rlacombe/ClimateX huggingface dataset:
Adaptation gaps or deficits arise from a lack of adequate technological, financial, social, and institutional capacities to adapt effectively to climate change and extreme weather events, which are in turn linked to development (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Despite the challenges of measurement associated with adaptation gaps, available evidence from smaller scales across several regions, communities and businesses suggest that significant adaptation gaps have existed in historical contexts of climate change, while expectations of extreme heat, increasing storm intensity and rising sea levels will create the context for the emergence of new gaps (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
A higher level of adaptation finance is critical to enhance adaptation planning and implementation and reduce adaptation gaps, particularly in developing countries (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
There are numerous individual and system mitigation options throughout the economy and within human and natural systems (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Limiting global average warming has been found to reduce climate risks (IPCC, 2018a; IPCC, 2019b), and limiting global average warming to any temperature level has also been found to be associated with broad ranges of potential global emissions pathways that represent future uncertainty in the evolution of socioeconomic, technological, market and physical systems (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
In general, mitigation alters development opportunities by constraining the emissions future society can produce, which affects markets, resource allocation, economic structure, income distribution, consumers and the environment (besides climate) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Nonlinearities have been estimated in global and regional mitigation costs and potential economic damages from climate change (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Not only do trade-offs vary by climate level, as do synergies, but they increase at an increasing rate and their relative importance can shift across climate levels (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
For instance, additional mitigation options and more economically efficient policy designs have been shown to reduce mitigation costs and the nonlinearities in mitigation costs (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Central to this framing is a shift away from viewing adaptation as discrete sets of options that are selected and implemented to manage risk, to thinking about adaptation as a social process that evolves over time, includes multiple decision points, and requires dynamic adjustments in response to new information about climate risk, socioeconomic conditions and the value of potential adaptation responses (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
While ensuring development and adaptation produce synergies that allow for the achievement of sustainable development is challenging, modelling exercises suggest that there are pathways where synergies among the SDGs are realised (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Synergies between adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development might be promoted by prioritising those CRD strategies most likely to generate synergies (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Similarly, trade- offs might be managed by prioritising strategies such as disqualifying mitigation options thought to have negative social implications (Section 18.2.5.3.1), internalising externalities, such as placing a fee or constraint on a negative externality or related activity (Dubash et al., 2022) (Bistline and Rose, 2018), or using complementary policies, such as transfer payments to offset negative mitigation, adaptation or sustainable development strategy implications (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Globally, low climate change projections, versus higher climate change projections, imply greater mitigation, lower climate risks and less adaptation. This implies greater mitigation trade-offs in terms of overall economic development, food crop prices, energy prices and overall household consumption, but lower climate risk, with sustainable development synergies such as human health and lower adaptation trade-offs, and an uneven distribution of effects (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Prioritising sustainable development locally is also supported by the insight that the impacts on poverty depend at least as much or more on development than on the level of climate change (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
In the climate change solution space, system transitions represent an important mechanism for linking and enabling mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development options and actions (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
This growth in demand, however, has been moderated by improvements in energy efficiency in industry, buildings and transportation sectors (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Features of sustainable development, such as enhanced energy access, energy security, reductions in air pollution and economic growth, continue to be the dominant influence on the evolution of energy systems and decision making regarding energy investments and portfolios (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Yet there are examples at the local, regional and national level of policy incentivising rapid changes in energy systems (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Many sustainable development priorities have co-benefits in terms of climate mitigation, such as air pollution and conservation policies reducing short-lived climate forcers and sequestering carbon respectively, as well adaptation benefits, such as improved energy access and environmental quality enhancing adaptive capacity (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Energy systems have been a historical driver of climate change, but are also adversely affected by climate change impacts, including short- term shocks and stressors from extreme weather as well as long-term shifts in climatic conditions (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Available literature indicates that greenhouse gas emissions reductions have been achieved in response to climate actions including financial incentives to promote renewable energy, carbon taxes and emissions trading, removal of fossil fuel subsidies, and promotion of energy efficiency standards (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Rather, urban areas are increasingly conceptualised as complex socio-ecological or socio- technical systems (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Urban transitions will be associated with synergies as well as trade-offs with respect to sustainable development (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Accordingly, significant acceleration in the pace of system transitions is necessary to enable the implementation of mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development initiatives consistent with CRD (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Contributing Authors: Seema Arora-Jonsson (Sweden/India), Emily Baker (USA), Graeme Dean (Ireland), Emily Hillenbrand (USA), Alison Irvine (Canada), Farjana Islam (Bangladesh/ UK), Katriona McGlade (UK/Germany), Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong (Ghana), Nitya Rao (UK/India), Federica Ravera (Italy), Emilia Reyes (Mexico), Diana Hinge Salili (Fiji), Corinne Schuster-Wallace (Canada), Alcade C. Segnon (Benin), Divya Solomon (India), Shreya Some (India), Indrakshi Tandon (India), Sumit Vij (India), Katharine Vincent (UK/South Africa), Margreet Zwarteveen (the Netherlands) Key Messages • Gender and other social inequities (e.g., racial, ethnic, age, income, geographic location) compound vulnerability to climate change impacts (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Efforts are needed to change unequal power dynamics and to foster inclusive decision making for climate adaptation to have a positive impact for gender equality (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Climate change is reducing the quantity and quality of safe water available in many regions of the world and increasing domestic water management responsibilities (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Water insecurity and the lack of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure have resulted in psychosocial distress and gender-based violence, as well as poor maternal and child health and nutrition (Collins et al., 2019a; Wilson et al., 2019; Geere and Hunter, 2020; Islam et al., 2020; Mainali et al., 2020) (Sections 4.3.3 and 4.6.4.4) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Increased domestic responsibilities of women and youth, due to migration of men, can increase their vulnerability due to their reduced capacity for investment in off-farm activities and reduced access to information (Sugden et al., 2014; O’Neil et al., 2017) (Sections 4.3, 4.6) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
In most regions where there are climate change policies that consider gender, they inadequately address structural inequalities resulting from climate change impacts, or how gender and other social inequalities can compound risk (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
However, attention to the following has the potential to bring about change: Creation of new, deliberative policymaking spaces that support inclusive decision making processes and opportunities to (re)negotiate pervasive gender and other social inequalities in the context of climate change for transformation (Tschakert et al., 2016; Harris et al., 2018; Ziervogel, 2019; Garcia et al., 2020) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Increased access to reproductive health and family planning services, which contributes to climate change resilience and socioeconomic development through improved health and well-being of women and their children, including increased access to education, gender equity and economic status (Onarheim et al., 2016; Starbird et al., 2016; Lopez-Carr, 2017; Hardee et al., 2018) (Section 7.4) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Strengthened adaptive capacity and resilience through integrated approaches to adaptation that include social protection measures, disaster risk management and ecosystem-based climate change adaptation (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
For example, gender-transformative and nutrition-sensitive agroecological approaches strengthen adaptive capacities and enable more resilient food systems by increasing leadership for women and their participation in decision making and a gender-equitable domestic work (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
The agency of people to act on CRD is grounded in their worldviews, beliefs, values and consciousness (Woiwode, 2020), and is shaped through social and political processes including how policies and decision making recognise the voices, knowledges and rights of particular actors over others (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Given these insights, CRD can be understood as the sum of complex multi-dimensional processes consisting of large numbers of actions and societal choices made by multiple actors from government, the private sector and civil society, with important influences by science and the media (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
However, the pursuit of a given NDC within a specific country will likely necessitate a range of other policy interventions that have more immediate impact on technologies and behaviour, implicating transitions in energy, industry, land and infrastructure (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
As reflected by the SDGs (and SDG 13 specifically), the mainstreaming of climate change concerns into development policies is one mechanism for pursuing sustainable development and CRD (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
As a consequence, the characteristics of economic systems will play an important role in determining their resilience (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Addressing climate impacts in isolation is unlikely to achieve equitable, efficient or effective adaptation outcomes (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Although higher levels of poverty, corruption, and economic and social inequalities can increase the risk of negative outcomes, these potential negative effects would be mitigated if inequality impacts were taken into consideration in all stages of policy making (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
