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As disruptions from climate change increase, so will the urgency to find shorter-term approaches to ameliorating its harms. This may include calls to implement solar geoengineering, an approach to cooling the planet by reflecting incoming sunlight back to space. While the exact effects of solar geoengineering are still highly uncertain, physical science to date suggests that it may be effective at reducing many aspects of climate change in the short term. One of the biggest concerns about solar geoengineering is the extent to which it may interfere with crucial emissions reductions policies, i.e. mitigation. There are multiple channels by which geoengineering could alter mitigation pathways, both financial and behavioural. Here we define three such linkages and present the evidence available to constrain their potential magnitudes. Because solar geoengineering is not a substitute for mitigation, policies to develop or implement technologies that could be used to carry it out should be designed to accentuate its complementary nature to mitigation and deter the possibility it is used to delay decarbonizing the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increase in simulated flood inundation areas and depths (6%-31% for different GCMs) in the future showed the importance of improving flood management tools for the sustainable development of urban water environments. The paper by Burch et al. (2010) addresses a different aspect of flood risk management in response to climate change and illustrates an advance in best practice for flood risk management and climate change planning. In terms of flood risk management, NBSs include natural flood management measures (NFMs), and these are the subject of the paper in this VSI by Dittrich et al. (2019). [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report Six (AR6) Working Group I (WG1) report focus on the assessment of the global climate-carbon system with implications for adaptation and mitigation action in southern Africa. It mentions climate change attribution science is capable of quantifying the role of human influence in the occurrence of individual weather events.

We welcome a broader debate on this aspect of global responses to climate change, attempt to reconcile our views in the following. B replying to b A. Lanson et al. I Nature Communications i https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31425-x (2022) In response to our recent paper[1] (hereafter SFL20) concerning the relation between natural variability in the climate system and the time to detect a response to emissions mitigation, Lanson et al.[2] (hereafter L22) call for 'a broader debate on how to best assess and communicate emerging effects of climate mitigation in the light of natural variability'. It is still efficient in revealing differences between the rapid climate response to aerosol perturbations, similar to the idealized test performed by L22, and the slower evolution from e.g. CO2 emissions. [Extracted from the article]

Regulating ecosystem services provided by urban forests are of great importance for the quality of life among city dwellers. To reach a maximum contribution to well-being in cities, the urban regulating ecosystem services (URES) must match with the demands in terms of space and time. If we understand the matches or mismatches between the current urban dwellers’ desired quality conditions (demand) and the supply of URES by urban forests (UF) in the cities, this will facilitate integrating the concepts of ecosystem services in urban planning and management, but such an assessment has suffered from major knowledge limitations. Since it is complex and problematic to identify the direct demands for URES and the spatiotemporal patterns therein, improving the demand indicators can help to determine the actual requirements. In this paper, a methodological approach based on indicators is presented and demonstrated for two important URES: air quality improvement and global climate change mitigation provided by urban trees and shrubs. Four air quality standards and greenhouse gas reduction targets were used and compared to supplies of the URES in Tabriz, Iran. Our results show that the mean contribution of the URES supply to air quality standards and greenhouse gas reduction targets is modest. Hence, in Tabriz, there is a strong mismatch between demand and supply. Mismatches at the city scale will have to be reduced by both a reduction in pollutant emissions and an increased provisioning of URES supply through urban greenery. The presented assessment approach and the results for Tabriz make it explicit how different the demands and supplies of the two studied URES are, and we expect similar mismatches in many other cities. Therefore, our approach, relatively simple but still realistic and easy-to-apply, can raise awareness about, and the utility of, the ecosystem services concepts for urban planning and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geophysical models of climate change are becoming increasingly sophisticated, yet less effort is devoted to modelling the human systems causing climate change and how the two systems are coupled. Here, we develop a simple socio-climate model by coupling an Earth system model to a social dynamics model. We treat social processes endogenously—emerging from rules governing how individuals learn socially and how social norms develop—as well as being influenced by climate change and mitigation costs. Our goal is to gain qualitative insights into scenarios of potential socio-climate dynamics and to illustrate how such models can generate new research questions. We find that the social learning rate is strongly influential, to the point that variation of its value within empirically plausible ranges changes the peak global temperature anomaly by more than 1°C. Conversely, social norms reinforce majority behaviour and therefore may not provide help when we most need it because they suppress the early spread of mitigative behaviour. Finally, exploring the model's parameter space for mitigation cost and social learning suggests optimal intervention pathways for climate change mitigation. We find that prioritising an increase in social learning as a first step, followed by a reduction in mitigation costs provides the most efficient route to a reduced peak temperature anomaly. We conclude that socio-climate models should be included in the ensemble of models used to project climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change mitigation is a shared global challenge that involves collective action of a set of individuals with different tendencies to cooperation. However, we lack an understanding of the effect of resource inequality when diverse actors interact together towards a common goal. Here, we report the results of a collective-risk dilemma experiment in which groups of individuals were initially given either equal or unequal endowments. We found that the effort distribution was highly inequitable, with participants with fewer resources contributing significantly more to the public goods than the richer −sometimes twice as much. An unsupervised learning algorithm classified the subjects according to their individual behavior, finding the poorest participants within two “generous clusters” and the richest into a “greedy cluster”. Our results suggest that policies would benefit from educating about fairness and reinforcing climate justice actions addressed to vulnerable people instead of focusing on understanding generic or global climate consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting successful climate change mitigation policies requires the public to choose how to balance the sometimes competing goals of managing CO2 emissions and achieving economic growth. It follows that collective action on climate change depends on members of the public to be knowledgeable of the causes and economic ramifications of climate change. The existing literature, however, shows that people often struggle to correctly reason about the fundamental accumulation dynamics that drive climate change. Previous research has focused on using analogy to improve people’s reasoning about accumulation, which has been met with some success. However, these existing studies have neglected the role economic factors might play in shaping people’s decisions in relation to climate change. Here, we introduce a novel iterated decision task in which people attempt to achieve a specific economic goal by interacting with a causal dynamic system in which human economic activities, CO2 emissions, and warming are all causally interrelated. We show that when the causal links between these factors are highlighted, people’s ability to achieve the economic goal of the task is enhanced in a way that approaches optimal responding, and avoids dangerous levels of warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, although historically their emissions have been great, most of the developed economies decoupled their carbon emissions and economic growth with the decarbonizing industry, and peaked their emissions by the first decade of this century [[2]]. Although theoretically these countries emit much less CO SB 2 sb , they appear to be more sensitive and susceptible to climate change, and it is very difficult for academics to conduct thorough studies in order to understand their emission baselines and track their climate change mitigation efforts. Therefore, their work advocates international assistance for these emerging emitters and reveals the important role of historically major emitters in addressing global climate change, not only to provide technical and financial assistance to reduce emissions, but also to prioritize their own emission reduction agenda. [Extracted from the article]