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.
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
ABSTRACT International conservation policy includes the dual aims of protecting biodiversity and nature's contributions to people (NCP). Achieving these goals requires protecting not only species and habitats but also the networks of biotic interactions that sustain them. Food webs, which represent predator‐prey interactions between species, are increasingly recognised as a link between ecosystem structure, function, and resilience, which are concepts that are frequently cited in conservation policy. Yet, conservation planning and policy typically focus on individual species and habitats and overlook the interactions that support their persistence. We review the literature at the intersection of food web ecology and conservation, and highlight how food webs can inform three conservation goals: preventing species extinctions, maintaining ecosystem functions and NCP, and fostering ecosystem resilience. Food web data and metrics, such as interaction diversity, trophic diversity, connectance, or modularity, can be used to prioritize species that are key to ecosystem structure and functioning, and to guide spatial prioritization to protect functionally diverse and resilient communities. Given the growing availability of food web data, incorporating food webs in conservation planning can lead to more effective and resilient conservation outcomes that sustain biodiversity and ecosystem functions in the long term.
