Climate Risk Management最新文献

Extreme weather events have cost lives and financial losses across the United States. Moreover, they are expected to increase in frequency, and this will exacerbate their impact on vulnerable sectors such as agriculture. But how farmers could adapt to extreme weather events by adopting different conservation practices has received slight attention in the literature. This study examines how farmers' perceptions of drought and flooding influence their decisions to implement conservation practices in their conventional crop fields. Out of the 350 farmer responses we received, fewer than half indicated a likelihood to adopt no-tillage/reduced tillage (43%), cover crops (40%), crop diversification (37%), and integrated crop-livestock grazing (29%). Using this data and a multivariate probit modeling framework, we show that farmers’ decisions can be partly explained by their perception of drought but not by their perception of flooding. Specifically, the perceived number of drought years significantly increases the likelihood of adopting no-tillage/reduced tillage and diversified cropping in the future. However, the number of drought years is not significantly associated with the use of cover crops and integrated crop-livestock grazing. These results suggest that the effects of extreme weather events on adoption of conservation practices as adaptive measures vary across different practices. Therefore, adaptation policies that make use of conservation practices must be tailored to farmers’ needs and priorities to be effective.

Building community resilience requires centering equity in resilience planning processes. Tools and resources for strengthening community resilience need to address equity in both their content and the process for using them. This is especially so for communities living in proximity to contaminated lands that face compounding hazards (i.e., environmental, disaster, and climate-related); legacies of institutional or structural disenfranchisement; challenges with inclusion of minority populations in planning; and constraints on doing data-intensive planning and management in under-resourced and underserved jurisdictions. A research team from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is developing a new resource, the Equitable Resilience Builder, which will serve communities with intersecting social and environmental vulnerabilities, in pursuit of creating resilience plans and developing the intra-community connections to implement them. This article details how the team used human-centered design to develop the Equitable Resilience Builder. Our objective in doing so is to share the evolution of equity in the project and demonstrate key inflection points in the discovery, synthesis, and ideation phases of human-centered design. The team was able to expand their understanding of what it means to undertake resilience planning in an equitable way during engagements with state, local, tribal agencies, foundations, non-governmental organizations, and academia and through participatory workshops. It developed design principles for how the tool might use storytelling and other techniques to address emotions and trauma, ensure local voices are heard, and encourage relationship building. This article offers lessons learned for others seeking to address resilience and equity in climate risk management, particularly when working with communities in proximity to contaminated lands.

Social protection, as a vulnerability response tool, is well-placed to equip climate-vulnerable populations with resources that de-risk livelihoods and smooth consumption. This systematic literature review of 28 studies identifies evidence for how social protection has influenced beneficiaries’ migration decisions, experiences, and outcomes in the context of a changing climate, through cash transfers, public work programs, insurance, and health care. The review reveal three key interlinkages between social protection policies and climate-migration, where social protection is recognized as a policy tool that can (i) ease the financial barriers to migration as a means of de-risking climate change impacts, (ii) address adverse drivers and structural factors that may compel people to engage in maladaptive, distress migration and (iii) support those ‘left at home’ in maintaining their livelihoods when they do not wish to leave. Understanding how social protection can be leveraged to stimulate positive climate-migration outcomes can aid policymakers, development practitioners, local governments, and social protection beneficiaries capitalize the necessary support in circumstances of migration or immobility in the context of adverse climate conditions. Knowledge gaps remain regarding the optimal methods in which social protection can support vulnerable groups and encourage positive outcomes of climate-migration. We expand the knowledge base by making a case for the inclusion of social protection in climate change and human migration debates; highlighting research and policy gaps and missed opportunities; and advocating for further empirical research on interlinkages and documentation of approaches where social protection can support voluntary, planned migration decisions where long-term adaptation is no longer viable.

