scholarly journals Can Regional-Scale Governance and Planning Support Transformative Adaptation? A Study of Two Places

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 6978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikael Granberg ◽  
Karyn Bosomworth ◽  
Susie Moloney ◽  
Ann-Catrin Kristianssen ◽  
Hartmut Fünfgeld
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Governance Processes ◽  
Transformative Adaptation

The idea that climate change adaptation is best leveraged at the local scale is a well-institutionalized script in both research and formal governance. This idea is based on the argument that the local scale is where climate change impacts are “felt” and experienced. However, sustainable and just climate futures require transformations in systems, norms, and cultures that underpin and reinforce our unsustainable practices and development pathways, not just “local” action. Governance interventions are needed to catalyse such shifts, connecting multilevel and multiscale boundaries of knowledge, values, levels and organizational remits. We critically reflect on current adaptation governance processes in Victoria, Australia and the Gothenburg region, Sweden to explore whether regional-scale governance can provide just as important leverage for adaptation as local governance, by identifying and addressing intersecting gaps and challenges in adaptation at local levels. We suggest that regional-scale adaptation offers possibilities for transformative change because they can identify, connect, and amplify small-scale (local) wins and utilize this collective body of knowledge to challenge and advocate for unblocking stagnated, institutionalized policies and practices, and support transformative change.

Food Systems at Risk: Transformative Adaptation for Long-Term Food Security

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Carter ◽  
Namrata Ginoya ◽  
Richard Choularton ◽  
Tyler Ferdinand ◽  
Helen Ding ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Small Scale Farmers ◽  
The Right ◽  
Transformative Adaptation

This report examines how climate change is impacting agriculture and threatening national and global food systems, particularly in climate hotspots, and how these trends are projected to intensify over the coming decades. The report defines and details transformative adaptation for agriculture and why such longer-term, systemic approaches are needed to protect the lives and livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers and herders. Transformative adaptation in agriculture promotes long-term resilience by continually shifting the geographical locations where specific types of crops and livestock are produced, aligning agricultural production with changing landscapes and ecosystems, and/or introducing resilience-building production methods and technologies across value chains. The report presents evidence to support a call for urgent action by: Agricultural research organizations, to build and share knowledge regarding transformative approaches; Governments, to integrate this knowledge into plans and policies by establishing and implementing transformative pathways; and Funding entities, to increase financial support for agricultural adaptation and design sustainable financing mechanisms with the right incentives and disincentives to support transformative adaptation. Strategic investments in resilient food systems are crucial to manage intensifying climate change impacts and feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Planning for transformative adaptation should center on inclusive, participatory processes that engage a diverse range of stakeholders who may otherwise be marginalized in decision-making, such as women, youth and Indigenous peoples.

scholarly journals TERENO: German network of terrestrial environmental observatories

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heye Reemt Bogena
Keyword(s):  
Regional Scale ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Integrated Modelling ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Catchment Scale ◽  
Terrestrial Environment ◽  
Regional Analyses ◽  
Research Facilities

Central elements of the TERENO network are “terrestrial observatories” at the catchment scale which were selected in climate sensitive regions of Germany for the regional analyses of climate change impacts. Within these observatories small scale research facilities and test areas are placed in order to accomplish energy, water, carbon and nutrient process studies across the different compartments of the terrestrial environment. Following a hierarchical scaling approach (point-plot-field) these detailed information and the gained knowledge will be transferred to the regional scale using integrated modelling approaches. Furthermore, existing research stations are enhanced and embedded within the observatories. In addition, mobile measurement platforms enable monitoring of dynamic processes at the local scale up to the determination of spatial pattern at the regional scale are applied within TERENO.

scholarly journals Agricultural groundwater management in the Upper Bhima Basin, India: current status and future scenarios

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Surinaidu ◽  
C. G. D. Bacon ◽  
P. Pavelic
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Use ◽  
Water Discharge ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Groundwater Levels ◽  
Groundwater Overdraft ◽  
Use Efficiency ◽  
Increasing Demand

