气候变化适应行动实施框架——宁夏农业案例实践

宁夏是我国生态脆弱区和贫困区之一,以宁夏为例开展农业适应行动实践具有一定的代表性和示范作用.根据气候变化适应行动实施框架,研究结果表明:宁夏未来气候干旱风险将增加,水资源短缺矛盾加剧,极端气候事件频率和强度加大.未来宁夏北部灌区农业应以发展节水灌溉和高效种植为主,中部以设施农业和牧业为主,南部以发展特色农业为主.气象部...     

Adapting to climate change impacts on water resources in England—An assessment of draft Water Resources Management Plans

Climate change is expected to produce reductions in water availability in England, potentially necessitating adaptive action by the water industry to maintain supplies. As part of Ofwat's fifth Periodic Review (PR09), water companies recently released their draft Water Resources Management Plans, setting out how each company intends to maintain the balance between the supply and demand for water over the next 25 years, following Environment Agency guidelines. This paper reviews these plans to determine company estimates of the impact of climate change on water supply relative to other resource pressures. The approaches adopted for incorporating the impact in the plans and the proposed management solutions are also identified.Climate change impacts for individual resource zones range from no reductions in deployable output to greater than 50% over the planning period. The estimated national aggregated loss of deployable output under a “core” climate scenario is ∼520 Ml/d (3% of deployable output) by 2034/2035, the equivalent of the supply of one entire water company (South West Water). Climate change is the largest single driver of change in water supplies over the planning period. Over half of the climate change impact is concentrated in southern England. In extreme cases, climate change uncertainty is of the same magnitude as the change under the core scenario (up to a loss of ∼475 Ml/d). 44 of the 68 resource zones with available data are estimated to have a climate change impact. In 35 of these climate change has the greatest impact although in 10 zones sustainability reductions have a greater impact. Of the overall change in downward pressure on the supply-demand balance over the planning period, ∼56% is accounted for by increased demand (620 Ml/d) and supply side climate change accounts for ∼37% (407 Ml/d). Climate change impacts have a cumulative impact in concert with other changing supply side reducing components increasing the national pressure on the supply-demand balance. Whilst the magnitude of climate change appears to justify its explicit consideration, it is rare that adaptation options are planned solely in response to climate change but as a suite of options to provide a resilient supply to a range of pressures (including significant demand side pressures). Supply-side measures still tend to be considered by water companies to be more reliable than demand-side measures.     

Climate change transformation: A definition and typology to guide decision making in urban environments

Climate change presents a threat to the sustainability of cities and their societies, and must be adequately addressed. Urban environments (cities) are responsible for the creation of a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions which are the source of climate change. Cities have been increasingly the focus of action to address climate change, yet emissions are not significantly reducing. Additionally, there a lack of integration between adaptation and mitigation. This prevents responses adequate to limit global warming to 1.5^OC, and to be well adapted to anticipated changes. This paper critically analyses existing definitions and typologies of climate change actions. A definition of ‘climate change transformation’ is proposed which includes the integration of adaptation and mitigation goals to enable a new regime in which global warming is limited to 1.5^OC. A new three-part typology: ‘coping, malaction and transformation,’ is presented for categorising climate change actions by the extent to which they integrate adaptation and mitigation, and define a new regime. The typology is accompanied by illustrations to demonstrate the relationship between adaptation and mitigation. The definition, typology and illustration serve to guide effective climate change decision making, and provides principles to guide application in urban environments.     

Challenges to scenario-guided adaptive action on food security under climate change

This paper examines the development and use of scenarios as an approach to guide action in multi-level, multi-actor adaptation contexts such as food security under climate change. Three challenges are highlighted: (1) ensuring the appropriate scope for action; (2) moving beyond intervention-based decision guidance; and (3) developing long-term shared capacity for strategic planning. To overcome these challenges we have applied explorative scenarios and normative back-casting with stakeholders from different sectors at the regional level in East Africa. We then applied lessons about appropriate scope, enabling adaptation pathways, and developing strategic planning capacity to scenarios processes in multiple global regions. Scenarios were created to have a broad enough scope to be relevant to diverse actors, and then adapted by different actor groups to ensure their salience in specific decision contexts. The initial strategy for using the scenarios by bringing a range of actors together to explore new collaborative proposals had limitations as well as strengths versus the application of scenarios for specific actor groups and existing decision pathways. Scenarios development and use transitioned from an intervention-based process to an embedded process characterized by continuous engagement. Feasibility and long-term sustainability could be ensured by having decision makers own the process and focusing on developing strategic planning capacity within their home organizations.     

A linked vulnerability and resilience framework for adaptation pathways in remote disadvantaged communities

We develop a systems framework for exploring adaptation pathways to climate change among people in remote and marginalized regions. The framework builds on two common and seemingly paradoxical narratives about people in remote regions. The first is recognition that people in remote regions demonstrate significant resilience to climate and resource variability, and may therefore be among the best equipped to adapt to climate change. The second narrative is that many people in remote regions are chronically disadvantaged and therefore are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. These narratives, taken in isolation and in extremis, can have significant maladaptive policy and practice implications. From a systems perspective, both narratives may be valid, because they form elements of latent and dominant feedback loops that require articulation for a nuanced understanding of vulnerability-reducing and resilience-building responses in a joint framework. Through literature review and community engagement across three remote regions on different continents, we test the potential of the framework to assist dialogue about adaptation pathways in remote marginalized communities. In an adaptation pathway view, short-term responses to vulnerability can risk locking in a pathway that increases specific resilience but creates greater vulnerability in the long-term. Equally, longer-term actions towards increasing desirable forms of resilience need to take account of short-term realities to respond to acute and multiple needs of marginalized remote communities. The framework was useful in uniting vulnerability and resilience narratives, and broadening the scope for adaptation policy and action on adaptation pathways for remote regions.     

Climate adaptation and development: Contradictions for human security in Gambella,Ethiopia

It is clear that we need a climate adaptation policy agenda that is sensitive to the special political, social, and ecological circumstances of highly vulnerable regions, most of which are located in the African Sahel. While the existing literature on climate variability and climate change makes important theoretical contributions on development, vulnerability, and adaptation more broadly, with few exceptions it has not acknowledged that contradictions arise in addressing insecurities via the implementation of development, vulnerability reduction, and adaptation programs. An empirical assessment of how such contradictions are both driven by and negotiated in such programs is particularly useful if we are to design a more robust and grounded adaptation agenda. In this article, we focus on the paradigmatic case of Gambella in Ethiopia, a region that lies near the bottom of many development indices, but has also been the site for recent efforts to reduce climate vulnerability through village and agricultural modernization programs. Drawing on recent research in the region and on these programs, we demonstrate how the politics of development and adaptation lead to differential and contradictory impacts on four arenas of human security (a) elements of water security, (b) temporal aspects of water security and livelihoods security, (c) personal, state and community security, and (d) differentiated geographies economic security which privilege the national and international scale. The result of this complex political economy is that responses have served to increase rather than decrease tensions in the region.     

Using community led development approaches to address vulnerability after disaster: Caught in a sad romance

A reading of the social capital literature suggests that the networks and the social relationships which enable collective action can be used to address critical livelihood needs, even in disaster contexts. Yet even when such community-led approaches are combined with substantial resources, too often these interventions (re)produce vulnerabilities without recovering prior levels of development. Examining the outcomes of community-led approaches in post-tsunami Aceh after the gaze of the aid industry has moved elsewhere, this paper finds that in a few cases, interventions worked with social networks to revive livelihoods successfully, albeit in complex, contingent ways. Yet, given the nature of post-disaster contexts and the exigencies driving NGO and donors actions, the research concludes that the capacity for community based approaches to address the underlying drivers of vulnerability remains limited. The paper calls for a rewriting of intervention narratives and a reworking of intervention practices, to address the deeper determinants of disadvantage and vulnerability.     

How harmful are restrictions on adapting to climate change?

The dominant assumption in economic models of climate policy remains that adaptation will be implemented in an optimal manner. There are, however, several reasons why optimal levels of adaptation may not be attainable. This paper investigates the effects of suboptimal levels of adaptation caused by different types of adaptation restrictions, on the composition and level of climate change costs and on welfare. We find that especially restrictions to the effectiveness of adaptation at more extreme levels of climate change can be very harmful. Furthermore we show that the potential of mitigation to offset suboptimal adaptation varies from being essential in case adaptation becomes ineffective at higher temperature increases, to being largely ineffective in case of short-term inaction. However, in all cases the short-term recommendation is to increase mitigation levels slightly above what is normally recommended, and to keep mitigation policies flexible enough to be able to respond when adaptation restrictions become more prominent. It is clear that by reducing adaptation restrictions, in combination with adjusting the optimal level of mitigation may keep the costs of adaptation restrictions limited, and thus generally it is very harmful to ignore existing restrictions on adaptation when devising (efficient) climate policies.     

Embedding complex hydrology in the regional climate system – Dynamic coupling across different modelling domains

To improve our understanding of the impacts of feedback between the atmosphere and the terrestrial water cycle including groundwater and to improve the integration of water resource management modelling for climate adaption we have developed a dynamically coupled climate–hydrological modelling system. The OpenMI modelling interface is used to couple a comprehensive hydrological modelling system, MIKE SHE running on personal computers, and a regional climate modelling system, HIRHAM running on a high performance computing platform. The coupled model enables two-way interaction between the atmosphere and the groundwater via the land surface and can represent the lateral movement of water in both the surface and subsurface and their interactions, not normally accounted for in climate models. Meso-scale processes are important for climate in general and rainfall in particular. Hydrological impacts are assessed at the catchment scale, the most important scale for water management. Feedback between groundwater, the land surface and the atmosphere occurs across a range of scales. Recognising this, the coupling was developed to allow dynamic exchange of water and energy at the catchment scale embedded within a larger meso-scale modelling domain. We present the coupling methodology used and describe the challenges in representing the exchanges between models and across scales. The coupled model is applied to one-way and two-way coupled simulations for a managed groundwater-dominated catchment, the Skjern River, Denmark. These coupled model simulations are evaluated against field observations and then compared with uncoupled climate and hydrological model simulations. Exploratory simulations show significant differences, particularly in the summer for precipitation and evapotranspiration the coupled model including groundwater and the RCM where groundwater is neglected. However, the resulting differences in the net precipitation and the catchment runoff in this groundwater dominated catchment were small. The need for further decadal scale simulations to understand the differences and insensitivity is highlighted.     

Sharing the burden of financing adaptation to climate change

Climate change may cause most harm to countries that have historically contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change. This paper identifies consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical principles to guide a fair international burden-sharing scheme of climate change adaptation costs. We use these ethical principles to derive political principles – historical responsibility and capacity to pay – that can be applied in assigning a share of the financial burden to individual countries. We then propose a hybrid ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ approach as a promising starting point for international negotiations on the design of burden-sharing schemes. A numerical assessment of seven scenarios shows that the countries of Annex I of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would bear the bulk of the costs of adaptation, but contributions differ substantially subject to the choice of a capacity to pay indicator. The contributions are less sensitive to choices related to responsibility calculations, apart from those associated with land-use-related emissions. Assuming costs of climate adaptation of USD 100 billion per year, the total financial contribution by the Annex I countries would be in the range of USD 65–70 billion per year. Expressed as a per capita basis, this gives a range of USD 43–82 per capita per year.