Collective climate action hinges on the distribution of benefits and burdens of climate change mitigation. Yet assumptions relevant to distributional justice are frequently made only implicitly in climate change mitigation scenarios. Here, we introduce the patterns of the distributional justice framework that operationalize philosophical justice theories as quantitative requirements for scenario trajectories. We then apply this framework to the IPCC AR6 scenario database to assess the distributional implications of global climate change mitigation scenarios across world regions. Focusing on scenario variables related to energy and meat consumption, we found a diversity of patterns of justice across scenario characteristics. The prioritarian perspective, which prioritizes improvements to those currently worse off, emerged as the most dominant pattern of justice. By contrast, futures with limited or reduced energy and meat consumption were the least represented in the database. Our research further indicates that most scenarios consistent with patterns of justice do not explicitly aim to model more just futures, suggesting that underlying scenario narratives—most often SSP2—largely determine the distributional outcomes. We therefore propose a stakeholder engagement strategy to make distributional justice assumptions in scenario development ex-ante more diverse and transparent. Overall, this study provides a practical avenue for developing justice-conscious scenarios that may be more likely to motivate collective climate action.

Planned relocation is gaining traction as a preventive adaptation measure to protect communities from the impacts of climate change. While its justice implications are increasingly recognised, empirical studies often focus on single dimensions such as distributive outcomes or procedural fairness. This paper proposes a more comprehensive approach that identifies multiple forms of justice—distributive, corrective, procedural and recognitional—as relevant for planning and implementing planned relocation. It further operationalises them through the lenses of the utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian and prioritarian philosophical traditions, and offers a framework for uncovering the implicit assumptions about justice that shape relocation policy and practice. The framework is applied to four case studies of preventive relocation in the context of flood risk in Europe (Portugal, Italy, Austria, UK). The application shows that utilitarian understandings of distributive justice dominate policy framings at national and regional levels, while prioritarian concerns emerge at community level, suggesting that different criteria can coexist across scales. An egalitarian approach characterises the sharing of costs and responsibilities, with cross-country difference in financial coverage and compensation models. Procedural justice is motivated on egalitarian grounds but practised performatively or with the utilitarian aim to promote acceptability, and it is often constrained by a reliance on technical expertise which sidelines local knowledge. Recognitional justice oscillates between exclusion based on property rights and attempts to prioritise the most vulnerable. By offering a framework to identify and clarify implicit justice assumptions in relocation decisions, this paper paves ways to support more transparent and accountable policymaking.

Many households worldwide face substantial gaps in decent living standards (DLS), universal and essential material preconditions for achieving well-being and inclusive development. Here, we use subnational Demographic and Health Survey data from 75 low and middle-income countries (1990-2021) to explore the distribution and trends of ten living standards. We estimate that 94.9% of households in our dataset lack the material prerequisites for at least one of the ten standards, and 63.6% for one-third of them. Stark inequalities persist both within and between countries, with regions in sub-Saharan Africa experiencing the most severe deprivations. Despite some improvements, progress remains limited in critical areas such as health care, sanitation, housing, and education. Within countries, rural, agrarian households with low levels of educational attainment are particularly disadvantaged. These granular findings at the subnational level can help direct policy efforts and resources towards those populations most in need.

Although humanity has always been adapting to a changing environment, the accelerated rate of climate change in combination with continued socioeconomic development and the delay in climate action result in deep uncertainties, further challenging policy, and decision making. A main are of concern, triggered by the increasing frequency and intensity of climatic hazards are growing uncertainties regarding the effectiveness of prevailing adaptation strategies, as well as constraints and eventually limits to adaptation. The existing literature is largely conceptual and focusses on the Global South, where evidence for reaching adaptation limits already exists. In this study, we aim to uncover whether Austria, a Global North country, faces intolerable risks from climate change and experiences adaptation constraints that may trigger limits to adaptation. As there are still considerable uncertainties involved in quantifying potential adaptation limits, we use a social science approach to collect first empirical evidence on this crucial issue. We identify and discuss sources of concern based on semi-structured interviews (n = 26) with climate change adaptation and disaster risk management experts. Our results indicate that although Austria may currently not face physical constraints, which could lead to “hard” adaptation limits, it is nevertheless essential to upgrade existing adaptation strategies for more severe climatic events that may impose “soft” adaptation limits at the local and individual level. Many of these perceived soft adaptation limits are linked to constraints in imagination, awareness, and knowledge, but also to confining decision-making processes and the locked-in focus on technical adaptation measures, which cannot be scaled up indefinitely. To overcome these constraints and avoid adaptation limits, we suggest more inclusive stakeholder involvement in adaptive planning and the design of climate strategies by fostering bottom-up or participatory processes and integrating disaster risk management and climate change adaptation more strongly within polycentric risk governance approaches. Our insights can be seen as a precursory scoping study for the establishment of comprehensive decision making under deep uncertainty approaches in Austria and beyond, since at least many Global North countries share similar constraints and uncertainties regarding technological, economic, and political trends.

This study develops a dynamic model of climate-related disaster impacts, considering multidimensional household heterogeneity, for analyzing changes in growth and inequality in low-income countries. Focusing on human capital development, the study demonstrates the multiple impacts of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies on human capital investment, including the effect of schooling opportunities for households constrained by the subsistence consumption constraint. Through numerical simulations performed for two economies that differ in terms of human capital, modeled after Madagascar and Fiji, it is illustrated that the possibilities of involuntary unemployment and the work-learning choice drive the diversity in macroeconomic impacts of a disaster. In an economy characterized by low levels of human capital, a disaster could cause an increase in labor supply in the immediate aftermath, but interrupt human capital formation, impeding long-term growth and human capital formation. Such a result contradicts prevailing intuition by demonstrating that a disaster occurring in an economy under recession may not result in a large adverse GDP impact in the short run but may negatively impact growth in the long run. On such a path, a policy of development in DRR infrastructure with appropriate taxation could reduce human-capital gaps in the long run by supporting continued post-disaster human-capital-investment opportunities for the poor.

Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being. Justice issues are integral to a variety of climate science and policy processes. This Perspective provides a framework, based on philosophical theory, to explain key justice concepts and how they can be applied in climate discussions.

Zusammenfassung Die Technische Zusammenfassung des APCC-Sonderberichts ″Landnutzung und Klimawandel in Österreich″ umfasst die Kernbotschaften der Kapitel 1–9. In ihr sind die Hauptaussagen zu den sozioökonomischen und klimatischen Treibern der Landnutzungsänderungen, zu den Auswirkungen von Landnutzung und -bewirtschaftung auf den Klimawandel, zu Minderungs- und Anpassungsoptionen im Kontext nachhaltiger Entwicklungsziele sowie zu Synergien, Zielkonflikten und Umsetzungsbarrieren von Klimamaßnahmen enthalten.

Zusammenfassung Dieses Kapitel präsentiert und bewertet den aktuellen Stand des Wissens zum Konnex Landnutzung und Klimawandel in Österreich aus dem systemischen Blickwinkel der UN Agenda 2030 für eine Nachhaltige Entwicklung. Dabei wird dem Thema entsprechend auf die Verflechtungen zwischen den lokalen, nationalen und internationalen Ebenen eingegangen. Die Menschheit befindet sich in kritischen, vielfältigen und vernetzten Krisen. Integrative und globale Lösungsansätze, wie sie in der Agenda 2030 festgeschrieben sind, haben für diese multiplen Krisen ein hohes Lösungspotenzial.

Zusammenfassung Die Gesellschaft-Natur-Perspektive beschäftigt sich mit historisch entstandenen, tiefenwirksamen Treibern der Klimakrise. Ihr Fokus liegt auf klimaschädlichen Merkmalen von Natur-Mensch-Beziehungen, die für die westliche Moderne typisch und auch in Österreich wirksam sind. Dazu zählen Wachstumszwang, Kapitalakkumulation, dualistische Verständnisse von Natur und Mensch, Vorstellungen und Praktiken der Naturbeherrschung, sozial-ökologische Ungleichheit und disziplinäre Wissensproduktion.

Zusammenfassung Die Bereitstellungsperspektive untersucht geeignete Strukturen klimafreundlichen Lebens ausgehend von Bereitstellungssystemen, die suffiziente und resiliente Praktiken und Lebensformen erleichtern und damit selbstverständlich machen. Sie ermöglicht eine ganzheitliche Sichtweise, um langfristige Klimawandelmitigation und -anpassung mit der kurzfristigen Sicherung der Grundversorgung und dem Schutz vor Naturgefahren zu verbinden. Die wichtigsten Theorien desWandels, die von der Bereitstellungsperspektive ausgehen und im Folgenden ausführlicher behandelt werden, sind Bereitstellungssysteme und Alltagsökonomie, praxistheoretische Ansätze, Lebensformen, umfassendes Klimarisikomanagement, Suffizienz und Resilienz.

Path dependency occurs when a contingent event predetermines what further steps can be taken and self-reinforcing mechanisms lock-in any further development on a sub-optimal trajectory. Path dependency is a prominent concept in the adaptation pathways literature, but insufficiently defined and operationalised. The present paper empirically tracks all constitutive elements of path dependency for four decades of flood risk management (FRM) in two alpine mountain regions in Austria, the Ennstal and Aist river catchments, using a mixed-methods approach. FRM governance has a critical role whether decisions lead to path dependency. Lock-in manifests not just in technical structures, but also in inertia of incumbent actor coalitions and management paradigms. Sub-optimality is hard to assess for lack of clearly defined protection targets; however, it appears in the ways that structural measures are implemented-too little, too late or with negative impacts on nature conservation. Past floods do not qualify as contingent events, as they have not fundamentally changed FRM practice. By contrast, technological and institutional shifts over longer periods, such as digital hazard maps and EU directives, have gradually reoriented FRM strategies. Institution-based self-reinforcing mechanisms are more prevalent than technology-based self-reinforcing mechanisms. Established actor coalitions combined with institutional density illustrate how those in charge uphold a path to defend their position, power and resources. Our recommendations for how to overcome path dependency in FRM governance are: encourage niche experiments, link FRM more closely with climate change adaptation, revise the national policy framework towards polycentric governance approaches and improve professional training.

