WPS and Climate Change

Author(s):  
Annica Kronsell

Climate change can be violent, expressed through immediate weather events, such as floods and storms, and slower, long term violence, such as droughts that impact women’s everyday lives and livelihoods and are exacerbated by other pressures and conflicts. However, climate change has not been explicitly connected to the UN women, peace, and security agenda. The likely reason is that the gender implications of the climate issue have only recently gained salience on the international climate agenda, through the dominant framing of women’s vulnerability. This chapter evokes the ecofeminism argument that climate change is part of a destructive patriarchal politico-economic structure, which implies there can be no separate solution to concerns for peace, equality, or climate issues; all have to be included in a reassessment of humans’ relation to the earth. It suggests that the human security focus provides a more inclusive way to connect the aspirations for peace with climate concerns. To that end, I argue that employing the human security lens as a starting point can help in taking seriously how individual women experience the bottom-up the effects of climate events.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 5954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Sanz-Lazaro

Climate change is modifying disturbance regimes, affecting the severity and occurrence of extreme events. Current experiments investigating extreme events have a large diversity of experimental approaches and key aspects such as the interaction with other disturbances, the timing, and long-term effects are not usually incorporated in a standardized way. This lack of comparability among studies limits advances in this field of research. This study presents a framework that is comprised of two experimental approaches designed to test expected changes on disturbance regime due to climate change. These approaches test the effects of disturbances becoming more clustered and more extreme. They use common descriptor variables regardless of the type of disturbance and ecosystem. This framework is completed with a compilation of procedures that increase the realism of experiments in the aforementioned key aspects. The proposed framework favours comparability among studies and increases our understanding of extreme events. Examples to implement this framework are given using rocky shores as a case study. Far from being perfect, the purpose of this framework is to act as a starting point that triggers the comparability and refinement of these types of experiments needed to advance our understanding of the ecological effects of extreme events.


Author(s):  
Mark Nevitt

The climate-security century is here. Both the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) and the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (“NCA”) recently sounded the alarm on climate change’s “super-wicked” and destabilizing security impacts. Scientists and security professionals alike reaffirm what we are witnessing with our own eyes: The earth is warming at a rapid rate; climate change affects international peace and security in complex ways; and the window for international climate action is slamming shut.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-160
Author(s):  
Roberto Buizza

Climate change is real, and we, humans, are responsible for it. Its impact is already evident, both on the Earth system (global warming, sea-level rise, sea-ice melting, more intense and frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves and fires) and on people (famines, health issues, migrations, political tensions and conflicts). We need immediate and concrete mitigation actions aiming to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, and adaptation actions to be able to cope with the increasing changing climate. We have to reach zero-net greenhouse gases emissions as soon as possible, by reducing emissions by at least 5% a year, starting from now. Otherwise the climate change impact will become more and more severe: it will induce more injustice, and it will have a major impact on people health. We have the resources and the technologies to deal with it: we must have the courage to change and transform and deal with it. Addressing climate change is not impossible: to the contrary, it is a ‘possible mission’.


Author(s):  
Robert A. Berner

The cycle of carbon is essential to the maintenance of life, to climate, and to the composition of the atmosphere and oceans. What is normally thought of as the “carbon cycle” is the transfer of carbon between the atmosphere, the oceans, and life. This is not the subject of interest of this book. To understand this apparently confusing statement, it is necessary to separate the carbon cycle into two cycles: the short-term cycle and the long-term cycle. The “carbon cycle,” as most people understand it, is represented in figure 1.1. Carbon dioxide is taken up via photosynthesis by green plants on the continents or phytoplankton in the ocean. On land carbon is transferred to soils by the dropping of leaves, root growth, and respiration, the death of plants, and the development of soil biota. Land herbivores eat the plants, and carnivores eat the herbivores. In the oceans the phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton that are in turn eaten by larger and larger organisms. The plants, plankton, and animals respire CO2. Upon death the plants and animals are decomposed by microorganisms with the ultimate production of CO2. Carbon dioxide is exchanged between the oceans and atmosphere, and dissolved organic matter is carried in solution by rivers from soils to the sea. This all constitutes the shortterm carbon cycle. The word “short-term” is used because the characteristic times for transferring carbon between reservoirs range from days to tens of thousands of years. Because the earth is more than four billion years old, this is short on a geological time scale. As the short-term cycle proceeds, concentrations of the two principal atmospheric gases, CO2 and CH4, can change as a result of perturbations of the cycle. Because these two are both greenhouse gases—in other words, they adsorb outgoing infrared radiation from the earth surface—changes in their concentrations can involve global warming and cooling over centuries and many millennia. Such changes have accompanied global climate change over the Quaternary period (past 2 million years), although other factors, such as variations in the receipt of solar radiation due to changes in characteristics of the earth’s orbit, have also contributed to climate change.


Author(s):  
Valentina Petrovna Gorbatenko ◽  
Marina Alexandrovna Volkova ◽  
Olga Vladimirovna Nosyreva ◽  
George Georgievich Zhuravlev ◽  
Irina Valerievna Kuzhevskaia

Current climate changes in Russia are attended by the increase in frequency of dangerous weather events. This chapter researches long-term variations of the dangerous weather's events on Western Siberia and to reveal general regularity, which can be associated with forest fires. The researches have been carried out for the territories of southeast of Western Siberia. The duration of the fire season increases due to climate change. This is due both to the earlier snowfall and the onset of the phenological spring, and to the increase in the duration of the thunderstorm period. Thunderstorms in Siberia are a much more frequent cause of forest fires (28%) than in other territories. Wildfire frequency is correlated with air temperature and drought anomalies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 138 (5) ◽  
pp. 282-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
JT Walker

Climate change is predicted to have a major impact on people’s lives with the recent extreme weather events and varying abnormal temperature profiles across the world raising concerns. The impacts of global warming are already being observed, from rising sea levels and melting snow and ice to changing weather patterns. Scientists state unequivocally that these trends cannot be explained by natural variability in climate alone. Human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, have warmed the earth by dramatically increasing concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere; as these concentrations increase, the more the earth will warm. Climate change and related extreme weather events are being exacerbated sooner than has previously been considered and are already adversely affecting ecosystems and human health by increasing the burden and type of disease at a local level. Changes to the marine environment and freshwater supplies already affect significant parts of the world’s population and warmer temperatures, especially in more temperate regions, may see an increased spread and transmission of diseases usually associated with warmer climes including, for example, cholera and malaria; these impacts are likely to become more severe in a greater number of countries. This review discusses the impacts of climate change including changes in infectious disease transmission, patterns of waterborne diseases and the likely consequences of climate change due to warmer water, drought, higher rainfall, rising sea levels and flooding.


Landslides ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (11) ◽  
pp. 2483-2501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Coe

Abstract Permafrost and glaciers are being degraded by the warming effects of climate change. The impact that this degradation has on slope stability in mountainous terrain is the subject of ongoing research efforts. The relatively new availability of high-resolution (≤ 10 m) imagery with worldwide coverage and short (≤ 30 days) repeat acquisition times, as well as the emerging field of environmental seismology, presents opportunities for making remote, systematic observations of landslides in cryospheric mountainous terrain. I reviewed the literature and evaluated landslide activity in existing imagery to select five ~ 5000-km2 sites where long-term, systematic observations could take place. The five proposed sites are the northern and eastern flanks of the Northern Patagonia Ice Field, the Western European Alps, the eastern Karakoram Range in the Himalayan Mountains, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and the Fairweather Range in Southeast Alaska. Systematic observations of landslide occurrence, triggers, size, and travel distance at these sites, especially if coupled with observations from in situ instrumental monitoring, could lead to a better understanding of changes in slope stability induced by climate change. The suggested sites are not meant to be absolute and unalterable. Rather, they are intended as a starting point and discussion starter for new work in this expanding landslide research frontier.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Baodeng Hou ◽  
Yongxiang Wu ◽  
Jianhua Wang ◽  
Kai Wu ◽  
Weihua Xiao

The frequent occurrence of geophysical disasters under climate change has drawn Chinese scholars to pay their attention to disaster relations. If the occurrence sequence of disasters could be identified, long-term disaster forecast could be realized. Based on the Earth Degassing Effect (EDE) which is valid, this paper took the magnitude, epicenter, and occurrence time of the earthquake, as well as the epicenter and occurrence time of the rainstorm floods as basic factors to establish an integrated model to study the correlation between rainstorm floods and earthquakes. 2461 severe earthquakes occurred in China or within 3000 km from China and the 169 heavy rainstorm floods occurred in China over the past 200+ years as the input data of the model. The computational results showed that although most of the rainstorm floods have nothing to do with the severe earthquakes from a statistical perspective, some floods might relate to earthquakes. This is especially true when the earthquakes happen in the vapor transmission zone where rainstorms lead to abundant water vapors. In this regard, earthquakes are more likely to cause big rainstorm floods. However, many cases of rainstorm floods could be found after severe earthquakes with a large extent of uncertainty.


elni Review ◽  
2007 ◽  
pp. 23-27
Author(s):  
Christoph Holtwisch

The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate [APP or AP6] is a very new phenomenon in international climate policy. It has important effects on the traditional climate regime formed by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [FCCC] and its Kyoto Protocol [KP]. From its own point of view, the APP is a grouping of key nations to address serious and long-term challenges, including anthropogenic climate change. The APP partners - Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the USA - represent roughly half the world economy and population, energy consumption and global greenhouse gas emissions. For this reason, this “coalition of the emitting” is – and will be – a central factor in international climate policy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serhan Cevik ◽  
Manuk Ghazanchyan

Abstract While the world’s attention is on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change remains a greater existential threat to vulnerable countries that are highly dependent on a weather-sensitive sector like tourism. Using a multidimensional index, this study investigates the long-term impact of climate change vulnerability on international tourism in a panel of 15 Caribbean countries over the period 1995–2017. Empirical results show that climate vulnerability already has a statistically and economically significant negative effect on international tourism revenues across the region. As extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe over time, our findings indicate that the Caribbean countries need to invest more in adaptation and mitigation in order to reduce vulnerabilities.


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