Agricultural systems in semi-arid regions are increasingly exposed to climate variability, yet the drivers of seasonal vulnerability remain insufficiently understood. This study examines whether perceived vulnerability during winter and summer cropping seasons is shaped by distinct mechanisms—climatic exposure during the wet season and adaptive capacity during the dry season. Using Morocco as a representative case for North African agriculture, we integrate long-term Earth observation indicators of environmental variability (precipitation, temperature, and NDVI) with survey data from 3,591 smallholder farmers and apply machine learning classification models evaluated under spatially explicit cross-validation. Model performance was benchmarked against multinomial logistic regression and majority-class baselines. While standard cross-validation yielded optimistic estimates, spatial cross-validation produced more conservative and policy-relevant results. Under spatial validation, Random Forest and XGBoost consistently outperformed simpler models, with macro F1 scores ranging from approximately 0.53 for overall vulnerability to over 0.70 for seasonal outcomes. Comparative experiments showed that survey-based predictors explain a larger share of perceived vulnerability than Earth observation indicators alone, while their combination provides complementary gains, particularly for winter vulnerability. Explainable model analysis revealed clear seasonal contrasts: winter vulnerability was dominated by hydroclimatic variability and soil moisture conditions, whereas summer vulnerability was more strongly shaped by adaptive capacity, including groundwater access, irrigation practices, and climate information use. The proposed framework offers a transferable approach for assessing climate vulnerability and informing targeted adaptation strategies in semi-arid farming systems.

Why do actors oppose the development and potential future use of solar geoengineering technologies? This article maps and analyzes growing opposition to the development of planetary-scale solar geoengineering technologies among three actor groups—governments, civil society and academics. While much social science research on such technologies has addressed questions of feasibility, acceptance, legality, the desirability of more research or hypothetical governance designs, hardly any empirical analyses exist of the opposition to these technologies. Drawing on numerous policy documents, civil society declarations and academic statements, this article identifies eight diverse rationales that underpin current opposition from governments, intergovernmental bodies, civil society and academic communities to solar geoenegineering. These rationales include concerns about risks and uncertainties of potential solar geoengineering schemes, their failure to address the root causes of climate change, risks of delaying mitigation, likely violations of international law, entrenchment of unjust power relations, presumed ungovernability, technological hubris, and the violation of the Earth’s integrity. Our analysis also finds evidence of cross-fertilization among these rationales and a gradual normalization of a global ‘non-use’ discourse. Overall, these critical perspectives increasingly shape the normative and political terrain within which solar geoengineering is being deliberated.

Consumer adoption of electrification technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps (HPs) is critical for mitigating climate change. While previous research has focused on demographic factors, incentives, and technology attributes, we do not yet understand how consumers’ ability to discern fact from fiction about these technologies relates to their adoption interest. In a preregistered study, we conducted an online national U.S. survey (n = 861) to investigate relationships between adoption interests and participants’ ability to discern true and false narrative statements about EVs and HPs. Our results show distinct consumer segments and reasons for technology adoption. We also find that adoption interest is not significantly associated with participants’ ability to discriminate accurate information about the technologies. Surprisingly, technology owners are less accurate than non-owners, being more likely to endorse false positive narrative statements and less likely to endorse correct negative narrative statements, regardless of technology. The disconnect between adoption and accuracy suggests that efforts to promote these technologies should focus beyond information provision to also address consumers’ biases. Politically liberal participants were biased toward positive statements, while politically conservative participants were biased toward negative statements about these technologies, again indicating confirmation bias. This bias is far stronger for EVs than HPs, given that HPs are broadly less familiar and less politically polarizing. Our work shows how participants systematically succumb to confirmation bias when navigating information which can dramatically shape adoption interest.

Agrifood systems are relevant contributors to climate change and additional ecological pressures like biodiversity loss, while also being affected by them. Recent disruptive events, such as the Covid-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine and the rise of climate extreme events, have revealed structural vulnerabilities that hinder the capacity of these systems to provide healthy and nutritious diets, particularly for the most vulnerable populations. As a result, household food security has become a focal research point in the Global North, leading to the emergence of diverse concepts and methodologies to capture the complexity underlying agrifood vulnerabilities and, in turn, food insecurity. While such concepts capture many complex dynamics, none of them provides a complete picture. This highlights the need for a framework that provides the full range of factors and interactions contributing to household food insecurity, with careful attention to contextualisation and intersectional approaches. Building on an exhaustive literature review, this paper proposes such an integrated framework and argues that household food insecurity emerges from overlapping and interconnected drivers stemming from multiple dimensions.