Climatic Change最新文献

During extreme heat events (EHEs) the public often learns about health protective actions through the media. Visual news coverage can act as a powerful tool to help convey complex health protective actions to the public. Despite the importance of images in helping the public understand the risk, there has been no systematic analysis to assess what images have been used by media outlets in Canada during EHEs. This paper helps to fill that gap by analyzing how the Canadian media visually communicated the risks of extreme heat to the public during the unprecedented 2021 Heat Dome. A review of thousands of online news media articles published about the 2021 Heat Dome in Canada was conducted on five subscription news databases. Overall, 845 images were coded to identify denotative, connotative, and ideological content. Only 16% of these published images implied that heat was dangerous, of which only 40% depicted people, and 46% implied human suffering. Our findings demonstrate that the majority of images used in Canadian news coverage on the 2021 Heat Dome are incompatible with, and frequently contradict, evidence-based heat protective actions. Governments, public health agencies, and other stakeholders engaged in distributing heat preparedness messaging (e.g., journalists) should prioritize improving the images of extreme heat in news coverage to align with evidence-based public health messages. With rising global temperatures due to climate change and the associated increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events, prioritizing these actions is critically important to offset the threat posed to public health.

Urban areas and the fastest-growing cities in Africa are experiencing devastating impact of climate change. The changing climate requires a human response to reduce urban vulnerability in Africa. The purpose of this scoping review was to map evidence of climate vulnerability, existing adaptation, and associated barriers to inform policies and future research in Africa. Search done in four main databases (PubMed, Central, JSTOR, and Science Direct) produced 13,191 records, and an additional 25 records were retrieved from Google, Google Scholar and Dimensions. Finally, 34 studies were included in this scoping review based on the inclusion criteria. Findings indicate that climate change is harming urban populations and communities, especially poor urban populations in informal settlements through food insecurity, water stress, destruction of livelihoods and key infrastructure, physical and mental health issues, poor sanitation, stigmatisation, crime, disruption in school and healthcare delivery, migration and unemployment. Also, existing urban adaptation responses to climate risk are not at the level needed to build resilience to urban vulnerability. In addition, there is evidence of maladaptation which might worsen the climate burden on the poor urban population. In conclusion, climate change poses severe challenges for Africa's urban poor, heightening vulnerability through food insecurity, water stress, and infrastructure destruction. Current adaptation efforts are insufficient and may worsen adaptation efforts. Urgent actions are needed, including enhanced climate knowledge, early warning systems, robust policies, and targeted interventions addressing poverty and infrastructure deficits. Integrating climate research into urban planning is vital to build resilience and protect marginalized urban populations in Africa.

Compound dry and hot extremes are proved to be the most damaging climatic stressor to wheat thereby with grave implications for food security, thus it is critical to systematically reveal their changes under unabated global warming. In this study, we comprehensively investigate the global change in compound dry and hot days (CDHD) within dynamic wheat growing seasons during 2015–2100 under 4 socio-economic scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5) based on the latest downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models. Our results demonstrate a notable increase in CDHD’s frequency (({CDHD}_{f})) and severity (({CDHD}_{s})) worldwide under all SSPs, such increase is sharper over southern Asia in winter wheat growing season, and southern Canada, northern America, Ukraine, Turkey and northern Kazakhstan in spring wheat growing season. As the top 10 wheat producer, India and America will suffer much more detrimental CDHD in their wheat growing season. Adopting a low forcing pathway will mitigate CDHD risks in up to 93.3% of wheat areas. Positive dependence between droughts and heats in wheat growing season is found over more than 74.2% of wheat areas, which will effectively promote the frequency and severity of CDHD. Global warming will dominate the increase of CDHD directly by increasing hot days and indirectly by enhancing potential evapotranspiration thereby aggravating droughts. This study helps to optimize adaptation strategies for mitigating CDHD risks on wheat production, and provides new insights and analysis paradigm for investigating future variations in compound extremes occurring within dynamic crops growing seasons.

Frost events can cause the deterioration of a wide range of heritage materials, including stone, brick and earth. In a warming world, the frequency and location of frost events is likely to change, affecting the conservation strategies required at heritage sites. We use a multi-model ensemble approach to investigate three types of frost events in East Asia: freeze–thaw cycles; deep frost days and wet frosts. The study uses nine CMIP6 models for the period 1850 to 2100, with future projections run under the SPS585 scenario. Additional analysis is undertaken for five specific 2° ✕ 2° areas located across East Asia. The three frost event parameters are spatially and temporally distinct. A decrease in all three frost parameters is found in Japan, South Korea and East China, with some areas projected to have no frost events by the end of the twenty-first century. However, Northwest China is distinctive as wet frosts are projected to increase over the twenty-first century, while on the Tibetan plateau of Southwest China, freeze–thaw cycles are projected to increase. This suggests that except in some localised regions, heritage managers can focus on risks other than frost weathering in developing plans to address climate change.

