Clim Change Research Articles

The role of nongovernmental organizations in China's climate change governance

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been a key player in international climate negotiations. In addition to being UNFCCC observers at the international level, the role of NGOs in domestic climate change governance has differed across countries due to varying political, legislative, and even cultural contexts. As the largest CO2 emitter in the world, China is engaged in the challenging process of low‐carbon development, which may not be achievable through exclusive reliance on top–down management and voluntary actions by the private sector. The participation of NGOs as a civil society actor is important. However, current understanding about the role of NGOs in China's climate change governance has been under‐studied. Climate change is still a relatively new topic for China's NGOs, and it has been difficult to differentiate the involvement of NGOs in climate change issues from their involvement in environmental issues more generally. Overall, the role NGOs play in China's climate change governance has had four main features: government partnership with restricted political space, organization development with inadequate professional capacity, strong international financial reliance but with growing domestic support, and public advocacy with low social recognition. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e483. doi: 10.1002/wcc.483This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate Change

Co‐production in climate change research: reviewing different perspectives

Notions of ‘co‐production’ are growing in popularity in social science and humanities research on climate change, although there is some ambiguity about the meanings of the term and how it is being used. It is time to critically and reflexively take stock of this expanding area of scholarship. A comprehensive review of over 130 scientific publications first mapped the scholars using co‐production, relative to characteristics like their discipline, nationality, and research themes. Second, it looked at how this diversity of scientific perspectives has opened up a multiplicity of meanings of co‐production. While most discussions of co‐production stop at a basic distinction between descriptive and normative uses of the term, this review unpacked eight conceptual lenses on co‐production, each discernible by its particular emphases, academic traditions, logic, and criteria of success. There are two important implications of this work. On one hand, it urges self‐reflexive transparency when using co‐production concepts. The multiple meanings attached to co‐production add richness to the concept and open it up to different uses. However, it is important that scholars clearly communicate how they use the term and are mindful of what they ‘buy into’ by using the concept in certain ways. On the other hand, there are tensions between the different perspectives as well as opportunities for combining them into a compound concept of co‐production. In this way, co‐production is reconceptualized as a prism, where each aspect allows different but complimentary insights on the relationship between science, society, and nature.WIREs Clim Change2017, 8:e482. doi: 10.1002/wcc.482This article is categorized under:Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

Artful climate change communication: overcoming abstractions, insensibilities, and distances

This article considers how visual and sonic art creates encounters through which audiences can experience climate change. Building on reviews published in WIREs Climate Change on images, films, drama, climate science fiction, and other literary forms, we examine how audio and visual art addresses the enduring problems of climate change communication. We begin with three of these problems: climate change's often abstract nature, the distances in time and space between those who cause climate change and the places its effects are felt, and forms of human–environmental relations that shape how climate is understood. We reflect on how, through a combination of vision and sound, art creates sensory experiences that tackle these challenges. In querying how our artistic examples bring about environmental engagements, we combine an analysis of the representations and narratives of these works with an appreciation of their aesthetic form—in short, how these art pieces activate emotional and experiential responses. While we recognize the limits of what art can do, especially the gallery‐based forms of work we study here, we argue that spending time exploring the encounters that art creates helps us to understand what it brings to the communication of climate change. It also demonstrates how lessons learnt about sensory experience, affect, and emotions might be more widely applied to the analysis of cultural forms—from literature to films—and their role in climate change communication. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e472. doi: 10.1002/wcc.472This article is categorized under: Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Climate‐relevant behavioral spillover and the potential contribution of social practice theory

Urgent and radical transition to lower‐carbon forms of society is imperative to limit current and future climate change impacts. Behavioral spillover theory offers a way to catalyze broad lifestyle change from one behavior to another in ways that generate greater impacts than piecemeal interventions. Despite growing policy and research attention, the evidence for behavioral spillover and the processes driving the phenomenon are unclear. The literature is split between studies that provide evidence for positive spillover effects (where an intervention targeting an environmentally conscious behavior leads to an increase in another functionally related behavior) and negative spillover effects (where an intervention targeting an environmentally conscious behavior leads to a decrease in another functionally related behavior). In summarizing findings, particular attention is given to the implications for climate‐relevant behaviors. While few examples of climate‐relevant behavioral spillover exist, studies do report positive and negative spillovers to other actions, as well as spillovers from behavior to support for climate change policy. There is also some evidence that easier behaviors can lead to more committed actions. The potential contribution of social practice theory to understanding spillover is discussed, identifying three novel pathways to behavioral spillover: via carriers of practices, materiality, and through relationships between practices within wider systems of practice. In considering future research directions, the relatively neglected role of social norms is discussed as a means to generate the momentum required for substantial lifestyle change and as a way of circumventing obstructive and intransigent climate change beliefs. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e481. doi: 10.1002/wcc.481This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses

Mitigation and adaptation in polycentric systems: sources of power in the pursuit of collective goals

Polycentric governance involves multiple actors at multiple scales beyond the state. The potential of polycentric governance for promoting both climate mitigation and adaptation is well established. Yet, dominant conceptualizations of polycentric governance pay scant attention to how power dynamics affect the structure and the outcomes of climate action. We review emerging evidence on power within polycentric and distributed governance across the climate, forestry, marine, coastal, urban, and water sectors, and relate them to established positions on power within research on federalism, decentralization, international relations, and networked governance. We develop a typology of design, pragmatic, and framing power that focuses on how and in whose interests power is mobilized to achieve outcomes. We propose that the conceptual model helps to explain power dynamics across different sectors and across both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Significant research challenges arising from the analysis include the measurement and monitoring of the outcomes of power asymmetries over time. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e479. doi: 10.1002/wcc.479This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Climate change and loss, as if people mattered: values, places, and experiences

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is seeking to prepare for losses arising from climate change. This is an emerging issue that challenges climate science and policy to engage more deeply with values, places, and people's experiences. We first provide insight into the UNFCCC framing of loss and damage and current approaches to valuation. We then draw on the growing literature on value‐ and place‐based approaches to adaptation, including limits to adaptation, which examines loss as nuanced and sensitive to the nature of people's lives. Complementary perspectives from human geography, psychology, philosophy, economics, and ecology underscore the importance of understanding what matters to people and what they may likely consider to constitute loss. A significant body of knowledge illustrates that loss is often given meaning through lived, embodied, and place‐based experiences, and so is more felt than tangible. We end with insights into recent scholarship that addresses how people make trade‐offs between different value priorities. This emerging literature offers an opening in the academic debate to further advance a relational framing of loss in which trade‐offs between lived values are seen as dynamic elements in a prospective loss space. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e476. doi: 10.1002/wcc.476This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Comparative Environmental Values

Is climate change a new kind of problem? The role of theology and imagination in climate ethics

Some scholars and activists assume that climate change is entirely sui generis: a brand new kind of problem that calls for new kinds of thinking and activism. Others communicate the seriousness of climate change by arguing that it is prefigured by the biggest events in human history, such as the moral crime of slavery or the political challenge of World War II. While the choice between these two frames for climate change is often implicit, it shapes the research and arguments that follow. This can be illustrated by examining Christian theology and ethics: Those theologians who see climate change as sui generis tend to embrace the inevitability of apocalyptic change, increasing instability, and an Anthropocene age that calls for new kinds of religion and spirituality. Those who see climate change as prefigured, by contrast, tend to emphasize the continued relevance of established religious traditions, in particular their commitments to social justice and their opposition to destructive political and economic structures. The two approaches offer different frames for climate change and different theological imaginations of the problem. When the question of whether climate change is new and the imaginaries that question inspires are explicit, arguments in theology and ethics are clearer and more defined. Interdisciplinary connections then suggest that this exercise of exploring how climate change is framed, characterized, and imagined will be relevant to a wide range of scholars and activists. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e480. doi: 10.1002/wcc.480This article is categorized under: Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Climate model pluralism beyond dynamical ensembles

