Bridging science and community knowledge? The complicating role of natural variability in perceptions of climate change

Although the spatial and temporal scales on which climate varies is a prominent aspect of climate research in the natural sciences, its treatment in the social sciences remains relatively underdeveloped. The result is limited understanding of the public's capacity to perceive climate variability as distinct from change, and uncertainty surrounding how and when to best communicate information on variability/change. Ignoring variability in favour of change-focused analyses and language risks significant misrepresentation of public perception and knowledge, and precludes detailed synthesis of data from the social and natural sciences. An example is presented based on a regional comparison of variability-dominated climate observations and change-focused survey data, collected in western Newfoundland (Canada). This region experiences pronounced, slow-varying natural variability, which acted to obscure broader climate trends through the 1980s and 1990s; since the late 1990s, the same variability has amplified apparent change. While survey results confirm residents perceive regional climate change, it is not clear whether respondents distinguish variability from change. This presents uncertainty in the best approach to climate science communication in this region, and raises concern that subsequent variability-driven transient cooling will erode public support for climate action. Parallels are drawn between these regional concerns and similar uncertainty surrounding treatment of variability in discussion of global temperature trends, highlighting variability perception as a significant gap in human dimensions of climate change research.     

Public microblogging on climate change: One year of Twitter worldwide

Public perceptions of climate change are traditionally measured through surveys. The exploding popularity of social networks, however, presents a new opportunity to research the spatiotemporal pattern of public discourse in relation to natural and/or socio-economic events. Among the social networks, Twitter is one of the largest microblogging services. The architecture of Twitter makes the question “what's happening?” the cornerstone of information exchange. This inspired the notion of using Twitter users as distributed sensors, which has been successfully employed in both the natural and social sciences. In 2012 and 2013, we collected 1.8 million tweets on “climate change” and “global warming” in five major languages (English, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish). We discuss the geography of tweeting, weekly and daily patterns, major news events that affected tweeting on climate change, changes in the central topics of discussion over time, the most authoritative traditional media, blogging, and the most authoritative organizational sources of information on climate change referenced by Twitter users in different countries. We anticipate that social network mining will become a major source of data in the public discourse on climate change.     

气候变化影响中国粮食安全研究的新思路北大核心CSCD

鉴于气候变化影响粮食安全问题的特殊性和复杂性,本文试图从自然科学和社会科学的交叉研究入手,提出一种新的研究的思路和方法,即:运用计量经济学模型对气候变化数据进行统计分析,使用计量经济学方法来评估气候这一外部驱动因素引发的社会经济系统变化与观测到的气候变化引发的社会经济系统变化之间的关系;在厘清“气候变化影响量”对粮食产量的影响的基础上,预估我国未来30年特别是经济社会发展两个关键节点2035年和2050年的粮食生产的气候变化风险,文章给出了一种新的研究视角,构建了研究内容和研究方法,力争实现定性研究与定量研究相结合,以科学预测为政策指导提供有力支撑。     

适应性治理与气候变化：内蒙古草原案例分析与对策探讨

适应性治理通过边学边做,针对各地方的社会经济条件、自然生态系统、地方知识文化等基本特征,基于一个动态、自下而上和自组织的过程不断测试和修正制度安排与知识体系,形成一个旨在解决实际问题的循环过程。通过内蒙古3个地区案例的对比分析研究,基于对其气候变化风险和社会脆弱性的评估,发现其在气候变化影响下形成的不同程度的社会脆弱性正是源于不同的草原利用机制和基于此的社会合作机制。正是因为3个案例地的牧民有着不同的社会资本和社会记忆,所以他们面对极端天气导致的自然灾害时,采取了不同的应对方式,有的牧户可以依赖于社会资本移动牲畜来渡过难关,有的牧户则可以在嘎查范围内重启社会记忆,通过合理安排草场利用和移动牲畜提高自身的抗灾能力,而有的牧户则只能通过买草料独立抗灾。这样不同的结果有力证明了适应性治理在提升这些地区气候变化应对能力方面的必要性和可行性。在地区层面引入适应性治理,可以满足各利益相关方的需求,有利于自然、社会及管理的多学科协同,与“未来地球计划”的协同设计、协同实施和协同推广理念不谋而合,是“未来地球”思想在气候变化适应研究中的实践。     

The politics and policy of carbon capture and storage: Framing an emergent technology

Over the past decade carbon capture and storage (CCS) has attracted increasing international attention as a climate change mitigation option and moved into the center of climate policy debates and negotiations. This special issue of Global Environmental Change brings together leading scholars to analyze the politics, policy and regulation of CCS in cross-country comparisons as well as in a global context. The aim is to contribute on two fronts: first, by applying concepts, theories and methodologies from the social and policy sciences, to elucidate how societies are engaging with CCS as a mitigation option; and secondly, to point toward a future research agenda which, while exploring basic aspects of technology development as situated in a social context, would also be aligned with the needs of the climate and environmental policy community. The contributions address at least one of three inter-related research areas; CCS and the emergence of long-term climate and energy strategies; regulation, policy instruments and public acceptance; and international politics and CCS in developing countries.     

