Climate change and security: examining China's challenges in a warming world

The environment is increasingly affected by global climate change. While the causes of climate change are generated across the globe, the impacts of climate change will be highly variable at the local level. An increased scientific understanding of the potential impacts that climate change may have within China has raised new concern among China's leaders. Given that China's domestic realities inform its international policy choices, understanding how climate change may affect its population and natural resources is critical to global climate stabilization efforts. This article examines how the impacts of climate change on China, and China's response, will drive security challenges domestically, as well as in the greater Asian region and around the world. It shows that the impact of climate change on China will be significant and may have sizable adverse economic implications, particularly on vulnerable east coast economic centers. Water scarcity is a problem that already challenges China's leadership and one that will be exacerbated under projected climate impacts. In addition, the country faces the risk of international retaliation should it fail to undertake serious greenhouse gas mitigation actions. Yet China is not without options, and is already well poised to become a leader in the low-carbon technology revolution.     

Planning for Climate Change Adaptation in a Multi-level Context: The Gothenburg Metropolitan Area

Individual local governments are key players in Sweden's strategy for climate adaptation but their authority does not match the scale of climate change and its impacts. Competences are divided among local, regional and national authorities. Climate adaptation thus requires cooperation, particularly in metropolitan regions. This raises issues of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of adaptation measures recommended in local Master Plans. The focus here is on how the 13 municipalities in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area—expected to be the part of Sweden most affected by impacts of climate change—address and act upon issues of climate change adaptation within the framework of Sweden's Planning and Building Act, which places responsibility for the “common interest” of climate adaptation with local governments. Analysing municipal Master Plans, as well as the comments on these plans from the regional County Administrative Board and from Göteborg Region Association of Local Authorities, the inter-municipal association charged with infrastructural planning, I identify patterns in terms of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of planning for climate change adaptation. Results are discussed in relation to propositions from recent research on planning for climate adaptation in multi-level contexts.     

Managing the interlocking climate and resource challenges

Energy security, climate change and food and water concerns are posing serious challenges to the management of international relations in an already turbulent world. These new developments—and the corresponding risk management strategies—will change the calculus of interests, powers and strategies for all actors, with significant impacts on the global political economy. Climate change action (such as targets for emissions reductions) will challenge the existing power structures, with the transition to a low-carbon economy creating new winners and losers in the global economy. Today, there is a fresh appreciation about the consequences of bad policy choices. Comparisons have been drawn between the fallout in the global financial system and the kind of risks that unmitigated climate change may bring. Even though the pressure on some resources may have eased since the onset of the global economic downturn in 2008, it is unlikely that the longer term trajectory has been reversed. This calls for renewed understanding and appreciation of the magnitude of risks foreseen. Multiple public goods need to be generated from the same production systems or sectors. In the context of climate change, international cooperation offers the only option that can best serve even narrowly defined national interests. Ensuring human security and peaceful relations among states in the decades to come will require short-term common action within the framework of long-term strategizing and visionary leadership as well as concerted efforts to deal head-on with worst case scenarios in our forecasting and policy planning.     

Climate change,human security and violent conflict

Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that climate change may increase the risk of violent conflict. This paper integrates three disparate but well-founded bodies of research – on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change, on livelihoods and violent conflict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conflict. It explains that climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to sustain livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine the capacity of states to provide the opportunities and services that help people to sustain their livelihoods. We argue that in certain circumstances these direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security may in turn increase the risk of violent conflict. The paper then outlines the broad contours of a research programme to guide empirical investigations into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.     

Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research for Planning Climate Change Adaptation Responses: The Example of Santiago de Chile

Abstract

This article gives insights into an inter- and transdisciplinary research approach designed to enhance the planning of climate change adaptation responses at urban-regional level. What makes interdisciplinary approaches to adaptation action unique is its ability to unravel the complexity of climate change and the interwoven processes it entails. It is the planning aspect here that makes stakeholder involvement crucial. Hence in contemporary climate change research the science-policy interface takes centre stage, generating response capacity and exchanging ‘usable’ information with decision-makers within the framework of a transdisciplinary approach. Climate action plans and climate adaptation strategies, for example, have the potential to unite sectors and levels of decision-making around an integrated planning approach. This article discusses the challenges and constraints of the inter- and transdisciplinary research approach developed for a Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile (MRS).     

