Bridging the gap: empowering decision-making for adaptation through the UK Climate Impacts Programme

Abstract

The methods, tools and outputs of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) show how building adaptive capacity to climate change can be embedded within a wide range of organizations. UKCIP has been operating since 1997 to support decision-makers' assessments of their vulnerability to climate change so that they can plan how to adapt. Whilst stakeholder engagement is now generally regarded as vital to ensure that research meets the needs of decision-makers for information, this usually means that stakeholders are positioned in a ‘consultative’ role in research. In contrast, the UKCIP aims to bridge the gap between research and policy so that decision-makers take control to produce research in ways that are useful to them. The Programme has been flexible and was developed incrementally, with increased scientific understanding, taking advantage of collaborative funding and facilitating long-standing partnerships. Whilst the core framework of scenarios and tools has been developed centrally, most studies have been stakeholder-funded and led. The Programme's results suggest that if decision-makers are supported, capacity is built for assessments, and crucially, research outputs are directly applicable to their ongoing work and strategic planning. This capacity-building has worked across scales and sectors and is an effective route to mainstreaming climate change adaptation. The implication, therefore, is that more support should be given by funding agencies to develop institutional capacity to support adaptation to climate change in both the private and public sectors.     

Framings and coverage of climate change in Swedish specialized farming magazines

Climate change is a fundamental challenge for which agriculture is sensitive and vulnerable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified relevant information as key to enabling appropriate climate adaptation and mitigation action. Information specifically directed to farmers can be found, for example, in specialized farming magazines. While recent studies examine how national news media frame climate change, less—if any—studies have addressed climate framings and coverage in specialized media. Media framings are storylines that provide meaning by communicating how and why an issue should be seen as a problem, how it should be handled, and who is responsible for it. This paper analyses the framings and coverage of climate change in two Swedish specialized farming magazines from 2000 to 2009. It examines the extent of the climate change coverage, the content of the media items, and the dominant framings underlying their climate change coverage. The study identifies: increased coverage of climate change starting in 2007; frequent coverage of agriculture’s contribution to climate change, climate change impacts on agriculture, and consequences of climate politics for agriculture; and four prominent frames: conflict, scientific certainty, economic burden, and action. The paper concludes that climate change communicators addressing farmers and agricultural extension officers should pay attention to how these frames may be interpreted by different target audiences. Research is needed on how specialized media reports on climate-related issues and how science-based climate information is understood by different groups of farmers and which other factors influence farmers’ engagement in climate mitigation and adaptation.     

Impacts

Participatory Integrated Assessement (IA) methods complement analytical methods like IA-modeling in their explicit inclusion of stakeholders and decision-makers in the assessment. Integrated Assessment is perceived as a process of social learning involving scientists, stakeholders, policymakers and the society at large. We introduce a new approach to provide expert knowledge for participatory integrated assessments of regional climate change: `Interactive Citizen's Information Tools' (ICITs). ICITs provide citizens with expert knowledge about causes of climate change, potential impacts, and policy options to address anthropogenic climate change. In this paper we discuss the development and application of IMPACTS in IA-focus groups in Switzerland. IMPACTS is based on user-friendly hypermedia technologies and allows citizens to get informed on a broad range of potential climate change impacts – with an emphasison prevailing uncertainties. IA-focus groups are deliberative group discussions that make use of computer tools to support the discussion and assessment. The goal of IA-focus groups is to elicit how informed citizens judge the risks of anthropogenic climate change. Experiences with IMPACTS showed that the combination of focus groups with ICITs is a feasible and promising approach for a participatory IA of regional climate change, in particular, and of complex environmental issues, in general.     

Triggering transformative change: a development path approach to climate change response in communities

While climate change action plans are becoming more common, it is still unclear whether communities have the capacity, tools, and targets in place to trigger the transformative levels of change required to build fundamentally low-carbon, resilient, healthy communities. Evidence increasingly supports the finding that this transformation is not triggered by climate policy alone, but rather is shaped by a broad array of decisions and practices that are rooted in underlying patterns of development. Even so, these findings have rarely penetrated the domain of practice, which often remains squarely focused on a relatively narrow set of climate-specific policies. This article builds a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of community-level development path transformations that may both dramatically reduce GHG emissions and significantly enhance community resilience. This framework illuminates eight critical enablers of innovation on climate change, each of which is illustrated by compelling examples of community-level experimentation on climate change across the province of British Columbia, Canada. It is concluded that community-based climate (or sustainability) policy might be more likely to trigger development path shifts if it employs a longer time horizon, recognition of adaptability and feedbacks, integrated decision making, and systems thinking.     

Governing people on the move in a warming world: Framing climate change migration and the UNFCCC Task Force on Displacement

Different ways of framing the nexus between climate change and migration have been advanced in academic, advocacy and policy circles. Some understand it as a state-security issue, some take a protection (or human security) approach and yet others portray migration as an adaptation or climate risk management strategy. Yet we have little insight into how these different understandings of the ‘problem’ of climate change-related migration are beginning to shape the emergence of global governance in the climate regime. Through a focus on the UNFCCC Task Force on Displacement we argue that these different framings of climate change migration shape how actors understand the appropriate role of the TFD, including the substantive scope of its mandate; its operational priorities; the nature of its outputs and where it should be situated in the institutional architecture. We show that understanding the different framings of the nexus between climate change and migration – and how these framings are contested within the UNFCCC – can help to account for institutional development in this area of climate governance.     

Decision support for climate change adaptation planning in the US: why it needs a coordinated internet-based practitioners’ network

Decision support resources are emerging across the United States to address the adaptation and mitigation challenges associated with climate variability and change. In theory, climate-related decision support identifies the need to move beyond the linear dissemination of information from experts to decision-makers. Interviews with researchers and federal program managers, however, show that in practice there are still wide gaps between the development of climate science and its application. Lessons learned in two example cases of decision support experiments are discussed to highlight some of the on-going challenges in applying climate science, e.g. defining decision support, involving decision-makers, and determining effectiveness. The published literature also shows these reoccurring challenges but emphasizes more collaboration between science and decision-makers as this improves the relevance, compatibility, and accessibility of climate science information and can increase users’ receptiveness. This article proposes that the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) can help the development of decision support resources, in one way, by coordinating an Internet-based practitioners’ network. A coordinated network could provide opportunities for climate-related decision support practitioners to build collaborative partnerships, share lessons-learned, provide feedback to the USGCRP, and thereby assist the transition of science into decision-making processes to better address adaptation planning.     

Including indigenous peoples in climate change mitigation: addressing issues of scale,knowledge and power

Involving indigenous peoples in the development of mitigation measures for climate change presents procedural, conceptual and structural challenges. Here, we reflect on some of these challenges and ways of overcoming them, as suggested by collaborative approaches to policy and decision making. We specifically focus on issues of scale, knowledge and power, and how they interrelate to act as a barrier or opportunity for the involvement of indigenous groups. We argue that multi-scalar negotiations, blended knowledge and power-sharing structures are all necessary to include indigenous communities as valuable partners in climate change mitigation, and we suggest strategies and recommendations for actively accomplishing this inclusion. Examples from recent literature about the inclusion of indigenous communities in different sectors, are used to illustrate and provide evidence of the current problematic and the need for collaborative solutions. Overall, the ideas expressed here, serve as a conceptual framework to better understand and support the inclusion of indigenous communities in policy and decision making processes.     

A framework for nitrogen futures in the shared socioeconomic pathways

Humanity's transformation of the nitrogen cycle has major consequences for ecosystems, climate and human health, making it one of the key environmental issues of our time. Understanding how trends could evolve over the course of the 21^st century is crucial for scientists and decision-makers from local to global scales. Scenario analysis is the primary tool for doing so, and has been applied across all major environmental issues, including nitrogen pollution. However, to date most scenario efforts addressing nitrogen flows have either taken a narrow approach, focusing on a singular impact or sector, or have not been integrated within a broader scenario framework – a missed opportunity given the multiple environmental and socio-economic impacts that nitrogen pollution exacerbates. Capitalizing on our expanding knowledge of nitrogen flows, this study introduces a framework for new nitrogen-focused narratives based on the widely used Shared Socioeconomic Pathways that include all the major nitrogen-polluting sectors (agriculture, industry, transport and wastewater). These new narratives are the first to integrate the influence of climate and other environmental pollution control policies, while also incorporating explicit nitrogen-control measures. The next step is for them to be used as model inputs to evaluate the impact of different nitrogen production, consumption and loss trajectories, and thus advance understanding of how to address environmental impacts while simultaneously meeting key development goals. This effort is an important step in assessing how humanity can return to the planetary boundary of this essential element over the coming century.     