Operationalizing longitudinal approaches to climate change vulnerability assessment

The past decade has seen a proliferation of community-scale climate change vulnerability assessments globally. Much of this work has employed frameworks informed by scholarship in the vulnerability field, which draws upon interviews with community members to identify and characterize climatic risks and adaptive responses. This scholarship has developed a baseline understanding of vulnerability in specific places and industries at particular times. However, given the dynamic nature of vulnerability new methodologies are needed to generate insights on how climate change is experienced and responded to over time. Longitudinal approaches have long been used in sociology and the health sciences to capture the dynamism of human processes, but their penetration into vulnerability research has been limited. In this article, we describe the application of two longitudinal approaches, cohort and trend studies, in climate change vulnerability assessment by analyzing three case studies from the Arctic where the authors applied these approaches. These case studies highlight how longitudinal approaches can be operationalized to capture the dynamism of vulnerability by identifying climate anomalies and trends, and how adaptations develop over time, including insights on themes such as social learning and adaptive pathways.     

Citizens, consumers and sustainability: (Re)Framing environmental practice in an age of climate change

Recent moves by national and local policy makers have sought to encourage individuals to engage in a wide range of pro-environmental practices to address both discrete environmental problems and major, global challenges such as climate change. The major framing device for these developments is the notion of ‘citizen–consumers’, which positions individual ecological responsibilities alongside consumer choice logics in a Neo-liberal socio-economic framework. In the environmental social sciences, there have been recent moves to interpret the citizen–consumer through adopting a social practices approach, which advances the notion that in understanding environmental commitments, a deeper appreciation of underlying norms, values, identity politics and consumption is required to uncover the complex processes that lead to environmental practices in specific contexts. This paper argues that whilst these approaches have considerable utility in tracing the normalisation of established and discrete environmental practices in particular contexts, the issue of climate change represents an independent and over-arching discursive conflict between new and embedded practices that challenges the ability of citizen–consumers to act as agents for change. Accordingly, the data presented in this paper suggest that climate change can be seen as an unsettling and dynamic issue that generates discursive conflict in its own right around fundamental issues of knowledge, responsibility, scale and place. The paper therefore argues that a new and more critical perspective is required within environmental social science to understand (conflicting) discourses of sustainable living between the ‘passive’ normalisation of conventional environmental practice and the ‘contested’ ambiguities of climate change.     

气候变化影响下我国农业经济评价问题探讨

年代际的全球变化预测及其区域适应 ,是一个属于自然科学和社会科学相互交叉领域的问题。作者将全球气候变化研究与经济学研究结合起来进行探索性思考 ,提出了气候变化与人类经济活动相互关系的研究领域中 4个有待探讨的问题 ,并重点针对其中气候变化对我国农业的影响 ,及气候变化影响下我国农业经济评价问题进行了探讨 ,同时初步讨论了经济评估的验证问题。     

Institutions,climate change and cultural theory: towards a common analytical framework

Institutions are the multitude of means for holding society together, for giving it a sense of purpose and for enabling it to adapt. Institutions help to define climate change both as a problem and a context, through such socialised devices as the use of scientific knowledge, culturally defined interpretation of scientific findings, and politically tolerable adaptation strategies. This paper briefly reviews the origins and current status of the ‘new’ institutional theories that have recently developed within the social sciences. The conclusion is that they are based on such contradictory interpretations of human behaviour that, although appealing, a complete synthesis will never be possible. In effect, there is a fundamental institutional ‘failure’ over the interpretation and resolution of climate change. Cultural theory helps to explain why this is the case by throwing light on the inherent contradictions that beset us all when confronted with global warming.     

Physical and economic bias in climate change research: a scientometric study of IPCC Third Assessment Report

This study demonstrates that IPCC Third Assessment Report is strongly dominated by Natural sciences, especially the Earth sciences. The Social sciences are dominated by Economics. The IPCC assessment also results in the separation of the Earth, Biological and Social sciences. The integration that occurs is mainly between closely related scientific fields. The research community consequently imposes a physical and economic bias and a separation of scientific fields that the IPCC reproduces in the policy sphere. It is argued that this physical and economic bias distorts a comprehensive understanding of climate change and that the weak integration of scientific fields hinders climate change from being fully addressed as an integral environmental and social problem. If climate change is to be understood, evaluated and responded to in its fullness, the IPCC must broaden its knowledge base and challenge the anthropocentric worldview that places humans outside of nature.     