Using pluralist research strategies can be a profitable way to study complex systems. This contribution focuses on the approaches for studying the climate that make use of multiple different models, aiming to increase the reliability (in terms of robustness) of attribution results. This Opinion article argues that the traditional approach, which is based on ensemble runs of global climate models, only partially allows the application of a robustness scheme, owing to the difficulty to match or evaluate the conditions required for robustness (i.e., independence or heterogeneity among models). An alternative ‘multi‐approach’ strategy is advanced, beyond dynamical modeling but still preserving the idea of model pluralism. Such a strategy, which uses a set of ensembles of different model types by combining dynamical modeling with data‐driven methodological approaches (i.e., neural networks and Granger causality), seems to better match the condition of independence. In addition, neural networks and Granger causality lead to achievements in attribution studies that can complement those obtained by dynamical modeling. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e477. doi: 10.1002/wcc.477This article is categorized under: Climate Models and Modeling > Earth System Models

Local knowledge in climate adaptation research: moving knowledge frameworks from extraction to co‐production

This review consists of a systematic assessment of climate change adaptation literature to elicit major trends, discourses, and patterns in how local knowledge is conceived. We report on conceptual and geographic trends within the literature, including the practice of assessing local knowledge against scientific benchmarks, and present results of a textual network analysis that illustrates overlap and co‐occurrence among different characterizations of local knowledge. In critically assessing the dominant trends we draw special attention to problems associated with the extraction of local knowledge without due consideration of how this process is embedded and inextricable from local contexts and sociotechnical orders. Drawing on theories of science and technology that examine the ontological politics of research practices, we propose a co‐productive path forward for local knowledge mobilization to inform adaptation decision‐making, which we argue facilitates the transformation of the institutional and governance arrangement of climate adaptation to provide greater flexibility and experimentalism in research and decision‐making. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e475. doi: 10.1002/wcc.475This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

Rethinking the green state beyond the Global North: a South African climate change case study

This study focuses on the role of the South African state in environmental governance, with particular reference to transformations in political authority and processes of capital accumulation. Our approach underscores the importance of analyzing state environmental efforts both empirically and normatively, in order to understand the underlying drivers of state policies that perpetuate or ameliorate environmental degradation. The tension between economic and ecological values lies at the heart of South Africa's approach to mitigation. We evaluate South Africa's performance on climate change mitigation policies and programs and show that while, empirically, South Africa may appear to be a partial or emerging green state, its performance is weak when assessed against normative frameworks.WIREs Clim Change2017, 8:e473. doi: 10.1002/wcc.473This article is categorized under:Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy

Trajectories of exposure and vulnerability of small islands to climate change

This article advocates for a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of vulnerability to climate‐related environmental changes in order to feed the design of adaptation future pathways. It uses the trajectory of exposure and vulnerability (TEV) approach that it defines as ‘storylines of driving factors and processes that have influenced past and present territorial system exposure and vulnerability to impacts associated with climate variability and change.’ The study is based on the analysis of six peer‐reviewed Pacific island case studies covering various geographical settings (high islands vs low‐lying reef islands, urban vs rural) and hazards associated with climate variability and change; that addressed the interactions between natural and anthropogenic driving factors; and adopted multidecadal past‐to‐present approaches. The findings emphasize that most urban and rural reef and high islands have undergone increasing exposure and vulnerability as a result of major changes in settlement and demographic patterns, lifestyles and economies, natural resources availability, and environmental conditions. The article highlights three generic and successive periods of change in the studied islands’ TEV: from geopolitical and political over the colonization‐to‐political independence period; to demographic, socio‐economic, and cultural from the 1960s to the 1980s; culminating in the dominance of demographic, socio‐economic, cultural, and environmental drivers since the 1980s. Based on these empirical insights, the article emphasizes the existence of anthropogenic‐driven path‐dependency effects in TEV, thus arguing for the analysis of the temporal dimensions of exposure and vulnerability to be a prerequisite for science to be able to inform policy‐ and decision‐making processes toward robust adaptation pathways. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e478. doi: 10.1002/wcc.478This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

