This study examined how the terms used to describe climate change influence landholder acceptability judgements and attitudes toward climate change at the local scale. Telephone surveys were conducted with landholders from viticultural (n = 97) or cereal growing (n = 195) backgrounds in rural South Australia. A variety of descriptive and inferential statistics were used to examine the influence...

Few studies have explored the relationships between nation-building, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Focusing on small island developing states, this paper examines nation-building in Timor-Leste, a small island developing state that recently achieved independence. Nation-building in Timor-Leste is explored in the context of disaster risk reduction, which necessarily incl...

Transportation departments are beginning to recognize that adaptation for climate change must become an integral part of their planning efforts. However, staff members frequently lack adequate local data, training, or guidance to begin adaptation planning assessments. As a result, climate change adaptation planning has remained generally abstract and lacks specificity needed to identify potenti...

Despite growing recognition of the importance of climate change adaptation, few global estimates of the costs involved are available for the water supply sector. We present a methodology for estimating partial global and regional adaptation costs for raw industrial and domestic water supply, for a limited number of adaptation strategies, and apply the method using results of two climate models....

All human-environment systems adapt to climate and its natural variation. Adaptation to human-induced change in climate has largely been envisioned as increments of these adaptations intended to avoid disruptions of systems at their current locations. In some places, for some systems, however, vulnerabilities and risks may be so sizeable that they require transformational rather than incrementa...

It is difficult to determine whether specific weather events like the storms in Washington can be definitively attributed to climate change or if they are severe storm occurrences within otherwise natural weather patterns. However, consensus in the scientific community indicates that major storms and other events including inundation of coastal roads from a rising sea level, erosion of roadways...

1 The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program, Integrated Assessment Program, Grant No. DE-SC0005171. Integrated assessment models (IAMs), models that couple the human and natural systems, have been widely used by the climate change research community to project the emissions consequences of economic activity and the technical potential and co...

Many decisions concerning long-lived investments already need to take into account climate change. But doing so is not easy for at least two reasons. First, due to the rate of climate change, new infrastructure will have to be able to cope with a large range of changing climate conditions, which will make design more difficult and construction more expensive. Second, uncertainty in future clima...