Zusammenfassung Kapitel 24 ist die Einleitung zu Teil 5, der die Hintergrundbewertungen für Kapitel 2 liefert. Teil 5 nimmt eine detaillierte Bestandsaufnahme von Theorien vor, die in einem weiten Sinne Wandel untersuchen. In den darauffolgenden Kapiteln werden die Marktperspektive (Kapitel 25), die Innovationsperspektive (Kapitel 26), die Bereitstellungsperspektive (Kapitel 27) sowie die Gesellschaft-Natur-Perspektive (Kapitel 28) detaillierter vorgestellt.

Lack of perceived efficacy can be an important barrier to climate mitigation action at various scales. Here, we study how a participatory visioning process, the Climate Modernity workshop in Styria, Austria, affected participants' efficacy outcomes. To this end, we conducted two survey waves eliciting self- and response efficacy regarding possible mitigation measures. We estimate difference-in-differences models and corroborate the findings using qualitative participant feedback. The results indicate that the intervention tended to decrease personal self-efficacy, in particular with regard to controversial topics like the transformation of the transport system. This suggests that participatory stakeholder processes can draw attention to the conflict potential and complexity of specific mitigation policies, decreasing the perceived feasibility of implementing them. The workshop, however, tended to increase particpants' personal response efficacy, particularly regarding voting for pro-environmental candidates. Accordingly, participatory processes could raise trust in the democratic process and in the effectiveness of making a green voting decision.

The need for a compound risk governance system and management practice is argued in this paper. We find that, historically, risk management strategies have been developed for single hazards and are often subject to path dependency. It is thus difficult to adapt them to a situation that has compound risks. The lack of attention to compound risks in current risk management practices often leads to potential side effects—positive or negative—on other risks and can also result in related management strategies being overlooked. This can ultimately cause barriers to larger transformational adaptation efforts and lead to the intensification of existing societal inequalities or to the creation of new ones. To alert policy- and decision-makers to the need to move toward compound-risk management strategies, we argue that risk management must explicitly highlight various elements of path dependencies, the positive and negative side effects of single-hazard risk management, the appearance of new social inequalities, and the intensification of existing ones.

Comprehensively addressing different aspects of justice is essential to enable risk management to contribute to sustainable development. This article offers a new conceptual framework called risk justice that comprises procedural, distributive, and corrective justice in four dimensions related to sustainable development: social, ecological, spatial, and temporal issues. Risk justice is defined as the quality of being fair and reasonable while governing and managing a possible negative event. After explaining the conceptual framework, a detailed content analysis of two international guidelines for disaster risk management (the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and the European Floods Directive) illustrates the analytical potential of the risk justice framework. Findings show strong emphasis on social and spatial aspects of distributive and procedural justice in the two documents, whereas considerations of corrective justice and temporal and ecological issues are scarce or indirect. This may result in conflicting impacts of disaster risk management on sustainable development. Therefore, discussing risk management with a risk justice viewpoint while elaborating guidelines or choosing risk management strategies provides new avenues for sustainable development and facilitates transparent trade-offs. Our risk justice framework enables risk practitioners and researchers to reflect systemically about justice in risk management in different risk contexts and can be used both as a proactive and as a retrospective tool.

There is increasing evidence that anthropogenic climate change and socioeconomic development are altering the dynamics of extreme wildfire events, leading to increasing wildfire risk globally and causing potential new conflicts in wildfire risk management (WFRM). Managing these risks in increasingly complex governance settings raises important equity concerns; in particular, what is perceived as just in terms of outcomes and processes. We develop a framework for identifying and categorizing along the WFRM cycle (prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery and adaptation) crucial and generally applicable aspects of distributional, procedural and restorative justice. We argue that policymakers and decision-makers should proactively consider all three justice aspects within collaborative governance policy processes to successfully innovate integrated WFRM strategies that respond to equity concerns.

Climate-related risks are a major threat to humanity, affecting the lives and livelihoods of communities globally. Even with adaptation, climate change is projected to increase the severity of risks, leading to impacts and residual risks, also termed losses and damages. Frameworks and approaches using Climate Risk Management (CRM), an integration of Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation, and sustainable development, are being devised to support the comprehensive management of increasing climate-related risks. Here we discuss to what extent comprehensive CRM has been implemented in three specific cases – in Peru, India and Austria. The approach is conceptually represented and evaluated using a CRM framework. The cases deal with risks associated with glacial lake outburst floods, sea level rise, tropical cyclones, salinization, riverine floods and agricultural droughts. Ultimately, we synthesise policy and research recommendations to help understand what is feasible for CRM approaches applied in practice. We find that successful CRM implementation in practice benefits from being flexible, and participatory from beginning to end, whilst considering compounding risks, and the spectrum of (just and equitable) incremental to transformational adaptation measures necessary for attending to current and projected future increases in climate-related risks.