ALBERT

Beschreibung: A methodology to assess future development in patterns of vulnerability is presented which can support the assessment of global policies with regard to their impacts on specific vulnerabilities on the regional or local scale. Patterns of vulnerability, formalized by vulnerability profiles (e.g. for the livelihoods of dryland smallholder farmers) were investigated under different consistent indicator scenarios reflecting different global policies. After unfolding several principal possibilities to do such an analysis of temporal change in vulnerability patterns we could conclude that the concept of “Clusters of Change” (CoCs) is the most straight forward and promising approach. The main arguments are that each interpretation has necessarily to consider both, the starting situation and it’s change over time (”poor and heavily improving”, ”rich and stagnating” etc.). This implies that we are looking for patterns which represent typical combinations of present states AND expected future changes. An application of the CoC-concept to the drylands vulnerability patterns considering the indicator set for the present situation and the same indicator set for 2050 under a baseline scenario was performed as a test. Comparison of the present vulnerability cluster partition with the spatial distribution of the CoCs revealed that most of these clusters are separated into an improving and a deteriorating part which shows where winners and losers of the baseline scenario are – an interesting result which illustrates the appropriateness of the CoC – method. To explore the potential of CoCs for the dryland vulnerability we applied the method to two different sets of scenarios until 2050: a baseline vs. Climate policy scenario (OECD, 2012) and a ”policy first” scenario vs. ”security first” scenario (UNEP, 2007). The first one serves as an example for a policy assessment while the second compares the vulnerability consequences of two scenarios based on different story-lines of further global development. The main conclusion to be drawn from these calculations is that the CoCs are rather insensitive with regard to the small differences between the scenarios. Regarding the first set of scenarios the relatively short time horizon of relevant influences of climate policies on climate change impacts and several indicators which are not influenced at all generate only a very small difference. The only significant change in the resulting vulnerability profiles was in the values of change in water scarcity: it was lower for all profiles in the climate policy case. The second set of scenarios is not directly related to policy decisions but to different global story-lines which deviate stronger. This resulted in an increasing cluster number from 4 (policy first) to 5 (security first) clusters, about 20% of the pixels changing cluster membership, 3 clusters showing the same spatial extent for both scenarios but the 4th cluster (“policy first”) “losing” India which generates a separate cluster in the “security first” scenario. This allows for the interpretation that a further development according to the “security first”-storyline compared to the “policy first”-storyline would make a difference particularly for India. Closer inspection of the respective profile shows a qualitatively different situation indicating increased vulnerability compared to the “policy first” scenario where India shares one cluster with e.g., Northern Africa.

Beschreibung: Climate change is arguably the most severe challenge facing our planet during the 21st century. Human interference with the climate system (mainly through the emission of greenhouse gases and changes in land use) has increased the global and annual mean air temperature at the Earth's surface by roughly 0.8 °C since the 19th century (IPCC, 2013). The year 2014 was the hottest one on record so far (NOAA, 2015a), and at the time of writing, 2015 appears to be on track to set a new record (NOAA, 2015b). This trend of increasing temperatures will continue into the future: by 2100, the globe could warm by another 4 °C or so if emissions are not decisively reduced within the next decades (IPCC, 2013). There is broad agreement that a warming of this magnitude would have profound impacts both on the environment and on human societies (IPCC, 2014a), and that climate change mitigation via a transformation to decarbonized economies and societies has to be achieved to prevent the worst of these impacts (IPCC, 2014b). The spatial and temporal extent of the climate challenge deeply connects it to ethical questions as well. These arise both from the fact that the poorest people on Earth are not significantly contributing to global emissions, but may well feel the impacts most severely, and from the long‐term commitment to future warming and climate change impacts – like sea level or the partial melting of the large ice sheets – which will be felt by future generations. In essence, past and future greenhouse gas emissions seriously affect a large fraction of the still growing human population on our planet and profoundly shape the environment in which our children and grandchildren will have to live in. Humanity therefore has a moral obligation to address the climate challenge. This will have to combine successful negotiations on a binding and effective international climate agreement and bottom‐up initiatives from individuals or communities. There is a wide range of global threats that certainly require humanity's urgent attention (see the recent report by the World Economic Forum, 2015). These global risks include water, food and energy security, population growth, infectious diseases, and international security, for example. However, climate change is often regarded as one of the most profound global problems. This is mainly due to the sheer scale of climate change impacts – both in terms of its global and temporal spread and of the variety of sectors affected by it – that sets it apart from other planetary challenges. Indeed, recent high‐level initiatives highlight the importance of climate change, including the ground‐breaking encyclical of Pope Francis, the G7 countries' pledge to phase out fossil fuels or Barack Obama's new climate mitigation proposal. But climate change cannot be considered isolated from other challenges. Indeed, climate change is a truly cross‐cutting issue affecting many sectors and connected to other global challenges. For example, climate change has the potential to impact global water supplies, agricultural production, human health, and our energy infrastructure. In turn, the way in which we produce our energy and food has a profound effect on the Earth's climate system. Finally, the impacts of policies in one of the fields on the other challenges need to be explored if truly sustainable solutions to global problems shall be achieved. These close connections – and the societal and technical challenges of climate mitigation (IPCC 2014b) and adaptation (IPCC 2014a) – require interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking; we hope that our new journal Global Challenges can serve as a highly visible forum for research bridging classical scientific disciplines, for ideas which have the potential to directly influence future climate policy and for discussions about new research and different policy options. Within the climate change focus of Global Challenges , we therefore invite submissions related to climate change of the highest quality, with a clear focus on the global view of the climate problem and with relevance for (global) climate policy or bottom‐up initiatives which are a significant step towards a solution of the climate challenge. We explicitly invite submissions connecting climate change to the other challenges covered by the journal. In addition to original research papers, we will regularly commission commentary pieces and review articles highlighting the most relevant recent developments in climate research and policy as well as the most exciting open research questions. I firmly believe that a journal like Global Challenges with its broad scope, its cross‐cutting nature, its focus on policy relevance, and its open‐access publication model is an important and innovative outlet for high‐quality research work on global problems in general. Concerning climate change in particular, I am looking forward to working with the editorial team, the staff at Wiley and the global climate science community to develop Global Challenges into one of the major journals in the field.

Beschreibung: Climate change and socioeconomic developments will have a decisive impact on people exposed to hunger. This study analyses climate change impacts on agriculture and potential implications for the occurrence of hunger under different socioeconomic scenarios for 2030, focusing on the world regions most affected by poverty today: the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We use a spatially explicit, agroeconomic land-use model to assess agricultural vulnerability to climate change. The aims of our study are to provide spatially explicit projections of climate change impacts on Costs of Food, and to combine them with spatially explicit hunger projections for the year 2030, both under a poverty, as well as a prosperity scenario. Our model results indicate that while average yields decrease with climate change in all focus regions, the impact on the Costs of Food is very diverse. Costs of Food increase most in the Middle East and North Africa, where available agricultural land is already fully utilized and options to import food are limited. The increase is least in Sub-Saharan Africa, since production there can be shifted to areas which are only marginally affected by climate change and imports from other regions increase. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa can partly adapt to climate change, in our model, by modifying trade and expanding agricultural land. In the Middle East and North Africa, almost the entire population is affected by increasing Costs of Food, but the share of people vulnerable to hunger is relatively low, due to relatively strong economic development in these projections. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the Vulnerability to Hunger will persist, but increases in Costs of Food are moderate. While in South Asia a high share of the population suffers from increases in Costs of Food and is exposed to hunger, only a negligible number of people will be exposed at extreme levels. Independent of the region, the impacts of climate change are less severe in a richer and more globalized world. Adverse climate impacts on the Costs of Food could be moderated by promoting technological progress in agriculture. Improving market access would be advantageous for farmers, providing the opportunity to profitably increase production in the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, but may lead to increasing Costs of Food for consumers. In the long-term perspective until 2080, the consequences of climate change will become even more severe: while in 2030 56% of the global population may face increasing Costs of Food in a poor and fragmented world, in 2080 the proportion will rise to 73%.

