Economic damage from climate change includes several aspects that need to be considered at the global and regional levels to achieve an equitable common solution to global warming. The economic literature reviewed here analyzes this issue under three general perspectives.
First, the analytical estimation of the linkages between damages in monetary terms and climate variables, as projections of temperature, precipitation, and frequency of extreme events, is rapidly evolving. Damage functions are included in complex economic models in order to calculate the economic impact of the climate change on economic output and growth, thus informing the debate on the amount of resources that should be devoted to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and limiting climate damages. The choice of the geographical aggregation in this respect is a crucial aspect to be considered if policy advice is to be formulated on the basis of model results. The higher the level of regional detail, the more reliable the results are in terms of geographical distribution of economic damages.
Second, the precise estimation of the costs associated with different damages caused by climate change is attracting growing interest. Climate costs present a wide range of heterogeneity for several reasons, such as the different formulation of the damage function adopted, the modeling design of the economic impact, the temporal horizon considered, and the differentiation across sectors. Two broad categories of analysis are relevant. The first refers to the choice of the sectoral dimension under investigation, where some studies cover multiple sectors and their interactions, while others analyze specific sectors in depth. The second classification criterion refers to the choice of the economic aspects estimated, where a strand of literature analyzes only market-based costs, while other analyses also include non-market (or intangible) damages. The most common sectors investigated are agriculture, forestry, health, energy, coastal zones and sea level rise, extreme events, tourism, ecosystems, industry, air quality, and catastrophic damages. Most studies consider market-based costs, while non-market impacts need to be better detailed in economic models.
Third, the computation of a single number through the analytical framework of the social costs of carbon (SCC) represents a key aspect of the process of adapting complex results in order to properly inform the political debate. SCC represents the marginal global damage cost of carbon emissions and can also be interpreted as the economic value of damages avoided for unitary GHG emission reduction. Several uncertainties still influence the robustness of the SCC analytical framework, such as the choice of the discount rate, which strongly influences the role of SCC in supporting or not mitigation action in the short term.
Although the debate on the economic damages arising from climate change is flourishing, several aspects still need to be investigated in order to build a common consensus within the scientific community as a necessary condition to properly inform the political debate and to facilitate the achievement of a long-term equitable global climate agreement.
Article
Anil Markandya, Elena Paglialunga, Valeria Costantini, and Giorgia Sforna
Article
Laura Pereira
Confidence in the projected impacts of climate change on agricultural systems has increased substantially since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. In Africa, much work has gone into downscaling global climate models to understand regional impacts, but there remains a dearth of local level understanding of impacts and communities’ capacity to adapt. It is well understood that Africa is vulnerable to climate change, not only because of its high exposure to climate change, but also because many African communities lack the capacity to respond or adapt to the impacts of climate change. Warming trends have already become evident across the continent, and it is likely that the continent’s 2000 mean annual temperature change will exceed +2°C by 2100. Added to this warming trend, changes in precipitation patterns are also of concern: Even if rainfall remains constant, due to increasing temperatures, existing water stress will be amplified, putting even more pressure on agricultural systems, especially in semiarid areas. In general, high temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns are likely to reduce cereal crop productivity, and new evidence is emerging that high-value perennial crops will also be negatively impacted by rising temperatures. Pressures from pests, weeds, and diseases are also expected to increase, with detrimental effects on crops and livestock.
Much of African agriculture’s vulnerability to climate change lies in the fact that its agricultural systems remain largely rain-fed and underdeveloped, as the majority of Africa’s farmers are small-scale farmers with few financial resources, limited access to infrastructure, and disparate access to information. At the same time, as these systems are highly reliant on their environment, and farmers are dependent on farming for their livelihoods, their diversity, context specificity, and the existence of generations of traditional knowledge offer elements of resilience in the face of climate change. Overall, however, the combination of climatic and nonclimatic drivers and stressors will exacerbate the vulnerability of Africa’s agricultural systems to climate change, but the impacts will not be universally felt. Climate change will impact farmers and their agricultural systems in different ways, and adapting to these impacts will need to be context-specific.
Current adaptation efforts on the continent are increasing across the continent, but it is expected that in the long term these will be insufficient in enabling communities to cope with the changes due to longer-term climate change. African famers are increasingly adopting a variety of conservation and agroecological practices such as agroforestry, contouring, terracing, mulching, and no-till. These practices have the twin benefits of lowering carbon emissions while adapting to climate change as well as broadening the sources of livelihoods for poor farmers, but there are constraints to their widespread adoption. These challenges vary from insecure land tenure to difficulties with knowledge-sharing.
