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Climate change forecasts indicate that the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events will increase in the future; these changes will have important effects on ecosystem stability and function. An important arid region of the world, Central Asia has ecosystems that are extremely vulnerable to extreme weather events. However, few studies have investigated the resistance and resilience of this region’s ecosystems to extreme weather events. In this study, first, the extreme drought/wet threshold was calculated based on the 113-year (1901–2013) standardized precipitation–evapotranspiration index (SPEI); second, moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) remote sensing data were applied to calculate ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE) and quantify ecosystem resistance and resilience after different extreme climate events; and finally, differences in the changes of various ecosystem types before and after climate events were assessed. The results showed the following: (1) The average SPEI was 0.073, and the thresholds of extreme wetness and drought were 0.91 and −0.67, respectively. Central Asia experienced extreme wet periods in 2002 and 2003 and a drought period in 2008. (2) Suitable wetness levels can increase the resistance of an ecosystem; however, continuous wetness reduces ecosystem resistance, as does drought. Wet areas had strong resilience after wet events, and arid areas had strong resilience after drought events. (3) During both wet and drought years, the transition between shrubland and grassland caused changes in ecosystem resistance and resilience. These findings are important for understanding the impact of future climate change on ecosystem stability.

Extreme climatic events have significant impacts on society and the environment, especially when multiple hazards occur concurrently (e.g., drought and heat waves) or consecutively (wildfires and extreme precipitation). A large number of indicators have been developed to detect and study changes in extreme events across space and time. While the current climate extreme indicators provide useful information, most do not provide any information on compound/concurrent events. A compound event corresponds to a situation in which multiple (often interrelated) hazard drivers lead to an extreme outcome. Therefore, current univariate methods used for frequency analysis and risk assessment may underestimate the risk or occurrence probability of extreme events. After a comprehensive review of the existing methods, this study outlines frameworks for detecting, modeling, and analyzing inter-related events and processes including compound extremes.

The magnitude of temperature changes in the Early Jurassic are not well known. Clumped isotope measurements can potentially be used to provide better constrains, but unfortunately many of the well-studied sedimentary successions that preserve Lower Jurassic fossils experienced burial temperatures above the limits of preservation of Δ47, which for geological timescales is thought to be between 80–120 °C. Samples from these basins are expected to be partially reordered and yield apparent clumped isotope temperatures that are warmer than original values. Here, we explore whether useful paleoclimate information can be recovered from these samples. We test the hypothesis that relative temperature differences are preserved in partially reordered samples when they experience a common burial history. This was done with the use of reordering models and Δ47 measurements of early Jurassic belemnites from the Aubach section of the SW German Basin, a basin that has a relatively well constrained burial history with maximum burial temperatures above 90 °C. We find that even though partial reordering progressively erases the Δ47 difference between samples, the majority (>50%) of the signal is preserved when samples are buried at temperatures as high of 150 °C for up to 200 Ma. Moreover, the models demonstrate that – regardless of burial conditions – partially reordered samples always preserve minimum records of temperature change across climate events. These inferences are supported by the belemnite Δ47 data that show partially reordered compositions and warming/cooling patterns across the Early Jurassic that closely mimic observations from independent proxies. Model observations are used to interpret a 13 ± 4 °C (95% ci) temperature increase that is observed in the belemnite data across the Early Toarcian. The large magnitude of the temperature excursion is explained as a combination of warming and a change in belemnite habitat before and after the Toarcian Ocean Anoxic Event. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of partially reordered samples and further open the use of this proxy in deep time settings., Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 293, ISSN:0016-7037, ISSN:1872-9533

Plague is an infectious disease found worldwide and has been responsible for pandemics throughout history. Yersinia pestis, the causative bacterium, survives in rodent hosts with flea vectors that also transmit it to humans. It has been endemic in Madagascar for a century but the 1990s saw major outbreaks and in 2006 the WHO described the plague as re-emerging in Madagascar and the world. This review highlights the variety of factors leading to plague re-emergence in Madagascar, including climate events, insecticide resistance, and host and human behaviour. It also addresses areas of concern for future epidemics and ways to mitigate these. Pinpointing and addressing current and future drivers of plague re-emergence in Madagascar will be essential to controlling future outbreaks both in Madagascar and worldwide.

Climate downscaling is a way to provide finer resolution data at local scales, which has been widely used in meteorological research. The two main approaches for climate downscaling are dynamical and statistical. The traditional dynamical downscaling methods are quite time- and resource-consuming based on general circulation models (GCMs). Recently, more and more researchers construct a statistical deep learning model for climate downscaling motivated by the single-image superresolution (SISR) process in computer vision (CV). This is an approach that uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping and produces great enhancements in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, it has provided an appreciable new insight and successful downscaling solution to multiple climate phenomena. However, most existing models only make a simple analogy between climate downscaling and SISR and ignore the underlying dynamical mechanisms, which leads to the overaveraged downscaling results lacking crucial physical details. In this paper, we incorporate the a priori meteorological knowledge into a deep learning formalization for climate downscaling. More specifically, we consider the multiscale spatial correlations and the chaos in multiple climate events. Depending on two characteristics, we build up a two-stage deep learning model containing a stepwise reconstruction process and ensemble inference, which is named climate downscaling network (CDN). It can extract more local/remote spatial dependencies and provide more comprehensive captures of extreme conditions. We evaluate our model based on two datasets: climate science dataset (CSD) and benchmark image dataset (BID). The results demonstrate that our model shows the effectiveness and superiority in downscaling daily precipitation data from 2.5 degrees to 0.5 degrees over Asia and Europe. In addition, our model exhibits better performance than the other traditional approaches and state-of-the-art deep learning models.

Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases causes rising in global warming and carbon dioxide emissions. With further efforts to reduce carbon dioxide, it is possible to prevent the warming of the earth, but the effects of climate change that we have already created can not be reduced. Recent observed and predicted alterations in the global climate require a double policy to react to the decline in climate alteration and its adjustment (coexistence) to explain the key factors and their effects. Measures to reduce climate alteration through decreasing greenhouse gas releases or removing them from the atmosphere are possible. Execution of more reduction measures at the present time will require less adaptation in the future. Meanwhile, inadequate measures to curb climate change presently increase the risk of catastrophic consequences, so that adjustment costs will rise unreasonably and adaptive capacity will face further constraints. Climate change adaptation measures concentrate in increasing our capability to deal with or prevent damaging effects or the use of new circumstances. Increasing temperature and changes visible today due to climate change mean that adaptation strategies should be applied. In this paper, strategies for reducing climate change and adaptation are reviewed and various strategies are presented. Meanwhile, this paper looks at the economies affected by climate change, our involvement to climate alteration, and the ways in which the economy has influenced climate change and the ways in which it can provide logical options.

The Eastern Rif Mountains are frequently subject to exceptional rainfall events, whose consequences are sometimes disastrous. The impact of these phenomena on environments is more important as the majorities of slopes are bare and subject to strong human influence. The protective natural forests of the slopes are almost destroyed; they currently cover only a few peaks of mountains in the region. They represent 1.84% of the total area of wadi Tleta sub-basin and only 1.32% of the Tarmast wadi sub-basin. However, croplands, occupying respectively 60% and 34% in the two sub-basins, extend even on the steepest slopes. Similarly, the accelerated and uncontrolled human occupation of the urban peripheries, located downstream of the basins, amplifies the vulnerability of these environments to the hydrological hazards, that threaten several sites surrounding the agglomeration of Taza. Thus, the whole region is subject to different degradation processes. Hydric erosion affects the majority of the slopes; it causes excessive sediment production that may exceed 60 t ha -1 year -1 in some sub-basins. Similarly, flood disasters are quite common in the region. The flood of 20/9/2000 is a reference, with a volume estimated at 4 million m 3 (DRH-Sebou 2000). Human and material damage was enormous in the rural centers and in the northern outlying districts of Taza. This contribution aims to present and analyze the combined impacts of the extreme rains and the actions of the human societies on the dynamics of the prerifain environment and its adjoining spaces.

