New challenges, old dilemmas?

The Nanchang Communication about the potential for implementation of conservation practices for climate change mitigation and adaptation to achieve food security in the 21st century

The role of the chief scientist (CS), a key administrative position in various Israeli ministries, is to fund policy‐oriented research and support evidence‐based decision‐making. Has the CS's role promoted or constrained incorporation of scientific advice regarding climate change adaptation into governmental policy? Have administrative traditions affected the adaptation planning process in Israel? Analysis of documents and 26 in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders sheds light on the ongoing climate change adaptation policy formulation process. Our study reveals that the CS of the Ministry of Environmental Protection functions as a bridge at different interfaces and can be characterized as a boundary worker between institutions. The inherent independence of this position facilitates the CS's ability to initiate, foster, and prioritize complex issues such as adaptation. Our findings further suggest that the perception that Israel has already adapted, or will easily adapt, has negatively affected the adaptation process. 科学建议和行政传统：首席科学家在气候变化适应工作中的作用 首席科学家是以色列各部门的一个关键行政职务, 其具体作用是为政策性研究提供资金, 并支持循证决策。对于有关气候变化适应的科学建议, 首席科学家的作用是促进还是限制了其被纳入到政府政策中？行政传统是否影响了以色列的气候适应规划进程？通过文件分析及与关键利益相关者的26次深入访谈, 笔者揭示了正在进行的适应气候变化政策的制定过程。研究表明, 环保部门的首席科学家在不同的层面上起着桥梁作用, 在不同机构的分界线上工作以彼此连接。该职位的内在独立性能促进首席科学家在发起问题、培养和优先考虑包括适应气候等复杂问题的能力。研究进一步表明, 以色列已经适应了或即将轻易适应某些观点, 而这已经对气候适应过程产生了负面影响。 Asesoria cientifica y tradiciones administrativas: el papel que juegan los cientificos principales en la adaptacion al cambio climatico El papel que juegan los cientificos principales, un puesto administrativo clave en varios ministerios israelies, esta especificamente designado para el financiamiento de investigacion orientada hacia la politica y el apoyo a decisiones basadas en evidencia. ?El papel que juegan los cientificos principales ha promovido o limitado la incorporacion de asesoria cientifica en lo que concierne a la adaptacion al cambio climatico dentro de las politicas del gobierno? ?Las tradiciones administrativas han afectado el proceso de planeacion para la adaptacion en Israel? El analisis de los documentos en 26 entrevistas exhaustivas con partes afectadas clave ilustra el proceso de formulacion de las politicas de adaptacion al cambio climatico actual. Nuestro estudio revela que el Cientifico Principal del Ministerio de Proteccion Ambiental funciona como un puente para diferentes interfaces y puede ser caracterizado como un trabajador limitrofe entre las instituciones. La independencia inherente de esta posicion facilita la habilidad del cientifico principal para iniciar, fomentar y darle prioridad a complejos problemas como la adaptacion. Nuestros hallazgos sugieren que la percepcion de Israel ya se ha adaptado, o se adaptara facilmente, y ha afectado negativamente el proceso de adaptacion.

Purpose- Cities and their residents are affected by climate change, the poor are more vulnerable to consequences of climate extremes and variability increases. Climate change mitigation and adaptation are challenges that face cities. City administration offices can contribute positively in mitigating climate change impact if workers have right perception. This study focus on determining the perception of Gondar City administration workers on climate change impact, organizational adaptation capacity and adaptation works. Factors associated with adaptation practices of climate change impact were also determined. Design/methodology/approach- A cross sectional study design was implemented among Gondar city administration workers. Findings - Majority of workers in City of Gondar administration offices were aware of climate change and its impact. Adaptation capacity of the city administration was relatively low; which results unavailability of adaptation plans and minimal works done on climate change adaptation. The study also revealed that adaptation capacity of Gondar city administration offices was associated with the practicality of adaptation activities within the city. Originality/value - This paper will be of value to city management and policy developers looking in to mainstream climate change adaptation in Ethiopia at City level. Key words : Awareness, Perception, Climate change adaptation, Adaptation capacity

