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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.

Political dynamics across scales are often overlooked in the design, implementation and evaluation of environmental governance. We provide new evidence to explain how interactions between international organizations and national governments shape environmental governance and outcomes for 238 World Heritage ecosystems, on the basis of a new intervention–response–outcome typology. We analyse interactions between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and 102 national governments responsible for implementing ecosystem protection under the World Heritage Convention between 1972 and 2019. We combine data on the reporting, deliberation and certification of individual ecosystem-level threats, with data on national governance quality, economic complexity and key stakeholder perspectives. We find that the extent of threatened ecosystems is seriously underestimated and that efforts to formally certify threatened ecosystems are often resisted by national governments. A range of responses to international intervention, including both productive and counterproductive responses, generates material impacts at the ecosystem level. Counterproductive responses occur in nations dependent on limited high-value natural resource industries, irrespective of overall level of economic development. We identify new political approaches to improve environmental governance, including how to overcome the problem of regulatory capture. Our findings inform how we can better anticipate and account for political dynamics in environmental governance. Interaction between international organizations and national governments over 238 World Heritage ecosystems shows patterns of productive and counterproductive dynamics, which yield lessons to improve environmental governance.

Mobility is a key livelihood and risk management strategy, including in the context of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced long standing concerns that migrant populations remain largely overlooked in economic development, adaptation to climate change, and spatial planning. We synthesize evidence across multiple studies that confirms the overwhelming preponderance of in-country and short distance rather than international migration in climate change hotspots in Asia and Africa. The emerging findings highlight the critical importance of addressing immobility and the intersecting social determinants that influence who can move and who cannot in development policy. This evidence suggests a more focused climate mobilities research agenda that includes understanding multiple drivers of mobility and multi-directional movement; intersecting social factors that determine mobility for some and immobility for others; and the implications for mobility and immobility under climate change and the COVID-19 recovery.

The dominant movement of people in the mega-deltas of Asia is from agriculture-dominated rural areas to urban settlements, driven by growing opportunities, but resulting in new human development challenges. In this context, the present study aims to investigate whether remittance income leads to enhanced multiple dimensions of well-being in sending areas in deltas, by focusing on two delta regions with significant out-migration rates, Bangladeshi Ganges Brahmaputra and the Vietnamese Mekong deltas. The paper develops a conceptual framework that draws on existing migration theories and the aspirations and capabilities theories. Data from large scale sample household surveys (2010 Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey and 2012 Vietnam Living Standards Survey) are analysed through multilevel regression modelling to examine well-being outcomes in sending areas and links to remittance income. The results show that the temporal extent of internal and international migration is positively associated with remittances in both delta regions. The results also suggest that in both delta regions remittances have a significant positive effect on household well-being in the source rural areas, including overall income, investments in health, food security and access to sanitation. The study concludes that landscapes of urban and rural deltas are increasingly economically integrated which suggests greater resilience even for environmentally-at-risk tropical deltas.

Studies of climate change at specific intervals of future warming have primarily been addressed through top-down approaches using climate projections and modelled impacts. In contrast, bottom-up approaches focus on the recent past and present vulnerability. Here, we examine climate signals at different increments of warming and consider the need to reconcile top-down and bottom-up approaches. We synthesise insights from recent studies in three climate-sensitive systems where change is a defining feature of the human-environment system. Whilst top-down and bottom-up approaches generate complementary insights into who and what is at risk, integrating their results is a much-needed step towards developing relevant information to address the needs of immediate adaptation decisions.

International audience; It is well established that ecosystems bring meaning and well-being to individuals, often articulated through attachment toplace. Degradation and threats to places and ecosystems have been shown to lead to loss of well-being. Here, we suggestthat the interactions between ecosystem loss and declining well-being may involve both emotional responses associated withgrief, and with observable impacts on mental health. We test these ideas on so-called ecological grief by examining individualemotional response to well-documented and publicized ecological degradation: coral bleaching and mortality in the GreatBarrier Reef ecosystem. The study focuses both on one off events of coral loss and the prospect of continuing decline on theself-reported well-being of residents living within the ecosystem, visitors, and those whose livelihood is dependent on themarine resource: data from face-to-face surveys of 1870 local residents, 1804 tourists, and telephone surveys of 91 fishersand 94 tourism operators. We hypothesise that the extent to which individuals experience ecological grief is dependent onthe meanings or intrinsic values (such as aesthetic, scientific, or biodiversity-based values), and is moderated by their placeattachment, place identity, lifestyle dependence, place-based pride, and derived well-being. Results show that around halfof residents, tourists and tourist operators surveyed, and almost one quarter of fishers, report significant Reef Grief. ReefGrief is closely and positively associated with place meanings within resident and tourist populations. By contrast respond-ents who rated high aesthetic value of the coral ecosystem report lower levels of Reef Grief. These findings have significantimplications for how individuals and populations experience ecosystem decline and loss within places that are meaningfulto them. Given inevitable cumulative future impacts on ecosystems from committed climate change impacts, understand-ing and managing ecological grief will become increasingly important. This study seeks to lay conceptual and theoreticalfoundations to identify how ecological grief is manifest and related to meaningful places and the social distribution of suchgrief across society.

