Climate Resilience and Sustainability最新文献

In this paper, I discuss rhetorical studies’ contribution to the study of environmental communication. With the concept of rhetorical environmental citizenship, I emphasize rhetorical scholarship's concern with citizens’ participation in democracy – both as recipients of and actors in environmental debates. Specifically, this approach invites analyses and evaluations of the public rhetoric of elite actors, considering how it facilitates critical engagement and reflection in matters affecting the environment. Additionally, it encourages examinations of citizens’ democratic participation, attending to how citizens perform, challenge and negotiate their membership in the community also through non-deliberative rhetorical practices.

Increasing climate change risks in Africa, emerging from global warming and their interaction with non-climate risks such as market, have increased the need for comprehensive Climate Risk Management (CRM) that considers both climatic and non-climatic risks and enables actions that address the underlying drivers of vulnerability to these risks. However, comprehensive CRM requires holistic Climate Information Services (CIS), that is, CIS that balances between components focused on provision of short- and long-term climate information for both local and non-local decision makers. In this article, we ask: to what extent is CIS in Africa holistic? We review recent and ongoing CIS interventions in Africa to determine whether a balance of components between short- and long-term CIS for local and non-local decision makers is achieved for holistic CIS. We find a focus on provision of short-term, that is, Sub-Seasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) CIS for local and non-local decision makers, with limited focus on medium- to long-term (MLT) CIS, particularly MLT CIS for local decision makers which represents the biggest gap to achieving holistic CIS in Africa. We present a supported case that ensuring holistic CIS in Africa will require a portfolio-based approach to CIS development, particularly focusing on MLT CIS for local decision makers. We further highlight the need for integration of this MLT CIS for local decision makers into existing CIS. Achieving this will require: (a) experimentation and innovation with different CIS formats, products and timeframes to enable learning and flexibility to achieve desired goals; (b) capacity development of producers and consumers of climate information to ensure that they have the skills and expertise to understand and generate, and articulate needs and consume MLT CIS respectively; and (c) coordinated allocation of financial resources to ensure that all components of the holistic CIS are advanced.

This article synthesizes critiques of ‘carbon-fix’ strategies in the forestry sector to clarify key concerns about reductionist treatments of forests and carbon and to facilitate further debate. It begins by asserting that since climate change mitigation has been placed at the centre of forest governance, forests have been deemed to serve as ‘carbon-fixing’ devices in ways that can be discerned across three distinct but inter-related categories: (i) carbon storage devices, (ii) carbon removal devices and (iii) net-zero bioenergy devices. A transdisciplinary literature review is used to shed light on key concerns relating to the instrumentalisation of forests within each of these categories. By doing so, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of why relegating forests to a ‘carbon-fix’ function is insufficient to tackle climate change and, rather, poses threats to forest ecosystems and forest-dependent communities. This review ultimately calls into question the use of forests to delay crucial systemic changes, without diminishing the importance of forest conservation, restoration, governance, as well as technological innovation, in mitigating the ongoing harmful effects of climate change.

In agriculture, the possibility of climatic hazards negatively impacting small farmers’ livelihood is high. Thus, there are reasons to contend that climate vulnerabilities could determine economic behaviour. This paper investigates whether discounting behaviour varies with exposure to natural hazards. We analyse data from a survey involving an experiment in which farmers made choices between a smaller immediate payment compared with larger future amounts. The results show that 58% heavily discounted the future in favour of the immediate payment. Among the climatic shocks examined, flood, drought and salinity were the main hazards farmers faced on their plots. However, these natural hazards varied across locations. Our examination of the effect of the experience of natural hazards and the severity of climate vulnerability on farmers’ discounting behaviour suggests that experience and vulnerability had different impacts on discounting behaviour. Recent exposure to drought and flood reduces patience. However, the opposite is the case for a recent experience of salinity. This paper shows that under circumstances of climate vulnerabilities, farmers may be willing to make decisions that result in immediate albeit lower rewards in place of potential higher rewards in the future. The implication is that experience and vulnerability to natural hazards might affect farmers’ decision-making to the extent that it prevents them from a speedy economic recovery post-disaster.

Cultural heritage shapes our identity, delivers capacities, and exposes vulnerabilities, yet cultural heritage value and vulnerability are largely missing from conventional risk assessments. Risk assessments are a fundamental first step in identifying effective mechanisms for Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and disaster management. However, by ignoring the influence of heritage, decision makers are limiting their understanding of risk and therefore opportunities vital for building and maintaining local resilience. We present findings from a synthesis of peer-reviewed literature from the last 15 years on cultural heritage risk assessment for primarily CCA but with wider implications for disaster management. We identify a significant lack of research examining intangible aspects of heritage and their influence on risk and resilience. Across the literature, risk assessments focus largely on exposure in isolation from vulnerability or adaptive capacity and where vulnerability is included there is no consistent definition or criterion. We highlight that the most frequently used methods have minimal engagement with local community values, experience, and knowledge relating to heritage practice and customs. Community engagement is most often associated with ‘professional experts’ rather than members of a local community. Furthermore, the Global South is severely under-represented with a research bias towards Europe and North America. We recommend an agile approach to future assessments with the adjustment of risk tool research and development to include participatory approaches. Future climate risk frameworks must incorporate community-scale values to understand the role of cultural heritage in relation to adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and resilience.

