In 2017, climate-driven Atlantic hurricanes – Harvey, Irma, and Maria – produced harmful population health effects. Florida was one of the most significantly affected states. These hurricanes caused significant damage, but over time, lessons were revealed for opportunities to increase hurricane resilience. As a result, the Florida Hurricane Response Hub was established; this Hub was used as one of

The Philippines is highly susceptible to both geophysical and climate-related disasters. This article explores Filipinos knowledge and perception of climate change and their association with what action Filipinos take to prepare for rapid onset natural hazards such as typhoons. Data for this study were collected from a nationally representative random survey of 5,184 adults conducted between March

Climate and weather-related damage have been increasing globally in recent decades. Due to climate change and socio-economic developments, a further increase in climate-related risks is expected. Numerous countries have a long and successful history in disaster risk management (DRM) to avoid, minimize and manage damage caused by extreme weather events. In addition, climate change adaptation (CCA) focuses

The purpose of this study is to assess the implicit effects of climate change on the food industry by measuring post and pre-linkage with the agricultural sector and to further investigate the effects of alterations in food components (agriculture and livestock) in two regional, agro-ecological zones, namely the Caspian Sea and Central Iran, under two scenarios of climate change (optimistic and pessimistic)

Climate extremes are one of the main drivers of acute food insecurity. In Guatemala, acute food insecurity reaches alarming levels when the usual dry period during the bimodal rainy seasons is extended or starts earlier than expected. Drought has a slow-onset which theoretically leaves sufficient lead-time for addressing impacts on food security. In practice, emergency response to drought is often

Seasonal climate variability frequently undermines farm yields, reduces food availability, and lowers income. This is particularly evident among small-scale agricultural producers in both irrigated and non-irrigated agroecosystems in the Global South where maize cultivars constitute a critical component of food production. In these systems, farmers make climate-sensitive decisions that include the

This article proposes overcoming the distinction between the effects of climate change and the effects linked to classical disaster hazards by considering Climate Change as global catastrophe. The theoretical approach to combining the two models has until now greatly emphasized the need for further research, but with poor results. Starting from a new conception of climate change as a catastrophe in

The combined effects of global warming and increasing urban heat islands (UHIs) on air temperature and heat stress in cities are notable physical and mental health implications for citizens. With research having shown the effective role of urban green spaces in decreasing urban heat, this study investigated the cooling effect of a large urban park on thermal comfort outside the park area, from psychological

Diverse and contested local interests and the complexity of climate change make adaptation to climate change risks at the coast challenging. Even in similar settings, adaptation experiences and prospects can differ markedly. Why? This paper provides empirical evidence of comparative adaptation experiences in two regions of Aotearoa-New Zealand - the Coromandel Peninsula and the Hawke’s Bay coast. We

Making climate-resilient planning and adaptation decisions is, in part, contingent on the use of climate information. Growing attention has been paid to the “usability gap” and the need to make information both useful and useable to decision-makers. Less attention has, however, been paid to the factors that determine whether, once created, useful and useable information is then actually used. In this

Climate change is expected to alter the structure and functions of an ecosystem including species composition and its geographical distribution. There is limited understanding on how the habitat of the Himalayan range-restricted species would be affected under the influence of climate change. In the present study, we model the climate change impacts on habitat suitability of western tragopan (Tragopan

Climate risks pose a particular set of challenges to electrical utilities, who must manage the direct impacts of climate and weather, as well as how related effects might propagate through networks of interconnected social and environmental risks. In this paper, we present a case study example of climate services development, co-produced between a regional electrical utility and researchers at the

We introduce the concept of Climate Risk Narratives (CRNs), their origin, and their evolution through a trans-disciplinary engaged research activity around urban climate resilience. While the use of narratives as a communication and engagement device is well established and similar concepts such as scenarios and storylines exist, we describe the learning and value that this specific formulation of

Drought indices are widely used for drought quantification. The objective of this study is to introduce a hybrid drought index, the Precipitation Evapotranspiration Difference Condition Index (PEDCI), and to compare its performance in Oklahoma to existing drought indices. The PEDCI is based on a simple water balance model, which accounts for the difference between water supply (precipitation) and water

Gender influences people’s behaviour in various ways. This study investigates gendered (im)mobility during cyclone strikes in Bangladesh. During such strikes people have described being unable to move away from environmentally high-risk locations and situations. The Q-based Discourse Analysis used by this study shows how and why gender-roles (im)mobilised people in three coastal locations during the

Climate change is dramatically shifting the way cities interpret and live with their local climate. This paper analyses how climate change is emerging as a matter of concern in the public spheres of Bergen, and interprets how this concern is affecting Bergen’s identity, with implications for the city’s climate risk governance. Historically, Bergen has a strong identity as Europe’s rainiest city, manifested

The IPCC states that climate change unequivocally impacts on various aspects of the natural and built environment, including our vital critical infrastructure systems (transport, energy, water/wastewater and communications). It is thus essential for countries to gain an understanding of critical infrastructure vulnerability to current and future climate-related threats, in order to develop effective

Climate change is expected to have adverse impacts and implications for a range of human-environment systems. However, our understanding of the extent to which these impacts may propagate as cascades, compounding to form multiple impacts across sectors, is limited. Cascades result from interdependencies between systems and sub-systems of coupled natural and socio-economic systems in response to changes

The National Coastal Property Model (NCPM) simulates flood damages resulting from sea level rise and storm surge along the contiguous U.S. coastline. The model also projects local-level investments in a set of adaptation measures under the assumption that these measures will be adopted when benefits exceed the costs over a 30-year period. However, it has been observed that individuals and communities

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge associated with the analysis of transdisciplinary research. We use a narrative centered approach, focusing on hybridity, sensemaking and the potential for transdisciplinary research to foster agency. When confronted with changes, people – as individuals – and local communities – as groups – make sense of them in the light of their own knowledge, beliefs

Three years ago, the autonomous citizen science project Meet je Stad (Measure your City) formed a community in Amersfoort that developed its own instruments to measure climatic change locally. Like many citizen science projects, this initiative faces challenges to being considered a legitimate and credible way of extending climate research, or as a source of robust information for local climate risk

Cities face increasing risks due to climate change, and many cities are actively working towards increasing their climate resilience. Climate change-induced risks and interventions to reduce these risks do not only impact urban risk management systems and infrastructures, but also people’s daily lives. In order to build public support for climate adaptation and resilience-building and stimulate collaboration

Since the impacts of climate change will be felt most directly through changes in water availability and water security, adequate tools are required to support water resources management decisions for the medium and long term. The Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) provides a pathway for more localized vulnerability assessments of water resources under climate change, while encompassing

In this introduction, we situate the topic of this Special Issue on ‘narratives of change’ in the scholarly literature about how we inform climate risk governance, including through climate services. We argue that many places experience a persistent mismatch between predominantly science-based and technical framings of climatic risk on the one hand, and the place-based understandings of climate extremes

After the Paris Agreement, the transition towards a carbon free society necessitates new forms of collaboration between climate science and society. In my article, I argue that the increasing participation of disciplines from the humanities represent a cultural turn in climate risk governance. At the example of my anthropological case study at the Northern German coastline, I show that the co-development

This article extends ecological framings of resilience into socio-ecological and governance domains for urban infrastructure managers concerned with climate risk. Under moments of disruption, reliable and equitable access to adequate provision of public goods is anticipated to be increasingly challenging in cities across the world due to observed and anticipated disruptions of climate change and variability

Increased frequency and intensity of flash floods and landslides in the Northern Mountainous Regions of Vietnam represent the most damaging hazards to the production activities and livelihoods of rural households, which are heavily reliant on agriculture. Assessing households’ vulnerability therefore becomes critical and urgent to help policy-makers in Vietnam in facilitating the implementation of

Though not a sufficient condition, the ability to reproduce key elements of climate variability over the historical record should be a minimum requirement for placing any confidence in a model’s climate forecasts or projections of climate change. When projections are used to guide practical adaptation, model evaluations should focus on the weather and climate events of interest to decision-makers,

Assessing flood risk using stationary flood frequency analysis techniques is commonplace. However, it is increasingly evident that the stationarity assumption of these analyses does not hold as anthropogenic climate change could shift a site’s hydroclimate beyond the range of historical behaviors. We employ nonstationary flood frequency models using the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution

The purpose of this perspective article is to provide a broader viewpoint on the contents of this special issue on ‘narratives of change’ and the role of narratives not only for climate risk governance, but also for the science-society nexus at the global and local scales. Narratives of change are ambiguous; they can be narratives of risk (the technoscientific version of danger) or they can be narratives

