enzo is writing a research paper about climate change

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Critical Writing: Waking Up to Climate Change: Researching the White Paper

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Research the White Paper

Researching the White Paper:

The process of researching and composing a white paper shares some similarities with the kind of research and writing one does for a high school or college research paper. What’s important for writers of white papers to grasp, however, is how much this genre differs from a research paper.  First, the author of a white paper already recognizes that there is a problem to be solved, a decision to be made, and the job of the author is to provide readers with substantive information to help them make some kind of decision--which may include a decision to do more research because major gaps remain. 

Thus, a white paper author would not “brainstorm” a topic. Instead, the white paper author would get busy figuring out how the problem is defined by those who are experiencing it as a problem. Typically that research begins in popular culture--social media, surveys, interviews, newspapers. Once the author has a handle on how the problem is being defined and experienced, its history and its impact, what people in the trenches believe might be the best or worst ways of addressing it, the author then will turn to academic scholarship as well as “grey” literature (more about that later).  Unlike a school research paper, the author does not set out to argue for or against a particular position, and then devote the majority of effort to finding sources to support the selected position.  Instead, the author sets out in good faith to do as much fact-finding as possible, and thus research is likely to present multiple, conflicting, and overlapping perspectives. When people research out of a genuine desire to understand and solve a problem, they listen to every source that may offer helpful information. They will thus have to do much more analysis, synthesis, and sorting of that information, which will often not fall neatly into a “pro” or “con” camp:  Solution A may, for example, solve one part of the problem but exacerbate another part of the problem. Solution C may sound like what everyone wants, but what if it’s built on a set of data that have been criticized by another reliable source?  And so it goes. 

For example, if you are trying to write a white paper on the opioid crisis, you may focus on the value of  providing free, sterilized needles--which do indeed reduce disease, and also provide an opportunity for the health care provider distributing them to offer addiction treatment to the user. However, the free needles are sometimes discarded on the ground, posing a danger to others; or they may be shared; or they may encourage more drug usage. All of those things can be true at once; a reader will want to know about all of these considerations in order to make an informed decision. That is the challenging job of the white paper author.     
 The research you do for your white paper will require that you identify a specific problem, seek popular culture sources to help define the problem, its history, its significance and impact for people affected by it.  You will then delve into academic and grey literature to learn about the way scholars and others with professional expertise answer these same questions. In this way, you will create creating a layered, complex portrait that provides readers with a substantive exploration useful for deliberating and decision-making. You will also likely need to find or create images, including tables, figures, illustrations or photographs, and you will document all of your sources. 

Courtney Warren

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The link between extreme weather and climate change has never been more clear

Experts say drawing the direct connection from specific storms to the nebulous idea of climate change can help people grasp the urgency of our crisis.

A decade ago, scientists would say they were pretty sure a specific hurricane, heatwave, flood, drought or raging wildfire was more severe due to climate change, but they could rarely pinpoint its exact contribution. Now, thanks to a convergence of human brainpower, mathematical models, precise weather data, and superpower computers, climate fingerprints are being calculated for many major weather events.

The purpose of this climate attribution is to drive home the extent that greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuel relates to the weather effects people are seeing.  

“We want everyone to understand how what we as humans have done translates into the intensities and frequencies of extreme events,” says Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist at the London-based nonprofit   World Weather Attribution   (WWA), a leader in this research. “We’re not saying that climate change caused a particular extreme weather event. What we are saying is, ‘Here’s the extent climate change has modified it’.”  

More than 400 extreme weather events, many in the past few years, have been studied to determine to what extent the grade of the phenomenon was driven by climate change.    

For example, researchers at Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that collaborates with WWA, found that last summer’s heat wave in the Southwestern United States—where temperatures in July were some 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal—was   five or more times more likely   because of climate change.

Heat waves like that “are not just blips,” but will become much more frequent if the world doesn’t quickly transition away from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases, says   Andrew Pershing, the lead scientist for attribution research at   Climate Central.  

Climate has worsened heat, floods, and storms  

Complex weather events are triggered by several environmental factors, including high- or low-pressure systems, jet streams, and more. But it’s long been known that warmer air and ocean surface temperatures are additional important contributors that have worsened many recent disasters.  

Scientists have calculated, for example, that total rainfall from six of the major hurricanes that struck the Atlantic coast in the past 20 years—Katrina,   Irma, Maria, Harvey, Dorian, and Florence—and which collectively caused more than $500 billion in damage, were four to 15 times more intense (depending on the hurricane) than they would have been had the Earth been cooler.

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Last year’s unusually warm Midwestern Christmas week was   at least twice more likely   due to climate change, a Climate Central analysis found. While some put the blame for that snow-free Christmas on El Niño—the periodic warming on the surface of the Pacific Ocean that does affect weather—without global warming the area might have received some holiday snow.

