Bangladesh is currently ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In Threatening Dystopias, Kasia Paprocki investigates the politics of climate change adaptation throughout ...the South Asian nation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts.Paprocki looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claimthat increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple.For the country's rural poor, these promises ring hollow.As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all- consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh.
A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among ...human societies. This scholarship, which we term the 'history of climate and society' (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate-society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived-and often thrived-in the face of climatic pressures.
Adaptation strategies have become critical in climate change mitigation and impact reduction, to safeguard population and the ecosystem from irreparable damage. While developed countries have ...integrated adaptation plans and policies into their developmental agenda, developing countries are facilitating or yet to initiate adaptation policies in their development. This study examines the nexus between climate change vulnerability and adaptation readiness in 192 UN countries using mapping and panel data models. The study reveals Africa as the most vulnerable continent to climate change with high sensitivity, high exposure, and low adaptive capacity. Developed countries, including Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Sweden, United Kingdom, Finland, France, Spain, and Germany, are less vulnerable to climate change due to strong economic, governance and social adaptation readiness. International commitment from developed countries to developing countries is essential to strengthen their resilience, economic readiness and adaptive capacity to climate-related events.
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•Scandinavian countries have low vulnerability and high climate change readiness.•African countries have high climate sensitivity and low adaptive capacity.•Climate change adaptation actions mitigate climate vulnerability.•Economic, governance and social interventions are critical to climate stress reduction.
Climate change is profoundly altering our world in ways that pose major risks to human societies and natural systems. We have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice, warns ...economist William Nordhaus. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino, and in this essential book the author explains how.
Bringing together all the important issues surrounding the climate debate, Nordhaus describes the science, economics, and politics involved-and the steps necessary to reduce the perils of global warming. Using language accessible to any concerned citizen and taking care to present different points of view fairly, he discusses the problem from start to finish: from the beginning, where warming originates in our personal energy use, to the end, where societies employ regulations or taxes or subsidies to slow the emissions of gases responsible for climate change.
Nordhaus offers a new analysis of why earlier policies, such as the Kyoto Protocol, failed to slow carbon dioxide emissions, how new approaches can succeed, and which policy tools will most effectively reduce emissions. In short, he clarifies a defining problem of our times and lays out the next critical steps for slowing the trajectory of global warming.
How much finance should be provided to support climate change adaptation and by whom? How should it be allocated, and on what basis? Over the years, various actors have expressed different normative ...expectations on climate finance. Which of these expectations are being met and which are not; why, and with what consequences? Have new norms and rules emerged, which remain contested? This article takes stock of the first 25+ years of adaptation finance under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and seeks to understand whether adaptation finance has become more justly governed and delivered over the past quarter century. We distinguish among three “eras” of adaptation finance: (1) the early years under the UNFCCC (1992–2008); (2) the Copenhagen shift (2009–2015); and (3) the post-Paris era (2016–2018). For each era, we systematically review the justice issues raised by evolving expectations and rules over the provision, distribution, and governance of adaptation finance. We conclude by outlining future perspectives for adaptation finance and their implications for climate justice.
We quantify the projected impacts of alternative levels of global warming upon the probability and length of severe drought in six countries (China, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana and India). This ...includes an examination of different land cover classes, and a calculation of the proportion of population in 2100 (SSP2) at exposed to severe drought lasting longer than one year. Current pledges for climate change mitigation, which are projected to still result in global warming levels of 3 °C or more, would impact all of the countries in this study. For example, with 3 °C warming, more than 50% of the agricultural area in each country is projected to be exposed to severe droughts of longer than one year in a 30-year period. Using standard population projections, it is estimated that 80%-100% of the population in Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia and Ghana (and nearly 50% of the population of India) are projected to be exposed to a severe drought lasting one year or longer in a 30-year period. In contrast, we find that meeting the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, that is limiting warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, is projected to greatly benefit all of the countries in this study, greatly reducing exposure to severe drought for large percentages of the population and in all major land cover classes, with Egypt potentially benefiting the most.
A vast amount has been written on climate change and what should be our response. Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation suggests that most of this literature takes a far too optimistic position ...regarding the potential for conventional mitigation solutions to achieve the deep cuts in greenhouse gases necessary in the limited time frame we have available. In addition, global environmental problems, as exemplified by climate change, and global resource problems - such as fossil fuel depletion or fresh water scarcity - have largely been seen as separate issues. Further, proposals for solution of these problems often focus at the national level, when the problems are global. The authors argue that the various challenges the planet faces are both serious and interconnected. Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation takes a global perspective in its treatment of various solutions: - renewable energy, - nuclear energy, - energy efficiency, - carbon sequestration, and - geo-engineering. It also addresses the possibility that realistic solutions cannot be achieved until the fundamentally ethical question of global equity - both across nations today and also inter-generational - is fully addressed. Such an approach will also involve reorienting the global economy away from an emphasis on growth and toward the direct satisfaction of basic human needs for all the Earth's people. Rise and Fall of the Carbon Civilisation is aimed at the many members of the public with an awareness of climate change, but who wish to find out more about how we need to respond to the challenge. It will also be of interest to technical professionals, as well as postgraduate students and researchers, from the environmental and engineering science sectors.
Cement and steel - nine steps to net zero Fennell, Paul; Driver, Justin; Bataille, Christopher ...
Nature (London),
03/2022, Letnik:
603, Številka:
7902
Journal Article
PDF
