Climatic risks to adaptive capacity

Does climate change influence if societies will be better or worse equipped to reduce climatic risks in the future? A society’s adaptive capacity determines whether the potential of adaptation to reduce risks will be realized. Assumptions about the level of adaptive capacity are inherently made when the potential for adaptation to reduce risks in the future and resultant levels of risk are estimated. In this review, we look at the literature on human impacts of climate change through the lens of adaptive capacity. Building on evidence of impacts on financial resources as presented in the Working Group 2 (WG2) report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), we here present the methodology behind this review and complement it with an analysis of climatic risks to human resources. Based on our review, we argue that climate change itself adds to adaptation constraints and limits. We show that for more realistic assessments of sectoral climate risks, assumed levels of future adaptive capacity should — and can — be usefully constrained in assessments that rely on expert judgment, and propose avenues for doing so

Towards scenario representation of adaptive capacity for global climate change assessments

Climate change adaptation needs, as well as the capacity to adapt, are unequally distributed around the world. Global models that assess the impacts of climate change and policy options to reduce them most often do not elaborately represent adaptation. When they do, they rarely account for heterogeneity in societies’ adaptive capacities and their temporal dynamics. Here we propose ways to quantify adaptive capacity within the framework of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, a scenario set widely used by climate impact and integrated assessment models. A large set of indicators spanning different socioeconomic dimensions can be used to assess adaptive capacity and deliver adaptation-relevant, scenario-resolved information that is crucial for more realistic assessment of whether and how climate risks can be reduced by adaptation

Global climate, sea level cycles, and biotic events in the Cambrian Period

The developing high-resolution chronostratigraphy of the Cambrian provides an updated age model for various geologic and biotic events that occurred during this critical period of Earth history. Broad, time-specific patterns of lithofacies, such as organic-rich deposits, and biofacies appear to be consistent across all Cambrian paleocontinents. Records of important evolutionary events including first appearances of certain metazoan taxa, migrations, and extinctions, tend to coincide with changes in eustatic sea level, as do the positions of many Konservat-Lagerstatten, concretion horizons, agnostoid-rich beds, and other sedimentary features. Most of these events or horizons also show a relationship to perturbations in the global carbon cycle. The positions of organic-rich deposits bear strong relationship to both paleogeographic position and sea level history. Cambrian strata show evidence of cyclicity at multiple scales. Synchronous or near-synchronous global cyclicity is inferred to be associated with oceanographic and climatic cycles characteristic of glacial expansion and deglaciation. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS