NPCC4: Climate risk and equity-advancing knowledge toward a sustainable future | Introduction.

This Introduction to NPCC4 provides an overview of the first three NPCC Reports and contextualizes NPCC4's deliberate decision to address justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in its collective work and in its own practices, procedures, and methods of assessment. Next, it summarizes the assessment process, including greater emphasis on sustained assessment. Finally, it introduces the NPCC4 chapters and their scope.

NPCC4: New York City climate risk information 2022-observations and projections.

New York City (NYC) faces many challenges in the coming decades due to climate change and its interactions with social vulnerabilities and uneven urban development patterns and processes. This New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) report contributes to the Panel's mandate to advise the city on climate change and provide timely climate risk information that can inform flexible and equitable adaptation pathways that enhance resilience to climate change. This report presents up-to-date scientific information as well as updated sea level rise projections of record. We also present a new methodology related to climate extremes and describe new methods for developing the next generation of climate projections for the New York metropolitan region. Future work by the Panel should compare the temperature and precipitation projections presented in this report with a subset of models to determine the potential impact and relevance of the "hot model" problem. NPCC4 expects to establish new projections-of-record for precipitation and temperature in 2024 based on this comparison and additional analysis. Nevertheless, the temperature and precipitation projections presented in this report may be useful for NYC stakeholders in the interim as they rely on the newest generation of global climate models.

Teaching the "how" of transformation.

College and university students are eager to engage with transformative solutions to the climate crisis, but often struggle to see openings or possibilities where they can leverage their actions and really "make a difference." While climate change education often focuses on the physical dimensions of climate change and the evaluation of political, technological, and behavioral solutions, less attention has been directed to questions of how large-scale transformations to sustainability occur and how educators can help students to perceive an active role for themselves in these efforts. This paper describes an integrative learning process for teaching the "how" of transformation. This process, which we use in our undergraduate courses on climate change and society, combines the "Three Spheres" model of transformation with an active learning change experiment. A pilot assessment, conducted via student surveys and focus groups during spring semester 2020, indicated that the learning process: (1) increased the students' understanding of transformation and their sense that transformative change is possible; (2) enhanced the students' sense of their own agency and ability to make a difference; and, (3) helped students to articulate a role for themselves in processes of transformative change. These initial findings suggest that teaching the "how" of transformation is possible and that both understanding and experiential realization of the connection between individual and collective change are vital elements for student learning and engagement. While these early findings need to be replicated in other courses and educational settings, they offer promising indications about how universities and climate change educators can play a more prominent role in generating transformative change.