The paper assesses local adaptive capacity of rural households in three drought-prone districts of rural Sidama using Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance’s (ACCRA) Local Adaptive Capacity Framework (LACF). Randomly selected401 households were approached to collect relevant data on the state of local adaptive capacity. Additional qualitative data were gathered from key informant interviews and

Coastal areas in Bangladesh are at severe risk of inundation by sea-level rise (SLR). Effective adaptation plan requires information about extent and level of projected inundation, which is yet to be localized for Bangladeshi coasts. We used downscaled and bias-corrected temperatures from 28 global climate models to predict SLR around Bangladesh. Based on the extended semi-empirical approach to SLR

As the impact of climate change increases it is more likely that we will see an increase of extreme weather events leading to significant food production losses. Therefore, understanding the complexities of how production losses impact on policy (through export or import restrictions) and prices (through markets) is important for the governance of the global food system in the future. In this paper

Understanding the adaptive capacity (AC) of farmers is crucial to planning effective adaptation. Action to promote farmers’ AC is required because climate change (CC) is resulting in unpredictable alterations in weather patterns. Based on the sustainable livelihoods framework (SLF), this study explored how access to natural, physical, financial, social and human capitals enhances the AC. Quantitative

This paper advances scholarly debate on the contradictions of environmental risk management measures by analyzing the determinants of flood insurance coverage among a sample of 403 residents in New Orleans, a city undergoing rapid transformation due to post-Katrina rebuilding efforts and anthropogenic modifications of climate, hydrology, and ecology. The paper focuses on several predictors including

Scholarly understanding of an individual’s climate change risk perception in the African context, is limited, including amongst those who have an influence on policy making. This discussion paper goes some way towards filling this gap in understanding by providing preliminary findings on concern and the psychological distance of climate change amongst policy influencers in three southern African cities

Agriculture is facing multifaceted changes. Farmers are eventually the ones who will implement changes or not depending on their knowledge, experience, views and other motives. To gain some insight into farmers’ decision making and to identify possible hotspots that require knowledge sharing, encouragement and subsidies, a farmer survey was arranged. 38,091 invitations were sent covering 80% of Finnish

Despite the potential of weather index insurance as an innovative climate risk adaptation instrument for farmers in the developing world, there is a major barrier to its widespread uptake, namely “basis risk”. In this paper, we focus on the spatial dimension of basis risk by analysing rainfall patterns over three years at six villages of Vidarbha region in Maharashtra, India where low-cost automated

This paper investigated the role of local institutions in facilitating farm households’ response and adaptation to climate change impacts on their livelihood. A case study of adapting to drought events associated with crop failure in a Semi-Arid Ecosystems of northern Ghana was taken. A total of 49 semi-structured interviews with key representatives of various local institutions from different sectors

Climate change directly alters climate conditions and indirectly impacts land suitability for cultivating rubber. The Malaysian tropical rainforest climate with regular rainfall of about 2000–2500 mm per year and the average temperature of 26–28 °C provide a suitable condition for planting rubber commercially. There is doubt about how well rubber plants will perform in the future because of climate

This paper assesses farmers’ experiences with different climatic shocks as well as their ex-ante and ex-post coping strategies for climatic risks and shocks in rural Malawi. The paper is based on a comprehensive data set collected in 2013 from 1582 farm households located in three regions of Malawi (northern, central, and eastern). The study uses a bivariate probit model to examine the role of farm

Under pressure to ensure national food security, China’s rice sector needs to adapt to changing climatic conditions. By investigating the effect of farmer’s risk preferences, adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices and use of crop insurance on technical efficiency of rice production, this paper explores climate-smart agriculture as a strategy to cope with climate risk challenges. The empirical

Understanding and quantifying the effects of future climate change is currently one of the most pressing challenges in science and of high relevance for society. Most future climate change studies consider changes between arbitrary time periods. We specify these time periods by splitting climate-change impacted streamflow time series at instances of highest change, by using statistical tests. We used

The paper explores the extent to which NGO-led interventions on climate change adaptation over the years have developed the adaptive capacity of farmers in Ghana. Drawing on the experiences of farmers from the Savelugu Municipal Assembly in Ghana, the paper investigates whether the adaptation practices by NGOs are localized and sufficiently progressive to ensure sustainable adaptation. The study is