Graphical Abstract

Meeting future demand for coffee under climate change is a challenge. Approaches that can inform where coffee may grow best under current and future climate scenarios are needed. Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora P.) is planted in many tropical areas and makes up around 40% of the world’s coffee supply. However, as the climate shifts, current robusta areas may become less productive, while in other areas new growing regions for robusta may emerge. Colombia is one of the world’s most important Arabica coffee producer, famous for its high-quality coffee. Although robusta coffee is not yet a commercial crop in Colombia, it could be one of the future bastions for robusta coffee in South America contributing to meeting the increasing demand, but this remains unexplored. We aimed to identify areas with highest biophysical and socio-economic potential to grow robusta coffee in Colombia. An integrated modelling approach was used, combining climate suitability and crop-yield modelling for current and future climate scenarios, soil constraints, pest risk assessment and socio-economic constraints to identify the regions with the highest potential productivity and the lowest pest and climate change risks with good market access and low security risks which don’t further expand the agricultural frontier. Our results showed that parts of the foothills along the eastern Andean Mountain ranges, the high plains of the Orinoquía region and the wet parts of the Caribbean region are the best candidates for the potential development of robusta coffee plantations in Colombia. The crop-yield model indicated highest yields of green coffee on the foothills of the eastern Andean Mountain range with an estimated average yield of 2.6 t ha⁻¹ (under rain-fed conditions) which is projected to occur at elevations below 600 m avoiding interference with the traditional and established Arabica coffee regions in Colombia. Under a 2 °C global warming scenario climate change is projected to have the largest impacts on the Caribbean region. Therefore, larger scale irrigated production system could be an appropriate option in the Caribbean region, while diversified smallholder robusta coffee agroforestry systems are considered more favourable in the Orinoquía region.

Previous research has demonstrated that the wealthy harm the environment to a much greater extent than those with lesser means. According to recent estimates, the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population emit 50% more CO2 than the bottom half of the income distribution. The reason for this inequality is clear: affluence boosts consumption, which in turn increases the ecological footprint. Although the phenomenon seems intuitive, little is known as to whether the layperson notices it. The current study assesses the extent to which individuals recognize or fail to notice such massive ecological footprint inequality and why misperceptions may arise. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,188) conducted in a highly unequal socio-economic environment (Brazil), we show that people often fail to accurately perceive the meaningful ecological footprint inequality that surrounds them. These misperceptions are explained by people’s (a) failure to properly incorporate the impact of income-based differences in consumption in their ecological footprint assessments and (b) tendency to associate wealth with superior environmental education, greater resources to act sustainably, and better local infrastructure (e.g., cleaner paved streets and proper waste collection). Emphasizing the lack of infrastructure in deprived neighborhoods further exacerbates the misperceptions, whereas highlighting key differences in consumption habits across the socio-economic spectrum increases accuracy. This research, thus, identifies the factors that magnify existing misperceptions in ecological footprint inequality and provides avenues for policymakers to reduce such mistakes.

Some argue that complementing climate change mitigation measures with solar radiation management (SRM) might prove a last resort to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. To make a socially responsible decision on whether to use SRM, it is important to consider also public opinion, across the globe and particularly in the Global South, which would face the greatest risks from both global warming and SRM. However, most research on public opinion about SRM stems from the Global North. We report findings from the first large-scale, cross-cultural study on the public opinion about SRM among the general public (N = 2,248) and students (N = 4,583) in 20 countries covering all inhabited continents, including five countries from the Global South and five ‘non-WEIRD’ (i.e. not Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) countries from the Global North. As public awareness of SRM is usually low, we provided participants with information on SRM, including key arguments in favour of and against SRM that appear in the scientific debate. On average, acceptability of SRM was significantly higher in the Global South than in the ‘non-WEIRD’ Global North, while acceptability in the ‘WEIRD’ Global North was in between. However, we found substantial variation within these clusters, especially in the ‘non-WEIRD’ Global North, suggesting that countries do not form homogenous clusters and should thus be considered individually. Moreover, the average participants’ views, while generally neither strong nor polarised, differed from some expert views in important ways, including that participants perceived SRM as only slightly effective in limiting global warming. Still, our data suggests overall a conditional, reluctant acceptance. That is, while on average, people think SRM would have mostly negative consequences, they may still be willing to tolerate it as a potential last resort to fight global warming, particularly if they think SRM has only minor negative (or even positive) impacts on humans and nature.