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While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises - that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by 'cascading' ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision-making capabilities and the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has been seen as a crisis looming in the future, and has therefore not reached the top of the political agenda. This no longer holds true when looking at Australia, where climate change has become high politics. In this paper we examine the Australian electoral debate in terms of accountability framing, where the Government and Opposition were involved in a ‘framing contest’. We argue that theories on accountability framing in crisis need to be modified in order to capture the complex dynamics of climate change due to its inherent scientific uncertainty and global nature. After conducting an inductive analysis of Australian Broadcasting Corporation-reporting we found three themes to be of importance for accountability framing in the ‘risk society’: labeling, linking and coping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]