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The purpose of the present paper is to examine a selection of macro- and micro-linguistic features (at text and sentence/word level respectively) of the South-African Green Paper 'National Climate Change Response' from 2010. Our overarching assumption is that the Green Paper needs to handle competing interests, beliefs and voices in a narrative structure favouring specific courses of action. How does the government portray the complex natural and societal phenomenon of climate change, and how does it take into account the many and often competing national and international views and interests which come into play? Our hypothesis is that the Green Paper constructs a narrative and that it relates to a number of voices other than that of the authors, through linguistic markers of polyphony, such as negation, sentence connectives, adverbs and reported speech. Thus we propose a narrative and polyphonic analysis of the Green Paper, at the level of the text as a whole (macro-level) but also with attention to linguistic constructions of polyphony or 'multi-voicedness' (micro-level). We find that the narrative-polyphonic properties of the Green Paper contribute to a strategy for building consensus on climate change policy. The South African government assumes the role of main hero in its own climate change 'story', and there are subtle forms of interaction with different and typically non-identified voices, such as concessive constructions and presuppositions. These results support our overarching interpretation of the whole document as striving to impose a South African consensus on the issue of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a global trend away from delivering 'climate information' towards producing 'climate services' for decision-makers. The rationale for this shift is said to be the demand for timely and actionable climate knowledge, whilst the means of its delivery involves a shift from public good to more privatised forms of climate science. This paper identifies important implications of this shift to climate services by examining the role of consultants, drawing on an in-depth study of adaptation consultants in Australia. The role of consultants is instructive, not just because these private sector experts are engaged in climate services, but also because publicly funded climate science agencies are increasingly encouraged to behave as consulting firms do. Four imperatives of knowledge businesses—to be client-focussed, solutions-oriented, resource-efficient and self-replicating—are described. The paper argues that an emphasis on climate services shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit. There is a subsequent diversion of effort away from publicly accessible and transparent climate information to private knowledge for discrete clients. Climate services also emphasise knowledge for climate solutions as opposed to the politically charged identification of climate risks. The paper concludes with a warning that the trend towards climate services undermines the knowledge required for societies to adequately respond to the scale, speed and severity of climate change. At the heart of this issue is a climate services paradox: how to achieve customisation without exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all climate change studies of plants and animals adopt an 'equilibrium assumption' that analyses of natural distributions provide reliable estimates of species climatic requirements. Yet commercial forestry trials around the world have shown that many tree species can grow successfully under climatic conditions somewhat different from those of their natural distributions. Under climate change it is reasonable to assume that a long-lived tree species, already well-established at particular sites, may be able to display some of the climatic adaptability shown in trials outside its natural distribution. The purpose of this paper is to outline how some species distribution modelling (SDM) and ecological niche modelling (ENM) studies have estimated species climatic requirements beyond those shown by conventional analyses of just their natural distributions, and to show how recent developments are facilitating these analyses. Some of the earliest SDM studies of trees demonstrated the desirability of assessing species climatic requirements using data from outside, as well as within, their natural distributions. In recent years, with the advent of large biodiversity databases and some revised SDM analysis methods, there has been a revival of interest in measuring species climatic requirements using data from beyond their realized niches. It is recommended that at least for tree species, natural distribution data, and where possible results from plantings beyond natural distributions, should be analysed in climate change studies. When this is not possible, some alternative methods of estimating species climatic requirements are identified and some of their advantages and disadvantages are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on using climate information has often focused on the interaction between users and producers and the technical fit of information for real decision-making. However, due to resource and capacity constraints within both user and producer communities, this approach will not always be feasible or indeed necessary depending on the decisions at hand. These contexts have been relatively under-explored by scholars, and this paper provides an original empirical contribution using three case studies of sub-national governments in India, Kenya and Uganda. In the paper, we analyse how social learning supports changing the usability of climate information and the role of intermediary organisations in these processes. Firstly, the paper shows that intermediaries often choose to build the commitment to project aims rather than using climate information as an entry point to working on climate change, and this allows them to instigate challenging learning processes. Secondly, there are barriers to iterative processes and critical reflection with government stakeholders but these processes can gain traction when built into institutional practices such as formal M&E processes. Lastly, social learning can broaden the framing of climate change from a single sector issue to a multi-sectoral one. We conclude by arguing that bringing together scholarship on social learning with that on the usability of climate information can deepen understanding of the dynamic context in which the information becomes usable. The evidence from the case studies shows that learning processes can alter this context across scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we extend the work of Goes, Tuana, and Keller (Climatic Change ; GTK) by reexamining the economic benefit, of aerosol geoengineering. GTK found that a complete substitution of geoengineering for CO abatement fails a cost-benefit test over a wide range of scenarios regarding (i) the probability that such a program would be aborted and (ii) the economic damages caused by geoengineering itself. In this paper, we reframe the conditions under which GTK assumed geoengineering would/could be used. In so doing, we demonstrate that geoengineering may pass a cost-benefit test over a wide range of scenarios originally considered by GTK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) is a collaborative effort to provide professionals, decision makers, and the public with information about how climate change affects state and local interests throughout Indiana, USA. This assessment effort has three interrelated goals: (1) analyze and document the best available climate change impacts research, (2) develop and maintain a network of stakeholders and experts, and (3) start a dialog about climate change throughout Indiana. The project adopted a process that prioritized stakeholder engagement, re-envisioned traditional dissemination approaches, and that had limited state government involvement, setting the IN CCIA apart from most other state climate assessments (SCAs) in the USA. This overview describes the motivations, principles, and processes that guided the IN CCIA development, explores how Indiana's approach compares with those of other SCAs, and briefly summarizes the papers presented in this special issue. As interest in SCAs grows in non-coastal and politically conservative locations, the IN CCIA serves as one example of how a bottom-up assessment with limited funding can deliver credible climate science to diverse stakeholder groups in the absence of state-level mandates or direction and attract public attention over an extended period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the Special Issue on "Everyday Climate Cultures: Understanding the cultural politics of climate change" edited by Goodman, Doyle and Farrell As we write this editorial introduction, the UK is slowly emerging from its period of self-imposed lockdown restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and facing the virus's lasting impacts upon society at every scale imaginable. Taking a longitudinal approach to the study of climate imagery, Saffron O'Neill (2020) explores how UK and US newspapers visually depict climate change during the period 2001-2009, an important decade for the expansion and consolidation of climate change science, activism and engagement. Through online surveys and interviews, US climate scholars were asked about their everyday climate advocacy work beyond their professional commitments, defined here by evidence-based climate science rather than particular policy outcomes. [Extracted from the article]

