Communicating the impacts of climate change and possible adaptive responses is a relatively recent branch of the larger endeavor of climate change communication. This recent emergence, in large part, is driven by the fact that the impacts and policy/planning/practice responses have only recently emerged in more widespread public consciousness and discourse, and thus in scholarly treatment. This article will first describe the critical and precarious moment of when impacts and adaptation communication becomes important; it will then summarize proposed approaches to do so effectively; and discuss key challenges confronting climate change communication going forward. These challenges may well be unique in the field of communication, in that they either uniquely combine previously encountered difficulties into novel complexities or are truly unprecedented. To date, scholarship and experience in climate, environmental, or risk communication provide little guidance on how to meet these challenges of communicating effectively with diverse publics and decision makers in the face of long-term degradation of the life support system of humanity. The article will conclude with an attempt to offer research and practice directions, fit at least to serve as appropriately humble attitudes toward understanding and engaging fellow humans around the profound risks of an utterly uncertain and far-from-assured future.
Article
Communicating Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience
Susanne C. Moser
Article
The Great Green Wall in the Sahel
Cheikh Mbow
For several decades, the Sahelian countries have been facing continuing rainfall shortages, which, coupled with anthropogenic factors, have severely disrupted the great ecological balance, leading the area in an inexorable process of desertification and land degradation. The Sahel faces a persistent problem of climate change with high rainfall variability and frequent droughts, and this is one of the major drivers of population’s vulnerability in the region. Communities struggle against severe land degradation processes and live in an unprecedented loss of productivity that hampers their livelihoods and puts them among the populations in the world that are the most vulnerable to climatic change. In response to severe land degradation, 11 countries of the Sahel agreed to work together to address the policy, investment, and institutional barriers to establishing a land-restoration program that addresses climate change and land degradation. The program is called the Pan-Africa Initiative for the Great Green Wall (GGW). The initiative aims at helping to halt desertification and land degradation in the Sahelian zone, improving the lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the area and helping its populations to develop effective adaptation strategies and responses through the use of tree-based development programs. To make the GGW initiative successful, member countries have established a coordinated and integrated effort from the government level to local scales and engaged with many stakeholders. Planning, decision-making, and actions on the ground is guided by participation and engagement, informed by policy-relevant knowledge to address the set of scalable land-restoration practices, and address drivers of land use change in various human-environmental contexts. In many countries, activities specific to achieving the GGW objectives have been initiated in the last five years.
Article
Regional Technological Adaptation of Coast and Climate With a Focus on the North Sea
Jürgen Jensen, Felix Soltau, and Ivan D. Haigh
Coastal zones are the most densely populated areas in the world and are vulnerable to extreme meteorological events like hurricanes, storm surges, tsunamis and climate change–induced sea level rise. Coasts are subject to constant change because of anthropogenic and natural variations in sea level, currents and wind waves, sediment supply, and so forth. The building of coastal defense and protection measures has also resulted in significant anthropogenic changes to the coast. Coasts are also affected by economic uses, including tourism, industrial activities (e.g., offshore wind farms), shipping, and fishing in coastal waters. This article discusses the regional technological adaptation of the coast, with a focus on the North Sea. The coastlines around the North Sea are, in many places, low lying, densely populated, and vulnerable to variations in sea level and coastal change. Worldwide, developments of coasts have been closely linked to climatic changes as mean sea level has increased and decreased over thousands of years. Around 2,000 years ago, people started to build the first coastal protection measures around the North Sea. A lot of different protection measures were developed, including dwelling mounds, groynes, dikes, polders, beach nourishment, and storm surge barriers. Land reclamation and storm surges shaped the Wadden Sea coast dramatically in the past. Globally, coasts and corresponding technological coastal adaptation measures are very diverse. Contrasting the previous technological “hard” coastal protection measures, in the 21st century nature-based solutions have become more attractive and are starting to be implemented more widely. Their natural contribution to coastal protection also provides an ecosystem service.
