Water is the fundamental natural resource that supports life, ecosystems and human society. Thus studying the water cycle is important for sustainable development. In the context of global climate change, a better understanding of the water cycle is needed. This study summarises current research and highlights future directions of water science from four perspectives: (i) the water cycle; (ii) hydrologic processes; (iii) coupled natural-social water systems; and (iv) integrated watershed management.
Droughts are extreme events that have major impacts on communities, ecosystems and economies due to slow onset and complex processes. Land and ecosystem degradation increase the risks of loss and damage during droughts, whereas well-adapted practices and policies can enable society to (re)build resilience. This review highlights actions needed to connect and fill gaps in the present systems for ecological and hydrological monitoring, governance, and alignment of economic incentives at regional, national and local scales.
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Oceans and the Cryosphere in a Changing Climate suggests sea level rise may be best understood as a slow onset disaster for Pacific Island countries and, in particular, low lying atoll nations. Sea-level rise, coastal flooding and surge inundation is an increasingly pressing problem across the urban Pacific.
Slow onset processes have been increasingly linked to human mobility in the global policy space. Yet, land and forest degradation and desertification (LFDD) as a driver of human displacement and its implications for long-term development policy have received less attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating to what extent the topic has been integrated into the national climate and desertification policy frameworks of countries in Latin American and the Caribbean – a region threatened by significant LFDD.
The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage has identified increasing temperatures as a key slow onset event. However, it is the resulting increases in short-term heat events — heatwaves — that have so far been the primary focus of risk assessment and policy, while gradual and sustained increases in temperature have received less attention. This is a global issue but particularly important in tropical and subtropical regions already chronically exposed to extreme heat.
The Amazon is the most concentrated expression of life on Earth and it is clearly threatened.
Droughts are significant drivers of land degradation, which in turn has adverse effects on resource-dependent rural populations and can potentially lead to livelihood losses and subsequent migration out of affected areas. Linkages between land degradation and migration are complex and not particularly well documented, as they occur within a larger context of multi-scale interactions of socio-economic, political, demographic, and environmental processes. Given these uncertainties, further research in this field is needed.
Responding to climate change requires radical transformations in social, political, economic and social-ecological systems. Recent research has argued that individuals can drive transformations at scale through changes in beliefs and values that affect political activity. We draw from sociological and psychological perspectives on mental health outcomes among survivors of violence and abuse, taking a gendered approach, to show how potential for individual transformation is differentially constructed through personal life trajectories and intersectional social relations.
The negative effects of slow onset events (SOEs) related to climate change are already affecting developing countries, with the resulting impacts likely to increase significantly. With an increasing urgency to act on SOEs, this paper systematically reviewed and synthesized literature on SOEs in Southeast Asia (SEA), which is a region of several highly climate vulnerable countries.
This review article assesses evidences published in the past two years on the links among slow-onset events, food security and poverty as well as the strategies focused on reducing specific problems, those implemented in the countries of the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. It is here, where slow-onset events related to Climate Change pose significant challenges intricately linked to poverty and food security; mainly as a result of a great economic and social dependence, strongly conditioned by environmental factors.