While African agriculture faces exposure to climate change as well as broader socioeconomic and political challenges, many of its diverse agricultural systems remain resilient. As the continent with the highest population growth rate, rapid urbanization trends, and rising GDP in many countries, Africa’s agricultural systems will need to become adaptive to more than just climate change as the uncertainties of the 21st century unfold.
Article
Thomas Rudel
Forest transitions take place when trends over time in forest cover shift from deforestation to reforestation. These transitions are of immense interest to researchers because the shift from deforestation to reforestation brings with it a range of environmental benefits. The most important of these would be an increased volume of sequestered carbon, which if large enough would slow climate change. This anticipated atmospheric effect makes the circumstances surrounding forest transitions of immediate interest to policymakers in the climate change era. This encyclopedia entry outlines these circumstances. It begins by describing the socio-ecological foundations of the first forest transitions in western Europe. Then it discusses the evolution of the idea of a forest transition, from its introduction in 1990 to its latest iteration in 2019. This discussion describes the proliferation of different paths through the forest transition. The focus then shifts to a discussion of the primary driver of the 20th-century forest transitions, economic development, in its urbanizing, industrializing, and globalizing forms. The ecological dimension of the forest transition becomes the next focus of the discussion. It describes the worldwide redistribution of forests toward more upland settings. Climate change since 2000, with its more extreme ecological events in the form of storms and droughts, has obscured some ongoing forest transitions. The final segment of this entry focuses on the role of the state in forest transitions. States have become more proactive in managing forest transitions. This tendency became more marked after 2010 as governments have searched for ways to reduce carbon emissions or to offset emissions through more carbon sequestration. The forest transitions by promoting forest expansion would contribute additional carbon offsets to a nation’s carbon budget. For this reason, the era of climate change could also see an expansion in the number of promoted forest transitions.
Article
Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters
The Anthropocene hypothesis—that humans have impacted “the environment” but also changed the Earth’s geology—has spread widely through the sciences and humanities. This hypothesis is being currently tested to see whether the Anthropocene may become part of the Geological Time Scale. An Anthropocene Working Group has been established to assemble the evidence. The decision regarding formalization is likely to be taken in the next few years, by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that oversees the Geological Time Scale. Whichever way the decision goes, there will remain the reality of the phenomenon and the utility of the concept.
The evidence, as outlined here, rests upon a broad range of signatures reflecting humanity’s significant and increasing modification of Earth systems. These may be visible as markers in physical deposits in the form of the greatest expansion of novel minerals in the last 2.4 billion years of Earth history and development of ubiquitous materials, such as plastics, unique to the Anthropocene. The artefacts we produce to live as modern humans will form the technofossils of the future. Human-generated deposits now extend from our natural habitat on land into our oceans, transported at rates exceeding the sediment carried by rivers by an order of magnitude. That influence now extends increasingly underground in our quest for minerals, fuel, living space, and to develop transport and communication networks. These human trace fossils may be preserved over geological durations and the evolution of technology has created a new technosphere, yet to evolve into balance with other Earth systems.
The expression of the Anthropocene can be seen in sediments and glaciers in chemical markers. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by ~45 percent above pre–Industrial Revolution levels, mainly through combustion, over a few decades, of a geological carbon-store that took many millions of years to accumulate. Although this may ultimately drive climate change, average global temperature increases and resultant sea-level rises remain comparatively small, as yet. But the shift to isotopically lighter carbon locked into limestones and calcareous fossils will form a permanent record. Nitrogen and phosphorus contents in surface soils have approximately doubled through increased use of fertilizers to increase agricultural yields as the human population has also doubled in the last 50 years. Industrial metals, radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing, and complex organic compounds have been widely dispersed through the environment and become preserved in sediment and ice layers.
Despite radical changes to flora and fauna across the planet, the Earth still has most of its complement of biological species. However, current trends of habitat loss and predation may push the Earth into the sixth mass extinction event in the next few centuries. At present the dramatic changes relate to trans-global species invasions and population modification through agricultural development on land and contamination of coastal zones.
Considering the entire range of environmental signatures, it is clear that the global, large and rapid scale of change related to the mid-20th century is the most obvious level to consider as the start of the Anthropocene Epoch.
Article
Sarah E. Scales, Julia Massi, and Jennifer A. Horney
Climate change is affecting every region of the world and is accelerating at an alarming rate. International efforts for mitigating climate change, like the Paris Agreement, through reductions in greenhouse gases are vital for slowing the global increase in temperatures. However, these mitigation measures will not have immediate impact, so urgent action is needed to address negative impacts currently posed by climate change. Adaptation measures are central to this response now, and will continue to be critical for protecting human health as temperatures rise and climate-related disasters increase in both frequency and severity. To maximize the effectiveness of adaptation measures, the health impacts of disasters should be well-characterized at the global, regional, national, and local levels. Surveillance and early warning systems are vital tools for early identification and warning of hazards and their potential impacts. Increasing global capacity to identify causes of morbidity and mortality directly and indirectly attributable to disasters are in line with the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals and Bangkok Principles of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Both improving data collected in disaster settings and more effectively using that information in real time are central to reducing the human-health impacts of disasters. The human-health impacts of climate change and associated disasters are interrelated. Climate change and commensurate changes in environmental suitability, vector viability, and human migration strongly influence the prevalence and seasonality of infectious and communicable diseases. Both drought and flood contribute to food and water insecurity, leading to a higher prevalence of undernourishment and malnourishment, especially in children. Compromised nutritional status, in conjunction with resulting human migration, leave individuals immunocompromised and populations at a high risk for spread of infectious disease. Extreme heat exposure likewise compromises individuals’ ability to regulate their physiological response to external stressors. Disasters of all classifications can result in exposure to environmental hazards, decrease air quality, and negatively affect mental health. Accordingly, health adaptation measures to climate change must be equally interrelated, addressing needs across disciplines, at both individual and community levels, and incorporating the many facets of the health needs of affected populations.
Article
Jorge H. García and Thomas Sterner
Economists argue that carbon taxation (and more generally carbon pricing) is the single most powerful way to combat climate change. Since this is so controversial, we need to explain it better, and to be precise, the efficiency gains are largest when the costs of abatement are strongly heterogeneous. This is often—but not always—the case. When it is not, standards can fill much the same role.
To internalize the climate externality, economic efficiency calls for a global carbon tax (or price) that is equal to the global damage or the so-called social cost of carbon. However, equity considerations as well as existing geographical and sectoral differences in the effectiveness of carbon taxation at reducing emissions, suggest earlier implementation of relatively high taxation levels in some sectors or countries—for instance, among richer economies followed by a more gradual phase-in among low-income countries.
The number of national and subnational carbon pricing policies that have been implemented around the world during the first years following the Paris Agreement of 2015 is significant. By 2020, these programs covered 22% of global emissions with an average carbon price (weighted by the share of emissions covered) of USD15/tCO2 and a maximum price of USD120/tCO2. The share of emissions covered by carbon pricing as well as carbon prices themselves are expected to consistently rise throughout the decade 2021–2030 and beyond. Many experts agree that the social cost of carbon is in the range USD40–100/tCO2.
Anti-climate lobbying, public opposition, and lack of understanding of the instrument are among the key challenges faced by carbon taxation. Opportunities for further expansion of carbon taxation lie in increased climate awareness, the communicative resources governments have to help citizens understand the logic behind carbon taxation, and earmarking of carbon tax revenues to address issues that are important to the public such as fairness.
Article
Farnaz Pourzand and Ilan Noy
The effect of climate change on hydrology and water resources is possibly one of the most important current environmental challenges, and it will be important for the rest of the 21st century. Climate change is anticipated to intensify the hydrological cycle and to change the temporal and spatial distribution patterns of water resources. It is predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme hydrological events, such as heavy rainfall and floods, but in some locations also droughts. Water-related hazards occur due to complex interactions between atmospheric and hydrological systems. These events can then cause economic disasters, societal disturbances, and environmental impacts, which can pose a major threat to lives and livelihoods if they happen in places that are exposed and vulnerable to them. The economic impacts of extreme hydrological events can be separated into direct damage and indirect losses. Direct damage includes the damages to fixed assets and capital; losses of raw materials, crops, and extractable natural resources; and, most importantly, mortality, morbidity, and population displacement. All can be a direct consequence of the extreme hydrological event. Indirect losses are reductions in economic activity, particularly the production of goods and services—which will be greatly decreased after the disaster and because of it. Possibly the most damaging hydro-meteorological hazard, drought, is also the one that is least understood and the most difficult to quantify—even its onset is often difficult to identify. Drought is recognized as being associated with some of the most high-profile humanitarian disasters of past years, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, particularly those living in semi-arid and arid regions. Drought impacts depend on a set of weather parameters—high temperatures, low humidity, the timing of rain, and the intensity and duration of precipitation, as well as its onset and termination—and they depend on the population and assets and their vulnerabilities. While drought has wide-ranging effects on many economic sectors, the agricultural sector bears much of the impact, as it is very dependent on precipitation and evapotranspiration. Approximately 1.3 billion people rely on agriculture as their main source of income. In developing countries, the agriculture sector absorbs up to 80% of all direct damages from droughts. Droughts may be the biggest threat to food security and rural livelihoods globally, and they can increase local poverty, displace large numbers of people, and hinder the already fragile progress that has been made toward the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As such, understanding droughts’ impacts, identifying ways to prevent or ameliorate them, and preventing further deterioration in the climatic conditions and social vulnerabilities that are their root causes are all of utmost importance.
