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The international literature on public attitudes finds that attitudes to climate change are closely related to attitudes to environmental protection. We ask whether this conclusion also holds for Norway. Our starting point is the political science literature on "old" versus "new" politics, old politics being defined in socio‐economic left or right terms and new politics being defined in accordance with an authoritarian or libertarian dimension in which environmental protection plays an important role. Based on these two axes, Herbert Kitschelt finds a new axis—a diagonal—combining old and new divides. According to Kitschelt, voters with traditional environmental attitudes have leftist and libertarian values, while voters favouring economic growth have rightist and authoritarian values. Using Norwegian data, we compare voters who favour traditional environmental protection and take climate change seriously with voters who only take climate change seriously. We expect that if climate change is perceived as one of many environmental threats, then the two voter groups are similar. We find that half of the voters see climate change as a big problem. Two thirds of these voters are in favour of environmental protection. However, the last third of these voters who take climate change seriously do not want greater environmental protection. Moreover, we find interesting differences between these groups. Those in the latter group have leftist and libertarian values, whereas climate‐only voters have rightist and authoritarian values. Thus the two groups of voters are dissimilar. Interestingly, this pattern corresponds to alignments along Kitschelt's new diagonal axis for party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transnational climate movement mobilized massively around the 2015 Paris Climate Summit (COP21) - despite a growing consensus within the movement that the UN was unable to solve the climate crisis. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork is the basis for exploration of the profound effect this consensus had on the movement around and beyond COP21. Firstly, it facilitated a historic degree of unification within a previously divided movement, around a desire to focus less on influencing official negotiations, although the degree to which negotiations should be ignored, and what actions should focus on instead, created new cleavages. Secondly, organizers experienced that mobilizing around a summit whilst trying to ignore it is problematic, thus limiting strategic options and presenting an ‘efficacy dilemma’. This, finally, limited the movement’s success, and fueled desires for a transnational climate movement beyond COPs. Whether those desires can be realized without the organizational benefits of summit mobilizations remains unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about climate projections and climate predictions and the European Climate Prediction System. It highlights the phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which aims to provide a basis for coordinated and consistent global climate simulations, and the underlying basis for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as other issues on global and regional climate changes.

The UN climate regime has served as the focal point for interstate cooperation on climate change in the political and legal domains for the last twenty-six years. However, since the lead-up to the Paris Agreement, the regime's interstate elements have been complemented by an evolving transnational sphere of governance in which sub-national and non-state actors engage in voluntary cross-border initiatives. These initiatives serve two key functions: first, they facilitate and implement climate action at the sub-national level and in the private sector, and second, they promote transnational normative frameworks which require members to take active steps to address climate change. This article describes how the UN climate regime has developed to recognize transnational climate governance initiatives, and it reflects on the implications of this development for legal scholarship on international climate change law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This study was conducted to analyse the extent at which Tanzanian newspapers paid attention to climate change information over the period of 10 years between January 2006 and December 2015.Design/methodology/approach Six Tanzanian newspapers were quantitatively content analysed for frequencies of coverage to climate change information.Findings The results indicate that of total six Tanzanian newspapers had very few (684; 0.84 per cent) articles on climate change which is an average of 68.4 articles per year. Much attention was given to entertainment (24,331; 30 per cent) followed by miscellaneous (19,413; 24.0 per cent) and advertisements (18,112; 22.3 per cent). The Pearson’s chi-square test indicates that there was a significant difference in χ2 = 21,765, p-value < 2.2e −16 between the level of coverage of climate change articles on other topics in the selected newspapers.Research limitations/implications Scanning the sampled six newspapers for climate change information and recording the results in the code sheet for the period of 10 years was a tedious and time-consuming exercise which demanded researchers and coders to be extremely careful. Also it is possible that the sampling strategy used led to missing some data that would have resulted into different conclusions about each newspaper’s coverage on climate change. However, the systematic sampling strategy was applied for a long period, that is, 40 months for each newspaper that increased the reliability and accuracy of the results and conclusions about the overall trends in each newspaper’s coverage of climate change information.Practical implications These findings imply that, as the disseminators of information, Tanzanian newspapers did not pay adequate attention to climate change issues. The study concludes that contrary to the fact that climate change is among the threatening phenomena in Tanzania that would commensurate a significant attention in the media, the findings of this study indicate that the volume of coverage devoted to climate change by the newspapers in Tanzania is very low and disproportionate to the level of threat. This leaves a question on the Tanzanian newspapers’ dedication to reporting climate change information. It is therefore recommended that newspapers’ media owners, editors and journalists should be environmental nationalistic enough to frequently report climate change information, and the scope of the government-owned newspapers should be revisited to ensure more coverage of climate change information in their publication which can be done by having a section specifically dedicated for climate change issue.Originality/value This study has therefore contributed to the growing body of analytical research knowledge on the role of newspapers in the dissemination of climate change information in Tanzania. This study has also highlighted the importance of taking into account newspapers coverage of climate change information which can further be used for policy recommendations to improve the climate change information communication system through the use of newspapers and show the credibility of the newspapers in creating awareness of climate change in Tanzania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an Editorial discussing the Special Issue on Climate Change and Health, guest editors Jonathan Patz and Madeleine Thompson summarize key issues in the field and describe the significance of research studies included in the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate‐induced resettlement programs are happening right now in places around the world where populations face high risks from climatic impacts. Burgeoning literatures are considering the ethical implications of climate change more broadly, and the ethics of migration, but the nexus between the two issues has not been given enough attention by moral and political theorists, especially with respect to climate‐induced community resettlement. Here, we sketch the key nodes in a debate we think should take place, which will be made even more urgent in the coming decades as climate change impacts on communities least resilient to it. This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is increasing public awareness of global warming, there is a gap between such perception and relevant actions to combat the problem. In order to develop effective strategies for facilitating public actions, in this paper we draw upon framing theory and a dual processing model. Based on an experiment involving 261 participants from a large public university in Taiwan, this study found that by framing global warming as a local issue, communication messages can trigger both analytic (issue relevance) and affective (negative emotions) appraisals, which, in turn, will increase people's intentions to take actions. This study provides important insights for government and environmental groups when designing communication campaigns on this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Decision-making for climate adaptation operates in an uncertain environment. Formal processes to decision-making under uncertainty weigh the ability of a decision rule to achieve multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives in an evaluation procedure. Increasingly, computer simulation models are being applied for this reason, so that the effectiveness of decisions can be evaluated before actually implementing them in reality. In this paper, we develop a simple stochastic simulation model of beach recession under climate change in Australia and evaluate decision rules for beach replenishment in the context of three management objectives: (i) to reduce beach recession, (ii) reduce variation in beach recession, and (iii) do so cost-effectively. Results indicate that a decision to intervene and replenish the beach based on a trigger level would be effective at maintaining shoreline position, with relatively little variation, but did so at a relatively high cost of multiple interventions. A decision procedure to intervene at a fixed period resulted in greater shoreline position variation but constrained management efforts and costs. This structured approach offers an evidence-based process to decision-making that lays bare the assumptions upon which decisions are made. This, in turn, allows for a more complete analysis of all the uncertainties and better outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, regionalisation in England held out the promise that regions could forge their own unique policies to address climate change. This paper considers the Yorkshire & Humber region's climate change action plan. The study uses critical discourse to analyse the plan and a series of interviews with those who helped develop the initiative. It shows that in the case of Yorkshire & Humber, the Regional Development Agency was a key player in shaping the policies. This resulted in a focus on un-proven large-scale technological projects to mitigate climate change and create significant economic development for the region. Little came of this. The need to maintain economic growth seriously undermined the drive to reduce carbon emissions. The findings suggest that the proposed new sub-national governance arrangements will face similar problems in which short-term economic drivers outweigh efforts to reduce carbon emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Adaptation to climate change raises important governance issues. Notwithstanding the increasing attention on climate adaptation at the global and European level, the variety of local conditions and climate impacts points towards a prime role for regional actors in climate change adaptation. They face the challenge of developing and implementing adaptation options and increasing the adaptive capacity of regions so that expected or unexpected impacts of future climate change can be addressed. This paper presents a conceptual framework to analyse the regional governance of climate adaptation. It addresses the following key questions: (1) What are the distinct challenges for the regional governance of climate adaptation? (2) Which concepts can guide the design of new governance arrangements and strategies? (3) What challenges to legal principles are posed by the climate? (4) What research methods are suitable for developing and testing governance arrangements and strategies? We present a framework designed to address each of these questions; it has analytical, design, normative, and methodological components. In the paper, examples from the Dutch regional governance of climate adaptation serve as illustrations of the conceptual argumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soil respiration, RS, the flux of microbially and plant-respired carbon dioxide (CO2) from the soil surface to the atmosphere, is the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux. However, the dynamics of RS are not well understood and the global flux remains poorly constrained. Ecosystem warming experiments, modelling analyses and fundamental biokinetics all suggest that RS should change with climate. This has been difficult to confirm observationally because of the high spatial variability of RS, inaccessibility of the soil medium and the inability of remote-sensing instruments to measure RS on large scales. Despite these constraints, it may be possible to discern climate-driven changes in regional or global RS values in the extant four-decade record of RS chamber measurements. Here we construct a database of worldwide RS observations matched with high-resolution historical climate data and find a previously unknown temporal trend in the RS record after accounting for mean annual climate, leaf area, nitrogen deposition and changes in CO2 measurement technique. We find that the air temperature anomaly (the deviation from the 1961–1990 mean) is significantly and positively correlated with changes in RS. We estimate that the global RS in 2008 (that is, the flux integrated over the Earth’s land surface over 2008) was 98 ± 12 Pg C and that it increased by 0.1 Pg C yr-1 between 1989 and 2008, implying a global RS response to air temperature (Q10) of 1.5. An increasing global RS value does not necessarily constitute a positive feedback to the atmosphere, as it could be driven by higher carbon inputs to soil rather than by mobilization of stored older carbon. The available data are, however, consistent with an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]