The study examines the relationship between sudden- and gradual-onset climate events and migration, hypothesizing that this relationship is mediated by the adaptive capacity of affected individuals. We use survey data from regions of Cambodia, Nicaragua, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam that were affected by both types of events with representative samples of non-migrant residents and referral samples of migrants. Although some patterns are country-specific, the general findings indicate that less educated and lower-income people are less likely to migrate after exposure to sudden-onset climate events compared to their counterparts with higher levels of education and economic resources. These results caution against sweeping predictions that future climate-related events will be accompanied by widespread migration., Population and environment, 43, ISSN:0199-0039, ISSN:1573-7810

A core taken in a tree today can reveal climate events from centuries past. Here we adapt this idea to record histories of neural activation. We engineered slowly growing intracellular protein fibers which can incorporate diverse fluorescent marks during growth to store linear ticker tape-like histories. An embedded HaloTag reporter incorporated user-supplied HaloTag-ligand dyes, leading to colored stripes whose boundaries mapped fiber growth to wall-clock time. A co-expressed eGFP tag driven by the cFos immediate early gene promoter recorded the history of neural activity. High-resolution multispectral imaging on fixed samples read the cellular histories. We demonstrated recordings of cFos activation in ensembles of cultured neurons with a single-cell absolute accuracy of approximately 39 min over a 12-hour interval. Protein-based ticker tapes have the potential to achieve massively parallel single-cell recordings of multiple physiological modalities.

Estimating the risk of forest collapse due to extreme climate events is one of the challenges of adapting to climate change. We adapt a concept from ruin theory, which is widely used in econometrics and the insurance industry, to design a growth–ruin model for trees which accounts for climate hazards that can jeopardize tree growth. This model is an elaboration of a classical Cramer–Lundberg ruin model that is used in the insurance industry. The model accounts for the interactions between physiological parameters of trees and the occurrence of climate hazards. The physiological parameters describe interannual growth rates and how trees react to hazards. The hazard parameters describe the probability distributions of the occurrence and intensity of climate events. We focus on a drought–heatwave hazard. The goal of the paper is to determine the dependence of the forest ruin and average growth probability distributions on physiological and hazard parameters. Using extensive Monte Carlo experiments, we show the existence of a threshold in the frequency of hazards beyond which forest ruin becomes certain to occur within a centennial horizon. We also detect a small effect of the strategies used to cope with hazards. This paper is a proof of concept for the quantification of forest collapse under climate change.

People affected by conflict are particularly vulnerable to climate shocks and climate change, yet little is known about climate change adaptation in fragile contexts. While climate events are one of the many contributing drivers of conflict, feedback from conflict increases vulnerability, thereby creating conditions for a vicious cycle of conflict. In this study, we carry out a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature, taking from the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative (GAMI) dataset to documenting climate change adaptation occurring in 15 conflict-affected countries and compare the findings with records of climate adaptation finance flows and climate-related disasters in each country. Academic literature is sparse for most conflict-affected countries, and available studies tend to have a narrow focus, particularly on agriculture-related adaptation in rural contexts and adaptation by low-income actors. In contrast, multilateral and bilateral funding for climate change adaptation addresses a greater diversity of adaptation needs, including water systems, humanitarian programming, and urban areas. Even among the conflict-affected countries selected, we find disparity, with several countries being the focus of substantial research and funding, and others seeing little to none. Results indicate that people in conflict-affected contexts are adapting to climate change, but there is a pressing need for diverse scholarship across various sectors that documents a broader range of adaptation types and their results.

