Climatic Change最新文献

Based on the historical (period of 1990–2014) spatial and temporal ranking, a future projection of four extreme precipitation indices over Iran is conducted. A multi-model ensemble approach and a rank-based weighting method with ten models from the CMIP6 dataset are used for this projection. The weight of each model is calculated based on its historical simulation skill, and weighted models are employed for future projections across three periods (2026–2050, 2051–2075, and 2076–2100), under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5). The results show that an increase in total extreme precipitation (R95p) and the absolute intensity of extreme precipitation (AEPI) in Iran is almost certain in all periods, under all scenarios. The maximum increase of the R95p index is 10%, and the probability of its increase in all periods and scenarios (except for SSP1-2.6 scenario in the 2076–2100 period) exceeds 50%. This probability of increase is particularly high in the first period, ranging from 70 to 90%. In all periods and scenarios, the median of the number of days with extreme precipitation (R95d) is close to zero or negative. This index exhibits a decrease compared to the historical period, with a probability of over 60%, except for the 2026–2050 period under SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios. Furthermore, the probability of an increase in the AEPI compared to the historical period is more than 75%. This study finds no significant increase or decrease in the fraction of total rainfall from events exceeding the extreme precipitation threshold (R95pT).

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of severe droughts. As water scarcity can destroy vital resources such as crops and livestock, droughts pose major challenges to affected societies. Concerns arise that the resulting hardship and suffering could exacerbate social tensions. Trust in the political system, defined as citizens’ overall confidence in the state to deliver satisfactory outcomes, is an integral foundation of stable state-society relations. To illuminate under what conditions droughts might exert a destabilizing effect, investigating their impact on trust in the political system is paramount. Our study is the first to investigate how drought exposure influences citizens´ overall confidence in the political system. Previous research shows that citizens tend to lose trust when dissatisfied with the living conditions and output that a system provides. While droughts emerge gradually and, thus, give states multiple opportunities to intervene, states in the Global South often struggle to master the challenging task of drought management, thereby demonstrating inadequate, dissatisfactory state performance. We argue that failures in successful drought management showcase what goes wrong in a political system, which in turn leads to an erosion of trust in the political system. Using individual-level survey data from Afrobarometer round five, matched with high-resolution water scarcity data, our analysis reveals that recently drought-exposed individuals exhibit significantly lower levels of trust in the political system compared to their unaffected counterparts. This effect is most pronounced in sub-national regions with low state capacity, where the implementation of successful drought relief measures might be particularly difficult.

This paper examines how rising temperatures impact the agricultural production value of Thai farmers, compares potential adaptation strategies like agricultural diversification, and analyzes future projections based on IPCC AR6 scenarios. We analyze nationally representative socioeconomic survey data from farm households alongside ERA5 weather data, utilizing econometric regression analysis. Our analysis reveals that higher temperatures lead to a reduction in agricultural output value, with the situation expected to worsen as global warming progresses. Furthermore, we find that households with diversified production practices, such as a variety of agricultural activities or multicropping, exhibit a greater capacity to adapt to rising temperatures. These findings substantiate the importance of the country’s policies promoting integrated farming and diversified crop-mix strategies.

Water resources managers face decisions related to building new infrastructure to increase water system resilience to climate and demand changes. To inform this adaptation planning process, current decision-making methods commonly use scenario approaches to estimate the benefit of adaptation options. While effective, these new analyses require communication of complicated findings to often nontechnical audiences. This paper introduces a pragmatic approach that uses the results from a bottom-up assessment of vulnerability of the water system with future climate projection-based probabilities of climate change to select a single planning scenario that encapsulates the decision-makers’ chosen level of robustness for their system. Contrary to typical implementation of option analysis under deep climate uncertainty, the proposed pragmatic approach does not require the analyst to evaluate each portfolio of adaptation options against all possible states of the world, significantly reducing the required computational costs and communication challenges. It also aligns with the planning scenario approach used in practice by water utilities. The modeling framework is illustrated for the regional water system operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (California, United States) for which changes in average temperature, precipitation and urban demand are considered.

Losses and damages (l&d) from climate change and the frequency of extreme events will burden our global budgetary constraints and adaptive capacities. Scientific and analytical support for allocating public funding in humanitarian aid and disaster management to counter them involves determining the most pertinent criteria to use or where to design forecasting. Their priorities are often assumed, and assumptions can be ill-fitting. Thus, we asked the key users of such information for their preferences.

A two-round anonymous Delphi method utilising global frameworks for a funding allocation simulation was employed to survey the stated preferences of a stratified panel of l&d experts (N = 36). They were experts from 19 countries of origin representing international organisations (e.g., United Nations, European Union, World Bank), the research sector, the public sector, and civil society (e.g., Save the Children, World Vision). The consensus and stability were analysed with parametric measures.

We find that the near-future preference for magnitude-indicating criteria, such as people-centric and disaster risk-based, outweighs the importance of indicators related to governance, the rule of law, or a socio-economic aspect. Likewise, financing adaptation options to climate change-related risks to food security, human health, and water security are a high near-future priority for minimising l&d compared to, for example, risks to living standards or risks to terrestrial and ocean ecosystems. The covariance suggests that these priorities are an emergent preference in the l&d sector. Thus, it raises further questions on what we can and should prioritise with scarce resources.

In recent years, South Korea has experienced a notable escalation in the intensity and frequency of summer heat. To quantitatively gauge the impact of global warming on Korean summers, this study employs the Time of Emergence (TOE) method, assessing when the effects of global warming surpass natural climate variability. Determining a precise regional TOE is challenging due to disparities between modeled climates and observations. For peak summer seasons (July and August), TOE estimates range from the 2010s to the early 2030s in Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) 5-8.5, suggesting an imminent or already reached TOE. However, for the same scenario, different methodologies and datasets project the TOE to the late 21st century, suggesting the existence of uncertainty in the TOE. One reason for this uncertainty is the discrepancies identified between climate models and observations, which suggest that climate models could delay the TOE beyond the present time. Furthermore, from 1959 to 2014, global warming accounts for less than 10% of the observed temperature. Despite this, the strengthening of global warming signals is confirmed, leading to the expectation of more extreme events than those seen in the 2018 heat wave. This raises questions about current estimates of TOE and emphasizes the need for robust climate modeling to inform effective climate action.

Approximately 11% of the world’s population lives within 10 km of an ocean coastline, a percentage that is likely to increase during the remainder of the 21st century due to urbanization and economic development. In the presence of climate change, coastal communities will be threatened by increasing damages due to sea-level rise (SLR), accompanied by hurricanes, storm surges and coastal inundation, shoreline erosion, and seawater intrusion into the soil. While the past decade has seen numerous proposals for coastal protection using adaptation methods to deal with the deep uncertainties associated with a changing climate, our review of the potential impact of SLR on the resilience of coastal communities reveals that these adaptation methods have not been informed by community resilience or recovery goals. Moreover, since SLR is likely to continue over the next century, periodic changes to these community goals may be necessary for public planning and risk mitigation. Finally, community policy development must be based on a quantitative risk-informed life-cycle basis to develop public support for the substantial public investments required. We propose potential research directions to identify effective adaptation methods based on the gaps identified in our review, culminating in a decision framework that is informed by community resilience goals and metrics and risk analysis over community infrastructure life cycles.

The Dingwu Great Famine (DGF) is considered to be the worst drought in China over the past 300 years. How the central government took steps to cope with the catastrophe during this period and ultimately survived deserves in-depth study. This paper collects the official records during the DGF and uses textual analysis and statistical methods to explore the responses carried by the central government. We found that 21 measures in 7 categories had been taken in response to this extreme drought, with political, economic, and cultural responses being the most commonly used. The governmental responses during DGF can be divided into three phases and had a significant “mismatch” (6 months lagging behind) compared with the meteorological process, which may be related to the higher social robustness in the early period. The 7 categories can be further clustered into 3 types based on their time-series performance. The first type includes economic, material, and political responses, which were aimed at responding to the drought impacts and reducing social losses more quickly and played the role of a “quick effect drug” for society. The second type includes agricultural and engineering, and population responses, which mitigated the drought impacts through “after-effects” measures and played the role of “slow-release drug”. The third type is the cultural response, which acted like a “placebo”. It did not help to mitigate the drought but alleviated the dissatisfaction of the refugees by shaping the spiritual objects (rain gods), thus maintaining social stability.

The Gulf of Eilat (Gulf of Aqaba) is a semi-enclosed basin situated at the northern end of the Red Sea, renowned for its exceptional marine ecosystem. To evaluate the response of the Gulf to climate variations, we analyzed various factors including temperature down to 700 m, surface air temperature, and heat fluxes. We find that the sea temperature is rising at all depths despite inconclusive trends in local atmospheric variables, including the surface air temperature. The Gulf’s sea surface temperature (SST) warms at a rate of a few hundredths of a degree Celsius per year, which is comparable to the warming of the global SST and the Mediterranean Sea. The increase in sea warming is linked to fewer winter deep mixing events that used to occur more frequently in the past. Based on the analysis of the ocean-atmosphere heat fluxes, we conclude that the lateral advection of heat from the southern part of the Gulf likely leads to an increase in water temperature in the northern part of the Gulf. Our findings suggest that local ocean warming is not necessarily associated with local processes, but rather with the warming of other remote locations.

We present a framework for developing storylines of UK sea level rise to aid risk communication and coastal adaptation planning. Our approach builds on the UK national climate projections (UKCP18) and maintains the same physically consistent methods that preserve component correlations and traceability between global mean sea level (GMSL) and local relative sea level (RSL). Five example storylines are presented that represent singular trajectories of future sea level rise drawn from the underlying large Monte Carlo simulations. The first three storylines span the total range of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) likely range GMSL projections across the SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios. The final two storylines are based upon recent high-end storylines of GMSL presented in AR6 and the recent literature. Our results suggest that even the most optimistic sea level rise outcomes for the UK will require adaptation of up to 1 m of sea level rise for large sections of coastline by 2300. For the storyline most consistent with current international greenhouse gas emissions pledges and a moderate sea level rise response, UK capital cities will experience between about 1 and 2 m of sea level rise by 2300, with continued rise beyond 2300. The storyline based on the upper end of the AR6 likely range sea level projections yields much larger values for UK capital cities that range between about 3 and 4 m at 2300. The two high-end scenarios, which are based on a recent study that showed accelerated sea level rise associated with ice sheet instability feedbacks, lead to sea level rise for UK capital cities at 2300 that range between about 8 m and 17 m. These magnitudes of rise would pose enormous challenges for UK coastal communities and are likely to be beyond the limits of adaptation at some locations.