Investigating the correlation between monthly average temperatures and tithe proxy data from the Low Countries

The likely intensification of extreme droughts from climate change in many regions across the United States has increased interest amongst researchers and water managers to understand not only the magnitude of drought impacts and their consequences on water resources, but also what they can do to prevent, respond to, and adapt to these impacts. Building and mobilizing ‘adaptive capacity’ can help in this pursuit. Researchers anticipate that drought preparedness measures will increase adaptive capacity, but there has been minimal testing of this and other assumptions about the governance and institutional determinants of adaptive capacity. This paper draws from recent extreme droughts in Arizona and Georgia to empirically assess adaptive capacity across spatial and temporal scales. It combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify a handful of heuristics for increasing adaptive capacity of water management to extreme droughts and climate change, and also highlights potential tradeoffs in building and mobilizing adaptive capacity across space and time.     

Sustainability transformations: socio-political shocks as opportunities for governance transitions

Faced with accelerating environmental challenges, research on social-ecological systems is increasingly focused on the need for transformative change towards sustainable stewardship of natural resources. This paper analyses the potential of rapid, large-scale socio-political change as a window of opportunity for transformative change of natural resources governance. We hypothesize that shocks at higher levels of social organization may open up opportunities for transformation of social-ecological systems into new pathways of development. However, opportunities need to be carefully navigated otherwise transformations may stall or lead the social-ecological system in undesirable directions. We investigate (i) under which circumstances socio-political change has been used by actors as a window of opportunity for initiating transformation towards sustainable natural resource governance, (ii) how the different levels of the systems (landscape, regime and niche) interact to pave the way for initiating such transformations and (iii) which key features (cognitive, structural and agency-related) get mobilized for transformation. This is achieved through analyzing natural resource governance regimes of countries that have been subject to rapid, large-scale political change: water governance in South Africa and Uzbekistan and governance of coastal fisheries in Chile. In South Africa the political and economic change of the end of the apartheid regime resulted in a transformation of the water governance regime while in Uzbekistan after the breakdown of the Soviet Union change both at the economic and political scales and within the water governance regime remained superficial. In Chile the democratization process after the Pinochet era was used to transform the governance of coastal fisheries. The paper concludes with important insight on key capacities needed to navigate transformation towards biosphere stewardship. The study also contributes to a more nuanced view on the relationship between collapse and renewal.     

Unpacking governance: Building adaptive capacity to climate change of river basins in Brazil

Governance and institutions are critical determinants of adaptive capacity and resilience. Yet the make-up and relationships between governance components and mechanisms that may or may not contribute to adaptive capacity remain relatively unexplored empirically. This paper builds on previous research focusing on integrated water resources management in Brazil to ‘unpack’ water governance mechanisms that may shape the adaptive capacity of water systems to climatic change. We construct a river basin index to characterize governance approaches in 18 Brazilian river basins, apply a reliability test to assess the validity of these governance indicators, and use in-depth qualitative data collected in a subsample of the basins to explore the relationship between the governance indicators and adaptive capacity. The analysis suggests a positive relationship between integrated water governance mechanisms and adaptive capacity. In addition, we carry out a cluster analysis to group the basins into types of governance approaches and further unveil potential relationships between the governance variables and overall adaptive capacities. The cluster analysis indicates that tensions and tradeoffs may exist between some of the variables, especially with equality of decision making and knowledge availability; a finding that has implications for decision makers aiming to build adaptive capacity and resilience through governance and institutional means.     

National-level factors affecting planned,public adaptation to health impacts of climate change

Our understanding of whether adaptive capacity on a national level is being translated into adaptation policies, programs, and projects is limited. Focusing on health adaptation in Annex I Parties to the UNFCCC, we examine whether statistically significant relationships exist between regulatory, institutional, financial, and normative aspects of national-level adaptive capacity and systematically measured adaptation. Specifically, we (i) quantify adaptation actions in Annex I nations, (ii) identify potential factors that might impact progress on adaptation and select measures for these factors, and (iii) calculate statistical relationships between factors and adaptation actions across countries. Statistically significant relationships are found between progress on adaptation and engagement in international environmental governance, national environmental governance, perception of corruption in the public sector, population size, and national wealth, as well as between responsiveness to health vulnerabilities, population size and national wealth. This analysis contributes two key early empirical findings to the growing literature concerning factors facilitating or constraining adaptation. While country size and wealth are necessary for driving higher levels of adaptation, they may be insufficient in the absence of policy commitments to environmental governance. Furthermore, governance and/or incentive frameworks for environmental governance at the national level may be an important indicator of the strength of national commitments to addressing health impacts of climate change.     

Institutional design propositions for the governance of adaptation to climate change in the water sector

This paper provides an evidence-based contribution to understanding processes of climate change adaptation in water governance systems in the Netherlands, Australia and South Africa. It builds upon the work of Ostrom on institutional design principles for local common pool resources systems. We argue that for dealing with complexities and uncertainties related to climate change impacts (e.g. increased frequency and intensity of floods or droughts) additional or adjusted institutional design propositions are necessary that facilitate learning processes. This is especially the case for dealing with complex, cross-boundary and large-scale resource systems, such as river basins and delta areas in the Netherlands and South Africa or groundwater systems in Western Australia. In this paper we provide empirical support for a set of eight refined and extended institutional design propositions for the governance of adaptation to climate change in the water sector. Together they capture structural, agency and learning dimensions of the adaptation challenge and they provide a strong initial framework to explore key institutional issues in the governance of adaptation to climate change. These institutional design propositions support a “management as learning” approach to dealing with complexity and uncertainty. They do not specify blueprints, but encourage adaptation tuned to the specific features of local geography, ecology, economies and cultures.     

Harnessing scientific and local knowledge to face climate change in small-scale fisheries

Small-scale fisheries in developing regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change, but the assessment of climate-induced changes and impacts are often hampered by the data poor-situation of these social-ecological systems. Based on 40 years of scientific and local ecological knowledge, we provide a coherent narrative about the effects of a marine hotspot of climate change on a small-scale fishery across different geographical and temporal scales. We applied a mixed-methods approach to assess biophysical changes, social-ecological impacts, and the incremental spectrum of actions implemented at multiple levels to increase the adaptive capacity of a small-scale clam fishery. The warming hotspot here analyzed was the fastest-warming region in the South Atlantic Ocean. Long-term changes in wind intensity and direction were also noticeable at a regional scale. Both sea surface temperature and winds showed a clear shifting pattern in the late 1990 s. These climate-related stressors determined ecosystem and targeted population changes (e.g. clam mass mortalities, slow stock recovery rates after ecological shocks, habitat narrowing), and favored harmful algal bloom-forming organisms. Climate-induced drivers also affected the human component of the social-ecological system, preventing fishers from securing a fulltime livelihood and limiting the fishery economic potential. Adaptive responses at multiple levels provided some capacity to address climate change effects, and transformative pathways are being taken to adapt to climate-induced changes over the long-term. Transformative changes were fostered by the local perception of environmental change, shared narratives, sustained scientific monitoring programs, and the interaction between knowledge systems, facilitated by a bridging organization within a broader process of governance transformation. The combination of autonomous adaptations (based on linking social capital and fishery leaders agency) and government-led adaptations were essential to face the challenges imposed by climate change. Our results serve as a learning platform to anticipate threats and envision solutions to a wide range of small-scale fisheries in fast-warming regions worldwide.     

Constraints,multiple stressors,and stratified adaptation: Pastoralist livelihood vulnerability in a semi-arid wildlife conservation context in Central Kenya

The focus of this study is on how changes in formal and informal institutions have differential impacts across populations in terms of vulnerability of livelihoods to drought, and the unequal processes that shape adaptation to new conditions. Drought vulnerability occurs as a result of exposure and sensitivity to interrelated economic, social, political, and ecological dynamics. There is a need for approaches that can evaluate how the ability to reduce these exposures and sensitivities becomes socially stratified. Building on our understanding of institutional and biophysical constraints in one pastoralist group ranch, we use an approach that draws on quantitative and qualitative data to combine analyses of entitlements, access, and adaptive capacity. We asked how, in a context of changing herding institutions, the ability to adapt to drought and other stressors, is differentiated among actors. We found that herders with higher livestock wealth are more likely to have entitlement sets that include factors that enable access to secure cattle grazing on private wildlife conservation lands, and access to more distant areas with herds of sheep and cattle – two key means of reducing exposure to drought vulnerability, leading to greater coping ability during drought. Those with lower livestock wealth rely disproportionately on illicit, precarious access to external grazing resources. Higher livestock wealth families experienced disproportionately lower sensitivity to drought with smaller losses of cattle, and likely have decreased sensitivity to drought-related market fluctuations, while others are primarily reliant on small stock and/or precarious access pathways. However, rather than naturalize this differential ability as merely increased adaptive capacity for some that are better able to adapt to novel, local conditions, we argue this instead reflects the unequal footing that households find themselves on, in a shifting institutional landscape of structural and relational access constraints and reconfigurations of reciprocity, that are intertwined with interventions by state and non-state actors.     

Uncovering the political dimension of social-ecological systems: Contributions from policy process frameworks

Research on the governance of social-ecological systems often emphasizes the need for self-organized, flexible and adaptive arrangements to deal with uncertainty, abrupt change and surprises that are characteristic of social-ecological systems. However, adaptive governance as well as transitions toward alternative forms of governance are embedded in politics and it is often the political processes that determine change and stability in governance systems and policy. This paper analyses five established theoretical frameworks of the policy process originating in political science and public policy research with respect to their potential to enhance understanding of governance and complex policy dynamics in social-ecological systems. The frameworks are found to be divergent in their conceptualization of policy change (focusing on incremental or large-scale, major changes), highlighting different aspects of bounded rationality in their model of individual behavior and focusing their attention on different aspects of the policy process (role of information, attention, beliefs, institutional structure, particular actors, etc.). We discuss the application of these frameworks and their potential contribution to unravelling the political dimension in adaptive governance and transformations.     

Integrative propositions for adapting conservation policy to the impacts of climate change

Conservation policies have changed over time in response to changes in human and ecological drivers. The impacts of climate (and other) concurrent changes prompt consideration of further iterations for both conservation means and objectives. In this paper we bring together previous disparate literatures and apply them to the question of how to adapt conservation polices to suit an era of climate change impacts. Our approach is based on two assertions: (i) that the integration of specific natural and social science insights is essential for understanding and effectively responding to this challenge, and (ii) that in addition to adaptive conservation means (strategies), attention needs to be given to considering adaptive conservation objectives. Specifically, we convert a core set of natural and social science insights into analytical tools known as heuristics or rules of thumb. We then use the heuristics as a basis to offer a list of preliminary propositions that can help inform the development of new means and objectives. The propositions address key considerations including recalibrating management objectives, the role of disturbance in facilitating ecological transitions, and overarching topics relating to governance. The propositions are speculative, and so intended only to outline potential avenues for further empirical research and subsequent refinement. In the spirit of adaptation, we expect and welcome their revision.     

