a case study on climate change

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Seven case studies in carbon and climate

Every part of the mosaic of Earth's surface — ocean and land, Arctic and tropics, forest and grassland — absorbs and releases carbon in a different way. Wild-card events such as massive wildfires and drought complicate the global picture even more. To better predict future climate, we need to understand how Earth's ecosystems will change as the climate warms and how extreme events will shape and interact with the future environment. Here are seven pressing concerns.

The Far North is warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, on average. With a 5-year Arctic airborne observing campaign just wrapping up and a 10-year campaign just starting that will integrate airborne, satellite and surface measurements, NASA is using unprecedented resources to discover how the drastic changes in Arctic carbon are likely to influence our climatic future.

Wildfires have become common in the North. Because firefighting is so difficult in remote areas, many of these fires burn unchecked for months, throwing huge plumes of carbon into the atmosphere. A recent report found a nearly 10-fold increase in the number of large fires in the Arctic region over the last 50 years, and the total area burned by fires is increasing annually.

Organic carbon from plant and animal remains is preserved for millennia in frozen Arctic soil, too cold to decompose. Arctic soils known as permafrost contain more carbon than there is in Earth's atmosphere today. As the frozen landscape continues to thaw, the likelihood increases that not only fires but decomposition will create Arctic atmospheric emissions rivaling those of fossil fuels. The chemical form these emissions take — carbon dioxide or methane — will make a big difference in how much greenhouse warming they create.

Initial results from NASA's Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) airborne campaign have allayed concerns that large bursts of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas, are already being released from thawing Arctic soils. CARVE principal investigator Charles Miller of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, is looking forward to NASA's ABoVE field campaign (Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment) to gain more insight. "CARVE just scratched the surface, compared to what ABoVE will do," Miller said.

Methane is the Billy the Kid of carbon-containing greenhouse gases: it does a lot of damage in a short life. There's much less of it in Earth's atmosphere than there is carbon dioxide, but molecule for molecule, it causes far more greenhouse warming than CO 2 does over its average 10-year life span in the atmosphere.

Methane is produced by bacteria that decompose organic material in damp places with little or no oxygen, such as freshwater marshes and the stomachs of cows. Currently, over half of atmospheric methane comes from human-related sources, such as livestock, rice farming, landfills and leaks of natural gas. Natural sources include termites and wetlands. Because of increasing human sources, the atmospheric concentration of methane has doubled in the last 200 years to a level not seen on our planet for 650,000 years.

Locating and measuring human emissions of methane are significant challenges. NASA's Carbon Monitoring System is funding several projects testing new technologies and techniques to improve our ability to monitor the colorless gas and help decision makers pinpoint sources of emissions. One project, led by Daniel Jacob of Harvard University, used satellite observations of methane to infer emissions over North America. The research found that human methane emissions in eastern Texas were 50 to 100 percent higher than previous estimates. "This study shows the potential of satellite observations to assess how methane emissions are changing," said Kevin Bowman, a JPL research scientist who was a coauthor of the study.

Tropical forests

Tropical forests are carbon storage heavyweights. The Amazon in South America alone absorbs a quarter of all carbon dioxide that ends up on land. Forests in Asia and Africa also do their part in "breathing in" as much carbon dioxide as possible and using it to grow.

However, there is evidence that tropical forests may be reaching some kind of limit to growth. While growth rates in temperate and boreal forests continue to increase, trees in the Amazon have been growing more slowly in recent years. They've also been dying sooner. That's partly because the forest was stressed by two severe droughts in 2005 and 2010 — so severe that the Amazon emitted more carbon overall than it absorbed during those years, due to increased fires and reduced growth. Those unprecedented droughts may have been only a foretaste of what is ahead, because models predict that droughts will increase in frequency and severity in the future.

In the past 40-50 years, the greatest threat to tropical rainforests has been not climate but humans, and here the news from the Amazon is better. Brazil has reduced Amazon deforestation in its territory by 60 to 70 percent since 2004, despite troubling increases in the last three years. According to Doug Morton, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, further reductions may not make a marked difference in the global carbon budget. "No one wants to abandon efforts to preserve and protect the tropical forests," he said. "But doing that with the expectation that [it] is a meaningful way to address global greenhouse gas emissions has become less defensible."

In the last few years, Brazil's progress has left Indonesia the distinction of being the nation with the highest deforestation rate and also with the largest overall area of forest cleared in the world. Although Indonesia's forests are only a quarter to a fifth the extent of the Amazon, fires there emit massive amounts of carbon, because about half of the Indonesian forests grow on carbon-rich peat. A recent study estimated that this fall, daily greenhouse gas emissions from recent Indonesian fires regularly surpassed daily emissions from the entire United States.

Wildfires are natural and necessary for some forest ecosystems, keeping them healthy by fertilizing soil, clearing ground for young plants, and allowing species to germinate and reproduce. Like the carbon cycle itself, fires are being pushed out of their normal roles by climate change. Shorter winters and higher temperatures during the other seasons lead to drier vegetation and soils. Globally, fire seasons are almost 20 percent longer today, on average, than they were 35 years ago.

Currently, wildfires are estimated to spew 2 to 4 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year on average — about half as much as is emitted by fossil fuel burning. Large as that number is, it's just the beginning of the impact of fires on the carbon cycle. As a burned forest regrows, decades will pass before it reaches its former levels of carbon absorption. If the area is cleared for agriculture, the croplands will never absorb as much carbon as the forest did.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to increase and global temperatures warm, climate models show the threat of wildfires increasing throughout this century. In Earth's more arid regions like the U.S. West, rising temperatures will continue to dry out vegetation so fires start and burn more easily. In Arctic and boreal ecosystems, intense wildfires are burning not just the trees, but also the carbon-rich soil itself, accelerating the thaw of permafrost, and dumping even more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

North American forests

With decades of Landsat satellite imagery at their fingertips, researchers can track changes to North American forests since the mid-1980s. A warming climate is making its presence known.

Through the North American Forest Dynamics project, and a dataset based on Landsat imagery released this earlier this month, researchers can track where tree cover is disappearing through logging, wildfires, windstorms, insect outbreaks, drought, mountaintop mining, and people clearing land for development and agriculture. Equally, they can see where forests are growing back over past logging projects, abandoned croplands and other previously disturbed areas.

"One takeaway from the project is how active U.S. forests are, and how young American forests are," said Jeff Masek of Goddard, one of the project’s principal investigators along with researchers from the University of Maryland and the U.S. Forest Service. In the Southeast, fast-growing tree farms illustrate a human influence on the forest life cycle. In the West, however, much of the forest disturbance is directly or indirectly tied to climate. Wildfires stretched across more acres in Alaska this year than they have in any other year in the satellite record. Insects and drought have turned green forests brown in the Rocky Mountains. In the Southwest, pinyon-juniper forests have died back due to drought.

Scientists are studying North American forests and the carbon they store with other remote sensing instruments. With radars and lidars, which measure height of vegetation from satellite or airborne platforms, they can calculate how much biomass — the total amount of plant material, like trunks, stems and leaves — these forests contain. Then, models looking at how fast forests are growing or shrinking can calculate carbon uptake and release into the atmosphere. An instrument planned to fly on the International Space Station (ISS), called the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar, will measure tree height from orbit, and a second ISS mission called the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) will monitor how forests are using water, an indicator of their carbon uptake during growth. Two other upcoming radar satellite missions (the NASA-ISRO SAR radar, or NISAR, and the European Space Agency’s BIOMASS radar) will provide even more complementary, comprehensive information on vegetation.

