Framing the application of adaptation pathways for rural livelihoods and global change in eastern Indonesian islands     

《Global Environmental Change》2014

In developing countries adaptation responses to climate and global change should be integrated with human development to generate no regrets, co-benefit strategies for the rural poor, but there are few examples of how to achieve this. The adaptation pathways approach provides a potentially useful decision-making framework because it aims to steer societies towards sustainable futures by accounting for complex systems, uncertainty and contested multi-stakeholder arenas, and by maintaining adaptation options. Using Nusa Tenggara Barat Province, Indonesia, as an example we consider whether generic justifications for adaptation pathways are tenable in the local context of climate and global change, rural poverty and development. Interviews and focus groups held with a cross-section of provincial leaders showed that the causes of community vulnerability are indeed highly complex and dynamic, influenced by 20 interacting drivers, of which climate variability and change are only two. Climate change interacts with population growth and ecosystem degradation to reduce land, water and food availability. Although poverty is resilient due to corruption, traditional institutions and fatalism, there is also considerable system flux due to decentralisation, modernisation and erosion of traditional culture. Together with several thresholds in drivers, potential shocks and paradoxes, these characteristics result in unpredictable system trajectories. Decision-making is also contested due to tensions around formal and informal leadership, corruption, community participation in planning and female empowerment. Based on this context we propose an adaptation pathways approach which can address the proximate and systemic causes of vulnerability and contested decision-making. Appropriate participatory processes and governance structures are suggested, including integrated livelihoods and multi-scale systems analysis, scenario planning, adaptive co-management and ‘livelihood innovation niches’. We briefly discuss how this framing of adaptation pathways would differ from one in the developed context of neighbouring Australia, including the influence of the province's island geography on the heterogeneity of livelihoods and climate change, the pre-eminence and rapid change of social drivers, and the necessity to ‘leap-frog’ the Millennium Development Goals by mid-century to build adaptive capacity for imminent climate change impacts.  相似文献   

Designing prediction markets for international negotiations: Lessons learnt from the Climate Summit in Copenhagen     

《Global Environmental Change》2014

This paper presents results from a field experiment of running a prediction market for international climate negotiations. We draw upon our experience of running the Copenhagen Prediction Market during the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009. The Copenhagen Prediction Market consisted of 17 different markets, where participants could trade in shares predicting, amongst others, reduction targets for various countries, the long-term stabilisation goal or the level of funding from developed countries to developing nations for mitigation and adaptation actions. We show that this novel application of prediction markets to climate negotiations is distinct from more traditional applications and, in many ways, more challenging. We discuss our experiences in designing and setting up the market and interpreting its results. In particular, it is crucial to be able to define the outcome of a climate conference in the face of often ambiguous final communications in order to make the prediction market robust and to find benchmarks to compare prediction market performance against.  相似文献   

Local values for fairer adaptation to sea-level rise: A typology of residents and their lived values in Lakes Entrance,Australia     

《Global Environmental Change》2014

Understanding the values and socio-economic characteristics of people at risk from climate change will inform how people feel about the likely distribution of impacts, as well as adaptation responses. This knowledge is necessary if adaptation is to achieve distributive fairness now and into the future. This study advances methods and analyses used in values-based adaptation research by using segmentation to explain the diversity of values that exist within a community, and on this basis identify particular groups at risk. A telephone survey was conducted with residents of Lakes Entrance, Australia—a coastal community already adapting to projected sea-level rise. The purpose was to determine the priorities residents place on a range of lived values—valuations that individuals make about what is important in their lives and the places they live. The telephone survey data was then analysed using cluster analysis to develop a lived values typology of residents. The analysis revealed that there are at least eight types of residents living in Lakes Entrance and that each group of residents has a unique set of lived values that will be differentially affected by sea-level rise and adaptation. The findings indicate that if sea-level rise adaptation policy is to be distributively fair it needs to develop a suite of adaptation responses that ensure that the lived values of each group of residents, and thus a diversity of values, are maintained or enhanced.  相似文献   

From reductionism to systems thinking: How the shipping sector can address sulphur regulation and tackle climate change     

《Marine Policy》2014

The shipping sector is required to reduce fuel sulphur content to 0.1% in Emission Control Areas by 2015 and to 0.5% globally by 2020. Although this is demanding, a greater challenge for all sectors is climate change. However, the three options to comply with sulphur regulation do little to address this challenge. With a deep-seated change to the type of fuel burnt in marine engines, this should be seen as an opportunity to explore co-benefits of sulphur and carbon reduction – instead of taking a short-sighted approach to the problem. It is argued here that the upcoming sulphur regulations should be postponed and instead, a co-ordinated suite of regulations should be implemented that tackles cumulative CO₂ emissions and localised SO_x emissions in chorus. This would ensure that less developed, yet more radical, step-change forms of propulsion such as wind, battery and biofuels are introduced from the outset – reducing the risks of infrastructure lock-in and preventing the lock-out of technologies that can meaningfully reduce absolute emissions from the sector.  相似文献   

Obtaining public support for North-South climate funding: Evidence from conjoint experiments in donor countries     

《Global Environmental Change》2014

The adoption of the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage has again highlighted the North-South divide in those parts of UNFCCC negotiations dealing with international climate finance. Current estimates put required funding from rich countries at 50–100 billion Euros per year to induce non-Annex I countries to take on greenhouse gas limitation commitments and to assist highly vulnerable countries. Results from survey-embedded conjoint experiments can help policy-makers anticipate opportunities and pitfalls in designing large-scale climate funding schemes. We implemented such experiments in the United States and Germany to better understand what institutional design characteristics are likely to garner more public support for climate funding among citizens in key developed countries. We find that climate funding receives more public support if it flows to efficient governments, funding decisions are made jointly by donor and recipient countries, funding is used both for mitigation and adaptation, and other donor countries contribute a large share. Contrary to what one might expect, climate change damage levels, income, and emissions in/of potential recipient countries have no significant effect on public support. These findings suggest that finance mechanisms that focus purely on compensating developing countries, without contributing to the global public good of mitigation, will find it hard to garner public support.  相似文献   

Remotely sensed surface temperature variation of an inland saline lake over the central Qinghai–Tibet Plateau     

《ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing》2014

Research on surface water temperature (SWT) variations in large lakes over the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) has been limited by lack of in situ measurements. By taking advantage of the increased availability of remotely sensed observations, this study investigated SWT variation of Siling Co in central QTP by processing complete MODIS Land surface temperature (LST) images over the lake covering from 2001 to 2013. The temporal (diurnal, intra-annul and inter-annul) variations of Siling Co SWT as well as the spatial patterns were analyzed. The results show that on average from late December to mid-April the lake is in a mixing state of water and ice and drastic diurnal temperature differences occur, especially along the shallow shoreline areas. The extent of spatial variations in monthly SWT ranges from 1.25 °C to 3.5 °C, and particularly large at nighttime and in winter months. The spatial patterns of annual average SWT were likely impacted by the cooling effect of river inflow from the west and east side of the lake. The annual cycle of spatial pattern of SWT is characterized by seasonal reversions between the shallow littoral regions and deep parts due to different heat capacity. Compared to the deep regions, the littoral shallow shoreline areas warms up quickly in spring and summer, and cool down drastically in autumn and winter, showing large diurnal and seasonal variation amplitudes of SWT. Two cold belt zones in the western and eastern side of the lake and warm patches along the southwestern and northeastern shorelines are shaped by the combined effects of the lakebed topography and river runoff. Overall, the lake-averaged SWT increased at a rate of 0.26 °C/decade during 2001–2013. Faster increase of temperature was found at nighttime (0.34 °C/decade) and in winter and spring, consistent with the asymmetric warming pattern over land areas reported in prior studies. The rate of temperature increase over Siling Co is remarkably lower than that over Bangoin station, which is probably attributable to the large heat capacity of water and partly reflects the sensitive of alpine saltwater lake to climate change.  相似文献   

Climate volatility and poverty vulnerability in Tanzania     

Syud Amer Ahmed  Noah S. Diffenbaugh  Thomas W. Hertel  David B. Lobell  Navin Ramankutty  Ana R. Rios  Pedram Rowhani 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(1):46-55

Climate volatility could change in the future, with important implications for agricultural productivity. For Tanzania, where food production and prices are sensitive to climate, changes in climate volatility could have severe implications for poverty. This study uses climate model projections, statistical crop models, and general equilibrium economic simulations to determine how the vulnerability of Tanzania's population to impoverishment by climate variability could change between the late 20th Century and the early 21st Century. Under current climate volatility, there is potential for a range of possible poverty outcomes, although in the most extreme of circumstances, poverty could increase by as many as 650,000 people due to an extreme interannual decline in grain yield. However, scenarios of future climate from multiple climate models indicate no consensus on future changes in temperature or rainfall volatility, so that either an increase or decrease is plausible. Scenarios with the largest increases in climate volatility are projected to render Tanzanians increasingly vulnerable to poverty through impacts on staple grains production in agriculture, with as many as 90,000 additional people entering poverty on average. Under the scenario where precipitation volatility decreases, poverty vulnerability decreases, highlighting the possibility of climate changes that oppose the ensemble mean, leading to poverty impacts of opposite sign. The results suggest that evaluating potential changes in volatility and not just the mean climate state may be important for analyzing the poverty implications of climate change.  相似文献   

What determines perceived value of seasonal climate forecasts? A theoretical analysis     

Antony Millner  Richard Washington   《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(1):209-218

Seasonal forecasts have potential value as tools for the management of risks due to inter-annual climate variability and iterative adaptation to climate change. Despite their potential, forecasts are not widely used, in part due to poor performance and lack of relevance to specific users’ decision problems, and in part due to a variety of economic and behavioural factors. In this paper a theoretical model of perceived forecast value is proposed and applied to a stylized portfolio-type decision problem with wide applicability to actual forecast users, with a view to obtaining a more complete picture of the determinants of perceived value. The effects of user wealth, risk aversion, and perceived forecast trustworthiness, and presentational parameters, such as the position of forecast parameter categories, and the size of probability categories, on perceived value is investigated. Analysis of the model provides several strong qualitative predictions of how perceived forecast value depends on these factors. These predictions may be used to generate empirical hypotheses which offer the chance of evaluating the model's assumptions, and suggest several means of improving understanding of perceived value based on qualitative features of the results.  相似文献   

Who participates in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and why: A quantitative assessment of the national representation of authors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change     

Claudia Ho-Lem  Hisham Zerriffi  Milind Kandlikar 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(4):1308-1317

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of international representation in the activities of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change using expert authorship counts by country in each of the four IPCC assessment reports (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007). Overall, we find that 45% of countries, all Non-Annex 1, have never had authors participate in the IPCC process; on the other hand, European and North American experts are make up more than 75% of all authors (N = 4394). Generalized linear models using negative binomial regression were used to quantitatively estimate the effect of a number of socio-economic, environmental and procedural factors influencing country-level participation in the IPCC. Per capita gross domestic product, population, English-speaking status, and levels of tertiary education were all found to be statistically significant drivers of authorship counts. In particular, participation by authors from English-speaking Non-Annex 1 countries is 2.5 times greater than those that are non-English speaking. Regionally small island nations of Oceania were the most severely under-represented group. South American and Asian countries had fewer authors, and African countries had more authors than what might be expected on the basis of demographic and socio-economic data. These differences across nations partly reflect existing scientific capacity that will be slow to change. However, the on-going under-representation of developing country scientists in the IPCC, particularly in the assessment of climate science (WGI) and climate mitigation (WGIII) warrants greater efforts to close the capacity gap.  相似文献   

‘Energy security’ and ‘climate change’: Constructing UK energy discursive realities     

T. Rogers-Hayden  F. Hatton  I. Lorenzoni 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(1):134-142

Recently, in the United Kingdom, two issues have dominated the energy policy agenda: effective climate change mitigation and energy security. Whilst evolving government policy has led to government support for new build nuclear power as part of the nation's future energy mix, limited attention has been devoted to examining how arguments were constructed to lead ‘naturally’ to nuclear new build as an option for addressing these two issues. Using Critical Discourse Analysis this paper analyses the struggles within the climate change mitigation and energy security discourses in generating and/or replacing meanings. In particular, it examines how construction of the dominant (hegemonic) discourses led ‘naturally’ to the necessity of new build nuclear power. This paper draws upon 24 stakeholder interviews to examine the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses. It outlines how climate change and energy security were perceived as motivators for energy policy; it shows how the combination of the dominant construction of climate change as an environmental issue and the construction of energy security as a ‘gas gap’ lent weight to the argument for nuclear new build. Struggling against these discourses is a counter-hegemonic discourse centred around climate change as a symptom of unsustainability and energy security as a lack of energy diversity. The latter, rather than ‘naturally’ proposing an urgent need for nuclear new build, lead to the argument for readdressing the focus of, and use of resources by, society - reducing energy demand and increasing energy supply diversity.  相似文献