Heat exposure and the climate change beliefs in a Desert City: The case of Phoenix metropolitan area

In many public policy areas, such as climate change, news media reports about scientific research play an important role. In presenting their research, scientists are providing guidance to the public regarding public policy choices. How do people decide which scientists and scientific claims to believe? This is a question we address by drawing on the psychology of persuasion. We propose the hypothesis that people are more likely to believe local scientists than national or international scientists. We test this hypothesis with an experiment embedded in a national Internet survey. Our experiment yielded null findings, showing that people do not discount or ignore research findings on climate change if they come from Europe instead of Washington-based scientists or a leading university in a respondent’s home state. This reinforces evidence that climate change beliefs are relatively stable, based on party affiliation, and not malleable based on the source of the scientific report.

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Pliocene-Pleistocene stability of the Queen Creek drainage in the Basin and Range Province, eastern Phoenix metropolitan area, Central Arizona

Geomorphology ◽

10.1016/j.geomorph.2021.107647 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 381 ◽

pp. 107647

Author(s):

Steven J. Skotnicki ◽

Brian F. Gootee ◽

Yeong Bae Seong

Keyword(s):

Metropolitan Area ◽

Basin And Range ◽

Basin And Range Province ◽

Phoenix Metropolitan Area ◽

Central Arizona

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Integrating climate change adaptation in coastal governance of the Barcelona metropolitan area

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change ◽

10.1007/s11027-021-09953-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 26 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Inga J. Sauer ◽

Elisabet Roca ◽

Míriam Villares

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Climate Change Adaptation ◽

Metropolitan Area ◽

Management Practice ◽

National Level ◽

Adaptation Planning ◽

Coastal Protection ◽

Adaptive Governance ◽

Governance Structures ◽

Coastal Governance

AbstractCoastal cities are exposed to high risks due to climate change, as they are potentially affected by both rising sea levels and increasingly intense and frequent coastal storms. Socio-economic drivers also increase exposure to natural hazards, accelerate environmental degradation, and require adaptive governance structures to moderate negative impacts. Here, we use a social network analysis (SNA) combined with further qualitative information to identify barriers and enablers of adaptive governance in the Barcelona metropolitan area. By analyzing how climate change adaptation is mainstreamed between different administrative scales as well as different societal actors, we can determine the governance structures and external conditions that hamper or foster strategical adaptation plans from being used as operational adaptation tools. We identify a diverse set of stakeholders acting at different administrative levels (local to national), in public administration, science, civil society, and the tourism economy. The metropolitan administration acts as an important bridging organization by promoting climate change adaptation to different interest groups and by passing knowledge between actors. Nonetheless, national adaptation planning fails to take into account local experiences in coastal protection, which leads to an ineffective science policy interaction and limits adaptive management and learning opportunities. Overcoming this is difficult, however, as the effectiveness of local adaptation strategies in the Barcelona metropolitan area is very limited due to a strong centralization of power at the national level and a lack of polycentricity. Due to the high touristic pressure, the legal framework is currently oriented to primarily meet the demands of recreational use and tourism, prioritizing these aspects in daily management practice. Therefore, touristic and economic activities need to be aligned to adaptation efforts, to convert them from barriers into drivers for adaptation action. Our work strongly suggests that more effectively embedding adaptation planning and action into existing legal structures of coastal management would allow strategic adaptation plans to be an effective operational tool for local coastal governance.

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COVID-19 Trends in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area from a Mobile Testing Program: Last Quarter of 2020

Journal of Community Health ◽

10.1007/s10900-021-00991-4 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Christine S. M. Lau ◽

Sebastian Shu ◽

Jennifer Mayer ◽

Mikayla Towns ◽

Alexis Farris ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Metropolitan Area ◽

Testing Program ◽

Mobile Testing ◽

Phoenix Metropolitan Area ◽

The Phoenix

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Comparative analysis of three NDVI resolutions in different urban typologies. The case of Granollers in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona.

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14785 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alan García-Haro ◽

Josep Roca

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Metropolitan Area ◽

Urban Studies ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Industrial Area ◽

Landsat 8 ◽

Urban Context ◽

Urban Core ◽

First Results ◽

Definition Of

In recent years, the use of remote sensed NDVI has become recurrent in urban studies regarding the adaptation of cities to climate change. However, due to the physical diversity within cities and the different resolution offered by the sensors, the territorial interpretation of what the NDVI values really mean becomes difficult. Where the larger the size of the cells of the image, the greater the number of elements of the built environment within it, and the more complex the interpretation becomes.In this work, the relationship between the NDVI of three sensors with different cell resolution for the same location and date is studied. In particular, the city of Granollers in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona is analyzed. First, the NDVI images were obtained from Landsat-8 with 30m resolution, Sentinel-2 with 10m and from the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food of Catalonia (DARP) with 0.125m resolution. Then, the comparison was performed with a sample of five different typologies of the territory: dense urban core, suburban, industrial, area of highway and rural.As first results, a supervised classification of the DARP image allowed the definition of 0.30 as the precise minimum value of NDVI that indicates the actual presence of vegetation. On the other hand, the comparison indicates that, in the urban context, the larger the cell size, the presence of vegetation quality is overestimated, where the higher percentage of cells is concentrated in higher NDVI values than in those with lower resolution. However, this behavior is not appreciated in rural areas, where higher percentages of cells of different resolutions were concentrated in the same NDVI ranges.In such a way, it is corroborated that it is in the urban context where this indicator has a greater difficulty of territorial interpretation. Statements that are analyzed in greater depth in this study, where its implications in the use of NDVI in urban studies for the adaptation of cities to climate change are discussed.

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