中国气候与环境演变评估(I):中国气候与环境变化及未来趋势

近百年来,全球气候正经历着一次以变暖为主要特征的显著变化,全球气候与环境的重大变化对中国的气候与环境演变也产生了重大影响。来自气候、环境、海洋和经济社会科学等领域的百余位专家和学者对中国气候与环境的演变及其对自然生态系统和社会经济部门的影响进行了评估,在此基础上,提出了适应和减缓气候变化的对策。本文主要阐述在全球气候变化背景下中国气候与环境的演变,并对未来气候变化的趋势做出了预测。     

中国气候与环境演变评估（Ⅰ）：中国气候与环境变化及未来趋势

近百年来,全球气候正经历着一次以变暖为主要特征的显著变化,全球气候与环境的重大变化对中国的气候与环境演变也产生了重大影响。来自气候、环境、海洋和经济社会科学等领域的百余位专家和学者对中国气候与环境的演变及其对自然生态系统和社会经济部门的影响进行了评估,在此基础上,提出了适应和减缓气候变化的对策。本文主要阐述在全球气候变化背景下中国气候与环境的演变,并对未来气候变化的趋势做出了预测。     

Social capital,trust, and adaptation to climate change: Evidence from rural Ethiopia

Climate change is expected to have particularly severe effects on poor agrarian populations. Rural households in developing countries adapt to the risks and impacts of climate change both individually and collectively. Empirical research has shown that access to capital—financial, human, physical, and social—is critical for building resilience and fostering adaptation to environmental stresses. Little attention, however, has been paid to how social capital generally might facilitate adaptation through trust and cooperation, particularly among rural households and communities. This paper addresses the question of how social capital affects adaptation to climate change by rural households by focusing on the relationship of household and collective adaptation behaviors. A mixed-methods approach allows us to better account for the complexity of social institutions—at the household, community, and government levels—which drive climate adaptation outcomes. We use data from interviews, household surveys, and field experiments conducted in 20 communities with 400 households in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Our results suggest that qualitative measures of trust predict contributions to public goods, a result that is consistent with the theorized role of social capital in collective action. Yet qualitative trust is negatively related to private household-level adaptation behaviors, which raises the possibility that social capital may, paradoxically, be detrimental to private adaptation. Policymakers should account for the potential difference in public and private adaptation behaviors in relation to trust and social capital when designing interventions for climate adaptation.     

Amplification or suppression: Social networks and the climate change—migration association in rural Mexico

Increasing rates of climate migration may be of economic and national concern to sending and destination countries. It has been argued that social networks—the ties connecting an origin and destination—may operate as “migration corridors” with the potential to strongly facilitate climate change-related migration. This study investigates whether social networks at the household and community levels amplify or suppress the impact of climate change on international migration from rural Mexico. A novel set of 15 climate change indices was generated based on daily temperature and precipitation data for 214 weather stations across Mexico. Employing geostatistical interpolation techniques, the climate change values were linked to 68 rural municipalities for which sociodemographic data and detailed migration histories were available from the Mexican Migration Project. Multi-level discrete-time event-history models were used to investigate the effect of climate change on international migration between 1986 and 1999. At the household level, the effect of social networks was approximated by comparing the first to the last move, assuming that through the first move a household establishes internal social capital. At the community level, the impact of social capital was explored through interactions with a measure of the proportion of adults with migration experience. The results show that rather than amplifying, social capital may suppress the sensitivity of migration to climate triggers, suggesting that social networks could facilitate climate change adaptation in place.     

Engagement,involvement and empowerment: Three realms of a coproduction framework for climate services

While knowledge coproduction between climate scientists and climate information users has become a common theme in the climate services discourse, the interface between climate service providers and users is an aspect of climate services projects that still calls for more attention. This is due in part to the dominance of the physical sciences in these projects, as well as the prevalence of an instrumental and narrow interpretation of coproduction. Following up on the World Meteorological Organisation’s Guidance on Good Practices for Climate Services User Engagement, and incorporating insights from the social and human sciences, we develop a coproduction framework for climate services to help establish a smooth and effective interface between scientists and stakeholders. This framework is intended for research and innovation projects developing climate knowledge and services. The coproduction framework comprises three realms: (i) engagement using various communication channels; (ii) involvement through interviews, workshops and webinars; and (iii) empowerment of stakeholders and scientists through focused relationships. This incremental participatory process involves stakeholders in increasingly profound ways: from a broad stakeholder group identified through awareness-raising campaigns, on to potential users with whom we exchange knowledge, and then to a set of “champion users” who co-develop the service and pioneer its use in decision-making processes. This paper illustrates the application of the coproduction framework in PRIMAVERA, an EU H2020-funded project for designing, running and testing new high-resolution global climate models and evaluating their outputs. While PRIMAVERA provided ground breaking scientific findings that could potentially benefit various stakeholders and support climate risk assessment activities, these results are highly specialised and their added value has yet to be assessed. Accordingly, the user engagement component of the project faced the challenging task of both motivating stakeholders’ participation in the project and motivating future users of potential services based on PRIMAVERA data. The trial of the framework in PRIMAVERA provided key lessons for enhancing coproduction in research and innovation projects. We demonstrate how the role of scientists gradually shifted in this coproduction cycle from masters of knowledge(Roux et al., 2017) to co-learners, and how the involvement of the project’s interdisciplinary team and their interaction with stakeholders served to move the project towards transdisciplinary knowledge production.     

