Regional Environmental Change

Correction to: The Paris Agreement and climate change negotiations: Small Islands, big players The author would like to correct the article title. “A commentary” has to be deleted from the article title.

Small island developing states and 1.5 °C

Heading for the hills: climate-driven community relocations in the Solomon Islands and Alaska provide insight for a 1.5 °C future Abstract Whilst future air temperature thresholds have become the centrepiece of international climate negotiations, even the most ambitious target of 1.5 °C will result in significant sea-level rise and associated impacts on human populations globally. Of additional concern in Arctic regions is declining sea ice and warming permafrost which can increasingly expose coastal areas to erosion particularly through exposure to wave action due to storm activity. Regional variability over the past two decades provides insight into the coastal and human responses to anticipated future rates of sea-level rise under 1.5 °C scenarios. Exceeding 1.5 °C will generate sea-level rise scenarios beyond that currently experienced and substantially increase the proportion of the global population impacted. Despite these dire challenges, there has been limited analysis of how, where and why communities will relocate inland in response. Here, we present case studies of local responses to coastal erosion driven by sea-level rise and warming in remote indigenous communities of the Solomon Islands and Alaska, USA, respectively. In both the Solomon Islands and the USA, there is no national government agency that has the organisational and technical capacity and resources to facilitate a community-wide relocation. In the Solomon Islands, communities have been able to draw on flexible land tenure regimes to rapidly adapt to coastal erosion through relocations. These relocations have led to ad hoc fragmentation of communities into smaller hamlets. Government-supported relocation initiatives in both countries have been less successful in the short term due to limitations of land tenure, lacking relocation governance framework, financial support and complex planning processes. These experiences from the Solomon Islands and USA demonstrate the urgent need to create a relocation governance framework that protects people’s human rights.

Climate change impacts on critical international transportation assets of Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS): the case of Jamaica and Saint Lucia Abstract This contribution presents an assessment of the potential vulnerabilities to climate variability and change (CV & C) of the critical transportation infrastructure of Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS). It focuses on potential operational disruptions and coastal inundation forced by CV & C on four coastal international airports and four seaports in Jamaica and Saint Lucia which are critical facilitators of international connectivity and socioeconomic development. Impact assessments have been carried out under climatic conditions forced by a 1.5 °C specific warming level (SWL) above pre-industrial levels, as well as for different emission scenarios and time periods in the twenty-first century. Disruptions and increasing costs due to, e.g., more frequent exceedance of high temperature thresholds that could impede transport operations are predicted, even under the 1.5 °C SWL, advocated by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and reflected as an aspirational goal in the Paris Climate Agreement. Dynamic modeling of the coastal inundation under different return periods of projected extreme sea levels (ESLs) indicates that the examined airports and seaports will face increasing coastal inundation during the century. Inundation is projected for the airport runways of some of the examined international airports and most of the seaports, even from the 100-year extreme sea level under 1.5 °C SWL. In the absence of effective technical adaptation measures, both operational disruptions and coastal inundation are projected to increasingly affect all examined assets over the course of the century.

Practical tools for quantitative analysis of coastal vulnerability and sea level rise impacts—application in a Caribbean island and assessment of the 1.5 °C threshold Abstract The quantitative analysis of hurricane impacts on coastal development in the Caribbean is surprisingly infrequent and many tools to assess physical vulnerability to sea level rise (SLR) are insufficient to evaluate risk in coastal areas exposed to wave attack during extreme events. This paper proposes a practical methodology to quantify coastal hazards and evaluate SLR impact scenarios in coastal areas, providing quantitative input for coastal vulnerability analysis. We illustrate the implementation of the proposed methodology with results from a site-specific analysis. We quantify how storm wave impacts penetrate farther inland and reach higher elevations for increasing SLR conditions. We also show that the increase in elevation of storm wave impacts is more than the nominal increase in mean sea level, and that elevation increase may be on the order of up to twice the nominal SLR. By developing design parameters for multiple scenarios, as opposed to the determination of a single SLR value for design established by consensus, this approach generates information that we argue encourages resilient design and embedding future adaptation in coastal design. We discuss how government planners and regulators, as well as real estate developers, lenders, and investors, can improve coastal planning and resilient design of coastal projects by using this approach.

Spatiotemporal variation in the occurrence of sand-dust events and its influencing factors in the Beijing-Tianjin Sand Source Region, China, 1982–2013 Abstract The Beijing-Tianjin Sand Source Region (BTSSR) is an ecological barrier for Beijing, the capital of China. Exploration of the spatiotemporal patterns of sand-dust weather and their influencing factors is important for effective management of regional environments. Changes in patterns of sand-dust weather days from 1982 to 2013 were analyzed based on remote sensing and meteorological observation data, and the contributions of meteorological and vegetation factors to the variation in sand-dust events at the regional and sub-regional scales were investigated. The results showed that the number of sand-dust weather days in the BTSSR decreased with decreasing wind speed and variations in precipitation and vegetation restoration, from 24 in 1982 to 5 in 2013. The occurrence of sand-dust weather was related mainly to the mean wind speed during March and May, the cumulative precipitation from the antecedent July to the concurrent June, and the maximum vegetation cover of the antecedent year. These factors could explain 76.4% of the variation in sand-dust events, with meteorological factors, including wind speed and precipitation, contributing about 57%. The spatiotemporal patterns of sand-dust weather and their specific influencing factors were spatially heterogenous. In 70% of sub-regions, the influencing factors explained at least 50% of the variation in sand-dust events. Although meteorological factors dominated, the function of vegetation in the variation in sand-dust weather could not be ignored, with contributions of 26–48%. Existing eco-restoration projects (e.g., reforestation and afforestation, enclosure of grassland) should be effectively managed and protected to maintain vegetation and reduce the sand-dust event risk.

Connecting water science and policy in India: lessons from a systematic water governance assessment in the city of Ahmedabad Abstract Cities in the Global South are facing high climate vulnerabilities. Still, systematic insights in factors that stimulate or impede governance capacity are less widely available than those in the Global North. Moreover, translating relevant scientific insights into policy and practice is often problematic. Hence, there is a need for feasible interactive approaches that may facilitate integration between science and policy. In this paper, we assess to what extent the City Blueprint Approach may facilitate such meaningful science-policy interaction. This approach has been developed in the context of Watershare and the European Innovation Partnership on Water. We discuss the content of the approach and reflect on the process of applying it in the case of Ahmedabad, India. First, we carried out an overall assessment of Ahmedabad’s trends, pressures, and integrated water resources management. Important challenges of Ahmedabad are water pollution, water scarcity (decline of groundwater levels), heat risk and urbanisation. Second, a governance capacity assessment provided a clearer understanding of the main enabling and limiting conditions that determine the city’s ability to govern these challenges. It was found that the governance conditions regarding learning, stakeholder engagement and implementing capacity are most in need of improvement. Next, we zoomed in on a specific development in which these limiting governance conditions were better developed: Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan. Based on our results and experiences, we reflect on the generalisability of the findings on the City Blueprint Approach (CBA)’s usefulness for improving science-policy interactions and water governance to India as well as the Global South more generally.

The Paris Agreement and climate change negotiations: Small Islands, big players Abstract Climate change poses an existential threat to Small Island Developing States (SIDS). They have played a leading role in raising awareness of climate change on the international stage and advocating for strong climate action, notably through the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Despite their heterogeneity, they succeeded in building a common diplomatic discourse and influencing strategy, and mobilized political leaders as well as talented negotiators and advisors. Small Island States were a crucial group in the negotiating period up to, during the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21), and for the entry into force of the Paris Agreement. SIDS succeeded to secure their special circumstances as vulnerable countries, demonstrated leadership in raising ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help secure an ambitious long-term temperature goal of limiting global warming to below 1.5 °C, and advanced the complex debate on loss and damage. Small Island States face major challenges to advance their leadership on climate change moving forward: securing immediate actions for those particularly vulnerable countries and increasing their influence within and outside the climate change negotiations. For Small Island states, the 1.5 °C goal should be considered “the visible part of the iceberg” for their diplomacy in a post-Paris context.

Community-based adaptation in low-lying islands in the Philippines: challenges and lessons learned Abstract Community-based adaptation (CBA) seeks to address climate risks and socio-economic drivers of vulnerability simultaneously. However, as CBA activities appear very similar to standard development work, difficulties in identifying good practices arise. To clarify the role of CBA, this study elucidated how climate change can impact pre-existing development problems by investigating the experiences of four low-lying island communities in central Philippines. The islands currently suffer from frequent and extreme tidal flooding (following an earthquake-induced land subsidence in 2013, with a magnitude that is broadly similar to sea-level rise projections under a 1.5 to 2 °C global warming scenario), and endured a dry spell in 2016. The study also identified various publicly and privately initiated adaptation strategies, and evaluated their resilience against actual biophysical events. The study conducted focus group discussions with local leaders and in-depth interviews with government officials and residents in March 2016. Results show that tidal flooding impacted almost all aspects of daily life on the islands, while the dry spell completely depleted their limited water supplies. The strategies implemented by governments and NGOs (e.g., seawalls, rainwater collectors) were found to be inadequate in preventing tidal flooding and compensating for the dry spell. Also, communities used coral stones and plastic waste for raising the floors of their homes, which have an erosive effect on their capacity to adapt in the long term. Lack of community participation in publicly initiated projects and lack of adaptation funding for community-based strategies were the greatest obstacles to implementing climate-resilient solutions.

Effect of legal protection and management of protected areas at preventing land development: a Spanish case study Abstract Protected areas are entrusted long-term biodiversity conservation, but measures of their effectiveness are limited, methodologically diverse and, sometimes, of improvable accuracy. Using a semi-experimental BACI research design, this study assesses the environmental effectiveness of two highly related multiple-use protected area (PA) categories of European relevance at preventing land development: Sites of Community Importance (SCIs) and Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). The non-overlapping SCI and SAC polygon networks of a northern Spanish region (Navarra) were used as the best possible case studies in the country because their main difference is implementation of active management (in the case of SACs). One kilometre outer buffer areas were created to serve as controls for each of the two PA networks. Three spatial-statistical models that progessively consider exclusion areas according to additional land protection legislation and biophysical covariates were tested to maximise their accurateness. Percentual increases of land development were compared for each of the four groups: SCIs, SCI-Buffers, SACs and SAC-Buffers, using Corine Land Cover (CLC) data from 2006 and 2012. Results show that SACs have been fully effective at preventing land development in the Navarra region whereas some exceptional development occurred in SCIs, even though their biophysical characteristics made them less prone to development than their buffer areas. Additional legislation seems to slightly add to protection inside PAs and provides clear protection to surrounding buffer areas. Residential uses were minor among the new artificial uses around Navarra’s PAs.