Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict.

Research findings on the relationship between climate and conflict are diverse and contested. Here we assess the current understanding of the relationship between climate and conflict, based on the structured judgments of experts from diverse disciplines. These experts agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential, and the mechanisms of climate-conflict linkages remain a key uncertainty. Intensifying climate change is estimated to increase future risks of conflict.

Social dimensions of fertility behavior and consumption patterns in the Anthropocene.

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household's decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others. In a famous paper, Garrett Hardin [G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243-1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people "abandoning the freedom to breed." That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes.

Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world.

The concept of community is often used in environmental policy to foster environmental stewardship and public participation, crucial prerequisites of effective management. However, prevailing conceptualizations of community based on residential location or resource use are limited with respect to their utility as surrogates for communities of shared environment-related interests, and because of the localist perspective they entail. Thus, addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which tend to involve transnational social and environmental interactions, urgently requires additional approaches to conceptualizing community that are compatible with current globalization. We propose a framing for redefining community based on place attachment (i.e., the bonds people form with places) in the context of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Area threatened by drivers requiring management and political action at scales beyond the local. Using data on place attachment from 5,403 respondents residing locally, nationally, and internationally, we identified four communities that each shared a type of attachment to the reef and that spanned conventional location and use communities. We suggest that as human-environment interactions change with increasing mobility (both corporeal and that mediated by communication and information technology), new types of people-place relations that transcend geographic and social boundaries and do not require ongoing direct experience to form are emerging. We propose that adopting a place attachment framing to community provides a means to capture the neglected nonmaterial bonds people form with the environment, and could be leveraged to foster transnational environmental stewardship, critical to advancing global sustainability in our increasingly connected world.

The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change.

The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change is an international, multidisciplinary research collaboration between academic institutions and practitioners across the world. It follows on from the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission, which concluded that the response to climate change could be "the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century". The Lancet Countdown aims to track the health impacts of climate hazards; health resilience and adaptation; health co-benefits of climate change mitigation; economics and finance; and political and broader engagement. These focus areas form the five thematic working groups of the Lancet Countdown and represent different aspects of the complex association between health and climate change. These thematic groups will provide indicators for a global overview of health and climate change; national case studies highlighting countries leading the way or going against the trend; and engagement with a range of stakeholders. The Lancet Countdown ultimately aims to report annually on a series of indicators across these five working groups. This paper outlines the potential indicators and indicator domains to be tracked by the collaboration, with suggestions on the methodologies and datasets available to achieve this end. The proposed indicator domains require further refinement, and mark the beginning of an ongoing consultation process-from November, 2016 to early 2017-to develop these domains, identify key areas not currently covered, and change indicators where necessary. This collaboration will actively seek to engage with existing monitoring processes, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and WHO's climate and health country profiles. The indicators will also evolve over time through ongoing collaboration with experts and a range of stakeholders, and be dependent on the emergence of new evidence and knowledge. During the course of its work, the Lancet Countdown will adopt a collaborative and iterative process, which aims to complement existing initiatives, welcome engagement with new partners, and be open to developing new research projects on health and climate change.

Advances in risk assessment for climate change adaptation policy.

Climate change risk assessment involves formal analysis of the consequences, likelihoods and responses to the impacts of climate change and the options for addressing these under societal constraints. Conventional approaches to risk assessment are challenged by the significant temporal and spatial dynamics of climate change; by the amplification of risks through societal preferences and values; and through the interaction of multiple risk factors. This paper introduces the theme issue by reviewing the current practice and frontiers of climate change risk assessment, with specific emphasis on the development of adaptation policy that aims to manage those risks. These frontiers include integrated assessments, dealing with climate risks across borders and scales, addressing systemic risks, and innovative co-production methods to prioritize solutions to climate challenges with decision-makers. By reviewing recent developments in the use of large-scale risk assessment for adaptation policy-making, we suggest a forward-looking research agenda to meet ongoing strategic policy requirements in local, national and international contexts.This article is part of the theme issue 'Advances in risk assessment for climate change adaptation policy'.

Transmission of climate risks across sectors and borders.

Systemic climate risks, which result from the potential for cascading impacts through inter-related systems, pose particular challenges to risk assessment, especially when risks are transmitted across sectors and international boundaries. Most impacts of climate variability and change affect regions and jurisdictions in complex ways, and techniques for assessing this transmission of risk are still somewhat limited. Here, we begin to define new approaches to risk assessment that can account for transboundary and trans-sector risk transmission, by presenting: (i) a typology of risk transmission that distinguishes clearly the role of climate versus the role of the social and economic systems that distribute resources; (ii) a review of existing modelling, qualitative and systems-based methods of assessing risk and risk transmission; and (iii) case studies that examine risk transmission in human displacement, food, water and energy security. The case studies show that policies and institutions can attenuate risks significantly through cooperation that can be mutually beneficial to all parties. We conclude with some suggestions for assessment of complex risk transmission mechanisms: use of expert judgement; interactive scenario building; global systems science and big data; innovative use of climate and integrated assessment models; and methods to understand societal responses to climate risk. These approaches aim to inform both research and national-level risk assessment.

Evidence and future potential of mobile phone data for disease disaster management.

Global health threats such as the recent Ebola and Zika virus outbreaks require rapid and robust responses to prevent, reduce and recover from disease dispersion. As part of broader big data and digital humanitarianism discourses, there is an emerging interest in data produced through mobile phone communications for enhancing the data environment in such circumstances. This paper assembles user perspectives and critically examines existing evidence and future potential of mobile phone data derived from call detail records (CDRs) and two-way short message service (SMS) platforms, for managing and responding to humanitarian disasters caused by communicable disease outbreaks. We undertake a scoping review of relevant literature and in-depth interviews with key informants to ascertain the: (i) information that can be gathered from CDRs or SMS data; (ii) phase(s) in the disease disaster management cycle when mobile data may be useful; (iii) value added over conventional approaches to data collection and transfer; (iv) barriers and enablers to use of mobile data in disaster contexts; and (v) the social and ethical challenges. Based on this evidence we develop a typology of mobile phone data sources, types, and end-uses, and a decision-tree for mobile data use, designed to enable effective use of mobile data for disease disaster management. We show that mobile data holds great potential for improving the quality, quantity and timing of selected information required for disaster management, but that testing and evaluation of the benefits, constraints and limitations of mobile data use in a wider range of mobile-user and disaster contexts is needed to fully understand its utility, validity, and limitations.

Social consequences of planned relocation in response to sea level rise: impacts on anxiety, well-being, and perceived safety.

Governments globally are adapting to sea level rise through a range of interventions to improve everyday lives of communities at risk. One prominent response is planned relocation, where people and communities are enabled to move from localities exposed to coastal erosion and inundation as a result of sea level rise. Managed retreat has significant social consequences including under-reported impacts on health, well-being and social identity. Here we adopt well-established measures of well-being and document the outcomes of planned relocation on well-being in the Volta Delta region of Ghana. Data from a bespoke survey for individuals (n = 505) in relocated and non-relocated communities demonstrate that planned relocation negatively impacts well-being and anxiety of those relocated when compared to a community that is equally exposed but has not moved. Individuals in the relocated community reported significantly lower levels of overall wellbeing, significantly higher levels of anxiety, and lower perceptions of safety, compared to non-relocated community members. These outcomes are explained as being related to the disruption of community connection, identities, and feelings of efficacy. Relocated community members reported significantly lower levels of attachment to the local area and home, significantly lower levels of community-based self-efficacy, and significantly lower levels of overall community-based identity. The results demonstrate that planned relocation to address sea level rise has multiple social consequences with outcomes for well-being that are not straightforwardly related to risk reduction.

Health and wellbeing implications of adaptation to flood risk.

Adaptation strategies to ameliorate the impacts of climate change are increasing in scale and scope around the world, with interventions becoming a part of daily life for many people. Though the implications of climate impacts for health and wellbeing are well documented, to date, adaptations are largely evaluated by financial cost and their effectiveness in reducing risk. Looking across different forms of adaptation to floods, we use existing literature to develop a typology of key domains of impact arising from interventions that are likely to shape health and wellbeing. We suggest that this typology can be used to assess the health consequences of adaptation interventions more generally and argue that such forms of evaluation will better support the development of sustainable adaptation planning.

