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.     

Characterization and assessment of the devastating natural hazards across the Canadian Prairie Provinces from 2009 to 2011

From 2009 to 2011, the Canadian Prairies were subjected to exceptionally variable precipitation regimes, ranging between record drought and unprecedented flooding. Adjacent regions concurrently experienced droughts and floods, and individual areas transitioned rapidly from pluvial to drought conditions and vice versa. Such events had major impacts; for example, damages from floods in the Assiniboine River Basin (ARB) have exceeded $1 billion, and forest fires ravaged the town of Slave Lake, Alberta. This study first characterizes, and then assesses, these devastating natural hazards in terms of their physical processes (across multiple spatial and temporal scales) related to both the spatially contrasting precipitation states and rapid temporal transitions between these states. Subtle differences in large-scale atmospheric flow had marked impacts on precipitation. Primary factors controlling the distribution and amount of precipitation included the location and persistence of key surface and upper-air features, as well as their interaction. Additionally, multiple events—rather than individual extremes—were responsible for the flooding over the Saskatchewan River Basin and the ARB. Very heavy rainfall events (≥25 mm d^?1) accounted for up to 55 % of warm season rain at some locations, and the frequency of heavy rainfall events was critical for determining whether a region experienced drought or pluvial conditions. This study has increased our knowledge of the characteristics, impacts and mechanisms of rapidly transitioning disparate precipitation states on the Canadian Prairies and will aid in better understanding both past and projected future hydro-climatic extremes in the region.     

Gisbornian (Caradoc) graptolites from New South Wales,Australia: systematics,biostratigraphy and evolution

The biodiversity record of graptolites from the Cheeseman's Creek Formation, considered herein as late Gisbornian (Caradoc) in age, has been substantially increased to fifteen taxa, including the new species Dicellograptus praemorrisi sp. nov. and Climacograptus vandenbergi sp. nov. Some of the records have global correlative significance enabling us to identify the wilsoni Biozone ( = calcaratus Biozone of eastern Australia). Several evolutionary lineages have been recognized:

• 1 Dicellograptus moffatensis (Carruthers, 1858) → D. praemorrisi sp. nov → D. morrisi Hopkinson, 1871
• 2 Glossograptus hincksi Hopkinson, 1872 → Glossograptus? sp.
• 3 Climacograptus bicornis (J. Hall, 1847) → C. vandenbergi sp. nov. → C. lanceolatus VandenBerg, 1990.

Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.