Climate communication faces a messenger challenge: while the urgency of climate crisis demands broad-based public engagement, conventional advocates who are left-leaning environmentalists often struggle to reach diverse audiences due to identity-based barriers and negative stereotypes. This study examines “unconventional advocates”: individuals or groups who advocate for climate action from within social identities not typically associated with environmentalism. Through public intercept interviews with 90 Australians across urban and regional areas, we identified five interrelated social and psychological factors shaping public evaluations of these atypical climate messengers: identification, surprise, group importance, trustworthiness, and legitimacy. Our findings reveal that public views of unconventional advocates are shaped not only by identity alignment, but also by broader stereotype-based expectations, perceived credibility and legitimacy, and the wider socio-political meanings attached to different groups. These findings advance theoretical understandings of social identity, impression formation, and climate communication, while informing practical strategies in climate advocacy to broaden the social base of support for climate action.
Marine Heatwaves (MHWs) have emerged as a prominent manifestation of ongoing climate change, with increasing ocean temperatures favouring more frequent and intense events in the Northern Indian Ocean (NIO) and posing significant risks to marine ecosystems and coastal societies. This study investigates the relationship between NIO MHWs and Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) rainfall using long-term datasets (1993–2024). Statistical analyses were performed to quantify the association of MHWs to ISM rainfall variability after accounting for the influence of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The results demonstrate that stronger seasonal MHW activity, particularly over the northern Arabian Sea (ASea), is robustly associated with enhanced rainfall over Peninsular India and the eastern ASea, even after accounting for ENSO and IOD. Composite analyses further demonstrate that enhanced moisture convergence and rainfall over Peninsular India and the eastern ASea are recurring characteristics of strong MHW years. Detailed analyses of the contrasting ISM of 2018 and 2020 reveal a physically consistent sequence in which positive net heat fluxes, weakened winds, and mixed-layer shoaling favour MHW initiation, whereas rainfall-induced surface freshening and enhanced stratification contribute to MHW persistence. Operational forecast analyses demonstrate that the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) forecasting system successfully reproduces the large-scale observed rainfall under contrasting ocean thermal states. These findings identify NIO MHWs as an important oceanic contributor to ISM rainfall variability and highlight the need for improved representation of thermal extremes in seasonal prediction systems under a warming climate.
This study examines the impact of the first state-level climate change adaptation planning mandate in the United States, California’s Senate Bill 379 (SB379). We analyze the content of local plans before and after the mandate and compare the quality of the mandated plans with a sample of voluntary climate change adaptation plans developed by local governments across the U.S. The research finds that plans developed after the mandate incorporated more climate adaptation strategies, a greater variety of strategy types, and addressed a wider range of climate hazards. The mandate is associated with increased “mainstreaming” of climate adaptation, primarily through add-on and programmatic strategies. SB379-mandated plans scored higher overall compared to voluntary climate plans from other states but lower on addressing uncertainty. The findings indicate that state mandates like SB379 can effectively catalyze local climate adaptation planning, but challenges remain in achieving high-quality, actionable plans across diverse communities.
Climate change disinformation, defined as the strategic production and dissemination of false or misleading claims about climate science, impacts, and policy, erodes public understanding, frustrates evidence-based policymaking, and obstructs collective action. This review synthesizes the literature on climate disinformation to develop an integrated account of how it is produced, circulated, and sustained. The analysis draws on three complementary strands: a synthesis of literature on the structural drivers of climate disinformation; a qualitative thematic synthesis of two case framings, denialist discourse and the framing of climate policy as an economic and liberty threat, interpreted through the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal (PESTEL) framework; and a focused Web of Science synthesis of eight studies on platform mechanisms of climate disinformation in social and hybrid media. Together, the three strands point to a layered, structurally sustained phenomenon in which political-economic, rhetorical, and platform-mechanical processes reinforce each other. Funding sustains the organizations that develop rhetorical repertoires; those repertoires furnish content that platforms amplify; and platform incentives reward the most emotionally charged versions of those repertoires. Message-level remedies such as inoculation and consensus messaging are effective but insufficient on their own; durable responses require pairing them with transparency in advocacy funding, structural reform of platform amplification, and media and information literacy. The review argues that effective response to climate disinformation requires treating it as a system rather than a sequence of claims and identifies integrated empirical designs and comparative research beyond the Global North as priorities for future work.
Tackling climate change requires integrated approaches that combine mitigation and adaptation strategies and take into account local climatic, socio-economic, environmental and political contexts. The paper assesses how high-resolution multi-sectoral modelling and participatory bottom-up co-creation can be integrated into a unified methodological framework to identify synergies and trade-offs between climate mitigation and adaptation at the local level based on three European projects DISTENDER, KNOWING, and NEVERMORE. The projects develop methodologies and tools that serve to improve the understanding of climate risks in a multi-scale approach, assess the effectiveness of adaptation and mitigation measures as well as their interdependencies, and involve stakeholders in the development of a set of strategies. Through workshops, consultations and co-creation exercises, the projects foster collaboration between scientists, policy makers, businesses and local communities thereby ensuring the sustainability and applicability of the resulting methodologies, strategies and tools. Each project employs a transdisciplinary research approach that integrates climate modeling, socioeconomic analysis and participatory processes to identify synergies and trade-offs between adaptation and mitigation actions. To support decision making, the projects develop various digital tools, such as decision support systems (DSS), interactive applications and knowledge databases. These tools synthesize complex climate data, socioeconomic indicators, relevant adaption and mitigation policy measures, and future scenarios into accessible formats for policy makers as well as civil society. The paper summarizes and analyses the approaches and results of the three projects and their contributions to the advancement of knowledge on climate risks and the development of actions against climate change.