Ocean carbon absorption

When carbon-dioxide-rich air meets seawater containing less carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas diffuses from the atmosphere into the ocean as irresistibly as a ball rolls downhill. Today, about a quarter of human-produced carbon dioxide emissions get absorbed into the ocean. Once the carbon is in the water, it can stay there for hundreds of years.

Warm, CO 2 -rich surface water flows in ocean currents to colder parts of the globe, releasing its heat along the way. In the polar regions, the now-cool water sinks several miles deep, carrying its carbon burden to the depths. Eventually, that same water wells up far away and returns carbon to the surface; but the entire trip is thought to take about a thousand years. In other words, water upwelling today dates from the Middle Ages – long before fossil fuel emissions.

That's good for the atmosphere, but the ocean pays a heavy price for absorbing so much carbon: acidification. Carbon dioxide reacts chemically with seawater to make the water more acidic. This fundamental change threatens many marine creatures. The chain of chemical reactions ends up reducing the amount of a particular form of carbon — the carbonate ion — that these organisms need to make shells and skeletons. Dubbed the “other carbon dioxide problem,” ocean acidification has potential impacts on millions of people who depend on the ocean for food and resources.

Phytoplankton

Microscopic, aquatic plants called phytoplankton are another way that ocean ecosystems absorb carbon dioxide emissions. Phytoplankton float with currents, consuming carbon dioxide as they grow. They are at the base of the ocean's food chain, eaten by tiny animals called zooplankton that are then consumed by larger species. When phytoplankton and zooplankton die, they may sink to the ocean floor, taking the carbon stored in their bodies with them.

Satellite instruments like the Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua let us observe ocean color, which researchers can use to estimate abundance — more green equals more phytoplankton. But not all phytoplankton are equal. Some bigger species, like diatoms, need more nutrients in the surface waters. The bigger species also are generally heavier so more readily sink to the ocean floor.

As ocean currents change, however, the layers of surface water that have the right mix of sunlight, temperature and nutrients for phytoplankton to thrive are changing as well. “In the Northern Hemisphere, there’s a declining trend in phytoplankton,” said Cecile Rousseaux, an oceanographer with the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at Goddard. She used models to determine that the decline at the highest latitudes was due to a decrease in abundance of diatoms. One future mission, the Pre-Aerosol, Clouds, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, will use instruments designed to see shades of color in the ocean — and through that, allow scientists to better quantify different phytoplankton species.

In the Arctic, however, phytoplankton may be increasing due to climate change. The NASA-sponsored Impacts of Climate on the Eco-Systems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment (ICESCAPE) expedition on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in 2010 and 2011 found unprecedented phytoplankton blooms under about three feet (a meter) of sea ice off Alaska. Scientists think this unusually thin ice allows sunlight to filter down to the water, catalyzing plant blooms where they had never been observed before.

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Climate Case Studies

People taking action to promote climate resilience

U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

• Steps to Resilience
• Case Studies

Communities, businesses, and individuals are taking action to document their vulnerabilities and build resilience to climate-related impacts. Click dots on the map to preview case studies, or browse stories below the map. Use the drop-down menus above to find stories of interest. To expand your results, click the Clear Filters link.

A Climate for Resilience

A Community Effort Stems Runoff to Safeguard Corals in Puerto Rico

A Community Works Together to Reduce Damages from Flooding

A Coral Bleaching Story With an Unknown Ending

A New Generation of Water Planners Confronts Change Along the Colorado River

A Road-Flooding Fix for a California State Park

A Town with a Plan: Community, Climate, and Conversations

Addressing Links Between Climate and Public Health in Alaska Native Villages

Addressing Short- and Long-Term Risks to Water Supply

Addressing Water Supply Risks from Flooding and Drought

After Katrina, Health Care Facility's Infrastructure Planned to Withstand Future Flooding

After Record-Breaking Rains, a Major Medical Center's Hazard Mitigation Plan Improves Resilience

Alaska Native Villages Work to Enhance Local Economies as They Minimize Environmental Risks

Alaskan Tribes Join Together to Assess Harmful Algal Blooms

Alert System Helps Strawberry Growers Reduce Costs

All Hands on Deck: Creating Green Infrastructure to Combat Flooding in Toledo

Amending Land Use Codes for Natural Infrastructure Planning

American Rivers: Increasing Community and Ecological resilience by Removing a Patapsco River Fish Barrier

An Inland City Prepares for a Changing Climate

An Integrated Plan for Water and Long-Term Ecological Resilience

Analyzing Future Urban Growth and Flood Risk in North Carolina

And the Trees Will Last Forever

Anticipating and Preventing the Spread of Invasive Plants

Aquifer Storage and Recovery: A Strategy for Long-Term Water Security in Puerto Rico

Asheville Makes a Plan for Climate Resilience

Ashland Climate and Energy Action Plan

Assessing a Tropical Estuary's Climate Change Risks

Assessing Climate Risks in a National Estuary

Assessing the Timing and Extent of Coastal Change in Western Alaska

Balancing Variable Water Supply With Increasing Demand in a Changing Climate

Battling Blazes Across Borders

Better Soil, Better Climate

Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe Undertakes Innovative Action to Reduce the Causes of Climate Change

Boise's Climate Action Roadmap

Boosting Community Storm Resilience in Alaska

Boosting Ecosystem Resilience in the Southwest's Sky Islands

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Climate Change Collection

HKS climate change cases span the globe and cover a variety of disciplines from economics to leadership, and from energy policy to international trade. For your convenience, this resource has been categorized in two ways: by topic and by region .

Climate Change Cases by Topic

Climate change cases by region.

Negotiating toward the Paris Accords: WWF and the Role of Forests in the 2015 Climate Agreement  by Pamela Varley and Robert Wilkinson

Shaping the Future of Solar Power: Climate Change, Industrial Policy and Free Trade by Anjani Datla and Robert Lawrence

Shaping the Future of Solar Power: Climate Change, Industrial Policy and Free Trade (B)  by Anjani Datla and Robert Lawrence

Solar Panels and Safeguards: Rising Tensions in the Global Trading System by Anjani Datla and Robert Lawrence

Buchanan Renewables: Bringing Power to Liberia  by Tamara Heimur, Henry Lee, and Akash Deep Evaluating the Impact of Solar Lamps in Uganda  by Anjani Datla, Dan Levy, and Patricia Garcia-Rios

Fighting Pollution with Data: Environmental Audits and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board and sequel   by Anjani Datla and Rohini Pande

Central America

Costa Rica's Forests and the Market for Carbon Emissions Reduction Credits by Rene Castro Salazar and Jose Gomez-Ibanez

Rural Electrification in Nicaragua (Abridged)  by Tahir Sheikh and Jose Gomez-Ibanez

South America

Integrating Renewable Energy in Argentina  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee

Untapped Potential: Renewable Energy in Argentina  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee

U.S., Canada, and Europe

A Cascade of Emergencies: Responding to Superstorm Sandy in New York City (A)  by David W. Giles and Arnold M. Howitt 

