Climatic Change最新文献

Uptake and support of sustainable technologies that decrease greenhouse gas emissions are critical to mitigating climate change. Engagement in individual (e.g., eating less meat, electric car use) and collective (e.g., petition signing, donating money to environmental causes) sustainability behaviors may correlate with psychological factors including emotions, worry about climate change and natural hazards, and response efficacy. However, little research has explored these relationships in representative samples at high risk for climate-related hazard exposures (e.g., hurricanes, heatwaves, flooding). We assessed climate change-related sustainability behaviors in an ongoing, probability-based representative survey of 1479 Texas and Florida residents repeatedly exposed to climate-related hazards including hurricanes, heatwaves, flooding, and tornadoes. Controlling for demographics, behavior-related positive and negative emotions correlated with engagement in performing a greater number of collective-level sustainability behaviors (positive emotions: IRR = 2.06, p < .001; negative emotions: IRR = 1.46, p = .030). However, negative emotions were mediated by natural hazard worry, which in turn was mediated by climate change worry. Positive emotions were mediated by response efficacy. Individual-level sustainability behaviors were associated with positive emotions (IRR = 1.18, p < .001), which were again mediated by response efficacy. In adjusted analyses unpacking the relationship between discrete emotions and sustainability behaviors, hope was associated with individual- and collective-level sustainability behaviors (all ps < .05). Results suggest general climate change worry may be adaptive and that feelings of hope, relative to other emotions (both positive and negative), may help encourage sustainability behaviors that address climate change. Scalable interventions should explore leveraging these psychological experiences to promote uptake of sustainable technology-related behaviors more broadly.

This article explores the discursive construction of news values by Chinese media to reveal how climate change was packaged and sold to the Chinese public over the last 30 years (1993–2022). Adopting the corpus linguistic method and the Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) framework, this study examines news values through key words and photographs from five Chinese mainstream media websites. The selected timeframe is significant as it comprises domestic news reports published during three different governance phases, from 1993–2002, 2003–2012, and 2013–2022. The results show that the Chinese news reporting in each of the 3 phases has constantly and dominantly construed the news value of Eliteness, albeit in different ways. From 1993 to 2002, climate change was constructed as an an external concept which lacked a concrete China-associated interpretation; from 2003 to 2012, climate change was framed as China’s domestic issue, which saw substantive progress in governance efforts across the board to address the challenge; from 2013 to 2022, climate change was established as China’s diplomatic issue. Overall, through the three phases, climate change has been identified as increasingly concrete and localized in the Chinese context, and China’s initiatives to tackle climate change have been increasingly promoted from domestic to international contexts. The news values and the construction ways the Chinese media selected to report climate change were largely dominated by China’s transition in industrial structure and mode of production during the last 30 years, as well as China’s diplomatic strategy to build a Community with a Shared Future in the recent decade.

This paper attempts to analyze decoupling between CO₂ emissions and income growth in the U.S. through the lens of Environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). Many states in the U.S. have achieved absolute decoupling in recent years, which means that CO₂ emissions have decreased while the economy grows. This is partly due to the adoption of low-emission technologies, such as coal to gas switching, nuclear power, and economic restructuring towards a more sustainable economy. We argue that understanding decoupling is crucial to implement effective climate change policies. This study suggests that, after 2015, EKC has taken on the U-shaped form with many states currently located on the negatively sloped portion of the curve. It is not desirable as emissions may eventually begin to increase as the economy grows. To support this claim, we estimate panel fixed effects rolling-window EKCs using two-stage least square with two instrumental variables, unemployment rate and the trend variable. Empirical results show how the inverted U-shaped EKC has transformed into the U-shaped EKC in the U.S. This transformation is probably caused by the recent increases in emissions in transportation sector, strong electricity demand in recent years with cold winter seasons, reversals of eco-friendly energy policies, and manufacturers’ onshoring. Stakeholders should make efforts to transform the U-shaped EKC back to an inverted U-shaped EKC even in cases where absolute decoupling is observed.

We quantify the projected impacts of alternative levels of global warming upon the climatically determined geographic ranges of plants and vertebrates in six countries (China, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana and India), accounting for uncertainties in regional climate projection. We quantify in a spatially explicit fashion the species richness remaining or lost, allowing the identification of climate refugia which we define as areas where > 75% of the species currently present remain in a world with a particular level of global warming above pre-industrial levels. In all countries and in both taxa, species richness declines with warming, as does the proportion of each country remaining a climate refugium for plants or vertebrates. In percentage terms, refugia loss relative to a 1961–1990 baseline period is greatest in India and Brazil, and least in Ghana and Ethiopia for the same level of warming, and is greater for plants than for vertebrates. Taking account of present land uses (i.e. area still considered natural), and using species richness of plants as a proxy to indicate biodiversity more generally, the proportion of land acting as climate refugia for biodiversity in five of the countries variously declines from 32–75% of a country in the 1961–1990 baseline period to 20–64% for 1.5 °C global warming, 11–53% for 2 °C, 3–33% for 3 °C and 2–24% for 4 °C warming. In Ethiopia, India, Brazil and China, climate refugia decline rapidly with warming while in Ghana and China some refugia persist even with 3–4 °C of warming. Only small percentages of Brazil, India and China are both climate refugia and lie within protected areas; hence, an expansion of the protected area networks in these countries would be required to deliver climate resilient biodiversity conservation. These percentages are larger in Ethiopia and Ghana and, in some areas of Ghana, the only remaining refugia are in protected areas, the remaining landscape converted to other uses.

The Topical Collection “Accrual of Climate Change Risk in Six Vulnerable Countries” provides a harmonised assessment of risks to human and natural systems due to global warming of 1.5–4 °C in six countries (China, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, and India) using a consistent set of climate change and socioeconomic scenarios. It compares risks in 2100 if warming has reached 3 °C, broadly corresponding to current global greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, including countries’ National Determined Contributions, rather than the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to ‘well below’ 2 °C and ‘pursuing efforts’ to limit to 1.5 °C. Global population is assumed either constant at year 2000 levels or to increase to 9.2 billion by 2100. In either case, greater warming is projected to lead, in all six countries, to greater exposure of land and people to drought and fluvial flood hazard, greater declines in biodiversity, and greater reductions in the yield of maize and wheat. Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, compared with ~ 3 °C, is projected to deliver large benefits for all six countries, including reduced economic damages due to fluvial flooding. The greatest projected benefits are the avoidance of a large increase in exposure of agricultural land to severe drought, which is 61%, 43%, 18%, and 21% lower in Ethiopia, China, Ghana, and India at 1.5 °C than at 3 °C, whilst avoided increases in human exposure to severe drought are 20–80% lower at 1.5 °C than 3 °C across the six countries. Climate refugia for plants are largely preserved at 1.5 °C warming in Ghana, China, and Ethiopia, but refugia shrink in areal extent by a factor of 2, 3, 3, 4, and 10 in Ghana, China, India, Ethiopia, and Brazil, respectively, if warming reaches 3 °C. Economic damages associated with sea-level rise are projected to increase in coastal nations, but more slowly if warming were limited to 1.5 °C. Actual benefits on the ground will also depend on national and local contexts and the extent of future investment in adaptation.

Today, a major challenge for climate science is to overcome what is called the “usability gap” between the projections derived fromclimate models and the needs of the end-users. Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are expected to provide usable information concerning a variety of impacts and for a wide range of end-users. It is often assumed that the development of more accurate, more complex RCMs with higher spatial resolution should bring process understanding and better local projections, thus overcoming the usability gap. In this paper, I rather assume that the credibility of climate information should be pursued together with two other criteria of usability, which are salience and legitimacy. Based on the Swiss climate change scenarios, I study the attempts at meeting the needs of end-users and outline the trade-off modellers and users have to face with respect to the cascade of uncertainty. A conclusion of this paper is that the trade-off between salience and credibility sets the conditions under which RCMs can be deemed adequate for the purposes of addressing the needs of end-users and gearing the communication of the projections toward direct use and action.

