Games for a new climate: experiencing the complexity of future risks

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This report is a product of the Pardee Center Task Force on Games for a New Climate, which met at Pardee House at Boston University in March 2012. The 12-member Task Force was convened on behalf of the Pardee Center by Visiting Research Fellow Pablo Suarez in collaboration with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre to “explore the potential of participatory, game-based processes for accelerating learning, fostering dialogue, and promoting action through real-world decisions affecting the longer-range future, with an emphasis on humanitarian and development work, particularly involving climate risk management.” Compiled and edited by Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez and Carina Bachofen, the report includes contributions from all of the Task Force members and provides a detailed exploration of the current and potential ways in which games can be used to help a variety of stakeholders – including subsistence farmers, humanitarian workers, scientists, policymakers, and donors – to both understand and experience the difficulty and risks involved related to decision-making in a complex and uncertain future. The dozen Task Force experts who contributed to the report represent academic institutions, humanitarian organization, other non-governmental organizations, and game design firms with backgrounds ranging from climate modeling and anthropology to community-level disaster management and national and global policymaking as well as game design.Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centr

Climate-Induced Stressors to Peace: A Review Of Recent Literature

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to global peace and security. This paper intends to provide a better understanding of the nature of interactions between climate change and events that undermine peace through a systematic review of recent literature. It highlights major methodological approaches adopted in the literature, elaborates on the geographic focus of the research at the nexus of climate change and peace, and provides further information on how various climatic stressors, such as extreme temperature, floods, sea-level rise, storms, and water stress may be linked to different events that undermine peace (e.g. civil conflict, crime, intercommunal violence, interstate conflict, political conflict, and social conflict) through direct and indirect pathways. Results confirm previous findings that statistical techniques and qualitative case studies are dominant methods in climate-conflict research but show that there has been an increase in the geographic information system based risk analyses and qualitative comparative analyses in the recent years. In line with previous reviews, results show that the literature is mainly focused on certain regions of the world and several major regions that have experienced numerous conflicts over the past few years and/or are vulnerable to adverse climatic events are understudied. However, a new finding is that, in the past few years, there has been an increasing focus on Asia, which contrasts with previous reviews that show an African focus in the literature. Also, there is an unbalanced attention to different climatic stressors and peace-related events. Interactions between water stress/extreme temperature and civil and interstate conflicts have received more attention. A major finding is that, only under certain conditions climatic stressors may act as driving forces or aggravating factors. In fact, there is a strong consensus that climate change is less likely to undermine peace in isolation from a wide range of contextual socio-economic and institutional factors such as political instability, poor governance, poverty, homogeneous livelihood structures, and ethnic fractionalization. However, such contextual factors can contribute to undermining peace via either direct or indirect pathways. The former may occur through direct psychological/physiological effects of climatic impacts or via competition over scarce resources. In contrast, in indirect pathways climate change may lead to conflict through diminishing livelihood capacities and/or inducing migration. In addition to synthesizing literature on contextual factors and direct/indirect pathways, the review identifies gaps that need further research

International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Report 44

The primary goals of the SysTem for Analysis, Research and Training in global change science (START), which is co-sponsored by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP); the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP); and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) are to promote regional global change science and to enhance the capacity of individuals, institutions and developing regions to undertake such research. START capacity building initiatives include the recognition that human capacity building is much more than training and that, as with all development, sustainable development is best. Once-off training exercises are easy to organize, but are the least effective method of capacity enhancement and result in large cost/benefit ratios. In contrast, sustained development of human capacity through continual involvement with research maximizes efficiency and minimizes the cost/benefit ratio. START seeks to enhance regional global change research while at the same time enhancing the individual and institutional capacity to conduct such research. The details as to how START operates, and how it plans to encompass its vision and meet its objectives are given in the START Implementation Plan

Pharmacological basis for the medicinal use of alcea rosea in airways disorders and chemical characterization of its fixed oils through GC-MS

Alcea rosea L. also known as Althea rosea belongs to the Malvaceae family. This medicinal herb, traditionally used to treat several conditions including airway disorders like asthma and chronic bronchitis. This study evaluated the bronchodilatory effects and possible mechanism of A. rosea on guinea-pig tracheal tissues. Moreover lipophilic profiling of A. rosea has been carried out by using Gas-Chromatography-Mass-Spectrometry. A total of 19 compounds have been identified from the plant, n-hexane fraction. These compounds have been further confirmed from their Van den Dool and Kratz (I) Indices. Major class of metabolite identified from the plant includes fatty acid, saturated and unsaturated fatty acid esters. Hydrocarbons have also been detected from the n-hexane fraction. These fatty acid esters have not been reported previously by GC-MS and were identified first time from the flowers of Alcea rosea. In-vitro experiments were performed on guinea-pig tracheal tissues, mounted in Kreb\u27s solution at 37°C and bubbled with carbogen. In isolated guinea-pig trachea, A. rosea inhibited carbamylcholine and K+ (80 mM)-induced contractions, potentiated isoprenaline concentration-response curves (CRCs) and suppressed Ca2+ CRCs. These results suggest that A. rosea cause bronchodilation through dual inhibition of phosphodiesterase enzyme and Ca2+ influx, which substantiate its potential in airways disorders

Africa Climate Conference 2013: Addressing Priority Research Gaps to Inform Adaptation Decision-Making in Africa, Frontiers in African Climate Science Research and Applications

The Africa Climate Conference 2013, due to be held October 15-18, 2013 in Arusha (Tanzania), aims to narrow the communications gap currently existing between African decision-makers and climate scientists and to develop a coordinated collaborative research strategy to enhance climate science outputs so that they may better inform climate early warning responses and adaptation in Africa. This document outlines, in the context of global climate initiatives, the key research frontiers for African climate that will be addressed. In a departure from usual practice, motivated by the imperative of ‘mainstreaming use of climate information in decision making’, research priorities are ordered according to their alignment with emerging priority needs for African users. As part of its activities the conference will review and validate these ‘frontier’ research priorities (see also the conference concept note)