Abstract. The basaltic aquifers of the Upper Bhima River basin in southern India are heavily utilized for small-scale agriculture but face increasing demand-related pressures along with uncertainty associated with climate change impacts. To evaluate likely groundwater resource impacts over the coming decades, a regional groundwater flow model for the basin was developed. Model predictions associated with different climate change and abstraction scenarios indicate that the continuation of current rates of abstraction would lead to significant groundwater overdraft, with groundwater elevations predicted to fall by −6 m over the next three decades. Groundwater elevations can however be stabilized, but would require 20–30% of the mean surface water discharge from the basin to be recharged to groundwater, along with reductions in pumping (5–10%) brought about by improved water efficiency practices and/or shifts towards lower-water use crops. Modest reductions in pumping alone cannot stabilize groundwater levels; targeted conjunctive use and improved water use efficiency are also needed.

scholarly journals Coffee, Migration and Climatic Changes: Challenging Adaptation Dichotomic Narratives in a Transborder Region

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
Celia Ruiz-de-Oña ◽  
Patricia Rivera-Castañeda ◽  
Yair Merlín-Uribe
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climatic Changes ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Central American ◽  
Adaptation Policy ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Coffee Farmers

The narratives of migration as adaptation and in situ adaptation are well established in mainstream adaptation policy and are usually presented as independent and opposing trends of action. A common and fundamental element of such narratives is the depoliticized conception of both migration and adaptation. Using a trans-scalar approach, we address the migration–coffee–climate change nexus: first at a regional scale, at the conflictive border of Guatemala–Mexico, to show the contradiction between the current Central American migratory crisis and the narrative of migration as adaptation; second, at a local scale and from an ethnographic perspective, we focus on the process of in situ adaptation in shade-grown coffee plots of smallholder coffee farmers in the Tacaná Volcano cross-border region, between Chiapas and Guatemala. We argue that the dichotomy “in situ adaptation” versus “migration as adaptation” is not useful to capture the intertwined and political nature of both narratives, as illustrated in the case of the renovation of smallholders’ coffee plots in a context of climatic changes. We provide elements to contribute towards the repolitization of adaptation from an integral perspective.

A public-private collaboration initiative for innovative Earth Observation (EO) technologies and methodologies for investigating climate change impacts by means of an inter-disciplinary approach: the OT4CLIMA project

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Pergola ◽  
Carmine Serio ◽  
Francesco Ripullone ◽  
Francesco Marchese ◽  
Giuseppe Naviglio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Earth Observation ◽  
Ministry Of Education ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Company Survey ◽  
Industrial Partnership

<p>The OT4CLIMA project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, within the PON 2014-2020 Industrial Research program, “Aerospace” thematic domain, aims at developing advanced Earth Observation (EO) technologies and methodologies for improving our capability to better understand the effects of Climate Change (CC) and our capability to mitigate them at the regional and sub-regional scale. Both medium-to-long term impacts (e.g. vegetation stress, drought) and extreme events with rapid dynamics (e.g. intense meteorological phenomena, fires) will be investigated, trying a twofold (i.e. interesting both “products” and “processes”) technological innovation: a) through the design and the implementation of advanced sensors to be mounted on multiplatform EO systems; b) through the development of advanced methodologies for EO data analysis, interpretation, integration and fusion.</p><p>Activities will focus on two of the major natural processes strictly related to Climate Change, namely the Carbon and Water Cycles by using an inter-disciplinary approach.</p><p>As an example, the project will make it possible the measurements, with an unprecedented accuracy of atmospheric (e.g. OCS, carbon-sulphide) and surface (e.g. soil moisture) parameters that are crucial in determining the vegetation contribution to the CO2 balance, suggesting at the same time solutions based on the analysis and integration of satellite, airborne and unmanned data, in order to significantly improve the capability of local communities to face the short- and long-term CC-related effects.</p><p>OT4CLIMA benefits from a strong scientific expertise (14 CNR institutes, ASI, INGV, CIRA, 3 Universities), considerable research infrastructures and a wide industrial partnership (including both big national players, i.e. E-Geos and IDS companies and well-established italian SMEs consortia, i.e. CREATEC, CORISTA and SIIT, and a spin-off company, Survey Lab) specifically focused on the technological innovation frontier.</p><p>This contribution would summarize the project main objectives and show some activities so far carried out.</p>

Upscaling modelled crop yields to regional scale: A case study using DSSAT for spring wheat on the Canadian prairies

2015 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Huffman ◽  
Budong Qian ◽  
Reinder De Jong ◽  
Jiangui Liu ◽  
Hong Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Spring Wheat ◽  
Input Data ◽  
Crop Yields ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Crop Productivity ◽  
Canadian Prairies ◽  
Crop Models

Huffman, T., Qian, B., De Jong, R., Liu, J., Wang, H., McConkey, B., Brierley, T. and Yang, J. 2015. Upscaling modelled crop yields to regional scale: A case study using DSSAT for spring wheat on the Canadian prairies. Can. J. Soil Sci. 95: 49–61. Dynamic crop models are often operated at the plot or field scale. Upscaling is necessary when the process-based crop models are used for regional applications, such as forecasting regional crop yields and assessing climate change impacts on regional crop productivity. Dynamic crop models often require detailed input data for climate, soil and crop management; thus, their reliability may decrease at the regional scale as the uncertainty of simulation results might increase due to uncertainties in the input data. In this study, we modelled spring wheat yields at the level of numerous individual soils using the CERES–Wheat model in the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) and then aggregated the simulated yields from individual soils to regions where crop yields were reported. A comparison between the aggregated and the reported yields was performed to examine the potential of using dynamic crop models with individual soils in a region for the simulation of regional crop yields. The regionally aggregated simulated yields demonstrated reasonable agreement with the reported data, with a correlation coefficient of 0.71 and a root-mean-square error of 266 kg ha−1 (i.e., 15% of the average yield) over 40 regions on the Canadian prairies. Our conclusion is that aggregating simulated crop yields on individual soils with a crop model can be reliable for the estimation of regional crop yields. This demonstrated its potential as a useful approach for using crop models to assess climate change impacts on regional crop productivity.

scholarly journals From emission scenarios to spatially resolved projections with a chain of computationally efficient emulators: MAGICC (v7.5.1) – MESMER (v0.8.1) coupling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Beusch ◽  
Zebedee Nicholls ◽  
Lukas Gudmundsson ◽  
Mathias Hauser ◽  
Malte Meinshausen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Greenhouse Gas Emission ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Natural Variability ◽  
Climate Response ◽  
Computationally Efficient ◽  
Spatially Resolved ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Uncertainty Space

Abstract. Producing targeted climate information at the local scale, including major sources of climate change projection uncertainty for diverse emissions scenarios, is essential to support climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Here, we present the first chain of computationally efficient Earth System Model (ESM) emulators allowing to rapidly translate greenhouse gas emission pathways into spatially resolved annual-mean temperature anomaly field time series, accounting for both forced climate response and natural variability uncertainty at the local scale. By combining the global-mean, emissions-driven emulator MAGICC with the spatially resolved emulator MESMER, ESM-specific as well as constrained probabilistic emulated ensembles can be derived. This emulation chain can hence build on and extend large multi-ESM ensembles such as the ones produced within the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The main extensions are threefold. (i) A more thorough sampling of the forced climate response and the natural variability uncertainty is possible with millions of emulated realizations being readily created. (ii) The same uncertainty space can be sampled for any emission pathway, which is not the case in CMIP6, where some of the most societally relevant strong mitigation scenarios have been run by only a small number of ESMs. (iii) Other lines of evidence to constrain future projections, including observational constraints, can be introduced, which helps to refine projected future ranges beyond the multi-ESM ensemble's estimates. In addition to presenting results from the coupled MAGICC-MESMER emulator chain, we carry out an extensive validation of MESMER, which is trained on and applied to multiple emission pathways for the first time in this study. The newly developed MAGICC-MESMER coupled emulator will allow unprecedented assessments of the implications of manifold emissions pathways at regional scale.