‘Telling a different tale’: literary, historical and meteorological readings of a Norfolk heatwave

Articulated initially by physical scientists, the idea of anthropogenic global climate change has been subject to increasingly diverse examinations in recent years. The idea has been appropriated by economists, worked with by engineers and, more recently, scrutinised by social scientists and humanities scholars. Underlying these examinations are different, yet rarely exposed, presumptions about what kind of ??thing?? climate is: a physical abstraction, a statistical construct, an imaginative idea. If the ontological status of climate is rarely made explicit it becomes difficult to know whether the different epistemologies used to reveal climates ?? and their changing properties ?? are appropriate. This study offers one way in which the different worlds inhabited by the idea of climate may be revealed. It does so by examining a heatwave: a powerful meteorological phenomenon one would think and one which scientific accounts of climate change tell us will become more frequent in the future. The heatwave in question occurred in July 1900 in the county of Norfolk, England. This heatwave inhabits three very different worlds: the imaginative world of L P Hartley in his novel The Go Between; the historical world of late Victorian Norfolk; and the digital world of the climate sciences. The traces of the heatwave left in these different worlds are varied and access to them is uneven. Constructing an adequate interpretation of this singular climatic event and its meaning is challenging. The study suggests that grasping the idea of climate may be harder than we think. Climates may be ineffable. Yet the approach to the study of climate illustrated here opens up new ways of thinking about the meaning and significance of climate change.     

将适应气候变化纳入国土空间规划：进展、困境与思路

空间规划是适应气候变化的重要政策工具之一,将适应气候变化目标纳入空间规划已经成为国际主流政策。中国适应气候变化的空间规划仍面临诸多问题和挑战,包括气候适应目标和理念薄弱、气候变化风险评估与空间规划尺度不匹配、适应和减缓策略的协同机制欠缺、技术标准和法律法规不完善等。文章结合国家适应气候变化战略和国土空间规划体系重构的目标要求,研究提出适应气候变化导向的国土空间规划框架体系和技术思路,以及将适应气候变化纳入空间规划编制审批、技术标准、实施监督以及法规政策等各个环节的思路与建议,以期通过空间规划的编制与监督实施促进适应气候变化目标的实现。     

大学生气候变化意识的一次调查——以南京农业大学为例

 大学气候变化教育是国家应对气候变化能力建设的重要组成部分。通过一个自主设计的问卷,随机抽样调查了南京农业大学部分在校本科生,评价和分析了其对气候变化问题的认识水平、应对行动态度与行动的意愿性等。结果表明,被调查者在气候变化与农业的关系上有较高的认知,但在气候变化意识的不同方面和年级间及专业间都存在一定差异。农学类学生对于温室气体的产生途径及其与气候变化的关系了解不够,不过,高年级学生和农科类学生关于气候变化与农业关系方面的认知分别显著高于低年级和文科类学生。然而,学生个体间在应对气候变化的参与态度上有很大差异,而气候变化的总体意识和参与态度与年级关系相对较弱。看来,高等农业院校本科教育中急需加强气候变化教育。建议开设气候变化及其应对的公共选修课或专门气候变化管理课程,以适应应对气候变化的人才培养需求。     

Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma

Trade unions are actively engaging with the climate change agenda and formulating climate change policies. Although governments are placing considerable effort on changing consumer behaviour, arguably the most significant impacts on climate change will be through changes in production. Even changes in consumption will have consequences for production. Changes in production will affect workers through the loss of jobs, the changing of jobs, and the creation of new jobs. The jobs versus environment dilemma is a significant issue affecting workers worldwide. In this paper we focus on the ways in which international trade unions are conceptualising the relationship between jobs and the environment, which provide the point of departure from which climate change policies can be formulated. Extended interviews were conducted with senior policy makers in national and international trade unions. On the basis of their responses, four discourses of trade union engagement with climate change are discussed: ‘technological fix’, ‘social transformation’, ‘mutual interests’ and ‘social movement’, which are theorised in the context of the different international histories and models of trade unionism. All discourses imply a re-invention of unions as social movements but do not see nature as a partner in human development.