Climate information websites: an evolving landscape

The climate change agenda is populated by actors and agencies with different objectives, values, and motivations, yet many seek decision scale climate information to inform policy and adaptation responses. A central element of this network of activity is the climate information website (CIW) that has seen a rapid and organic growth, yet with variable content and quality, and unfettered by any code of practice. This builds an ethical–epistemic dilemma that warrants assessment as the presence of CIWs contribute to real‐world consequences and commitment. This study considers the context of CIW growth, and reviews a representative sample of CIWs to draw out key issues for consideration in CIW development. We assess content, function, and use‐case value through a dual approach of a typology and user experience narratives to evaluate the general efficacy of a CIW. The typology reveals strong contrasts in content, complicated interfaces, and an overload of choice making it difficult to converge on a stable outcome. The narratives capture user experience and highlight barriers that include navigation difficulties, jargon laden content, minimal or opaque guidance, and inferred information without context about uncertainty and limits to skill. This illuminates four concerns: (1) the ethics of information provision in a context of real‐world consequences; (2) interfaces that present barriers to achieving robust solutions; (3) weak capacity of both users and providers to identify information of value from the multimodel and multimethod data; and (4) inclusion of data that infer skill. Nonetheless, results provide a positive indication of a community of practice that is still maturing. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e470. doi: 10.1002/wcc.470This article is categorized under: Climate Models and Modeling > Knowledge Generation with Models Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Scenario Development and Application

Adaptive capacity: exploring the research frontier

In the past 15 years there has been rapid growth in research on adaptive capacity. This article critically reviews this literature, describing changes in the field over time, and highlighting the new frontiers in research. It explains how research on adaptive capacity began and remains heavily influenced by a one‐size‐fits‐all assets‐based theory that assumes that adaptation action is commensurate with the possession of capitals. It explains how this theory has been unable to explain how adaptation is actually practiced across diverse contexts and scales. The article then highlights new research, particularly that which extends analysis to include psycho‐social and institutional dimensions applied at smaller scales of analysis. This shift recognizes and helps overcome the limits of traditional approaches to adaptive capacity, but the field still lacks theories that can explain the relationship between adaptive capacity and adaptation outcomes. Drawing on findings from disaster risk reduction and behavioral science literatures, this article outlines a framework comprised of six factors that better explain how capacity is translated and mobilized into action, namely: risk attitudes, personal experience, trust in and expectations of authorities, place attachment, competing concerns, and household composition and dynamics.WIREs Clim Change2017, 8:e467. doi: 10.1002/wcc.467This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation

Will the Paris Agreement accelerate the pace of change?

Since adoption of the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1997, the international climate regime has been caught in stasis. Due to a lack of direction and clarity at the policy level and deep political divides, the evolution of the international climate regime under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had failed to catch up with the changes occurring in the real economy. The momentum created ahead of COP21 in 2015 and resulting Paris Agreement has changed this, creating a new paradigm of international climate policy, politics and cooperation that is, if implemented, capable of generating the momentum needed to accelerate the pace of change and drive transformation. This new paradigm that emerged from the Paris Agreement, demonstrates the role of the United Nations in giving voice to smaller countries to create effective positive powerful coalitions and the need to invite the outside world into the process through greater participation of cities, business, investors and other non‐state actors. We outline the main policy and political shifts that the Paris Agreement represents, and explain why this new paradigm of international climate policy, politics and cooperation is key to accelerating the pace of change and keeping the world well below 2°C, and optimally 1.5°C. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e471. doi: 10.1002/wcc.471This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > International Policy Framework

