Climatic Change最新文献

Smallholder farmers in Ghana’s Savannah ecological zone face multiple climate stressors. Government and non-governmental organizations have introduced educative demonstrations on sustainable agriculture practices to help them cope. However, the effectiveness of these strategies in enhancing smallholder farmers’ climate resilience needs examination. Our study, guided by the Resilience Theory (RT), aimed to explore factors that shape smallholder farmers’ climate resilience and how their participation in Farmer Field Schools (FFSs) and Climate Action Plans (CAPs) affect their resilience to climate change. We analyzed data from a cross-sectional survey of 517 smallholder farmers in the Upper West region of Ghana using ordered logistic regression. Our findings showed that smallholder farmers’ “good” climate change resilience was associated with participation in Farmer Field Schools (OR: 7.809, p < 0.001) and active involvement in Climate Action Plans (OR: 1.976, p < 0.01). In addition, household food security (OR: 4.412, p < 0.001), access to credit (OR: 1.761, p < 0.01), and larger household sizes (OR: 2.255, p < 0.01) were associated with “good” climate resilience. However, larger land size (OR: 0.988, p < 0.01) and attainment of primary education (OR: 0.497, p < 0.01) showed a lesser likelihood of having “good” climate resilience. The study highlights the importance of practical learning platforms and participatory planning in improving climate resilience among smallholder farmers. Policies and programs should support these initiatives, improve resource accessibility, and tailor educational approaches. Our recommendations include expanding FFSs, integrating CAPs with agricultural services, developing scalable, adaptable, and sustainable agricultural practices, enhancing resource accessibility, and implementing monitoring and evaluation systems for these initiatives.

The growing understanding of how and why the climate is changing has led to mounting calls on climate scientists to take on more responsibility in the context of climate science. While an increasing responsibilisation takes place in the academic literature, asking scientists to “do more”, there is limited engagement with the responsibilities that scientists already assume in practice. Drawing on novel empirical insights from 77 semi-structured interviews with participants of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I take the increasing ‘peer-to-peer responsibilisation’ as a point of departure to contextualise such calls, asking what scientists themselves already feel and assume responsibility for at both the personal and professional level. I find that climate experts participating in the IPCC not only assume increasing responsibility across different stages of the IPCC process but also beyond. As my data analysis demonstrates, IPCC participants increasingly feel and take on responsibility not only for producing and assessing climate science but also for communicating and/or enacting it (PACE). The contribution of the article is threefold. Firstly, it makes sense of the mounting peer-to-peer responsibilisation by surfacing and contextualising how, why and with what consequences particular climate knowledge holders already assume responsibility for climate science at four key moments (PACE). Secondly, conceiving of the IPCC as a community of practice, the article provides novel insights into the work of IPCC participants and their individual experiences with the institution and its processes. Thirdly, the article adds evidence to a growing body of literature on practices of responsibility and climate emotions by focussing on participants' individual affective experiences. As the 7th Assessment Cycle gathers pace, I propose some measures the IPCC may undertake to support participants in assuming their responsibilities in the context of climate science.

Surface wind speed (SWS) over China exhibited a decreasing trend before the mid-1990s, referred to as SWS stilling, and an increasing trend thereafter. Northern China is susceptible to dust incidents in spring because of gales. In this study, we investigate the characteristics and causes of spring gale events over northern China. We find that gale events had a decreasing trend during both the SWS stilling and recovery period, reaching -0.68 day/year during the period 1973-2020. Four types of weather systems are associated with gale events, and analysis of all four weather systems indicates that the deep trough in the east of Eurasia is prone to cause gale events. Changes in atmospheric circulation contributed in part to the decrease of gale events, while thermodynamic factors arising from human emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and radiation changes caused by land use change, dominated the decreasing trend of gale events during the last 5 decades.

Capacity building approaches have a deep history of mobilizing agency and enabling change across development, governance, and environmental contexts. It has also been recognized as a central means of implementation for supporting climate action in the Paris Agreement. Despite this, capacity building remains ambiguous, fragmented, and prone to cooption by vested interests, all of which can limit its effectiveness for transformative climate action. Given that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demonstrates the need for transformative climate action to reduce emissions and limit warming to 1.5°C, the experiences and practical insights from capacity building implementation can be leveraged to concretize the more theoretical literature on transformation. The purpose of this study is thus to synthesize the best practices and lessons learned from scholarship on capacity building implementation for enabling transformations in the context of climate change. This scholarship is synthesized from five fields that are known for their practitioner involvement and implementation focus, and where capacity building has been in wide use for several decades: international development, public health, community development, sustainability, and climate change. Four implications emerge as essential from the synthesis: the importance of enabling agency while navigating power dynamics between capacity building stakeholders; making space for local cultures and knowledge across every stage of capacity building; incorporating mechanisms for learning, collaboration and systems thinking; and going beyond technical, managerial, and technological framings to also build capacities for envisioning, creating, mobilizing, learning and inculcating desirable attitudes, behaviors and values.

