Global Climate Forum

We use the concept of material beliefs to integrate self-interest into the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), providing new insights into collaboration between actors with material and purposive beliefs and transitions between subsystem types. Focusing on policy regarding the 1.6 million tons of sea-dumped munitions from the Second World War in German seas, which pose significant environmental and safety challenges, we applied a qualitative mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with desk reviews. Our findings reveal that material beliefs, such as financial profit and political power, initially sustained policy stasis within a unitary subsystem. A decade later, material beliefs enabled policy change, when aligned with purposive beliefs like environmental protection and long-term societal benefits. Contrary to the ACF hypothesis that purposive actors are more constrained in expressing beliefs, we find that both actor types are more constrained when expressing beliefs of their belief type and more flexible when expressing beliefs of the other. We demonstrate that entrepreneurs leveraged the differing incentives, rooted in actors’ deep core beliefs, to align policy core beliefs and foster collaboration. The alignment reflected asymmetric policy learning: material coalitions revised their policy core beliefs in response to shifting opportunities, while the purposive coalition adjusted secondary beliefs, suggesting greater stability but lower flexibility. Our findings challenge the ACF assumption that collaborative subsystems develop only when opposing coalitions collaborate with each other. We demonstrate an alternative theoretical pathway, in which collaboration emerges through the dissolution of one coalition, the participation of new actors, and the alignment of beliefs across coalitions.

Meteorological and climatological trends are surely changing the way urban infrastructure systems need to be operated and maintained. Urban road traffic fluctuates more significantly under the interference of strong wind–rain weather, especially during tropical cyclones. Deep learning-based methods have significantly improved the accuracy of traffic prediction under extreme weather, but their robustness still has much room for improvement. As the frequency of extreme weather events increases due to climate change, accurately predicting spatiotemporal patterns of urban road traffic is crucial for a resilient transportation system. The compounding effects of the hazards, environments, and urban road network determine the spatiotemporal distribution of urban road traffic during an extreme weather event. In this paper, a novel Knowledge-driven Attribute-Augmented Attention Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (KA3STGCN) framework is proposed to predict urban road traffic under compound hazards. We design a disaster-knowledge attribute-augmented unit to enhance the model’s ability to perceive real-time hazard intensity and road vulnerability. The attribute-augmented unit includes the dynamic hazard attributes and static environment attributes besides the road traffic information. In addition, we improve feature extraction by combining Graph Convolutional Network, Gated Recurrent Unit, and the attention mechanism. A real-world dataset in Shenzhen City, China, was employed to validate the proposed framework. The findings show that the prediction accuracy of traffic speed can be significantly increased by 12.16%~31.67% with disaster information supplemented, and the framework performs robustly on different road vulnerabilities and hazard intensities. The framework can be migrated to other regions and disaster scenarios in order to strengthen city resilience.

We critically analyzed the "Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock" (DD), a document promoting animal farming, and its implications for public discourse and policy. Our analysis reveals that the DD is scientifically problematic, particularly in its neglect of issues such as meat overconsumption in high-income countries and the dominance of industrial animal production, thereby downplaying associated risks and harms. We also show that the DD’s authors essentially suggest that societies should simply rely on technological progress to fix any “challenges” associated with the sector, a suggestion that aligns with the authors’ private interests. We identify several academically questionable practices, including denial of credentials to dissenting actors, omission of significant conflicts of interest, and excessive self-edition and self-citation, all while purporting to provide a scientific and balanced overview. Relatedly, we bring into view conflicts of interests of the Irish semi-state authority Teagasc, which hosted a DD-related summit, and of Animal Frontiers and the animal production science associations behind it, which published a special issue edited by the DD’s authors containing the DD. We explore potential responsibilities by these organizations, the DD’s authors, and Nature Food, which published a follow-up correspondence by two of the DD’s authors. Our perspective contributes to the growing literature exposing the influence of the meat industry on science and its representation in public discourse. We discuss broader policy measures to mitigate and counteract this influence.

The European Green Transition requires massive financing efforts, with estimates of EUR 620bn EUR annually, and the headwinds are substantial. Central banks seem overstretched and busy tightening to combat inflation; treasuries are subject to austerity-inducing fiscal rules; and banking systems are afflicted by non-performing loans, fragmentation, and risk aversion. We employ the Monetary Architecture framework to analyze the EU’s monetary and financial system as a constantly evolving hierarchical web of interlocking balance sheets and study its capacity to find “elasticity space” to meet the financing challenge. To this end, we draw on a four-step scheme for Green macro-financial governance along the financial cycle of balance sheet expansion, funding, and final contraction. We find that, first, Europe’s monetary architecture still has ample elasticity space to provide a green initial expansion due to its developed ecosystem of national, subnational, and supranational off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies. Second, as mechanisms to consciously organize the distribution of long-term debt instruments across different segments are absent, its capacity to provide long-term funding is limited. Third, institutional transformation in the last two decades has greatly improved the capacity of the European monetary architecture to counteract financial instability by providing emergency elasticity. Fourth, the capacity of the European monetary architecture to manage a final contraction of balance sheets is limited, which is a general quandary in modern credit money systems. Our analysis points to the need for further investigations into techniques for monetary architectures to manage long-term funding and balance sheet contractions.

Coping with the threats posed by multiple negative Earth tipping points calls for large coordinated actions conducive to creating long-lasting positive synergies between human and biophysical systems. Boundary concepts, engaging narratives and aspirational visions play a crucial role in coordinating the kinds of deliberate transformations needed to address global existential challenges. The regenerative sustainability paradigm offers an enabling cognitive and discursive capacity to integrate the insights from social and natural sciences so net-positive tipping points towards a safe and just space for humanity can better be operationalised, coordinated and enacted within and across multiple kinds of social-ecological systems.

Present days and future coastal flooding is a key concern for Europe due to sea-level rise, storm surges and the importance of infrastructure at risk in low-lying areas. To support adaptation, information on future risks such as people exposed and economic damages are required. The CoCliCo project aims to contribute responding to this need by informing users about coastal risks via an open-source web platform. This platform aspires to improve decision-making on coastal risk management and adaptation in Europe. Here, we present the methods used in CoCliCo to compute risks and provide early results of risk calculations at the European scale. The results take the form of costs calculated for different flooding scenarios on different infrastructures (residential buildings, roads...) as a function of flood water levels. Flood water levels are determined for each infrastructure based on flood modelling. Then, using vulnerability curves, a damage associated with the type of infrastructure as a function of the water level is assigned. The damage ratio then is used to calculate the cost of flooding. Coastal risk can also be presented in social terms, by assessing the number of people potentially affected by flooding. The results are illustrated for two case studies: Dieppe and Hyère in France using detailed flood modelling and complemented by preliminary results for Europe. Our results are compared results from with previous studies. Finally, flood risk projections will be presented for several return periods at different scales and for different integrated scenarios considering climate change and associated socio-economic pathways as well as different adaptation options. These results will be made available on the CoCliCo platform.