We present the results from a new framework providing an assessment of how climate change risks to natural capital accrue with warming of 1.5–4 °C in six countries (China, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, and India). Unlike typical biodiversity and climate change studies, this assessment also considers landcover and population changes across a range of 17 ecosystem services. The potential impacts of climate change (alone) on natural capital at 1.5 °C is greatest in Brazil and least in Ghana. However, when population and landcover change are included, areas projected to be at high natural capital risk begin to accrue by 1.5 °C in all countries. By 2 °C, Ethiopia and Ghana show increasing areas at high risk, even though they are at low risk owing to climate alone. Thus, current impacts to biodiversity and ecosystem services and changes in potential demand coupled with warming exceed changes projected by climate alone. However, this also indicates that there is adaptation potential, especially with warming of < 2 °C, to reduce risk through restoring habitat. At lower levels of warming, targeted restoration of marginal agricultural habitats would increase the bank of natural capital for use by people and provide support for remaining agricultural lands. By 3 °C, the adaptation potential from restoration is substantially less: < 1% in Brazil, India and Egypt; 7–8% in China and Ethiopia; but still 26% in Ghana. This indicates that restoration as an adaptation option for biodiversity, and thus, natural capital, rapidly decreases with increasing temperatures. By 2100, factoring in population change (SSP2), current ecological footprint, and current landcover, even with only 1.5 °C warming, large parts of Brazil, eastern China, most of Egypt, much of Ethiopia, southwestern Ghana (except for protected areas), and most of India are at high to extreme natural capital risk with an adaptation deficit potentially equating to a soft adaptation limit.

In response to the catastrophic flooding that occurred in British Columbia, Canada in November 2021, the City of Merritt is facing a difficult decision about whether to rebuild or not. The developing situation in Merritt provided a unique opportunity to explore the different types of adaptations (i.e., investments in climate resilient infrastructure, rebuilding, construction of structural mitigation, zoning, and buyouts) considered by policymakers in advance of official municipal decisions. Through qualitative mixed methods (e.g., interviews, open houses, town council meetings), the study explored preliminary discussions among decision makers surrounding long term risk reduction options including rebuild and retreat strategies, perceptions of flood risk, recovery challenges faced by small-scale municipalities, the development of the community’s flood mitigation plan, and recommendations for post-disaster transitional supports. The results indicated that communities in the post-disaster recovery phase are considering the use of buyouts as a risk reduction tool amongst broader flood mitigation strategies, however policy constraints and a lack of funding are impeding the implementation of a flood mitigation plan that includes buyouts. The findings suggest that decisions about post disaster recovery are often independent of broader municipal climate change adaptation plans instead focusing on short-term risk reduction mechanisms. Additionally, transitional supports including interim housing need to be accounted for in recovery planning. Governments in Canada can capitalize on the policy windows during the post-disaster recovery stage and learn from municipalities about the challenges and opportunities in the design and implementation of flood mitigation plans that can help to improve disaster policy.

Abstract

Climate change is contributing to the rapid warming of mountain environments, resulting in glacial retreat, diminished snowpacks, and permafrost thaw. Such rapid changes have transformed the riskscape of mountaineering routes, altering climbing conditions and increasing objective hazards. In response, this study used a mixed methods approach that combines statistical climatological analysis with archival content analysis and semi-structured interviews with mountain guides to explore the relationship between climate change, route conditions, hazards, and adaptations in the Abbot Pass area of Banff National Park (Canada). Results revealed that long-term climatic shifts contributed to change in climbing conditions and objective hazards across all routes, creating a typology of climate-driven route evolution based on the original route characteristics. Mountaineers adapted to such change by employing spatial/activity and temporal substitutions to mitigate risks and exploit emergent opportunities. However, the use of such strategies was influenced by demographic (i.e., age, years of experience) and socio-cultural factors (i.e., place attachment, risk tolerance) and limited by hard limits to adaptation. Given the projected trajectory of climate change, our findings highlight the potential inevitability of mountaineers encountering such limits, resulting in forced transformations and significant loss and damages. Therefore, it is imperative to examine both the economic and non-economic consequences of these shifts and evaluate the ability of mountaineers and tourism providers to navigate a significantly transformed climate future in mountainous areas. While focused on a Canadian context, the findings and methodologies developed herein are relevant to other mountain geographies, where climate change is rapidly transforming environments frequented by mountaineers and represents a call to action for more research in field of climate change, adaptation, and mountaineering.

How will the increased frequency of coastal inundation events induced by sea level rise impact residential insurance premiums, and when would insurance contracts be withdrawn? We model the contribution of localised sea level rise to the increased frequency of coastal inundation events. Examining four Aotearoa New Zealand cities, we combine historical tide-gauge extremes with geo-located property data to estimate the annual expected loss from this hazard, for each property, in order to establish when insurance retreat is likely to occur. We find that as sea level rise changes the frequency of inundation events, 99% of properties currently within 1% AEP coastal inundation zones can expect at least partial insurance retreat within a decade (with less than 10 cm of sea level rise). Our modelling predicts that full insurance retreat is likely within 20–25 years, with timing dependent on the property’s elevation and distance from the coast, and less intuitively, on the tidal range in each location.