A Cascade of Emergencies: Responding to Superstorm Sandy in New York City (B)  by David W. Giles and Arnold M. Howitt  Ambitious but Achievable: Using Land Use and Transportation Plans to Reduce GHG Emissions in California  and  sequel  by David Luberoff, Carl Allen, and Jose Gomez-Ibanez Caño Martín Peña: Land Ownership and Politics Collide in Puerto Rico  by Patricia Garcia-Rios and Quinton Mayne Choosing the Road Less Traveled: How Cycling Took Hold in Copenhagen by Pamela Varley and Quinton Mayne

Climate Resilience in New York City: The Battle over East River Park  by Patricia Garcia-Rios and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards 2017-2025  by Anjani Datla and Albert Nichols Electric Vehicles in Cities  by Yennga Khuong and Jose Gomez-Ibanez Gainesville Regional Utilities' Feed-in Tariff  and  epilogue  by Leah Stokes and Henry Lee

Greenland and the Paris Agreement  by Katie Segal, Elsenguaq Silassen, and Halla Hrund Logadóttir Iceland's Energy Policy: Finding the Right Path Forward  by Halla Hrund Logadóttir and Henry Lee Implementing the Inflation Reduction Act: Can the Tax Code Transform American Energy?  by Laura Winig and John D. Donahue Innovation at GSA: Zero Environmental Footprint and the Extreme Challenge (A)  by James Quinn, Patricia Garcia-Rios, and Steven Kelman Miami-Dade County and Sea Rise  and  sequel  by Henry Lee, Natalie Unterstell, Shauna Theel, and Pinar De Neve Mothers Out Front by Laura Winig and Marshall Ganz Pricing Carbon: The Birth of British Columbia's Carbon Tax  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee Oregon's Wind Energy Health Impact Assessment  by David Tannenwald and Arnold M. Howitt Power Partnership: The Creation of a Hybrid Electric Delivery Truck Eaton, Fedex, and Environmental Defense  by Barbara J. Mack and Alan Trager The California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32)  by Jose Gomez-Ibanez The Challenge of Adapting to Climate Change: King County Brings Local Action to a Global Threat  and  sequel  by Pamela Varley and John D. Donahue This Far and No Further: The Rise and Fall of the Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences  by David Kennedy and Bill Clark

Economics of Climate Change

Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards 2017-2025  by Anjani Datla and Albert Nichols Pricing Carbon: The Birth of British Columbia's Carbon Tax  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee Shaping the Future of Solar Power: Climate Change, Industrial Policy and Free Trade  by Anjani Datla and Robert Lawrence

Shaping the Future of Solar Power: Climate Change, Industrial Policy and Free Trade (B)  by Anjani Datla and Robert Lawrence Solar Panels and Safeguards: Rising Tensions in the Global Trading System  by Anjani Datla and Robert Lawrence Untapped Potential: Renewable Energy in Argentina  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee 

Return to Topics

Government and Regulation Buchanan Renewables: Bringing Power to Liberia  by Tamara Heimur, Henry Lee, and Akash Deep Choosing the Road Less Traveled: How Cycling Took Hold in Copenhagen  by Pamela Varley and Quinton Mayne Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards 2017-2025  by Anjani Datla and Albert Nichols Gainesville Regional Utilities' Feed-in Tariff  and  epilogue  by Leah Stokes and Henry Lee Miami-Dade County and Sea Rise  and  sequel  by Henry Lee, Natalie Unterstell, Shauna Theel, and Pinar De Neve Pricing Carbon: The Birth of British Columbia's Carbon Tax  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee The California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32)  by Jose Gomez-Ibanez The Challenge of Adapting to Climate Change: King County Brings Local Action to a Global Threat  and  sequel  by Pamela Varley and John D. Donahue

Evidence and Decision-Making Evaluating the Impact of Solar Lamps in Uganda  by Anjani Datla, Dan Levy, and Patricia Garcia-Rios Fighting Pollution with Data: Environmental Audits and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Rohini Pande Mothers Out Front  by Laura Winig and Marshall Ganz

Leadership and Negotiation Innovation at GSA: Zero Environmental Footprint and the Extreme Challenge (A)  by James Quinn, Patricia Garcia-Rios, and Steven Kelman Mothers Out Front  by Laura Winig and Marshall Ganz Negotiating toward the Paris Accords: WWF & the Role of Forests in the 2015 Climate Agreement  by Pamela Varley and Robert Wilkinson Pricing Carbon: The Birth of British Columbia's Carbon Tax  and  sequel  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee The Challenge of Adapting to Climate Change: King County Brings Local Action to a Global Threat  and  sequel  by Pamela Varley and John D. Donahue This Far and No Further: The Rise and Fall of the Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences  by David Kennedy and Bill Clark

Energy Policy and Renewables

Ambitious but Achievable: Using Land Use and Transportation Plans to Reduce GHG Emissions in California  and  sequel  by David Luberoff, Carl Allen, and Jose Gomez-Ibanez Buchanan Renewables: Bringing Power to Liberia  by Tamara Heimur, Henry Lee, and Akash Deep Caño Martín Peña: Land Ownership and Politics Collide in Puerto Rico  by Patricia Garcia-Rios and Quinton Mayne Costa Rica's Forests and the Market for Carbon Emissions Reduction Credits  by Rene Castro Salazar and Jose Gomez-Ibanez Electric Vehicles in Cities  by Yennga Khuong and Jose Gomez-Ibanez Greenland and the Paris Agreement  by Katie Segal, Elsenguaq Silassen, and Halla Hrund Logadóttir

Iceland's Energy Policy: Finding the Right Path Forward  by Halla Hrund Logadóttir and Henry Lee Implementing the Inflation Reduction Act: Can the Tax Code Transform American Energy?  by Laura Winig and John D. Donahue Integrating Renewable Energy in Argentina  by Anjani Datla and Henry Lee Oregon's Wind Energy Health Impact Assessment  by David Tannenwald and Arnold M. Howitt Power Partnership: The Creation of a Hybrid Electric Delivery Truck Eaton, Fedex, and Environmental Defense  by Barbara J. Mack and Alan Trager

Rural Electrification in Nicaragua (Abridged)  by Tahir Sheikh and Jose Gomez-Ibanez

Disaster Preparedness

A Cascade of Emergencies: Responding to Superstorm Sandy in New York City (B)  by David W. Giles and Arnold M. Howitt Climate Resilience in New York City: The Battle over East River Park  by Patricia Garcia-Rios and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner  Miami-Dade County and Sea Rise  and  sequel  by Henry Lee, Natalie Unterstell, Shauna Theel, and Pinar De Neve

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What We Do: Case Studies in Climate Change

Field trip lets students study climate change in the living lab of Eastern California.

Danielle Underferth

When it comes to climate change, California provides an ideal case study. And Scot Miller wants his students to be where the science is.

Miller, an assistant professor in the Whiting School of Engineering, took students on a field trip to Death Valley this spring to round out their classwork for the seminar Case Studies in Climate Change. The trip was designed to give the group a thorough understanding of how the Earth’s climate has fluctuated over time, how those fluctuations can be traced in the physical environment, and how one state – California – is managing repercussions from the rapid, human-made changes underway now.

Studying the past to understand the present

Climate change is not a new phenomenon. Over the past several million years, the Earth's climate has changed dramatically, with periods dominated by roaming glaciers and even a “snowball Earth” phase, when the entire globe was covered in ice.

Death Valley National Park and Eastern California are excellent locations to observe evidence of these changes, says Miller. “The region is a hub of global research on past climate change.”

It’s also an ideal place to study and understand the impacts of current climate change, he says.