On average, heatwaves that would have happened once in 10 years in pre-industrial times now occur some three times more often, and they’re frequently 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than in the past, WWA says. The record-smashing heatwave that buckled roads in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada in the summer of 2021 would have been all but impossible without the contribution of climate change.  

Could your own home have been saved?

Scientists now aim to calculate and disseminate these climate fingerprints within days or a few weeks of an extreme weather event, when people are paying close attention, says Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist who calculates attributions at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.  

Quickly connecting the dots between the event and greenhouse gases “helps people realize that climate change isn’t our children’s and grandchildren’s problem. Significant things are happening now,” Wehner says.

As soon as massive downpours began flowing in Dubai in mid-April this year—in which up to 10 inches of rain fell in less than two days—researchers at WWA dug into the data. A week after the rain, they reported that such an event became twice as likely from today’s climate.

Another recent focus is to document the event’s extra impacts rather than just the increased odds.

For example, researchers determined that Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston in 2017, contained 19 percent more rainfall than would have occurred without climate change, Wehner noted in a paper in   Physics Today . Then they figured out what this meant for residents:   14 percent more flooded areas   and a quadrupling of the financial loss in what was ultimately a $90 billion storm.  

People living in the storm’s path can even review Wehner’s   flood model map   to learn whether their house would have been spared absent climate change—something he estimates was the case for 32 percent of the damaged homes.

Some weather events are harder to crunch

Attribution science relies on climate models showing the impacts of greenhouse gases on the planet, which are then combined with current weather information gleaned from ground stations and weather satellites,   historical information from global datasets , and other inputs.

Statistical techniques culled from epidemiology are also used, since that field also teases apart the relative contributions of various factors, such as how much smoking habits, family history, and obesity each contribute to a population’s heart disease odds.

Heatwaves are simpler to calculate than hurricanes, and droughts are toughest of all, Kimutai says. Drought requires knowing not just how much how much rain has or hasn’t fallen but soil moisture levels, air evaporation rates, and other data. In many parts of the world, especially underdeveloped countries, this current and historical data does not exist.

Extraordinary events are also proving challenging. Climate is increasing the frequency of once-in-a-hundred-year events to 10- or 20-years. With the Pacific Northwest heatwave, for example, “we have more than 100 years of data, but there was nothing like it,” Wehner says.  

Most of the studies have focused on extreme weather, but everyday life is also different than it would have been without climate change, Pershing says. That’s why two years ago, Climate Central   launched its “climate shift” temperature website detailing how each U.S. area’s seven-day forecast diverges from its historical norms.

Minnesota’s site visitors last winter learned that many days were much warmer than usual—which climate change made three or more times more likely.  

This type of everyday event may not attract a splashy report from attribution scientists, Pershing says, “but it was certainly important to the residents who live there.”  

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A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

Kashif abbass.

1 School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim

2 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Chemical Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xiaolingwei 200, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Huaming Song

Muntasir murshed.

3 School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, 1229 Bangladesh

4 Department of Journalism, Media and Communications, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Haider Mahmood

5 Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, 173, Alkharj, 11942 Saudi Arabia

Ijaz Younis

Associated data.

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Source : constructed by authors

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Main natural danger statistics for 1985–2020 at the global level

Source: EM-DAT ( 2020 )

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Examples of how various environmental changes affect various infectious diseases in humans

Source: Aron and Patz ( 2001 )

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table ​ Table3 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Essential considerations while mitigating the climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Source : Fischer ( 2019 )

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

• The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Author contribution

KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Contributor Information

Kashif Abbass, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@ssabbafihsak .

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim, Email: moc.kooltuo@888misaqnahseez .

Huaming Song, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@gnimauh .

Muntasir Murshed, Email: [email protected] .

Haider Mahmood, Email: moc.liamtoh@doomhamrediah .

Ijaz Younis, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@sinuoyzaji .

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Primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources are different in the sciences than other areas of study. The question to ask to determine if a source is primary or secondary in science is, "Did the authors of this paper collect the data?" There are several clues to answer this question. 

Primary source —the work represents original research

Secondary source —the work reflects on, synthesizes, or reviews the research of others. 

Clues that the article is a primary source: 

• Analyzes the data collected by the authors. 
• Abstract may include phrases like "we observed," "we collected samples," etc. 
• Usually includes a methods section. 
• Will include a review of past work by others, but this is meant to provide context for original data collection and analysis. 

Clues that the article is a secondary source: 

• Describes the work of other scientists.
• Title or abstract includes the terms  review ,  literature review , or  meta-analysis . 
• May not include a methods section. 

The article below is a secondary source, not only because it says "review" in the title, but also because the article mentions it is a survey of other articles. 