Southern Asia experiences some of the most damaging climate events in the world, with loss of life from some cyclones in the hundreds of thousands. Despite this, research on climate extremes in the region is substantially lacking compared to other parts of the world. To understand the narrative of how an extreme event in the region may change in the future, we consider Super Cyclone Amphan, which made landfall in May 2020, bringing storm surges of 2–4 m to coastlines of India and Bangladesh. Using the latest CMIP6 climate model projections, coupled with storm surge, hydrological, and socio-economic models, we consider how the population exposure to a storm surge of Amphan's scale changes in the future. We vary future sea level rise and population changes consistent with projections out to 2100, but keep other factors constant. Both India and Bangladesh will be negatively impacted, with India showing >200% increased exposure to extreme storm surge flooding (>3 m) under a high emissions scenario and Bangladesh showing an increase in exposure of >80% for low-level flooding (>0.1 m). It is only when we follow a low-emission scenario, consistent with the 2°C Paris Agreement Goal, that we see no real change in Bangladesh's storm surge exposure, mainly due to the population and climate signals cancelling each other out. For India, even with this low-emission scenario, increases in flood exposure are still substantial (>50%). While here we attribute only the storm surge flooding component of the event to climate change, we highlight that tropical cyclones are multifaceted, and damages are often an integration of physical and social components. We recommend that future climate risk assessments explicitly account for potential compounding factors.

Most studies into the effects of climate change have headline results in the form of a global change in mean temperature. More useful for businesses and governments, however, are measures of the localized impact, and also of extremes rather than averages. We have addressed this by examining the change in frequency of exceeding a daily mean temperature threshold, defined as ‘disruption days’, as it is often this exceedance which has the most dramatic impacts on personal or economic behaviour. Our exceedance analysis tackles the resolution of climate change both geographically and temporally, the latter specifically to address the 5- to 20-year time horizon which can be recognized in business planning.

We apply bias correction with quantile mapping to meteorological reanalysis data from ECMWF ERA5 and output from CMIP5 climate model simulations. By determining the daily frequency at which a mean temperature threshold is exceeded in this bias-corrected dataset, we can compare predicted and historic frequencies to estimate the change in the number of disruption days. Furthermore, by combining results from 18 different climate models, we can estimate the likelihood of more extreme events, taking into account model variations. This is useful for worst-case scenario planning.

Taking the city of Chicago as an example, the expected frequency of years with 40 or more disruption days above the 25°C threshold rises by a factor of four for a time period centred on 2040, compared with a period centred on 2000. Alternately, looking at the change in the number of days at a given likelihood, an example is Shenzhen, where the number of disruption days in a once-per-decade event exceeding the 25°C or 30°C threshold is expected to rise by a factor of four.

In a future stage, superimposing these results onto maps of, for instance, GDP sensitivity or production days lost, will provide more accurate and targeted conclusions for future impacts of climate change. This method of quantifying costs on business-relevant timescales will enable businesses and governments properly include risks associated with facilities, plan mitigating actions and make accurate provisions. It can also, for example, inform their disclosure of physical risks under the framework of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. This approach is equally applicable to other weather-related, localized phenomena likely to be impacted by climate change.

Brazil has experienced huge areas of forest loss over recent decades with an estimated removal of 80 MHa of natural forest since 1990. Deforestation creates substantial greenhouse emissions that have historically dominated all other sectors. Effective governance has reduced deforestation and net land-use emissions have fallen by 74% since the mid-2000s. Anthropogenic carbon removal from secondary forest regrowth and protected areas has increased by 62%, which has helped drive the reduction in net emissions, offsetting gross emissions which have fallen by 44%. Major Brazilian biomes, such as the Atlantic Forest are net-sinks and the Amazon was near net-zero in 2010. Deforestation has increased over the last 10-years and now stands at a decadal high in the Amazon region. These increases in deforestation put Brazil at risk of missing its original National Determined Contribution; however, the recent revision has substantially increased the 2005 baseline and therefore the overall target. Carbon removals in the forest sector play an increasingly important role in reducing emissions and achieving the NDC. The Brazilian target of achieving 12 MHa of reforestation and restoration has the potential to further offset emissions through enhanced regrowth. However, the natural carbon sinks of Brazil are weakening. The Amazon forest is the single largest Brazilian biome for natural carbon uptake but when combined with land-use emissions has seen a net loss over the last 30 years. The natural sink remains large, but ecosystem resilience is declining driven by global and local climate change linked to rising international emissions and changing circulation patterns associated with local deforestation and degradation. These combine to make realizing the huge potential for carbon removal more challenging. It remains evident that forest protection and avoided degradation and disturbance is the best way to mitigate emissions and reduce climate impacts.

Human activities continue to warm our climate in ways unprecedented in thousands of years. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirms our role in this, and that more frequent and extreme events and impacts are being felt right now in all areas of the world. It is clear that we must adapt to some level of changes already occurring whilst also reducing our emissions to limit further damage and unmanageable impacts. What this means for society requires understanding at local levels to aide decision-making. The Climate Science for Service Partnership Brazil (CSSP Brazil) supports collaborative research between Brazil and U.K. partners to improve climate resilience and sustainability with particular focus on Brazil but with underpinning capability applicable more widely.