Climate Resilience and Sustainability最新文献

We are pleased to present Climate Resilience and Sustainability (CRS), an exciting new journal that is right for this decade and this century. The journal is online only and open access, reflecting our goal to make the papers available to everyone. We are aiming for fast publication, while ensuring a robust peer-review process. The journal is published as a joint effort between the Royal Meteorological Society and Wiley.

With accelerating climate change and impacts, effective action requires bringing together sound knowledge from multiple disciplines as well as “on the ground” practice. CRS aims to publish such interdisciplinary research and practice to scale-up solutions and actions. We would also like to receive papers that reflect action research and co-production of knowledge.

Our motivation to establish this journal reflects the change in focus over the past few decades from physical aspects of climate science to solutions for climate resilient and sustainable development. In the early 1980s, the focus of climate change research was on detecting the changes in the atmosphere and ocean, and on using models to understand these changes. Sophisticated models were developed for the atmosphere–ocean systems to understand and to project the likely changes on specific variables such as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration, air/ocean temperatures, and precipitation. By the early 1990s, the changes in the atmosphere–ocean systems were shown to be affecting societies and ecosystems. To reflect this, by the late 1990s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the change to the title of Working Group II Report from “Impacts, Adaptations and Mitigation of Climate Change: Scientific-Technical Analyses” to “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.” This heralded an increased focus on vulnerability, resilience and sustainability of people, ecosystems, and economies. IPCC Working Group II and the IPCC Synthesis Reports also highlighted the need for climate resilient and sustainable development pathways. In other discussion within the United Nations, the Millennium Development Goals evolved into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Collectively this strengthened the emphasis on sustainability and climate resilience as part of the ambitions for development of all countries.

These three categories also aim to bring together researchers and practitioners across a range of relevant disciplines into a single readership. We are certain that such a process will help find timely resilient solutions for our world that is being affected by escalating impacts of climate change and development activities.

CRS is also planning to publish special issues that focus on challenges and resilient solutions in specific countries or regions and on specific sectors. We already have a range of special issues being planned and in production, for example, country level research and assessment toward climate resilient

Climate change will increase the frequency of heatwaves in the United Kingdom and reduce the frequency of cold spells. This paper evaluates the effect of changes in climate as represented by UKCP18 climate projections on a series of indicators of heat and cold extremes relevant to policy in the United Kingdom. These indicators are expressed in terms of current critical thresholds beyond which alerts are issued or specific actions implemented, rather than impacts on health and well-being. The frequency and duration of heatwave and heat–health alerts increase under all scenarios, with the greatest absolute number of events in the south and east of England where the chance of hot weather events affecting worker productivity doubles by the 2020s. Cold weather events – triggering health and social care plans and benefit payments – will become less frequent, but the effects of climate change on cold events are much smaller than on hot events and they will continue to occur. Until at least the 2040s, the projected effects of climate change do not depend strongly on the assumed change in global emissions, and the range in possible changes is primarily determined by uncertainty in the change in temperature in the United Kingdom for a given emissions pathway. Beyond the 2050s, the impacts are strongly dependent on future emissions. Impacts in a high-emissions world will be considerably larger than in low-emissions world. The projected increase in heatwave alerts, and the duration and intensity of heatwaves, implies not only a need to review heatwave emergency planning arrangements – looking in particular at what should become regarded as ‘normal’ summer weather – but also increased efforts to reduce vulnerability to extreme heat events. At the same time, cold weather events will still continue to occur with a sufficient frequency that plans need to be maintained.