Integrating Climate Change Actions into Local Development


Book Description

To date, climate change adaptation and mitigation have been treated separately both in research and in the climate negotiations. However, a growing body of literature is now being developed that points to actual and potential synergies and trade-offs between responses to climate change and sustainability. This literature has evolved in a spontaneous way with diverse approaches and no common methodology to help practitioners explicitly plan for these synergies. This special issue of the Climate Policy journal addresses this gap between scientific knowledge and practitioners' needs by focussing on linkages between climate change and sustainable development at the level of conceptual framework and methods. In particular, the papers address in an integrated way local development options involving both adaptation and mitigation in order to promote resilience to climate change in human and natural systems. The special issue provides policy and methodological guidelines for linking local deveopment pathways with responses to climate change, based on collaboration between local practitioners, the public and scientists.




Enhancing the Climate Resilience of Africa's Infrastructure


Book Description

To sustain Africa’s growth, and accelerate the eradication of extreme poverty, investment in infrastructure is fundamental. In 2010, the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic found that to enable Africa to fill its infrastructure gap, some US$ 93 billion per year for the next decade will need to be invested. The Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), endorsed in 2012 by the continent’s Heads of State and Government, lays out an ambitious long-term plan for closing Africa’s infrastructure including trough step increases in hydroelectric power generation and water storage capacity. Much of this investment will support the construction of long-lived infrastructure (e.g. dams, power stations, irrigation canals), which may be vulnerable to changes in climatic patterns, the direction and magnitude of which remain significantly uncertain. Enhancing the Climate Resilience of Africa 's Infrastructure evaluates -using for the first time a single consistent methodology and the state-of-the-arte climate scenarios-, the impacts of climate change on hydro-power and irrigation expansion plans in Africa’s main rivers basins (Niger, Senegal, Volta, Congo, Nile, Zambezi, Orange); and outlines an approach to reduce climate risks through suitable adjustments to the planning and design process. The book finds that failure to integrate climate change in the planning and design of power and water infrastructure could entail, in scenarios of drying climate conditions, losses of hydropower revenues between 5% and 60% (depending on the basin); and increases in consumer expenditure for energy up to 3 times the corresponding baseline values. In in wet climate scenarios, business-as-usual infrastructure development could lead to foregone revenues in the range of 15% to 130% of the baseline, to the extent that the larger volume of precipitation is not used to expand the production of hydropower. Despite the large uncertainty on whether drier or wetter conditions will prevail in the future in Africa, the book finds that by modifying existing investment plans to explicitly handle the risk of large climate swings, can cut in half or more the cost that would accrue by building infrastructure on the basis of the climate of the past.




Cities and Climate Change


Book Description

This book shows how city and metropolitan regional governments working in tandem with national governments can change the way we think about responding to climate change.




Local Climate Action Planning


Book Description

Climate change is a global problem, but the problem begins locally. Cities consume 75% of the world's energy and emit 80% of the world's greenhouse gases. Changing the way we build and operate our cities can have major effects on greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, communities across the U.S. are responding to the climate change problem by making plans that assess their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and specify actions they will take to reduce these emissions. This is the first book designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local levels to develop Climate Action Plans. CAPs are strategic plans that establish policies and programs for mitigating a community's greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions. They typically focus on transportation, energy use, and solid waste, and often differentiate between community-wide actions and municipal agency actions. CAPs are usually based on GHG emissions inventories, which indentify the sources of emissions from the community and quantify the amounts. Additionally, many CAPs include a section addressing adaptation-how the community will respond to the impacts of climate change on the community, such as increased flooding, extended drought, or sea level rise. With examples drawn from actual plans, Local Climate Action Planning guides preparers of CAPs through the entire plan development process, identifying the key considerations and choices that must be made in order to assure that a plan is both workable and effective.