Heat, health, and humidity in Australia's monsoon tropics: a critical review of the problematization of ‘heat’ in a changing climate

Exposure to heat has killed more people in Australia than all other natural hazards combined. As the climate warms, temperatures are projected to rise substantially, increasing the impact of heat stress and heat illness nation‐wide. The relation between heat and health is profoundly complex, however, and is understood differently across multiple sectors. This paper thus provides a critical review of how heat is currently measured and managed in Australia, highlighting how humidity, exposure, and exertion are key elements that are not consistently incorporated into ‘problematizations’ of heat. The presence or absence of these elements produces different spatial and temporal geographies of danger, as well as different governance practices. In particular, the invisibility of humidity as having a significant impact on heat and health shapes whether Australia's tropical monsoon zone is visible as a region at risk or not, and whether prolonged periods of seasonal heat are treated as dangerous. Similarly, different populations and practices become visible depending on whether the human body (its exposure, exertion, cooling, and hydration) is included in accounts of what constitutes ‘heat.’ As a result, the outdoor, manual workforce is visible as a population at risk in some accounts but not others. A brief review of key policy areas including housing, public health and work health and safety is presented to demonstrate how specific problematizations of heat are critical to the identification of, and response to, current and future climatic conditions. This has implications for how populations, places, and practices are constituted in the region. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e468. doi: 10.1002/wcc.468This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation Policy and Governance > Governing Climate Change in Communities, Cities, and Regions

Contributions and perspectives from geography to the study of climate

Geographers have played an important and sometimes controversial role in the study of climate during the 20th century. This review traces the historical contributions of geographical scholarship to the study of climate in two primary areas: statistical, descriptive climatology and research in climate and society. It draws out the specifically geographical nature of climatological work in the 20th century, looking at the role of maps, classifications, and historical statistics in describing and potentially explaining climatic cycles, patterns, and processes. Geographers were keen to demonstrate the broader linkages between climate and the physical environment and humankind, such that applications of climatological expertise were crucial to economic development, imperialism and local scales, particularly the urban scale. This led geographers into insightful interdisciplinary applications, but also rather more awkward themes such as climatic determinism. The review draws out both the positive and negative aspects of geography's contribution to understandings of climate. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e466. doi: 10.1002/wcc.466This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives

United States agricultural stakeholder views and decisions on climate change

Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to agricultural production globally and in the United States; it is both vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate and a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Because farmers need to quickly adapt to reduce their risks and emissions, there is a pressing need to better understand the process by which they make decisions. This complex decision‐making process includes many factors, such as farmers’ beliefs; knowledge and capacity to make changes; the information they receive from Extension, industry, and social networks (e.g., family and peers); economics and regulations; and farm‐scale and environmental issues (including personal experience with extreme weather). This study assesses the published literature on U.S. agricultural stakeholder views and decisions on climate change, focusing on farmers and ranchers from different regions. We identify key themes that emerge from the literature on how stakeholder views about extreme weather and climate change relate to decisions about adaptation and mitigation practices. This review finds that although the majority of U.S. farmers believe the climate is changing, many remain skeptical of the issue and uncertain about the anthropogenic causes of climate change. Farmers’ climate change mitigation and adaptation decisions also vary widely and are often correlated with belief or other factors such as personal experience with extreme weather, costs of change, or fear of regulation. We conclude with the implications of the research, including the importance of understanding farmers’ view and actions and issue framing, and implications for researchers, Extension and policy makers, both nationally and globally. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e469. doi: 10.1002/wcc.469This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change

Amplified Arctic warming and mid‐latitude weather: new perspectives on emerging connections

