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Decisions about climate change are inherently moral. They require making moral judgements about important values and the desired state of the present and future world. Hence there are potential benefits in explaining climate action by integrating well-established and emerging knowledge on the role of morality in decision-making. Insights from the social and behavioural sciences can help ground climate change decisions in empirical understandings of how moral values and worldviews manifest in people and societies. Here, we provide an overview of progress in research on morals in the behavioural and social sciences, with an emphasis on empirical research. We highlight the role morals play in motivating and framing climate decisions; outline work describing morals as relational, situated, and dynamic; and review how uneven power dynamics between people and groups with multiple moralities shape climate decision-making. Effective and fair climate decisions require practical understandings of how morality manifests to shape decisions and action. To this end, we aim to better connect insights from social and behavioural scholarship on morality with real-world climate change decision-making.

Summary Environmental change influences population movements at various temporal and spatial scales. Yet individual decisions to migrate involve multiple motivations including perceived environmental risks and economic opportunities. We analyze how perceptions of environmental risks affect migration decisions and future migration intentions. We use cross-sectional household survey data (N = 5,450) from populations engaged in migration in net out-migration areas in four coastal areas in Ghana, Bangladesh, and India to examine ex post-migration motivations and ex ante-future migration intentions. The data include variables on previous migration, migration intentions, well-being, food insecurity, and perceived long-term environmental degradation. The results show that few households identified environmental risks as the primary driver for past migration decisions. Perceived increased severity of drought and household insecurity both reduce stated future migration intentions. Hence, perceptions of environmental risks, including future potential changes, are significant in altering aggregate migration flows from source areas in low-lying coastal regions.

© 2019 The Authors Failure to address unsustainable global change is often attributed to failures in conventional environmental governance. Polycentric environmental governance—the popular alternative—involves many centres of authority interacting coherently for a common governance goal. Yet, longitudinal analysis reveals many polycentric systems are struggling to cope with the growing impacts, pace, and scope of social and environmental change. Analytic shortcomings are also beginning to appear, particularly in the treatment of power. Here we draw together diverse social science perspectives and research into a variety of cases to show how different types of power shape rule setting, issue construction, and policy implementation in polycentric governance. We delineate an important and emerging research agenda for polycentric environmental governance, integrating diverse types of power into analytical and practical models.

Interactions of some of the principal historical natural hazards with human populations in the Austral-Asian region are discussed both from the perspective of the impact of the hazard on humans as well as the effects of human activities and climate change on hazard magnitude and frequency. Basically, the former type of interaction is evident for most hazards, while the latter interaction is primarily confined to terrestrial and coastal flooding, erosion, landslides, sea level rise, drought, and fire. Social vulnerability to natural hazards is related to the resources available to cope with the hazard, level of economic development, the ability to predict the occurrence of a hazard and to adjust and adapt to conditions posed by the hazard, and planning measures embraced by societies. Historical chronologies are presented for a range of hazards. Problems in reconstructing historical records of natural hazards include: interpretations of oral records; lack of supporting artifacts; obliteration of evidence of chronic hazards by higher magnitude events; and the inability to distinguish between the effects of different hazards in sediment records. Nevertheless, useful examples illustrate the effects and awareness of volcanic activity and associated hazards, such as tsunami, by early Maori and subsequent development of avoidance strategies; the effects of widespread land use changes and increases in population on the occurrence of floods, landslides and gullies in China and New Zealand; and the effects of forest conversion and drought on fire hazards in Indonesia.