The Palgrave Handbook of Climate Resilient Societies


Book Description

The effects of climate change are beginning to be felt around the world with rising temperatures, changing precipitation levels, more frequent and severe storms and longer more intensive droughts threatening human life and livelihoods and damaging property and infrastructure. As such, society in all countries – both developing and developed – need to increase their resilience to the impacts of climate change, where resilience is the ability of a system to absorb stresses and adapt in ways that improve the overall sustainability of the system; enabling it to be better prepared for future climate change impacts. In this context, a climate resilient society is one that is: reflective (learns from experiences); robust (both people and infrastructure can withstand the impacts of extreme conditions); forward-thinking (with plans made to ensure systems function during extreme events); flexible (so systems and plans can change, evolve or adopt alternative strategies); resourceful (to respond quickly to extreme events); inclusive (so all communities including the vulnerable are involved in planning); and integrated (so people, systems, decision-making and investments are mutually supportive of common goals). The Climate Resilient Societies Major Reference Work includes chapters covering a range of themes that provide readers with an invaluable overview on how various levels of government have attempted to create climate resilient societies. In particular, each chapter, under its respective theme, will address how a government, or series of governments, at various levels in non-OECD and/or OECD countries, have implemented innovative climate resilient policies that seek synergies across strategies, choices and actions, in an attempt to build a climate resilient society. Each chapter will address one specific sub-theme out of the population of themes covered in the Major Reference Work: Water, Energy, Agriculture and Food, Built environment and Infrastructure, Transport, Human health, Society, Disaster, Business and Economy, and Financing Climate Resilience.




Advancing the Science of Climate Change


Book Description

Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for-and in many cases is already affecting-a broad range of human and natural systems. The compelling case for these conclusions is provided in Advancing the Science of Climate Change, part of a congressionally requested suite of studies known as America's Climate Choices. While noting that there is always more to learn and that the scientific process is never closed, the book shows that hypotheses about climate change are supported by multiple lines of evidence and have stood firm in the face of serious debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations. As decision makers respond to these risks, the nation's scientific enterprise can contribute through research that improves understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change and also is useful to decision makers at the local, regional, national, and international levels. The book identifies decisions being made in 12 sectors, ranging from agriculture to transportation, to identify decisions being made in response to climate change. Advancing the Science of Climate Change calls for a single federal entity or program to coordinate a national, multidisciplinary research effort aimed at improving both understanding and responses to climate change. Seven cross-cutting research themes are identified to support this scientific enterprise. In addition, leaders of federal climate research should redouble efforts to deploy a comprehensive climate observing system, improve climate models and other analytical tools, invest in human capital, and improve linkages between research and decisions by forming partnerships with action-oriented programs.




Climate Change and Cities


Book Description

Climate Change and Cities bridges science-to-action for climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts in cities around the world.




Creating Resilient Futures


Book Description

This open access edited volume critically examines a coherence building opportunity between Climate Change Adaptation, the Sustainable Development Goals and Disaster Risk Reduction agendas through presenting best practice approaches, and supporting Irish and international case studies. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted existing global inequalities and demonstrated the scope and scale of cascading socio-ecological impacts. The impacts of climate change on our global communities will likely dwarf the disruption brought on by the pandemic, and moreover, these impacts will be more diffuse and pervasive over a longer timeframe. This edited volume considers opportunities to address global challenges in the context of developing resilience as an integrated development continuum instead of through independent and siloed agendas.




Local Action on Climate Change


Book Description

There is growing interest in analysing the role and effectiveness of the local scale in responding to the global challenge of climate change. However, while accounts of urban climate change governance are growing, there is now a real need for further conceptual and empirical work to better understand processes of change and uptake across a range of climate change actions. Local Action on Climate Change examines how local climate change responses are emerging, being operationalized and evaluated within a range of geographical and socio-political contexts across the globe. Focussing on the role and potential of local governments, non-government organisations and community groups in driving transformative change, the authors analyse how local climate change responses have emerged and explore the extent to which they are or have the potential to be innovative or transformative in terms of governance, policy and practice change. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, including examples from Vanuatu, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Sweden, the USA and India, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy and governance, and sustainability.




The Regional Impacts of Climate Change


Book Description

Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 1998.