The Arctic is warming and melting at alarming rates. Within the lifetime of a Millennial, the volume of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean has declined by at least half. The pace of Arctic warming is two‐to‐three times that of the globe; this disparity reached a new record high during 2016. While the Arctic spans only a small fraction of the Earth, it plays a disproportionate and multifaceted role in the climate system. In this article, we offer new perspectives on ways in which the Arctic's rapid warming may influence weather patterns in heavily populated regions (the mid‐latitudes) of the Northern Hemisphere. Research on this topic has evolved almost as rapidly as the snow and ice have diminished, and while much has been learned, many questions remain. The atmosphere is complex, highly variable, and undergoing a multitude of simultaneous changes, many of which have become apparent only recently. These realities present challenges to robust signal detection and to clear attribution of cause‐and‐effect. In addition to updating the state of this science, we propose an explanation for the varying and intermittent response of mid‐latitude circulation to the rapidly warming Arctic. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e474. doi: 10.1002/wcc.474This article is categorized under: Climate Models and Modeling > Knowledge Generation with Models

Cloud feedback mechanisms and their representation in global climate models

Cloud feedback—the change in top‐of‐atmosphere radiative flux resulting from the cloud response to warming—constitutes by far the largest source of uncertainty in the climate response to CO2 forcing simulated by global climate models (GCMs). We review the main mechanisms for cloud feedbacks, and discuss their representation in climate models and the sources of intermodel spread. Global‐mean cloud feedback in GCMs results from three main effects: (1) rising free‐tropospheric clouds (a positive longwave effect); (2) decreasing tropical low cloud amount (a positive shortwave [SW] effect); (3) increasing high‐latitude low cloud optical depth (a negative SW effect). These cloud responses simulated by GCMs are qualitatively supported by theory, high‐resolution modeling, and observations. Rising high clouds are consistent with the fixed anvil temperature (FAT) hypothesis, whereby enhanced upper‐tropospheric radiative cooling causes anvil cloud tops to remain at a nearly fixed temperature as the atmosphere warms. Tropical low cloud amount decreases are driven by a delicate balance between the effects of vertical turbulent fluxes, radiative cooling, large‐scale subsidence, and lower‐tropospheric stability on the boundary‐layer moisture budget. High‐latitude low cloud optical depth increases are dominated by phase changes in mixed‐phase clouds. The causes of intermodel spread in cloud feedback are discussed, focusing particularly on the role of unresolved parameterized processes such as cloud microphysics, turbulence, and convection. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e465. doi: 10.1002/wcc.465This article is categorized under: Climate Models and Modeling > Model Components

A systematic review of local vulnerability to climate change in developing country agriculture

In the mid‐2000s, several highly‐cited papers called for improving conceptual coherence and methodological transparency in vulnerability research to support greater policy relevance. As reducing vulnerability rises on political agendas, identifying empirically validated measures will become increasingly important in the design and evaluation of multi‐site and multi‐scale programmatic interventions. Using a systematic review methodology, we analyze the current range of conceptual frameworks, operationalizations and research methodologies as used in empirical studies of local‐level vulnerability in agricultural settings. Detailed analysis of theories and methods provides a platform for moving toward reporting that supports valid comparisons between disparate studies. This in turn, enables the design and implementation of empirically‐informed programmatic interventions. The results show that earlier concerns remain relevant. Even the best reported cases do not support aggregated analysis because conceptual ambiguity and methodological heterogeneity renders each study effectively unique. While conceptualization is broadly consolidating around the IPCC framework, declaration of that framework does not predict consistent operationalization. Furthermore, emerging alternative frameworks, especially Vulnerability as Expected Poverty, reveal important limitations of the IPCC framework. Findings also highlight that reporting practices in vulnerability research perpetuate problematic ambiguity. When designing and reporting research, we recommend addressing six key questions that can help specify the objectives of the study: (1) Is this system vulnerable? (2) To what is this system vulnerable? (3) How vulnerable is this system? (4)What is causing this system to be vulnerable? (5) How is vulnerability distributed within the system? (6) What is causing the observed distribution of vulnerability within the system? WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e464. doi: 10.1002/wcc.464This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies