. These results have implications for planning biodiversity conservation globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]