Climate change affects multiple dimensions of well-being through impacts, information and policy responses.

The consequences of climate change and responses to climate change interact with multiple dimensions of human well-being in ways that are emerging or invisible to decision makers. We examine how elements of well-being-health, safety, place, self and belonging-are at risk from climate change. We propose that the material impacts of a changing climate, discourses and information on future and present climate risks, and policy responses to climate change affect all these elements of well-being. We review evidence on the scale and scope of these climate change consequences for well-being and propose policy and research priorities that are oriented towards supporting well-being though a changing climate.

Scenarios of demographic distributional aspects of health co-benefits from decarbonising urban transport.

BACKGROUND: There is limited knowledge on the distribution of the health co-benefits of reduced air pollutants and carbon emissions in the transport sector across populations. METHODS: This Article describes a health impact assessment used to estimate the health co-benefits of alternative land passenger transport scenarios for the city of Beijing, China, testing the effect of five transport-based scenarios from 2020 to 2050 on health outcomes. New potential scenarios range from implementing a green transport infrastructure, to scenarios primarily based on the electrification of vehicle fleets and a deep decarbonisation scenario with near zero carbon emissions by 2050. The health co-benefits are disaggregated by age and sex and estimated in monetary terms. FINDINGS: The results show that all the alternative mitigation scenarios result in reduced PM2·5 and CO2 emissions compared to a business-as-usual scenario during 2020-50. The near zero scenario achieves the largest health co-benefits and economic benefits annually relative to the sole mitigation strategy, preventing 300 (95% CI 229-450) deaths, with health co-benefits and CO2 cost-saving an equivalent of 0·01% (0·00-0·03%) of Beijing's Gross domestic product in 2015 by 2050. Given Beijing's ageing population and higher mortality rate, individuals aged 50 years and older experience the greatest benefit from the mitigation scenarios. Regarding sex, the greatest health benefits occur in men. INTERPRETATION: This assessment provides estimates of the demographic distribution of benefits from the effects of combinations of green transport and decarbonising vehicles in transport futures. The results show that there are substantial positive health outcomes from decarbonising transport in Beijing. Policies aimed at encouraging active travel and use of public transport, increasing the safety of active travel, improving public transport infrastructure, and decarbonising vehicles lead to differential benefits. In addition, disaggregation by age and sex shows that the health impacts related to transport pollution disproportionately influence different age cohorts and genders. FUNDING: National Natural Science Foundation of China and FRIEND Project (through the National Research Foundation of Korea, funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT).

Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts.

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

Three ways social identity shapes climate change adaptation.

Adaptation to climate change is inescapably influenced by processes of social identity-how people perceive themselves, others, and their place in the world around them. Yet there is sparse evidence into the specific ways in which identity processes shape adaptation planning and responses. This paper proposes three key ways to understand the relationship between identity formation and adaptation processes: (a) how social identities change in response to perceived climate change risks and threats; (b) how identity change may be an objective of adaptation; and (c) how identity issues can constrain or enable adaptive action. It examines these three areas of focus through a synthesis of evidence on community responses to flooding and subsequent policy responses in Somerset county, UK and the Gippsland East region in Australia, based on indepth longitudinal data collected among those experiencing and enacting adaptation. The results show that adaptation policies are more likely to be effective when they give individuals confidence in the continuity of their in-groups, enhance the self-esteem of these groups, and develop their sense of self-efficacy. These processes of identity formation and evolution are therefore central to individual and collective responses to climate risks.

Social Ecological Dynamics of Catchment Resilience.

Catchment resilience is the capacity of a combined social ecological system, comprised of water, land, ecological resources and communities in a river basin, to deal with sudden shocks and gradual changes, and to adapt and self-organize for progressive change and transform itself for sustainability. This paper proposes that analysis of catchments as social ecological systems can provide key insights into how social and ecological dynamics interact and how some of the negative consequences of unsustainable resource use or environmental degradation can be ameliorated. This requires recognition of the potential for community resilience as a core element of catchment resilience, and moves beyond more structural approaches to emphasize social dynamics. The proposals are based on a review of social ecological systems research, on methods for analyzing community resilience, and a review of social science and action research that suggest ways of generating resilience through community engagement. These methods and approaches maximize insights into the social dynamics of catchments as complex adaptive systems to inform science and practice.

Modelling household well-being and poverty trajectories: An application to coastal Bangladesh.

Resource-based livelihoods are uncertain and potentially unstable due to variability over time, including seasonal variation: this instability threatens marginalised populations who may fall into poverty. However, empirical understanding of trajectories of household well-being and poverty is limited. Here, we present a new household-level model of poverty dynamics based on agents and coping strategies-the Household Economy And Poverty trajectory (HEAP) model. HEAP is based on established economic and social insights into poverty dynamics, with a demonstration of the model calibrated with a qualitative and quantitative household survey in coastal Bangladesh. Economic activity in Bangladesh is highly dependent on natural resources; poverty is widespread; and there is high variability in ecosystem services at multiple temporal scales. The results show that long-term decreases in poverty are predicated more on the stability of, and returns from, livelihoods rather than their diversification. Access to natural resources and ecosystem service benefits are positively correlated with stable income and multidimensional well-being. Households that remain in poverty are those who experience high seasonality of income and are involved in small scale enterprises. Hence, seasonal variability in income places significant limits on natural resources providing routes out of poverty. Further, projected economic trends to 2030 lead to an increase in well-being and a reduction in poverty for most simulated household types.

Directions for Research on Climate and Conflict.

The potential links between climate and conflict are well studied, yet disagreement about the specific mechanisms and their significance for societies persists. Here, we build on assessment of the relationship between climate and organized armed conflict to define crosscutting priorities for future directions of research. They include (1) deepening insight into climate-conflict linkages and conditions under which they manifest, (2) ambitiously integrating research designs, (3) systematically exploring future risks and response options, responsive to ongoing decision-making, and (4) evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to manage climate-conflict links. The implications of this expanding scientific domain unfold in real time.

Nested and teleconnected vulnerabilities to environmental change.

The vulnerability of distant peoples and places to global change in environment and society is nested and teleconnected. Here, we argue that such vulnerabilities are linked through environmental change process feedbacks, economic market linkages, and flows of resources, people, and information. We illustrate these linkages through the examples of the global transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the interdependent vulnerabilities and adaptations of coffee farmers in Vietnam and Mexico. These cases demonstrate that the vulnerability of specific individuals and communities is not geographically bounded but, rather, is connected at different scales, so that the drivers of their exposure and sensitivity are inseparable from large-scale processes of sociocultural change and market integration. Aggregate outcomes of government policies, trends in global commodity markets, and even decisions by individuals to improve livelihood security can have negative repercussions, not only locally, through transformations of ecological systems and social relations, but also at larger scales.

Perceptions of heatwave risks to health: interview-based study of older people in London and Norwich, UK.

BACKGROUND: Most projections of climate change suggest an increased frequency of heatwaves in England over coming decades; older people are at particular risk. This could result in substantial mortality and morbidity. OBJECTIVE: To determine elderly people's knowledge and perceptions of heat-related risks to health, and of protective behaviours. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews: 73 men and women, 72-94 years, living in their own homes in London and Norwich, UK. RESULTS: Few respondents considered themselves either old or at risk from the effects of heat, even though many had some form of relevant chronic illness; they did recognize that some medical conditions might increase risks in others. Most reported that they had taken appropriate steps to reduce the effects of heat. Some respondents considered it appropriate for the government to take responsibility for protecting vulnerable people, but many thought state intervention was unnecessary, intrusive and unlikely to be effective. Respondents were more positive about the value of appropriately disseminated advice and solutions by communities themselves. CONCLUSION: The Heatwave Plan should consider giving greater emphasis to a population-based information strategy, using innovative information dissemination methods to increase awareness of vulnerability to heat among the elderly and to ensure clarity about behaviour modification measures.