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Future Directions for the World Climate Research Programme

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As climate uncertainties increase on many fronts, the international climate research community is taking stock of its current research efforts and developing an evolving set of strategies to address these uncertainties with relevance and skill. The community displays a strong sense of urgency and commitment, even in the face of substantial social, political, and financial obstacles. However, representatives and leaders of the community must address cuts and redistribution of research funding, support the efforts of numerous volunteers, and develop and disseminate a compelling message to sustain the focus and commitment of this valuable research community.

With partners from the national and international assessments community, climate scientists urgently need to evaluate recent research as well as scientific and political outcomes from a mutual and timely vantage point: to view assessment report products in light of ongoing research and, conversely, to scrutinize the directions of ongoing climate research following recent national and international assessments. However, valid concerns have emerged within the research community about the present focus and impact of climate research and about the probable effort and impact of subsequent assessments. These concerns center around the quality of subsequent products: How can the research community ensure substantial rather than incremental improvements, and will the impacts justify the efforts?

To address these concerns, science leaders from the World Climate Research Programme ( WCRP ) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) are in deep collaboration. Together, they have outlined several knowledge gaps.

Speaking for WCRP, we recognize that addressing these knowledge gaps requires continual reexamination. WCRP’s evolution must ensure relevant and timely science outcomes in the context of immediate and longer-term efforts to mitigate climate change while recognizing political and funding challenges.

Research and Assessment Communities Meet

In the absence of an internationally agreed-upon and funded climate research strategy, the WCRP, on behalf of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Council for Science, and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, assumes the daunting tasks of planning and coordinating international efforts on climate research. The WCRP, a multinational consortium established in 1980, has undergone internal refreshment and refocusing since 2011.

Following extensive engagement with the research community, WCRP identified five climate science “ grand challenges .” These call for community focus and rapid progress on the following topics:

• clouds and atmospheric circulation
• regional sea level
• climate extremes
• water availability
• rapid cryosphere changes

As the WCRP grand challenges developed, the IPCC, the United Nations organization charged with producing periodic climate assessments, was working on its Fifth Assessment Report ( AR5 ). This report, based largely on WCRP-led or -coordinated research and modeling activities, was released in 2014. AR5 Working Group I ( Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis ) placed special emphasis on WCRP’s work.

The Joint Scientific Committee of WCRP, working closely with Working Group I leaders, organized a “ Lessons Learnt for Climate Change Research ” meeting to discuss AR5 soon after its publication. WCRP invited more than 75 researchers to convene in Bern, Switzerland, in September 2014, where they simultaneously evaluated AR5 and revisited the WCRP grand challenges. The meeting participants, a good mixture of lead authors of IPCC AR5 and WCRP project leaders, evaluated climate science, WCRP directions and plans, and future needs for research and assessments.

The “Lessons Learnt” meeting was conducted in partnership with the Technical Support Unit of IPCC Working Group I and the International Space Science Institute at the University of Bern. It had substantial financial support from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. Attendees primarily discussed the Working Group I report, but they also considered the reports from Working Group II ( Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability ) and Working Group III ( Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change ). A few weeks later, in November 2014, one of us (D.C.) attended the 7th Science Steering Committee meeting of the World Weather Research Programme ( WWRP ), where urban environments emerged as one convergent and overlapping area of mutual focus for WWRP and WCRP.

No Research Gaps, but Knowledge Gaps Remain

The “Lessons Learnt” group in Bern was asked to identify research gaps in AR5, particularly in the Working Group I report. Their response was emphatic: almost none. Nearly every researcher could identify areas of scientific progress since the 2012 and 2013 cutoff dates for the AR5 materials.

It was no surprise that systematic scrutiny, including a premeeting survey, turned up no serious omissions or weaknesses based on the research available at the time of the report. The conduct of AR5 and Working Group I processes were thorough, inclusive, and highly professional. Anticipating this result, the meeting’s Steering Committee structured meeting topics and sessions much more around the issue of knowledge gaps—challenges ahead rather than omissions behind.

The overall approach of AR5 was to assign calibrated uncertainty language to key findings, either through specifying a qualitative level of confidence (e.g., medium or low confidence) or, where the science permitted, a quantified certainty of assessment conclusions. This allowed the Steering Committee to extract and expose a series of key uncertainties in observations, forcing factors, fundamental understanding, and global and regional projections.

The committee then challenged meeting participants to assess WCRP activities, particularly the previously identified WCRP grand challenges, in light of these uncertainties. Perhaps not surprisingly (but certainly not inevitably), the group found a good match between goals of the WCRP grand challenges and knowledge gaps identified in the AR5 Working Group I report.

Matching Research Activities to Knowledge Gaps

Despite an overall coherence between AR5 Working Group I knowledge gaps and WCRP plans, a meeting-wide cross analysis of uncertainties versus ongoing activities exposed four areas for which the WCRP’s grand challenges seemed either deficient or in need of broadened or expanded research.

Ocean Heating and Circulation. Ocean heating, particularly in the deep ocean, was identified within the WCRP sea level grand challenge and was prominent within the premeeting survey. However, ocean heating and circulation, linked to decadal prediction challenges, seemed too weakly represented in the meeting agenda and hidden or at least subdued in the WCRP grand challenges.

Annual to Decadal Time Scales. The need for greater emphasis on understanding natural variability and forced change on annual to decadal time scales is relevant, and indeed urgent, for predictions of climate extremes (particularly those related to water availability) and other climate impacts on regional spatial scales.

Short-Lived Climate Forcers. There is a need for better descriptions and incorporation of aerosols and other so-called short-lived climate forcers into understanding and prediction on annual to decadal time scales and on local to regional spatial scales.

Biogeochemical Cycles. The need is growing to incorporate interactive components of the carbon and other biogeochemical cycles, including terrestrial and oceanic geochemical and ecological sources and sinks, into analyses and models.

Thinking Decadally

The video below, from the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum and Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie, shows two emission scenarios used in AR5 and compared across the globe as time marches toward 2100.

Despite great progress in modeling potential future conditions, the goal of increased predictive skill on decadal time scales emerges as a clarion theme. This theme, although hardly new, suggests an encompassing challenge and direction for WCRP. As weather forecasting extends from daily to weekly out to seasonal scales, climate predictions must move from centennial scales through decadal toward seasonal.

Weather and climate communities recognize this need despite enormous scientific and technical challenges. We suspect that fragmented organizational structures, with various seasonal and decadal initiatives and projects scattered within WCRP and between WCRP and its weather research counterpart, WWRP, reflect a very real scientific complexity. Unfortunately, this fragmentation may portend a hesitant approach to integrating these efforts.

At the same time, we recognize a need for WCRP and WWRP to work together to address urban populations and environments where hourly to decadal time scales, regional geographic scales, and integrated coupled weather-climate modeling capabilities become more urgent and more challenging. In particular, we understand that local decisions about investments in, for example, coastal infrastructure require mutually consistent predictions of extreme storm events and climate trends.

Gathering Data

Virtually every speaker and every report given at the “Lessons Learnt” discussions in Bern emphasized a need for better and more systematic sources of and access to data. Recognizing the extremely positive impact of meteorological reanalyses across and beyond atmospheric research and modeling, we anticipate movement by the major modeling centers toward broader Earth system reanalyses.

It seems timely to initiate a broad effort to gather existing but so far narrowly used climate data products from across the physical, chemical, biological, and ecological communities into a more uniform and assimilation-friendly format. We recognize substantial technical challenges arising from variable spatial resolutions and temporal extents, but we contend that such a planetary diagnosis effort represents a long-avoided task whose implementation would reverberate strongly through science and data communities.

Challenges Ahead

As WCRP pursues new directions, we confront four interlinked obstacles:

• Funding is decreasing generally, and it is increasingly earmarked and allocated for purposes other than fundamental climate research.
• Despite confirmation of the validity, indeed urgency, of the WCRP grand challenges, we have only a mixed record of implementation and a weak record of public engagement.
• Our tendency across WCRP is to overload and overwork a few key individuals, especially female individuals.
• Our most careful and creative products continually and increasingly clash with social or political comfort and convenience.

WCRP has developed through the accretion of good ideas and worthy plans, reflecting the emerging complexity and expanding facets inherent in analysis and prediction of a rapidly evolving climate system. Although we describe here the recent and necessary reassessment of the WCRP activities, we see a need for additional and continual refinement in light of priorities and resources.

With a small number of staff serving management and coordination roles at the center and across the projects, WCRP always and increasingly relies on enthusiastic volunteers who build and sustain the international science community. We observe an optimistic sense of urgency and possibility within that community—the collective overt determination to not simply repeat past steps or continue past processes emerging from the “Lesson Learnt” meeting confirms their motivation.

If we as representatives and leaders fail to confront funding, implementation, capacity, and messaging issues, we risk a serious and disabling loss of confidence and commitment within and across this most valuable climate resource.

Acknowledgments

We thank Thomas Stocker, cochair of IPCC AR5 Working Group I, and our colleagues within WCRP and from the Working Group I Technical Support Unit for extraordinary cooperation and support.

—Guy Brasseur, Chair, WCRP Joint Scientific Committee; also at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany; and David Carlson, Director, WCRP, Geneva, Switzerland; email: [email protected]

Citation:  Brasseur, G., and D. Carlson (2015), Future directions for the World Climate Research Programme,  Eos, 96, doi:10.1029/2015EO033577. Published on 30 July 2015.

Text © 2015. The authors. CC BY-NC 3.0 Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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FutureVU: Sustainability

Vanderbilt creates Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate

Posted by hamiltcl on Monday, April 1, 2024 in featured , FutureVU , GHG , Research .

Vanderbilt University will harness its global expertise in scientific discovery, technological innovation, public policy, law and education to launch the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate (VSEC).

The multimillion-dollar investment follows a recommendation by an interdisciplinary working group to address the crucial societal challenge of ensuring a sustainable world. It is the latest center to be launched through  Discovery Vanderbilt , an initiative of the  Office of the Provost  and one of three pathways in the university’s  Dare to Grow  campaign to support and extend the resources underpinning Vanderbilt’s most innovative research and education.

Previously announced centers include the  Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research , the  Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator , and the  Vanderbilt Center for Research on Inequality and Health .

“One of the defining hallmarks of Vanderbilt is our spirit of ‘radical collaboration’ where researchers across a wide range of disciplines join together with local and global partners to tackle some the most urgent issues of our time,” Provost C. Cybele Raver. “VSEC exemplifies this spirit, where this group of brilliant faculty members are taking on and solving complex and pressing challenges for climate, energy, and sustainability. It makes me so proud to see Vanderbilt so powerfully positioned to make tremendous contributions in these areas.”