This paper distinguishes between bridging and bonding social capital to assess their roles for individual farmers’ adaptation strategies taken through technology adoption. Based on primary data collected in Langcang River (LCR) basin area in southwestern China, the paper finds: (1) adaptation measures have been widely taken by surveyed households, but non-infrastructure-based measures are more prevalent than infrastructure-based measures and (2) surveyed households have strong social capital while having weak bridging social capital. Their bonding social capital has significantly positive relationship with their adaptation decisions, but bridging social capital does not have such statistically significant relationship. It recommends that the governments contemplate carefully how to help the poor to get a good combination of bonding and bridging social capital when designing policies to help the rural poor to improve their long-term adaptive capacity and achieve sustainable rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With global action being outpaced by climate change impacts, communities in climate-vulnerable countries are at increased risk of incurring climate-induced losses and damages. In the last few years, disasters from extreme weather events such as typhoons have increased and have breached records, with typhoon Haiyan being the strongest ever typhoon to make landfall. Such an event solicited global compassion and altruism where Canada and the USA, apart from doling out traditional humanitarian aid, also offered immigration relief opportunities to typhoon Haiyan victims who have familial connections to their residents. Drawing from these immigration relief interventions, this paper uses a sociopolitical approach in proposing a climate humanitarian visa that would be offered to climate change victims on the basis of transnational family networks and skilled labor. Noting that several countries such as in Europe have demographic deficits and labor shortages, such a scheme would benefit both climate change victims and receiving countries. To counter the risk of selective compassion against economically trapped populations, potential receiving countries could provide skills upgrading geared toward addressing their labor shortages through their existing development programs. While migration is only one strategy in a spectrum of responses to climate change impacts, a climate humanitarian visa could provide climate change victims a legal choice for mobility while invoking altruism, hospitality, and compassion from potential receiving countries, whether or not they historically cause climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though a small fraction of the US citizenry, agricultural producers are directly responsible for the stewardship of almost half of the country's land. This group is therefore an especially important one to understand from the standpoint of how they process and respond to science as it relates to agroecological phenomena. Data from a sample (n = 111) of farmers and ranchers located in the US state of Colorado are used to expand our understanding of how food producers process scientific claims. These insights, I argue, help us think through public understandings of science more generally. Using semi-structured interviews, the paper unpacks an identified asymmetry in how respondents perceive climate science and the science associated with genetically modified food and seed. These tensions are interrogated with the help of a novel methodological design that generated data converted to shading matrices—also known as heat maps. The heat maps illuminate certain cultural values among respondents, which were reinforced by motivated reasoning. This allows for an interrogation of tensions and inconsistencies in respondents' remarks about a variety of scientific claims. The heat maps, coupled with the qualitative data, allow for an exploration into how respondents perceive certain salient socio-technical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public education system can play a pivotal role in creating an electorate that is well informed of the consensus around climate change and its anthropogenic causes. In particular, more states have education standards that specifically address climate change today than ever before. However, previous research raises concerns about the discretion teachers have in if and how particular types of content are presented. The effectiveness of new state standards and the extent to which such state-level standards are coopted by teacher discretion has received minimal attention. Therefore, using a nationally representative sample of 1500 middle school and high school science teachers, this research examines the effectiveness of such state-level standards and the extent to which teacher ideology and knowledge mediate the relationship between standards and actual use of a consensus-informed approach to teaching climate science. Results show that teachers in states with any type of standards around climate change spend significantly more time on the topic in the classroom. However, teachers in states that have standards that require teachers to present "both sides" of climate change are significantly less likely to use a consensus-informed approach. While teacher characteristics (knowledge and ideology) can weaken their effect, standards continue to be important predictors of the time spent on climate change in the classroom and how content is presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of climate science standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, California has passed some of the strongest climate policies in the USA. These new policies have been motivated in part by increasing concerns over the risk of climate-related impacts and facilitated by the state's existing framework of energy and air quality policies. This paper presents an overview of the evolution of this increased awareness of climate change issues by policy makers brought about by the strong link between climate science and policy in the state. The State Legislature initiated this link in 1988 with the mandate to prepare an assessment of the potential consequences of climate change to California. Further interactions between science and policy has more recently resulted, in summer of 2006, in the passage of Assembly Bill 32, a law that limits future greenhouse gas emissions in California. This paper discusses the important role played by a series of state and regional climate assessments beginning in 1988 and, in particular, the lessons learned from a recently completed study known as the Scenarios Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change impacts are already happening through the world, and it is now clear that there is the need for an adaptive response from global institutions down to the local level. Reducing vulnerability to cope with climate variability might be more challenging in tropical countries than in North America or Europe. The ten papers of this special issue were presented during the Adaptclim conference that was held by the Sinergia Project, the CLARIS LPB project, and the GeoData Institute in Asunción, Paraguay, in 2010. All papers, except one regarding the Brahmaputra Basin in South Asia, present studies from South America. These studies are first contextualized geographically and then are related one to another by a simplified vulnerability concept linking climate stress to sensitivity and adaptive capacity of natural and human systems. One half of the papers focus on actual or future climate change and the present-day causes of the vulnerability of natural and agrosystems. Droughts are and will be the main source of stress for agriculture in South America. Increasing fragmentation of forest of the center of this continent is aggravating their vulnerability to dry spells. Another half of the studies of this special issue deal with the adaptive capacity human populations to system perturbations produced or enhanced by climate change. The studies point out inclusion of traditional knowledge and involvement of local actors in their own vulnerability assessment to increase adaptive capacity. These elements of climate justice, giving voice to those less responsible for carbon emissions but bearing their most severe consequences, allow the particular needs of a community to be considered and can direct adaptation policy toward preserving or rebuilding their specific capabilities under threat from climate change. The special issue also made clear that a basin analysis of the climate change problem could provide information, results, and methods more readily of use for the local population and decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the growing demand for climate change information to guide national and local adaptation decision-making in the Philippines, the climate science and services community is producing an increasing volume of future climate data using a range of modelling approaches. However, there is a significant methodological challenge in how to best compare and combine information produced using different models and methods. In this paper, we present the landscape of climate model data available in the Philippines and show how multi-model, multi-method climate projections are being used and communicated to inform climate change policy and planning, focusing on the agriculture sector. We highlight the importance of examining and communicating methodological strengths and weaknesses as well as understanding the needs and capabilities of different user communities. We discuss the assessment of projections from different methods, including global and regional downscaled simulations, and discuss ways to summarise and communicate this information to stakeholders using co-production approaches. The paper concludes with perspectives on how to best use an “ensemble of opportunity” to construct defensible, plausible and usable climate projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a potential threat to achieving food security, particularly in the most food insecure regions. However, interpreting climate change projections to better understand the potential impacts of a changing climate on food security outcomes is challenging. This paper addresses this challenge through presenting a framework that enables rapid country-level assessment of vulnerability to food insecurity under a range of climate change and adaptation investment scenarios. The results show that vulnerability to food insecurity is projected to increase under all emissions scenarios, and the geographic distribution of vulnerability is similar to that of the present-day; parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are most severely affected. High levels of adaptation act to off-set these increases; however, only the scenario with the highest level of mitigation combined with high levels of adaptation shows improvements in vulnerability compared to the present-day. The results highlight the dual requirement for mitigation and adaptation to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and to make gains in tackling food insecurity. The approach is an update to the existing Hunger and Climate Vulnerability Index methodology to enable future projections, and the framework presented allows rapid updates to the results as and when new information becomes available, such as updated country-level yield data or climate model output. This approach provides a framework for assessing policy-relevant human food security outcomes for use in long-term climate change and food security planning; the results have been made available on an interactive website for policymakers (www.metoffice.gov.uk/food-insecurity-index). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most deliberations on climate policy are based on a mitigation response that assumes a gradually increasing reduction over time. However, situations may occur where a more urgent response is needed. A key question for climate policy in general, but even more in the case a rapid response is needed, is: what are the characteristic response times of the response options, such as rapid mitigation or solar radiation management (SRM)? This paper explores this issue, which has not received a lot of attention yet, by looking into the role of both societal and physical response times. For mitigation, technological and economic inertia clearly limit reduction rates with considerable uncertainty corresponding to political inertia and societies’ ability to organize rapid mitigation action at what costs. The paper looks into a rapid emission reductions of 4–6 % annually. Reduction rates at the top end of this range (up to 6 %) could effectively reduce climate change, but only with a noticeable delay. Temperatures could be above those in the year of policy introduction for more than 70 years, with unknown consequences of overshoot. A strategy based on SRM is shown to have much shorter response times (up to decades), but introduces an important element of risk, such as ocean acidification and the risk of extreme temperature shifts in case action is halted. Above all, the paper highlights the role of response times in designing effective policy strategies implying that a better understanding of these crucial factors is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International assessments of evidence on climate change (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) or national climate change risk assessments (e.g. UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, CCRA) do not offer a sufficiently granular perspective on climate impacts to adequately inform governance of resilience to climate risks at the local level. Using an analysis of UK decision-makers managing and responding to heatwaves and flood risks, this paper argues how more robust local evidence is needed to inform decision-making regarding adaptation options for enhancing local resilience. We identify evidence gaps and issues relating to local climate change impacts, including sources and quality of evidence used, adequacy and accessibility of evidence available, ill-communicated evidence and conflicting or misused evidence. A lack of appreciation regarding how scientific evidence and personal judgement can mutually enhance the quality of decision-making underpins all of these gaps. Additionally, we find that the majority of evidence currently used is reductively based upon socio-economic and physical characteristics of climate risks. We argue that a step change is needed in local climate resilience that moves beyond current physical and socio-economic risk characterisation to a more inclusive co-constitution of social and politically defined climate risks at the local scale that are better aligned with the local impacts felt and needs of stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid pressure for climate action worldwide, processes of deliberative democracy are being called upon to address public policy complexities, include citizens in decision-making, restore faith in public institutions and enhance governance processes. The citizens' assembly model is lauded internationally for the much-needed structure it provides to support bottom-up governance efforts as well as the potential for effective citizen engagement on complex topics. The Irish Citizens' Assembly, which took place from 2016 to 2018, is heralded as an example of best practice in design and execution. Yet, there is a dearth in analysis of its form, structure, impact and content, particularly in the climate crisis context. This paper examines one element of the deliberative democracy process that aimed to include a wider breadth of publics beyond the 99 citizens randomly selected to take part: the public submissions invited as part of the Citizens' Assembly process. In total, 1185 submissions were received on the topic of climate change. Our study undertakes a comprehensive content analysis of these submissions. Specifically, we explore (1) the content and concerns foregrounded within the submissions, (2) the frames and rhetorical strategies employed and (3) the stakeholders and scales called upon for climate action. The study identifies trends, preoccupations and salience within the corpus of written submissions and expands our understanding of citizen perceptions of climate science and policy. We offer both operational lessons for others aiming to enact similar deliberative forums as well as communications lessons for wider efforts to deepen public engagement on the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a fundamental challenge for which agriculture is sensitive and vulnerable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified relevant information as key to enabling appropriate climate adaptation and mitigation action. Information specifically directed to farmers can be found, for example, in specialized farming magazines. While recent studies examine how national news media frame climate change, less-if any-studies have addressed climate framings and coverage in specialized media. Media framings are storylines that provide meaning by communicating how and why an issue should be seen as a problem, how it should be handled, and who is responsible for it. This paper analyses the framings and coverage of climate change in two Swedish specialized farming magazines from 2000 to 2009. It examines the extent of the climate change coverage, the content of the media items, and the dominant framings underlying their climate change coverage. The study identifies: increased coverage of climate change starting in 2007; frequent coverage of agriculture's contribution to climate change, climate change impacts on agriculture, and consequences of climate politics for agriculture; and four prominent frames: conflict, scientific certainty, economic burden, and action. The paper concludes that climate change communicators addressing farmers and agricultural extension officers should pay attention to how these frames may be interpreted by different target audiences. Research is needed on how specialized media reports on climate-related issues and how science-based climate information is understood by different groups of farmers and which other factors influence farmers' engagement in climate mitigation and adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his paper in Climate Monitor, TML Wigley uses basic probability arguments to illustrate how a slowly changing climate could potentially affect the frequency of extreme events. In the time since the paper appeared, there has been increased interest in assessing how weather extremes may be altered by climate change. Much of the work has been conducted using extreme value analysis, which is the branch of statistics developed specifically to characterize extreme events. This commentary discusses the advantages of an EVA approach and reviews some EVA techniques that have been used to describe climate change’s potential impact on extreme phenomena. Additionally, this commentary illustrates basic EVA techniques in an analysis of temperatures for central England. In parallel to Wigley’s analysis, a time-varying EVA analysis is compared to a stationary one, and furthermore, the trend from the EVA analysis is compared to the trend in means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing consistently with risk and uncertainty across the IPCC reports is a difficult challenge. Huge practical difficulties arise from the Panel’s scale and interdisciplinary context, the complexity of the climate change issue and its political context. The key question of this paper is if the observed differences in the handling of uncertainties by the three IPCC Working Groups can be clarified. To address this question, the paper reviews a few key issues on the foundations of uncertainty analysis, and summarizes the history of the treatment of uncertainty by the IPCC. One of the key findings is that there is reason to agree to disagree: the fundamental differences between the issues covered by the IPCC’s three interdisciplinary Working Groups, between the type of information available, and between the dominant paradigms of the practitioners, legitimately lead to different approaches. We argue that properly using the IPCC’s Guidance Notes for Lead Authors for addressing uncertainty, adding a pedigree analysis for key findings, and particularly communicating the diverse nature of uncertainty to the users of the assessment would increase the quality of the assessment. This approach would provide information about the nature of the uncertainties in addition to their magnitude and the confidence assessors have in their findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a framework for evaluating how prepared California resource managers are for risks of continued climate change. The framework presented suggests three critical dimensions of preparedness - awareness of climate-related risks, analytic capacity to translate such climate risks information into specific planning and management activities, and the extent of actions taken to address the risks. We illustrate the application of this framework in this paper through preliminary research of California coastal managers where we identify limited awareness of climate-change related risks, limited analytic capacity, and significant constraints on the abilities of institutions and individuals to take adaptation actions. Our analysis suggests that for California to realize its significant adaptive capacity and be able to manage the unavoidable impacts of climate change, resource managers need to be engaged more effectively in future discussions of managing climate risks in the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in climate service efforts continues to grow. However, more critical analysis could enhance how well climate services align with the needs of society. Collaborations between Native American Tribes (Tribes) and Climate Science Organizations (CSOs) providing decision-support for climate change planning accentuate the potential for climate services to have social justice implications through either deepening or softening existing inequities. This paper compares 30 Tribe-affiliated and 36 CSO-affiliated individuals' perceptions about potential harms and benefits associated with their collaborations with one another. The importance of the potential benefits of collaborations listed outweighed the potential harms listed for both groups, but while climate science organizations rated the potential benefits listed slightly higher than Tribes did, the potential harms listed were much more salient for Tribes. This finding highlights concerns that, without proper training and management, these collaborations may reinforce unequal relationships between settler and Indigenous populations. While CSOs appeared cognizant of their Tribe-affiliated colleagues' concerns, transitioning from a focus on building trust to establishing and sustaining shared systems of responsibilities might help these collaborations meet the needs of both groups more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerability is an emerging concept for climate science and policy. Over the past decade, efforts to assess vulnerability to climate change triggered a process of theory development and assessment practice, which is reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This paper reviews the historical development of the conceptual ideas underpinning assessments of vulnerability to climate change. We distinguish climate impact assessment, first- and second-generation vulnerability assessment, and adaptation policy assessment. The different generations of assessments are described by means of a conceptual framework that defines key concepts of the assessment and their analytical relationships. The purpose of this conceptual framework is two-fold: first, to present a consistent visual glossary of the main concepts underlying the IPCC approach to vulnerability and its assessment; second, to show the evolution of vulnerability assessments. This evolution is characterized by the progressive inclusion of non-climatic determinants of vulnerability to climate change, including adaptive capacity, and the shift from estimating expected damages to attempting to reduce them. We hope that this paper improves the understanding of the main approaches to climate change vulnerability assessment and their evolution, not only within the climate change community but also among researchers from other scientific communities, who are sometimes puzzled by the unfamiliar use of technical terms in the context of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris pledges are unique documents in climate governance that outline what each country intends to do to combat climate change. Often, these documents contain headline greenhouse gas percentage reduction targets that appear to summarize countries' contributions to mitigation. This is a boon for comparative climate policy research. However, I show in this paper that the Paris pledges require detailed interpretation to be comparable. I demonstrate the risks in comparing these targets by re-visiting a recent studying linking national public opinion to the stringency of countries' mitigation goals. I develop new indicators that better account for the structure of the targets and show in replications that the original finding is inconsistent with the underlying data. I conclude by drawing lessons for studying the Paris pledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on recent research on polycentric governance and the Ecology of Games to understand climate politics in the USA. Complementing previous work from 2005 to 2009, we map out the ideological networks of political actors engaged in the climate policy network using data from the US Congress as an arena of symbolic interaction. Our analysis identifies polycentric sites of ideological congruence and conflict in the discourse network on climate change. Political actors from different levels and including several actor types formed multiple centers that became bipolarized between the 112th and 114th sessions of the US Congress. This process took place in tandem with the increased participation of subnational actors in the polycentric system. By the 114th session of the Congress—during which the 2016 election took place—subnational policy actors, along with a diversity of other actors, contributed to an extremely polarized discussion of one of the central policies in the Obama Administration's Climate Action Plan: the Clean Power Plan. This finding is remarkable as the concept of polycentricity tends to be normatively associated with policy innovation, rather than stagnation. Our longitudinal analysis demonstrates, using Discourse Network Analysis, how increased multi-level participation can be associated with policy blockage of progressive climate policies rather than enabling policy innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of using climate metrics to estimate carbon dioxide equivalent emissions has long been subject to scientific discussion. One strand of this literature has analysed whether the choice of metric affects the relative cost-effectiveness of options for climate change abatement, but there has been little discussion on the effect of metric choices on cost-effective abatement of near-term climate forcers (NTCFs). These NTCFs are air pollutants primarily regulated by policies outside the climate policy arena and their estimated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are not typically considered in the evaluation of cost-effective abatement. However, the attention to NTCFs as climate forcers has increased during the last decade. The objective of this paper is to identify whether the relative cost-effectiveness of different NTCF abatement options is robust to climate metric choices. We assess nine plausible NTCF abatement options available in Sweden (with negligible effect on long-lived GHG emissions) and evaluate the robustness of the ranking of these, according to their estimated cost-effectiveness. Different metric designs are considered as well as climate impact uncertainty of NTCFs, with corresponding uncertainty in metric values. The results indicate that the choice of metric has little effect on the ranking of the options according to their cost-effectiveness, with options affecting NOx indicated as an exception. This suggests that the choice of metric utilised when calculating cost-effectiveness of NTCF abatement options is likely to have minor effect on which NTCF abatement options should be targeted for policy interventions (if NOx emissions are not significantly affected). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change adaptation is increasingly concerned with how organisations develop capacity to adapt to uncertain futures. A participatory action research project conducted in Victoria, Australia, examined how health and social service organisations developed their organisational adaptive capacity through the use of adaptation decision-support tools. It can be challenging for any organisation to select and apply a decision-support tool, but this is particularly the case where resources and capacities are limited. For most organisations, climate change is only one of a complex set of dynamic stressors they must consider in meeting organisational goals. This paper shows that while decision-support tools can help co-generate knowledge and facilitate customised organisational adaptation processes, for them to be practically helpful for organisations with limited resources and capacities, intensive collaborative and discursive processes are needed to adjust such tools to fit specific organisational contexts and needs. Facilitators and participatory approaches that enable co-inquiry can play a critical role in supplementing scarce resources and initiating adaptation processes that go well beyond the scope and purpose of the decision-support tool used. Organisations working effectively with decision-support tools to adapt to climate change will need to feel ownership of them and have confidence in modifying them to suit their particular adaptation needs and organisational goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of language on communication about climate change is well recognised, but this understanding is under-utilised by those seeking to increase uptake of action for climate change. We discuss the terms, discourse, resistance, and agency, to assist in developing ways to progress social action for climate change. Using a review of academic literature about climate change, we explore three of the many dominant discourses that constrain action: the logical action discourse; the complexity discourse; and the culture of consumption discourse. While there are more discourses about climate change, especially in the popular literature, the ways these three operate in the peri-scientific sphere is under-recognised. We suggest that by examining the different framings of climate change, there is potential to create novel discourses and to start new processes of societal response. This paper challenges the dominant scientific framing of climate change and seeks to begin the process of creating change through changing discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK Government's first National Adaptation Programme seeks to create a 'climate-ready society' capable of making well-informed and far-sighted decisions to address risks and opportunities posed by a changing climate, where individual households are expected to adapt when it is in their interest to do so. How, and to what extent, households are able to do this remains unclear. Like other developed countries, research on UK adaptation has focused predominately on public and private organisations. To fill that gap, a systematic literature review was conducted to understand what actions UK households have taken in response to, or in anticipation of, a changing climate; what drives or impedes these actions; and whether households will act autonomously. We found that UK households struggle to build long-term adaptive capacity and are reliant upon traditional reactive coping responses. Of concern is that these coping responses are less effective for some climate risks (e.g. flooding); cost more over the long-term; and fail to create household capacity to adapt to other stresses. While low-cost, low-skill coping responses were already being implemented, the adoption of more permanent physical measures, behavioural changes, and acceptance of new responsibilities are unlikely to happen autonomously without further financial or government support. If public policy on household adaptation to climate change is to be better informed than more high-quality empirical research is urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scenarios exist so that decision makers and those who provide them with information can make statements about the future that claim less confidence than do predictions, projections, and forecasts. Despite their prevalence, fundamental questions remain about how scenarios should best be developed and used. This paper proposes a particular conceptualization of scenarios that aims to address many of the challenges faced when using scenarios to inform contentious policy debates. The concept envisions scenarios as illuminating the vulnerabilities of proposed policies, that is, as concise summaries of the future states of the world in which a proposed policy would fail to meet its goals. Such scenarios emerge from a decision support process that begins with a proposed policy, seeks to understand the conditions under which it would fail, and then uses this information to identify and evaluate potential alternative policies that are robust over a wide range of future conditions. Statistical cluster analyses applied to databases of simulation model results can help identify scenarios as part of this process. Drawing on themes from the decision support literature, this paper first reviews difficulties faced when using scenarios to inform climate-related decisions, describes the proposed approach to address these challenges, illustrates the approach with applications for three different types of users, and concludes with some thoughts on implications for the provision of climate information and for future scenario processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the impacts of climate change is ever increasing. This is particularly true of the water sector where understanding potential changes in the occurrence of both floods and droughts is important for strategic planning. Climate variability has been shown to have a significant impact on UK climate and accounting for this in future climate change projections is essential to fully anticipate potential future impacts. In this paper a new resampling methodology is developed which includes the variability of both baseline and future precipitation. The resampling methodology is applied to 13 CMIP3 climate models for the 2080s, resulting in an ensemble of monthly precipitation change factors. The change factors are applied to the Eden catchment in eastern Scotland with analysis undertaken for the sensitivity of future river flows to the changes in precipitation. Climate variability is shown to influence the magnitude and direction of change of both precipitation and in turn river flow, which are not apparent without the use of the resampling methodology. The transformation of precipitation changes to river flow changes display a degree of non-linearity due to the catchment's role in buffering the response. The resampling methodology developed in this paper provides a new technique for creating climate change scenarios which incorporate the important issue of climate variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between long-term climate goals and short/medium-term emission targets forms crucial information for the design of international climate policy. Since IPCC's 4th Assessment Report (AR4), a large number of new scenario studies have been published. This paper reviews this new literature and finds that there is more flexibility in the timing of short-term emission reductions compared to the earlier scenarios assessed by the AR4. For instance, the current literature suggests that a peak of emissions in 2020 and even 2030 would be consistent with limiting temperature change to about 2°C in the long term. The timing when emissions peak depends on whether negative emissions in the long-term can be achieved. The recent scenarios further indicate that global emissions by 2050 should be 40-80% below 2000 levels. Above all, the paper argues that there is no clear, single 'law' that would directly determine the required emissions levels in 2020, but that instead policy-makers need to consider trade-offs between the likelihood of achieving long-term targets, the short-term costs, and their expectation with respect to future technologies (and their possible failure). The higher flexibility might be important in finding acceptable agreements on international climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

wide variety of scenarios for future development have played significant roles in climate policy discussions. This paper presents projections of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, sea level rise due to thermal expansion and glacial melt, oceanic acidity, and global mean temperature increases computed with the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model (IGSM) using scenarios for twenty-first century emissions developed by three different groups: intergovernmental (represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), government (represented by the U.S. government Climate Change Science Program) and industry (represented by Royal Dutch Shell plc). In all these scenarios the climate system undergoes substantial changes. By 2100, the CO concentration ranges from 470 to 1020 ppm compared to a 2000 level of 365 ppm, the CO-equivalent concentration of all greenhouse gases ranges from 550 to 1780 ppm in comparison to a 2000 level of 415 ppm, oceanic acidity changes from a current pH of around 8 to a range from 7.63 to 7.91, in comparison to a pH change from a preindustrial level by 0.1 unit. The global mean temperature increases by 1.8 to 7.0°C relative to 2000. Such increases will require considerable adaptation of many human systems and will leave some aspects of the earth's environment irreversibly changed. Thus, the remarkable aspect of these different approaches to scenario development is not the differences in detail and philosophy but rather the similar picture they paint of a world at risk from climate change even if there is substantial effort to reduce emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate the impacts of future climatic change on the occurrence of debris flows in the Massif des Ecrins (French Alps). Two distinct aspects are discussed: the impact of future climatic change on the evolution of the process, and changes in the spatial distribution. Three climate simulations are presented for the current period (1970–1999) and for future periods (2070–2099) using GCM ARPEGE CLIMAT model developed by Météo-France. Simulated data are then statistically downscaled to obtain a higher spatial resolution. In the first step, we compare occurrence probabilities in the current period and in the next century. In the second step, we estimate which zones would be affected by the process in the future at the scale of the Massif des Ecrins. For the current period, the best model was obtained between debris flows and the number of days between June 15th and October 15th with more than 20 mm calculated either from observed meteorological or simulated data. Results of the ARPEGE model considering the A2 hypothesis (IPCC ) showed that the most significant climatic trends for the end of the century will be a decrease in intense rainy events and an increase in temperature. These trends are expected to reduce the occurrence of hill slope debris flows in the Massif des Ecrins. From a spatial point of view, the increase in temperature should result in a shift of the 0°C isotherm to a higher elevation which, in turn, should result in a 20% reduction of the number of slopes affected by the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMS) have helped us over the past decade to understand the interactions between the environment and the economy in the context of climate change. Although it has also long been recognized that adaptation is a powerful and necessary tool to combat the adverse effects of climate change, most IAMS have not explicitly included the option of adaptation in combating climate change. This paper adds to the IAM and climate change literature by explicitly including adaptation in an IAM, thereby making the trade-offs between adaptation and mitigation visible. Specifically, a theoretical framework is created and used to implement adaptation as a decision variable into the DICE model. We use our new AD-DICE model to derive the adaptation cost functions implicit in the DICE model. In our set-up, adaptation and mitigation decisions are separable and AD-DICE can mimic DICE when adaptation is optimal. We find that our specification of the adaptation costs is robust with respect to the mitigation policy scenarios and parameter values. Our numerical results show that adaptation is a powerful option to combat climate change, as it reduces most of the potential costs of climate change in earlier periods, while mitigation does so in later periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observations of community members and instrumental records indicate changes in sea ice around the Inuit community of Igloolik, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. This paper characterizes local vulnerability to these changes, identifying who is vulnerable, to what stresses, and why, focusing on local and regional use of sea ice for the harvesting of renewable resources and travel. This analysis is coupled with instrumental and sea ice data to evaluate changing temperature/wind/sea ice trends over time, to complement local observations. We demonstrate the relationships between changing sea ice conditions/dynamics and harvesting activities (i.e. dangers and accessibility), with specific emphasis on ringed seal and walrus seasonal hunting, to illustrate current sea ice exposures that hunters are facing. Community members are adapting to such changes, as they have done for generations. However, current adaptive capacity is both enabled, and constrained, by social, cultural, and economic factors that manifest within the modern northern Hamlet. Enabling factors include the ability of hunters to manage or share the risks associated with sea ice travel, as well as through their flexibility in resource use, as facilitated by sophisticated local knowledge and land/navigational skills. Constraining factors include the erosion of land-based knowledge and skills, altered sharing networks, as well as financial and temporal limitations on travel/harvesting. The differential ability of community members to balance enabling and constraining factors, in relation to current exposures, comprises their level of vulnerability to sea ice change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peru experiences recurrent ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) events during which the Peruvian bay scallop ( Argopecten purpuratus) undergoes substantial changes in its stock size. In the North of the country strong warm ENSO events are synonymous with floods and river discharges that negatively affect scallop biomass, while in the South increased sea surface temperatures lead to an increase in stock size. This paper explores how formal institutions respond to climate variability and resource fluctuations in the scallop fishery, and what role they play in the maintenance or erosion of resilience. The research shows that formal institutions are slow to learn, self-reorganize and respond to climate variability while fishermen’s responses are spontaneous, ensuring a rapid process of individual adaptation. Institutional responses are mostly ex-post, and are not strongly shaped by past experience, thus eroding the resilience of the system. However, fishermen’s responses sometimes lead to negative outcomes such as local stock overexploitation or ‘invasion’ of natural scallop habitats for scallop grow-out, and formal institutions play an important role in resilience building through the control of effort and entry in the fishery. In this paper causal loop diagrams are used to conceptualize the fishery system to highlight key variables and processes. The study thus provides the opportunity to explore the usefulness of causal loop diagrams and conceptual models combined with participatory approaches in the exploration of the resilience of a system. The case study also illustrates that individual adaptation, a feature of resilience, is occurring and will occur spontaneously, changing property right regimes and responding not only to climate variability but also market forces. In order to maintain and build resilience and engender positive management outcomes, formal institutions not only need to shape fishermen decision-making, they must also contribute to knowledge building as well as the adoption of innovative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this paper demonstrated the existence of bias in GCM-derived precipitation series, downscaled using either a statistical technique (here the Statistical Downscaling Model) or dynamical method (here high resolution Regional Climate Model HadRM3) propagating to river flow estimated by a lumped hydrological model. This paper uses the same models and methods for a future time horizon (2080s) and analyses how significant these projected changes are compared to baseline natural variability in four British catchments. The UKCIP02 scenarios, which are widely used in the UK for climate change impact, are also considered. Results show that GCMs are the largest source of uncertainty in future flows. Uncertainties from downscaling techniques and emission scenarios are of similar magnitude, and generally smaller than GCM uncertainty. For catchments where hydrological modelling uncertainty is smaller than GCM variability for baseline flow, this uncertainty can be ignored for future projections, but might be significant otherwise. Predicted changes are not always significant compared to baseline variability, less than 50% of projections suggesting a significant change in monthly flow. Insignificant changes could occur due to climate variability alone and thus cannot be attributed to climate change, but are often ignored in climate change studies and could lead to misleading conclusions. Existing systematic bias in reproducing current climate does impact future projections and must, therefore, be considered when interpreting results. Changes in river flow variability, important for water management planning, can be easily assessed from simple resampling techniques applied to both baseline and future time horizons. Assessing future climate and its potential implication for river flows is a key challenge facing water resource planners. This two-part paper demonstrates that uncertainty due to hydrological and climate modelling must and can be accounted for to provide sound, scientifically-based advice to decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an assessment of the ways in which water supply companies in England and Wales are adapting to climate change, evaluated in the context of a model of the adaptation process. The four components of the model are (i) awareness of and concern about the potential impacts of climate change, (ii) adaptation strategy, (iii) the concept of an adaptation space from which options are selected, and (iv) the notion that three groups of factors influence awareness, strategy and option selection: susceptibility to change, internal characteristics of the organisation, and regulatory and market context. Public water supply in England and Wales is provided by private sector companies, subject to environmental and economic regulation. Hydrological simulations suggest that climate change has the potential to reduce the reliability of supply sources over the next few decades. The industry in December 2004 completed a review of investment requirements over the next five years. Awareness of climate change is high in the water industry, but by developing assessment procedures and incorporating them into the investment review the regulators forced companies to consider explicitly the potential impacts of climate change in a consistent and rigorous manner. These analyses combined climate change with other pressures on water resources, and in practice companies did not attribute specific investment decisions or proposals to climate change or indeed any other individual drivers. The broad strategy adopted by all water supply companies - to maintain standards of service - is determined by regulatory controls and market considerations, but the degree of concern about the impacts of climate change and precise adaptation options necessary to address supply-demand imbalances varied between water supply companies, reflecting local geographic conditions. The water supply companies and regulators have different perspectives on the relative merits of supply-side and demand-side measures, reflecting different organisational priorities. The 2004 investment review determined that no specific actions were necessary to deal with future climate change, but that measures set in place - in terms of methodologies and investment in investigations into specific resource developments - provided a sound foundation for more specific actions in the next investment review in five years time. The paper concludes by summarising the factors assisting and constraining adaptation over the next few decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If uncontrolled, human influences on the climate system may generate changes that will endanger various aspects of life on Earth. The precise implications of the scientific claims about climate change, and the extent to which they pose dangers to various populations, are becoming intensely debated at many levels in relation to policy. How 'danger' is interpreted will ultimately affect which actions are taken. In this paper, we examine how climate change is conceptualised by publics in Europe and in the USA. Although there is widespread concern about climate change, it is of secondary importance in comparison to other issues in people's daily lives. Most individuals relate to climate change through personal experience, knowledge, the balance of benefits and costs, and trust in other societal actors. We analyse these factors through findings from various surveys and studies, which highlight both the distinctiveness and some shared perspectives at a generalised level. We reflect upon these in relation to trust and responsibility for climate change action, and risk communication, supporting the call for discourses about climate change to also be situated in people's locality, as a means of increasing its saliency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal agencies use flood frequency estimates to delineate flood risk, manage the National Flood Insurance Program, and ensure that Federal programs are economically efficient. The assumption behind traditional flood risk analysis is that climate is stationary, but anthropogenic climate change and better knowledge of interdecadal climate variability challenge the validity of the assumption. This paper reviews several alternative statistical models for flood risk estimation that do not assume climate stationarity. Some models require subjective judgement or presuppose an understanding of the causes of the underlying non-stationarity, which is problematic given our current knowledge of the interaction of climate and floods. Although currently out of favor, hydrometeorological models have been used for engineering design as alternatives to statistical models and could be adapted to different climate conditions. Floodplain managers should recognize the potentially greater uncertainty in flood risk estimation due to climate change and variability and try to incorporate the uncertainties into floodplain management decision-making and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses methodological issues relevant to the calculation of historical responsibility of countries for climate change (‘The Brazilian Proposal’). Using a simple representation of the climate system, the paper compares contributions to climate change using different indicators: current radiative forcing, current GWP-weighted emissions, radiative forcing from increased concentrations, cumulative GWP-weighted emissions, global-average surface-air temperature increase and two new indicators: weighted concentrations (analogue to GWP-weighted emissions) and integrated temperature increase. Only the last two indicators are at the same time ‘backward looking’ (take into account historical emissions), ‘backward discounting’ (early emissions weigh less, depending on the decay in the atmosphere) and ‘forward looking’ (future effects of the emissions are considered) and are comparable for all gases. Cumulative GWP-weighted emissions are simple to calculate but are not ‘backward discounting’. ‘Radiative forcing’ and ‘temperature increase’ are not ‘forward looking’. ‘Temperature increase’ discounts the emissions of the last decade due to the slow response of the climate system. It therefore gives low weight to regions that have recently significantly increased emissions. Results of the five different indicators are quite similar for large groups (but possibly not for individual countries): industrialized countries contributed around 60% to today’s climate change, developing countries around 40% (using the available data for fossil, industrial and forestry CO2, CH4 and N2O). The paper further argues including non-linearities of the climate system or using a simplified linear system is a political choice. The paper also notes that results of contributions to climate change need to be interpreted with care: Countries