Using individual-level panel data representative of Chinese residents, this study examines in detail the relationship between temperature and subjective well-being (SWB). We first find that a 1 °C increase in temperature anomalies (difference between current and historical temperature) causes a 0.02 decrease in SWB (2% of 1 S.D.). Second, we present evidence of climate inequality along socioeconomic status (SES) as SWB of better educated, and higher-income Chinese residents are less affected by temperature anomalies compared to their lower SES counterparts. Closer examination reveals that adaptation mechanisms such as ownership of air-conditioners, automobiles, and indoor work help to alleviate adverse impacts of temperature anomalies. Lastly, for better comparison, we express our findings as monetized damages. We compute that a 1 °C increase in temperature anomalies causes damages equivalent to around 6.9% of income. However, these damages are mostly driven by Chinese from the lower-SES stratum as their damages are equivalent to around 9.6% of income compared to no damages for the high-SES group. Similarly, when translated into elasticity, we find that temperature-induced damages reduce by around 2% for every 1% increase in average income.

Universities have an unrivaled potential to educate students on climate change issues and to actively engage them in climate affairs, both as citizens and influencers of future professions. Despite this potential and the many advantages of university student engagement in climate change, less emphasis has been given to understanding their attitude and perceptions towards climate change, in a way that may guide changes in the curriculum and teaching practices. Based on the need to address the existing literature gap, this article assesses university students’ attitudes and perceptions toward climate change at the international level. This study comprises a survey of a sample of universities across the world and uses statistical analysis to identify the most important trends across geographical locations of the universities. The study revealed that university students are aware of climate change and associated risks. The university students believe that climate change education is a means to shape their attitude and equip them with relevant skills and knowledge so as to influent others. The awareness of university students is inextricably linked to their field of study and participation in various climate change events. Furthermore, the student’s knowledge of climate change risks varies across gender, age, and academic education. The study provides recommended universities to include climate change issues in their curricular and extracurricular programs so as to prepare future professionals to cope with the far reaching challenges of a climate change.

The frequency, intensity and duration of extreme weather events have seriously affected human life and production. The electric power sector is the foundation of economic activity as well as a core participant in the adaptation and mitigation of climate change. Therefore, in the context of climate change, it is crucial for the stable operation of the national economy for power sector to cope with different climate change risks and improve their adaptability to climate change. In this paper, listed power companies in China are selected as samples to analyse the impact of climate change risk on the financial performance of the power system's supply and transmission-distribution sides. The empirical results show a significant positive correlation between climate change risks and the financial performance of listed electric power companies. The rainfall index and drought index positively impact the financial performance of listed electric power companies. The cryogenic freezing index has a negative impact on the financial performance of listed electric power companies., which is further analysed and proved that a cryogenic freezing disaster will cause the regional breakdown of the power system. The operating cost ratio and the proportion of clean energy supply play a mediating effect on the correlation between the comprehensive climate risk index and the return on equity of companies. To increase electric power companies' ability to adapt to climate change, climate change risks should be integrated into the risk management framework, and the company's financial performance can be improved by optimizing the energy mix and constructing safe lines. The government can promote the transformation of electric power companies by launching green financial tools.

Economic decision analysis is an important tool for developing cost-efficient adaptation pathways in sectors that involve costly adaptation options, such as flood risk management. Standard economic approaches, however, do not consider learning about future changes in climate variables even though a large literature on adaptive planning emphasises the key role of learning over time, because uncertainties about climate change are substantial. An emerging, diverse and fragmented set of economic adaptive decision making approaches, coming under labels such as real-option analysis or optimal control, have started to address this challenge by including the economic valuation of learning in the economic appraisal of adaptation options through making use of so-called climate learning scenarios. We synthesise this literature and classify the climate learning scenarios applied with respect to which climate variable is learned about, which learning sources are employed, how the learning is modelled, which climate data is used for calibrating learning scenarios, which goodness of fit information is provided and how deep uncertainty is handled. Our results show that publications consider learning through observations or do not explicitly state the source of learning. Most authors generate climate learning scenarios through stochastic processes or Bayesian approaches and use climate model output from the IPCC or the UK Met Office to calibrate the learning scenarios. The reviewed literature rarely provides information on the goodness of fit of learning scenarios to the underlying climate data. We conclude that most of the methods used to generate climate learning scenarios are not well-grounded in climate science and are inadequate to represent climate uncertainty. One avenue to improve climate learning scenarios would be to combine a Bayesian approach with emulators that mimic climate model runs based on observations from future moments in time.

Adaptation requires investing now to avoid future damages, and thus adaptation is shaped by discount rates. Although the role of social discount rates in climate policy design has been well documented, the role of private discount rates has been ignored. We illustrate the importance of private discount rates in shaping adaptation investments by empirically demonstrating how household discount rates are negatively correlated with investments in water storage tanks in Central America. High private discount rates are common throughout the world and are a barrier to private adaptation investments. To overcome this barrier, adaptation policies targeted at private actors should ensure that benefits accrue sooner or that costs are lowered or accrue later. Governments or private companies could also offer long-term loans that exploit the differential between the discount rate of the lender and the private borrower.

Understanding farmers’ perceptions about climate change and adaptation strategies can help support their efforts and develop interventions more suited to the local context. This is particularly important for farmers who exploit fragile ecosystems such as marshlands.

Using semi-structured questionnaires and interviews conducted with smallholder farmers in the marshlands of Kabare, this study compares the perception of men and women relating to climate change and uses the chi-square test and logistic regression to examine gendered differences in response to climate change and the determinants of farmers’ choice of sustainable practices. Meteorological data trends for three decades were also compared.

Results showed that both men (77 %) and women (73 %) experienced climate change and this was illustrated by changes in temperature and rainfall patterns. Farmers’ climate change perceptions are consistent with the local historical climate data showing a slightly increasing trend of temperature and a decrease in rainfall for the last decade, particularly between 2013 and 2019. Although significant differences were observed between gender and sources of climate information (p < 0.05), 50 % of women farmers favored indigenous knowledge of climate, while 61 % of men farmers stated that experience exchange among fellow farmers helped to read and predict climate trends. The common impacts reported by farmers included the proliferation of pests (90 %), a decrease in soil fertility (75 %), and floods, resulting in crop failure. Farmers used various adaptation strategies in response to the perceived impacts. However, the choice of sustainable practices such as crop diversification, drainage, growing low-maintenance crops, and use of mulch and manure were associated with farmers ‘experience, exchanging information among fellow farmers, livestock ownership, and the perception of climatic threats to crops. The information provided in this paper is valuable for the farmers' resilience-building program.

Adoption of appropriate climate smart innovations is the major step towards enhancing food security, building climate resilience capacity as well as reducing or removing GHG emissions from smallholder farms to sustainably maintain agricultural livelihoods. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the rate, intensity, and determinants of multiple adoptions of climate-smart agriculture innovations among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia's Upper Blue Nile Highlands. All Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) innovations have a synergistic effect on the adoption of other innovations, with the exception of Soil and Water Conservation (SWC). The economic constraint model demonstrated that farm size, number of plots, and access to financial services influence crop residue management, crop rotation, and agroforestry adoption. Hence, a larger number of plots, a larger total farm size, and access to rural savings and credit increase the probability of adoption. The diffusion innovation model, on the other hand, asserted that frequent extension visits, market access, access to information communication, social networks, and strong tenure security have no less of an impact on the adoption of CSA innovations such as improved variety, crop residue management, crop rotation, compost, SWC, and agroforestry. Furthermore, farmers' perceived technology-specific characteristics of CSA innovations increase the likelihood of adoption. Hence, formal education, more awareness about climate change and CSA, and the ability of CSA innovations to reduce the impact of climate change risks such as rising temperatures, increased hailstorms, and increased erratic rainfall have significantly increased the likelihood of adoption. The integrated technology adoption model explains the determinants of adopting multiple CSA innovations simultaneously. Livelihood asset building programs, strong public extension systems via mobile phone, voice messaging, and radio enhance adoption. Policy to identify and scale up a portfolio of farm-level specific CSA innovations is required.