Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change最新文献

In recent years, companies’ disclosure of information regarding their carbon emissions has evolved rapidly. However, an important question remains whether carbon emissions disclosure has any influence on climate change risk reporting. Previous literature has not focused on the more pressing question of how changes in carbon performance may lead to subsequent changes in climate change disclosure. This study examines how sustainable board and the use of sustainability targets in executive compensation can moderate the relationship between climate change disclosure and carbon performance. Following a mixed theoretical framework focusing on upper echelon theory, we revisit the relationship between climate change reporting and carbon performance. The Leadership Index is used to measure the level of climate change disclosure, and carbon performance is based on both the carbon intensity of emissions and the mitigation of carbon emissions. From an international sample of listed companies, we use an ordered logit regression methodology. Our study contributes to the growing literature on sustainable governance and the effect of Chief Sustainability Officer serving on the board of directors on climate change reporting. The most important idea is to know which sustainable board mechanisms should be responsible for improving climate reporting.

Many countries have initiated specific regions dedicated to Green Finance to enhance environmental sustainability. This paper examines the influence of these zones on corporate greenwashing practices, using data from Chinese listed companies. Greenwashing is assessed by comparing corporate environmental, social, and governance disclosures against their actual performance in these areas. We find that the establishment of Green Finance Pilot Zones, which means experimental zones, significantly increases greenwashing behavior. These zones reduce actual performance in environmental, social, and governance aspects without altering disclosure practices. Additionally, the impact of these zones on greenwashing is more pronounced in companies with higher debt ratios and when environmental subsidies expire, indicating that financial incentives drive greenwashing. Conversely, stricter government regulations can mitigate this negative effect. The detrimental impact of these zones is notably observed in non-state-owned enterprises, non-heavy polluting companies, and industries with lower market concentration. The findings provide a foundation for further international studies and collaboration in the pursuit of global environmental sustainability, aiding the design and implementation of more robust and transparent Green Finance programs that can be adapted to various economic contexts.

Harvested wood products (HWPs) store a significant amount of carbon while long-lived products and wooden buildings can be among the most effective means for carbon storage. Wood products’ lifetime extension and appropriate waste management, recycling, and reuse can further contribute to the achievement of climate goals. In our study we projected under 10 different scenarios the carbon storage, carbon dioxide and methane emissions of the Hungarian HWP pool up to 2050 in order to find the combination of wood industry-related measures with the highest climate change mitigation effect. For the projection we used the country-specific HWP-RIAL model to predict emissions associated with the end-of-life and waste management of wood products. The main conclusion is that without additional measures the Hungarian HWP pool would turn from a carbon sink to a source of emissions by 2047. To maintain the Hungarian HWP pool to be a continuous carbon sink it is essential to implement additional climate mitigation measures including cascading product value chains, and approaches of a circular bioeconomy. We find the most effective individual measures are increasing product half-life, increasing recycling rate and increasing industrial wood production through increased industrial wood assortments and increased harvest. With the combination of these measures a maximum average annual climate change mitigation potential of 1.5 Mt CO₂ equivalents could be reached during the 2022–2050 period.

Communicating climate change projections to diverse stakeholders and addressing their concerns is crucial for fostering effective climate adaptation. This paper explores the use of storyline projections as an intermediate technology that bridges the gap between climate science and local knowledge in the Pilcomayo basin. Through fieldwork and interviews with different stakeholders, key environmental concerns influenced by climate change were identified. Traditional approaches to produce regional climate information based on projections often lack relevance to local communities and fail to address their concerns explicitly. By means of storylines approach to evaluate climate projections and by differentiating between upper and middle-lower basin regions and focusing on dry (winter) and rainy (summer) seasons, three qualitatively different storylines of plausible precipitation and temperature changes were identified and related to the main potential risks. By integrating these climate results with local knowledge, a summary of the social and environmental impacts related to each storyline was produced, resulting in three narrated plausible scenarios for future environmental change. The analysis revealed that climate change significantly influences existing issues and activities in the region. Projected trends indicate a shift towards warmer and drier conditions, with uncertainties mainly surrounding summer rainfall, which impacts the probability of increased flooding and river course changes, two of the most concerning issues in the region. These findings serve as a foundation for problem-specific investigations and contribute to informed decision-making for regional climate adaptation. Finally, we highlight the importance of considering local concerns when developing climate change projections and adaptation strategies.

Achieving sustainable futures is complicated by the diverse understandings and prioritisations of sustainability issues and practices. A reason for the lack of common ground is the fact that sustainability is a global project which is primarily driven by the North, rather than one that consistently integrates local and cultural diversity. Research has shown that sustainability expectancies of Southern civic society are lacking in the considerations of crucial sustainability frameworks. This investigation focuses on the expectancies of a community with Southern cultural origins and identities—the Indian diaspora in Australia. The unique bicultural positioning of diasporas and their growing influence on the cultural scaffolds of societies, make their assessment of sustainability distinctly relevant and insightful. The objective of this qualitative inquiry was to explore the Australian Indian diaspora’s understanding of sustainability, their prioritisation of diverse sustainability concerns, and the cultural underpinnings of these perceptions and preferences. Seven focus groups including components of the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique and personal storytelling, were conducted in Sydney, Australia from September to October 2022. This study demonstrates that two distinct sustainability narratives direct the meaning of sustainability—one has a global application and environmental focus, the other a localised Southern application and social focus. Cultural context is critical in directing the adoption of either narrative by mobilising relevant cultural social identities and promoting their resonance. Education emerges as a strategy to reframe the sustainability narrative and create a more balanced sustainability discourse.

Globally, climate change funding has become a focal point and debate among international organisations, private agencies, governments, and civil societies mainly because of its significant threats to social, economic, and the environment and the significant funds needed to adapt and mitigate its impacts. While substantial amounts of funds have been secured and distributed to governments, private organisations and institutions in the continent to mitigate and cope with the threats of climate variabilities, the outcomes have failed to meet the desired outcomes due to limited access to funding, lack of transparency in allocations and the failure of the funds to reach local communities where the impacts are significantly felt. Using a conventional approach of data collection tools predominantly of quantitative and qualitative methods and extensive literature materials, this paper explored the complexities and constraints of sourcing climate change funding and the mechanisms of distribution funds across the continent. The findings unearthed that climate funding lacks transparency and equitable distribution; furthermore, there are substantial bureaucratic processes, capacity constraints and immense conflicting priorities among countries on the continent. Our findings uncovered that addressing these anomalies will require innovative funding structures that catalyse technical assistance programmes to support the creation of new avenues for climate finance as well as reforming global financial institutions, emphasising debt reductions, freeing up additional funding for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and channelling private finance to both climate and sustainable development, particularly in the more vulnerable countries.

The blue carbon ecosystems possess the potential to mitigate climate change impacts, support adaptation, assist in reaching the national and global net-zero goals, and secure social, economic, and environmental outcomes through sequestering and storing carbon in sediments. The marine environment along the Red Sea coast of Egypt is distinguished by a high biodiversity with key marine ecosystems such as seagrasses meadows, coral reefs, and mangroves that can play a role in blue carbon ecosystems. To understand the capacity of the seagrasses to store carbon, this study aims at quantifying the vertical distribution of the organic carbon density (OCD) and the carbon sequestration potential (CSR) and evaluate the economic feasibility of seagrasses vegetation as a tool for mitigating climate change. Two sediment cores were sampled from vegetated areas (inhabited with seagrasses species: Thalassia hemprichii) and one core from a non-vegetated area (for comparison) from three nearshore locations within Wadi El Gemal Protected Area, Red Sea Egypt. The OCD in the vegetated areas increased with depth and showed higher capacities of carbon storage compared to the non-vegetated area. The overall calculated CSR for seagrasses in Wadi El-Gemal is 341.65 g C m⁻² yr⁻¹. These findings support the key role of seagrasses to mitigate climate change through CO2 sequestration and return an equivalent of 6,000 to 11,000 USD per year for every 100 hectares in monetary value. This highlights the importance of the conservation and restoration of seagrasses along the Red Sea coast and the potential of blue carbon finance that can be leveraged to meet national-level climate mitigation strategies and policies in Egypt.

Graphical Abstract

Effective climate change adaptation requires cohesive inter-institutional networks across different scales, facilitating the sharing of data, information, knowledge, and practices. However, the impact of adaptation attributes across scales is poorly understood due to limited focus on these networks. Based on interviews with 26 institutions operating at the national level (ION) in India and 26 institutions operating within a state (Himachal Pradesh) (IOS), this study analysed adaptation attributes and the inter-institutional networks across the two scales to understand its implications at different scales. IONs have a greater capacity (compared to IOS) to frame guidelines, standards and regulations for practitioners along with better accessibility to resources and information. When coupled with bridging institutions, this can enhance adaptive capacities at other scales. Conversely, learnings from low regret adaptive measures being implemented by IOS are opportunities for informing national policy strategies. While national adaptation strategies and goals can inspire adaptation at lower scales, the currently fragmented inter-institutional network in India reduces the passage and accessibility of data and information, creating a bottleneck for the smooth devolution of adaptation attributes. Recruitment and deployment practices for water officials further entrench silo attitudes, impeding essential data accessibility. Adaptation needs comprehensive networks across vertical, horizontal, and diagonal institutional connections to improve climate risk perception and strategy implementation. Policy measures should consider socio-institutional factors beyond legislative prescriptions.

To limit global climate change, ultimately it will be necessary to minimize the use of all fossil fuels for energy. Because the rate of CO₂ emissions per unit of primary energy varies among the fossil fuels, it is useful to focus first on reducing the use of coal, the fuel with the most CO₂ per unit of energy used. Although multiple factors are involved in the choice of which fuel will be used for a given purpose, data on CO₂ emissions show that over the last 25 years there has been an evolution in the fraction of emissions away from coal and toward natural gas. That is, although total emissions have continued to increase globally, the fraction attributable to coal has been decreasing in many places. This is true for the global sum of emissions, for Annex I countries, and for all regions except Asia Pacific. The fraction of emissions from oil products has varied largely with growth in the contribution of petroleum transportation fuels. Focus on decreasing the sum of all fossil fuels is needed, especially among the major energy users in the Asia Pacific region, but progress in the decreasing relative use of coal is promising.

For centuries, non-native tree (NNT) species have been planted throughout Europe for ecosystem services including timber and urban greenery. Public interest in NNTs has recently increased due to their potential role in climate change adaptation as alternatives to vulnerable native forest tree species. However, opinions regarding the benefits and risks of European NNTs differ. Understanding stakeholder perceptions is crucial for guiding adaptive forest management, especially in sensitive ecosystems like the European Alpine Space. To assess awareness and perception, a structured questionnaire was administered to 456 respondents from six countries in the European Alpine Space. Most respondents were aware of the origin of native and NNT species in their area. NNTs and invasive-NNTs were primarily found in urban regions, with a perceived increase in their occurrence over the past 25 years. With some exceptions, such as Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco, the most common NNTs were generally perceived as potentially invasive. The perception of the invasiveness of NNTs correlated with their perceived risks and benefits on ecosystem services. The respondents who were unconcerned about invasiveness believed NNTs had a positive impact on provisioning services like timber, while those concerned about invasiveness perceived their negative effects on regulating cultural ecosystem services such as native biodiversity and landscape aesthetics. Overall, most respondents were conservative, opposing the promotion of NNTs, even in biodiversity-poor areas. Most stakeholders also believe that NNT regulations should prioritize their sustainable use and management rather than focusing solely on an invasive-centric narrative.