“There is arguably no state that is more heavily impacted by current climate change than California, and the state government has taken global leadership by enacting innovative climate mitigation and management policies.”

Learning across disciplines

In order to understand climate trends and impacts, Miller’s students studied and did field work in the areas of geology, ecology, chemistry, meteorology, hydrology, and even public policy.

Activities included mapping and interpreting geological formations that show how the Earth swung from cold to hot climate extremes, measuring trees in different ecosystems to estimate how much carbon is locked up in certain ecosystems, and then modeling how carbon storage may change as those ecosystems adjust to a changing climate, collecting tree cores to observe variations in climate that stressed or benefited trees, and evaluating how California’s policies improve, or in some cases worsen climate stresses.

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• Published: 15 December 2020

Overcoming gender inequality for climate resilient development

• Marina Andrijevic   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0199-1988 1 , 2 ,
• Jesus Crespo Cuaresma 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ,
• Tabea Lissner 2 ,
• Adelle Thomas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0407-2891 1 , 7 &
• Carl-Friedrich Schleussner   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8471-848X 1 , 2  

Nature Communications volume  11 , Article number:  6261 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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• Climate-change adaptation
• Socioeconomic scenarios

Gender inequalities are reflected in differential vulnerability, and exposure to the hazards posed by climate change and addressing them is key to increase the adaptive capacities of societies. We provide trajectories of the Gender Inequality Index (GII) alongside the Shared-Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), a scenario framework widely used in climate science. Here we find that rapid improvements in gender inequality are possible under a sustainable development scenario already in the near-term. The share of girls growing up in countries with the highest gender inequality could be reduced to about 24% in 2030 compared to about 70% today. Largely overcoming gender inequality as assessed in the GII would be within reach by mid-century. Under less optimistic scenarios, gender inequality may persist throughout the 21st century. Our results highlight the importance of incorporating gender in scenarios assessing future climate impacts and underscore the relevance of addressing gender inequalities in policies aiming to foster climate resilient development.

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Introduction.

Differential risks to climate change impacts are shaped by variations in vulnerability and exposure within and across societies. Together with their biophysical determinants, vulnerability, and exposure are products of unevenly distributed socioeconomic development and multidimensional inequality 1 . Inequalities are reflected in income and wealth, which remain central subjects of socioeconomic research, but also in gender, education, racial, and ethnic profiles 2 . Socially marginalized groups are often affected by the interplay of these different dimensions and are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

A growing body of literature points at the facets of differential vulnerability and exposure to the impacts of climate change across genders, stressing that women are not inherently more at risk, but that intersections between gender, power dynamics, socio-economic structures, and societal expectations result in climate impacts being experienced very differently by women 3 . Research has also highlighted missed opportunities for action when women’s agency in policy and decision making is not fully seized 4 . In our contribution, we focus on the role of gender inequality, which despite its prominence as a cross-cutting theme in the sustainable development discourse, lacks concrete operationalizations in the analysis of future impacts of climate change and the extent to which these can still be avoided 5 .

Current and future damages of climate change are tied to the ability with which affected regions and populations adapt to changing conditions. In the risk framework of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), vulnerability to climate change impacts is inextricably linked to adaptive capacity, which is defined as “the ability of systems, institutions, humans, and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to respond to consequences” 6 . Adaptive capacity, in turn, hinges on a range of socioeconomic factors, gender inequality playing one of the central roles, particularly in areas most vulnerable to climate change. The linkages between gender inequality and adaptive capacity range from uneven access to resources, to cultural norms and entrenched social structures 7 , 8 .

Accounting for gender inequality and its possible future trajectories in the assessment of the pathways of adaptive capacity adds another layer to the identification of societal climate impact hotspots—areas where expected biophysical impacts intersect with socioeconomic vulnerability 9 , 10 . In this paper, we present an extension of the set of socioeconomic scenarios—the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) 11 —with an indicator of gender inequality, the Gender Inequality Index (GII) 12 of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The SSPs are a widely used toolkit in climate change research and provide a basis for the operationalization of indicators of gender inequality in integrated assessments.

The GII used here to reflect gender inequality consists of three dimensions: health (maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rates), educational and political empowerment (male to female ratio in parliamentary seats and secondary education) and participation in the labor market (male to female ratio in labor force participation rates, see the “Methods” section for additional details on the indicator) 12 . We collected the individual components from their respective original sources and reconstructed the index following the approach laid out in the Technical Notes of the Human Development Report 12 . This reconstruction produced more complete time series than those available hitherto (see Supplementary Fig.  1 ). The index ranges from 0 to 1, with higher values reflecting higher levels of inequality between men and women.

The multi-faceted nature of gender inequality at all levels of socio-economic development makes aggregation into indicator a complex exercise. Unsurprisingly, most indicators (including the GII), face justified criticism 13 , 14 (see the “Methods” section for an extended discussion). We consider the dimensions covered in the GII to describe necessary conditions of gender inequality, while acknowledging that they are not sufficient to characterize gender inequality across all the dimensions that contribute to it. In the light of these caveats, overcoming the inequality dimensions covered in the GII does not automatically mean that universal gender equality is achieved, and we do not assert that any country in the world can claim to have achieved full gender equality to date or in the near future. It is important to keep these limitations in mind when interpreting the results.

The ramifications of gender inequality for addressing climate change can be regarded through two lenses: women’s differential vulnerability and adaptive capacity; and the role of women in mitigation and adaptation actions. To illustrate the importance of accounting for gender inequality in both adaptation and mitigation of climate change, we correlate the GII with an adaptation-relevant and a mitigation-relevant metrics (compare Fig.  1 ).

a GII vs. vulnerability component of the ND-GAIN index (country-level estimates for 2017). b GII (country-level average 2005–2010) vs. CLIMI (countries’ communications of climate policies between 2005 and 2010).

Previous research shows that the gender-differentiated vulnerability to climate change is most pronounced in agriculture 15 , 16 and water 17 , 18 sectors, natural disasters 19 , reproductive health 20 , mental health, and well-being 21 . We use a broad measure of climate change vulnerability of the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index (ND-GAIN) 22 , a widely used summary measure of a country’s vulnerability to climate change and its readiness to improve resilience (for more applications, see refs. 23 , 24 , 25 ). Figure  1a depicts the correlation between the GII and the ND-GAIN vulnerability indicator (consisting of six life-supporting sectors: food, water, health, ecosystem services, human habitat, and infrastructure), and depicts a strong positive relationship between the two variables.

At the same time, a strand of research suggests that women’s representation in politics leads to more stringent climate action 26 , 27 , thus making a case for consideration of mainstreaming gender equality in mitigation. More broadly, female participation in decision-making is closely linked to various facets of socioeconomic progress: from higher spending on health and education to better quality of institutions, democracy and higher economic growth 26 , 28 , 29 , 30 . Following a recent approach 26 , in Fig.  1b we correlate the GII with the Climate Laws, Institutions and Measures Index (CLIMI) 31 , a measure of climate change mitigation policies set by countries (for more applications, see refs. 32 , 33 ). The correlation of the two indices suggests that low levels of gender inequality tend to occur in parallel to high levels of climate action, which corroborates previous research 26 .

