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Sea defence policy in England has proven contentious in the early twenty-first century, with government willing to defend the coast only where it is considered cost effective and not minded to compensate people for any resulting abandonment of homes. Additional focus is brought to this position by the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which reflect a growing emphasis on climate change effects and other environmental hazards, and the wellbeing of the current generation and those to come. This requires policy makers to seek to balance economic, social and environmental dimensions, and to tackle inequalities; with a central commitment of the goals to "leave no one behind". Subsequent to publication of the SDGs, England was promised a revolution in the government's approach to Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM). This paper seeks to understand the nature of this revolution with particular regard to extant issues around just governance. It finds that policy fails to deal with issues over the local acceptability of proposals for change and the bearing of risk, and instead lies principally in the elevation of the problematic concept of resilience and an accompanying ambivalence towards ideas of sustainability and sustainable development. International agreement that compensation should be paid to those countries suffering the worst effects of climate change, including sea level rise, suggests that adoption of a similar approach to vulnerable homeowners might be the more appropriate revolution and bring policy more into line with the aspirations of the SDGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, tourism is being deeply impacted by glacial retreat caused by climate change. However, research on stakeholders' adaptation to climatic change and its threat to the industry on tourism niche is currently inadequate. Thus, through a literature review of 61 glacier peer-reviewed papers, this paper highlights the advancement in research on glacier tourism and provides some basis for understanding stakeholders' adaptation strategies to climate change. The review shows that glacier tourism research publications increased between 2015 and 2020. It also identifies some impacts of climate change on the glacier tourism industry as well as 27 adaptation strategies to climatic change, which are classified under seven main themes: changes to access, activities, tourism planning, educational activities, temporal substitutions, spatial substitutions, and glacier shrinkage attenuation. We discuss the relevance of the resilience concept in the tourism industry and recommend that tourists' experiences should be enhanced by applying the findings of research on tourists' motivations and landscape perception and developing more adaptation-oriented research. The findings suggest that the glacier tourism industry can reduce its vulnerability to climate change through increased collaboration between tourism operators and climate and tourism researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increase in urbanization and climate change brings new challenges to the cities' sustainability and resilience, mainly related to flood and drought events. Among these challenges, it can be highlighted the physical and health damage to the population, interruption of water, energy and food supply services, damage to basic infrastructure, economic losses and contamination of urban rivers. To contribute to the increase of resilience in urban centers, LID practices have been used as a new approach of mitigation and adaptation within urban drainage systems, aiming at runoff retention, peak flow attenuation, pollutant removal and ecosystem services restoration (e.g., resources recycling, carbon sequestration, thermal comfort and landscape integration). These different mitigation purposes and complementary benefits provided by LID practices can be related to the different Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) presented by the United Nations (UN), to achieve countries' systemic sustainability. The identification of local techniques that contribute to the different SDG helps to achieve their territorialization and application as public policy. Therefore, this paper presents a literature review, categorizing the studies into different generations based on their main application purpose and presents a linkage of the LID benefits to different SDG. Some challenges were identified requiring further investigation, such as the need to identify and quantify the energy demands for LID practices maintenance and their incorporation in the system final energy balance, identification of processes that contribute to carbon sequestration and emission, and risks of emerging pollutants for human health from water reuse and nutrient cycling for sustainable agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate change adaptation field has evolved considerably in recent years. Important contributions have been made, with scholars developing methods for assessing vulnerability in different countries and communities, documenting broad strategies for adaptation and identifying opportunities for and barriers to adaptation as well as ways to enhance adaptive capacity. Issues of sustainability are, however, not readily argued and embraced. Predominantly, our analysis exposes that current adaptation discourse, particularly in Africa, offers a narrow conceptualisation of sustainability. The paper argues for a clear framework of sustainability in adaptation discourse which encompasses awareness to contextual aspects in responding to climate variability and change as well as resilience aspects. The paper also calls for an expansion of the knowledge base around the concept of 'climate-smart agriculture' towards effectively incorporating sustainability aspects in climate change adaptation discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban population in India is growing at a fast rate along with the growth in the construction of residential concrete houses. Though a majority of these residential buildings are still of naturally ventilated type due to the lower-middle-income group of the population, these buildings will be subjected to indoor overheating with climate change in future climatic years. This can cause severe thermal discomfort among the indoor occupants and reduce their well-being and satisfaction towards