| 1. |
- Birkmann, Joern, et al.
(författare)
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Regional clusters of vulnerability show the need for transboundary cooperation
- 2021
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9318 .- 1748-9326. ; 16:9
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reducing vulnerability is essential for adaptation to climate change. Compared to approaches that examine vulnerability to a specific hazard, our analysis offers an alternative perspective that conceptualizes vulnerability to climate change as a phenomenon that is independent of any specific type of hazard but relevant to multiple hazards. Vulnerability is thus a product of structural inequality and systemic in nature. Based on two established index systems, we perform global analyses of specific phenomena - such as poverty, access to basic infrastructure services and forced migration - that influence and determine vulnerability. Our statistical and spatial analyses reveal an emerging pattern of climate vulnerability within regional clusters and shows that vulnerability is a transboundary issue, crossing political, sectorial and geographical borders and impacting shared resources. The spatial statistical hotspot analysis of vulnerability underscores that hotspots, for example of high vulnerability, state fragility, low biodiversity protection or forced migration, emerge in multi-country clusters. This aspect has often been overlooked, most attention to-date having been given to the positioning of individual countries within vulnerability rankings. In hotspots such as in the Sahel, East and Central Africa, as well as in Southern Asia and Central America, vulnerability is interwoven with high levels of state fragility, making adaptation solutions more complex. The recognition of the regional clusters and the transboundary nature of vulnerability calls for new research and action on how to strengthen transboundary approaches for vulnerability reduction, potentially enhancing prospects for successful adaptation.
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| 2. |
- Pereira, Laura, et al.
(författare)
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Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments
- 2021
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Ingår i: Ecosystems and People. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2639-5908 .- 2639-5916. ; 17:1, s. 191-204
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared for action from global to local. While scenarios are an important tool for GEAs to link short-term decisions and medium and long-term consequences, these current information needs cannot be met only through deductive approaches focused on the global level. In this paper, we argue that a more diverse set of futures tools operating at multiple scales are needed to improve GEA scenario development and analysis to meet the information needs of policymakers and other stakeholders better. Based on the literature, we highlight four challenges that GEAs need to be able to address in order to contribute to global environmental decision-making about the future: 1. anticipate unpredictable future conditions; 2. be relevant at multiple scales, 3. include diverse actors, perspectives and contexts; and 4. leverage the imagination to inspire action. We present a toolbox of future-oriented approaches and methods that can be used to effectively address the four challenges currently faced by GEAs.
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| 3. |
- Pereira, Laura, et al.
(författare)
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Grounding global environmental assessments through bottom-up futures based on local practices and perspectives
- 2021
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 16:6, s. 1907-1922
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Future scenarios and pathways of potential development trajectories are powerful tools to assist with decision-making to address many sustainability challenges. Such scenarios play a major role in global environmental assessments (GEAs). Currently, however, scenarios in GEAs are mostly developed at the global level by experts and researchers, and locally imagined, bottom-up scenarios do not play a role in such assessments. In this paper, we argue that addressing future sustainability challenges for achieving more equitable development in GEAs requires a more explicit role for bottom-up inspired futures. To this end, this paper employs an innovative global assessment framework for exploring alternative futures that are grounded in local realities and existing practical actions, and that can be appropriately scaled to the required decision-making level. This framework was applied in the context of the UN’s Global Environment Outlook 6, a major example of a GEA. We developed novel methods for synthesizing insights from a wide range of local practices and perspectives into global futures. We collected information from crowdsourcing platforms, outcomes of participatory workshops in different regions of the world, and an assessment of reported regional outlooks. We analysed these according to a framework also used by an integrated assessment model in the same GEA. We conclude that bottom-up approaches to identify and assess transformative solutions that envision future pathways towards greater sustainability significantly strengthen current GEA scenario-development approaches. They provide decision makers with required actionable information based on tangible synergistic solutions that have been tested on the ground. This work has revealed that there are significant opportunities for the integration of bottom-up knowledge and insights into GEAs, to make such assessments more salient and valuable to decision makers.
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| 4. |
- Pereira, Laura M., et al.
(författare)
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From fAIrplay to climate wars : making climate change scenarios more dynamic, creative, and integrative
- 2021
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Ingår i: Ecology and Society. - 1708-3087. ; 26:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding possible climate futures that include carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation modification (SRM) requires thinking not just about staying within the remaining carbon budget, but also about politics and people. However, despite growing interest in CDR and SRM, scenarios focused on these potential responses to climate change tend to exclude feedbacks between social and climate systems (a criticism applicable to climate change scenarios more generally). We adapted the Manoa Mash Up method to generate scenarios for CDR and SRM that were more integrative, creative, and dynamic. The method was modified to identify important branching points in which different choices in how to respond to climate change (feedbacks between climate and social dynamics) lead to a plurality of climate futures. An interdisciplinary group of participants imagined distant futures in which SRM or CDR develop into a major social-environmental force. Groups received other seeds of change, such as Universal Basic Income or China's Belt and Road Initiative, and surprises, such as permafrost collapse that grew to influence the course of events to 2100. Groups developed narratives describing pathways to the future and identified bifurcation points to generate families of branching scenarios. Four climate-social dynamics were identified: motivation to mitigate, moral hazard, social unrest, and trust in institutions. These dynamics could orient toward better or worse outcomes with SRM and CDR deployment (and mitigation and adaptation responses more generally) but are typically excluded from existing climate change scenarios. The importance of these dynamics could be tested through the inclusion of social-environmental feedbacks into integrated assessment models (IAM) exploring climate futures. We offer a step-by-step guide to the modified Manoa Mash-up method to generate more integrative, creative, and dynamic scenarios; reflect on broader implications of using this method for generating more dynamic scenarios for climate change research and policy; and provide examples of using the scenarios in climate policy communication, including a choose-your-own adventure game called Survive the Century (https://survivethecentury.net/), which was played by over 15,000 people in the first 2 weeks of launching.
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| 5. |
- Savvidou, Georgia, 1991, et al.
(författare)
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Quantifying international public finance for climate change adaptation in Africa
- 2021
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Ingår i: Climate Policy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1752-7457 .- 1469-3062. ; 21:8, s. 1020-1036
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, international financial assistance is expected to support African and other developing countries as they prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The impact of this finance depends on how much finance is mobilized and where it is targeted. However, there has been no comprehensive quantitative mapping of adaptation-related finance flows to African countries to date. Here we track development finance principally targeting adaptation from bilateral and multilateral funders to Africa between 2014 and 2018. We find that the amounts of finance are well below the scale of investment needed for adaptation in Africa, which is a region with high vulnerability to climate change and low adaptation capacity. Finance targeting mitigation (US$30.6 billion) was almost double that for adaptation (US$16.5 billion). The relative share of each varies greatly among African countries. More adaptation-related finance was provided as loans (57%) than grants (42%) and half the adaptation finance has targeted just two sectors: agriculture; and water supply and sanitation. Disbursement ratios for adaptation in this period are 46%, much lower than for total development finance in Africa (at 96%). These are all problematic patterns for Africa, highlighting that more adaptation finance and targeted efforts are needed to ensure that financial commitments translate into meaningful change on the ground for African communities.
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