Contesting climate justice in the city: Examining politics and practice in urban climate change experiments

Debates about climate justice have mainly occurred at the international scale, and have focussed on the rights and responsibilities of nation-states to either be protected from the effects of climate change, or to take action to reduce emissions or support adaptation. In this paper, we argue that it is both productive and necessary to examine how climate justice is being pursued at the urban scale, which brings into focus the need for attention to issues of recognition as well as rights and responsibilities. Building on work from environmental justice, which has conceptualized justice as trivalent, we propose that climate justice can be understood as a pyramid, the faces of which are distributions, procedures, rights, responsibilities and recognition. We then apply this conceptual framework to examine climate change interventions in five cities; Bangalore, Monterrey, Hong Kong, Philadelphia and Berlin. Arguing that the politics and practices of urban climate change interventions are constantly engaging with and refracting the idea of justice, we examine how justice was articulated, practiced and contested across our cases. The perspective of recognition emerges as a particularly useful entry point through which to explore the types of rights, responsibilities, distributions and procedures required to respond justly to climate change. We conclude by reflecting on our framework, arguing that it is useful both as an analytical device to interrogate climate justice and to shape the design of climate change interventions which seek to ensure climate justice.     

What are robust strategies in the face of uncertain climate threshold responses?

We use an integrated assessment model of climate change to analyze how alternative decision-making criteria affect preferred investments into greenhouse gas mitigation, the distribution of outcomes, the robustness of the strategies, and the economic value of information. We define robustness as trading a small decrease in a strategy’s expected performance for a significant increase in a strategy’s performance in the worst cases. Specifically, we modify the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE-07) to include a simple representation of a climate threshold response, parametric uncertainty, structural uncertainty, learning, and different decision-making criteria. Economic analyses of climate change strategies typically adopt the expected utility maximization (EUM) framework. We compare EUM with two decision criteria adopted from the finance literature, namely Limited Degree of Confidence (LDC) and Safety First (SF). Both criteria increase the relative weight of the performance under the worst-case scenarios compared to EUM. We show that the LDC and SF criteria provide a computationally feasible foundation for identifying greenhouse gas mitigation strategies that may prove more robust than those identified by the EUM criterion. More robust strategies show higher near-term investments in emissions abatement. Reducing uncertainty has a higher economic value of information for the LDC and SF decision criteria than for EUM.     

Adaptation: Sensitivity to Natural Variability, Agent Assumptions and Dynamic Climate Changes

The role of adaptation in impact assessment and integrated assessment of climate policy is briefly reviewed. Agriculture in the US is taken as exemplary of this issue. Historic studies in which no adaptation is assumed (so-called "dumb farmer") versus farmer-agents blessed with perfect foresight (so-called "clairvoyant farmer") are contrasted, and considered limiting cases as compared to "realistic farmers." What kinds of decision rules such realistic farmer-agents would adopt to deal with climate change involves a range of issues. These include degrees of belief the climate is actually changing, knowledge about how it will change, foresight on how technology is changing, estimation of what will happen in competitive granaries and assumptions about what governmental policies will be in various regions and over time. Clearly, a transparent specification of such agent-based decision rules is essential to model adaptation explicitly in any impact assessment. Moreover, open recognition of the limited set of assumptions contained in any one study of adaptation demands that authors clearly note that each individual study can represent only a fraction of plausible outcomes. A set of calculations using the Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) crop model is offered here as an example of explicit decision rules on adaptive behavior on climate impacts. The model is driven by a 2xCO₂ regional climate model scenario (from which a "mock" transient scenario was devised) to calculate yield changes for farmer-agents that practice no adaptation, perfect adaptation and 20-year-lagged adaptation, the latter designed to mimic the masking effects of natural variability on farmers' capacity to see how climate is changing. The results reinforce the expectation that the likely effects of natural variability, which would mask a farmer's capacity to detect climate change, is to place the calculated impacts of climate changes in two regions of the US in between that of perfect and no adaptation. Finally, the use of so-called "hedonic" methods (in which land prices in different regions with different current average climates are used to derive implicitly farmers' adaptive responses to hypothesized future climate changes) is briefly reviewed. It is noted that this procedure in which space and time are substituted, amounts to "ergodic economics." Such cross-sectional analyses are static, and thus neglect the dynamics of both climate and societal evolution. Furthermore, such static methods usually consider only a single measure of change (local mean annual temperature), rather than higher moments like climatic variability, diurnal temperature range, etc. These implicit assumptions in ergodic economics make use of such cross-sectional studies limited for applications to integrated assessments of the actual dynamics of adaptive capacity. While all such methods are appropriate for sensitivity analyses and help to define a plausible range of outcomes, none is by itself likely to define the range of plausible adaptive capacities that might emerge in response to climate change scenarios.     