the indoor environment, and increase the possibilities of heat-related illness and even death. This paper presents the results of the effect of climate change on the thermal comfort of indoor occupants of low-rise naturally-ventilated buildings in two different physiographic and climatic regions of eastern India. The assessment methodology of indoor overheating hours and indoor overheating degree based on adaptive temperature limits are used to evaluate the indoor condition. Different simulation variants of archetypes, orientation, wall types, ventilation rates, roof types, etc. resulted in 13,824 conditions. The results show that these concrete dwellings existing in the region are unable to suppress the effects of global warming and the indoor environment deteriorates in these buildings in future conditions. The decrease in the number of annual overcooling hours caused by the increasing ambient temperature due to global warming is lesser than the increase in the number of annual overheating hours, which ultimately results in the decline of the number of indoor annual comfortable hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leading international organisations presently argue that a transition to ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA) is an obligatory task to ensure food supply for an anticipated nine billion people by 2050. Despite the rubric’s newfound importance, the conceptual underpinnings of CSA are often left unclear. Focusing on the World Bank’s framework, this paper critically interrogates the principles and concepts that underpin CSA. It argues that while CSA provides greater policy space for more holistic approaches to agriculture, it nonetheless operates within an apolitical framework that is narrowly focused on technical fixes at the level of production. This depoliticised approach to the global food system tends to validate existing policy agendas and minimise questions concerning power, inequality and access. By highlighting four strong tensions that permeate the CSA framework, the paper extols the need to greatly widen the scope of debate. To this end, it proposes an alternative ‘climate-wise’ framework to foreground the inherently political dimensions of food and agriculture in an era of climatic change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Global challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity and poverty must increasingly be tackled in cities. While cities can be significant contributors to climate change and resource scarcity, and face considerable risks as a consequence of these, they are also central to the solutions for these challenges. The quality of infrastructure, reliability of service provision and other economic and political conditions in urban areas shape levels of resource use by, and exposure to risks for, residents. This paper – which introduces a special issue on resilience and resource efficiency at the city scale – introduces these two concepts and explores the nexus between them. It uses several case studies from different contexts to illustrate the relationship between these ideas, and describes how the papers in the issue engage with them.  [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The resilience of US container ports is increasingly challenged by disruptive and stressful events such as regulatory change, adverse weather, larger container ship sizes, changing patterns of trade and sea routes, and the still to be quantified effects of enlarging the capabilities and capacity of the Panama Canal. Port sustainability requires the port managers to be resilient in their practices, to maintain existing performance levels and to increase market share when opportunity presents. The primary question that this paper addresses is how US container ports might be affected by adverse events and how they undertake resilience processes when faced with complex problems and uncertain outcomes. The paper gathers insights from literature on complex adaptive systems to discuss how US container ports may adapt to changing circumstances through innovation and the emergent outputs of self-organised agents (components) of their port organisations. The paper suggests that by conceptualising ports as complex adaptive systems, port managers may be able to better understand the complexity of change and organisational dynamics and thus harness the phenomenon of self-organisation towards their strategic intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating, caring for and repairing the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by a utilitarian positioning of natural environments by economic science. Ecologists have gone further in capturing the interdependence of economies and ecologies with the concept of socio-ecological resilience. Of concern, however, is the persistence of a vision of an economy ordered by market determinations in which there is no role for ethical negotiation between humans and with the non-human world. This paper reframes economy–ecology relations, resituating humans within ecological communities and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It advances the idea of community economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) and argues that these must be built if we are to sustain life in the Anthropocene. The argument is illustrated with reference to two construction projects situated in ‘Monsoon Asia’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience and sustainability have both gained traction in civil engineering. There is significant overlap between both fields, but practitioners tend to remain confined to their niche. This paper clarifies the link between both fields, reflects on the underlying concepts, and identifies challenges and opportunities in understanding complex problems involving both resilience and sustainability. A conceptual framework is proposed for understanding resilience and sustainability together. The example of a coastal town subject to sea-level rise and large storms is used to motivate the framework. The example is used to evaluate the use of discount rates for events in the distant future. The results are discussed to determine our ability to decide whether such scenarios are sustainable. The conclusion is that computational approaches will be inadequate. Rather, there is a need for qualitative thinking that embraces ambiguity and unmeasurable uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]