scholarly journals Climate change impacts on maritime mountain snowpack in the Oregon Cascades

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 13037-13081 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Sproles ◽  
A. Nolin ◽  
K. Rittger ◽  
T. Painter
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Snow Water Equivalent ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Snow Accumulation ◽  
Distributed Model ◽  
Modeling Framework ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Snow Cover Extent ◽  
Snow Water

Abstract. Globally maritime snow comprises 10% of seasonal snow and is considered highly sensitive to changes in temperature. This study investigates the effect of climate change on maritime mountain snowpack in the McKenzie River Basin (MRB) in the Cascades Mountains of Oregon, USA. Melt water from the MRB's snowpack provides critical water supply for agriculture, ecosystems, and municipalities throughout the region especially in summer when water demand is high. Because maritime snow commonly falls at temperatures close to 0 °C, accumulation of snow versus rainfall is highly sensitive to temperature increases. Analyses of current climate and projected climate change impacts show rising temperatures in the region. To better understand the sensitivity of snow accumulation to increased temperatures, we modeled the spatial distribution of snow water equivalent (SWE) in the MRB for the period of 1989–2009 with the SnowModel spatially distributed model. Simulations were evaluated using point-based measurements of SWE, precipitation, and temperature that showed Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency coefficients of 0.83, 0.97, and 0.80, respectively. Spatial accuracy was shown to be 82% using snow cover extent from the Landsat Thematic Mapper. The validated model was used to evaluate the sensitivity of snowpack to projected temperature increases and variability in precipitation, and how changes were expressed in the spatial and temporal distribution of SWE. Results show that a 2 °C increase in temperature would shift peak snowpack 12 days earlier and decrease basin-wide volumetric snow water storage by 56%. Snowpack between the elevations of 1000 and 1800 m is the most sensitive to increases in temperature. Upper elevations were also affected, but to a lesser degree. Temperature increases are the primary driver of diminished snowpack accumulation, however variability in precipitation produce discernible changes in the timing and volumetric storage of snowpack. This regional scale study serves as a case study, providing a modeling framework to better understand the impacts of climate change in similar maritime regions of the world.

scholarly journals Adapting global shared socio-economic pathways for national and local scenarios

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
B Frame ◽  
Judith Lawrence ◽  
AG Ausseil ◽  
A Reisinger ◽  
A Daigneault
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Response Options ◽  
Integrative Research ◽  
Climate Change Risks ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Adaptation And Mitigation

© 2018 The Authors Socio-economic scenarios enable us to understand the extent to which global-, national- and local-scale societal developments can influence the nature and severity of climate change risks and response options. Shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) enable a systematic exploration of the challenges to adaptation and mitigation that alternative futures entail. However, SSPs are primarily defined for the global scale. If countries are to test their adaptation and mitigation options for robustness across plausible future socio-economic conditions, then SSPs require country-relevant detail to understand climate change risks at the national and local scales. New Zealand is used to illustrate how nationally relevant socio-economic scenarios, nested within SSPs can be developed to inform national- and local-scale studies of climate change impacts and their implications. Shared policy assumptions were developed, involving a mix of climate-specific and non-climate-specific policies, to demonstrate how international links and global-scale developments are critical locally—local choices may accelerate, reduce or even negate the impact of global trends for extended periods. The typology was then ‘tested’ by applying it in a local context. The research challenges observed in developing credible, salient and legitimate national-scale socio-economic scenarios include issues in developing scenarios across a multidisciplinary team. Finally, recommendations for adapting shared climate policy assumptions to produce national and local scenarios, and for assessing the feasibility and effectiveness of climate change adaptation options are presented. These include the need for: guidelines to embed national scenarios in global frameworks; a limit the number of plausible futures; inter-operability of models; an ability to work towards effective multi-disciplinary teams and integrative research; and the opportunity to involve participatory processes where feasible.

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