The impacts of climate on health and wellbeing occur in time and space and through a range of indirect, complicated mechanisms. This diversity of pathways has major implications for national public health planning and influence on interventions that might help to mitigate and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions, nationally and internationally. This paper draws upon evidence from public health and adverse impact studies across climate science, hydrology, agriculture, public health, and the social sciences. It presents a conceptual model to support decision-making by recognizing both the proximal and distal pathways from climate-induced environmental change to national health and wellbeing. The proximal and distal pathways associated with food security, migration and mobility illustrate the diverse climate change influences in different geographic locations over different timescales. We argue that greater realization and articulation of proximal and distal pathways should radically alter how climate change is addressed as a national and international public health challenge. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12940-017-0329-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Deltas provide diverse ecosystem services and benefits for their populations. At the same time, deltas are also recognised as one of the most vulnerable coastal environments, with a range of drivers operating at multiple scales, from global climate change and sea-level rise to deltaic-scale subsidence and land cover change. These drivers threaten these ecosystem services, which often provide livelihoods for the poorest communities in these regions. The imperative to maintain ecosystem services presents a development challenge: how to develop deltaic areas in ways that are sustainable and benefit all residents including the most vulnerable. Here we present an integrated framework to analyse changing ecosystem services in deltas and the implications for human well-being, focussing in particular on the provisioning ecosystem services of agriculture, inland and offshore capture fisheries, aquaculture and mangroves that directly support livelihoods. The framework is applied to the world's most populated delta, the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta within Bangladesh. The framework adopts a systemic perspective to represent the principal biophysical and socio-ecological components and their interaction. A range of methods are integrated within a quantitative framework, including biophysical and socio-economic modelling and analyses of governance through scenario development. The approach is iterative, with learning both within the project team and with national policy-making stakeholders. The analysis is used to explore physical and social outcomes for the delta under different scenarios and policy choices. We consider how the approach is transferable to other deltas and potentially other coastal areas.

© 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.

Responses to climate change in transboundary river basins are believed to depend on national and sub-national capacities as well as the ability of co-riparian nations to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate across their international boundaries. We develop the first framework for assessing transboundary adaptive capacity. The framework considers six dimensions of transboundary river basins that influence planning and implementation of adaptation measures and represents those dimensions using twelve measurable indicators. These indicators are used to assess transboundary adaptive capacity of 42 basins in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Sahel. We then conduct a cluster analysis of those basins to delineate a typology that includes six categories of basins: High Capacity, Mediated Cooperation, Good Neighbour, Dependent Instability, Self-Sufficient, and Low Capacity. We find large variation in adaptive capacity across the study area; basins in Western Europe generally have higher capacities to address the potential hazards of climate change. Our basin typology points to how climate change adaptation policy interventions would be best targeted across the different categories of basins.

The governance of climate adaptation involves the collective efforts of multiple societal actors to address problems, or to reap the benefits, associated with impacts of climate change. Governing involves the creation of institutions, rules and organizations, and the selection of normative principles to guide problem solution and institution building. We argue that actors involved in governingclimate change adaptation, as climate change governance regimes evolve, inevitably must engage in making choices, for instance on problem definitions, jurisdictional levels, on modes of governance and policy instruments, and on the timing of interventions. Yet little is known about how and why these choices are made in practice, and how such choices affect the outcomes of our efforts to govern adaptation. In this introduction we review the current state of evidence and the specific contribution of the articles published in this Special Feature, which are aimed at bringing greater clarity in these matters, and thereby informing both governance theory and practice. Collectively, the contributing papers suggest that the way issues are defined has important consequences for the support for governance interventions, and their effectiveness. The articles suggest that currently the emphasis in adaptation governance is on the local andregional levels, while underscoring the benefits of interventions and governance at higher jurisdictional levels in terms of visioning and scaling-up effective approaches. The articles suggest that there is a central role of government agencies in leading governance interventions to address spillover effects, to provide public goods, and to promote the long-term perspectives for planning. They highlight the issue of justice in the governance of adaptation showing how governance measures have wide distributional consequences, includingthe potential to amplify existing inequalities, access to resources, or generating new injustices through distribution of risks. For several of these findings, future research directions are suggested.

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.

Climate change is altering the productivity of natural resources with far-reaching implications for those who depend on them. Resource-dependent industries and communities need the capacity to adapt to a range of climate risks if they are to remain viable. In some instances, the scale and nature of the likely impacts means that transformations of function or structure will be required. Transformations represent a switch to a distinct new system where a different suite of factors become important in the design and implementation of response strategies. There is a critical gap in knowledge on understanding transformational capacity and its influences. On the basis of current knowledge on adaptive capacity we propose four foundations for measuring transformational capacity: (1) how risks and uncertainty are managed, (2) the extent of skills in planning, learning and reorganizing, (3) the level of financial and psychological flexibility to undertake change and (4) the willingness to undertake change. We test the influence of place attachment and occupational identity on transformational capacity using the Australian peanut industry, which is presently assessing significant structural change in response to predicted climatic changes. Survey data from 88% of peanut farmers in Queensland show a strong negative correlation between transformational capacity and both place attachment and occupational attachment, suggesting that whilst these factors may be important positive influences on the capacity to adapt to incremental change, they act as barriers to transformational change.

Migration represents a major transformation of the lives of those involved and has been transformative of societies and economies globally. Yet models of sustainability transformations do not effectively incorporate the movementof populations. There is an apparent migration-sustainability paradox: migration plays a role as a driver of unsustainability as part of economic globalisation, yet simultaneously represents a transformative phenomenon and potential forcefor sustainable development. We propose criteria by which migration represents an opportunity for sustainable development: increasing aggregate well-being; reduced inequality leading to diverse social benefits; and reducedaggregate environmental burden. We detail the dimensions of the transformative potential of migration and develop a generic framework for migration-sustainability linkages based on environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, highlighting identity and social transformation dimensions of migration. Such a model overcomes the apparent paradox by explaining the role of societal mobility in achieving sustainable outcomes.