Addressing climate change necessitates creating new, or building the capacity of old, institutions. Institutions are vital tools that determine the intensity by which climate change considerations are incorporated into the decision-making process, designs, and plans. This article aims to illustrate that it is necessary to understand the institutional environment where the CCA endeavors will be implemented such that local climate change adaptation (CCA) policies, plans, and programs can be implemented effectively. The paper also intends to demonstrate that, along with the scientific and technological discussions, institutional conversations should be among the initial vital steps in CCA planning, and that the institutional dimension should be the foundation of broader reforms toward an effective CCA implementation. The paper accomplished this by investigating the conditions in the local agriculture and CCA in the Philippines. The paper applied the Institutional Environment Matrix as the main analytical framework. The analysis showed that the existing institutional dynamics in the Philippines have impacted the effectiveness of the introduced CCA policies and efforts. The Local Government Code of the Philippines had counterproductive interplays with other institutional rules; first in agriculture, and afterwards, in CCA. The Code has devolved tasks to the local governments, provided local government units with extensive authority over their jurisdictions, and improved autonomy in local governance. However, it lacks the arrangements that would create (dis)incentives for individual and collective actions (i.e., rewards and penalties, payoffs on actions). Likewise, institutional mechanisms to support the devolution of government services are wanting. Such institutional environment in local governance has curtailed the effectiveness of local agricultural policies and the efficient implementation of new CCA policies. This article advocates that analyzing the institutional environment where the CCA endeavors will be implemented will enable policy makers and CCA planners to understand better and to have deeper perception of the interlinkages between and among institutional arrangements. In the case of the Philippines, if the local agricultural institutional environment was considered in the design and implementation of the CCA policies, institutional support mechanisms that can address the existing issues and concerns in local agriculture may have been incorporated into these policies. Such action may have helped implementers to avoid the same difficulties in operationalizing CCA initiatives. Accordingly, the paper analyzed how CCA is operationalized through an institutional lens, and presented how institutional analysis is important in policy making. It further demonstrated the complexity of institutional linkages and raised the conversation on the institutional dimension of CCA.

Ecosystem services based spatial planning decision making for adaptation to climate changes

Mind the gap in SEA: An institutional perspective on why assessment of synergies amongst climate change mitigation, adaptation and other policy areas are missing

Tradeoffs between climate change mitigation and adaptation policies are explored under both certainty and uncertainty with learning using a numerical two-period decision model. We first replicate a version of the Adaptation in DICE climate model (AD-DICE) (de Bruin et al., 2009), which modifies the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE) (Nordhaus and Boyer, 2000) to incorporate climate change adaptation explicitly into the traditional optimisation framework. Our model is then extended to include uncertainty over a probability distribution of expected Climate Sensitivity (CS) values and the implications for optimal mitigation and adaptation levels are then explored. In the certainty model runs, the results of previous studies that incorporated adaptation into the portfolio of climate change responses are largely confirmed. Modelling an uncertain CS with the same expected value as under certainty leads to several insights: before learning occurs, optimal levels of both mitigation and adaptation are lower under uncertainty than under certainty; in this same early period, optimal mitigation and adaptation levels are most sensitive to the respective cost of each strategy, with the mitigation level more dependent on adaptation costs than vice versa; variance in CS – a parameter with long-term effects – affects mitigation levels more than adaptation levels.

Cities are at the forefront of the battle against climate change. We are the source of approximately 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And as the climate changes, densely populated urban areas—particularly coastal cities—–will disproportionately feel the impacts. Those of us in local government recognize the importance of national and international leadership on climate change. But we are not waiting for others to act first. Under PlaNYC, New York City's comprehensive sustainability plan, most of our efforts have focused on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Initiatives including the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, which will increase energy efficiency of existing buildings, and retrofitting ferries to use cleaner fuel, will help us meet our goal of reducing the city's emissions by 30% by 2030. These actions alone, however, will not stop climate change. We already face climate risks today, including heat waves, blackouts, flooding, and coastal storms. With climate change these risks will only increase. To ensure that New York City is resilient to existing and future climate risks, we must take further action. Through a generous contribution from the Rockefeller Foundation, I convened the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), which gathered the leading climate change scientists, academics, and insurance, risk management and legal experts. These experts helped develop a framework and tools to assist the City create a risk-based response to climate change that is grounded in state-of-the-art science information. In February 2009, the NPCC released the most detailed climate risk information for any major city in the world; this volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences presents the NPCC's full findings. The NPCC climate change projections put numbers to what we already know: climate change is real and could have serious consequences for New York if we do not take action. I appreciate the hard work of the members of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. Through PlaNYC, the City will build on their work as we craft strategies to improve the city's resilience to climate. Building climate resilience can take many forms, including increasing our understanding of climate risks and vulnerabilities, hardening facilities and assets to prevent impacts, educating vulnerable populations about risks, and ensuring that we can quickly resume operations after weather events occur. In the coming months, the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, another PlaNYC initiative, will release a plan detailing how Task Force members will prepare the city's critical infrastructure for warmer temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels. Planning for climate change today is less expensive than rebuilding an entire network after a catastrophe. We simply can't wait to plan for the effects of climate change. The NPCC and Rockefeller Foundation's contributions to the City's climate resilience efforts will help ensure that we create a greener, greater New York for future generations. In 2008, Mayor Bloomberg established the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), with the mandate to provide New York City with the most up-to-date and comprehensive scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information about climate change and its impacts on the city and environs. Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response is the first report of the NPCC. The report will help New York City develop, adopt, and implement policies to adapt the city's critical infrastructure to the changing climate. This NPCC report outlines a powerful and novel framework for deploying sophisticated tools of risk management to address the city's climate adaptation challenges, and details with rigor and insight the critical challenges that climate change poses to New York City's energy, transportation, water, and communications systems. The report also presents a coordinated set of climate projections prepared by the NPCC to be used by the many public agencies and private-sector organizations that manage critical infrastructure in the region as they develop adaptation strategies, and it describes how legal and regulatory tools can support adaptation policies. The challenges facing the insurance industry and the use of insurance to reduce climate risks are also described at length. A final section sets forth the indicators and monitoring activities needed to inform Flexible Adaptation Pathways as the City and region move forward. The NPCC report is the product of the committed scientists and experts in the New York City region who served as authors, led by Co-chairs Cynthia Rosenzweig and William Solecki. The dedicated Science and Policy Team at the Columbia Earth Institute and the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities organized the process that has resulted in the production of this landmark report. It is becoming recognized throughout the world that cities have a crucial role to play in responding to climate change. The NPCC 2010 Report puts climate change adaptation in New York City in the broader national and international contexts and helps establish New York City as a thought and policy leader in this urgent endeavor. Climate Change Adaptation in New York City will be widely read around the world, both for its specific insights and also as a roadmap for other cities in preparing plans for climate change adaptation. The work of the NPCC is a pioneering activity for which all New Yorkers, and all others around the world who will benefit, should be most grateful. The Rockefeller Foundation also merits our gratitude for the generous support it has provided to this endeavor. Climate change will have a profound impact on New York City and its residents as it alters environmental baselines on which the urban infrastructure was built. Despite this, both the City and its stakeholders have a wide range of tools and resources with which to respond to the problem. Key insights in the following report derive from the highly integrated connections between science and public policy as they relate to climate change. The New York City Panel on Climate Change, for example, comprises a number of scientists and other technical experts capable of considering the issues at hand with a view to understanding the potential impacts of climate change and options for adaptation. The City University of New York is well placed to contribute to the multifaceted complex questions of climate change and how the city will be affected. This requires a multidisciplinary approach that can draw from the deep resources of the colleges that make up our institution. In addition, the New York City Panel on Climate Change had ongoing, continuous, and fruitful communication with the Mayor's Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, and the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. The collaborations brought forward in this document embody the culmination of a first step in a science–policy linkage that will be required to effectively address climate change in New York City. In addition, these collaborations show how great universities in a great city can link together to make a positive difference in the lives of its citizens.

Mapping Climate in the 21st Century

The climate challenges confronting agriculture are multiple, interconnected and multi-scaled. Agriculture is a source of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, but it is also vulnerable to climate change impacts. Adopting resilient approaches in the agricultural industry can help to contribute to both climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. Climate-smart agriculture has emerged as a solution to address the multiple challenges of climate change and food security by sustainably increasing productivity, enhancing resilience and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To date, there is limited scholarly evidence on what constitutes climate-smart agriculture, and how it is framed globally and practiced by smallholder farming communities. This research helps to bridge this gap by analysing the international discourse around climate-smart agriculture, and providing local empirical evidence derived from smallholder farming communities in the Philippines and Timor-Leste. At the broad level, this research aims to identify how climate-smart agriculture within community-based adaptation programs is contributing to the integration of mitigation and adaptation responses to climate change. Drawing from political ecology and climate change (adaptation and mitigation sciences) theories, the research explains how socio-institutional factors – inequality, unequal power relations and social injustice – influence climate-smart agriculture. The theoretical arguments are illustrated with empirical case studies of smallholder farmers and civil society organisations in the two case studies. Using mixed qualitative methods and descriptive analysis of over 150 semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation, the research examines climate-smart agriculture practices across three broad categories: vulnerability of smallholder farmers (socioeconomic factors), synergistic relationships (adaptation, mitigation and food security) and governance (socio-institutional determinants). This research argues that mitigation and adaptation interventions are climate-smart for smallholder farmers when they directly address local climate risks, support a combination of adaptation, food security and livelihood strategies, and empower at-risk and marginalised populations. Results indicate that climate-smart agriculture in the Philippines and Timor-Leste are characterised and influenced by multiple socio-institutional factors. The increasing burden of loss and damage as a result of extreme climate events subject women to migration, increased discrimination, loss of customary rights to land, resource poverty and food insecurity. In terms of farming practices implemented by smallholder farmers, most adaptation actions were found to have corresponding positive mitigation, food security and livelihood co-benefits. At the community level, climate-smart interventions are highly location-specific, technically rigorous, involve knowledge-intensive processes, and are influenced by the finance and capacities of local farming communities and implementing partners. Furthermore, of relevance at the global level, this research finds that there is a growing divide between how developed and developing countries frame solutions to the impacts of climate change on agriculture despite agriculture featuring prominently in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations. Such a divide is limiting the recognition of solutions that integrate mitigation and adaptation opportunities. The insights from the Philippines and Timor-Leste make a compelling case for joint adaptation and mitigation actions in the agriculture sector across three broad policy frontiers. First, implementation of climate-smart agriculture will require participatory platforms that have a focus on livelihood and income opportunities for smallholder farmers. Second, policies and institutions on agriculture, agrarian reform, land use and climate change should mainstream both adaptation and mitigation outcomes using local plans and community level programs. Third, partnerships with community-based organisations and local governments are pivotal to coordinating services with farmers, providing an array of agriculture and climate services generating new knowledge and implementing climate-smart farming solutions.