Transitions toward co-management: The process of marine resource management devolution in three east African countries

Communities are increasingly empowered with the ability and responsibility of working with national governments to make decisions about marine resources in decentralized co-management arrangements. This transition toward decentralized management represents a changing governance landscape. This paper explores the transition to decentralisation in marine resource management systems in three East African countries. The paper draws upon expert opinion and literature from both political science and linked social-ecological systems fields to guide exploration of five key governance transition concepts in each country: (1) drivers of change; (2) institutional arrangements; (3) institutional fit; (4) actor interactions; and (5) adaptive management. Key findings are that decentralized management in the region was largely donor-driven and only partly transferred power to local stakeholders. However, increased accountability created a degree of democracy in regards to natural resource governance that was not previously present. Additionally, increased local-level adaptive management has emerged in most systems and, to date, this experimental management has helped to change resource user's views from metaphysical to more scientific cause-and-effect attribution of changes to resource conditions.     

Collapse and recovery in a remote small island—A tale of adaptive cycles or downward spirals?

Few studies consider how social-ecological systems recover from disturbance. We consider the small semi-autonomous island of Rodrigues (Indian Ocean). Based on semi-structured interviews (n = 70), a fisher survey (n = 73), weather data and official records we build a timeline of key events. We tabulate local perceptions (5+ mentions) of changes (social, economic and natural capital) and look for signs of adaptive cycles in the island's social-ecological past. Rising human pressure and extreme weather event impacts are reported since first settlement. We propose a recent “collapse” phase catalysed in the 1970s by severe drought, based on respondents’ perceptions of still-ongoing changes in farming and fishing, water, external dependence, migration and inter-island political change. Connectivity (flows of people, goods, information, money, power) appear to have strengthed local island recovery, but degradation continued, not least due to water scarcity and a lack of shared political vision as Rodrigues became more tied into the wider world.Overall, our findings suggest social-ecological systems may get stuck in a post-collapse recovery without any new structure emerging, presuming adaptive cycles can even be detected. Data gaps and global change redefining spatial and temporal scales could mean the adaptive cycle's usefulness is limited in development policy-making contexts.     

Complex aspen forest carbon and root dynamics during drought

Drought-induced vegetation mortality has been documented on every vegetated continent in recent decades and constitutes a major uncertainty in climate change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and carbon cycle feedbacks. While recent research has focused on specific failure mechanisms during drought-induced forest die-off, a broader understanding of the physiology of trees under drought, especially changes in growth and carbon allocation, is needed for determining the sensitivity of forests to drought and interacting mechanisms during forest mortality. I present here multi-tissue and high-resolution temporal dynamics of tree carbon resources during moderate experimental and natural drought in trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) forests, a major forest type in western North America that recently experienced widespread drought-induced die-off. Drought led to substantial declines in inferred carbon uptake. Tree carbohydrate concentrations, however, largely increased in concert with substantial decreases in growth and severe declines in root biomass. These findings highlight that growth declines, especially in fine roots which are important to water uptake, and increased carbon allocation to root non-structural carbohydrates are key responses to drought in aspen and could play an important role in widespread die-off. They suggest multi-year consequences of drought and carbon-hydraulic interconnections. They underscore the need for a more integrated multi-tissue, multi-process, and multi-year perspective of climate-induced forest mortality.     

Navigating climate crises in the Great Barrier Reef

A dramatic escalation of extreme climate events is challenging the capacity of environmental governance regimes to sustain and improve ecosystem outcomes. It has been argued that actors within adaptive governance regimes can help to steer environmental systems toward sustainability in times of crisis. Yet there is little empirical evidence of how acute climate crises are navigated by actors operating within adaptive governance regimes, and the factors that influence their responses. Here, we qualitatively assessed the actions key governance actors took in response to back-to-back mass coral bleaching – an extreme climate event – of the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017, and explored their perceptions of barriers and catalysts to these responses. This research was, in part, a product of collaboration and knowledge co-production with Great Barrier Reef governance actors aimed at improving responses to climate crises in the region. We found five major categories of activity that actors engaged with in the wake of recurrent mass coral bleaching: assessing the scale and extent of bleaching, sharing information, communicating bleaching to the public, building local resilience, and addressing global threats. These actions were both catalyzed and hindered by a range of factors that fall within different domains of adaptive capacity; such as assets, social organization, and agency. We discuss the implications of our findings as they relate to existing research on adaptive capacity and adaptive governance. We conclude by coalescing insights from our interviews and a participant engagement process to highlight four key ways in which the ability of governance actors, and the Great Barrier Reef governance regime more broadly, can be better prepared for, and more effectively respond to extreme climate events. Our research provides empirical insight into how crises are experienced by governance actors in a large-scale environmental system, potentially providing lessons for similar systems across the globe.     

What drives national adaptation? A global assessment

That the climate is changing and societies will have to adapt is now unequivocal, with adaptation becoming a core focus of climate policy. Our understanding of the challenges, needs, and opportunities for climate change adaptation has advanced significantly in recent years yet remains limited. Research has identified and theorized key determinants of adaptive capacity and barriers to adaptation, and more recently begun to track adaptation in practice. Despite this, there is negligible research investigating whether and indeed if adaptive capacity is translating into actual adaptation action. Here we test whether theorized determinants of adaptive capacity are associated with adaptation policy outcomes at the national level for 117 nations. We show that institutional capacity, in particular measures of good governance, are the strongest predictors of national adaptation policy. Adaptation at the national level is limited in countries with poor governance, and in the absence of good governance other presumed determinants of adaptive capacity show limited effect on adaptation. Our results highlight the critical importance of institutional good governance as a prerequisite for national adaptation. Other elements of theorized adaptive capacity are unlikely to be sufficient, effective, or present at the national level where national institutions and governance are poor.     

气候变化国家评估报告（II）：气候变化的影响与适应

已经观测到的气候变化影响是显著的、多方面的。各个领域和地区都存在有利和不利影响,但以不利影响为主,未来的气候变暖将会对中国的生态系统、农业以及水资源等部门和沿海地区产生重大的不利影响。采取适应措施可以减轻气候变化的不利影响,应将适应气候变化的行动逐步纳入国民经济和社会发展的中长期规划中。由于我国科学研究的相对不足和科学认识能力的局限,目前的气候变化影响评估方法和结果还存在很大的不确定性。应当加强区域适应气候变化的案例研究、扩大研究领域、加强极端天气、气候事件影响的研究,以降低影响评估的不确定性,并提出切实可行的适应对策。     

Climate change impacts on the water resources of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the U.S.

This paper provides an overview of climate change impacts on tribal water resources and the subsequent cascading effects on the livelihoods and cultures of American Indians and Alaska Natives living on tribal lands in the U.S. A hazards and vulnerability framework for understanding these impacts is first presented followed by context on the framework components, including climate, hydrologic, and ecosystem changes (i.e. hazards) and tribe-specific vulnerability factors (socioeconomic, political, infrastructural, environmental, spiritual and cultural), which when combined with hazards lead to impacts. Next regional summaries of impacts around the U.S. are discussed. Although each tribal community experiences unique sets of impacts because of their individual history, culture, and geographic setting, many of the observed impacts are common among different groups and can be categorized as impacts on—1) water supply and management (including water sources and infrastructure), 2) aquatic species important for culture and subsistence, 3) ranching and agriculture particularly from climate extremes (e.g., droughts, floods), 4) tribal sovereignty and rights associated with water resources, fishing, hunting, and gathering, and 5) soil quality (e.g., from coastal and riverine erosion prompting tribal relocation or from drought-related land degradation). The paper finishes by highlighting potentially relevant research questions based on the five impact categories.     

Improving China’s water resources management for better adaptation to climate change

Challenged by insufficient water resources and by degraded water quality caused by widespread pollution, China faces an imbalance between the supply and the demand of water for supporting the rapid social and economic development while protecting the natural environment and ecosystems. Climate change is expected to further stress freshwater resources and widen the gap between the demand for and supply of water. As a legacy of the earlier planned economy, water resources management has been primarily supply-driven, which largely fails to account for the economic nature of water resources in relation to their natural characteristics. This paper presents a historical perspective on the water resources management policies and practices in China, and recommends demand management and pollution control as key measures for improving water resources management to adapt to climate change based on the current political, socio-economic and water resources conditions. The past and future impacts of climate change on water resources in China and the general adaptation strategies are also presented. How demand management through increasing water use efficiency, improving water rights and rights trade, and effective regulation enforcement, along with pollution control could improve China’s water resources management are discussed in details. Ultimately, China should develop a sustainable water resources management strategy based on both supply- and demand-side management options to make the limited water supplies meet the demands of economic development, social well-being and the conservation of ecosystems in the context of global climate change.     

Analyzing the (mis)fit between the institutional and ecological networks of the Indo-West Pacific

Critical to improving environmental governance is understanding the fit (alignment) between institutional arrangements and key ecological processes. This is particularly true for biodiversity hotpots and ecologically sensitive areas that are subject to significant impacts from human activities. Here, we have developed an innovative approach to quantify ecological-institutional alignment across an environmentally and politically complex large-scale marine social-ecological system. We mapped the trans-boundary networks of marine population dispersal corridors, and intersected these with estimates of cross-country institutional linkages related to marine management and conservation. In integrating large-scale ecological-institutional networks, we identify geopolitical fit and misfit between a region's ecological processes and its governance. We have demonstrated this approach in the Indo-West Pacific region, a global marine biodiversity hotpot in the Indo-West Pacific. We present region-specific institutional and ecological networks, highlight current challenges, and suggest future directions to refine the proposed approach to quantify alignment between ecological processes and governance arrangements. Ultimately, our method has the potential to assist management efforts in prioritizing and strengthening governance to effectively safeguard ecological processes across multiple jurisdictions.     

气候变化背景下水资源脆弱性研究与展望

论述了气候变化背景下水资源脆弱性概念、内涵及其与适应性管理的联系;综述了水资源脆弱性定量评估方法,包括指标权重法、函数及综合指标法等;介绍了减少水资源脆弱性的适应对策研究。分析表明,联系水资源供需矛盾的水资源脆弱性既有自然变化脆弱性的一面,又有气候变化影响导致水资源供需关系发生变化以及旱涝灾害影响加剧水资源脆弱性的问题。关键是要识别影响水资源脆弱性变化的主要调控变量,通过应对气候变化的适应性对策研究,最大限度地减少水资源脆弱性。未来气候变化背景下水资源脆弱性研究,将在进一步发展脆弱性影响与评估基础上,逐步转到适应性水资源管理与对策的研究。     

Adaptive environmental governance of changing social-ecological systems: Empirical insights from the Okavango Delta,Botswana

Adaptive management and related fields have theorized new governance strategies that embrace complexity and are able to respond effectively to changing and unpredictable biophysical dynamics. However, this body of work pays inadequate attention to important on-the-ground realities, including feasibility of implementation and the power dynamics embedded in multi-scalar systems of environmental governance. This paper presents findings from a research project on challenges to adaptive management in the variable wetland ecosystem of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Many residents of this rural region rely on transitional agricultural practices, shifting between dryland and floodplain farming in response to dynamic precipitation and flooding patterns. Higher than average floods in 2009–2011 inundated many floodplain fields past the point of production, causing farmers to shift to the dryland for multiplem seasons. At the same time, the highly centralized Government of Botswana began to implement stricter regulations over floodplain resources, which stemmed in part from a new adaptive management plan developed for the region. As a result, many farmers felt pressured by the government to abandon transitional livelihood practices and to shift permanently to dryland agriculture even though many preferred to continue floodplain farming. This loss of a responsive livelihood strategy will likely result in decreased long-term adaptive capacity for many residents. Drawing on these findings, this paper advances the argument that if adaptive management is to become a viable option for communities in changing environments, more attention must be given to the role of unequal power relations in multi-scalar systems of environmental governance.