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Delivering sustainable climate action: reframing the sustainable development goals
Globally, climate change represents the most significant threat to the environment and socio-economic development, endangering lives and livelihoods. Within the UN’s current 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), climate action is explicitly covered under Goal 13, “to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. This perspective considers how to re-frame the SDGs and their successor towards mainstreaming climate action within the targets and indicators of all the development goals.
Video communication, blue marble awe, and attitudes toward climate change and renewable energy
We conducted a survey experiment to examine how respondents’ attitudes toward climate change and renewable energy are affected by six communication approaches using online videos. Three interventions used single message approaches, which focused on facts about climate change science, facts about solar PV technology, or the emotion of blue marble awe (the feeling of awe for the Earth arising from the realization that we live on a fragile planet). Two interventions used dual message approaches, which combined blue marble awe with either climate change science or solar PV technology facts. One intervention used a dual reinforced message approach, which combined blue marble awe, solar PV technology facts, and a message from an astronaut who is an ambassador for renewable energy. Results show that the dual reinforced message approach has the strongest effects on energy and environmental attitudes. Our findings offer important lessons for scientists and educators interested in energy communication.
Household-specific barriers to citizen-led flood risk adaptation
Adaptation is essential to mitigate the effects of climate change, such as increasing flood risk. In response to widespread maladaptation, citizen-led approaches are increasingly championed, whereby people on the frontline of climate change determine their own objectives and strategies of adaptation. Enabling equitable and effective citizen-led adaptation requires an understanding of the barriers for different groups of people but this is currently lacking, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Using responses to a co-produced household survey (n = 286) in Tamale, Ghana, we show that barriers to citizen-led adaptation interventions (n = 11) differ between households which we relate to important components of adaptive capacity. Overall, awareness, education, and networks are the most important barriers, but resources and time are important for poor households of fewer members. Barriers also differ between interventions and overall structural interventions are preferred over behavioural. This work can inform policies and actions to support effective and equitable citizen-led adaptation.
Machine learning map of climate policy literature reveals disparities between scientific attention, policy density, and emissions
Current climate mitigation policies are not sufficient to meet the Paris temperature target, and ramping up efforts will require rapid learning from the scientific literature on climate policies. This literature is vast and widely dispersed, as well as hard to define and categorise, hampering systematic efforts to learn from it. We use a machine learning pipeline using transformer-based language models to systematically map the relevant scientific literature on climate policies at scale and in real-time. Our “living systematic map” of climate policy research features a set of 84,990 papers, and classifies each of them by policy instrument type, sector, and geography. We explore how the distribution of these papers varies across countries, and compare this to the distribution of emissions and enacted climate policies. Results suggests a potential stark under-representation of industry sector policies, as well as diverging attention between science and policy with respect to economic and regulatory instruments.
A systematic analysis of disability inclusion in domestic climate policies
We provide the first systematic analysis of whether, how, and to what extent people with disabilities and their human rights are included in two subsets of climate policies adopted by 195 parties to the Paris Agreement. We found that only 41 parties mention people with disabilities in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), whereas only 75 do so in their adaptation policies. Moreover, these references are rarely accompanied by concrete measures to include people with disabilities, their rights, or their knowledge in climate decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that states are generally not abiding by their obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of persons with disabilities under international and domestic law. This exposes people with disabilities to climate-related harm and reinforces, rather than disrupts, the inequities they face in societies around the world. It also fails to harness the multiple benefits associated with a disability-inclusive approach to climate action.
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