scholarly journals Communicating climate risk: a handbook

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freya Eloise Roberts ◽  
Kris De Meyer ◽  
Lucy Hubble-Rose

This handbook is a practical guide to communicating climate risk, designed specifically for those working at the interface of climate science and policy. It explains insights from psychology and neuroscience on how our brains engage with the idea of climate risk, it highlights journalism hacks for writing about risk clearly, it shares lessons learned from the authors' experience working with policymakers on climate risk, and it offers a set of useful questions to help other researchers ascertain what policymakers need from climate risk research. Contact the authors on Twitter @UCL_CAU or email [email protected] for further information.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Suniya S. Luthar ◽  
Ashley M. Ebbert ◽  
Nina L. Kumar

Abstract When children are exposed to serious life adversities, Ed Zigler believed that developmental scientists must expediently strive to illuminate the most critical directions for beneficial interventions. In this paper, we present a new study on risk and resilience on adolescents during COVID-19, bookended – in introductory and concluding discussions – by descriptions of programmatic work anchored in lessons learned from Zigler. The new study was conducted during the first two months of the pandemic, using a mixed-methods approach with a sample of over 2,000 students across five high schools. Overall, rates of clinically significant symptoms were generally lower as compared to norms documented in 2019. Multivariate regressions showed that the most robust, unique associations with teens’ distress were with feelings of stress around parents and support received from them. Open ended responses to three questions highlighted concerns about schoolwork and college, but equally, emphasized worries about families’ well-being, and positive outreach from school adults. The findings have recurred across subsequent school assessments, and strongly resonate with contemporary perspectives on resilience in science and policy. If serious distress is to be averted among youth under high stress, interventions must attend not just to the children's mental health but that of salient caregiving adults at home and school. The article concludes with some specific recommendations for community-based initiatives to address mental health through continued uncertainties of the pandemic.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARUCH FISCHHOFF

Abstract The behavioral sciences were there at the beginning of the systematic study of climate change. However, in the ensuing quarter century, they largely faded from view, during which time public discourse and policy evolved without them. That disengagement and the recent reengagement suggest lessons for the future role of the behavioral sciences in climate science and policy. Looking forward, the greatest promise lies in projects that make behavioral science integral to climate science by: (1) translating behavioral results into the quantitative estimates that climate analyses need; (2) making climate research more relevant to climate-related decisions; and (3) treating the analytical process as a behavioral enterprise, potentially subject to imperfection and improvement. Such collaborations could afford the behavioral sciences more central roles in setting climate-related policies, as well as implementing them. They require, and may motivate, changes in academic priorities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn McGregor

Climate risk management has emerged over the last decade as a distinct area of activity within the wider field of climatology. Its focus is on integrating climate and non-climate information in order to enhance the decision-making process in a wide range of climate-sensitive sectors of society, the economy and the environment. Given the burgeoning pure and applied climate science literature that addresses a range of climate risks, the purpose of this progress report is to provide an overview of recent developments in the field of climatology that may contribute to the risk assessment component of climate risk management. Data rescue and climate database construction, hurricanes and droughts as examples of extreme climate events and seasonal climate forecasting are focused on in this report and are privileged over other topics because of either their fundamental importance for establishing event probability or scale of societal impact. The review of the literature finds that historical data rescue, climate reconstruction and the compilation of climate data bases has assisted immensely in understanding past climate events and increasing the information base for managing climate risk. Advances in the scientific understanding of the causes and the characterization of hurricanes and droughts stand to benefit the management of these two extreme events while work focused on unravelling the nature of ocean–atmosphere interactions and associated climate anomalies at the seasonal timescale has provided the basis for the possible seasonal forecasting of a range of climate events. The report also acknowledges that despite the potential of climate information to assist with managing climate risk, its uptake by decision makers should not be automatically assumed by the climatological community.


Eos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Zeppetello

A student who saw his climate research misrepresented in online forums shares the experience, as well as lessons learned and recommendations for how to counter efforts to distort climate science.


2020 ◽  
pp. 030631272094193
Author(s):  
Bård Lahn

Over the last 10 years, the concept of a global ‘carbon budget’ of allowable CO2 emissions has become ubiquitous in climate science and policy. Since it was brought to prominence by the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, the carbon budget has changed how climate change is enacted as an issue of public concern, from determining the optimal rate of future emissions to establishing a fixed limit for how much emissions should be allowed before they must be stopped altogether. Exploring the emergence of the carbon budget concept, this article shows how the assessment process of the IPCC has offered scientific experts the means to modify how the climate issue is problematized, and discusses the implications of this ‘modifying-work’ for the politics of climate change. It finds that the ‘modified climate issue’ must be seen as an outcome of the ordinary work within established scientific and political institutions, and the agency these institutions afford scientists to enact the issue differently. On this basis, it argues that the case of the carbon budget holds important insights not only for the relationship between climate science and policy, but also for the pragmatist literature on ‘issue formation’ in STS.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Stoner ◽  
Jennifer Jacobs ◽  
Jo Sias ◽  
Gordon Airey ◽  
Katharine Hayhoe

<p>Climate change is already impacting the performance and integrity of transportation infrastructure around the world and is anticipated to have serious ramifications for infrastructure safety, environmental sustainability, economic vitality, mobility and system reliability. These impacts will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations and urban locations as well as compromising the resilience of the larger interconnected physical, cyber, and social infrastructure networks. For this reason, increasing the resilience of transportation infrastructure to current and future weather and climate extremes is a global priority.</p><p>The complexity of this challenge requires a convergence approach to foster collaboration and innovation among technically and socially diverse researchers and practitioners. The multi-institutional <strong>ICNet Global</strong> Network of Networks unites domestic and international research and practice networks to facilitate integrated engineering, climate science, and policy research to advance the development of resilient transportation infrastructure and systems. ICNet Globalcollaborators represent networks based in Korea, Europe, United Kingdom, and the United States and link researchers at the forefront of scientific, engineering, and policy research frontiers, drawing expertise from many disciplines and nations to share and enhance best practices for transportation resilience.</p><p><strong>ICNet Global’s</strong> long-term mission is to prepare the world’s existing and future transportation infrastructure for a changing climate. To that end, we are working to: (1) build a network of existing research networks who are tackling the challenges climate change poses to transportation infrastructure; (2) establish a common base-level knowledge, capacity, and vision to support the convergence of novel and diverse ideas, approaches, and technologies for creating climate resilient transportation infrastructure; and (3) grow the next generation of critical and diverse thinkers with the expertise to address and solve climate-related infrastructure challenges. Although just one year into our work, and dispite challenges represented by COVID-19, we have surveyed over 100 potential members worldwide to learn about fields of interest and held five productive virtual workshops to discuss current research, how to encorporate climate change information into engineering education, and how practitioners are currently including climate information into planning and design. In this presentation we highlight our goals and recent accomplishments while laying out future plans and inviting interested researchers and practitioners to join us.</p>


1994 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 94-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
JANET L. FATH ◽  
TERESA L. MANN ◽  
THOMAS G. HOLZMAN

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