Article
The emergence of environment as a security imperative is something that could have been avoided. Early indications showed that if governments did not pay attention to critical environmental issues, these would move up the security agenda. As far back as the Club of Rome 1972 report, Limits to Growth, variables highlighted for policy makers included world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion, all of which impact how we live on this planet.
The term environmental security didn’t come into general use until the 2000s. It had its first substantive framing in 1977, with the Lester Brown Worldwatch Paper 14, “Redefining Security.” Brown argued that the traditional view of national security was based on the “assumption that the principal threat to security comes from other nations.” He went on to argue that future security “may now arise less from the relationship of nation to nation and more from the relationship between man to nature.”
Of the major documents to come out of the Earth Summit in 1992, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development is probably the first time governments have tried to frame environmental security. Principle 2 says: “States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national.”
In 1994, the UN Development Program defined Human Security into distinct categories, including:
• Economic security (assured and adequate basic incomes).
• Food security (physical and affordable access to food).
• Health security.
• Environmental security (access to safe water, clean air and non-degraded land).
By the time of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in 2002, water had begun to be identified as a security issue, first at the Rio+5 conference, and as a food security issue at the 1996 FAO Summit. In 2003, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan set up a High-Level Panel on “Threats, Challenges, and Change,” to help the UN prevent and remove threats to peace. It started to lay down new concepts on collective security, identifying six clusters for member states to consider. These included economic and social threats, such as poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation.
By 2007, health was being recognized as a part of the environmental security discourse, with World Health Day celebrating “International Health Security (IHS).” In particular, it looked at emerging diseases, economic stability, international crises, humanitarian emergencies, and chemical, radioactive, and biological terror threats. Environmental and climate changes have a growing impact on health. The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified climate security as a key challenge for the 21st century. This was followed up in 2009 by the UCL-Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change—linking health and climate change.
In the run-up to Rio+20 and the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, the issue of the climate-food-water-energy nexus, or rather, inter-linkages, between these issues was highlighted. The dialogue on environmental security has moved from a fringe discussion to being central to our political discourse—this is because of the lack of implementation of previous international agreements.
Article
Rhett B. Larson
Increased water variability is one of the most pressing challenges presented by global climate change. A warmer atmosphere will hold more water and will result in more frequent and more intense El Niño events. Domestic and international water rights regimes must adapt to the more extreme drought and flood cycles resulting from these phenomena.
Laws that allocate rights to water, both at the domestic level between water users and at the international level between nations sharing transboundary water sources, are frequently rigid governance systems ill-suited to adapt to a changing climate. Often, water laws allocate a fixed quantity of water for a certain type of use. At the domestic level, such rights may be considered legally protected private property rights or guaranteed human rights. At the international level, such water allocation regimes may also be dictated by human rights, as well as concerns for national sovereignty. These legal considerations may ossify water governance and inhibit water managers’ abilities to alter water allocations in response to changing water supplies. To respond to water variability arising from climate change, such laws must be reformed or reinterpreted to enhance their adaptive capacity. Such adaptation should consider both intra-generational equity and inter-generational equity.
One potential approach to reinterpreting such water rights regimes is a stronger emphasis on the public trust doctrine. In many nations, water is a public trust resource, owned by the state and held in trust for the benefit of all citizens. Rights to water under this doctrine are merely usufructuary—a right to make a limited use of a specified quantity of water subject to governmental approval. The recognition and enforcement of the fiduciary obligation of water governance institutions to equitably manage the resource, and characterization of water rights as usufructuary, could introduce needed adaptive capacity into domestic water allocation laws. The public trust doctrine has been influential even at the international level, and that influence could be enhanced by recognizing a comparable fiduciary obligation for inter-jurisdictional institutions governing international transboundary waters.
