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Threats to health from climate change are increasingly recognized, yet little research into the effects upon health systems is published. However, additional demands on health systems are increasingly documented. Pathways include direct weather impacts, such as amplified heat stress, and altered ecological relationships, including alterations to the distribution and activity of pathogens and vectors. The greatest driver of demand on future health systems from climate change may be the alterations to socioeconomic systems; however, these "tertiary effects" have received less attention in the health literature. Increasing demands on health systems from climate change will impede health system capacity. Changing weather patterns and sea-level rise will reduce food production in many developing countries, thus fostering undernutrition and concomitant disease susceptibility. Associated poverty will impede people's ability to access and support health systems. Climate change will increase migration, potentially exposing migrants to endemic diseases for which they have limited resistance, transporting diseases and fostering conditions conducive to disease transmission. Specific predictions of timing and locations of migration remain elusive, hampering planning and misaligning needs and infrastructure. Food shortages, migration, falling economic activity, and failing government legitimacy following climate change are also "risk multipliers" for conflict. Injuries to combatants, undernutrition, and increased infectious disease will result. Modern conflict often sees health personnel and infrastructure deliberately targeted and disease surveillance and eradication programs obstructed. Climate change will substantially impede economic growth, reducing health system funding and limiting health system adaptation. Modern medical care may be snatched away from millions who recently obtained it.

Issues to be addressed when signatories to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) meet at Kyoto, Japan in Dec. 1997. Air pollution, greenhouse gases, emissions reduction, and policy options.

The case for impending climate change is now proven. Governments can decide, by their action or inaction, to what extent the change will occur; the International Agriculture Research Community (IARC) will have no say in this whatsoever. It is up to the IARC to try to maintain objectives in the face of the possible scenarios. In this paper we discuss the various types of agricultural research projects in terms of their time to fruition and the expected longevity of their results. We look at the information requirements for ensuring that project products have the necessary lifetimes to justify the investments in the research. We show that strategies differ depending on the type of research that is undertaken. Basic research into genetic traits and capacities within the available germplasm has to be planned in the long term with outcomes in mind. The vulnerability of the populations and agricultural systems that use developments from this basic research now places its priority setting in a changing climate and world concept. Ensuring that the germplasm is available for use has taken on a critical new importance with recent studies. Germplasm banks comprise a small fraction of what we will be relying on for the future. Well over 90% of useful genetic variability may still be in the wild. This has to be considered carefully in setting out research objectives. Plant breeders, who will put together the results of the basic research into useful packages, now have an uncertain target to aim for when regarding future climate conditions. They may not be able to choose their testing sites in present climates to target agricultural populations that will be using their products in the future. Agronomic and agricultural development projects face the most difficult task. How do we develop stable farming systems in an environment that is not only unstable, but also changing so slowly that the farmers cannot see, or even envisage, the changes. These are some examples of the problem. The paper sets out to categorise the types of research and information that will be necessary at all levels. We draw on experience from the CGIAR system and from CIAT in particular. We show that a number of software tools have been developed that can address some of these problems. ; Peer-reviewed

AbstractMost countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade‐off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade‐offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs' constituency adherence in a difference‐in‐differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade‐offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a 'window of opportunity' for advocates of the ' green shift'.

Most countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade‐off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade‐offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs' constituency adherence in a difference‐in‐differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade‐offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a 'window of opportunity' for advocates of the ' green shift'.

The authors use a comparative politics framework, examining electoral interests, policy-maker's own normative commitments, and domestic political institutions as factors influencing Annex 1 countries' decisions on Kyoto Protocol ratification and adoption of national policies to mitigate climate change. Economic costs and electoral interests matter a great deal, even when policy-makers are morally motivated to take action on climate change. Leaders' normative commitments may carry the day under centralized institutional conditions, but these commitments can be reversed when leaders change. Electoral systems, federalism, and executive-legislative institutional configurations all influence ratification decisions and subsequent policy adoption. Although institutional configurations may facilitate or hinder government action, high levels of voter concern can trump institutional obstacles. Governments' decisions to ratify, and the reduction targets they face upon ratification, do not necessarily determine their approach to carbon emissions abatement policies: for example, ratifying countries that accept demanding targets may fail to take significant action. Adapted from the source document.