that developed early benefited economically, but have high historical emission, and countries developing at a later period can profit from developments in other countries and are therefore likely to have a lower contribution to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of an experimental `end to end' assessment of the effects of climate change on water resources in the western United States are described. The assessment focuses on the potential effects of climate change over the first half of the 21st century on the Columbia, Sacramento/San Joaquin, and Colorado river basins. The paper describes the methodology used for the assessment, and it summarizes the principal findings of the study. The strengths and weaknesses of this study are discussed, and suggestions are made for improving future climate change assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the TC has been fully independent of the IPCC, there has been significant engagement with the IPCC throughout the TC, resulting in a number of contributions lead- or co-authored by IPCC staff. This article is part of the topical collection "Climate Change Communication and the IPCC", edited by Saffron O'Neill and Roz Pidcock The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely regarded as the most important and authoritative source on climate change, its impacts and how to tackle the rising emissions that drive it. In 2016, the IPCC convened an Expert Meeting on Communication, which led to a number of recommendations to enhance IPCC communications activities, strategy and capacity (IPCC [1]; see also Lynn and Peeva, this issue). Introducing the Topical Collection: "Climate change communication and the IPCC". [Extracted from the article]

Social vulnerability to climate change is increasingly being acknowledged, and proposals to measure and manage it are emerging. Building upon this work, this paper proposes an approach to social vulnerability assessment using new empirical definitions of Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) components and new mechanism to aggregate and account for causal relationships among these components. To develop this index, the authors propose a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, which are all based on local environmental professionals and community members. A means to develop an appropriate primary dataset, through application of a specifically designed household survey questionnaire, is underpinned by the results of a Delphi survey, an in-depth interview and focus group discussions. The data collection and analysis, including calibration and calculation of the SVI, is demonstrated through application in a case study city in central coastal Vietnam. The calculation of SVI at the fine-grained local scale provides high resolution in vulnerability assessment and also obviates the need for secondary data, which may be unavailable or problematic, particularly at the local scale in developing countries. The research reveals inherent limitations of existing SVIs but also indicates the potential for their use in assessing social vulnerability and making decisions associated with responding to climate change at the local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malaria is a climate sensitive disease that is causing rampant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and its impact is expected to worsen under climate change. Thus, pre-emptive policies for future malaria control require projections based on integrated models that can accommodate complex interactions of both climatic and non-climatic factors that define malaria landscape. In this paper, we combined Geographical Information System (GIS) and Bayesian belief networks (BBN) to generate GIS-BBN models that predicted malaria hotspots in 2030, 2050 and 2100 under representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5. We used malaria data of children of SSA, gridded environmental and social-economic data together with projected climate data from the 21 Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5 models to compile the GIS-BBN models. Our model on which projections were made has an accuracy of 80.65% to predict the high, medium, low and no malaria prevalence categories correctly. The non-spatial BBN model projection shows a moderate variation in malaria reduction for the high prevalence category among RCPs. Under the low prevalence category, an increase in malaria is seen but with little variation ranging between 4.6 and 5.6 percentage points. Spatially, under RCP 4.5, most parts of SSA will have medium malaria prevalence in 2030, while under RCP 8.5, most parts will have no malaria except in the highlands. Our BBN-GIS models show an overall shift of malaria hotspots from West Africa to the eastern and southern parts of Africa especially under RCP 8.5. RCP 8.5 will not expand the high and medium malaria prevalence categories in all the projection years. The generated probabilistic maps highlight future malaria hotspots under climate change on which pre-emptive policies can be based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power distribution pole networks are vulnerable to a changing climate. Climate change can increase wind speeds, and changes in rainfall and temperature can accelerate timber decay, affecting residual capacity of timber power poles. The present paper utilises advanced stochastic simulation methods to examine climate change impacts, and possible climate change adaptation strategies, for Australian power distribution networks. The assessment framework developed, which is applicable to a wide variety of infrastructure types and research areas, utilises probabilistic methods to investigate the appropriateness of climate adaptation strategies aimed at ameliorating the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure. Measures investigated include alterations to design or maintenance practices through, for example, installation of larger poles, more frequent inspections, or changes to pole replacement criteria. A cost-benefit decision analysis is developed herein using the latest AR5 climate projections, network vulnerability, adaptation measures, and cost and loss data for both direct and indirect costs. The net present value and benefit-to-cost ratio is calculated for different adaptation strategies over the life cycle of the assets up to the year 2090. An adaptation measure that allows for the installation of larger poles but less stringent pole replacement criteria has the highest net benefit-with a mean potential saving of hundreds of millions of dollars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mathematical model is developed in this study with the goal of maximizing agricultural benefits in the Aidoghmush river basin, Iran. The results show that the cultivated area of various crops and their agricultural benefits would be increased over the planning horizon with proper management and modification of cropping patterns despite the decline in streamflow and increasing water demand under climate-change conditions. Therefore, considering the optimal cropping pattern increases agricultural benefits by 14 and 17% under baseline climatic and climate-change conditions, respectively, compared to present conditions. This paper's results indicate that areas cultivated with various crops would increase under climate-change conditions compared to baseline climatic conditions, except for alfalfa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Total factor productivity (TFP) analysis has been the focus of a large number of methodological and empirical studies over the past several decades. One remarkable gap in this literature is the omission of climatic variables as regressors in the models used to derive TFP measures. The purpose of this paper is to narrow this gap by developing climate-adjusted (CA) TFP measures. We combine information from the Climatic Research Unit with Food and Agriculture Organization data for 28 Latin American and Caribbean countries over a 52-year period (1961-2012) to estimate random parameter stochastic production frontier (SPF) models. The goal is to investigate the impact of climatic variability on TFP. The estimated coefficients from the SPF models are used to construct a climatic effects index across countries and over time. The average annual variation in climatic conditions is stronger at the end of the 2000s compared to earlier periods. Climatic variability has a negative effect on production in 20 of the 28 LAC countries analyzed, and this is more severe over Central America and the Caribbean. The average reduction in output across the region attributable to climatic variables is between 0.02 and 22.7% over the last decade compared to the period 1961-1999. The estimated average annual growth rate of CATFP (0.69%) is consistently lower than TFP (1.08%), confirming the adverse impact of climatic variability on agricultural output and productivity in LAC. The results show considerable variability across countries, and this points to the importance of accounting for climatic effects in analyzing TFP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]