Legal reforms to facilitate water markets may also introduce greater adaptive capacity into otherwise rigid water allocation regimes. Water markets are frequently inefficient for several reasons, including lack of clarity in water rights, externalities inherent in a resource that ignores political boundaries, high transaction costs arising from differing economic and cultural valuations of water, and limited competition when water utilities are frequently natural monopolies. Legal reforms that clarify property rights in water, specify the minimum quantity, quality, and affordability of water to meet basic human needs and environmental flows, and mandate participatory and transparent water pricing and contracting could allow greater flexibility in water allocations through more efficient and equitable water markets.
Article
P.S. Goh, A.F. Ismail, and N. Hilal
Water scarcity as an outcome of global population expansion, climate change, and industrialization calls for new and innovative technologies to provide sustainable solutions to address this alarming issue. Seawater and brackish water are abundantly available on earth for drinking water and industrial use, and desalination is a promising approach to resolving this global challenge. Recently, the considerable reduction in the cost of desalination has contributed to the growing capacity for global desalination. The desalination technologies that have been deployed worldwide for clean water production can be categorized into two main types: membrane-based and thermal-based. Technological advancement in this field has focused on the reduction of capital and operating cost, particularly the energy consumption of the systems. Seawater and brackish desalination technologies are promising solutions for water shortages.
Article
Holly Morgan, Saran Sohi, and Simon Shackley
Biochar is a charcoal that is used to improve land rather than as a fuel. Biochar is produced from biomass, usually through the process of pyrolysis. Due to the molecular structure and strength of the chemical bonds, the carbon in biochar is in a stable form and not readily mineralized to CO2 (as is the fate of most of the carbon in biomass). Because the carbon in biochar derives (via photosynthesis) from atmospheric CO2, biochar has the potential to be a net negative carbon technology/carbon dioxide removal option. Biochar is not a single homogeneous material. Its composition and properties (including longevity) differ according to feedstock (source biomass), pyrolysis (production) conditions, and its intended application. This variety and heterogeneity have so far eluded an agreed methodology for calculating biochar’s carbon abatement.
Meta-analyses increasingly summarize the effects of biochar in pot and field trials. These results illuminate that biochar may have important agronomic benefits in poorer acidic tropical and subtropical soils, with one study indicating an average 25% yield increase across all trials. In temperate soils the impact is modest to trivial and the same study found no significant impact on crop yield arising from biochar amendment. There is much complexity in matching biochar to suitable soil-crop applications and this challenge has defied development of simple heuristics to enable implementation. Biochar has great potential as a carbon management technology and as a soil amendment. The lack of technically rigorous methodologies for measuring recalcitrant carbon limits development of the technology according to this specific purpose.
Article
Heather Williams
Worldwide, governments subsidize agriculture at the rate of approximately 1 billion dollars per day. This figure rises to about twice that when export and biofuels production subsidies and state financing for dams and river basin engineering are included. These policies guide land use in numerous ways, including growers’ choices of crop and buyers’ demand for commodities. The three types of state subsidies that shape land use and the environment are land settlement programs, price and income supports, and energy and emissions initiatives. Together these subsidies have created perennial surpluses in global stores of cereal grains, cotton, and dairy, with production increases outstripping population growth. Subsidies to land settlement, to crop prices, and to processing and refining of cereals and fiber, therefore, can be shown to have independent and largely deleterious effect on soil fertility, fresh water supplies, biodiversity, and atmospheric carbon.
Article
David I. Stern
The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between environmental degradation and GDP per capita. In the early stages of economic growth, pollution emissions and other human impacts on the environment increase, but beyond some level of GDP per capita (which varies for different indicators), the trend reverses, so that at high income levels, economic growth leads to environmental improvement. This implies that environmental impacts or emissions per capita are an inverted U-shaped function of GDP per capita. The EKC has been the dominant approach among economists to modeling ambient pollution concentrations and aggregate emissions since Grossman and Krueger introduced it in 1991 and is even found in introductory economics textbooks. Despite this, the EKC was criticized almost from the start on statistical and policy grounds, and debate continues. While concentrations and also emissions of some local pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, have clearly declined in developed countries in recent decades, evidence for other pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, is much weaker. Initially, many understood the EKC to imply that environmental problems might be due to a lack of sufficient economic development, rather than the reverse, as was conventionally thought. This alarmed others because a simplistic policy prescription based on this idea, while perhaps addressing some issues like deforestation or local air pollution, could exacerbate environmental problems like climate change. Additionally, many of the econometric studies that supported the EKC were found to be statistically fragile. Some more recent research integrates the EKC with alternative approaches and finds that the relation between environmental impacts and development is subtler than the simple picture painted by the EKC. This research shows that usually, growth in the scale of the economy increases environmental impacts, all else held constant. However, the impact of growth might decline as countries get richer, and richer countries are likely to make more rapid progress in reducing environmental impacts. Finally, there is often convergence among countries, so that countries that have relatively high levels of impacts reduce them more quickly or increase them more slowly, all else held constant.