These gains can provide more resource-efficient production technologies and positively affect economic competitiveness (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Financial actors increasingly recognise that the generation of long-term, sustainable financial returns is dependent on stable, well-functioning and well-governed social, environmental and economic systems (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Stable and predictable carbon-pricing regimes would significantly contribute to fostering financial innovation that can help further accelerate the decarbonisation of the global economy, even in jurisdictions which are more lenient in implementing climate mitigation actions (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
As a consequence, they and can become a significant barrier to change, whether incremental or more transformational (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
There is agreement in this literature that such an approach allows for the effective integration of climate challenges into existing policy and planning processes (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
However, access to, and the benefits of, that innovation have not been evenly distributed among global regions and communities, and continued innovation is needed to facilitate climate action and sustainable development (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
The need to assess resilience and adaptation against a background of evolving climate hazards, and to link resilience and adaptation with development outcomes, present further methodological challenges (very high confidence) (Brooks et al., 2014).Currently, the ability to monitor different components of CRD are in various stages of maturity (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
This allows measurement of key indicators that are proxies for resilience at regular intervals, even in the absence of significant climate hazards and associated disruptions (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Alternatively, they can also serve as significant barriers to system transitions and transformation, based on anthropocentric, mechanistic and materialistic worldviews and the utilitarian, individualist or skeptical values and attitudes they often promote (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
On the other hand, the tendency for certain worldviews to dominate the policy discourse has the potential to exacerbate social, economic and political inequities as well as ontological, epistemic and procedural injustices (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Yet these knowledge systems represent a range of cultural practices, wisdom, traditions and ways of knowing the world that provide accurate and useful climate change information, observations and solutions (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Instead, Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge can shape how climate change risk is understood and experienced, the possibility of developing climate change solutions grounded in place-based experiences, and the development of governance systems that match the expectations of different Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge holders (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Supporting Indigenous Peoples’ leadership and rights in climate adaptation options at the local, regional, national and international levels is an effective way to ensure that such options are adapted to their living conditions and do not pose additional detrimental impacts to their lives (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Climate-resilient futures will depend on recognising the socioeconomic, political and health inequities that often affect Indigenous Peoples (Mapfumo et al., 2016; Ludwig and Poliseli, 2018) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Adaptation efforts have benefited from the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge (IPCC, 2019e) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Moreover, it has been recognised that including Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge in IPCC reports can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation (IPCC, 2019c) (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
More integration of government policy and interventions across scales, accompanied by capacity building to accelerate adaptation is needed (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
However, the resource limitations of local governments as well as their small geographic sphere of influence suggests the need for more funding for this from higher levels of government, particularly national governments, to address adaptation gaps (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Wealthy nations of the Global North, including for example the USA, Great Britain, Iceland and Japan, have had success over the past decade in reducing their GHG emissions while growing their economies (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
While GDP growth can drive growth in income, it can also drive growth in inequality which can undermine poverty reduction efforts (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Nevertheless, consistent with earlier assessment of enabling conditions for system transitions (Section 18.4.2.1), implementation of Blue Growth initiatives is contingent upon the successful achievement of social innovation as well as creating an inclusive and cooperative governance structure (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
However, while scientific and technology knowledge may be useful, in some cases, they remain subordinate to political agendas, or are controlled by actors in positions of power and thus not equitably distributed (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Realising the benefits of STI, however, may be contingent on building broader STI capacity and bolstering nations’ systems of innovation (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Since AR5, both formal and informal setting are increasingly arenas of debate and contestation regarding development choices and pathways (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Social movements are demanding radical action as the only option to achieve the mobilisation necessary for deep societal transformation (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Research shows that new climate movements have increased public awareness, and also stimulated unprecedented public engagement with climate change (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
