Worldwide economic losses from extreme weather events (EWE) have increased over recent decades, with significant geographic heterogeneity in damages. The IPCC defines the risk from EWE as a function of the climate hazard, socioeconomic exposure, and vulnerability. Although these three drivers vary at fine spatial scales, spatial variability largely has been overlooked in assessments of the drivers of economic loss from EWE. Using cluster analysis, we developed a novel socio-climate hazard typology (SCT) that integrates locally defined climate hazard and socioeconomic exposure and social vulnerability typologies. The results identified 838 unique SCT types impacted by EWE across the Gulf Coastal United States during 1981–2010. We regressed the SCT types and their constituent hazard and socioeconomic components against the cumulative economic loss (1981–2010) from EWE for each SCT type. Across the landscape, economic damages of SCT types were determined by unique, spatially explicit combinations of different risk factors, even in explaining the same level of economic loss. For example, multi-billion-dollar damages in the central Gulf Coast and peninsular Florida were explained by different drivers of risk, with damages in the former explained by additive interaction between climate hazard and multiplicative interaction between climate hazard and socioeconomic exposure and vulnerability, and in the latter explained by socioeconomic exposure and vulnerability. These results highlight the need to diagnose additive and multiplicative interactions among drivers of EWE risk in a spatially explicit context.

The cover image, by Xiaofeng Xu et al., is based on the Advanced Review “Interdisciplinary research in climate and energy sciences,”, DOI 10.1002/wene.180. image

Due to the complex nature of climate change, interdisciplinary research approaches involving knowledge and skills from a broad range of disciplines have been adopted for studying changes in the climate system as well as strategies for mitigating climate change (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions reductions) and adapting to its impacts on society and natural systems. Harnessing of renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels is widely regarded as a long‐term mitigation strategy that requires the synthesis of knowledge from engineering, technology, and natural and social sciences. In this study, we examine how the adoption of interdisciplinary approaches has evolved over time and in different geographic regions. We conducted a comprehensive literature survey using an evaluation matrix of keywords, in combination with a word cloud analysis, to evaluate the spatiotemporal dynamics of scholarly discourse about interdisciplinary approaches to climate change and renewable energy research and development (R&D). Publications that discuss interdisciplinary approaches to climate change and renewable energy have substantially increased over the last 60 years; it appears, however, that the nature, timing, and focus of these publications vary across countries and through time. Over the most recent three decades, the country‐level contribution to interdisciplinary research for climate change has become more evenly distributed, but this was not true for renewable energy research, which remained dominated by the United Sates and a few other major economies. The research topics have also evolved: Water resource management was emphasized from 1990s to 2000s, policy and adaptation were emphasized from the 2000s to 2010–2013, while vulnerability became prominent during the most recent years (2010–2013). Our analysis indicates that the rate of growth of interdisciplinary research for renewable energy lags behind that for climate change, possibly because knowledge emanating from climate change science has motivated the subsequent upswing in renewable energy R&D. WIREs Energy Environ 2016, 5:49–56. doi: 10.1002/wene.180 This article is categorized under: Bioenergy > Climate and Environment Energy and Climate > Climate and Environment

It is time to acknowledge that global average temperatures are likely to rise above the 2 °C policy target and consider how that deeply troubling prospect should affect priorities for communicating and managing the risks of a dangerously warming climate.

Agriculture is considered to be “climate-smart” when it contributes to increasing food security, adaptation and mitigation in a sustainable way. This new concept now dominates current discussions in agricultural development because of its capacity to unite the agendas of the agriculture, development and climate change communities under one brand. In this opinion piece authored by scientists from a variety of international agricultural and climate research communities, we argue that the concept needs to be evaluated critically because the relationship between the three dimensions is poorly understood, such that practically any improved agricultural practice can be considered climate-smart. This lack of clarity may have contributed to the broad appeal of the concept. From the understanding that we must hold ourselves accountable to demonstrably better meet human needs in the short and long term within foreseeable local and planetary limits, we develop a conceptualization of climate-smart agriculture as agriculture that can be shown to bring us closer to safe operating spaces for agricultural and food systems across spatial and temporal scales. Improvements in the management of agricultural systems that bring us significantly closer to safe operating spaces will require transformations in governance and use of our natural resources, underpinned by enabling political, social and economic conditions beyond incremental changes. Establishing scientifically credible indicators and metrics of long-term safe operating spaces in the context of a changing climate and growing social-ecological challenges is critical to creating the societal demand and political will required to motivate deep transformations. Answering questions on how the needed transformational change can be achieved will require actively setting and testing hypotheses to refine and characterize our concepts of safer spaces for social-ecological systems across scales. This effort will demand prioritizing key areas of innovation, such as (1) improved adaptive management and governance of social-ecological systems; (2) development of meaningful and relevant integrated indicators of social-ecological systems; (3) gathering of quality integrated data, information, knowledge and analytical tools for improved models and scenarios in time frames and at scales relevant for decision-making; and (4) establishment of legitimate and empowered science policy dialogues on local to international scales to facilitate decision making informed by metrics and indicators of safe operating spaces.

