Local level climate justice? Adaptation finance and vulnerability reduction     

Sam Barrett 《Global Environmental Change》2013,23(6):1819-1829

Climate change creates a double inequality through the inverse distribution of risk and responsibility. Developed states are responsible, but are forecast to confront only moderate adverse effects; least developed states are not culpable and yet experience significant threats to livelihoods, assets and security. Adaptation finance addresses inequity by developed states facilitating/funding behaviour adjustments necessary for exposed communities to lessen climate risk. This article investigates the ground-level effectiveness of adaptation finance in climate vulnerable villages across Malawi, while controlling for disparities in vulnerability. Malawi and selected districts are both climate vulnerable and significant recipients of adaptation finance. This concludes a larger top–down multi-scalar analysis of climate justice, which applies the distribution and effectiveness of adaptation finance as a proxy. The study avails of participatory assessments to compare actions of villages receiving adaptation finance with those engaging in autonomous and informal adaptations. Adaptation finance villages: (a) address more climate related risks; and (b) enhance agency, security and sustainably lessen climate vulnerability. Conversely, informal practice villages attend to a lower proportion of climate risks and often develop short-term strategies with less enduring vulnerability reduction. Vulnerable communities receiving adaptation finance do change behaviours to reduce climate risk and thus secure local level climate justice.  相似文献   

Community level adaptation to climate change: The potential role of participatory community risk assessment   总被引：13，自引：0，他引：13  

Maarten K. van Aalst  Terry Cannon  Ian Burton   《Global Environmental Change》2008,18(1):165-179

This paper explores the value of using community risk assessments (CRAs) for climate change adaptation. CRA refers to participatory methods to assess hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities in support of community-based disaster risk reduction, used by many NGOs, community-based organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. We review the evolution of climate change adaptation and community-based disaster risk reduction, and highlight the challenges of integrating global climate change into a bottom-up and place-based approach. Our analysis of CRAs carried out by various national Red Cross societies shows that CRAs can help address those challenges by fostering community engagement in climate risk reduction, particularly given that many strategies to deal with current climate risks also help to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Climate change can also be explicitly incorporated in CRAs by making better use of CRA tools to assess trends, and by addressing the notion of changing risks. However, a key challenge is to keep CRAs simple enough for wide application. This demands special attention in the modification of CRA tools; in the background materials and trainings for CRA facilitators; and in the guidance for interpretation of CRA outcomes. A second challenge is the application of a limited set of CRA results to guide risk reduction in other communities and to inform national and international adaptation policy. This requires specific attention for sampling and care in scaling up qualitative findings. Finally, stronger linkages are needed between organizations facilitating CRAs and suppliers of climate information, particularly addressing the translation of climate information to the community level.  相似文献   

Assessing vulnerability of selected farming communities in the Philippines based on a behavioural model of agent's adaptation to global environmental change   总被引：5，自引：0，他引：5  

Lilibeth Acosta-Michlik  Victoria Espaldon 《Global Environmental Change》2008,18(4):554

Behavioural models that allow simple representation of the complexity of human–environment links are important in vulnerability assessment because they allow the analysis of human adaptive processes in a changing environment. This paper applies an agent-based framework that considers the behavioural model of farmers in three villages in a municipality in the Philippines. Agent-based modelling is a useful policy tool for simulating the effects of different adaptation options on reducing vulnerability because it allows representation of not only the dynamic changes in climate and market but also the dynamic adaptive process of different groups of communities to the impacts of these changes. Model simulations of adaptation options under various global change scenarios showed that production support would significantly reduce future vulnerability only if complemented with appropriate market support. It is thus important for policy to provide a complementary bundle of adaptation measures. Lack of money and information are the most important reasons for not applying available technical adaptation measures, which currently hinder reduction of vulnerability in selected villages in the municipality. Social networks, which play an important role in adapting to environmental changes, are limited to relatives and neighbours, who are important sources of informal credit.  相似文献   

Observed adaptation to climate change: UK evidence of transition to a well-adapting society   总被引：5，自引：0，他引：5  

Emma L. Tompkins  W. Neil Adger  Emily Boyd  Sophie Nicholson-Cole  Keith Weatherhead  Nigel Arnell 《Global Environmental Change》2010,20(4):627-635

This paper investigates whether and to what extent a wide range of actors in the UK are adapting to climate change, and whether this is evidence of a social transition. We document evidence of over 300 examples of early adopters of adaptation practice to climate change in the UK. These examples span a range of activities from small adjustments (or coping), to building adaptive capacity, to implementing actions and to creating deeper systemic change in public and private organisations in a range of sectors. We find that adaptation in the UK has been dominated by government initiatives and has principally occurred in the form of research into climate change impacts. These government initiatives have stimulated a further set of actions at other scales in public agencies, regulatory agencies and regional government (and the devolved administrations), though with little real evidence of climate change adaptation initiatives trickling down to local government level. The sectors requiring significant investment in large scale infrastructure have invested more heavily than those that do not in identifying potential impacts and adaptations. Thus we find a higher level of adaptation activity by the water supply and flood defence sectors. Sectors that are not dependent on large scale infrastructure appear to be investing far less effort and resources in preparing for climate change. We conclude that the UK government-driven top-down targeted adaptation approach has generated anticipatory action at low cost in some areas. We also conclude that these actions may have created enough niche activities to allow for diffusion of new adaptation practices in response to real or perceived climate change. These results have significant implications for how climate policy can be developed to support autonomous adaptors in the UK and other countries.  相似文献   

Dealing with displacement: Can “social protection” facilitate long-term adaptation to climate change?     