The WGI data also indicate that increases in globally averaged temperatures will have different consequences for regional climate change (Table 18.4), including variation in the magnitude and, for precipitation, even the direction of change (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Given outcomes in many systems including public health, agriculture, ecosystems and biodiversity, and infrastructure are often associated with biophysical thresholds (e.g., physiological or design thresholds), those regions where such thresholds are increasingly exceeded due to climate change may experience disproportionately higher impacts (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Nevertheless, such higher SSTs have implications not only for ocean ecosystems and the distribution of marine species, but also for weather patterns, such as formation and intensity of tropical cyclones (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
If that demand is not met, then the adaptation gap will be larger, with greater risk of loss and damage (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Common indicators of development reflect the significant diversity that exists across different global regions with respect to their development context (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
However, nations and regions with high PPAHDI values also tend to have higher per capita CO 2-e emissions production, indicating that economic development based on fossil fuel use undermines both efforts on climate action as well as the SDGs (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
In addition to development indicators, the literature assessed in the WGII regional chapters indicates that different regions experience a range of development challenges and opportunities that affect the pursuit of CRD (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
For example, significant challenges exist within regions with respect to managing debt and the ability to fund or finance climate action and sustainable development interventions (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
On the other hand, a broad range of opportunities exist to pursue CRD including challenges with debt and financing of adaptation competing policy objectives, social protection programmes, economic diversification, investing in education and human capital development, and expanding disaster risk reduction efforts (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
There are a wide variety of more focused options for climate action and sustainable development (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
For example, in all regions, existing vulnerability and inequality exacerbate climate risk and therefore pose challenges to CRD (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Furthermore, low prioritisation of sustainability and climate action in government decision making, low perceptions of climate risk, and path dependence in governance systems and decision-making processes all pose barriers to system transitions, transformation and CRD (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Issues associated with natural resource dependency, access to information for decision making, access to human and financial capital, and path dependence of institutions represent barriers that must be overcome if sectors are to support transitions that enable CRD. These challenges are more acute within vulnerable communities or nations where capacity to innovate and invest are constrained and social inequities reinforce the status quo (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
Moreover, progress across multiple sectors simultaneously creates opportunities for synergies for achieving the SDGs, but also enhances the risk of potential trade-offs (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
These include enhancing understanding of mainstreaming of climate change into institutional decision making, managing risk under conditions of uncertainty, catalysing system transitions and transformation, and processes for enhancing participation, equity and accountability in sustainable development (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
This includes consideration for risk and science communication; decision analysis and decision support systems; and mechanisms for knowledge co-production between scientists and public policy actors (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: very high)
For energy systems transitions, the adaptation options of infrastructure resilience, efficient water use and water management, and reliable power systems enable energy systems to work during disasters with reduced costs, demonstrating the synergistic relationships between mitigation and adaptation (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
New evidence has focused on both options for peri-urban and rural areas through distributed generation and isolated renewable energy systems, which also provide multiple social co-benefits (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: medium)
For efficient water use and management, the synergistic potential with mitigation can make processes more efficient and cost effective (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
With regards to adaptation feasibility, efficient water use is especially useful in drought-stricken areas and provides better water management for multiple uses (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
Forest- and biodiversity-based adaptation options are generally promoted on the basis of their positive impacts on adaptive and ecological capacities, increased provision of ecosystem services and goods, with a particularly strong contribution to carbon sequestration (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: high)
However, large afforestation projects and the introduction of non-native and fast-growing vegetation reduce water availability, impoverish habitats for wildlife and reduce overall ecological resilience, threatening the achievement of some Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and potentially leading to maladaptation (high confidence).Over-reliance on forest-based solutions may increase the susceptibility to wildfires, with detrimental consequences both for mitigation and adaptation (IPCC AR6_WGII, confidence: medium)