Article
Celia McMichael
Global environmental change amplifies and creates pressures that shape human migration. In the 21st century, there has been increasing focus on the complexities of migration and environmental change, including forecasts of the potential scale and pace of so-called environmental migration, identification of geographic sites of vulnerability, policy implications, and the intersections of environmental change with other drivers of human migration. Migration is increasingly viewed as an adaptive response to climatic and environmental change, particularly in terms of livelihood vulnerability and risk diversification. Yet the adaptive potential of migration will be defined in part by health outcomes for migrating populations. There has been limited examination, however, of the health consequences of migration related to environmental change.
Migration related to environmental change includes diverse types of mobility, including internal migration to urban areas, cross-border migration, forced displacement following environmental disaster, and planned relocation—migration into sites of environmental vulnerability; much-debated links between environmental change, conflict, and migration; immobile or “trapped” populations; and displacement due to climate change mitigation and decarbonization action. Although health benefits of migration may accrue, such as increased access to health services or migration away from sites of physical risk, migration—particularly irregular (undocumented) migration and forced displacement—can amplify vulnerabilities and present risks to health and well-being. For diverse migratory pathways, there is the need to anticipate, respond to, and ameliorate population health burdens among migrants.
Article
Rachel N. McInnes
Allergenic pollen is produced by the flowers of a number of trees, grasses, and weeds found throughout the world. Human exposure to such pollen grains can exacerbate pollen-related asthma and allergenic conditions such as allergic rhinitis (hay fever). While allergenic pollen comes from three main groups of plants—certain trees, grasses, and weeds—many people are sensitive to pollen from one or a few taxa only. Weather, climate, and environmental conditions have a significant impact on the levels and varieties of pollen grains present in the air. These allergenic conditions significantly reduce the quality of life of affected individuals and have been shown to have a major economic impact.
Pollen production depends on both the current meteorological conditions (including day length, temperature, irradiation, precipitation, and wind speed/direction), and the water availability and other environmental and meteorological conditions experienced in the previous year. The climate affects the types of vegetation and taxa that can grow in a particular location through availability of different habitats. Land-use or land management is also crucial, and so this field of study has implications for vegetation management practices and policy.
Given the influential effects of weather and climate on pollen, and the significant health impacts globally, the total effect of any future environmental and climatic changes on aeroallergen production and spread will be significant. The overall impact of climate change on pollen production and spread remains highly uncertain, and there is a need for further understanding of pollen-related health impact information. There are a number of ways air quality interacts with the impact of pollen. Further understanding of the risks of co-exposure to both pollen and air pollutants is needed to better inform public health policy. Furthermore, thunderstorms have been linked to asthma epidemics, especially during the grass pollen seasons. It is thought that allergenic pollen plays a role in this “thunderstorm asthma.”
To reduce the exposure to, or impact from, pollen grains in the air, a number of adaptation and mitigation options may be adopted. Many of these would need to be done either through policy changes, or at a local or regional level, although some can be done by individuals to minimize their exposure to pollen they are sensitive to. Improved aeroallergen forecast models could be developed to provide detailed taxon-specific, localized information to the public. One challenge will be combining the many different sources of aeroallergen data that are likely to become available in future into numerical forecast systems. Examples of these potential inputs are automated observations of aeroallergens, real-time phenological observations and remote sensing of vegetation, social sensing, DNA analysis of specific aeroallergens, and data from symptom trackers or personal monitors. All of these have the potential to improve the forecasts and information available to the public.
Article
James B. London
Coastal zone management (CZM) has evolved since the enactment of the U.S. Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, which was the first comprehensive program of its type. The newer iteration of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), as applied to the European Union (2000, 2002), establishes priorities and a comprehensive strategy framework. While coastal management was established in large part to address issues of both development and resource protection in the coastal zone, conditions have changed. Accelerated rates of sea level rise (SLR) as well as continued rapid development along the coasts have increased vulnerability. The article examines changing conditions over time and the role of CZM and ICZM in addressing increased climate related vulnerabilities along the coast.
