Understanding the Links Between Climate Change Risk Perceptions and the Action Response to Inform Climate Services Interventions.

Understanding what motivates people to act on climate change provides an opportunity to design more effective interventions, in particular, climate services interventions, by aligning them with factors that strongly influence action. Climate change risk perceptions have been shown to underlie action on climate change. Therefore, this study performs exploratory research to understand how various determinants of risk perceptions contribute and interact to influence climate change risk perceptions and professional action on climate change in East Africa, in order to inform the context-specific design of climate services. Using data collected through a region-wide survey, a model to risk perceptions and professional action was constructed through structural equation modeling. The model elucidates the cascading effects of variables such as age, gender, education, and personal values on action. In particular, it highlights a split in motivating factors among individuals with higher levels of self-enhancing values versus those with higher levels of self-transcending values. The model also highlights the prominent role that experience of extreme weather events, psychological proximity of climate change, climate change risk perceptions, and social norms play in motivating action. The model, therefore, offers a framework for prioritizing the various factors that motivate people to take adaptation action, which, in turn, provides a basis for informing climate services development going forward.

Emerging climate change-related public health challenges in Africa: A case study of the heat-health vulnerability of informal settlement residents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Heat has the potential to become one of the most significant public health impacts of climate change in the coming decades. Increases in temperature have been linked to both increasing mortality and morbidity. Cities have been recognized as areas of particular vulnerability to heat's impacts on health, and marginalized groups, such as the poor, appear to have higher heat-related morbidity and mortality. Little research has examined the heat vulnerability of urban informal settlements residents in Africa, even though surface temperatures across Africa are projected to increase at a rate faster than the global average. This paper addresses this knowledge gap through a mixed-methods analysis of the heat-health vulnerability of informal settlement residents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The heat exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of informal settlement residents were assessed through a combination of climate analyses, semi-structured interviews with local government actors and informal settlement residents, unstructured interviews with health sector respondents, a health impacts literature review, and a stakeholder engagement workshop. The results suggest that increasing temperatures due to climate change will likely be a significant risk to human health in Dar es Salaam, even though the city does not reach extreme temperature conditions, because informal settlement residents have high exposure, high sensitivity and low adaptive capacity to heat, and because the heat-health relationship is currently an under-prioritized policy issue. While numerous urban planning approaches can play a key role in increasing the resilience of citizens to heat, Dar es Salaam's past and current growth and development patterns greatly complicate the implementation and enforcement of such approaches. For African cities, the findings highlight an urgent need for more research on the vulnerability and resilience of residents to heat-health impacts, because many African cities are likely to present similar characteristics to those in Dar es Salaam that increase resident's vulnerability.

Toward a conceptual framework for blending social and biophysical attributes in conservation planning: a case-study of privately-conserved lands.

There has been increasing recognition within systematic conservation planning of the need to include social data alongside biophysical assessments. However, in the approaches to identify potential conservation sites, there remains much room for improvement in the treatment of social data. In particular, few rigorous methods to account for the diversity of less-easily quantifiable social attributes that influence the implementation success of conservation sites (such as willingness to conserve) have been developed. We use a case-study analysis of private conservation areas within the Little Karoo, South Africa, as a practical example of the importance of incorporating social data into the process of selecting potential conservation sites to improve their implementation likelihood. We draw on extensive data on the social attributes of our case study obtained from a combination of survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. We discuss the need to determine the social attributes that are important for achieving the chosen implementation strategy by offering four tested examples of important social attributes in the Little Karoo: the willingness of landowners to take part in a stewardship arrangement, their willingness to conserve, their capacity to conserve, and the social capital among private conservation area owners. We then discuss the process of using an implementation likelihood ratio (derived from a combined measure of the social attributes) to assist the choice of potential conservation sites. We conclude by summarizing our discussion into a simple conceptual framework for identifying biophysically-valuable sites which possess a high likelihood that the desired implementation strategy will be realized on them.

Devising appropriate policies and instruments in support of private conservation areas: lessons learned from the Klein Karoo, South Africa.

The amount of privately conserved land is increasing worldwide. The potential of these areas to contribute to the global conservation of biodiversity is significant, given that statutory protected areas alone will not suffice. Nevertheless, there is still inadequate support for private conservation areas, and further research on appropriate, flexible, and generally applicable incentive measures is necessary. We conducted 25 semistructured interviews with the owners of private conservation areas in the Little Karoo, South Africa, to examine landowner opinions of existing conservation policies and their relationships with the local conservation authority. We also assessed landowner preferences regarding conservation incentive measures. Landowners doubted the conservation authority's capacity to implement its stewardship program and were also discouraged by the bureaucracy of the program. The conservation authority was often viewed negatively, except where landowners had experienced personal contact from conservation staff or where strong social capital had formed among landowners. Landowners did not desire financial rewards for their conservation efforts, but sought recognition of their stewardship role and greater involvement from the conservation authority through personal contact. We conclude that conservation policies for private lands could benefit from the provision of extension services to landowners, promotion of formation of groups of landowners and other stakeholders, and public acknowledgment of the contributions private conservation areas make.