Climate change is an environmental justice issue because it is likely to cause disproportionate harm to low-income countries and low-income populations in higher-income countries. While climate change mitigation and adaptation policies may be able to minimize these harms, they could make them worse unless they are developed and implemented with an eye toward promoting justice and fairness. Those who view climate change as an environmental justice issue should be wary of endorsing policies that sound like they promote the cause of social and economic justice, but in fact do not. While climate change policies may help to mitigate the effects of climate change on poor people, there is no guarantee that they will be just at the local, national, or global level. Those who care about global climate justice must remain actively engaged in policy formation and implementation to ensure that justice does not get shortchanged in the response to global warming.

Learning from Tribal Innovations: Lessons in Climate Change Adaptation

Today, the growing global recognition of the critical connections between soil health and climate change is driving widespread acceptance of soil carbon sequestration as an integral component of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies and practices globally. This article provides a brief examination of the historical evolution of federal United States (US) policy on soil carbon sequestration, tracing its origins from twentieth-century soil conservation policies that sought to address soil erosion to today’s focus on nature-based climate solutions. This shift acknowledges climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ that continues to exacerbate land degradation and food insecurity globally. The article presents an overview of some of the major legislative initiatives and programs to date, including the landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Energy EarthShots™ initiatives to demonstrate how soil health has become central to US mitigation and adaptation strategies. Further, this analysis identifies major impediments to market-based soil carbon sequestration approaches and the risks of corporate greenwashing that could potentially undermine credibility of soil carbon sequestration as a component of nature-based climate change mitigation practices.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and customary rights are crucial elements in sustainable natural resource management, especially amidst the dynamics of global climate change. This study uses bibliometric methods to map scientific developments and legal frameworks governing the protection of customary rights and the use of TEK in the context of the environment and climate change. Data were collected from leading academic databases from 2000 to 2024 and analyzed using bibliometric software to identify publication trends, researcher collaborations, and dominant keywords. The results show a significant increase in international publications and collaborations, primarily focusing on integrating local wisdom in climate change adaptation and mitigation policies and strengthening the legal framework for customary rights. This study confirms that recognizing and protecting customary rights in environmental policies are critical for sustainability and social justice. The main contribution of this study is the presentation of a comprehensive picture of the scientific and legal landscape that can form the basis for developing climate adaptation policies based on customary rights.

Climate is one of the most important factors that influence and determine the behavior, abundance and distribution of species, as well as having a strong influence on the ecology of habitats and ecosystems structure. Changes in the behavior, abundance and distribution of species are linked to climate. Diversity and plant species are highly interlinked and the relationship between biodiversity and climate change should be explored from several perspectives. This variety provides the building blocks to adapt to changing environmental conditions which are caused due to climate change. Conserved habitats can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus helping to address climate change by storing carbon in the plant biomass. Climate is one of the major limiting factors which determine the survival and growth of plants. The conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services can play a key role in helping societies to adapt to climate change. Biodiversity is affected by climate change, but biodiversity, through the ecosystem services and function it supports, also makes an important contribution to both climate-change mitigation and adaptation. Maintenance of agro-biodiversity and carbon sequestration through the process of photosynthesis is the two important and complementary environmental services of agro-ecosystems. Climate change affects biodiversity and one of the causes of biodiversity loss. At the same time climate change will accelerate further if biodiversity and ecosystems are not effectively protected. Generally due to the variation of genetic makeup within pants, different plant species diversity plays a great role in climate change adaption and mitigation process.