Negative learning

New technical information may lead to scientific beliefs that diverge over time from the a posteriori right answer. We call this phenomenon, which is particularly problematic in the global change arena, negative learning. Negative learning may have affected policy in important cases, including stratospheric ozone depletion, dynamics of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and population and energy projections. We simulate negative learning in the context of climate change with a formal model that embeds the concept within the Bayesian framework, illustrating that it may lead to errant decisions and large welfare losses to society. Based on these cases, we suggest approaches to scientific assessment and decision making that could mitigate the problem. Application of the tools of science history to the study of learning in global change, including critical examination of the assessment process to understand how judgments are made, could provide important insights on how to improve the flow of information to policy makers.     

Reflections on Delhi

The ‘efficiency paradox’ has generated controversy and suggests that mainstream economics is not neutral in the way it deals with climate change. An alternative economic framework, evolutionary economics, is used to investigate this crucial issue and offer insights into the development of a complementary framework for designing climate policy and for managing the transition to a low-carbon society. The evolutionary framework allows us to identify the presence of two sources of inertia (i.e. at the individual level through ‘habits’ and at the level of socio-technical systems) that mutually reinforce each other in a path-dependent manner. To overcome ‘carbon lock-in’, decision-makers should design measures (e.g. commitment strategies, niche management) that specifically target those change-resisting factors, as they tend to reduce the efficiency of traditional instruments. A series of recommendations for policy-makers is provided.     

Integrated models,scenarios and dynamics of climate,land use and common birds

Reconciling food, fiber and energy production with biodiversity conservation is among the greatest challenges of the century, especially in the face of climate change. Model-based scenarios linking climate, land use and biodiversity can be exceptionally useful tools for decision support in this context. We present a modeling framework that links climate projections, private land use decisions including farming, forest and urban uses and the abundances of common birds as an indicator of biodiversity. Our major innovation is to simultaneously integrate the direct impacts of climate change and land use on biodiversity as well as indirect impacts mediated by climate change effects on land use, all at very fine spatial resolution. In addition, our framework can be used to evaluate incentive-based conservation policies in terms of land use and biodiversity over several decades. The results for our case study in France indicate that the projected effects of climate change dominate the effects of land use on bird abundances. As a conservation policy, implementing a spatially uniform payment for pastures has a positive effect in relatively few locations and only on the least vulnerable bird species.     

Multiple adaptation types with mitigation: A framework for policy analysis

Effective climate policy will consist of mitigation and adaptation implemented simultaneously in a policy portfolio to reduce the risks of climate change. Previous studies of the tradeoffs between mitigation and adaptation have implicitly framed the problem deterministically, choosing the optimal paths for all time. Because climate change is a long-term problem with significant uncertainties and opportunities to learn and revise, critical tradeoffs between mitigation and adaptation in the near-term have not been considered. We propose a new framework for considering the portfolio of mitigation and adaptation that explicitly treats the problem as a multi-stage decision under uncertainty. In this context, there are additional benefits to near-term investments if they reduce uncertainty and lead to improved future decisions. Two particular features are fundamental to understanding the relevant tradeoffs between mitigation and adaptation: (1) strategy dynamics over time in reducing climate damages, and (2) strategy dynamics under uncertainty and potential for learning. Our framework strengthens the argument for disaggregating adaption as has been proposed by others. We present three stylized classes of adaptation investment types as a conceptual framework: short-lived “flow” spending, committed “stock” investment, and lower capacity “option” stock with the capability of future upgrading. In the context of sequential decision under uncertainty, these subtypes of adaptation have important tradeoffs among them and with mitigation. We argue that given the large policy uncertainty that we face currently, explicitly considering adaptation “option” investments is a valuable component of a near-term policy response that can balance between the flexible flow and committed stock approaches, as it allows for the delay of costly stock investments while at the same time allowing for lower-cost risk management of future damages.     

A verification framework for interannual-to-decadal predictions experiments

Decadal predictions have a high profile in the climate science community and beyond, yet very little is known about their skill. Nor is there any agreed protocol for estimating their skill. This paper proposes a sound and coordinated framework for verification of decadal hindcast experiments. The framework is illustrated for decadal hindcasts tailored to meet the requirements and specifications of CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5). The chosen metrics address key questions about the information content in initialized decadal hindcasts. These questions are: (1) Do the initial conditions in the hindcasts lead to more accurate predictions of the climate, compared to un-initialized climate change projections? and (2) Is the prediction model’s ensemble spread an appropriate representation of forecast uncertainty on average? The first question is addressed through deterministic metrics that compare the initialized and uninitialized hindcasts. The second question is addressed through a probabilistic metric applied to the initialized hindcasts and comparing different ways to ascribe forecast uncertainty. Verification is advocated at smoothed regional scales that can illuminate broad areas of predictability, as well as at the grid scale, since many users of the decadal prediction experiments who feed the climate data into applications or decision models will use the data at grid scale, or downscale it to even higher resolution. An overall statement on skill of CMIP5 decadal hindcasts is not the aim of this paper. The results presented are only illustrative of the framework, which would enable such studies. However, broad conclusions that are beginning to emerge from the CMIP5 results include (1) Most predictability at the interannual-to-decadal scale, relative to climatological averages, comes from external forcing, particularly for temperature; (2) though moderate, additional skill is added by the initial conditions over what is imparted by external forcing alone; however, the impact of initialization may result in overall worse predictions in some regions than provided by uninitialized climate change projections; (3) limited hindcast records and the dearth of climate-quality observational data impede our ability to quantify expected skill as well as model biases; and (4) as is common to seasonal-to-interannual model predictions, the spread of the ensemble members is not necessarily a good representation of forecast uncertainty. The authors recommend that this framework be adopted to serve as a starting point to compare prediction quality across prediction systems. The framework can provide a baseline against which future improvements can be quantified. The framework also provides guidance on the use of these model predictions, which differ in fundamental ways from the climate change projections that much of the community has become familiar with, including adjustment of mean and conditional biases, and consideration of how to best approach forecast uncertainty.     

Characterising climate change discourse on social media during extreme weather events

When extreme weather events occur, people often turn to social media platforms to share information, opinions and experiences. One of the topics commonly discussed is the role climate change may or may not have played in influencing an event. Here, we examine Twitter posts that mentioned climate change in the context of three high-magnitude extreme weather events – Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy and Snowstorm Jonas – in order to assess how the framing of the topic and the attention paid to it can vary between events. We also examine the role that contextual factors can play in shaping climate change coverage on the platform. We find that criticism of climate change denial dominated during Irene, while political and ideological struggle frames dominated during Sandy. Discourse during Jonas was, in contrast, more divided between posts about the scientific links between climate change and the events, and posts contesting climate science in general. The focus on political and ideological struggle frames during Sandy reflects the event’s occurrence at a time when the Occupy movement was active and the 2012 US Presidential Election was nearing. These factors, we suggest, could also contribute to climate change being a more prominent discussion point during Sandy than during Irene or Jonas. The Jonas frames, meanwhile, hint at lesser public understanding of how climate change may influence cold weather events when compared with tropical storms. Overall, our findings demonstrate how event characteristics and short-term socio-political context can play a critical role in determining the lenses through which climate change is viewed.     

Climate change and road freight safety: a multidisciplinary exploration

The freight and logistics sector is of significant importance as an enabler and driver of the global economy, but it is also inherently vulnerable to hazardous weather. Despite this, there is currently no quantitative assessment of how climate change may affect the sector. This paper applies multidisciplinary climate change impact assessment tools and conceptual frameworks to the road freight sector of Great Britain in order to identify potential future weather-related safety issues. Relationships between weather and freight accidents are determined using road accident data and meteorological observations, which are then used with climate change scenarios to arrive at projections of possible impacts across the regions of Great Britain. Included in the study are industry perceptions of future trends within the sector and wider economy which many affect freight’s exposure and sensitivity to weather. These are elicited through interviews and an iterative expert Delphi study. Hence, unlike many other climate change impact assessments, this innovative study takes into account the potentially significant impact of socio-economic change (including institutional and operational). The results show that summer precipitation and winter ice-related accidents are likely to decrease across most of the country, whereas winter rain-related accidents are projected to increase. However, it is postulated that some of the impacts of climate change will be modified by reflexive behavioural change on the part of the driver and either institutional adaptation or complacency on the part of the road authorities. The paper concludes by framing the study in a range of future scenarios outlining how the socio-economic environment could influence the road transport network and how it is used, modifying the impact of climate change.     

Framework for integrated assessments of global warming impacts

This paper provides a framework for integrated assessment of the impacts of climate change on natural resources and sets the stage for papers that follow in this volume. Integrated assessments are used to organize large quantities of technical information bearing on complex issues (environmental and others) in ways that facilitate application of the information in decision making and policy setting. Any integrated assessment must be based on the best available information. For that reason this paper includes a ‘primer’ on the current (and presumably best available) understanding of the science underlying climatic change. The remainder of the paper describes the component parts of one possible framework for integrated assessment.