Results and discussion

While the importance of rapid and stringent mitigation cannot be overemphasized, and recent research insights provide indications that gender equality facilitates climate action, here we focus on the importance of gender equality for adaptive capacity and vulnerability to climate change. To this end, we expand the scenario space of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), with the intention of improving the understanding of adaptation challenges under different socio-economic conditions. The SSPs are scenarios that explore a range of possible futures that illustrate how socio-economic conditions might change over the next century and what implications these conditions may have for climate change adaptation and mitigation. SSPs quantify five different narratives of socio-economic futures to operationalize them for climate change research 11 —they are a widely used tool in climate research community, indispensable for integrated assessments of the dynamics between socioeconomic and climate change variables, and are also the scenario framework used in the Sixth Assessment report of the IPCC.

SSP1, the ‘sustainability’ scenario, is characterized by low challenges to mitigation and adaptation, a result of increased investments in education, health, renewable energy sources and declining inequalities between and within countries, thus limiting impacts and increasing adaptive capacity. SSP2, the ‘middle of the road’ scenario, maintains premediated challenges to adaptation and mitigation, and is a pathway of uneven and slower socioeconomic progress, compatible with the continuation of historical trends. SSP3 is characterized by high challenges to both mitigation and adaptation, which are a product of a growing divergence between economies, weak international cooperation and increase in internal and international conflicts. SSP4, the scenario of ‘inequality’, leads to low challenges for mitigation, due to technological advancements in high income countries, but high challenges for adaptation, because of an unequal distribution of advancements and resources across countries. Finally, SSP5 is similar to SSP1 in the fast socioeconomic progress on all fronts, but with the major difference of the progress being powered by fossil fuels, which produces substantially higher emissions and resulting climate impacts.

So far, the SSPs storylines have been quantified in future trajectories of income 34 , 35 , population 36 , education 36 , urbanization 37 , the Human Development Index 38 , inequality 39 , and governance 40 . Gender inequality is qualitatively featured in the scenarios’ storylines focusing on the demographic and human development elements (see Table  1 ), and is to a certain extent reflected in the measures of discrepancies in educational attainment between men and women in the population projections by age and sex 36 . Our contribution provides projections of gender inequality, as quantified by the GII, which are compatible with the SSP scenarios described above and thus provide a new dimension to the assessment of potential future climate change adaptation pathways.

To achieve an internally consistent extension of the SSPs, we use the existing indicators under the SSP framework to analyze past trends and project future dynamics of gender equality. Our results indicate that past trends in the GII can be robustly explained by the dynamics of GDP per capita, population with post-secondary education and the gender gap in mean years of schooling after controlling for country-specific equilibria and global trends (see “Methods” for regression results and Supplementary Material for a sensitivity analysis). As is the case within the methodological framework of the SSPs, the projections of the GII are not to be interpreted as predictions, but as quantifications of narrative-driven scenarios.

Our projection exercise shows that major improvements in terms of overcoming gender inequality are achieved worldwide by mid-century under the SSP 1 scenario (Fig.  2c ). Significant improvements happen following the SSP2 (Fig.  2d ) pathway, though with notable exceptions in the most vulnerable parts of the world. In the SSP3 world (Fig.  2e ), however, only marginal progress is made in parts of Latin America, while in Sub Saharan Africa gender inequality is projected to deteriorate (compare Fig.  2e ).

a Components of the GII. b Values of the GII in 2017. c – e Projections of the GII for the year 2050, for c , SSP1 (‘sustainability’), d SSP2 (‘middle of the road’) and ( e ) SSP3 (‘a rocky road’).

Given the central role that gender equality has for adaptive capacity, the future outlook concerning how well a country or a region can cope with the impacts of climate change can be very different depending on the scenario of socio-economic development. Across all world regions, improvements in gender equality in inclusive high-development pathways (SSP1, 5) are most pronounced in the near-term until mid-century. Note that the trajectories for SSPs 1 and 5 largely overlap due to similar levels of the underlying dimensions that gender inequality is a function of (education, GDP and gender gap in mean years of schooling). The summary of regional levels of gender inequality in Fig.  3 reflects the severity of the difference in levels of the GII, and the importance of near-term improvements for less well-off regions. As it is the case for other indicators of socio-economic development 38 , 40 , the rates of improvement in the GII towards gender equality are highest up to 2050 in these scenarios. Less optimistic development pathways show a linear continuation of current trends or even a slow-down. Note that, by design, the SSPs do not allow for a systematic long-run deterioration of socio-economic indicators.

Historical values of the GII index and projections over five SSP scenarios, averaged by world region.

In the wider context of sustainable development—still inextricably linked to the climate change problem—the gender dimension is a crucial policy component, including as a stand-alone item under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations’ 2030 agenda. SDG 5 strives to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” 41 , and the progress towards the multiple goals under SDG 5 is tracked with a set of individual indicators. The Gender Inequality Index presented here is a more holistic measure than the specific indicators used in monitoring SDG 5. With its dimensions related to reproductive health and decision-making, as well as political and employment participation, it relates to underlying structural issues determining gender inequality 42 . As such, the GII and its projections can be a useful tool to assess how the very basic conditions for making progress on SDG 5 vary in different socioeconomic futures.

Many of the countries experiencing high levels of gender inequality are in the mid-stages of the demographic transition 43 , implying that their populations are expected to substantially grow in the next decades. Such a demographic development exposes young women to slow improvements in health, as well as to unequal opportunities in education and employment. Given the relatively high life expectancy of women born today, the level of gender inequality they are exposed to in the next decade will affect a cohort who will shape most of the 21st century. Figure  4 illustrates the opportunities for near-term improvements of gender inequality: already in 2030, the fraction of young girls growing up in environments of lower gender inequality (the present-day range of the GII in OECD countries) can be more than 2.5 larger in a pathway such as SSP1, where rates of population growth slow down and socioeconomic progress speeds up. On the other hand, scenario SSP3 virtually retains the present global distribution of our gender inequality indicator, due to faster population growth and slower and uneven socioeconomic development up to 2030. This underscores how rapid improvements towards achieving gender equality in the near-term would be possible, in line with the goals of the SDG 5. Note that for reasons of brevity we here show only scenarios 1–3, which encompass the full range of the five scenarios, and exhibit large differences between each other.

GII values for 2017 and projections for 2030 are divided in two groups. The division is based is based on the present-day range of GII in the OECD countries (0.001–0.312), which splits the countries in GII ≤ 0.3 and GII > 0.3. The GII estimates are coupled with population projections disaggregated by female population projections for two broad age groups: ( a ), 0–14 years and ( b ), older than 15.

Our analysis outlines potential future gender inequality pathways under different scenarios of socio-economic development outlined in the SSPs. Our projections show that SSP1 results in major improvements in gender equality on a global scale while SSP2 shows some significant improvements but with notable exceptions in the most vulnerable regions, including Africa. In contrast, in the SSP3 world, gender inequality at the global level is either only marginally reduced or, in some cases, intensified. We show how such pathways may achieve concrete near-term improvements in the gender inequality environment for girls in the coming decade or may contribute to maintaining the status quo. The environments of gender inequality have significant implications for the growing global population, whose actions affect achievement of the SDGs. As a crucial component of adaptive capacity, gender inequality also plays a decisive role in allowing populations to adapt to increasing climate impacts. Overcoming gender inequality is a cornerstone of climate resilient development—and improvements may have far-reaching benefits for adaptation and mitigation alike. Achieving climate resilience has to be designed in a way that not only prevents further erosion of gender equality, but actively works towards it, thereby reducing vulnerability and providing an empowering environment for strengthening women’s agency.