The literature on climate change's impacts on energy security is scattered across disparate fields of research and schools of thought. Much of this literature has been produced outside of the academy by scholars and practitioners working in "think tanks," government agencies, and international/multilateral institutions. Here we reviewed a selected set of 58 articles and reports primarily from such sources and performed textual analysis of the arguments. Our review of this literature identifies three potential mechanisms for linking climate change and energy security: Climate change may 1) create second-order effects that may exacerbate social instability and disrupt energy systems; 2) directly impact energy supply and/or systems or 3) influence energy security through the effects of climate-related policies. We identify emerging risks to energy security driven by climate mitigation technology choices but find less evidence of climate change's direct physical impacts. We used both empirical and qualitative selection factors for choosing the grey literature sample. The sources we selected were published in the last 5 years, available through electronic media and were written in language accessible to general policy or academic readers. The organizations that published the literature had performed previous research in the general fields of energy and/or climate change with some analytical content and identified themselves as non-partisan. This literature is particularly valuable to scholars because identifies understudied relationships that can be rigorously assessed through academic tools and methodologies and informs a translational research agenda that will allow scholars to engage with practitioners to address challenges that lie at the nexus of climate change and energy security.

The study of the impacts of climate change on national and interna-tional security has grown as a research field, particularly in the last five years. Within this broad field, academic scholarship has concentrated primarily on whether climate change is, or may become, a driver of violent conflict. This relationship remains highly contested. However, national security policy and many non-governmental organizations have identified climate change as a threat multiplier in conflict situations. The U.S. Department of Defense and the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense have incorporated these findings into strategic planning documents such as the Quadrennial Defense Review and the Strategic Defence and Security Review. In contrast to the climate-conflict nexus, our analysis found that academic scholarship on the climate change and energy security nexus is small and more disciplinarily focused. In fact, a search of social science litera-ture found few sources, with a significant percentage of these works attribut-able to a single journal. Assuming that policymakers are more likely to rely on broader social science literature than technical or scientific journals, this leaves a limited foundation. This then begged the question: what are these sources? We identified a body of grey literature on the nexus of climate change and energymore » security of a greater size than the body of peer-reviewed social science literature. We reviewed fifty-eight recent reports, issue briefs, and transcripts to better understand the nexus of climate change and energy security, as well as to gain insight about the questions policymakers need answered by those undertaking the research. In this article, we describe the nature of the sources reviewed, highlight possible climate change and energy security linkages found within those sources, identify emerging risks, and offer conclusions that can guide further research.« less

Researchers must make a stronger case for funding in the face of a perfect storm of budget cuts and eroding political support, says Jay Gulledge.

Physical injury is common in terrestrial plants as a result of grazing, harvesting, trampling, and extreme weather events. Previous studies demonstrated enhanced emission of non-microbial CH4 under aerobic conditions from plant tissues when they were exposed to increasing UV radiation and temperature. Since physical injury is also a form of environmental stress, we sought to determine whether it would also affect CH4 emissions from plants. Physical injury (cutting) stimulated CH4 emission from fresh twigs of Artemisia species under aerobic conditions. More cutting resulted in more CH4 emissions. Hypoxia also enhanced CH4 emission from both uncut and cut Artemisia frigida twigs. Physical injury typically results in cell wall degradation, which may either stimulate formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) or decrease scavenging of them. Increased ROS activity might explain increased CH4 emission in response to physical injury and other forms of stress. There were significant differences in CH4 emissions among 10 species of Artemisia, with some species emitting no detectable CH4 under any circumstances. Consequently, CH4 emissions may be species-dependent and therefore difficult to estimate in nature based on total plant biomass. Our results and those of previous studies suggest that a variety of environmental stresses stimulate CH4 emission from a wide variety of plant species. Global change processes, including climate change, depletion of stratospheric ozone, increasing ground-level ozone, spread of plant pests, and land-use changes, could cause more stress in plants on a global scale, potentially stimulating more CH4 emission globally.

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A budget for the methane (CH4) cycle in the Xilin River basin of Inner Mongolia is presented. The annual CH4 budget in this region depends primarily on the sum of atmospheric CH4 uptake by upland soils, emission from small wetlands, and emission from grazing ruminants (sheep, goats, and cattle). Flux rates for these processes were averaged over multiple years with differing summer rainfall. Although uplands constitute the vast majority of land area, they consume much less CH4 per unit area than is emitted by wetlands and ruminants. Atmospheric CH4 uptake by upland soils was −3.3 and −4.8kg CH4ha−1y−1 in grazed and ungrazed areas, respectively. Average CH4 emission was 791.0kg CH4ha−1y−1 from wetlands and 8.6kg CH4ha−1y−1 from ruminants. The basin area-weighted average of all three processes was 6.8kg CH4ha−1y−1, indicating that ruminant production has converted this basin to a net source of atmospheric CH4. The total CH4 emission from the Xilin River basin was 7.29Gg CH4y−1. The current grazing intensity is about eightfold higher than that which would result in a net zero CH4 flux. Since grazing intensity has increased throughout western China, it is likely that ruminant production has converted China's grazed temperate grasslands to a net source of atmospheric CH4 overall.

The hefty 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gets a diminutive translation.

Methylococcus capsulatus strain Bath, a methane-oxidizing bacterium, and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) carry out the first step of nitrification, the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite, through the intermediate hydroxylamine. AOB use hydroxylamine oxidoreductase (HAO) to produce nitrite. M. capsulatus Bath was thought to oxidize hydroxylamine with cytochrome P460 (cytL), until the recent discovery of an hao gene in its genome. We used quantitative PCR analyses of cDNA from M. capsulatus Bath incubated with CH4 or CH4 plus 5 mm (NH4)2SO4 to determine whether cytL and hao transcript levels change in response to ammonia. While mRNA levels for cytL were not affected by ammonia, hao mRNA levels increased by 14.5- and 31-fold in duplicate samples when a promoter proximal region of the transcript was analyzed, and by sixfold when a region at the distal end of the transcript was analyzed. A conserved open reading frame, orf2, located 3′ of hao in all known AOB genomes and in M. capsulatus Bath, was cotranscribed with hao and showed increased mRNA levels in the presence of ammonia. These data led to designating this gene pair as haoAB, with the role of haoB still undefined. We also determined mRNA levels for additional genes that encode proteins involved in N-oxide detoxification: cytochrome c′-β (CytS) and nitric oxide (NO) reductase (NorCB). Whereas cytS mRNA levels increased in duplicate samples by 28.5- and 40-fold in response to ammonia, the cotranscribed norC-norB mRNA did not increase. Our results strongly suggest that M. capsulatus Bath possesses a functional, ammonia-responsive HAO involved in nitrification.

Traditionally, methane (CH4) emission from terrestrial plants is thought to originate from belowground microbial metabolism under anaerobic conditions, with subsequent transport to the atmosphere through stems. However, a recent study reported aerobic CH4 emission from plants by an unrecognized process, a result that has since been questioned. We investigated CH4 emissions under aerobic conditions from aboveground tissues of 44 species indigenous to the temperate Inner Mongolia steppe. Ten herbaceous hydrophytes (wetland-adapted plants) were examined, two of which--Glyceria spiculosa and Scirpus yagara--emitted CH4 from stems but not from detached leaves. Of 34 xerophytes (arid-adapted plants) examined, 7 out of 9 shrub species emitted CH4 from detached leaves but not stems, whereas none of 25 herbaceous xerophytes emitted CH4. The herbaceous hydrophyte, S. yagara, emitted highly 13C-depleted CH4, suggesting a microbial origin. Achillea frigida exhibited the highest CH4 emission rates among the shrubs and continuously emitted relatively 13C-enriched CH4 from detached leaves, indicating that CH4 was derived directly from plant tissues under aerobic conditions. Because woody species are relatively rare in the Inner Mongolia steppe, aerobic, plant-derived CH4 emission is probably negligible in this region. Our results may imply a larger role for aerobic CH4 production in upland ecosystems dominated by woody species or in ecosystems where woody encroachment is occurring as a result of global change.