Climate change and health effects in Northwest Alaska

This article provides examples of adverse health effects, including weather-related injury, food insecurity, mental health issues, and water infrastructure damage, and the responses to these effects that are currently being applied in two Northwest Alaska communities

Global-scale climate impact functions: the relationship between climate forcing and impact

Although there is a strong policy interest in the impacts of climate change corresponding to different degrees of climate change, there is so far little consistent empirical evidence of the relationship between climate forcing and impact. This is because the vast majority of impact assessments use emissions-based scenarios with associated socio-economic assumptions, and it is not feasible to infer impacts at other temperature changes by interpolation. This paper presents an assessment of the global-scale impacts of climate change in 2050 corresponding to defined increases in global mean temperature, using spatially-explicit impacts models representing impacts in the water resources, river flooding, coastal, agriculture, ecosystem and built environment sectors. Pattern-scaling is used to construct climate scenarios associated with specific changes in global mean surface temperature, and a relationship between temperature and sea level used to construct sea level rise scenarios. Climate scenarios are constructed from 21 climate models to give an indication of the uncertainty between forcing and response. The analysis shows that there is considerable uncertainty in the impacts associated with a given increase in global mean temperature, due largely to uncertainty in the projected regional change in precipitation. This has important policy implications. There is evidence for some sectors of a non-linear relationship between global mean temperature change and impact, due to the changing relative importance of temperature and precipitation change. In the socio-economic sectors considered here, the relationships are reasonably consistent between socio-economic scenarios if impacts are expressed in proportional terms, but there can be large differences in absolute terms. There are a number of caveats with the approach, including the use of pattern-scaling to construct scenarios, the use of one impacts model per sector, and the sensitivity of the shape of the relationships between forcing and response to the definition of the impact indicator

Effects of Elevated Temperature and Carbon Dioxide on the Growth and Survival of Larvae and Juveniles of Three Species of Northwest Atlantic Bivalves

Rising CO2 concentrations and water temperatures this century are likely to have transformative effects on many coastal marine organisms. Here, we compared the responses of two life history stages (larval, juvenile) of three species of calcifying bivalves (Mercenaria mercenaria, Crassostrea virginica, and Argopecten irradians) to temperatures (24 and 28°C) and CO2 concentrations (∼250, 390, and 750 ppm) representative of past, present, and future summer conditions in temperate estuaries. Results demonstrated that increases in temperature and CO2 each significantly depressed survival, development, growth, and lipid synthesis of M. mercenaria and A. irradians larvae and that the effects were additive. Juvenile M. mercenaria and A. irradians were negatively impacted by higher temperatures while C. virginica juveniles were not. C. virginica and A. irradians juveniles were negatively affected by higher CO2 concentrations, while M. mercenaria was not. Larvae were substantially more vulnerable to elevated CO2 than juvenile stages. These findings suggest that current and future increases in temperature and CO2 are likely to have negative consequences for coastal bivalve populations

The 4Cs of adaptation tracking: consistency, comparability, comprehensiveness, coherency

Adaptation tracking seeks to characterize, monitor, and compare general trends in climate change adaptation over time and across nations. Recognized as essential for evaluating adaptation progress, there have been few attempts to develop systematic approaches for tracking adaptation. This is reflected in polarized opinions, contradictory findings, and lack of understanding on the state of adaptation globally. In this paper, we outline key methodological considerations necessary for adaptation tracking research to produce systematic, rigorous, comparable, and usable insights that can capture the current state of adaptation globally, provide the basis for characterizing and evaluating adaptations taking place, facilitate examination of what conditions explain differences in adaptation action across jurisdictions, and can underpin the monitoring of change in adaptation over time. Specifically, we argue that approaches to adaptation tracking need to (i) utilize a consistent and operational conceptualization of adaptation, (ii) focus on comparable units of analysis, (iii) use and develop comprehensive datasets on adaptation action, and (iv) be coherent with our understanding of what constitutes real adaptation. Collectively, these form the 4Cs of adaptation tracking (consistency, comparability, comprehensiveness, and coherency)