Extreme event attribution is an active area of scientific research, but public attribution of extreme events to climate change is not well understood – despite its importance to climate change communication and policy. We surveyed a representative sample of the U.S. population (n = 1071) to measure the public’s confidence in attributing five event types to climate change – wildfire, heat, rainfall/flooding, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Our respondents had the highest confidence in attributing wildfires and extreme heat to climate change, and the lowest confidence for hurricanes and tornadoes. Respondent characteristics, such as education level, age, race/ethnicity, political affiliation, and self-reported extreme event impacts, were linked to attribution confidence. Overall, those reporting negative impacts from extreme events had higher levels of attribution confidence. While Republicans on average had lower levels of attribution confidence, we found that self-reported negative event impacts had a moderating effect on attribution confidence among Republicans. Republicans who were more negatively impacted by extreme events had higher levels of attribution confidence compared to Republicans who were less impacted. We also compared the public’s attribution confidence to scientific assessments, developing a measure of attribution alignment. We found that respondents aligned with scientific event attribution for an average of 2 out of 5 extreme event types. While respondent characteristics were less consistently related to attribution alignment overall, Democrats on average had lower alignment. Our study suggests that the public is connecting climate change to extreme weather and making distinctions in attribution levels, but politics and experiences with extreme weather matter. We recommend that scientists and climate change communicators reflect this discernment in discourses about extreme events, climate change, and policy.

The usability gaps between climate information producers and users have always been an issue in climate services. This study aims to tackle the gap for rice farmers in Bangladesh by exploring the potential value of tailored agronomic monsoon onset definitions. Summer aman rice is primarily cultivated under rainfed conditions, and farmers rely largely on monsoon rainfall and its onset for crop establishment. However, farmers’ perception of the arrival of sufficient rains does not necessarily coincide with meteorological definitions of monsoon onset. Therefore, localized agronomic definitions of monsoon onset need to be developed and evaluated to advance in the targeted actionable climate forecast. We analyzed historical daily rainfall from four locations across a north-south gradient in Bangladesh and defined dynamic definitions of monsoon onset based on a set of local parameters. The agronomic onset definition was evaluated in terms of attainable yields simulated by a rice simulation model compared to results obtained using conventional meteorological onset parameters defined by the amount of rainfall received and static onset dates. Our results show that average simulated yields increase up to 7 – 9% and probabilities of getting lower yields are reduced when the year-to-year varying dynamic onset is used over the two drier locations under fully rainfed conditions. It is mainly due to earlier transplanting dates, avoiding the impact of drought experienced with early monsoon demise. However, no yield increases are observed over the two wetter locations. This study shows the potential benefits of generating “localized and translated” climate predictions.

This study examines 2021 and 2022 news coverage of Generation Z and climate change to understand how this discursive relationship is constructed. This is important to understanding how Generation Z’s climate change activism is perceived by other groups such as other generations, activist groups, and journalists. This study answers the central question: In what ways do news articles construct and represent the relationship between Generation Z, climate change, activism, and intergenerational relationships? The study identifies five common discourses from the most popular news articles on the subject that reflect nuances in reporting and discursive construction of the group and issue: (1) climate change as inherited and chosen by Generation Z, (2) passive and active motivations for activism, (3) activism negatively impacting relationships with older groups, (4) future responsibilities, and (5) overuse of figureheads. The nuances of these news discourses impact opinions of Generation Z and the impact the group have on climate change activism with the potential to impact activist group outreach strategies, policy development, and relationships with the news media.

We analysed a recently released corpus of climate-related tweets to examine the macro-level factors associated with public declarations of climate change scepticism. Analyses of over 2 million geo-located tweets in the U.S. showed that climate scepticism – and the aggressiveness of climate-related tweets – was greater in states with higher per capita carbon emissions. This pattern remained significant after controlling for political conservatism, GDP per capita, education, and gender, and was replicated across 126 nations from around the world. The findings are consistent with a vested interest hypothesis—misinformation around climate change is most likely to be distributed in regions where there is high fossil fuel reliance, and where the economic stakes of acknowledging climate change are high. Understanding the macro-level patterns that are implicated in climate scepticism can help inform structural interventions for those seeking a low-carbon future.

Recent studies reveal that young people are experiencing a range of emotions relating to climate change, including anxiety, anger and a sense of powerlessness. Young people have also voiced distrust in governments for failing to adequately address climate change, which they see as a critical threat to their future. However, there is limited research considering the interplay between young people’s emotions about climate change and the broader social context in which they live; social-ecological theory can assist in identifying important systemic factors influencing emotional responses to climate change. In this qualitative research project, I drew upon a social-ecological theoretical framework to explore the affective dimensions of climate change as experienced by young Australians aged 18–24 (N = 14). A primary, overarching finding was of climate change as a multidimensional emotional challenge for young people, with four sub-themes that describe key experiences through which it manifests: a fragmented climate education; disillusionment with politics, but hope for change; reckoning with uncertain futures; and grappling with agency. The findings contribute to the growing literature on climate-related emotions, highlighting experiences of interrelated emotions that resist being reduced to one label (e.g., ‘eco-anxiety’). Accordingly, I discuss a ‘greenhouse affect’ to convey the affective quandary provoked by climate change, expanding upon established anxiety-centred concepts. I also discuss implications for educating young Australians about climate change, and how this might improve their sense of agency to meaningfully contribute to climate solutions.

We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term, and find that this approach provides economic support for stringent warming targets across a variety of specifications. Our results provide insight into how a systematic incorporation of climate-related risk influences optimal emissions abatement pathways.