Raver added that the university is embarking on a global search for an accomplished researcher and administrative leader to direct the center.

VSEC’s primary mission will focus on advancing multidisciplinary research that includes partnerships with communities, government, industry, national laboratories and other research universities. The center will also engage Vanderbilt’s world-class engineering, science, law, policy and education expertise to investigate areas such as:

• Energy Integration
• Resource Sustainability
• Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
• Systems Risk, Reliability, and Resilience

“Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering is the ideal setting for this forward-thinking cross-disciplinary center,” said  Hiba Baroud , who co-led the strategic planning committee that recommended the creation of VSEC and who is serving as its interim director, said the center is unique because it tackles complex challenges that require advances in basic science as well as broad interdisciplinary applied research.

“We are taking a holistic approach to achieve sustainable development by examining how different aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation affect each other,” said Baroud, who is the A. James and Alice B. Clark Foundation Faculty Fellow and Associate Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering. “We envision the center doing this not just in terms of making advances in different focus areas, but by pairing scientific discoveries and transformative technologies with implementation and policy adoption.”

Jonathan Gilligan , who was vice chair of the strategic planning committee and is director of the Vanderbilt Climate and Society Grand Challenge Initiative, said it is imperative for VSEC to view sustainability solutions through a wide lens, engaging all the schools and disciplines of the university on equal footing, as well as connecting with community, industry, and government partners.

“VSEC’s success will be measured by how deeply it engages the expertise of the entire university, including engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and professional disciplines such as law, management, and healthcare,” said Gilligan, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences whose work explores the intersection of the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and public policy. “Its success will not be measured solely by the number of academic papers published or the amount of grant money it attracts, but on its ability to draw upon Vanderbilt’s distinctive strengths in trans-institutional and trans-disciplinary collaboration in order to advance the frontiers of transdisciplinary research on sustainability, to provide students with a world-class holistic education on climate change and environmental sustainability, and to apply the results of its research to delivering tangible benefits to society.”

Already, the center’s strategic planning committee has identified opportunities to perform rigorous testing of novel concepts and technologies by leveraging existing testbeds at Vanderbilt and developing new ones that address sustainable transportation, materials science, microgrid energy development and biomanufacturing.

The university seeks to hire a permanent director. Interested candidates should contact  [email protected] .

Tags: climate change , featured , FutureVU , GHG , Research

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Original research article, a bibliometric analysis of climate change risk perception: hot spots, trends and improvements.

• 1 School of Civil Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
• 2 School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
• 3 College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

Climate change is a global problem, and it is receiving increasing scientific attention due to its significant impact. To provide valuable insights for understanding and summarizing the research trends and prospects on climate change risk perception, this study takes a qualitative and quantitative analysis by using bibliometric tools. This analysis presents information related to authors, countries, institutions, journals, top cited publications, research hot spots, trends, and prospects. The analysis involved 4429 articles after rigorous screening and evaluated them on the risk perception of climate change in countries and the public. The majority of publications were published during the period of 2016–2022 (70.92%), with Climatic Change being the dominant journal and most research originating from the USA, England and Australia. The research content of this topic is primarily divided into several categories, including environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, water resources and public health. The results showed that adaptation and vulnerability attract much attention. Finally, this paper identifies and discusses five research themes that should be further studied: determinants of perception, human behavior, human mental health risk, agriculture and adaptive strategy.

1 Introduction

Recently, the Sixth Assessment Report of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the authority on global climate change, warns that global action to mitigate climate change and adaptation is urgent and that any delay will make people's futures unlivable and sustainable. At the same time, scientists, politicians, and economists have all centered their attention on climate change in recent decades. It is one of the main causes of adverse impacts and key risks to natural and human social systems. Denying climate change, especially by governments and policymakers, is a serious problem because it hinders the process of risk mitigation and strategy adaptation. There is a broad scientific conclusion that global climate change is taking place. Research on the impact of climate change mainly focuses on environmental and economic aspects, including food security ( Parvin and Ahsan, 2013 ), water resources ( Yang et al., 2018 ), health ( Madeira et al., 2018 ), biodiversity ( Fei et al., 2017 ), energy ( Wang et al., 2018 ) and some other aspects. Scientists' research on climate change has been quite comprehensive.

Climate change has been a widespread concern, but less attention has been given to climate change risk perception. Climate change is a human-reduced, serious risk, but the public's perception of climate change and support for climate change policies are still ambiguous in many parts of the world ( Brechin and Bhandari, 2011 ), which depends on their environment and world outlook ( Becerra et al., 2020 ). Many scholars from various countries have conducted much research on the risk perception of climate change. For instance, Leiserowitz studied the perception of the American people on the local climate and found that most people pay high attention to the global climate change problem, but they believe that the risk of climate change is medium, and the public perception of climate change also affects their perception of relevant government policies ( Leiserowitz, 2005 ). Recent research on the public perception of climate change has improved our understanding of the changing public response ( Brulle et al., 2012 ). These climate change risk perception studies are important to inform and support local people, technical experts and decision makers ( Funatsu et al., 2019 ). Understanding and encouraging the potential drivers of local people to adapt to climate change can help develop plans and strategies, which has a greater possibility of achieving positive results.

Climate change risk perception is a complex problem with subjectivity based on environmental and cultural characteristics. However, it is important for scientists and politicians to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies and policies ( Armah et al., 2017 ). Strengthening the research on the risk perception of climate change and judging whether public perception is accurate by comparing with the actual climate change trend. These results can provide a reference for government decision-making behavior. Although many articles cover different perspectives of climate change risk perception, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to help scholars evaluate current research progress and determine future research directions. Since these publications are geographically and spatially distributed, our analysis will show the relationship between them and how much they are related to each other.

The application of big data and bibliometric analysis makes it more convenient to collect and process scientific climate change research. This helps to understand the relationship between previous research and the current literature ( Callaghan et al., 2020 ). Bibliometric research has been proven to be very useful for natural science, urban research and other research directions ( Wu et al., 2018 ) and has become one of the most prominent methods to evaluate and predict the research trends of specific topics ( Zhao et al., 2018 ). At the same time, this research method is helpful for revealing the research trends and the characteristics of academic publishing, as well as the relationship among different documents, authors and publishing regions ( Lee, 2017 ). In bibliometric analysis, big data is defined as “big literature”, which is characterized by high velocity, volume, and variability ( Nunez Mir et al., 2016 ). The objective of this study is to analyze the 4429 pieces of literature collected (from 2000 to 2022) and thus derive a research analysis of climate change risk perception.

We identified hot spots, trends and improvements in climate change risk perception in recent years through bibliometric analysis. Moreover, we analyzed the core topic, future research hotspots and practical research methods to provide an overview of references for theoretical research and practical work on climate change risk perception. The dataset has been made publicly available on figshare ( https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/data_zip/21314085 ).

2 Materials and methods

2.1 data collection.

We comprehensively searched the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database to search publications, and the selected time span ranged from 2000 to 2022. The reason for only including 22 years of studies is that only 16 papers were found before 2000 by searching WoSCC using our preidentified keywords (see below). Additionally, papers published before 2000 are not very relevant to the current study due to the long distance between them. Therefore, we selected papers from 2000-2022 for analysis. The retrieval time was March 13th, 2022. The search statement is “TS= (("climat* chang*" or "climat* var*" or "environment* chang*" or "climat* warm*") and risk and (aware* or percept* or sense* or feel* or cogni*)) AND PY= (2000-2022)”. The WoSCC is currently one of the primary sources for most bibliometric analyses ( Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2015 ). We restricted the language of our results to English. We choose the related categories, including environmental sciences, environmental studies, meteorology atmospheric sciences, water resources, public environmental occupational health, geosciences multidisciplinary, geography or ecology, economics, development studies, energy fuels, social sciences interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary sciences, biodiversity conservation, regional urban planning, mathematics interdisciplinary applications, psychology multidisciplinary and communication. We finally selected original research and review articles, filtering publications to 4429 records. Remove papers that are not related to the research topic, including ethics, limnology, toxicology, pediatrics, etc. The timeframe spanned more than 20 years, which made the analysis of the structure and trends of knowledge domains more typical. To ensure an accurate search, our theoretical approaches consider what is now understood as climate change risk perception research. Three independent variables, climate change, risk and perception, were defined as the search keywords.

2.2 Topic explanation

The theme of this paper is “climate change risk perception,” which means people’s perception of climate change risk. Compared with ( Howe et al., 2015 ), our paper pays more attention to climate change risk perception globally; our paper focuses on the many aspects of climate change risk perception, rather than just the climate change risk perception about environment ( Bradley et al., 2020 ); compared with ( Tam and McsDaniels, 2013 ), our research focuses on relevant policies; also, our paper is more concentrated on the people of all classes than ( Parvin and Ahsan, 2013 ) and ( Wu et al., 2018 ).

2.3 Bibliometric Analysis

Bibliometrics provides an important method for analyzing academic documents. It can visually show the statistical results of academic documents by using bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Bibliometrix ( Li et al., 2017 ). Bibliometrix, an important R-tool for comprehensive bibliometric analysis designed in R language ( Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017 ). With a complete process of data import, data transformation, data analysis, and scientific visualization, Bibliometrix basically meets the requirements of bibliometric analysis ( Chen et al., 2022 ). We used it to make diagrams and tables, including thematic map, thematic evolution, network map, co-citation network, co-authorship network and co-occurrence network. VOSviewer is a program developed for constructing and viewing bibliometric maps. The program is freely available to the bibliometric research community ( van Eck and Waltman, 2010 ). Therefore, we use VOSviewer, which also has three types of visualization: network, overlay and density. It is color-coded depending on the popularity and similarity of the studies. The line used in the interconnection of words also changes in contrast. As the word is commonly used in different studies, the color becomes vibrant ( Tamala et al., 2022 ). The viewing capabilities of VOSviewer are particularly useful for analyses that contain at least a moderate number of items (at least 100 items) ( van Eck and Waltman, 2010 ).

3.1 Overview of result data and map

As shown in Figure 1 . First, we summarize the data and network diagram obtained by analyzing the collected documents with bibliometric tools. In the performance analysis, we study the following aspects: publication-related, citation-related, citation-publication-related and author-related metrics. Combining these data, we can see the current situation of climate change risk perception research, the degree of citation of relevant literatures and the overall level of the authors. We use two bibliometric tools to map science mapping. Through VOSviewer, we can obtain three main types of graphs: network, overlay and density visualization maps. Co-occurrence, citation and co-citation analyses are represented by these three kinds of diagrams. Furthermore, we used the Bibliometrix package in R language for visual analysis. Using it, we can obtain a visual map of overview, documents, sources and authors.

FIGURE 1 . Overview of the bibliometric analysis in this paper

3.2 Analysis of articles

The annual growth rate of related publications is 15.76%. The number of related publications increased slowly from 2000 to 2015, accounting for just 29.08% of the total. The number of publications has increased substantially since 2015. The number of related papers has grown rapidly, with 26.49% during 2016-2017. The majority of publications (70.92%) were published from 2016 to 2022, which is shown in Figure 2 . This may be because these years had the greatest impact from climate change. A World Meteorological Organization survey showed that 2015 was the hottest year on record, and during this period, concentrations of the major greenhouse gases continued to rise and reached record levels for the instrumental period ( World Meteorological Organization, 2019 ). In addition, the Paris Agreement was adopted by the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2015 ( United Nations, 2015 ). All these factors have led to the upsurge in climate change research since 2015.

FIGURE 2 . Number of articles per year from 2000 to 2021.

3.2.1 Citations of articles

Table 1 shows the top 10 articles according to the number of total citations and total citations per year and local citation scores. ( Adger, 2006 ), published in the Global Environmental Change in 2006, is cited the most 2895 times, which reviews research traditions of vulnerability to environmental change and the challenges for present vulnerability research in integrating with the domains of resilience and adaptation ( Adger, 2006 ). The other three articles are also cited more than 1000 times ( Adger et al., 2009 ) (1267 times), ( Leiserowitz, 2006 ) (1078 times) and ( Parry et al., 2004 ) (1023 times). Meanwhile, ( Adger, 2006 ) is also the most cited article per year (170.29), followed by ( Dryhurst et al., 2020 ) (160.67) and ( Gatto et al., 2020 ) (134.67). The most cited articles can provide helpful insights to researchers interested in this field. Moreover, two important indicators, the local citation score (LCS) and global citation score (GCS), were used to identify hot publications with citation analysis ( Huang et al., 2022 ). GCS refers to the total number of citations in the Web of Science database. LCS represents the number of times a document has been cited in the current sample literature ( Huang et al., 2022 ). The article with the highest local citation score in the current research field is ( Leiserowitz, 2006 ), with an LCS of 428 and GCS of 1078, which means that its local citations are more than others. However, there are some articles, for example, ( Adger et al., 2009 ) with high GCS (1267) but low LCS (197), which shows that their study content is mostly interdisciplinary research.

TABLE 1 . The Top 10 articles according to the number of total citations and total citations per year and local citation score

3.2.2 Co-Citation Network Analysis

Co-citation is a bibliographic analysis method that indicates a connection between two documents that are both cited by an identical third document ( Nadelhoffer and Raich, 1992 ). The co-citation analysis of VOSviewer software includes cited references, cited sources, and cited authors, which can find close relationship between articles, journals and authors in that field. In the co-citation network, a cluster can be defined as a group of well-connected articles in a research field, and the connection with articles in other clusters or research fields is limited ( Huang et al., 2022 ).

Among the 196313 cited references, according to the calculated total strength of links with other cited references. There is a co-citation network composed of the top 50 influential articles (each has more than 97 cited references) is displayed in Figure 3A , which has a small table about the information of the top 3. The reason for choosing the top 50 articles for the network diagram is that 50 items can display the main content of the graph in a reasonable way when drawing, without cluttering the graph because of too many items. At the same time, the graph does not contain too little information due to the small number of items. Moreover, most of the bibliometric literature also selects approximately 50 items for network diagramming (e.g., ( Rana, 2020 )). ( Leiserowitz, 2006 ) has the highest total link strength. This study found that American risk perceptions and policy support are strongly influenced by experiential factors, which is 2268, followed by ( Spence et al., 2011 ) (1487) and ( Weber, 2006 ) (1425), and they are all the top influence co-citation articles. Figure 3A also shows 3 clusters in these articles, and each cluster has a different color. The red cluster with 22 articles focuses on public perception ( Weber, 2006 ; Spence et al., 2011 ); the green cluster with 15 items focuses on risk perception ( Slovic, 2020 ); and the blue cluster with 13 publications focuses on perception and policy support ( Leiserowitz, 2006 ).

FIGURE 3 . Cocitation map of articles (A) (top 50 articles with more than 97 cited references) and journals (B) ((top 50 journals with more than 488 cited references)

3.3 Analysis of journals

3.3.1 distribution of journals.

The results show that the 4429 selected studies are published in 686 types of journals. Table 2 shows the primary performance of the top 10 most productive journals. The results find that Climatic Change (Climatic Change is dedicated to the totality of the problem of climatic variability and change, including its descriptions, causes, implications and interactions among these) is the most productive journal publishing 190 papers, followed by Sustainability (176 papers) and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (131 papers). Global Environmental Change-human And Policy Dimensions has the highest h -index (53), followed by Climatic Change (40) and Risk Analysis (40). Global Environmental Change-human And Policy Dimensions also has the highest total citations (14036). These all indicate that Global Environmental Change-human And Policy Dimensions, Climatic Change , Risk Analysis, Sustainability and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health have significant contributions in this field, while the rest of journals have additional contributions. Among these ten journals, 4 were in England, 3 were in the Netherlands and 2 were in Switzerland, and they all had high impact factors.

TABLE 2 . The Primary performance of the top 10 most productive journals.

3.3.2 Co-Citation of journals

In the visualization of journal co-citation, the distance between the two journals reflects the correlation between different journals and disciplines. Generally, the closer the distance between the two journals, the stronger the correlation between them. We can easily find that VOSviewer divides journals into five clusters in Figure 3B : environmental and global in the red cluster ( Global Environmental Change-Human And Policy Dimensions, Natural Hazards and Environmental Science & Policy ); risk and climate change in the blue cluster ( Climatic Change, Risk Analysis and Nature Climate Change ); nature and biology in green cluster ( Nature , Science and Plos One ); energy and technology ( Energy Policy , Energy Research & Social Science and Environmental Science & Technology ); public health in purple ( International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health and Environmental Health Perspectives ). Among the 67859 sources, Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions, which advance knowledge about the human and policy dimensions of global environmental change, have the highest total link strength, which is 389864.

3.4 Subject categories analysis

The top 10 subject categories included environmental sciences (1933 articles, accounting for 43.64% of the total), environmental studies (1399 articles, 31.59%), meteorology atmospheric sciences (809 articles, 18.27%), water resources (563 articles, 12.71%), public environmental occupational health (488 articles, 11.01%), geosciences multidisciplinary (414 articles, 9.35%), geography (292 articles, 6.60%), ecology (243 articles, 5.49%), economics (213 articles, 4.81%), and development studies (163 articles, 3.68%). The number of various publications reflects the trend of climate change risk perception research in different fields. Between 2000 and 2022, the number of publications in environmental sciences, environmental studies and meteorology atmospheric sciences increased significantly, while the number of publications in other categories increased gradually.

3.5 Changes and trends of themes

In Figure 4A , the time periods analyzed are divided according to important time points (e.g., the enactment of important agreements). The themes are generated automatically by the analysis of Bibliometrix. The different themes were weighted by using a modified version of the inclusion index, taking into account the occurrences per period of each keyword appearing in a theme ( Aria et al., 2020 ). In Figure 4B , motor theme means a theme that is currently being researched and is likely to become a hot topic for future research. The basic theme means that it is more basic and from which most other research is developed. A declining theme means that it is fading and will likely not be researched in the future. The niche theme means a theme of a small group that deviates from the main direction of research.

FIGURE 4 . The change in the themes at different times during the period 2000-2022 (A); status and development trend of different themes during the period 2016-2022 (B) .

3.5.1 Change of the themes

In Figure 4A , we can find the change in the themes at different times, the influence of different events, and the future development trends. With the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol during the period 2000-2009, countries began to perceive climate change and gradually recognize the risks it poses. Therefore, during this period, the main themes were risk, science, temperature and information. In addition, the basic themes are science and climate change. After 2009, the themes were changed, when 129 countries discussed follow-up plans after the expiration of phase I commitments of the Kyoto Protocol . Between 2010 and 2015, they became adaptation, change and climate change, and it was determined that the motor theme was adaptation. The active participation of countries led to the signing of the Paris Agreement, which will cause a change in research direction. Moreover, countries' awareness of climate change risk perception is deepening. Therefore, COP25 was held in Madrid in 2019, and COP26 was held in Glasgow in 2021. The global perception of climate change is becoming stronger.

In fact, the keywords that shift from one period to another are also relevant. The shift from 9 keywords in the 2000-2009 period of research to 4 keywords in the 2010-2015 period of research indicates that scientists' research on climate change risk perception tends to be rational and targeted. The shift from temperature and environmental change in the first period (2000-2009) to climate change in the second period (200-2015) shows that scientists' research on climate change is gradually becoming systematic. From "adoption" in the second period and "policy" in the third period, we can see that people are increasingly trying to find solutions to the problems caused by climate change. In the fourth period (2020-2022), "impact" becomes one of the key words, indicating that scientists are looking for the far-reaching effects of climate change.

3.5.2 Trend of different themes during the period 2016-2022

Figure 4B depicts the status and development trend of different themes during the period 2016-2022. The main themes turned into policy, climate change and risk during 2015-2019 ( Figure 4B ). Meanwhile, the basic theme is risk, and the niche theme is policy. The motor theme is knowledge, and the declining theme is the model. More importantly, from this figure, we can see that the themes of “climat-change” and “risk” are becoming increasingly important. After this period, countries actively cooperated and took action to deal with climate change.

3.6 Active authors, countries and institutions

A total of 13333 authors were involved in the study of climate change risk perception. Table 3 illustrates the top 10 authors in the number of papers, total citations and h -index. In this topic, Leiserowitz A (School of the Environment Yale University) published the largest number of 32 papers, followed by Pidgeon N (28) and Siegrist M (26). Adger Wn has the highest total citations (5621), followed by Lorenzoni I (4317) and Leiserowitz A (3190). Meanwhile, Leiserowitz A has the highest h -index. Therefore, Leiserowitz A made a great contribution to this topic.

TABLE 3 . The top 10 authors regarding the number of papers, total citations and h-index.

All of the papers were from 145 countries, among which the United States published the highest number of 1438 papers, accounting for 32.47%, followed by the United Kingdom (602 papers, 13.59%), Australia (493 papers, 11.13%), China (389 papers, 8.78%) and Germany (387 papers, 8.74%). Figure 5A shows the number of papers and collaborations among the 30 most productive countries. The table of the data of the top 5 countries is in the upper right corner. The size of the node in the figure indicates the number of papers. The larger the node is, the more papers there are ( Li et al., 2019 ). Moreover, the thickness of the line between two points indicates the degree of contact between the two countries. It is obvious that China has the closest cooperative relationship with the United States and Australia. The color of the node in the figure from dark to light indicates the time sequence when the country began to study. We can see that the United States began research earlier, while China began research in recent years. This may be because the Obama administration (beginning in 2009) has established the action policy of building a green economy and developing new energy and explored new economic growth models to achieve America’s economic recovery. However, starting from the construction of “The Belt and Road” (since 2015), China began to clearly implement the new concept of global governance, which is to build a community of human destiny to achieve win‒win cooperation and common development.

FIGURE 5 . The Network map of (A) the top 30 productive countries (top 30 countries with more than 45 documents) and (B) the top 25 institutions for research on climate change risk perception (top 25 institutions with more than 950 cited references).

Network maps can provide information about influential research institutions and potential collaborators and can help researchers establish collaborations ( Shi et al., 2020 ). A total of 4063 institutions worldwide contribute to research on climate change risk perception. Figure 5B shows the top 25 institutions with the most contributions; in addition, the table about the information of the top 3 institutions is in the upper right corner. Cardiff University is ranked first, contributing 74 papers, accounting for 1.67%. Then, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published 61 papers (1.38%), followed by Arizona State University (59 papers, 1.33%). The graph also shows frequent exchanges between Cardiff University, Yale University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Queensland and Michigan State University.

3.7 Keyword analysis

3.7.1 hotspots of keywords.

The frequency analysis of keywords is key to investigating hot topics and developments associated with a given field ( Wang, 2018 ). We use author keywords and keywords plus to explore hot issues and identify the research trends in this topic. Author keywords can provide important information about the core content and research trends ( Ma and Zhang, 2020 ), while keywords plus are generated by an ISI algorithm from words or expressions of the article’s reference titles ( Huang et al., 2022 ). Except for the search terms in this study, the two most commonly used author keywords and keywords plus are all "adaptation" and "vulnerability" ( Table 4 ). Meanwhile, “climate change adaptation” and “resilience” are also common keywords, and “management” and “policy” are common keywords plus. Figure 6A shows the density visualization (a function of VOSviewer) based on the keywords plus and the intensity of hot spots with the color spectrum, with warm red colors representing hot areas and cool blue colors representing cool areas ( Zhang et al., 2020 ). In addition, the distance between them means the extent of their relationship, such as “climate-change”, “risk” and “policy”, are closer than other words.

TABLE 4 . The Top 10 frequencies of author keywords and keywords used during 2000–2022.

FIGURE 6 . The Density (A) , overlay (B) and network (C) visualization map of keywords plus.

3.7.2 Co-occurrence keyword analysis

Figure 6B is an overlay visualization map illustrating the keywords plus from 2015 to 2019. The yellower the color of the node in the figure is, the newer the keywords. The keywords in the blue region almost appeared before 2015. Obviously, most keywords have appeared in the past five years. This may reflect that climate change risk perception is a new field. In addition, Figure 6C shows network visualization, which consists of different nodes and wires. All these keywords are divided into 3 clusters, and the size of the node in the figure indicates the frequency of the keywords. The color of the nodes represents the cluster to which it belongs, and different clusters are represented by different colors. The red cluster focuses on policy, people and information about risk perception. The keywords with the highest frequency in the blue cluster are health and climate change. The green one concerns the influence of climate change risk perception in different fields: adaptation, strategy, vulnerability, management and agriculture.

4 Discussion

By summarizing the collected literature with a high number of citations in recent years and analyzing Figure 6C , we discuss the following topics. They largely reflect the hot spots of research in recent years and future trends.

4.1 Determinants of risk perception

The determinants affecting climate change risk perception are an important research topic ( Figure 6C red cluster). At present, the relationship between education level and climate change risk perception has been basically confirmed ( Lee et al., 2015 ). Research shows that the higher the level of education is, the sharper the risk perception of climate change. We argue that this is because higher educators have a better understanding of the phenomenon and connotations of climate change, and they are more likely to worry about the world. Moreover, experience is also an important factor affecting climate change risk perception. Usually, the elderly have more experience ( Rufat and Botzen, 2022 ), especially compared the current climate with the climate of their youth, since they experience climate change longer than young people. At the same time, we found that beliefs and values also play an important role in perception ("beliefs” and “values” are all the keywords in the red cluster). Different beliefs pay different attention to climate, which leads to differences in perception. Some religions encourage believers to raise awareness of climate change and participate in environmental protection ( Hornsey et al., 2016 ).

4.2 Human behavior

On the other hand, we can see that the red cluster also contains another core view of "behavior" ( Figure 6C red cluster). First, human behavior is the main cause of global climate change ( Ayal et al., 2021 ). At the same time, behavior is also bidirectional, which means that climate change will affect people's behavior. Because of the drastic change in climate, people choose adaptive behavior and support for government policies to reduce personal losses ( Xue et al., 2021 ). Research has shown that adaptation is essential to reduce or avoid the negative effects of climate change ( Valkengoed and Steg, 2019 ). The majority of people actively or passively take actions conducive to the environment. At present, the government's intervention policies are mainly divided into monetary intervention and nonmonetary intervention. Monetary intervention is often more able to motivate the public and achieve better results ( Khanna et al., 2021 ). People preferably take action when they return from the government. However, when people take environmentally friendly actions for the first time, they are more likely to continue. In the future, we should continue to study what kind of intervention can improve people's enthusiasm to take action to protect the environment.

4.3 Human mental health risk

Climate change will not only have an influence on human behavior but also have an important impact on public health, especially on mental health ( Figure 6C blue cluster). Climate change can affect mental health through a variety of risk pathways ( Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018 ), including the extinction of wild animals and the deterioration of the surrounding environmental landscape. People's emotions are largely related to their environment. However, clinical medicine has not revealed the specific relationship between climate change and mental health ( Brown et al., 2021 ). Grief is a normal response to the deterioration of the environment, and this psychology will become more common with the aggravation of climate change, ultimately affecting the overall mental health of the public. In addition, this emotion may encourage them to take measures to protect the environment. While climate change will affect all people, some groups bear greater risks than others ( Manning and Clayton, 2018 ). Generally, this emotion, grief, increases with the improvement of perception level. At the same time, women and children are easily affected, perhaps because of their relative psychological vulnerability. Researchers should further explore the specific relationship between climate change and mental health and strengthen counseling for the mental health of vulnerable people.

4.4 Impact on Agriculture

Climate change has an impact on almost all human production and life, especially on agricultural production (keyword “agriculture” in Figure 6C green cluster). Climate change has been shown to increase temperature and reduce precipitation, resulting in lower soil water content, which in turn affects agricultural production ( Grusson et al., 2021 ). In fact, the agricultural production system is very fragile, and climate change will hinder the development of agriculture. Because they themselves heavily rely on the climate, it is difficult to make self-regulation in the short term. Therefore, farmers are required to actively adopt adaptive plans to adjust agricultural production. A study in Sri Lanka shows that farmers' adaptation measures can increase rice production ( Suresh et al., 2021 ). However, farmers generally have limited capacity and are especially unable to cope with extreme weather and long-term climate risks caused by climate change. Relevant researchers should search for appropriate and targeted adaptive measures, guiding agricultural producers to implement.

4.5 Adaptive strategy

The continuous change in climate led to the attention of adaptive strategies ( Figure 6C green cluster). However, based on existing traditional concepts, most people only accept adaptation strategies similar to the current situation ( Tam and McDaniels, 2013 ). Nevertheless, these strategies often do not play a substantive role, and the adaptive effect is very small. This is closely related to people's conservative ideas. Some people even sacrifice their livelihood to maintain their original way of life. For example, some shrimp fishermen in Bangladesh tend to maintain their customs, resulting in a decline in production, which has also had a great impact on the development of the country. Therefore, governments should introduce adaptive policies. At the same time, natural and social scientists also need to contact and work with decision makers ( Seddon et al., 2020 ). Moreover, in Figure 6B , we found that the word "adaptation" has only been studied in the last five years, which is also the key content of the Paris Agreement, signed in 2015 and implemented in 2016. Obviously, the signing of the Paris Agreement has promoted the emergence and development of adaptive policies. We suggest that climate change research should be guided by the international situation in the future.

4.6 Summary of discussion

This paper also reveals some characteristics and directions of current climate change risk perception. At present, research in this direction is relatively sufficient, but there are still some deficiencies. In the future, we should strengthen the research in the following aspects. First, it is important to explore the determinants that affect the public's risk perception of climate change. We should continue to reveal them, which will help to purposefully improve the perception level of the public. Then, governments should increase investment in research and intervention policies to encourage people to carry out adaptive behavior. Moreover, the research proves that climate change will lead to mental health diseases, but it does not reveal the specific relationship between them. Psychologists and environmentalists should cooperate in this research. On the other hand, climate change also causes an imbalance in the agricultural system. Farmers use adaptive methods, which is an effective way to solve the problem, but farmers' capability is limited, and they need further guidance from researchers. In addition, we find that moderate adaptation policies have little effect. Finally, the analysis shows that more cooperation between different research institutions is needed to maximize success ( Chen et al., 2022 ).

The great impact of climate change on human society and global ecosystems has attracted the attention of the whole world. Although the importance of climate change is obvious, climate change risk perception still needs further research. This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of the global research overview of climate change risk perception and provides relevant information, including countries, institutions, journals, articles, authors, hot topics and research trends. From 2000 to 2022, the publication of relevant articles gradually increased with increasingly serious climate change. Among them, articles published by the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia account for 57.19%. Cardiff University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University are the top productivity institutions. Climatic Change and Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions are the most productive and influential journals, respectively. Keywords co-occurrence analysis reveals three key research topics: policy of risk perception, health and adaptation strategy. Determinations and strategies are recent research directions. At the same time, it reveals that the current climate change research has been interdisciplinary research involving the environment, politics, medicine, agriculture and other disciplines.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Author contributions

JF: Methodology, Formal analysis, and Writing—Original Draft; GL: Conceptualization, Resources, Writing—Review & Editing and Funding acquisition; ZX: Methodology and Writing—Review & Editing; SC: Methodology and Writing—Review & Editing.

This work was supported by the International Cooperation and Exchange of the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC3201204).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: Climate Change, Risk Perception, Bibliometric, impact, adaptive strategy

Citation: Fan J, Liu G, Xia Z and Cai S (2022) A bibliometric analysis of climate change risk perception: Hot spots, trends and improvements. Front. Environ. Sci. 10:917469. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2022.917469

Received: 11 April 2022; Accepted: 04 November 2022; Published: 22 November 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Fan, Liu, Xia and Cai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Gang Liu, [email protected]

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Climate adaptation research applied 'in real-time'

by SciDev.Net

With global South countries already bearing the devastating consequences of climate change, adaptation research needs to have immediate on-the-ground impact, while still being scientifically rigorous, say climate action specialists in a review published in Climate Services .

"With the climate crisis before us, we don't have time to sit back and do a conventional research program of two, or five, or 10 years, and then use the research itself," says Jesse DeMaria-Kinney, head of secretariat of the Adaptation Research Alliance (ARA).

The effects of climate change, fueled by the greenhouse gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere, are being felt acutely in the global South as temperatures rise, seasons shift, and extreme weather events, such as floods and storms, become more frequent and intense.

Adaptation, which involves changing ecological, social or economic systems to make them better able to weather the risks of climate change, "is a critical component of the long-term global response to climate change to protect people, livelihoods and ecosystems," according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

But the difficulty is that research, as it is traditionally undertaken, has long lead times and that model is not fit for a rapidly changing climate.

"Decisions and actions have to be made now and they need to be made on the best available evidence," says DeMaria-Kinney. "But we need to build flexibility into research and that flexibility has to be informed by a continual research and iterative process that runs parallel to implementation."

Action-oriented research

Last year, at the UN climate summit COP28 in Dubai, ARA announced that it had mobilized more than £3 million (US$3.8 million) in investments for action-oriented research that addresses pressing adaptation needs of those most vulnerable to climate impacts.

Formally launched in 2021, the ARA is a global coalition of organizations committed to action-orientated research for adaptation. Its 250 members range from intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations Environmental Program to small community-based organizations.

"Action-orientated research is a paradigm shift in the way that the ARA sees research being done on climate change adaptation," DeMaria-Kinney says.

"This kind of research really focuses on ensuring impact for those on the frontlines of climate change, building capacity throughout the research processes, and the research actually being done with the end users."

Action-orientated research is different from traditional research because it happens alongside the implementation of findings on the ground, DeMaria-Kinney explains, adding that it focuses on "learning while doing."

He stresses that it should be driven by the needs of affected communities, working with those communities to co-design projects and find solutions that will have genuine societal impact.

One of the major investments announced by ARA was for the new Research 4 Impact (R4I) Hub, set up as part of the Climate Adaptation and REsilience (CLARE) research program, jointly designed and run by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Canada's International Development Research Center (IDRC).

"We're in a decisive decade," says Bruce Currie-Alder, who leads the climate team at the IDRC. "We often know enough to act" and with action-oriented research, "you use research as a learning tool in real-time," implementing and testing findings immediately to determine what worked and what didn't, he explains.

As an example he points to flood preparedness in communities in West Africa and the research that can be done ahead of an actual flood event to determine the most effective action. In October 2022, more than 3.4 million people were displaced following floods in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Cameroon.

"What's the tailoring that needs to be done at a community level?" Currie-Alder asks. If a community were flooded, would its residents be able to receive cash transfers to tide them over during the flood and in its aftermath? "What types of measures are needed 72 hours before the water starts rising? These are researchable questions," he says.

Research findings could be implemented immediately to prepare the community for the next flood, he explains, and scientists could then research whether the interventions made a difference and how they could be improved.

Research for impact

The R4I Hub's new Opportunities Fund aims to translate research and existing knowledge into practical applications for communities in the global South. Project funding ranges from C$15,000 (US$11,00) to C$60,000 (US$44,000), and interventions need to be completed within a year, Currie-Alder says. It is open to governments and quasi-government agencies, and non-governmental and civil society organizations that want to put evidence into action.

"Over the years, I've heard people say things like, 'I don't have time to wait for a new research project to get up and running and develop answers—I only have three months to get something in front of the minister and influence this particular investment,"' he adds. "This is the responsive need we're hoping that the hub will be able to address."

There are many funding opportunities available, from large international funds such as the Green Climate Fund to more modest national efforts, but small interventions which need evidence can fall through the cracks, says Currie-Alder.

For example, perhaps "there's a community investing its local funds and trying to think about the best bet in terms of local infrastructure, whether it's a drainage channel or a new road," he explains.

"These are things that sometimes go under the radar of a big research agenda. You don't go to a university and say, 'I want a Ph.D. student to do this.'" But the R4I Opportunity Fund could be able to mobilize existing expertise and research to assist.

The fund is looking for organizations that already have a clear sense of the project they need guidance on and the sort of support they need. This support could, for example, be the help of a soil scientist, an energy and water systems optimization specialist, or understanding the research around adaptation decisions.

"We're keen to learn from the hub's activities over 2024 and 2025 and then see whether its funding needs to be bigger, and if it needs to offer a greater spectrum of funding options," Currie-Alder says.

Collaboration on the ground

Jenny Frankel-Reed, a senior program officer with the agricultural development team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, tells SciDev.Net, "We need to increase the relevance of scientific inquiry around climate action." The research should also be run by the affected regions, she says, adding, "In Sub-Saharan Africa, there's inequity both in terms of the impacts of climate and also who is generating the solutions."

The foundation has pledged £300,000 (US$380,000) to facilitate "co-creation" workshops for small-scale farmers in two African countries to identify research opportunities collaboratively. It is still deciding where the workshops will be based.

"It's always worth the time and the expense to do that [collaborative co-design] work well because the results are more durable, the buy-in is stronger, the questions are clearer—there are many advantages," says Frankel-Reed. This is one of the fundamental principles of action-oriented adaptation research.

About 70 percent of smallholder farmers in Africa rely on rainfed farming systems and this type of agriculture is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with its shifting seasons, variable temperatures, and extreme weather events .

"There's an urgency to climate adaptation that requires our research to be shaped by the people who are affected and really collaborate with the people who will use it," says Frankel-Reed. "It also needs to be done in a way that is going to build capacity around the world so that people are able to solve their own challenges around climate adaptation as well."

"There's a demand for this kind of research," adds DeMaria-Kinney. "That demand is seen by the ARA going from 33 when we launched at COP26 [in 2021] to having 250 members."

Action-oriented adaptation research is "flipping" the traditional research model around, says Currie-Alder. "As opposed to saying, 'What's your interesting idea and how does that influence the real work?', you're saying, 'What is the opportunity for impact, and what is the knowledge that is needed for that?'"

Provided by SciDev.Net

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• Published: 27 February 2023

Climate change as a global amplifier of human–wildlife conflict

• Briana Abrahms   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1987-5045 1 ,
• Neil H. Carter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4399-6384 2 ,
• T. J. Clark-Wolf 1 ,
• Kaitlyn M. Gaynor 3 ,
• Erik Johansson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1986-2252 1 ,
• Alex McInturff   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4858-1292 4 ,
• Anna C. Nisi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0286-3187 1 ,
• Kasim Rafiq   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1551-711X 1 &
• Leigh West   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1447-0586 1  

Nature Climate Change volume  13 ,  pages 224–234 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Climate change and human–wildlife conflict are both pressing challenges for biodiversity conservation and human well-being in the Anthropocene. Climate change is a critical yet underappreciated amplifier of human–wildlife conflict, as it exacerbates resource scarcity, alters human and animal behaviours and distributions, and increases human–wildlife encounters. We synthesize evidence of climate-driven conflicts occurring among ten taxonomic orders, on six continents and in all five oceans. Such conflicts disrupt both subsistence livelihoods and industrial economies and may accelerate the rate at which human–wildlife conflict drives wildlife declines. We introduce a framework describing distinct environmental, ecological and sociopolitical pathways through which climate variability and change percolate via complex social–ecological systems to influence patterns and outcomes of human–wildlife interactions. Identifying these pathways allows for developing mitigation strategies and proactive policies to limit the impacts of human–wildlife conflict on biodiversity conservation and human well-being in a changing climate.

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Data availability

All case study data derived from the systematic literature review are available at https://github.com/Abrahms-Lab/Climate-Conflict-Review and archived via Zenodo ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo/7502350 ).

Code availability

All R code used for analyses is available at https://github.com/Abrahms-Lab/Climate-Conflict-Review and archived via Zenodo ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo/7502350 ).

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We are grateful to A. Zimmerman and L. Withey for providing early feedback on our manuscript. We thank our institutions for supporting this work. L.W. was supported under an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

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Abrahms, B., Carter, N.H., Clark-Wolf, T.J. et al. Climate change as a global amplifier of human–wildlife conflict. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13 , 224–234 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01608-5

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Heat Waves Are Moving Slower and Staying Longer, Study Finds

Climate change is making heat waves linger for longer stretches of time, exacerbating the effects of extreme temperatures.

By Delger Erdenesanaa

When heat waves swept across large parts of the planet last summer , in many places the oppressive temperatures loitered for days or weeks at a time. As climate change warms the planet, heat waves are increasingly moving sluggishly and lasting longer, according to a study published on Friday .

Each decade between 1979 and 2020, the rate at which heat waves travel, pushed along by air circulation, slowed by about 5 miles per day, the study found. Heat waves also now last about four days longer on average.

“This really has strong impacts on public health,” said Wei Zhang, a climate scientist at Utah State University and one of the authors of the study, which appeared in the journal Science Advances.

The longer heat waves stick around in one place, the longer people are exposed to life-threatening temperatures . As workers slow down during extreme heat, so does economic productivity . Heat waves also dry out soil and vegetation, harming crops and raising the risk of wildfires.

These changes to heat wave behavior have been more noticeable since the late 1990s, Dr. Zhang said. He attributes the changes in large part to human-caused climate change, but also in part to natural climate variability.

The study is among the first to track how heat waves move through both space and time.

Rachel White, an atmospheric scientist at the University of British Columbia who wasn’t involved in the paper, said she had been waiting to see research like this.

“We know that climate change is increasing the intensity of heat waves. We know climate change is increasing the frequency of heat waves,” Dr. White said. “But this study really helps us understand more about how that’s happening.”

Dr. Zhang and his colleagues analyzed temperatures around the world between 1979 and 2020. They defined heat waves as contiguous areas reaching a total of 1 million square kilometers (247 million acres) or more, where temperatures rose to at least the 95th percentile of the local historical maximum temperature (basically, enormous blobs of unusually hot air). The heat waves also had to last for at least three days. The researchers then measured how far these giant air masses moved over time to calculate their speed.

Over all the years they studied, heat waves slowed down by about 8 kilometers per day each decade, or nearly 5 miles per day each decade.

The average life span of heat waves has also stretched out: From 2016-20, they persisted for an average of 12 days, compared with eight days from 1979 to 1983. These longer-lived heat waves are also traveling farther, increasing the distance they travel by about 226 kilometers per decade.

The researchers also found that heat waves are becoming more frequent, to an average of 98 per year between 2016 and 2020, from 75 per year between 1979 and 1983.

There are some regional differences. Heat waves are lasting longer particularly in Eurasia and North America. And they are traveling farther particularly in South America.

To examine the role of climate change, the researchers used models to simulate temperatures in scenarios with and without the warming from human greenhouse gas emissions. They found that the scenario with these emissions was the best match for what has actually happened to heat wave behavior, indicating that climate change is a major force behind these trends.

Scientists have started to detect a larger pattern of air circulation and upper atmosphere winds like the jet streams getting weaker, at least during the summer at higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. This could cause extreme weather events of all kinds to stall and overstay their welcome.

“It stands to reason that that would slow down the speed of heat waves,” said Stephen Vavrus, the state climatologist for Wisconsin. Dr. Vavrus studies atmospheric circulation but wasn’t involved in this research.

The new study did find a correlation between a weaker jet stream and slower heat waves. Dr. White, however, thinks more research is needed to determine whether the jet stream is truly the cause.

No matter the exact reasons for the slowdown, the harmful effects remain.

“It’s sort of multiple factors conspiring together,” Dr. Vavrus said. If heat waves become more frequent, more intense, last longer and cover a greater area, he said, “that really increases the concern we have for their impacts.”

Dr. Zhang is especially concerned about cities, which are often hotter than their surrounding areas because of the urban heat island effect . “If those heat waves last in the city for much longer than before, that would cause a very dangerous situation,” he said.

Alongside his atmospheric research, Dr. Zhang is helping with local efforts to plant more trees and grasses around bus stops in Salt Lake City, where people have to wait in the sun during increasingly hot summers. He suggested that cities build more cooling centers, especially for people experiencing homelessness.

“There are some things a community can do,” he said.

While waiting for international leaders to make progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and stopping climate change, Dr. Zhang said, local adaptation efforts are important to help keep people safer.

Delger Erdenesanaa is a reporter covering climate and the environment and a member of the 2023-24 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Delger Erdenesanaa

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Environmental Factor

Your online source for niehs news, climate change and health: boosting resilience via adaptation science.

I spoke with Peter Kilmarx, M.D., acting head of the Fogarty International Center, about how such research can bolster health interventions.

By Rick Woychik

I recently sat down with Peter Kilmarx, M.D. , acting director of the NIH Fogarty International Center (FIC), to discuss adaptation science, a critical yet often overlooked area in the broader conversation on climate change. As climate-related environmental challenges and extreme weather events continue to intensify, adaptation science — which is about understanding and implementing strategies to strengthen health and resiliency — becomes paramount.

Also, health threats posed by climate change are global in nature, so fostering international scientific collaboration — central to the mission of FIC — is critical. That is one reason why I am excited to share excerpts of my talk with Dr. Kilmarx, as he brings a wealth of experience and knowledge on how to build effective global partnerships. For me, the conversation served as a strong reminder of the interconnectedness of climate change and human health, and the role of multidisciplinary science in helping people everywhere to improve health outcomes.

As Dr. Kilmarx aptly noted, "Adaptation science is about looking forward, anticipating the challenges ahead, and equipping ourselves with the knowledge and tools to face them." Climate change can impact our lives in numerous complex ways, so embracing adaptation science is essential for ensuring that the approaches individuals and communities adopt account for that complexity. Through research and greater collaboration, we can advance adaptation strategies that help people in the U.S. and around the world to live healthier lives.

Expanding research partnerships

Rick Woychik : Let's kick things off by first talking about the Fogarty International Center and your major focus areas.

Peter Kilmarx : Sure. The Fogarty International Center is the smallest of the NIH institutes and centers based on our budget and staffing, but we have a very big mission, which is to support all of NIH in its global research activities. We focus especially on training and capacity building in lower income countries to expand scientific partnerships between those countries and NIH, and we work a lot in infectious diseases and noncommunicable diseases.

It is not often appreciated that NIH is in fact a global enterprise. A few years ago, we found that there are about 80,000 scientific publications each year that cite NIH funding, and 35% of those publications have coauthors outside of the U.S. We discovered that those publications actually have a higher scientific impact factor compared with those with only U.S. authors.

Climate change and health

RW : Fogarty was among the first NIH institutes and centers to actively participate in the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative, which NIEHS is helping to lead. Can you elaborate on Fogarty's interest in this area?

PK : Climate change is certainly a focus at Fogarty because it represents a significant health threat on a global scale. There's a scientific imperative to learn more about how it will affect us and to discover what we can do to minimize the negative impacts. That kind of research requires a multidisciplinary approach, and it involves almost every NIH institute’s scientific interest.

Fogarty has played a role in supporting and coordinating research efforts related to climate change involving multiple institutes and centers, such as through our Global Environmental and Occupational Health Program, which NIEHS has participated in. I should add that the social justice aspect of climate change — where lower income countries face the greatest impacts — resonates with Fogarty's mission, and we are committed to addressing these disparities.

Extreme weather’s direct and indirect effects

RW : What are some of the direct and indirect effects of climate change that you think will require increased research moving forward?

PK : Direct effects, such as injuries, infectious diseases, and mental health issues, can stem from extreme weather events like cyclones and flooding, where massive loss of live can devastate families and entire communities. Extreme conditions also pose risks to agricultural and factory workers through heat exhaustion, stroke, and acute kidney injuries. Furthermore, climate change is altering disease vectors, introducing infectious diseases to new regions.

Indirect consequences include things like destruction of healthcare infrastructure by hurricanes, where patients who depend on ongoing treatments such as dialysis or chemotherapy find their care networks disrupted. Moreover, climate change is exacerbating migration and refugee crises, with people fleeing their homes due to droughts and storms. These shifts have profound impacts on mental health, contributing to climate anxiety and other concerns.

Adaptation science

RW : What exactly is adaptation science? And how does it differ from climate mitigation?

PK : While there's some overlap between the two, mitigation tends to focus on prevention of climate change, and adaptation tends to emphasize managing its impact.

Mitigation involves reducing emissions or increasing absorption of greenhouse gases, encompassing strategies from renewable energy to changes in transportation and diet. Adaptation acknowledges the reality of climate change, focusing on adjustments to minimize its effects through a variety of strategies, including biomedical, behavioral, and structural changes.

Adaptation strategies are as varied as the direct and indirect challenges we just discussed. For outdoor workers, simple measures like providing rest, shade, and hydration can significantly reduce the risk of acute kidney injury. But many seemingly beneficial proposed strategies will require careful health impact evaluations and research moving forward.

Understanding unintended consequences

RW : Can you expand on that?

PK : Consider the practice of rainwater collection to combat the effects of drought. While beneficial for hydration and hygiene, that can create breeding grounds for disease vectors like mosquitoes, leading to increased Dengue fever incidence.

Similarly, while indoor air filters can combat wildfire smoke by reducing levels of fine particulate matter, their impact on specific health conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma has not been fully assessed.

There can even be unintended consequences of tree planting, particularly regarding pollen and allergies. While planting trees is generally seen as a beneficial action for carbon capture and urban cooling, the resulting increase in pollen can exacerbate allergies for many people. This illustrates the importance of selecting low-allergenic trees and considering health outcomes like allergy-related medical visits when planning urban greening projects.

The point here is that as scientists, we must consider the broader implications of our proposals, including potential risks. At NIH, I believe we have a strong role to play in terms of enhancing health outcomes through careful study and implementation of these interventions.

More collaboration on the horizon

RW : Any closing thoughts for our readers?

PK : I would just add that when it comes to improving health outcomes in the face of climate change, both adaptation science and mitigation efforts are important.

Adaptation science allows us to understand and anticipate the impacts of climate change on diverse ecosystems and human populations, enabling us to prepare and respond more effectively. And mitigation efforts are essential, too, because they address the root causes of climate change, primarily through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Finally, the importance of scientific collaboration cannot be overstated. It is through sharing knowledge, resources, and technologies that we can accelerate innovation and scale up effective interventions grounded in best practices and the latest research. That is one reason why we at Fogarty are excited to collaborate with NIEHS and other NIH institutes on the Climate Change and Health Initiative, and we look forward to fostering fruitful partnerships with your institute and other organizations in the years ahead.

(Rick Woychik, Ph.D., directs NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program.)

Eagle Scout finds research passion

Rick Woychik : What inspired you to pursue a career in public health and work to advance global research partnerships?

Peter Kilmarx : Growing up in Rhode Island, the Ocean State, I spent a lot of my time mucking around and exploring marshes, collecting clams, and fishing.

This natural inclination toward exploring and understanding the environment was nurtured not just by the state's rich coastal ecosystems but also by my family's activities.

We owned a farm in New Hampshire, where we made maple syrup and maple sugar, processes deeply connected to the health of the trees and the nuances of the changing seasons.

My engagement with the outdoors was further solidified through my involvement with the Boy Scouts, reaching the rank of Eagle Scout.

Also, my parents were actively involved in environmental advocacy, contributing to my profound respect for nature and the importance of environmental stewardship.

In addition to those early-life experiences, there may also be a bit of genetic determinism at play with my career trajectory. I found out recently that I'm actually a donor-conceived child. Not only that, but my sperm donor was a prominent physician and actually was in the Public Health Service like me, and he even spent time at NIH.

During my college years, I pursued a major in biology, focusing on pre-med courses while dedicating most of my time to various branches of ecology, including forest, pelagic, tropical, terrestrial, and marine ecology.

Nevertheless, I felt I lacked the maturity and motivation for medical school, and that prompted me to join the Peace Corps. My time as a volunteer in what was then Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo] was transformative.

I was the first and only Westerner to live in a very remote rural area there, assisting farmers and families in raising tilapia in fishponds, living without running water or electricity, and confronting medical and environmental challenges, including storms, malaria, and other diseases. This experience deeply influenced my perspective and has motivated me throughout my career.

Afterward, I attended medical school and completed my training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins. My journey continued at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service Training Program, focusing on sexually transmitted diseases.

This career path led me to Thailand, where I worked on STD and HIV prevention in Chiang Rai, and later to Botswana, working on HIV prevention efforts.

Eventually, I transitioned to NIH, which allowed me to shift my focus from HIV and Ebola to a broader range of issues, including indoor air pollution, climate change, mental health, and non-communicable diseases.

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Going 'back to the future' to forecast the fate of a dead Florida coral reef

Researchers reconstruct late holocene-aged subfossil coral death assemblage and compare it to modern reefs.

Rising temperatures and disease outbreaks are decimating coral reefs throughout the tropics. Evidence suggests that higher latitude marine environments may provide crucial refuges for many at-risk, temperature-sensitive coral species. However, how coral populations expand into new areas and sustain themselves over time is constrained by the limited scope of modern observations.

What can thousands of years of history tell us about what lies ahead for coral reef communities? A lot. In a new study, Florida Atlantic University researchers and collaborators provide geological insights into coral range expansions by reconstructing the composition of a Late Holocene-aged subfossil coral death assemblage in an unusual location in Southeast Florida and comparing it to modern reefs throughout the region.

Located off one of the most densely populated and urbanized coastlines in the continental United States, the Late Holocene coral death assemblage known as "Pompano Ridge," records a northward range expansion of tropical coral communities that occurred during a period of regional climate warming more than 2,000 years ago.

Could this happen again in the face of climate change? Going "back to the future," this study offers a unique glimpse into what was once a vibrant coral reef assemblage and explores if history can repeat itself.

Results of the study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment , reveal significant differences in coral composition between Late Holocene and modern assemblages, suggesting that ongoing environmental stressors that were not present during the Late Holocene will likely limit the ability of modern higher latitude reefs in Florida to function as long-term climate refuges.

"Today's environmental conditions and ecology have substantially deviated from long-term Holocene baselines that occurred over millennial timescales," said Anton E. Oleinik, Ph.D., co-author and an associate professor of geology, Department of Geosciences, FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. "Based on the findings from our study, we are not overly optimistic that Florida's subtropical reefs will be able to support range expansions of reef-building coral species reminiscent of the Late Holocene any time soon."

Findings show that Late Holocene coral assemblages were dominated by now critically endangered Acropora species (stony coral) between 1,800 and 3,500 years ago, mirroring classic zonation patterns characteristic of healthy pre-1970s Caribbean reefs.

"What's really remarkable is that we didn't find these subfossil corals in the middle of the Caribbean like Belize or Bonaire. We found them right here in South Florida well beyond their present-day core range," said Alexander B. Modys, Ph.D., first author and a recent doctoral graduate in FAU's Department of Geosciences. "What existed here thousands of years ago is similar to what we would have seen in Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s."

In contrast, the modern reefs off Southeast Florida are becoming increasingly dominated by stress-tolerant species like Porites astreoides (mustard hill coral) and Siderastrea siderea (round starlet coral), partly due to their resistance to thermal stress, sedimentation, and more recently, stony coral tissue loss disease.

Researchers conducted surveys along 16 transects across the full extent of the coral rubble zone in the study area and identified 21 unique coral groups. To determine how current assemblages at the study site compared with the Late Holocene assemblages, they collected live coral abundance data along the same 16 transects in the summer and fall of 2018. They also compared the composition of the Late Holocene assemblages to publicly available data for the entire reef tract off Southeast Florida from the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Evaluation and Monitoring program, allowing for a comprehensive analysis that spans the full extent of the region's coral communities.

A total of 1,949 coral skeletons were identified and qualitatively evaluated based on their overall preservation in terms of abrasion, presence of original corallite material, and encruster communities. Researchers used Uranium-Thorium dating to determine their age, which ranged from 900 to 4,500 years old. Subfossil samples included well-preserved Late Holocene-aged elkhorn coral ( A. palmata ), which made up nearly 50 percent of the samples, mountainous star coral ( Orbicella spp.) and pillar coral ( Dendrogyra cylindrus ), a hard coral that is now genetically extinct along the Florida reef tract due to a disease outbreak in 2014.

The author's research suggests Southeast Florida could offer a haven for corals that are being devastated by climate warming in the tropics. However, they caution that the range expansions observed in the past are unlikely to happen today without direct human intervention.

"The rapid decline of southern source populations and the added anthropogenic stressors that weren't present during the Holocene are likely inhibiting the natural expansion of tropical corals we'd expect to see with climate warming," said Modys. "They aren't going to get there on their own so more aggressive conservation strategies like assisted migration may be needed."

The Late Holocene record from Pompano Ridge provides a foundation for not only identifying areas that could serve as critical climate refuges for corals in the future, but also for developing comprehensive restoration and management strategies that aim to replicate the successful ecological attributes of historical coral communities, ensuring their long-term sustainability. However, climate change remains a major obstacle even on higher latitude reefs.

"It is important to emphasize that the long-term sustainability of these restoration activities will ultimately depend on the rate and magnitude of present-day climate warming," said Oleinik. "If climate warming continues at its present rate, it will become too warm even at historically cooler, higher latitude locations like Southeast Florida, and sadly, these restoration programs won't be enough."

Study co-authors are Lauren T. Toth, Ph.D., a research physical scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey; William F. Precht, Marine and Coastal Programs, Dial Cordy & Associates, Inc.; and Richard A. Mortlock, Ph.D., an assistant research professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University.

Funding for the study was provided by the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal/Marine Hazards and Resources Program.

• Marine Biology
• Ecology Research
• Coral Reefs
• Global Warming
• Coral bleaching
• Great Barrier Reef
• Southeast Asia coral reefs
• Dinoflagellate
• Eutrophication

Story Source:

Materials provided by Florida Atlantic University . Original written by Gisele Galoustian. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Alexander B. Modys, Anton E. Oleinik, Lauren T. Toth, William F. Precht, Richard A. Mortlock. Modern coral range expansion off southeast Florida falls short of Late Holocene baseline . Communications Earth & Environment , 2024; 5 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s43247-024-01283-0

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Climate change and biodiversity conservation: impacts, adaptation strategies and future research directions

Shannon m hagerman.

Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory, 4 th Floor, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada

Kai MA Chan

The impacts of climate change pose fundamental challenges for current approaches to biodiversity conservation. Changing temperature and precipitation regimes will interact with existing drivers such as habitat loss to influence species distributions despite their protection within reserve boundaries. In this report we summarize a suite of current adaptation proposals for conservation, and highlight some key issues to be resolved.

Introduction and context

Changing temperature and precipitation regimes [ 1 ] are expected to interact with other drivers to impact a range of biological processes and influence species distributions [ 2 , 3 ] ( Figure 1 ). In the past 5 years a growing body of empirical evidence has documented climate-change-attributed changes in processes, including phenology [ 4 - 6 ], net primary production [ 7 ], and species interactions [ 8 ]. Changes in species distributions have also been observed in both above-ground [ 3 , 9 - 11 ] and below-ground communities [ 12 ].

Within and between each of these levels, the global change drivers, mediating drivers and responses can interact and feed back to each other.

This situation poses fundamental challenges to existing approaches for biodiversity conservation because targets (for example, species) are currently managed within spatially and temporally static reserves [ 13 - 18 ]. As a result of changing species distributions, some populations and species will no longer be viable in reserves created for their protection. Additionally, altered disturbance regimes may enhance the ability of invasive species to colonize reserves more easily [ 19 ].

Thus, a central unresolved question in conservation biology is: how can we manage for biodiversity objectives in an era of accelerated climate change? In this report we provide a brief overview of a current suite of proposed adaptation approaches, and identify some future challenges and key issues to be resolved. Both mitigation and adaptation strategies are crucial to respond to climate change. Although reserves can play a role in carbon storage and sequestration - for example, through initiatives such as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (one aspect of climate change mitigation) - here we focus solely on adaptation strategies.

Major recent advances

Below we highlight four commonly proposed adaptation strategies for biodiversity conservation given climate change. In this overview report we focus on a selection of commonly proposed in situ adaptation strategies in response to the impacts of climate change. For a journalistic overview of ex situ strategies, such as captive breeding, seed and gene banking, in the context of responding to climate change, the reader is referred to [ 20 ].

The first three approaches seek to reduce extinction risk primarily by addressing the effects of climate change on species distributions (the pattern), and in part by passively influencing mediating drivers (for example, providing corridors for movement). The last considers a more controversial interventionist option ( Table 1 ).

Managing the matrix as a buffer should both protect core populations (but often not in the matrix, rather by insulating reserves) and also facilitate shifts across a landscape; new and dynamic reserves function primarily by protecting core populations and also by accommodating (rather than facilitating) target movement.

New reserves and corridors

The most common proposed approach for conservation adaptation is to expand linked networks of protected areas including migration corridors [ 15 , 17 , 18 , 21 - 23 ]. These researchers argue that the existing network does not provide enough area to allow for organisms to respond autonomously to changing climatic conditions.

The principal purpose of new protected areas is to mitigate the risk of extinction by providing the potential for species distributions to shift; a secondary contribution is that they may also enhance micro-evolutionary potential through enhanced population size and diversity. Therefore, corridors may reduce extinction risk by enabling the passive shifting of some species to new geographic ranges, and by reinforcing species distributions (in a metapopulation context).

A crucial challenge for this approach is determining where to site corridors and new reserve areas. The current state-of-the-science is to use species distribution models or bioclimate envelope models to generate projections of future species’ responses to various climate scenarios [ 24 - 27 ]. Many view this information as providing essential insight into the strategic siting of new protected areas [ 28 ]. At the same time, myriad uncertainties impact the validity of these projections [ 29 - 34 ]. Efforts to address these uncertainties are ongoing [ 27 , 35 ], but many uncertainties may remain (or even increase) within decision-making time frames nonetheless.

Schemes for siting new areas may be more robust to uncertainties by incorporating coarse scale environmental gradients, such as edaphic and elevational ranges (for example, [ 21 ]).

Matrix as buffers

As a complement to protected areas expansion, many researchers highlight the importance of matrix areas [ 36 , 37 ] or the wider landscape, as being particularly crucial for biological adaptation in an era of change [ 15 , 21 ]. For example, some land uses, such as forestry or agro-forestry (or lower impact marine activities), may provide a spatial buffer for populations as they respond to climate change and move outside core reserves. In order for this proposal to be effective, matrix areas must be of sufficient size, and landowners must be willing to adjust their activities as monitoring indicates [ 21 ]. Incentives may increase the viability of this proposal. The logic of this approach is similar to new protected areas and corridors: more benign matrix areas may passively facilitate species shifts by promoting movement across land- and seascapes; they may also reinforce species distributions at fine scales (around reserves).

Dynamic reserves

The management of matrix areas for biodiversity objectives further supports a third proposal. Dynamic reserves implemented on managed landscapes (or seascapes) are areas whose locations and levels of protection change through time and space [ 18 , 22 , 38 , 39 ]. This approach may be particularly important in areas where there is little spatial opportunity available for new core protected areas. At the same time, the issue of ownership and property rights requires further examination in different contexts in order to more fully understand the implementation challenges of this potential approach in particular localities. This approach involves the future passive facilitation of shifting species distributions in response to future conditions, rather than prediction of conditions.

Assisted colonization

More controversial is the interventionist proposal for ‘assisted migration’ [ 40 , 41 ] or ‘assisted colonization’ [ 42 ]. Both describe a management option in which species are deliberately introduced into an area where it has not existed in recent history for the purpose of achieving a conservation objective. This proposal has emerged in response to the mounting evidence that some species may not be able to track changing climatic conditions quickly enough [ 3 , 43 ], or because there are natural or human barriers in the way. This approach would involve actively shifting species distributions.

The assisted colonization proposal is at odds with current reserve management in which substantial efforts are directed at keeping non-native species out. It also carries with it substantial risks because introduced species may become invasive and displace other valued ecosystem elements. Nevertheless, assisted colonization may be seen as a necessary last resort in some cases. In anticipation of this, Hoegh-Guldberg et al . [ 42 ] have proposed a framework for decision making within which the costs, benefits and risks of the translocation event would be evaluated. Other researchers have inferred the risk of potential invasion of assisted colonization from comparisons of intra-continental and inter-continental past invasions [ 44 ].

Future directions

In this last section we identify a collection of key challenges and issues to be resolved for reserve management suited for an era of change. We divide these challenges into five categories: focus on processes, projections and uncertainties, monitoring, implementation, and norms and expectations.

Focus on processes

In the main, conservation activities have focussed on maintaining biodiversity patterns and indirectly enabling natural processes: for example, by protecting space for species to exist (represented by the first three categories referred to above). As climate change influences mediating drivers, the attributes that make certain places conducive to species flourishing (critical habitat) will change, and in some cases disappear. For species whose critical habitat changes dramatically or disappears, it will be increasingly necessary to consider approaches that involve the active management of mediating drivers.

Restoration activities have long involved management of disturbance regimes, ecosystem function, and species interactions. Adapting to the impacts of climate change may require more such active management, including assisted colonization, and other interventions, such as enhancement of evolutionary adaptation [ 45 ], and active maintenance of pre-climate change processes and conditions.

Projections and uncertainties

A key area of future research is to improve our capacity for forecasting species responses to changing climate - for example, by incorporating biotic interactions in bio-climate models [ 46 ], and refining species-specific process-based models [ 47 ]. Other areas include the longstanding scientific challenge of understanding when a given species will become invasive in a given context [ 44 ]. Efforts to reduce the ecological uncertainties just mentioned will represent a key contribution to the literature on adaptive reserve management.

In addition to ecological uncertainties, there are various parametric and model uncertainties relating to species distribution models. This includes uncertainties relating to so-called ‘unknown unknowns’; where key processes are not yet recognized, understood or incorporated into model structure, or as parameters. Yet such processes may play critical roles in ecosystem dynamics nonetheless. Moreover, there are uncertainties relating to the climate scenario models that influence the outputs of envelope models [ 48 ]. Lastly, there are critical socio-political uncertainties (in values, impacts, responses and feedbacks).

Thus, a second key area of future research is the development of conservation approaches that are robust to uncertainty, recognizing that many of the above uncertainties are irreducible. As ecological and social systems co-adapt, non-linear dynamics will lead to perpetually surprising outcomes [ 49 ]. Therefore, even with the best scientific research and most comprehensive models, species responses may surprise us. Indeed, uncertainties may also increase with new research and insights [ 50 ]. Thus, the implementation of safe-to-fail adaptive management policies may be as or more important than efforts to reduce uncertainties.

In many ways, conservation adaptation requires recognition of what is changing and where (for example, assisted migration, dynamic reserves). Thus, there is an urgent need for monitoring of impacts. While existing monitoring programs could be adapted and used for this purpose, programs specifically targeted to assessing the impacts of climate change would support the most effective adaptation responses possible under highly uncertain circumstances.

Implementation

So far, the adaptation proposals outlined above have focussed primarily on biological dimensions. This effort has provided a critical foundation, but land-use decisions, including reserves, are social decisions made in the context specific places. Therefore, a key area of future research is to identify through applied case studies the factors that determine the relative receptivity or resistance of communities to new and additional conservation measures. This effort will provide crucial insights by which conservationists can foster socially sustainable conservation action.

Changing norms and expectations for reserve management

To date, core protected areas have been managed with a preferred minimum intervention (with exceptions for active management including controlled burns, programs to limit grazers, and efforts to minimize the impacts and distributions of invasive species, for example). Proposals for more widespread intervention, including assisted colonization, raise many unanswered questions. When do we intervene and to what extent? To what extent and under what circumstances are we willing to sacrifice the persistence of one species to save another? Who decides? And by what decision process? Addressing these questions, including latent and even more controversial proposals for conservation triage [ 51 ], will be a key challenge moving forward.

Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges to fostering biological adaptation may be a willingness across stakeholders, scientists and managers to re-calibrate existing expectations of nature and reserves in responding to an era of global change.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (SES-0345798) through the Climate Decision Making Center (CDMC) at Carnegie Mellon University, and a University Graduate Fellowship from the University of British Columbia.

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found at: http://F1000.com/Reports/Biology/content/1/16

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Hurricanes are getting so intense, scientists propose a Category 6

When meteorologists began using the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale to measure hurricane intensity in the 1970s, a Category 5 storm represented oblivion. Such a cyclone, with sustained winds of at least 157 mph, could flatten any structure of the era, so there was no reason to give the most ferocious tier of hurricanes an upper bound.

But as the planet warms, storms are increasingly surpassing what was once considered extreme, according to research published Monday . Now, two scientists are proposing a new label they say a growing number of storms already merit: Category 6.

“Climate change has demonstrably made the strongest storms stronger,” said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Introduction of this hypothetical Category 6 would raise awareness of that.”

Wehner and James Kossin, a distinguished science adviser at the First Street Foundation, suggest the Category 6 label could go to any tropical cyclone with sustained winds of at least 192 mph — an intensity that five storms have surpassed since 2013.

Meteorologists have for years debated whether the current hurricane scale adequately captures the hazards of today’s storms — it only takes winds into account, not pounding waves or flooding — and whether a new top-end category is needed. With the new research, the scientists say they are formalizing that discussion, in hopes of spurring more academic debate about the ways climate change is heightening weather hazards as we know them.

“Having [Category 5] mean anything above a certain threshold is becoming more and more problematic,” Kossin said. “It tends to understate the risk.”

There is no sign that government hurricane forecasters will revise their rating scale anytime soon — and some meteorologists disagree on whether it should be adopted. Still, the proposal underscores how dramatically the potential for extreme storms has surged.

As global temperatures rise, oceanic and atmospheric warming are more often creating a prime environment for storms to rapidly strengthen and swirl more forcefully than ever.

The scientists predict the trend will only accelerate in warm basins such as the Gulf of Mexico, where some sea surface temperature readings surpassed 100 degrees amid record global warmth last summer. Scientists forecast the threat will worsen once planetary temperatures average 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. In that scenario, they say the risk of Category 6 storms in the Gulf will double.

Climate change is intensifying hurricanes

The research adds to a growing body of understanding — and proof — that global warming translates to stronger storms.

After all, warmer air holds more moisture. And more heat means more energy for storms to feed on and violently unleash. Tropical cyclones effectively serve to even out clashes between high and low pressure and hot and cool temperatures, returning the meteorological environment to equilibrium .

Global warming has already translated to increasing odds of major hurricanes around the world , according to research Kossin led that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. Other studies have found that as temperatures rise, more hurricanes are undergoing what meteorologists call rapid intensification , and they are doing so at accelerating rates.

Kossin and Wehner’s latest paper adds more detail and scientific rigor to our understanding of what climate change means for the most intense hurricanes.

They scrutinized observations of past storms to find that five stand as outliers relative to past Category 5 storms: Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, Hurricane Patricia in 2015, Typhoon Meranti in 2016, Typhoon Goni in 2020 and Typhoon Surigae in 2021.

Haiyan killed thousands across the Philippines, stunning meteorologists with its record intensity. Two years later, Patricia became even stronger, with maximum sustained winds of 215 mph, though it weakened before making landfall in Mexico.

They analyzed how often conditions could be ripe for such extreme storms to develop. They found that near the Philippines, risks of a Category 6 storm would rise by 50 percent once global warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and would double at 4 degrees of warming. In the Gulf, the risks would triple if warming reaches 4 degrees above preindustrial levels.

And they used climate models to forecast how often Category 6 storms might form in the future and to be sure the trend is tied to climate change and not natural variability. They found that annual chances of a Category 6 forming somewhere on the planet would climb to 2 percent at 1.5 degrees of global warming, 7 percent at 2 degrees of warming and 10 percent at 3 degrees of warming.

Some worry a new category could backfire

Though there might be a scientific basis for the idea of a Category 6 storm, not all meteorologists will support adopting it. After all, a Category 5 storm causes “catastrophic” damage that could make an area “uninhabitable for weeks or months,” according to the National Hurricane Center’s description.

“It’s hard for me to envision the need to convey a threat beyond this, even if a hypothetical tropical cyclone had peak winds that would constitute a category 6 (however one defines this),” Michael Fischer, an assistant scientist at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab, said in an email.

And there is a risk that the Category 6 designation could backfire, he added.

“If a category 6 were established, would that diminish the threat of a category 5 storm, since that is no longer the most severe rating?” Fischer added.

Even without introduction of a Category 6, the Saffir-Simpson scale already faces criticism for only considering wind speeds and not dangers from storm surge, flooding or tornadoes. To qualify as hurricanes, tropical cyclones must have sustained winds of at least 74 mph; “major” hurricanes have winds of at least 111 mph.

The National Hurricane Center will soon test a new version of its widely used forecast cone that is intended to communicate that a storm’s wind hazards extend far from the spot at which its eye is predicted to make landfall.

But National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research shows such water-related hazards are hurricanes’ deadliest threats, said Deirdre Byrne, a NOAA oceanographer who studies ocean heat and its role in hurricane intensification. While adding a Category 6 “doesn’t seem inappropriate,” she said, combining the Saffir-Simpson scale with something like an A through E rating for inundation threats might have a greater impact.

“That might save even more lives,” Byrne said.

In a statement, National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan seconded those concerns. He said NOAA forecasters have “tried to steer the focus toward the individual hazards,” including storm surge, flooding rains and dangerous rip currents, rather than overemphasizing the storm category, and, by extension, the wind threats alone.

“It’s not clear that there would be a need for another category even if storms were to get stronger,” he said.

Bringing the Saffir-Simpson scale into the future

Kossin and Wehner said their research doesn’t mean to suggest that Category 6 should be added to the Saffir-Simpson scale. That is a decision that would require social science research into how it might affect people’s risk perceptions and their actions to prepare for tropical cyclones, they said.

Instead, they said their intention is to convey just how dramatically global warming has changed the environment for hurricanes. The scientists said they hope the discussion raises urgency to better equip coastal communities for new and changing weather extremes.

Wehner compared it to when Australians had to add a new color to heat maps amid unprecedented heat waves, or when, just last month, extreme ocean temperatures prompted NOAA to add three categories to a coral bleaching alert system .

“The ways we considered things in the past are not necessarily good describers of the present, and certainly the future,” he said.

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