The article argues that effective adaptation strategies will require a sound information base and an institutional framework that appropriately addresses the risk of development in the coastal zone. The information base has improved through recent advances in technology and geospatial data quality. Critical for decision-makers will be sound information to identify vulnerabilities, formulate options, and assess the viability of a set of adaptation alternatives. The institutional framework must include the political will to act decisively and send the right signals to encourage responsible development patterns. At the same time, as communities are likely to bear higher costs for adaptation, it is important that they are given appropriate tools to effectively weigh alternatives, including the cost avoidance associated with corrective action. Adaptation strategies must be pro-active and anticipatory. Failure to act strategically will be fiscally irresponsible.
Article
Tamara Shapiro Ledley, Juliette Rooney-Varga, and Frank Niepold
The scientific community has made the urgent need to mitigate climate change clear and, with the ratification of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international community has formally accepted ambitious mitigation goals. However, a wide gap remains between the aspirational emissions reduction goals of the Paris Agreement and the real-world pledges and actions of nations that are party to it. Closing that emissions gap can only be achieved if a similarly wide gap between scientific and societal understanding of climate change is also closed.
Several fundamental aspects of climate change make clear both the need for education and the opportunity it offers. First, addressing climate change will require action at all levels of society, including individuals, organizations, businesses, local, state, and national governments, and international bodies. It cannot be addressed by a few individuals with privileged access to information, but rather requires transfer of knowledge, both intellectually and affectively, to decision-makers and their constituents at all levels. Second, education is needed because, in the case of climate change, learning from experience is learning too late. The delay between decisions that cause climate change and their full societal impact can range from decades to millennia. As a result, learning from education, rather than experience, is necessary to avoid those impacts.
Climate change and sustainability represent complex, dynamic systems that demand a systems thinking approach. Systems thinking takes a holistic, long-term perspective that focuses on relationships between interacting parts, and how those relationships generate behavior over time. System dynamics includes formal mapping and modeling of systems, to improve understanding of the behavior of complex systems as well as how they respond to human or other interventions. Systems approaches are increasingly seen as critical to climate change education, as the human and natural systems involved in climate change epitomize a complex, dynamic problem that crosses disciplines and societal sectors.
A systems thinking approach can also be used to examine the potential for education to serve as a vehicle for societal change. In particular, education can enable society to benefit from climate change science by transferring scientific knowledge across societal sectors. Education plays a central role in several processes that can accelerate social change and climate change mitigation. Effective climate change education increases the number of informed and engaged citizens, building social will or pressure to shape policy, and building a workforce for a low-carbon economy. Indeed, several climate change education efforts to date have delivered gains in climate and energy knowledge, affect, and/or motivation. However, society still faces challenges in coordinating initiatives across audiences, managing and leveraging resources, and making effective investments at a scale that is commensurate with the climate change challenge. Education is needed to promote informed decision-making at all levels of society.
Article
Aijun Ding, Xin Huang, and Congbin Fu
Air pollution is one of the grand environmental challenges in developing countries, especially those with high population density like China. High concentrations of primary and secondary trace gases and particulate matter (PM) are frequently observed in the industrialized and urbanized regions, causing negative effects on the health of humans, plants, and the ecosystem.
Meteorological conditions are among the most important factors influencing day-to-day air quality. Synoptic weather and boundary layer dynamics control the dispersion capacity and transport of air pollutants, while the main meteorological parameters, such as air temperature, radiation, and relative humidity, influence the chemical transformation of secondary air pollutants at the same time. Intense air pollution, especially high concentration of radiatively important aerosols, can substantially influence meteorological parameters, boundary layer dynamics, synoptic weather, and even regional climate through their strong radiative effects.
As one of the main monsoon regions, with the most intense human activities in the world, East Asia is a region experiencing complex air pollution, with sources from anthropogenic fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, dust storms, and biogenic emissions. A mixture of these different plumes can cause substantial two-way interactions and feedbacks in the formation of air pollutants under various weather conditions. Improving the understanding of such interactions needs more field measurements using integrated multiprocess measurement platforms, as well as more efforts in developing numerical models, especially for those with online coupled processes. All these efforts are very important for policymaking from the perspectives of environmental protection and mitigation of climate change.