This article explores responses to one type of climate risk, severe water scarcity, during Cape Town’s drought from 2016 to mid-2018. Advancing our understanding of how societies can cope and develop despite disruptions, it considers how selected pathways shaped noteworthy response diversity to mitigate the impact and potential harms associated with the unprecedented drought. Enhancing capacity through

Global climate change may provide new opportunities for agricultural development at higher latitudes. High expectations for increasing cropping intensity have driven increases in crop production in northeastern and northern China. However, effectively utilizing the increased climate resources available at higher latitudes (due to longer growing seasons) remains controversial due to the increased risks

Hurricanes can be a major threat to electrical power systems, often resulting in costly repairs and lengthy restoration times. The Hurricane Outage Prediction Model (HOPM) predicts the location and number of outages for a major coastal Gulf of Mexico utility company up to 5 days before a hurricane makes landfall. This model can help electrical utilities to improve their resource allocations and potentially

Climate change may exacerbate the environmental damage due to coastal hazards and increase associated risks. This would result in degradation of coastal wetlands, especially in developing countries due to the lack of sufficient resilience to coastal hazards such as inundation and coastal erosion. Environmental damages will lead to a decrease in services provided by the coastal wetland ecosystems that

Index-based livestock insurance has been introduced in Borena zone of southern Ethiopia by the International Livestock Research Institute working in partnership with Oromia Insurance Company and humanitarian agencies since 2012 as an instrument to help protect pastoralists’ herders against drought related mortality of livestock. Despite the some positive success to the concerted efforts, the continued

Climate sensitive primary industries including pastoral farming, high-value horticulture and viticulture are central to Aotearoa-New Zealand’s economy. While advances have been made in understanding the impacts and implications of climate change critical knowledge gaps remain, particularly for adaptation. This study develops and applies a novel methodology to identify and characterise adaptation knowledge

Weather-based crop insurance is a powerful tool for stabilizing farmers’ income by providing timely payouts directly linked with weather parameters. However, its performance can be marred by faulty design, leading to high basis risk and insufficient payouts. This paper presents a new methodology for contract design for weather-based insurance, field tested in India. By combining agro-meteorological

The Western Cape region of South Africa is a key producing area for South African agriculture, with a strong dependence on austral winter rainfall. The past three years have, however, seen extensive drought impacting this region, with significant impacts on agriculture. In this article, we unpack how the drought unfolded, as well as possibilities in predicting winter rainfall. We consider how drought

Wheat is key global food crop that is heavily influenced by climatic variability. There has been extensive research on improving forecasts and management practices to minimise climate related yield losses, but less on how to handle yield losses caused by climate variability. We investigated whether index insurance could be used to manage climate related losses, specifically from winter rainfall drought

Vulnerability of agriculture to climate shocks and its consequences on farm livelihoods and food security is well recognized. Mainstreaming climate adaptation into policy landscape is a must for achieving the pathway to sustainable development. The approach envisages grass-root and climate perspectives to bring about developmental interventions for rural poor and small farm holders. Even though macro-level

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in 2016 adversely affected Vietnam particularly in the Mekong River Delta (MRD), where more than 90% of the country’s rice export is produced annually. During that time, salinity intrusion and drought significantly affected agricultural production in the area. Furthermore, flooding is another recurring event in the area that is increasing in frequency. An assessment

Protecting the UK’s capital city from global mean sea level rise that the IPCC considers plausible over the next centuries would require a combination of a new tidal barrier, high volume pumping and incremental raising of the system of flood walls and embankments. Using a risk and decision analysis methodology that is transferable to other vulnerable coastal cities of high strategic economic and political

Northern Australian agricultural industries are vulnerable to a highly variable climate. Year-to-year fluctuations in rainfall strongly affect pasture growth and increase the challenge of matching forage supply with stock numbers. A case study of climate drivers of pasture growth is conducted for the extensively-grazed cattle enterprises in the semi-arid tropics of north-eastern Australia. By assessing

Adoption of improved varieties is an important strategy to adapt to the negative implication associated with climate change and variability. However, incomplete data on varietal release and adoption is often the reality in many countries hindering informed decision-making on breeding and varietal dissemination strategies to effectively adapt to climate change. In taking the example of potatoes in India

The Yangtze River Basin in China is subject to high inter- and intra-annual variability in its rainfall, leading to challenges in flood protection and for the high-value agricultural activity and large urban populations and infrastructure along its banks. As part of the Climate Science for Services Partnership in China, Chinese and UK scientists, along with key decision makers in this region, are working