Craig A. Johnson  Krishna Krishnamurthy 《Global Environmental Change》2010,20(4):648-655

This article explores the possibilities of using social protection to manage and reduce the risks of forced displacement resulting from climate change. It reviews the relevant literature on migration, disasters and climate change, and constructs a model through which international policies may be used to encourage resettlement options that support the capabilities and entitlements of poor and vulnerable populations. By distinguishing between rapid-onset disasters and long-term environmental change, it explores the ways in which cash transfers, asset transfers and conditional cash transfers may be used to break the cycle of vulnerability, destitution and distress migration that can occur during times of severe environmental stress. An important distinction is made between “economic migration,” which implies that households have at their disposal an opportunity to engage in forward-looking analysis about the ways in which they will invest household resources and “distress migration,” which implies that household decisions about investment and migration are largely ad hoc responses to external environmental processes and events. The article reviews recent discussions about the prospects of revising the international refugee regime, and identifies the opportunities and challenges of using social protection to support household decisions that can facilitate economic migration over the long-term.  相似文献   

Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: lessons from resilience thinking   总被引：3，自引：4，他引：3  

Fikret Berkes 《Natural Hazards》2007,41(2):283-295

Vulnerability is registered not by exposure to hazards alone; it also resides in the resilience of the system experiencing the hazard. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb recurrent disturbances, such as natural disasters, so as to retain essential structures, processes and feedbacks) is important for the discussion of vulnerability for three reasons: (1) it helps evaluate hazards holistically in coupled human–environment systems, (2) it puts the emphasis on the ability of a system to deal with a hazard, absorbing the disturbance or adapting to it, and (3) it is forward-looking and helps explore policy options for dealing with uncertainty and future change. Building resilience into human–environment systems is an effective way to cope with change characterized by surprises and unknowable risks. There seem to be four clusters of factors relevant to building resilience: (1) learning to live with change and uncertainty, (2) nurturing various types of ecological, social and political diversity for increasing options and reducing risks, (3) increasing the range of knowledge for learning and problem-solving, and (4) creating opportunities for␣self-organization, including strengthening of local institutions and building cross-scale linkages and problem-solving networks.  相似文献   

‘Earth system governance’ as a crosscutting theme of global change research     

Frank Biermann   《Global Environmental Change》2007,17(3-4):326-337

In 2001, the four global change research programmes ‘urgently’ called for ‘an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management’. Yet this notion of ‘earth system management’ remains vaguely defined: It is too elusive for natural scientists, and too ambitious or too normative for social scientists. In this article, I develop an alternative concept that is better grounded in social science theory: ‘earth system governance’. I introduce, first, the concept of earth system governance as a new social phenomenon, a political programme and a crosscutting theme of research in the field of global environmental change. I then sketch the five key problem structures that complicate earth system governance, and derive from these four overarching principles for earth system governance as political practice, namely credibility, stability, adaptiveness, and inclusiveness. In the last part of the article, I identify five research and governance challenges that lie at the core of earth system governance as a crosscutting theme in global change research. These are the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency beyond the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and of their accountability and legitimacy, and of the modes of allocation in earth system governance—in short, the five A's of earth system governance research.  相似文献   

Changed thinning regimes may increase carbon stock under climate change: A case study from a Finnish boreal forest     

Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo  Heli Peltola  Elemer Briceño-elizondo  Seppo Kellomäki 《Climatic change》2007,81(3-4):431-454

A physiological growth and yield model was applied for assessing the effects of forest management and climate change on the carbon (C) stocks in a forest management unit located in Finland. The aim was to outline an appropriate management strategy with regard to C stock in the ecosystem (C in trees and C in soil) and C in harvested timber. Simulations covered 100 years using three climate scenarios (current climate, ECHAM4 and HadCM2), five thinning regimes (based on current forest management recommendations for Finland) and one unthinned. Simulations were undertaken with ground true stand inventory data (1451 hectares) representing Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), Norway spruce (Picea abies) and silver birch (Betula pendula) stands. Regardless of the climate scenario, it was found that shifting from current practices to thinning regimes that allowed higher stocking of trees resulted in an increase of up to 11% in C in the forest ecosystem. It also increased the C in the timber yield by up to 14%. Compared to current climatic conditions, the mean increase over the thinning regimes in the total C stock in the forest ecosystem due to the climate change was a maximum of 1%; but the mean increase in total C in timber yield over thinning regimes was a maximum of 12%.  相似文献   

樟子松沙地适应性的初步研究   总被引：17，自引：1，他引：17  

李胜功 《中国沙漠》1994,14(1):60-67

根据樟子松形态、生态和生理特征，初步分析讨论了其沙地适应性。  相似文献   

自适应的最小平方反褶积及在地震勘探中的应用   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1       下载免费PDF全文

王承曙  张裕平 《地球物理学报》1987,30(3):307-317

本文给出了一种自适应的最小平方反褶积方法（ALSD法）,其基本原理是用滤波器的输出来修正愿望输出,从而使结果得到改善。从迭代格式来讲,它是极小熵反褶积方法的推广。本文还从理论上讨论了自适应函数的选取方法。通过人工模拟地震记录数据及真实地震剖面计算的结果,显示出ALSD法是一种计算量省且效果好的方法。对小相位子波,滤波效果与最小平方预测反褶积相当;对混合相位子波,仍具有近于小相位时的效果。  相似文献