Robust adaptation to climate change

Robust adaptation to climate chang

Consensus Among Many Voices: Articulating the European Union\u27s Position on Climate Change

This article attempts to provide an overview of key policy elements of the European Union\u27s climate policy since the adoption of the UNFCCC in 1992. Section II discusses the main features of the EU as an actor vis-a-vis its Member States and the international community at large. Section III identifies the key actors at play in the EU context; Section IV analyzes the EU\u27s track record on domestic policies and measures. Section V, in turn, debates selected key topics in the international climate change negotiations from a EU perspective. Finally, section VI debates the prospects of continued international EU leadership on climate change, especially now that the U.S. has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol

Perspectives on climate information use in the Caribbean

Within research on climate information for decision-making, localized insights on the influences of climate information use remain limited in small and low-income countries. This paper offers an empirical contribution on Caribbean perspectives of climate information use considering current barriers and enablers in the region. We employ thematic analysis of 26 semi-structured interviews with region-focused sectoral experts (including end-users and decision-makers) drawn from climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and resilience focused initiatives and institutions. The results reaffirm presence of known barriers, such as the crucial role of finance, but notably we identify a range of interlinked enabling and catalyzing conditions necessary for the effective use of climate information. These conditions include the need for island- and sector- contextualized climate information, the role of international donors, the importance of adequate human resource capacity and presence of loud voices/climate champions, as well as the need for effective political and legislative mandates and for greater co-production. We construct a visualization of respondents' understanding of influencing factor interrelationships. This shows how their heuristics of climate information use for decision-making intricately link with roles for proactive climate champions, and that available finance often reflects donor interests. We end by discussing how these insights can contribute to strategies for more effective climate information use to promote resilience within the region

Assessing the quality of regional climate information

There are now a plethora of data, models, and approaches available to produce regional and local climate information intended to inform adaptation to a changing climate. There is, however, no framework to assess the quality of these data, models, and approaches that takes into account the issues that arise when this information is produced. An evaluation of the quality of regional climate information is a fundamental requirement for its appropriate application in societal decision-making. Here, an analytical framework is constructed for the quality assessment of science-based statements and estimates about future climate. This framework targets statements that project local and regional climate at decadal and longer time scales. After identifying the main issues with evaluating and presenting regional climate information, it is argued that it is helpful to consider the quality of statements about future climate in terms of 1) the type of evidence and 2) the relationship between the evidence and the statement. This distinction not only provides a more targeted framework for quality, but also shows how certain evidential standards can change as a function of the statement under consideration. The key dimensions to assess regional climate information quality are diversity, completeness, theory, adequacy for purpose, and transparency. This framework is exemplified using two research papers that provide regional climate information and the implications of the framework are explored

Assessing the quality of state-of-the-art regional climate information: the case of the UK Climate Projections 2018

In this paper, we assess the quality of state-of-the-art regional climate information intended to support climate adaptation decision-making. We use the UK Climate Projections 2018 as an example of such information. Their probabilistic, global, and regional land projections exemplify some of the key methodologies that are at the forefront of constructing regional climate information for decision support in adapting to a changing climate. We assess the quality of the evidence and the methodology used to support their statements about future regional climate along six quality dimensions: transparency; theory; independence, number, and comprehensiveness of evidence; and historical empirical adequacy. The assessment produced two major insights. First, a major issue that taints the quality of UKCP18 is the lack of transparency, which is particularly problematic since the information is directed towards non-expert users who would need to develop technical skills to evaluate the quality and epistemic reliability of this information. Second, the probabilistic projections are of lower quality than the global projections because the former lack both transparency and a theory underpinning the method used to produce quantified uncertainty estimates about future climate. The assessment also shows how different dimensions are satisfied depending on the evidence used, the methodology chosen to analyze the evidence, and the type of statements that are constructed in the different strands of UKCP18. This research highlights the importance of knowledge quality assessment of regional climate information that intends to support climate change adaptation decisions