Article
Juha Merilä and Ary A. Hoffmann
Changing climatic conditions have both direct and indirect influences on abiotic and biotic processes and represent a potent source of novel selection pressures for adaptive evolution. In addition, climate change can impact evolution by altering patterns of hybridization, changing population size, and altering patterns of gene flow in landscapes. Given that scientific evidence for rapid evolutionary adaptation to spatial variation in abiotic and biotic environmental conditions—analogous to that seen in changes brought by climate change—is ubiquitous, ongoing climate change is expected to have large and widespread evolutionary impacts on wild populations. However, phenotypic plasticity, migration, and various kinds of genetic and ecological constraints can preclude organisms from evolving much in response to climate change, and generalizations about the rate and magnitude of expected responses are difficult to make for a number of reasons.
First, the study of microevolutionary responses to climate change is a young field of investigation. While interest in evolutionary impacts of climate change goes back to early macroevolutionary (paleontological) studies focused on prehistoric climate changes, microevolutionary studies started only in the late 1980s. The discipline gained real momentum in the 2000s after the concept of climate change became of interest to the general public and funding organizations. As such, no general conclusions have yet emerged. Second, the complexity of biotic changes triggered by novel climatic conditions renders predictions about patterns and strength of natural selection difficult. Third, predictions are complicated also because the expression of genetic variability in traits of ecological importance varies with environmental conditions, affecting expected responses to climate-mediated selection.
There are now several examples where organisms have evolved in response to selection pressures associated with climate change, including changes in the timing of life history events and in the ability to tolerate abiotic and biotic stresses arising from climate change. However, there are also many examples where expected selection responses have not been detected. This may be partly explainable by methodological difficulties involved with detecting genetic changes, but also by various processes constraining evolution.
There are concerns that the rates of environmental changes are too fast to allow many, especially large and long-lived, organisms to maintain adaptedness. Theoretical studies suggest that maximal sustainable rates of evolutionary change are on the order of 0.1 haldanes (i.e., phenotypic standard deviations per generation) or less, whereas the rates expected under current climate change projections will often require faster adaptation. Hence, widespread maladaptation and extinctions are expected. These concerns are compounded by the expectation that the amount of genetic variation harbored by populations and available for selection will be reduced by habitat destruction and fragmentation caused by human activities, although in some cases this may be countered by hybridization. Rates of adaptation will also depend on patterns of gene flow and the steepness of climatic gradients. Theoretical studies also suggest that phenotypic plasticity (i.e., nongenetic phenotypic changes) can affect evolutionary genetic changes, but relevant empirical evidence is still scarce. While all of these factors point to a high level of uncertainty around evolutionary changes, it is nevertheless important to consider evolutionary resilience in enhancing the ability of organisms to adapt to climate change.
Article
Enuvie G. Akpokodje
Deltas have played a significant role in the growth of human civilization because of their unique economic and ecological importance. However, deltas are becoming increasingly vulnerable because of the impact of intensive human developmental activities, high population and urban growth, subsidence, climate change, and the associated rise in sea level. The trapping of sediments by dams is another major threat to the long-term stability and sustainability of deltas. The emergence and global acceptance of the concept of sustainable development in the 1980s led to the advent of several multidisciplinary and applied fields of research, including environmental science, environmental geology, and sustainability science. Environmental geology focuses on the application of geologic knowledge and principles to broad-ranging environmental and socioeconomic issues, including the specific problems confronting deltas. The key environmental geologic challenges in deltas (especially urban delta areas) are: increasing exposure and vulnerability to geologic hazards (flooding, cyclones, etc.), rise in sea level, decreasing sediment load supply, contamination of soil and water resources, provision of adequate drinking water, and safe waste disposal. The application of geologic knowledge and principles to these challenges requires consideration of the critical geologic controls, such as the geological history, stratigraphy, depositional environment, and the properties of the alluvial sediments. Until recently, most of the traditional engineered solutions in the management of deltas were designed to keep out water (fighting nature), typically without adequate geological/hydrological input, rather than building with nature. Recent innovative approaches to delta management involve a paradigm shift from the traditional approach to a more integrated, holistic, adaptive, and ecologically based philosophy that incorporates some critical geological and hydrological perspectives, for instance, widening and deepening rivers and flood plains as well as constructing secondary channels (i.e., making more room for water). A key challenge, however, is the establishment of a close and functional communication between environmental geologists and all other stakeholders involved in delta management. In addition, there is growing global consensus regarding the need for international cooperation that cuts across disciplines, sectors, and regions in addressing the challenges facing deltas. Integrating good policy and governance is also essential.