快速城市化地区应对气候变化的城市规划探讨——以南京市为例

全球气候变化是人类历史上对文明生存的最大挑战。近年来,世界各国出现了几百年来历史上最极端的天气,它的出现与人类活动密不可分。为此,世界各国展开了包括行政手段和技术手段等在内的应对气候变化的方法,城市规划也是一个关注和讨论的重点领域。但是,目前这些方法仍旧延续了原有城市规划的原则和方法,现实指导作用较为有限。特别是对于快速城市化地区,如何通过调整规划原则和方法,编制能应对气候变化的城市或区域规划,仍是亟待探索和实践的问题。因此,本文就快速城市化地区如何应对气候变化提出了一系列的城市规划原则与方法,并将其深入落实在南京新一轮城市规划中。     

Blueing business as usual in the ocean: Blue economies,oil, and climate justice

Oceans are increasingly looked toward for their contribution to addressing climate change. These so-called ocean-based climate “solutions” often fall under the umbrella of the “blue economy,” a term used to refer to new ways of organizing ocean economies to provide equitable economic and environmental benefits. Yet, thus far the literature exploring blue economies and blue economy governance has largely overlooked or downplayed its equity and justice roots and implications, including how blue economies are embedded in multiple scales of environmental injustices. This is particularly important when blue economies include offshore oil production. The purpose of this paper is to both emphasize the need and provide an approach to incorporate justice and equity—specifically climate justice—into blue economy planning and scholarship. We build on conceptualizations of blue economies as assemblages to draw attention to the global reach of climate impacts associated with oil that are often overlooked or ignored at sites of production and through regional governance. We argue that greenhouse gas emissions from the life cycle of oil should be included in policies and planning (including blue economy planning) at sites of production, but that this must also incorporate underlying power structures that lead to uneven impacts and climate injustice. We look at environmental assessments as a regional governance tool that could be used to shape opportunities and openings to organize blue economies differently. To illustrate these points, we look at how environmental assessments are playing (and could play) a role in enacting and shaping Newfoundland and Labrador's blue economy.     

Parched and impatient: Political engagement after drought

How does local experience of climate change alter voters' policy preferences and voting decisions? After exposure to a climate disaster, voters may elect politicians prioritising robust disaster prevention policies, or conversely, immediate economic relief. In turn, elected representatives will either mitigate or exacerbate the severity of future climate events. In this study, I leverage a climate event with a high degree of local geographic variation – a pre-election drought in Australia – to see how it shaped political beliefs and behaviours in 2019. Using a longitudinal panel survey, I show that voters in drought-exposed areas increasingly prioritised individual economic security, rather than broader climate-mitigation policies. Moreover, I find that regional micro-parties in drought-affected regions gained vote share. In other words, voters at the front-lines of climate change sought out immediate and local economic relief. Unless local politicians can propose climate policies with short-term economic benefits, disasters may limit governments' capacities to pursue long-term climate resilience.     

Climate and energy security policies and measures: synergies and conflicts

Concerns about climate and energy security are leading to increased government intervention in the energy sector, in particular as they relate to the choice of energy supply options. While many of these options will improve both energy and climate security, many measures will benefit one while harming the other. This raises an important question for governments and energy planners: how can conflicts between climate and energy security be resolved? This article outlines some of the barriers and problems that may arise as governments and companies try to address climate and energy security concerns simultaneously in various energy supply areas. It concludes by arguing against choosing one objective over the other, and by outlining steps that can be taken to help resolve conflicts between the two agendas.     

Resilience in the Light of Climate Change: Useful Approach or Empty Phrase for Spatial Planning?

In the context of adaptation to climate change and spatial planning, the idea of urban and regional resilience has been attracting increasing attention because it recognizes both the given uncertainty of climate change and the complexity of cities and regions. Even if initial attempts have been made to operationalize the concept of resilience, a gap exists between the intense theoretical discussion and the use of resilience thinking in planning practice. On the basis of a discussion of existing attempts that define resilience principles, the authors derive eight principles for urban and regional resilience: diversity, redundancy, flexibility and adaptability, modularity, interdependency, stabilizing and buffering factors, mobility, as well as planning and foresight. Referring to two exploratory studies—the City and Region of Stockholm (Sweden) and the City and Region of Rostock (Germany)—this article aims to explore whether spatial planning already contributes to these principles and so to build resilience. The analysis shows that spatial planning already contributes to urban and regional resilience. Also, the principles, as suggested here, can be used to operationalize the idea of resilience. Prospectively, such principles may support spatial planning to choose adaptation measures and specific objectives and to contribute to urban and regional resilience.     

Vulnerability to climate change hazards and risks: crop and flood insurance

This paper reviews the widely used concepts of risk and vulnerability as they relate to climate and weather hazards, re‐conceptualizes these terms in the context of climate change and illustrates this development using crop and flood insurance as examples. Government subsidization of insurance against risks associated with adverse climatic conditions and weather events, such as flood damage and crop loss, may lead to individual decisions that actually increase the susceptibility of people, property and economic activities to those risks. The processes that give rise to this phenomenon are important in understanding the vulnerability of human populations to climate change. In many regions, existing conditions that give rise to flooding or crop failure are likely to be exacerbated by climate change over coming decades. In the climate change field, vulnerability has been conceptualised as a function of exposure to risk and as an ability to adapt to the effects. In this context, crop and flood insurance are possible adaptive measures. This treatment of vulnerability compares with similar concepts in insurance and risk management whereby events that cause loss are known as perils, and physical conditions, such as climate change, that increase the likelihood of a peril occurring, are known as physical hazards. Human behaviour that increases the exposure of individuals to potential perils is known as morale hazard or moral hazard, depending on the intentions of the person. Vulnerability consequently becomes a function of hazard and responses taken to reduce risk. Examples of crop and flood insurance programs from Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. are used to show how subsidized insurance might create a morale hazard in addition to physical hazards such as short‐term weather events and long‐term climate change, resulting in a higher level of vulnerability than would otherwise exist. These findings demonstrate that human behaviour affects the formation of both exposure and adaptive capacity in the context of vulnerability to climate change. Responses taken to increase adaptive capacity may in some cases be offset by individual behaviour that increases exposure.     

A Visceral Politics of Sound

Questions of bodies and embodiment are a critical focus for geographers. In this paper we advance discussion of the mobilisation of bodies that investigates the interconnections between the visceral and discursive, through paying attention to the affordances of sound. We draw on our ethnographic research of the Climate Camp parade held during October 2009 in Helensburgh, New South Wales, Australia. Using feminist theory and visceral understandings of socio‐political life, we explore sounds to illustrate how people's beliefs about climate change are mobilised at this parade. We argue that visceral experiences of the rhythmic affordances of sounds—flow, pulse and beat—provide us insights as to how people are mobilised into action. Our results explore bodily judgements of sounds to illustrate how a visceral approach can help to mobilise bodies in ways that can both upset, and reproduce, particular beliefs, subjects and places.     

Canada–United States Energy Relations: Making a MESS of Energy Policy 1 , 2

Energy policy-making has become ever-more challenging over the last three decades, comprising a larger and more complex set of inter-related dimensions. Energy policy-makers have to deal with energy as a discrete market sector, pursuing competitive, efficient, safe, and affordable energy. They also have to address environmental imperatives, ensuring energy is developed with due regard for sustainability, ecosystems, air quality, climate change, and the like. In addition, energy policy must address security objectives, which themselves have broadened over time. Finally, energy must be developed in ways that are socially acceptable. This article examines how these four policy dimensions—Market, Environment, Security and Social acceptability, the acronym MESS—have come to characterize energy policy-making in the twenty-first century. It then explores what kind of MESS the Canadian and American governments are making of energy policy—both domestically and bilaterally—and offers some proposals for key sectors and activities that could benefit from greater collaboration.     

Statecraft,Scalecraft and Urban Planning: A Comparative Study of Birmingham,UK, and Brisbane,Australia

Recent discussions on state rescaling have pointed towards the need for a greater focus on how and why state activity may change over time in order to generate insights into the provenance, trajectories and outcomes of rescaling in different global regions and national state spaces. Consequently, this paper explores the dialectical and recursive relationship between the concepts of “statecraft” and “scalecraft” to explore the evolving sites, objects and mechanisms for urban planning within two key urban centres in different parts of the world—Birmingham, UK, and Brisbane, Australia. It is illustrated how a range of actors—from the national to the local level—have sought to craft and reshape the strategies and structures for urban planning according to different imperatives. In turn, the implications for a tighter specifying of the process of state rescaling are considered, as well as the subsequent nature of urban planning arrangements.     

Organisational responses to climate change: do collaborative forums make a difference?

Innovative and effective responses to climate change require that we move beyond reliance on government to include organisations spanning different sectors, such as not‐for‐profit, private, and community groups. Interactions among these organisations in collaborative networks—or “forums”—may provide important mechanisms to successfully address climate change impacts. This paper investigates the relationships between organisational participation and involvement in forums and responses to climate change. Survey data show that people from many organisations are participating in forums and using these meeting points to discuss climate change, even when forums are intended to serve other purposes. The data suggest that participation in any type of forum is related to organisational responses to climate change. Attributes such as type of organisation and knowledge of climate change issues were also found to be related to organisational responses to climate change but these became less important when climate change was discussed in forums. The results of the research suggest that a practical way to increase the volume and variety of organisational responses to climate change may be to encourage participation in forums and/or to influence existing networks to incorporate more discussions of climate change issues.     

Measuring park visitation vulnerability to climate extremes in U.S. Rockies National Parks tourism

ABSTRACT

Changes in temperature and precipitation can affect tourist experiences. This study examines how summer park visitation has changed in response to temperature and precipitation extremes. The study goals were two-fold. The first is to introduce a framework and the second is to test it in a pilot region with four mountainous National Parks. The framework is designed to compare the vulnerability of seasonal park visitation to shifts in a combined indicator of temperature and precipitation. It uniquely considers needed measurements, and the data required to conduct an analysis. The second goal is to test it in four destinations in the U.S. Northern Rockies, including Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. The preliminary test reveals outlier cases of visitation under wet and dry extremes. The analysis connects time series climate and visitation data for the peak summer season from 1991–2012. Outlier analysis illustrates more change in extremely dry conditions, with four out of the six dry-year outliers resulting in a visitation decline. Whether this decline in park tourism is attributable to climate features, economic factors, or conscious management decisions, these drops have significant economic impacts: estimates of changes in visitor spending during dry years are between roughly 9 and 90 million USD. These differences may be connected to the popular activities in each park, and the extent they are dependent on weather conditions. This framework can be used to test the relationship between climate and tourism visitation in other regions, in various seasons and time frames. The work may inform the tourist sector in adjusting and planning for a range of conditions. We discuss opportunities and conclude with additional needs for understanding the mechanisms behind risk in mountain park tourism under climate extremes.     

Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.     

Climate migrants and new identities? The geopolitics of embracing or rejecting mobility

New evidence is emerging to suggest that climate change mobility is giving effect to changing forms of island identity among Tuvaluans and i-Kiribati. This nascent shift prompts a number of questions addressed in this paper. What, for example, does climate change migration mean for island identity and its geographic performance? How does the spatialization of identity inform shared experiences of climate change, and how does identity assist in the formation of shared positions from which to advocate for change? Drawing on discourses of sedentarism and mobilization among Tuvaluan and i-Kiribati, we explore performances of identity related to climate change being fashioned and refashioned in different contexts.     

Climate change and conflict

The prospect of human-induced climate change encourages drastic neomalthusian scenarios. A number of claims about the conflict-inducing effects of climate change have surfaced in the public debate in recent years. Climate change has so many potential consequences for the physical environment that we could expect a large number of possible paths to conflict. However, the causal chains suggested in the literature have so far rarely been substantiated with reliable evidence. Given the combined uncertainties of climate and conflict research, the gaps in our knowledge about the consequences of climate change for conflict and security appear daunting. Social scientists are now beginning to respond to this challenge. We present some of the problems and opportunities in this line of research, summarize the contributions in this special issue, and discuss how the security concerns of climate change can be investigated more systematically.