This paper explores the impact of environmental, e.g. sea level rise, and climatic events, e.g. abrupt cooling events, on Mesolithic populations (ca. 11,350 to 6600 cal BP) living in the western Scheldt basin of Belgium and Northern France. The Mesolithic in this study-area has been extensively studied during the last few decades, leading to an extensive database of radiocarbon dates (n = 418), sites (n = 157) and excavated loci (n = 145). A multi-proxy analysis of this database reveals important changes both chronologically and geographically, which are interpreted in terms of population dynamics and changing mobility and land-use. The results suggest a population peak and high residential mobility in the Early Mesolithic, followed by a population shift and increased intra-basin mobility in the Middle Mesolithic, possibly triggered by the rapid inundation of the North Sea basin. The situation during the Late Mesolithic remains less clear but a possible reduction in the mobility seems likely. Currently there is little evidence supporting a causal link between these diachronic changes in human behavior and the 9.3 and 8.2 ka cooling events. Most of the observed changes seem more in response to long-term climatic and environmental changes during the Early and Middle Holocene, hinting at considerable resilience.

As the cost and societal impacts of extreme weather, water, and climate events continue to rise across the United States, the National Weather Service (NWS) has adopted a strategic vision of a Weather-Ready Nation that aims to help all citizens be ready, responsive, and resilient to extreme weather, water, and climate events. To achieve this vision and to meet the NWS mission of saving lives and property and enhancing the national economy, the NWS must improve the accuracy and timeliness of forecasts and warnings, and must directly connect these forecasts and warnings to critical life- and property-saving decisions through the provision of impact-based decision support services (IDSS). While the NWS has been moving in this direction for years, the shift to delivering IDSS holistically requires an agency-wide transformation. This article discusses the elements driving the need for change at the NWS to build a Weather-Ready Nation; the foundational basis for IDSS; ongoing challenges to provide IDSS across federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels of government; the path toward evolving the NWS to deliver more effective IDSS; the importance of partnerships within the weather, water, and climate enterprise and with those responsible for public safety to achieve the Weather-Ready Nation vision; and initial supporting evidence and lessons learned from early efforts.

Este ensaio vem discorrer sobre a mudança do clima, em que consiste e como esta afeta adversamente a fruição dos direitos humanos. Descreve de que modo o clima age como fator de violação de direitos humanos, as iniciativas de cidadãos para demandar mais efetividade no combate ao problema e as respostas da comunidade internacional para proteger os direitos humanos diante da mudança climática. A seguir, trata das migrações provocadas pelos eventos climáticos e dos instrumentos jurídicos existentes para proteção dos direitos humanos nesse contexto. Expõe como alguns grupos populacionais estão mais expostos aos impactos da mudança do clima que outros, apesar de terem contribuído menos para o problema. Prossegue discorrendo sobre a relação entre a mudança climática e os conflitos e apresenta a contribuição que os recursos naturais oferecem para a construção da paz e proteção dos direitos humanos. Por fim, apresenta conclusões e recomendações.

Increasingly unstable climate events such as floods and other natural disasters have become part of the grand narratives of the Anthropocene that create distance, fear, anxiety, hysteria and apathy that are part of our everyday lives. In asking how can we-as-humans survive both the real and grand narratives of this epoch, my own survival story of Desperado (memories of our family sailing boat) became an anchor for COPE (Choreographies of Participatory Ecologies). These choreographies, as series of guided performances/survival tours, involved tactics and strategies/mechanisms that contributed to an ecology of participatory practice. The instructional video Lilo Safely drew together actions of rafting, resting and recovery as a way to take care of other, to deconstruct the instrumental way of being-with the planet, encouraging us to include the non-human, the neuro-diverse, into our own stories of surviving with and beyond, through the practice of Rafting-with.