More than ten years after REDD + (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) entered the UN climate negotiations, its current state and future direction are a matter of contention. This paper analyses 162 INDCs (Intended National Determined Contributions), or climate action plans, to assess whether and how countries plan to use REDD + in their implementation the Paris Agreement. Our analysis suggests that REDD + continues to have political traction Many tropical countries still have expectations of REDD +, and hope that public and private donors will support chronically underfunded domestic conservation programs. However, the expectations are not formulated in detail. We argue that until the questions of how to finance REDD + and how to deal with the drivers of deforestation are resolved, REDD is unlikely to move quickly from formulated INDCs plans to implementation on the ground.

In the wake of 25 UN Climate Change Conferences of the Parties (and counting), international cooperation on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to avoid substantial and potentially irreversible climate change remains an important challenge. The limited impact that the Kyoto Protocol and its successor, the Paris Agreement, have had on curbing emissions demonstrate both the dificulties in negotiating ambitious environmental agreements and the reluctance of countries to comply with their agreed emission targets once they have joined the treaty. Therefore, a better understanding of the obstacles and opportunities that the interactions between domestic and international policy pose for the design of successful international climate cooperation is of utmost importance. To shed light on the roots of the stalemate (and suggest possible ways out), this article reviews, and draws lessons from, a growing theoretical, experimental and empirical literature that accounts for the hierarchical interplay between domestic political pressure and international climate policy.

After the perceived failure of global approaches to tackling climate change, enthusiasm for local climate initiatives has blossomed world-wide, suggesting a more experimental approach to climate governance. Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments looks critically at climate governance experimentation, focusing on how experimental outcomes become embedded in practices, rules and norms. Policy which encourages local action on climate change, rather than global burden-sharing, suggests a radically different approach to tackling climate issues. This book reflects on what climate governance experiments achieve, as well as what happens after and beyond these experiments. A bottom-up, polycentric approach is analyzed, exploring the outcomes of climate experiments and how they can have broader, transformative effects in society. Contributions offer a wide range of approaches and cover more than fifty empirical cases internationally, making this an ideal resource for academics and practitioners involved in studying, developing and evaluating climate governance

In a world that is increasingly hot and suffering from global warming, or rather, global weirding, as it is not just the temperatures that are climbing but weather events that are turning "weird", as we have seen just this year with increased and prolonged rainfalls causing floods, earlier storm seasons with increased frequency of stronger and more severe storms, longer fire seasons with increased extreme fire weather and forest fires, or extended droughts. One such drought has been and still is affecting the southern portion of Madagascar. The region is experiencing the worst drought in four decades (FAO 2021a). A million people are on the brink of starvation. Is this drought due to climate change? Interesting to note in this context, is the fact that while Joe Biden gets cited in the news all over the World linking the Kentucky tornado with increasing temperatures, associating the current drought in Southern Madagascar has been formally excluded from an effect of climate change (Harrington et al. 2021). Worth noting here but not surprisingly, the Madagascar drought got very little global coverage. Both events cannot yet scientifically establish a causal link with climate change. While the tornado is referred to as a tragedy, the Madagascar drought is exacerbating the suffering of an already structurally impoverished region. Water levels are sinking. Lands are drying. Food is getting scares. Drinking water is getting scares. Reliable climate data are often lacking—as in most countries in the global south—weather stations are isolated and few and far between. There is a pressing need to strengthen the research capacities in Madagascar to face climate change, with support from wealthier countries (Schiermeier 2021). Worse, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the government has restricted flights to Madagascar, which is also affecting critical humanitarian cargo to relieve the suffering. To top this off, FAO analyses predict an increased vulnerability to locust plague in the same region during the locust's migration period, from November 2021 to March 2022 (FAO 2021b).

An assessment of the vulnerability of Australia's biodiversity to climate change was commissioned by the Australian Government to help increase our understanding of how to help Australia's rich biodiversity adapt to climate change. The assessment finds that Australia's biodiversity is at risk from even moderate climate change and already under stress, for example from habitat degradation, changed fire regimes and invasive species. Climate change is likely to exacerbate these existing stressors and add additional stresses such as through declining water availability. Australia is one of 17 megadiverse countries - a group of countries that harbour more than 70 per cent of the Earth's species and are therefore considered extremely biodiverse. Australia has many species that are unique to Australia and vulnerable to climate change. About 85 per cent of Australia's terrestrial mammals, 91 of flowering plants, and 90 per cent of reptiles and frogs are found nowhere else in the world. More than 50 per cent of the world's marsupial species occur only in Australia. Rates of extinction of species are likely to increase as the global average temperature rises by just 1.0 or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and likely to accelerate sharply as temperature rises beyond 2 degrees Celsius. The assessment was undertaken by an independent group of experts, led by Professor Will Steffen, for the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council.