Gender Inequality Index (GII) : the analysis in this paper is based on the GII 12 , produced by the United Nations Development Programme. It integrates measures of reproductive health (maternal mortality ratio, adolescent birth rate), empowerment (secondary education, parliamentary seats), and labor market outputs (labor force participation rate).

The GII has been criticized on several grounds 13 , 44 , with key issues relating to its functional form (which is asserted to be unnecessarily complex and difficult to interpret); the health dimension of the index variables not having a male equivalent (unlike the dimensions of economic, political and labor market metrics); and the potential penalization of poor countries owing to the possibility that poor reproductive health is a result of general poverty rather than gender inequality. Attempts have been made to simplify the index and make its interpretation more intuitive, though no clear consensus on how exactly the adapted indicator should look like has been reached, and to our best knowledge, the UNDP has not made any amends to the index so far.

The criticism about the penalization of less developed countries is concerned with the indicator’s health dimensions (i.e., maternal mortality and adolescent birth rates), which could be caused by poverty rather than gender inequality, thereby obscuring the implications of this dimension. The very rationale behind accounting for maternal mortality and adolescent birth rate as a dimension of gendered health inequality stems from the fact that poor maternal health sets women back uniquely, irrespective of the reason and without an equivalent risk for men, and as such arguably contributes to gender inequality. Reducing maternal mortality and adolescent pregnancy are also among the targets of the Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality 41 . In addition, recent applications found that the GII explains variance in child malnutrition and mortality in low and middle-income countries with similar income levels 45 , implying that there the index does provide information on the variation of gender inequality across countries beyond that contained in GDP per capita differences. Finally, the fact that reproductive health is strongly affected by climate change impacts such as extreme heat is particularly relevant for the projection exercise presented here, and as such merits consideration as an own standing dimension of climate adaptation 46 .

Further support for the GII’s reflection of a broader understanding of gender inequality can be found in studies where it is found to correlate with other manifestations of gender inequality that go beyond what is included in the calculation of the index, such as the suicide gender ratio 47 , adolescent dating violence 48 , and intimate partner violence 49 .

Alternative indicators of gender equality

Alternative indicators available in the literature incorporate different aspects of gender inequality. In the following, three other indicators will be introduced and examined in relation to the GII.

Gender Development Index (GDI) : The GDI 12 is designed within the Human Development Reports provided by the United Nations Development Programme. Similarly to the Gender Inequality Index, it accounts for metrics of health, education and economic empowerment. The economic component of the index is difficult to reconstruct due to the scarcity of data on the wage gap between women and men, which is necessary for the calculation of the overall index. In addition, variation between countries is not as large as in the GII index, and the GDI does not capture basic metrics such as maternal and adolescent health, which are relevant for climate change vulnerability. The correlation of the GDI with the GII is depicted in Fig.  5a .

Correlation coefficient ( R ) and the statistical significance (p) are provided for the relationship between GII and ( a ) Gender Development Index, b Women, Peace, and Security Index, and ( c ) Gender Gap index.

Women, Peace and Security Index (WPS) : The WPS 50 is provided by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security and index captures three dimensions: inclusion (economic, social, political), justice (formal laws and informal discrimination) and security (violence, safety). Even though this index incorporates dimensions of high relevance for climate change-related vulnerability (particularly violence), it is only available at two points in time and is therefore suboptimal for the estimation of the historical response function that underpins our analysis. However, it is highly correlated to the GII used in this paper (see Fig.  5b ).

Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) : produced by the World Economic Forum, the GGI 51 incorporates four dimensions: economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment. The dimensions are represented by 14 different indicators. Compared to the GII used in this analysis, the GGI contains similar dimensions and there are overlaps among the underlying indicators to the GII used in this analysis, while the major difference is in the health component, where the GII considers maternal mortality and adolescent pregnancy, while the GGG takes into account life expectancy. Similarly to other indices, the time series of GGI is shorter than that of the GII. The GGI has the lowest (albeit statistically significant) correlation coefficient with the GII (Fig.  5c ).

Gender equality indicators and climate adaptation

Compared to other commonly used indicators including the Gender Development Index 12 , the Gender Empowerment Measure 51 , and the Women, Peace and Security Index 50 , we find that the GII is particularly indicative of hindered adaptive capacity in many climate-vulnerable countries, since its dimensions (such as maternal health, participation in economic and political life) point at the very basic disempowerment of women that directly reduces their capacity to adapt to climate change. The GII is also more holistic in its economic dimension, by considering education and labor force participation rather than income, since the data on gender gap in earned income tends to be problematic 52 . In addition, the construction of the GII precludes the different dimensions of the indicator from compensating for each other (i.e., poor performance in one dimension cannot be compensated for with higher performance in another dimension in GII). While this is beyond the scope of this paper, application of our analytical framework to different indicators of gender inequality and analyzing the effect of the choice of the indicator on projections could be a fruitful research avenue.

Following the approach laid out in the Technical Notes of the Human Development Report (2018), we reconstructed the GII with the same underlying indicators, with the aim of obtaining more complete time series than those available hitherto. The data are available for majority of countries and can be reconstructed back to 1995 (see Supplementary Fig.  1 ). To capitalize on data availability and completeness, we use the same source indicators except for the education component, which we source from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital 36 for better consistency with the projections that follow in the second stage of the analysis. The calculation of inequality uses an association-sensitive method, with geometric means of the three dimensions calculated for each gender separately, and then aggregated across genders using a harmonic mean. For comparison of the reconstructed GII and the data provided through the UNDP website, see Supplementary Fig.  1 . Data analysis and projections were done using R software version 1.3.1073.

To analyze the relationship between gender inequality and other socio-economic dimensions, we use a simple econometric model that expresses the GII as a function of GDP per capita, the share of population with higher education and the difference in mean years of schooling between men and women, and accounts for country-specific time-invariant characteristics using fixed effects. The model is aimed at replicating long-run dynamics in GII, with the theoretical underpinning that trends in socioeconomic variables correlate with the changes observed in gender inequality over long periods of time. From an econometric point of view, it can be considered a cointegration relationship posing common trends in gender inequality, income and human capital indicators around a country-specific equilibrium.

Prior to the analysis, the GII is transformed to account for the bounded nature of the index, which is defined between 0 and 1. The variable used in the panel regression models is given by \({\mathrm{GII}}^ \ast = {\mathrm{log}}\left( {\frac{{{\mathrm{GII}}_{{\mathrm{i}},{\mathrm{t}}}}}{{1 - {\mathrm{GII}}_{{\mathrm{i}},{\mathrm{t}}}}}} \right)\) , where \({\mathrm{GII}}_{{\mathrm{i,t}}}\) is the original Gender Inequality Index for country i in period t. Our basic specification is given by:

where \(\alpha _i\) captures country fixed effects and \(\varepsilon _{i,t}\) is the error term, assumed to be stationary. Several robustness checks carried out by changing the specification can be found in Supplementary Table  1 .

Projections for the 21st century are carried out by combining the parameter estimates from the specification given by Eq. ( 1 ) with the existing projections of GDP 34 , population by age, sex and education 36 and gender gap in education 36 thereby remaining internally consistent with the SSP scenario framework and providing direct comparability with the rest of the socioeconomic projections existing. The SSP population projections 36 were employed to derive the proportion of women experiencing different levels of gender inequality in the future at the global level. We split the population of women into two age groups: 0–14 and 15+. The thresholds for dividing the distribution of GII are based on the levels of gender inequality currently in the OECD countries (0.002–0.315).

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

Original GII data is available through the UNDP website ( http://hdr.undp.org/en/data ). Data on maternal mortality ratio is available from UNICEF ( https://data.unicef.org/topic/maternal-health/maternal-mortality/ ), and adolescent birth rates from WHO ( https://www.who.int/gho/maternal_health/reproductive_health/adolescent_fertility/en/ ). Historical GDP was obtained from the Penn World Tables  7.0 ( https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/pwt-releases/pwt-7.0 ) and projected values through the IIASA SSP database ( https://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/SspDb/ ). Data on educational attainment and gender gap in mean years of schooling is accessible through the Data Explorer of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital ( http://dataexplorer.wittgensteincentre.org/wcde-v2/ ).

Code availability

Code underlying the results is available at https://github.com/marina-andrijevic/gender_equality2020 .

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the scientific community for developing the SSP scenarios and to the International Institute for Advanced System Analysis (IIASA) for hosting the SSP database. M.A. and C.F.S. acknowledge support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (01LN1711A).

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Climate-Smart Intervention Takes Top 2023 Case Studies in the Environment Prize

Case Studies in the Environment is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition .

Eligible submissions are judged for their ability to translate discrete case studies into broad, generalizable findings; for advancing a strong perspective and engaging narrative; for being accessible to their intended audiences; for addressing topics that are important or notable in their novelty, impact, or urgency; and which contribute to the teaching of environmental concepts to students and/or practitioners.

The winning case study from the 2023 competition, “ Building Resilience in Jamaica’s Farming Communities: Insights From a Climate-Smart Intervention ,” from The University of the West Indies’ Donovan Campbell and Shaneica Lester, demonstrates that while climate change poses immense threats to the environment and to human livelihoods, adaptation also provides opportunities to strengthen a community.

“This positivity and sense of agency is critical to the success of climate initiatives,” noted CSE Editor-in-Chief Dr. Jennifer Bernstein. “The editorial team felt that the manuscript exemplifies the journal at its best–identifying and evaluating an important environmental question using robust interdisciplinary methods.”

The honorable mention articles from the 2023 competition are “ Teaching the Complex Dynamics of Clean Energy Subsidies With the Help of a Model-as-Game ,” from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Eric Hittinger, Qing Miao, and Eric Williams; and “ Barriers and Facilitators for Successful Community Forestry: Lessons Learned and Practical Applications From Case Studies in India and Guatemala ,” from Vishal Jamkar (University of Minnesota), Megan Butler (Macalester College), and Dean Current (University of Minnesota).

“‘Teaching the Complex Dynamics of Clean Energy Subsidies’ recognizes the value of subsidies, while at the same time acknowledging contextual constraints. The game itself allows students to work through subsidy design via a number of cases, and provides high quality material for use immediately in the classroom. This is a wildly useful tool, and exemplifies what we want to see with respect to accessible pedagogy using environmental case studies as a focus.”

“Barriers and Facilitators for Successful Community Forestry” is the author team’s second case study contribution to the journal, extending the well-developed framework of their previous article, “ Understanding Facilitators and Barriers to Success: Framework for Developing Community Forestry Case Studies ” and applying it to two unique locations.

Both the winning case study and honorable mentions have been made freely available to the public at online.ucpress.edu/cse .

The Case Studies in the Environment team extends their gratitude to everyone who submitted articles for the 2023 competition. For previous Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition winners, please see our prize competition landing page .

Case Studies in the Environment is a journal of peer-reviewed case study articles and case study pedagogy articles. The journal informs faculty, students, researchers, educators, professionals, and policymakers on case studies and best practices in the environmental sciences and studies. online.ucpress.edu/cse

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Houston’s flood problems offer lessons for cities trying to adapt to a changing climate

Professor Emeritus of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, University of Michigan

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Richard Rood receives funding from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation. He is a co-principal investigator at the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessment Center at the University of Michigan.

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Scenes from the Houston area looked like the aftermath of a hurricane in early May after a series of powerful storms flooded highways and neighborhoods and sent rivers over their banks north of the city.

Hundreds of people had to be rescued from homes, rooftops and cars, according to The Associated Press. Huntsville registered nearly 20 inches of rain from April 29 to May 4, 2024.

Floods are complex events, and they are about more than just heavy rain. Each community has its own unique geography and climate that can exacerbate flooding. On top of those risks, extreme downpours are becoming more common as global temperatures rise.

I work with a center at the University of Michigan that helps communities turn climate knowledge into projects that can reduce the harm of future climate disasters. Flooding events like the Houston area experienced provide case studies that can help cities everywhere manage the increasing risk.

Flood risks are rising

The first thing recent floods tell us is that the climate is changing.

In the past, it might have made sense to consider a flood a rare and random event – communities could just build back. But the statistical distribution of weather events and natural disasters is shifting.

What might have been a 1-in-500-years event may become a 1-in-100-years event , on the way to becoming a 1-in-50-years event. When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, it delivered Houston’s third 500-year flood in the span of three years.

Basic physics points to the rising risks: Global greenhouse gas emissions are increasing global average temperatures. Warming leads to increasing precipitation and more intense downpours, and increased flood potential, particularly when storms hit on already saturated ground.

Communities aren’t prepared

Recent floods are also revealing vulnerabilities in how communities are designed and managed.

Pavement is a major contributor to urban flooding, because water cannot be absorbed and it runs off quickly. The Houston area’s frequent flooding illustrates the risks. Its impervious surfaces expanded by 386 square miles between 1997 and 2017, according to data collected by Rice University . More streets, parking lots and buildings meant more standing water with fewer places for rainwater to sink in.

If the infrastructure is well designed and maintained, flood damage can be greatly reduced. However, increasingly, researchers have found that the engineering specifications for drainage pipes and other infrastructure are no longer adequate to handle the increasing severity of storms and amounts of precipitation. This can lead to roads being washed out and communities being cut off . Failures in maintaining infrastructure, such as levees and storm drains, are a common contributor to flooding.

In the Houston area, reservoirs are also an essential part of flood management, and many were at capacity from persistent rain. This forced managers to release more water when the storms hit.

For a coastal metropolis such as the Houston-Galveston area, rapidly rising sea levels can also reduce the downstream capacity to manage water. These different factors compound to increase flooding risk and highlight the need to not only move water but to find safe places to store it.

The increasing risks affect not only engineering standards, but zoning laws that govern where homes can be built and building codes that describe minimum standards for safety, as well as permitting and environmental regulations.

By addressing these issues now, communities can anticipate and avoid damage rather than only reacting when it’s too late.

Four lessons from case studies

The many effects associated with flooding show why a holistic approach to planning for climate change is necessary, and what communities can learn from one another. For example, case studies show that:

Floods can damage resources that are essential in flood recovery, such as roads, bridges and hospitals . Considering future risks when determining where and how to build these resources enhances the ability to recover from future disasters . Jackson, Mississippi’s water treatment plant was knocked offline by flooding in 2022, leaving people without safe running water. Houston’s Texas Medical Center famously prepared to manage future flooding by installing floodgates, elevating backup generators and taking other steps after heavy damage during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

Flood damage does not occur in isolation. Downpours can trigger mudslides , make sewers more vulnerable and turn manufacturing facilities into toxic contamination risks . These can become broad-scale dangers, extending far beyond individual communities.

