A less disastrous disaster: Managing response to climate-driven hazards in the Cayman Islands and NE Brazil

This paper explores the relationship between disaster risk reduction and long-term adaptive capacity building in two climate vulnerable areas—the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean and Ceará, in NE Brazil. Drawing on past applications of the disaster risk reduction framework, we identify four critical factors that have led to reductions in risk: flexible, learning-based, responsive governance; committed, reform-minded and politically active actors; disaster risk reduction integrated into other social and economic policy processes; and a long-term commitment to managing risk. We find that while the presence of these factors has reduced overall risk in both regions, in Ceará, disaster response as it is currently practiced, has fallen short of addressing the fundamental causes of vulnerability that leave those prone to hazards able to cope in the short term, yet enmeshed in poverty and at risk from the longer-term changes associated with climate change. Although calls for integration of disaster risk management with poverty eradication are not new, there has been insufficient attention paid in the literature on how to foster such integration. Based on the two case studies, we argue that the adoption of good governance mechanisms (such as stakeholder participation, access to knowledge, accountability and transparency) in disaster risk reduction policy may create the policy environment that is conducive to the kind of structural reform needed to build long-term adaptive capacity to climate-driven impacts. We conclude that without a synergistic two-tiered approach that includes both disaster risk reduction and structural reform, disaster risk reduction, in the face of climate changes, will prove to be an expensive and ineffective palliative treatment of changing risks.     

Voices of young biosphere stewards on the strengths,weaknesses, and ways forward for 74 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves across 83 countries

Young stakeholders are key actors in social-ecological systems, who have the capacity to be agents of sustainability transformation but are also at high risk of exclusion in the unfolding of global change challenges. Despite the focus of sustainability on future generations, there has been little research effort aimed at understanding young actors’ roles as biosphere stewards. In this work we investigate how young stakeholders perceive and participate in the implementation of sustainability objectives in 74 Biosphere Reserves of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme across 83 countries, through participatory group workshops, individual surveys and grey literature review. We explore to what extent youth perceptions are aligned or not with current understandings of Biosphere Reserves and how young stakeholders are acting in pursuit of Biosphere Reserve objectives. We find that young stakeholders have a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges faced by environmental governance, such as resilience and adaptation to global change and the governance challenges of implementing adaptive co-management and increasing stakeholder participation. We also show that young stakeholders can be active participants in a wide range of activities that contribute to achieving conservation and development goals in their territories. They are particularly concerned with youth participation within all levels of Biosphere Reserve functioning and with the creation of sustainable livelihood opportunities that will allow future generations to remain in their native territories. Our study provides evidence of the importance of young stakeholder knowledge and perspectives as central actors in conservation and development initiatives, like Biosphere Reserves, and of the need to increase young stakeholder integration and participation within environmental governance.     

An integrated socio-environmental framework for glacier hazard management and climate change adaptation: lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

Glacier hazards threaten societies in mountain regions worldwide. Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) pose risks to exposed and vulnerable populations and can be linked in part to long-term post-Little Ice Age climate change because precariously dammed glacial lakes sometimes formed as glaciers generally retreated after the mid-1800s. This paper provides an interdisciplinary and historical analysis of 40?years of glacier hazard management on Mount Hualcán, at glacial Lake 513, and in the city of Carhuaz in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range. The case study examines attempted hazard zoning, glacial lake evolution and monitoring, and emergency engineering projects to drain Lake 513. It also analyzes the 11 April 2010 Hualcán rock-ice avalanche that triggered a Lake 513 GLOF; we offer both a scientific assessment of the possible role of temperature on slope stability and a GIS spatial analysis of human impacts. Qualitative historical analysis of glacier hazard management since 1970 allows us to identify and explain why certain actions and policies to reduce risk were implemented or omitted. We extrapolate these case-specific variables to generate a broader socio-environmental framework identifying factors that can facilitate or impede disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Facilitating factors are technical capacity, disaster events with visible hazards, institutional support, committed individuals, and international involvement. Impediments include divergent risk perceptions, imposed government policies, institutional instability, knowledge disparities, and invisible hazards. This framework emerges from an empirical analysis of a coupled social-ecological system and offers a holistic approach for integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.     

Community level adaptation to climate change: The potential role of participatory community risk assessment

This paper explores the value of using community risk assessments (CRAs) for climate change adaptation. CRA refers to participatory methods to assess hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities in support of community-based disaster risk reduction, used by many NGOs, community-based organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. We review the evolution of climate change adaptation and community-based disaster risk reduction, and highlight the challenges of integrating global climate change into a bottom-up and place-based approach. Our analysis of CRAs carried out by various national Red Cross societies shows that CRAs can help address those challenges by fostering community engagement in climate risk reduction, particularly given that many strategies to deal with current climate risks also help to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Climate change can also be explicitly incorporated in CRAs by making better use of CRA tools to assess trends, and by addressing the notion of changing risks. However, a key challenge is to keep CRAs simple enough for wide application. This demands special attention in the modification of CRA tools; in the background materials and trainings for CRA facilitators; and in the guidance for interpretation of CRA outcomes. A second challenge is the application of a limited set of CRA results to guide risk reduction in other communities and to inform national and international adaptation policy. This requires specific attention for sampling and care in scaling up qualitative findings. Finally, stronger linkages are needed between organizations facilitating CRAs and suppliers of climate information, particularly addressing the translation of climate information to the community level.     

Public participation and climate change adaptation: avoiding the illusion of inclusion

Public participation is commonly advocated in policy responses to climate change. Here we discuss prospects for inclusive approaches to adaptation, drawing particularly on studies of long-term coastal management in the UK and elsewhere. We affirm that public participation is an important normative goal in formulating response to climate change risks, but argue that its practice must learn from existing critiques of participatory processes in other contexts. Involving a wide range of stakeholders in decision-making presents fundamental challenges for climate policy, many of which are embedded in relations of power. In the case of anticipatory responses to climate change, these challenges are magnified because of the long-term and uncertain nature of the problem. Without due consideration of these issues, a tension between principles of public participation and anticipatory adaptation is likely to emerge and may result in an overly managed form of inclusion that is unlikely to satisfy either participatory or instrumental goals. Alternative, more narrowly instrumental, approaches to participation are more likely to succeed in this context, as long as the scope and limitations of public involvement are made explicit from the outset.     

Governing resilience building in Thailand's tourism-dependent coastal communities: Conceptualising stakeholder agency in social-ecological systems

In current scientific efforts to harness complementarity between resilience and vulnerability theory, one response is an ‘epistemological shift’ towards an evolutionary, learning based conception of the ‘systems-actor’ relation in social-ecological systems. In this paper, we contribute to this movement regarding the conception of stakeholder agency within social-ecological systems. We examine primary evidence from the governance of post-disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts in Thailand's coastal tourism-dependent communities following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Through an emerging storyline from stakeholders, we construct a new framework for conceptualising stakeholder agency in social-ecological systems, which positions the notion of resilience within a conception of governance as a negotiated normative process. We conclude that if resilience theory is proposed as the preferred approach by which disaster risk reduction is framed and implemented, it needs to acknowledge much more explicitly the role of stakeholder agency and the processes through which legitimate visions of resilience are generated.     

Approaches to defining a planetary boundary for biodiversity

The idea that there is an identifiable set of boundaries, beyond which anthropogenic change will put the Earth system outside a safe operating space for humanity, is attracting interest in the scientific community and gaining support in the environmental policy world. Rockstrom et al. (2009) identify nine such boundaries and highlight biodiversity loss as being the single boundary where current rates of extinction put the Earth system furthest outside the safe operating space. Here we review the evidence to support a boundary based on extinction rates and identify weaknesses with this metric and its bearing on humanity's needs. While changes to biodiversity are of undisputed importance, we show that both extinction rate and species richness are weak metrics for this purpose, and they do not scale well from local to regional or global levels. We develop alternative approaches to determine biodiversity loss boundaries and extend our analysis to consider large-scale responses in the Earth system that could affect its suitability for complex human societies which in turn are mediated by the biosphere. We suggest three facets of biodiversity on which a boundary could be based: the genetic library of life; functional type diversity; and biome condition and extent. For each of these we explore the science needed to indicate how it might be measured and how changes would affect human societies. In addition to these three facets, we show how biodiversity's role in supporting a safe operating space for humanity may lie primarily in its interactions with other boundaries, suggesting an immediate area of focus for scientists and policymakers.     

A three-tiered approach to participatory vulnerability assessment in the Solomon Islands

Greater recognition of the seriousness of global environmental change has led to an increase in research that assesses the vulnerability of households, communities and regions to changing environmental or economic conditions. So far, however, there has been relatively little attention given to how assessments can be conducted in ways that help build capacity for local communities to understand and find their own solutions to their problems. This paper reports on an approach that was designed and used to work with a local grass roots organization in the Solomon Islands to promote inclusivity and participation in decision-making and to build the capacity of the organization to reduce the vulnerability of communities to drivers of change. The process involved working collaboratively with the organization and training its members to conduct vulnerability assessments with communities using participatory and deliberative methods. To make best use of the learning opportunities provided by the research process, specific periods for formal reflection were incorporated for the three key stakeholders involved: the primary researchers; research assistants; and community members. Overall, the approach: (1) promoted learning about the current situation in Kahua and encouraged deeper analysis of problems; (2) built capacity for communities to manage the challenges they were facing; and (3) fostered local ownership and responsibility for problems and set precedents for future participation in decision-making. While the local organization and the communities it serves still face significant challenges, the research approach set the scene for greater local participation and effort to maintain and enhance livelihoods and wellbeing. The outcomes highlight the need for greater emphasis on embedding participatory approaches in vulnerability assessments for communities to benefit fully from the process.     

从气候变化的新视角理解灾害风险、暴露度、脆弱性和恢复力

不断变化的气候可导致前所未有的极端天气和气候事件。这些事件能否构成灾害,在很大程度上取决于脆弱性和暴露度水平。虽然无法完全消除各种灾害风险,但灾害风险管理和气候变化适应的重点是减少脆弱性和暴露度,并提高对各种潜在极端事件不利影响的恢复力,从而促进社会和经济的可持续发展。全面的灾害风险管理要求更加合理地分配对减灾、灾害管理等方面所付出的努力。过去的主流是强调灾害管理,但目前减灾成为关注焦点和挑战。这种主动积极的灾害风险管理与适应有助于避免未来的风险和灾害,而不仅仅是减少已有的风险和灾害,同时这也是灾害风险管理和气候变化适应更加紧密联系的一个背景。灾害风险管理促进气候变化适应从应对当前的影响中汲取经验,而气候变化适应帮助灾害风险管理更加有效地应对未来变化的条件。     

Compound[ing] disasters in Puerto Rico: Pathways for virtual transdisciplinary collaboration to enhance community resilience

Puerto Rico has been subject to complex and compounding effects of multiple disasters, exacerbated by sociopolitical, climactic, and geographical challenges that complicate relief and resilience. Interdisciplinary teams are uniquely suited to traverse emerging challenges in post-disaster settings, but there are few studies that leverage transdisciplinary skill sets and virtual co-production of knowledge to build on local autonomous responses. Communities are key sources of information and innovation which can serve as a model for recovery amidst disaster. Thus, an interdisciplinary team of emerging scholars collaborated with Caras con Causa, a local organization in Cataño, Puerto Rico, to develop processes for enhancing autonomous responses to disaster events through participatory pathways, specifically highlighting local knowledge and preferences. The results of this collaboration include: (1) an iterative process model for transdisciplinary co-production in virtual settings and (2) key highlights from post engagement reflections including community-scale definitions of disaster, and limitations to virtual collaboration amidst disaster. Together, these results yielded critical insights and lessons learned, including recommendations for improved project communication methods within transdisciplinary and virtual collaborations. Collectively, the process, it’s resulting products, and the post-engagement reflections demonstrate a pathway for scholars and community members to engage disaster resilience challenges. These strategies are most effectively practiced through focused collaboration with community stakeholders and are paramount in solving real-world challenges related to the increasing complex of compounding disasters.     

Participatory Water Basin Councils in Peru and Brazil: Expert discourses as means and barriers to inclusion

In the last twenty years, participatory forums have been increasingly used to manage water basins around the world. The implementation of participatory forums has sought to prevent and overcome conflicts by bringing together a multiplicity of stakeholders in joint efforts to deliberate, achieve mutually agreed upon decisions, and distribute limited water resources. Different literature streams have evaluated the benefits and challenges of participatory forums in practice, such as the difficulties some forums have had when confronting existing power structures. Separately, research on water governance has paid particular attention to the ways in which expert discourses are used by traditionally powerful actors to exclude less powerful others. This paper draws from the literatures on participation and discourses in environmental governance to empirically investigate how expert discourses may empower or disempower certain actors in four basin councils – two in Peru and two in Brazil. Through qualitative thematic analysis of 116 interviews and observation notes, we specifically investigate the extent to which expert discourses in these basin councils help empower previously excluded actors. Our findings indicate stakeholder interests that are not, or cannot, be expressed within the frame of expert discourses are often marginalized. This suggests participation has made it possible for some previously excluded actors to have a voice, yet their potential influence is seemingly confined to a restricted space beyond which their voices will have little effect.     

Addressing climate services in SouthAmerican Chaco region through a knowledge coproduction process

When engaging in an interdisciplinary and intersectoral knowledge coproduction process, what premises should (academic and non-academic) participants consider to prevent power dynamics and divergent interests from becoming epistemological obstacles (Bachelard, 1974)? What methodological devices should be adopted to enable a productive dialogue between heterogeneous actors and knowledge? Despite the plethora of literature on the relevance of participatory approaches and the promotion of open science to produce socially meaningful knowledge, most works neglect central challenges present in any coproduction experience. Namely, how to deal with power dynamics, how to challenge the identity anchors of the participants and how to ensure the epistemological conditions for initiating long-term collaboration. Hence, based on these concerns, this paper puts forth the theoretical-methodological basis of a knowledge coproduction approach for the development of climate services for family farming. In addition, we present two major results achieved in the framework of a coproduction process involving academic and non-academic participants: the development of a community-based rainfall monitoring network in the eastern region of the South American Gran Chaco and the codesign of a smartphone application.     

Perceptions and responses to climate policy risks among California farmers

This paper considers how farmers perceive and respond to climate change policy risks, and suggests that understanding these risk responses is as important as understanding responses to biophysical climate change impacts. Based on a survey of 162 farmers in California, we test three hypotheses regarding climate policy risk: (1) that perceived climate change risks will have a direct impact on farmer's responses to climate policy risks, (2) that previous climate change experiences will influence farmer's climate change perceptions and climate policy risk responses, and (3) that past experiences with environmental policies will more strongly affect a farmer's climate change beliefs, risks, and climate policy risk responses. Using a structural equation model we find support for all three hypotheses and furthermore show that farmers’ negative past policy experiences do not make them less likely to respond to climate policy risks through participation in a government incentive program. We discuss how future research and climate policies can be structured to garner greater agricultural participation. This work highlights that understanding climate policy risk responses and other social, economic and policy perspectives is a vital component of understanding climate change beliefs, risks and behaviors and should be more thoroughly considered in future work.     

Seeing the forest and the trees: Facilitating participatory network planning in environmental governance

Governance processes to address environmental change involve many different actors from multiple spatial, temporal and socio-political scales, not all of whom are connected by hierarchy and whose actions cannot always be mandated. In the environmental governance literature, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been found useful in understanding complex governance arrangements. In this paper we present and reflect on our experience with the Net-Map tool for participatory network mapping. The Net-Map tool was applied in three transdisciplinary case studies for three different purposes: (a) to contribute to an improved understanding of biodiversity knowledge flows in Europe, (b) to explore the interplay between actors with influence on water, agriculture, and energy developments at the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and (c) to understand the challenges facing stakeholders engaged in conservation and economic development in a Southeast Asian mountain range. The case studies explore how network maps can serve as boundary objects to engage stakeholders of diverse points of view and jointly design strategies to address governance challenges. More specifically they show how network maps are used to gain a better understanding of governance situations, to help stakeholders identify strategies for navigation of the complex networks in which they are embedded and to support transdisciplinary research processes. We close with some reflections on the potential and limitations of the Net-Map tool in facilitating multi-stakeholder processes and disentangling complex governance arrangements.     

ESSP框架下几种灾害的研究进展——2006年地球系统科学联盟(ESSP)全球环境变化科学大会综述

简要介绍了2006年11月9—11日在北京召开的地球系统科学联盟(ESSP)全球环境变化科学大会的基本内容,着重论述了全球环境变化背景下,海平面上升、城市疾病灾害、非洲的灾害以及灾害风险评估与管理等当前灾害研究热点领域的最新进展。从大会与灾害相关分会场的讨论内容可以看出,未来国际灾害研究关注的重点问题包括:理解和研究气候变化,以及气候与生态系统和人类社会之间的相互影响;加强对决定沿海系统脆弱性因素的评估,开展避免和减轻海平面上升影响的适应性研究;推进全球环境变化对人类健康影响途径和机制的深入研究;区域食物安全和饥荒依然是全球环境变化背景下非洲发展的重要议题;增强国际社会开展灾害风险评估、灾害预警、应急和恢复等风险管理方面的研究,探讨利用灾害制图、GIS和GPS等技术,对灾害多发地区,特别是沿海地区的灾害影响与损失进行评估。     

杭州市伏、秋旱灾害风险区划

根据杭州市1959-2010年降水资料、自然环境以及社会经济要素,综合致灾因子、孕灾环境、承灾环境及防灾减灾能力,构建区域干旱灾害风险评价模型。通过ArcGIS空间分析技术结合模糊综合评价法,编制以100 m＆#215;100 m栅格为基本评价单元的杭州市伏、秋旱灾害风险区划图。区划结果表明,淳安西北部、建德中南部、桐庐中部、富阳南部、临安东部以及余杭、主城区,伏旱、秋旱灾害风险均较高。     

三明市雷电气候特征与雷电灾害易损度区划研究

通过对三明市市区及10个县（市）气象观测站1981-2013年雷电观测资料的统计分析,得出了三明市雷电气候特征与变化规律.采用2003-2012年雷电灾害数据,从雷电致灾因子、承灾体因素考虑,选取雷击密度N_g、雷电灾害频度P、经济损失模数D和生命受损模数L作为分析雷电灾害易损度指标参数,通过广泛调研和抽样调查问卷,确定各要素所占权重,计算出三明市区及所属10个县（市）雷电灾害易损性风险值,确定了雷电灾害易损度区划分级指标,绘制雷电灾害易损度区划图,完成了雷电灾害易损度区划研究.     

社交媒体在“21世纪海上丝绸之路”沿线国家海洋防灾减灾中的应用及借鉴

以Twitter、Facebook为代表的社交媒体在防灾减灾方面的作用越来越受到关注.中国是世界上海洋灾害最为严重的国家之一,海洋防灾减灾是目前我国面临的十分紧迫的问题.近年来,智能手机和网络的普及让中国的社交媒体进入了人们的日常生活.借鉴国外社交媒体在防灾减灾方面的经验,我们认为中国的社交媒体在海洋防灾减灾中同样拥有巨大潜力.本文首先介绍了"21世纪海上丝绸之路"沿线的几个国家利用社交媒体开展海洋防灾减灾工作的情况,随后总结了当前中国在海洋灾害预警、灾害信息传播及灾害管理等方面的实际情况.最后,借鉴国外先进的经验和做法,为进一步提升中国社交媒体在海洋防灾减灾工作中的作用提出了启示性的对策建议.     

Disaster risk reduction legislations: Is there a move from events to processes?

Disaster research and scholarship is now advocating a shift from focusing on the hazard event to processes that generate vulnerability and loss of resilience to disasters. Disaster legislations are among prominent instruments that can highlight the tensions as well as challenges that are being encountered towards this change in focus. Using textual analysis, this paper presents a study that investigated whether five post-2002 disaster legislations have shifted emphasis from the hazard to the vulnerability and resilience paradigms. The five examples illustrate that while there is a slight change, at least in rhetoric, from response to a prevention focus, disaster legislations largely promote a centralised institutional framework, with inadequate resource commitments and limited participation from vulnerable communities. Consequently, while generalisations simply cannot be made without a wider analysis of many more examples from different countries, the five disaster legislations appear to re-emphasise the response focus with less attention on the processes that reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience. The conclusion is that while the rhetoric has changed, the disaster legislations have not significantly moved from the hazard to vulnerability and resilience focus suggesting that reduction of losses and damages to disasters remains a big challenge     

Learning effects of interactive decision-making processes for climate change adaptation

Learning is gaining attention in relation to governance processes for contemporary environmental challenges; however, scholarship at the nexus of learning and environmental governance lacks clarity and understanding about how to define and measure learning, and the linkages between learning, social interactions, and environment. In response, this study aimed to advance and operationalize a typology of learning in an environmental governance context, and examined if a participatory decision-making process (adaptive co-management) for climate change adaptation fostered learning. Three types of learning were identified: cognitive learning, related to the acquisition of new or the structuring of existing knowledge; normative learning, which concerns a shift in viewpoints, values or paradigms, and relational learning, referring to an improved understanding of others’ mindsets, enhanced trust and ability to cooperate. A robust mixed methods approach with a focus on quantitative measures including concept map analysis, social network analysis, and self-reflective questions, was designed to gauge indicators for each learning type. A participatory decision-making process for climate change adaptation was initiated with stakeholders in the Niagara region, Canada. A pseudo-control group was used to minimize external contextual influences on results. Clear empirical evidence of cognitive and relational learning was gained; however, the results from normative learning measures were inconclusive. The learning typology and measurement method operationalized in this research advances previous treatments of learning in relation to participatory decision-making processes, and supports adaptive co-management as a governance strategy that fosters learning and adaptive capacity.