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Strengthen markets, measures and definitions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fight climate change. Strengthen markets, measures and definitions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fight climate change.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates how the impacts of climate change are beginning to converge with other developing challenges with a likely peak with global population, requiring more integrated responses locally, regionally and globally.

The notion of a threshold of dangerous climate change has been central to national and international efforts to address climate risks. However, the focus on a single target has now become an obstacle because it reinforces three key problems: it frames climate change as a distant abstract threat, it impedes integration of mitigation and adaptation, and it fails to recognize the diversity of values and risk perceptions of people around the globe. We present an alternative framework that considers both biophysical science and social values in characterizing the broad spectrum of climate risks. The framework also presents the options for managing these risks within four quadrants defined by the inherent limits to mitigation and adaptation. This quadrant-based approach to managing the spectrum of climate risks restructures the climate change problem from avoiding a distant catastrophe to minimizing collective suffering.

Even with aggressive global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the climate will continue to change for decades due to previous emissions and the inertia in biogeophysical and social systems. Therefore, as a complement to mitigation actions, society must also focus on enhancing its capacity to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change that we are already experiencing and will continue to experience over the next few decades. Resource managers, regional planners, and government agencies need to consider climate risks in their planning. We provide an overview of climate change scenarios for California and suggestions on the use of climate projections in state and regional planning efforts in the future.

In response to an Executive Order by California Governor Schwarzenegger, an evaluation of the implications to California of possible climate changes was undertaken using a scenario-based approach. The "Scenarios Project" investigated projected impacts of climate change on six sectors in the California region. The investigation considered the early, middle and later portions of the twenty-first century, guided by a set of IPCC Fourth Assessment global climate model runs forced by higher and lower greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Each of these climate simulations produce substantial impacts in California that would require adaptations from present practices or status. The most severe impacts could be avoided, however, if emissions can be held near the lower end of global greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. It is increasingly apparent that the rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs), resulting from human activities, is changing the climate in ways that pose serious risks to California's health, economy, and environment. Furthermore, the more GHGs accumulate in the Earth's atmosphere, the more the climate is likely to change and the greater the risks that Earth's system processes and society will face (IPCC 2007). If actions are not taken soon, substantial impacts are likely to happen sooner and grow to larger magnitudes.

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.

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.

It is time to acknowledge that global average temperatures are likely to rise above the 2 °C policy target and consider how that deeply troubling prospect should affect priorities for communicating and managing the risks of a dangerously warming climate.

This paper introduces an analytical framework for evaluating the vulnerability of people and places to environmental and social forces. The framework represents the relative vulnerability of a variable of concern (e.g. such as agricultural yield) to a set of disturbing forces (e.g. climate change, market fluctuations) by a position on a three-dimensional analytical surface, where vulnerability is defined as a function of sensitivity, exposure, and the state relative to a threshold of damage. The surface is presented as a tool to help identify relative vulnerability in order to prioritize actions and assess the vulnerability implications of management and policy decisions.

We propose measuring vulnerability of selected outcome variables of concern (e.g. agricultural yield) to identified stressors (e.g. climate change) as a function of the state of the variables of concern relative to a threshold of damage, the sensitivity of the variables to the stressors, and the magnitude and frequency of the stressors to which the system is exposed. In addition, we provide a framework for assessing the extent adaptive capacity can reduce vulnerable conditions. We illustrate the utility of this approach by evaluating the vulnerability of wheat yields to climate change and market fluctuations in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico.

The vulnerability of people and places has emerged in the past decade as a central concern related to climate change (IPCC 2001; IHDP 2001) and a key question in the emerging field of sustainability science (see Clark et al. 2000; Kates et al. 2001; Turner, Kasperson, et al. 2003; Turner, Matson, et al. 2003; Eakin and Luers 2006). As it becomes increasingly clear that not everyone or every place is equally vulnerable to the rising frequency of environmental stresses, such as floods and drought resulting from climate change, or to major price shocks and policy changes, researchers and practitioners are seeking to understand what makes some places more vulnerable than others. What can be done to reduce the likelihood of harm for the most vulnerable? How can more resilient and adaptive communities and ecosystems be built or managed?