It is difficult for an individual or a community to take on even the technical aspects of flood preparation alone – there is too much interconnectedness. Protective measures like levees or channels might protect one neighborhood but worsen the flood risk downstream . Planners should identify the appropriate regional scale, such as the entire drainage basin of a creek or river, and form important relationships early in the planning process.

Natural disasters and the ways communities respond to them can also amplify disparities in wealth and resources. Social justice and ethical considerations need to be brought into planning at the beginning.

Learning to manage complexity

In communities that my colleagues and I have worked with , we have found an increasing awareness of the challenges of climate change and rising flood risks.

In most cases, local officials’ initial instinct has been to protect property and persist without changing where people live. However, that might only buy time for some areas before people will have little option but to move .

When they examine their vulnerabilities, many of these communities have started to recognize the interconnectedness of zoning, storm drains and parks that can absorb runoff, for example. They also begin to see the importance of engaging regional stakeholders to avoid fragmented efforts to adapt that could worsen conditions for neighboring areas.

This is an updated version of an article originally published Aug. 25, 2022 .

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Gas Stove Pollution Risk Is Greatest in Smaller Homes, Study Finds

Gas-burning ranges, a significant contributor to indoor pollution, can produce and spread particularly high levels of some pollutants in smaller spaces.

By Hiroko Tabuchi

For decades, scientists have worked to clean up air pollution from factories, cars and power plants. But researchers are increasingly turning their attention to the air that people breathe indoors. And one appliance has come to the fore as a source of pollutants harmful to human health: the humble gas stove.

A new study from researchers at Stanford University sheds light on how much Americans may be exposed, indoors, to nitrogen dioxide, which comes from burning coal and gas and has been linked to asthma and other respiratory conditions.

The researchers found that, across the country, short-term nitrogen dioxide exposure from typical gas stove use frequently exceeded benchmarks set by both the World Health Organization and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. In the longer term, using gas or propane stoves meant that the typical American could breathe in three-quarters of the nitrogen dioxide levels deemed safe by the W.H.O. within their own homes.

As with outdoor pollution , disadvantaged households may be more exposed, the researchers found. Because gas more easily spreads throughout smaller spaces, people in homes smaller than 800 square feet were exposed to four times more nitrogen dioxide in the long term than people in homes larger than 3,000 square feet, the study found. Black and Latino households were exposed to 20 percent more nitrogen dioxide compared with the national average.

“We’ve done a really good job in this country of reducing outdoor pollution,” said Rob Jackson, professor of earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a principal investigator on the study, which was published on Friday in Science Advances. “But we’ve ignored the risks that people face indoors. And that’s the air that we’re breathing most of the time.”

And though home cooks who use a gas stove are particularly exposed to nitrogen dioxide, he said, “we’re getting a better handle on the migration of pollution down the hall, to the living room and the bedroom.”

The focus on gas stoves isn’t without critics. When a Biden administration official spoke about the health hazards of gas stoves last year, Republican politicians and their allies accused the administration of overreach and of planning to ban gas stoves outright.

Next week, House Republicans are set to meet on a bill called the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, which would make it harder for the Department of Energy to set more stringent energy-efficiency standards on household appliances, including gas stoves.

Health experts say that the health risks posed by gas stoves are significant. “There really is no safe amount of exposure to these toxicants produced by gas or propane, or any fossil fuel, outside or inside,” said Kari Nadeau, chairwoman of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The Stanford study estimated that long-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide from stoves was likely causing up to 50,000 cases of asthma in children.

Some cities and counties have tried to move away from gas altogether, as part of a transition to cleaner forms of energy. Over the past few years, more than 140 cities and local governments have sought to restrict gas hookups in new buildings or have taken other measures to end the use of natural gas in new buildings, though those measures have been challenged in court .

“It isn’t ideal to tell people, they have to rip a perfectly good gas stove out of their home,” Dr. Jackson said. But requiring new homes to install electric stoves, which the study found had virtually no harmful emissions, made sense, he said. “Otherwise, we’re putting dirty polluting infrastructure into the next set of homes, and it will be there and 50 years. No one benefits from that.”

The Stanford team took direct measurements of nitrogen dioxide emissions and concentrations at about 100 homes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City and other major U.S. cities, and used indoor air-quality monitoring and epidemiological risk calculations to estimate exposure and health consequences.

They found that home cooks were exposed to three times more nitrogen dioxide pollution compared to the average, said Yannai Kashtan, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford and the study’s lead researcher. Mr. Kashtan was the subject of a recent article on the debate at Stanford about fossil fuel funding for climate research.

For this study, the researchers also found that the pollution traveled quickly out of the kitchen, down hallways, and into living rooms and bedrooms.

Good ventilation, for example turning on the range hood or opening a window, helped to reduce exposure. But more than that, the study found that “the kind of stove you cook on matters the most,” Mr. Kashtan said. “Ultimately, the best way is to reduce pollution at the source.”

Hiroko Tabuchi covers the intersection of business and climate for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York. More about Hiroko Tabuchi

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Appeals court rejects climate change lawsuit by young Oregon activists against US government

FILE - Kelsey Juliana, of Eugene, Ore., a lead plaintiff who is part of a lawsuit by a group of young people who say U.S. energy policies are causing climate change and hurting their future, greets supporters outside a federal courthouse, June 4, 2019, in Portland, Ore. A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, rejected a long-running lawsuit brought by young Oregon-based climate activists who argued that the U.S. government’s role in climate change violated their constitutional rights. (AP Photo/Andrew Selsky, File)

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SEATTLE (AP) — A federal appeals court panel on Wednesday rejected a long-running lawsuit brought by young Oregon-based climate activists who argued that the U.S. government’s role in climate change violated their constitutional rights.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals previously ordered the case dismissed in 2020, saying that the job of determining the nation’s climate policies should fall to politicians, not judges. But U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon, instead allowed the activists to amend their lawsuit and last year ruled the case could go to trial .

Acting on a request from the Biden administration, a three-judge 9th Circuit panel issued an order Wednesday requiring Aiken to dismiss the case, and she did. Julia Olson, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit law firm representing the activists, said they were considering asking the 9th Circuit to rehear the matter with a larger slate of judges.

“I have been pleading for my government to hear our case since I was ten years old, and I am now nearly 19,” one of the activists, Avery McRae, said in a news release issued by the law firm. “A functioning democracy would not make a child beg for their rights to be protected in the courts, just to be ignored nearly a decade later. I am fed up with the continuous attempts to squash this case and silence our voices.”

The case — called Juliana v. United States after one of the plaintiffs, Kelsey Juliana — has been closely watched since it was filed in 2015. The 21 plaintiffs, who were between the ages of 8 and 18 at the time, said they have a constitutional right to a climate that sustains life. The U.S. government’s actions encouraging a fossil fuel economy, despite scientific warnings about global warming, is unconstitutional, they argued.

The lawsuit was challenged repeatedly by the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations , whose lawyers argued the lawsuit sought to direct federal environmental and energy policies through the courts instead of through the political process. At one point in 2018, a trial was halted by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts just days before it was to begin.

Another climate lawsuit brought by young people was successful: Early this year the Montana Supreme Court upheld a landmark decision requiring regulators to consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions before issuing permits for fossil fuel development.

That case was also brought by Our Children’s Trust, which has filed climate lawsuits in every state on behalf of young plaintiffs since 2010.