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Roads play a vital role in transportation systems, and their construction and maintenance expenses are high. Those reasons make crucial the examination of factors that accelerate road deterioration and those factors' negative impacts on societies. Climatic-related elements, especially temperature and precipitation, significantly affect the quality and lifespans of roads. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is causing changes in climate and that the rate of change has accelerated during the past several decades. To assess the impacts of changing climatic parameters on flexible-pavement performance, this study used 32 climate models to evaluate the performance of interstate, primary, and secondary roads across 11 diverse locations with varying traffic and climatic conditions. The study's findings reveal that changing climate exacerbates pavement distresses, leading to reduced pavement lifespans and increased numbers of reconstruction projects, which in turn raise demands for materials and equipment and contribute to higher GHG emissions. The effects of changing climate and changing climate's associated economic and environmental costs make the application of various engineering solutions to enhance pavement resilience essential, as described in this paper, in the absence of comprehensive emissions reduction strategies. [Display omitted] [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]

Lam, N.S.N., Arenas, H., Brito, P.L., Liu, K.B., 2014. Assessment of vulnerability and adaptive capacity to coastal hazards in the Caribbean region. In: Green, A.N. and Cooper, J.A.G. (eds.), Proceedings 13th International Coastal Symposium (Durban, South Africa), Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 70, pp. 473-478, ISSN 0749-0208. It has been documented that given the same type of climate related hazard and degree of exposure, the vulnerability of a region to the hazard and its resultant damages could be very different, depending on a number of natural and socioeconomic factors. An understanding of the factors contributing to the vulnerability of a region requires a good assessment method. This paper reports the results of a vulnerability assessment to hurricane hazards for the countries in the Caribbean region. The resultant index is a weighted combination of variables. The paper demonstrates a methodology to validate the weights of the variables used to compute the index through regression analysis with the storm damage data. The refined vulnerability indices for the 25 countries studied were found to range from 0.31 to 0.77. Small island countries were generally more vulnerable than large countries, with the highest vulnerability indices (>0.6) found in The Bahamas, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Turks and Caicos Is. Although the hurricane exposure was originally considered a key variable contributing to high vulnerability, low adaptive capacity in the form of low socioeconomic status, high electricity consumption, and low infrastructure development were found to have a higher weight contributing to the overall vulnerability index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the possibilities for transformation of a climate-change hot spot--the coal-producing Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia--using complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory. It uses CAS theory to understand the role of coal in the region's history and efforts to strengthen the ecological, economic, and social resilience of the region's coal industry in the face of demands for a shift from fossil fuel dependency to clean, renewable energy and genuine resilience and sustainability. It uses CAS theory to understand ways in which the resilience of two alternative futures, labeled "Carbon Valley" and "Post-Carbon Society" (Heinberg 2004), might evolve. The paper discusses ways in which changes implemented through the efforts of local communities at local, smaller scales of the nested systems seek to influence the evolution of adaptive cycles of the system at the local, national, and global scales. It identifies the influences of "attractors," defined as factors driving the evolution of the system, that are influential across the panarchy. These include climate change threats, markets, regulatory regimes, political alliances, and local concerns about the environmental and social impacts of the Hunter's coal dependency. These factors are weakening the apparent resilience of the coal industry, which is being propped up by the coal industry corporations, labor unions, and governments to maintain coal dependency in the Carbon Valley. Moreover, they are creating an alternative basin of attraction in which a Post-Carbon Society might emerge from the system's evolutionary processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The '15-minute city' concept is emerging as a potent urban regeneration model in post-pandemic cities, offering new vantage points on liveability and urban health. While the concept is primarily geared towards rethinking urban morphologies, it can be furthered via the adoption of Smart Cities network technologies to provide tailored pathways to respond to contextualised challenges through the advent of data mining and processing to better inform urban decision-making processes. We argue that the '15-minute city' concept can value-add from Smart City network technologies in particular through Digital Twins, Internet of Things (IoT), and 6G. The data gathered by these technologies, and processed via Machine Learning techniques, can unveil new patterns to understand the characteristics of urban fabrics. Collectively, those dimensions, unpacked to support the '15-minute city' concept, can provide new opportunities to redefine agendas to better respond to economic and societal needs as well as align more closely with environmental commitments, including the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. This perspective paper presents new sets of opportunities for cities arguing that these new connectivities should be explored now so that appropriate protocols can be devised and so that urban agendas can be recalibrated to prepare for upcoming technology advances, opening new pathways for urban regeneration and resilience crafting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experts working on behalf of international development organisations need better tools to assist land managers in developing countries maintain their livelihoods, as climate change puts pressure on the ecosystem services that they depend upon. However, current understanding of livelihood vulnerability to climate change is based on a fractured and disparate set of theories and methods. This review therefore combines theoretical insights from sustainable livelihoods analysis with other analytical frameworks (including the ecosystem services framework, diffusion theory, social learning, adaptive management and transitions management) to assess the vulnerability of rural livelihoods to climate change. This integrated analytical framework helps diagnose vulnerability to climate change, whilst identifying and comparing adaptation options that could reduce vulnerability, following four broad steps: i) determine likely level of exposure to climate change, and how climate change might interact with existing stresses and other future drivers of change; ii) determine the sensitivity of stocks of capital assets and flows of ecosystem services to climate change; iii) identify factors influencing decisions to develop and/or adopt different adaptation strategies, based on innovation or the use/substitution of existing assets; and iv) identify and evaluate potential trade-offs between adaptation options. The paper concludes by identifying interdisciplinary research needs for assessing the vulnerability of livelihoods to climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]