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BACKGROUND: The public health community readily recognizes flooding and wildfires as climate-related health hazards, but few studies quantify changes in risk of exposure, particularly for vulnerable children and older adults. OBJECTIVES: This study quantifies future populations potentially exposed to inland flooding and wildfire smoke under two climate scenarios, highlighting the populations in particularly vulnerable age groups (≤4 y old and ≥65 y old). METHODS: Spatially explicit projections of inland flooding and wildfire under two representative concentration pathways (RCP8.5 and RCP4.5) are integrated with static (2010) and dynamic (2050 and 2090) age-stratified projections of future contiguous U.S. populations at the county level. RESULTS: In both 2050 and 2090, an additional one-third of the population will live in areas affected by larger and more frequent inland flooding under RCP8.5 than under RCP4.5. Approximately 15 million children and 25 million older adults could avoid this increased risk of flood exposure each year by 2090 under a moderate mitigation scenario (RCP4.5 compared with RCP8.5). We also find reduced exposure to wildfire smoke under the moderate mitigation scenario. Nearly 1 million young children and 1.7 million older adults would avoid exposure to wildfire smoke each year under RCP4.5 than under RCP8.5 by the end of the century. CONCLUSIONS: By integrating climate-driven hazard and population projections, newly created county-level exposure maps identify locations of potential significant future public health risk. These potential exposure results can help inform actions to prevent and prepare for associated future adverse health outcomes, particularly for vulnerable children and older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a systematic framework to identify barriers that may impede the process of adaptation to climate change. The framework targets the process of planned adaptation and focuses on potentially challenging but malleable barriers. Three key sets of components create the architecture for the framework. First, a staged depiction of an idealized, rational approach to adaptation decision-making makes up the process component. Second. a set of interconnected structural elements includes the actors, the larger context in which they function (e.g., governance), and the object on which they act (the system of concern that is exposed to climate change). At each of these stages, we ask (1) what could impede the adaptation process and (ii) how do the actors, context, and system of concern contribute to the barrier. To facilitate the identification of barriers, we provide a series of diagnostic questions. Third, the framework is completed by a simple matrix to help locate points of intervention to overcome a given barrier. It provides a systematic starting point for answering critical questions about how to support climate change adaptation at all levels of decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Most climate change researchers in California want to increase their engagement with practitioners, and the more researchers focus on climate change, the more they want to engage practitioners. • The frequency of engagement with practitioners varies significantly across academic fields. • The most highly engaged disciplines are also the most peripheral disciplines in climate science. • Representing empirically the social structure of climate research, including its demographic and disciplinary composition, can inform future research on the "co-production" of climate information in contexts of public decision-making. Interactions between researchers and practitioners can lead to the increased use of climate science in decision-making. Past studies on these interactions have focused on the information needs of decision-makers, but less is known about why and how climate researchers choose to engage with decision-makers. Understanding the experiences, beliefs and constraints on both sides of the 'knowledge-action gap' is critical for implementing robust climate adaptation strategies. This study thus examines the perspectives and experiences of researchers regarding practitioner engagement, drawing from an original survey of California's climate research community (N = 991) and supplemental interviews. Given a history of support for climate research and climate change adaptation, analysis of the California case is useful as a means of characterizing the relationship between climate research and practitioner engagement. We find that most scientists want to engage more with practitioners but are constrained by several factors, including resource limitations and the challenge of building relationships. Additionally, we find that the level of interest and frequency of engagement with stakeholders varies significantly across academic disciplines. We demonstrate that building capacity within research organizations and integrating stakeholder engagement in funding criteria and professional development can help foster relationship-building between scientists and decision-makers. The analysis suggests that the social structure of climate research warrants further examination of the ways that climate researchers relate to practitioners at present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]