美国气候变化期刊(英文)最新文献

Climate-related hazards like drought are associated with loss of life and lead to food insecurity in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Food insecurity, which affects more than 220 million sub-Saharan Africans, manifests as starvation that leads to more than 50% of children under the age of 5-years presenting as underweight for age in many communities on the continent. This household survey reports the means by which rural fisher folk and farming communities in Uganda gained access to early warning meteorological information. The survey covered five districts across different climatic zones in Uganda and recruited a total of 405 respondents with an average age of 41 years (SD 16). Economic activity was used to categorize each of the five districts into farming (crops and livestock) and fishing areas. The results showed that most respondents were unaware of drought as one of the climate-related hazards. Compared to respondents from the fishing communities, the respondents from farming communities were more likely to be receiving weather-related information (P-value < 0.01). There were 204/405 (50.37%) female respondents who, compared to male respondents, were less likely to have access to weather information, less willing to pay for weather information, and less likely to have and or own devices like a radio for receiving weather information. The survey demonstrated that: 1) there were gaps in the knowledge about climate-related hazards, 2) there is a need for additional interventions targeting fisher folk communities access timely weather information, and 3) introducing user paid access to weather information may increase climate-related gender-based disparities.

Many have voiced concern about the long-term survival of coastal communities in the face of increasingly intense storms and sea level rise. In this study we select indicators of key theoretical concepts from the social-ecological resilience literature, aggregate those indicators into a resilience-capacity index, and calculate an index score for each of the 52 coastal counties of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Building upon Cutter's Social Vulnerability Index work [1], we use Factor Analysis to combine 43 variables measuring demographics, social capital, economic resources, local government actions, and environmental conditions within the counties. Then, we map the counties' scores to show the spatial distribution of resilience capacities. The counties identified as having the highest resilience capacities include the suburban areas near New Orleans, Louisiana and Tampa, Florida, and the growing beach-tourist communities of Alabama and central Florida. Also, we examine whether those counties more active in oil and gas development and production, part of the region's "energy coast", have greater capacity for resilience than other counties in the region. Correlation analyses between the resilience-capacity index scores and two measures of oil and gas industry activity (total employment and number of business establishments within five industry categories) yielded no statistically significant associations. By aggregating a range of important contextual variables into a single index, the study demonstrates a useful approach for the more systematic examination and comparison of exposure, vulnerability and capacity for resilience among coastal communities.