Beschreibung: While deforestation represents an obvious ecosystem change, forest degradation is often more difficult to discern or quantify, but it impacts anumber of ecosystem functions which are vital for biodiversity and climate feedbacks. In the Brazilian Amazon, land-use changes increasefire occurrence, especially in fragmented forests close to managed land. We used remote sensing imagery to estimate the extent and impact of forest fires in degraded tropical rain-forest in the Brazilian Legal Amazon between 2007 and 2010and examinedland-use establishing in degraded areas. The trends in degraded area vs. burned area were different. Even though degradation increased one year after a high fire year, there wasnospatialoverlap, which pointsto other causes for degradation. Up to 11% of the degraded area was burned in the same year, playing escaping fires from managed and deforested lands a significant role in degradation by fire. Eighty-fourpercent of 2007s degraded area remained forest one year later, whereas the rest was identified as deforestation, secondary vegetation or pasture.Three years after degradation, 80% remained forest, the proportion of deforested area decreased and areas in regeneration after being deforested increased. Monitoring of forest degradation across tropical forests is critical for developing land management policies and for carbon stocks/emissions estimation.

Beschreibung: The Fennec climate programme aims to improve understanding of the Saharan climate system through a synergy of observations and modelling. We present a description of the Fennec airborne observations during 2011 and 2012 over the remote Sahara (Mauritania and Mali) and the advances in the understanding of mineral dust and boundary layer processes they have provided. Aircraft instrumentation aboard the UK FAAM BAe146 and French SAFIRE (Service des Avions Français Instrumentés pour la Recherche en Environnement) Falcon 20 is described, with specific focus on instrumentation specially developed for and relevant to Saharan meteorology and dust. Flight locations, aims and associated meteorology are described. Examples and applications of aircraft measurements from the Fennec flights are presented, highlighting new scientific results delivered using a synergy of different instruments and aircraft. These include (1) the first airborne measurement of dust particles sizes of up to 300 microns and associated dust fluxes in the Saharan atmospheric boundary layer (SABL), (2) dust uplift from the breakdown of the nocturnal low-level jet before becoming visible in SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible Infra-Red Imager) satellite imagery, (3) vertical profiles of the unique vertical structure of turbulent fluxes in the SABL, (4) in situ observations of processes in SABL clouds showing dust acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice nuclei (IN) at −15 °C, (5) dual-aircraft observations of the SABL dynamics, thermodynamics and composition in the Saharan heat low region (SHL), (6) airborne observations of a dust storm associated with a cold pool (haboob) issued from deep convection over the Atlas Mountains, (7) the first airborne chemical composition measurements of dust in the SHL region with differing composition, sources (determined using Lagrangian backward trajectory calculations) and absorption properties between 2011 and 2012, (8) coincident ozone and dust surface area measurements suggest coarser particles provide a route for ozone depletion, (9) discrepancies between airborne coarse-mode size distributions and AERONET (AERosol Robotic NETwork) sunphotometer retrievals under light dust loadings. These results provide insights into boundary layer and dust processes in the SHL region – a region of substantial global climatic importance.

Beschreibung: Focusing on critical aspects of infrastructure, such as energy, this brief argues that Africa, and African cities in particular, need infrastructure that advances both basic needs and industrialization, and avoids a lock-in of unsustainable, high-carbon technologies. G20 countries can promote and support quality of life in Africa by: (1) aligning and cementing the G20 Agenda for Africa with African initiatives, SDGs and the Paris Agreement, (2) mitigating economic risks of climate change through supporting low carbon development pathways in Africa, (3) creating and enabling a level playing field for low carbon technologies, which includes integrated strategies for de-risking renewable energy investments, and (4) supporting smart and sustainable urban planning.

Beschreibung: This chapter is a joint effort by natural and legal scientists to make the case for the dramatic consequences black carbon (BC) emissions mainly from outside the Arctic region have on the Arctic ecosystem, and how BC has recently become the specific focus of a regime complex. The authors provide scientific knowledge about the sources, pathways, and climate impacts of BC emissions, and stress the special relevance of possible near-immediate climate benefits from BC emission reduction in the Arctic. Further consideration is given to the crucial importance of the governance responses to these opportunities and challenges. Thus, the second part of the chapter critically discusses the status and prospects of current multilateral BC emission reduction efforts in the context of the Arctic Council, the International Maritime Organization, and the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution.