Climate adaptation is increasingly recognized as a global necessity. Top-down adaptation measures alone are unlikely to be effective unless complemented by bottom-up implementation and public compliance. To achieve this, individual engagement in the enactment of climate adaptation policies is essential. Motivating individuals requires a psychological understanding of the factors that drive support for policy operationalization. This study investigates these factors in European contexts by incorporating key concepts from the Extended Parallel Process Model, along with social norms and environmental awareness. The results of structural equation modeling reveal that perceived risk and efficacy significantly influence individuals’ intentions to support climate adaptation policies. Additionally, social norms and environmental awareness significantly impact climate risk perception. Perceived risk emerged as the strongest determinant of engagement intention, while environmental awareness was the strongest predictor of perceived risk. From a policy perspective, efforts to increase individual engagement should consider these dimensions, particularly the crucial role of raising environmental awareness.
Despite growing efforts to address climate change impacts, an adaptation implementation gap persists, where administrative, financial, cultural, and organizational challenges hinder the translation of climate change policies into action. As one of several approaches to bridge this gap, meaningful stakeholder engagement in adaptation is widely recognized as crucial for enhancing action effectiveness, acceptance, stakeholder empowerment, learning and social justice. Stakeholder engagement in climate adaptation has increased over the past decade, however it remains limited. To understand how to improve engagement, this paper reviews current practices and investigates key barriers and enablers in implementing citizens and stakeholders’ engagement in climate adaptation action. It adopts a mixed-method approach that includes a systematic literature review (n = 123 papers), interviews (n = 20) and online surveys (n = 51) with European adaptation practitioners. The findings reveal a critical disconnect: while operational enablers for engagement are widely recognized, their implementation is frequently undermined by persistent, often overlooked structural institutional and social barriers related to governance, resources, and capacity to engage. Consequently, the range of current engagement practices remains narrow, confined to specific solutions, socio-economic sectors, phases of the adaptation cycle and passive engagement approaches. Advancing engagement requires moving beyond operational guidelines to address these systemic constraints. Key enablers to promote change include strengthening local institutions’ capacity and resources, embedding engagement mandates across sectors, diversifying methods, and meaningfully empowering citizens to engage. This can be achieved not only by raising awareness and disseminating knowledge, but also by building capacities, providing economic resources, and fostering trust.
Wildfires, insect outbreaks, and storms cause large pulses of tree mortality. Climate change amplifies these forest disturbances, yet their future magnitude and extent remain uncertain. Here, we simulated future forest disturbance regimes at 100-meter resolution across Europe using a deep learning-based simulation framework. Our results show that forest disturbances will continue to increase throughout the 21st century, with disturbed areas more than doubling relative to the recent past under an unabated continuation of climate change. Wildfires are the main agent driving future disturbance change. Changing disturbances result in an increase in young forests, substantially altering Europe's forest demography. Because of their profound implications for forest carbon storage and the habitat value of forest ecosystems, disturbances should be a priority of forest policy and management.
Climate change is projected to exacerbate food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by reducing crop yields and soil fertility. Many climate change impact studies in SSA have overlooked long-term effects of soil fertility on crop yield. We evaluated maize yields under different scenarios of soil fertility (using soil organic carbon as a proxy) and climate change (considering changes in temperature, rainfall, and CO2) at four sites in SSA. Using an ensemble of 15 calibrated soil-crop models, we found a strong consensus that, without fertilization, soil fertility declines over time, impacting maize yields more strongly than changes in temperature, rainfall, or CO2. The model ensemble indicated that when accounting for soil fertility changes, the yield benefits of combined application of organic and mineral inputs increase over time, even under climate change. These findings highlight the importance of considering long-term change in soil fertility when assessing impacts of climate change and integrated nutrient management on crop production in SSA.
Rapid Arctic warming is thawing carbon-rich permafrost, releasing greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change. Despite the importance of this feedback, permafrost-enabled global-scale models simulate only gradual, top-down thickening of the seasonally-thawed soil. This ignores abrupt permafrost thaw and intensifying fire regimes that combust soil carbon and further accelerate thaw. Here, we expand a compact Earth system model (OSCAR v3.0) enabling initial estimates of the impacts of abrupt thaw and wildfire, together with gradual thaw, on remaining carbon budgets consistent with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. Our model suggests that including permafrost thaw and fire-related carbon emissions reduces the remaining allowable carbon budgets from 2025 onward by 25