Based on a systematic review of journal articles, books and book chapters, and policy papers, we evaluate possible sources of finance for addressing loss and damage from slow onset climate events in developing countries. We find that most publications explore insurance schemes which are not appropriate for most slow onset events. From this, we determine that only a few sources are sustainable. Levies and taxes are seen as relatively fair, predictable, adequate, transparent, and additional. These results confirm that current options for sustainably and equitably financing loss and damage from slow onset events are limited., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Aim Our study evaluated the effects of extreme weather events and environmental conditions on the trophic groups of copepods (herbivores and omnivores) in the upper Paraná River floodplain. Methods The zooplankton were collected and Copepods and Rotifers were analyzed in nine environments of the upper Paraná River floodplain during 2000 and 2010, during which time the La Niña (drought) and El Niño (flood) climatic events occurred, respectively. Results The results suggest that in periods of extreme drought productivity-related variables act as determining forces on abundance of copepod trophic groups due to the contraction of aquatic ecosystems. Although the abundance of trophic groups is associated with system productivity, the responses between them differ, since herbivore abundance was associated with chlorophyll-a and total phosphorus and omnivores with rotifer abundance. In extreme flood (El Niño), no significant relationship was found between environmental variables and any trophic group. Conclusions In general, it is believed that in periods of extreme drought the variables associated with productivity act as determining forces on the abundance of trophic groups of copepods due to the contraction of aquatic ecosystems. According to the results found, it is suggested that other works be carried out with a greater number of extreme events to corroborate our results and, and also to extrapolate to other aquatic communities.

We present new high-resolution absolute-dated stalagmite δ18O and δ13C records from the southeastern United States (SE US) spanning the last 12 thousand years (ka). A local relationship between annual rainfall amount and its amount-weighed δ18O composition exists on interannual timescales, driven mostly by an amount effect during summer and spring seasons, and by an isotopically depleted composition of fall and winter precipitation. Based on a novel interpretation of modern rainfall isotopic data, stalagmite δ18O variability is interpreted to reflect the relative contribution of summer and spring precipitation combined relative to combined fall and winter precipitation. Precipitation amount in the SE US increases during the Younger Dryas, the 8.2 ka and Little Ice Age abrupt cooling events. High precipitation during these events reflects enhancement of spring and summer precipitation while the contribution of fall and winter rainfall remained unchanged or decreased slightly. Results from this study support model simulation results that suggest increased precipitation in the SE US during Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) slowdown/shutdown (LeGrande et al., 2006; Renssen et al., 2002; Vellinga and Wood, 2002). In association with Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude cooling from the Early to mid-Holocene, annual precipitation in the SE US decreases, a pattern distinctive from that observed during abrupt cooling events related to AMOC shifts. Long-term hydroclimate change in the SE US is likely sensitive to summer insolation reduction as inferred for other tropical and subtropical regions. This study has implications for our understanding of the sensitivity of subtropical hydroclimate to factors both internal and external to the climate system in a warmer climate.

Extreme weather and climate events, such as heat waves, cyclones, and floods, are an expression of climate variability. These events and events influenced by climate change, such as wildfires, continue to cause significant human morbidity and mortality and adversely affect mental health and well-being. Although adverse health impacts from extreme events declined over the past few decades, climate change and more people moving into harm's way could alter this trend. Long-term changes to Earth's energy balance are increasing the frequency and intensity of many extreme events and the probability of compound events, with trends projected to accelerate under certain greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. While most of these events cannot be completely avoided, many of the health risks could be prevented through building climate-resilient health systems with improved risk reduction, preparation, response, and recovery. Conducting vulnerability and adaptation assessments and developing health system adaptation plans can identify priority actions to effectively reduce risks, such as disaster risk management and more resilient infrastructure. The risks are urgent, so action is needed now.

This book contributes to previous and ongoing action to initiate and inform conversations about climate risk and the need for adaptation and resilience building. This involves blending insights from climate science about what the future climate will look like with experiences of the social science of response through adaptation, based on practical applications in a variety of contexts. In this chapter, we reflect on these conversations and what they mean for the growing adaptation agenda. We consider who needs to be involved in conversations about adaptation, how such conversations can be structured and the need to assess their outcomes. We profile important considerations relevant for tailoring climate information to make adaptation decisions and discuss the outcomes of different types of conversations. We conclude by noting the significance of recent major climate events and the rapidly evolving risk landscape in sub-Saharan Africa, and arguing that the need for these conversations is ever more evident. The experiences outlined in this book provide a starting point for conversations about adaptation that aim to inform future action.

The workshop, conducted virtually due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19, gathered scientists from six countries and focused on the mechanistic understanding, statistical characterization, and modeling of societally relevant compound climate events and extremes in the midlatitudes. These ranged from co-occurring hot–humid or wet–windy extremes, to spatially compounding wet and dry extremes, to temporally compounding hot–wet events and more. The aim was to bring together selected experts studying a diverse range of compound climate events and extremes to present their ongoing work and outline challenges and future developments in this societally relevant field of research.

Bangladesh is a small country of South Asia which is considered as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change and it is affected by severe weather and climate events. In th...

Compound events (CEs) are weather and climate events that result from multiple hazards or drivers with the potential to cause severe socio-economic impacts. Compared with isolated hazards, the multiple hazards/drivers associated with CEs can lead to higher economic losses and death tolls. Here, we provide the first analysis of multiple multivariate CEs potentially causing high-impact floods, droughts, and fires. Using observations and reanalysis data during 1980–2014, we analyse 27 hazard pairs and provide the first spatial estimates of their occurrences on the global scale. We identify hotspots of multivariate CEs including many socio-economically important regions such as North America, Russia and western Europe. We analyse the relative importance of different multivariate CEs in six continental regions to highlight CEs posing the highest risk. Our results provide initial guidance to assess the regional risk of CE events and an observationally-based dataset to aid evaluation of climate models for simulating multivariate CEs., Compound climate events such as floods and droughts together can cause severe socio-economic impacts. Here, the authors analyse global hazard pairs from 1980–2014 and find global hotspots for the occurrence of compound events.

Characterizing the temporal uncertainty in palaeoclimate records is crucial for analysing past climate change, correlating climate events between records, assessing climate periodicities, identifying potential triggers and evaluating climate model simulations. The first global compilation of speleothem isotope records by the SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) working group showed that age model uncertainties are not systematically reported in the published literature, and these are only available for a limited number of records (ca. 15 %, n = 107/691). To improve the usefulness of the SISAL database, we have (i) improved the database’s spatio-temporal coverage and (ii) created new chronologies using seven different approaches for age– depth modelling. We have applied these alternative chronologies to the records from the first version of the SISAL database (SISALv1) and to new records compiled since the release of SISALv1. This paper documents the necessary changes in the structure of the SISAL database to accommodate the inclusion of the new age models and their uncertainties as well as the expansion of the database to include new records and the qualitycontrol measures applied. This paper also documents the age–depth model approaches used to calculate the new chronologies. The updated version of the SISAL database (SISALv2) contains isotopic data from 691 speleothem records from 294 cave sites and new age–depth models, including age–depth temporal uncertainties for 512 speleothems. SISALv2 is available at https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.256 (Comas-Bru et al., 2020a)., The design and creation of v2 of the database were supported by funding to Sandy P. Harrison from the ERCfunded project GC2.0 (Global Change 2.0: Unlocking the past for a clearer future; grant no. 694481) and the Geological Survey Ireland Short Call 2017 (Developing a toolkit for model evaluation using speleothem isotope data; grant no. 2017-SC-056) award to Laia Comas-Bru. Sandy P. Harrison and Laia Comas-Bru received additional support from the ERC-funded project GC2.0 and from the JPI-Belmont project “PAlaeo-Constraints on Monsoon Evolution and Dynamics (PACMEDY)” through the UK Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC). Laia Comas-Bru and Belen Martrat received support from the CSIC scientific international collaboration programme I-LINKA20102 IBCC-lo2k. Kira Rehfeld and Denis Scholz acknowledge support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; codes RE3994/2-1 and SCHO 1274/11-1).