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Home / For Educators: Grades 6-12 / Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics

Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics

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Climate Explained, a part of Yale Climate Connections, is an essay collection that addresses an array of climate change questions and topics, including why it’s cold outside if global warming is real, how we know that humans are responsible for global warming, and the relationship between climate change and national security.

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Climate Change Basics: Five Facts, Ten Words

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To simplify the scientific complexity of climate change, we focus on communicating five key facts about climate change that everyone should know. 

Why should we care about climate change?

Having different perspectives about global warming is natural, but the most important thing that anyone should know about climate change is why it matters.  

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Research Article

How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? An empirical analysis based on Overton data

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Science Policy and Strategy Department, Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society, Munich, Germany, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation SciTech Strategies, Inc., Albuquerque, NM, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Berlin, Germany

• Lutz Bornmann, 
• Robin Haunschild, 
• Kevin Boyack, 
• Werner Marx, 
• Jan C. Minx

• Published: September 22, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693
• Reader Comments

Climate change is an ongoing topic in nearly all areas of society since many years. A discussion of climate change without referring to scientific results is not imaginable. This is especially the case for policies since action on the macro scale is required to avoid costly consequences for society. In this study, we deal with the question of how research on climate change and policy are connected. In 2019, the new Overton database of policy documents was released including links to research papers that are cited by policy documents. The use of results and recommendations from research on climate change might be reflected in citations of scientific papers in policy documents. Although we suspect a lot of uncertainty related to the coverage of policy documents in Overton, there seems to be an impact of international climate policy cycles on policy document publication. We observe local peaks in climate policy documents around major decisions in international climate diplomacy. Our results point out that IGOs and think tanks–with a focus on climate change–have published more climate change policy documents than expected. We found that climate change papers that are cited in climate change policy documents received significantly more citations on average than climate change papers that are not cited in these documents. Both areas of society (science and policy) focus on similar climate change research fields: biology, earth sciences, engineering, and disease sciences. Based on these and other empirical results in this study, we propose a simple model of policy impact considering a chain of different document types: The chain starts with scientific assessment reports (systematic reviews) that lead via science communication documents (policy briefs, policy reports or plain language summaries) and government reports to legislative documents.

Citation: Bornmann L, Haunschild R, Boyack K, Marx W, Minx JC (2022) How relevant is climate change research for climate change policy? An empirical analysis based on Overton data. PLoS ONE 17(9): e0274693. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693

Editor: Alberto Baccini, University of Siena, Italy, ITALY

Received: March 21, 2022; Accepted: September 1, 2022; Published: September 22, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Bornmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from https://doi.org/10.17617/3.DUY0LD .

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

People have long believed that nature is so vast and powerful that mankind has not the potential for any major and lasting effect on the earth’s climatic system. One century ago, Arrhenius [ 1 ], one of the discoverers of the greenhouse effect, even welcomed a hotter climate for Northern Europe. According to Weart [ 2 ], the World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979 and the reports of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1983 are important milestones at the beginning of the climate debate, particularly beyond the scientific community.

In the 1960s many experts assumed that swings of the global mean temperature take tens of thousands of years; in the 1970s, they assumed thousands of years. Meanwhile, ice core data from the last Glacial Period show that abrupt global warming is possible and can happen within a few decades or even within a few years as a climate shock [see 3 , climate change beyond 2100, irreversibility and abrupt changes]. In the 1980s, climate change was no longer a theoretical problem. It was widely agreed among experts that global warming could be a concrete threat. A growing number of well-respected climate researchers (like Roger Revelle, Stephen Schneider, James Hansen, Bert Bolin) were deeply concerned and pointed out that the earth was getting noticeably warmer. A series of meetings of meteorologists held in Villach, Austria, led to a growing conviction that global warming may not be a problem of the far future but might become serious within the scientists’ own lifetimes. Subsequently, scientists took an active stance and prompted governments to act soon, because the rate and degree of future warming could be influenced by governmental policy [see 2 , breaking into policy].

The year 1988 marked an important turning point for climate science and policy. Supported by governments around the globe, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded under the roof of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) as a unique science-policy interface. The panel, i.e., participating governments, tasked a set of elected scientists to assess the state of climate science in dedicated reports, i.e., to review and synthesize scientific information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of climate change and of its risk, its environmental, political, and economic impacts and possible response options (see https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ ). The latest report is from 2021 [ 4 ].

These assessments follow strict principles and procedures (see https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-principles.pdf and https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-principles-appendix-a-final.pdf ) to ensure policy relevance without being policy prescriptive. Hundreds of scientists and other experts contribute to the assessment in diverse author teams from a wide range of disciplines including climate physics, engineering, economics, geography, political science, psychology, sociology or urban science and from different world regions to ensure balanced findings. Review is another critical element of IPCC reports. Authors have to respond to tens of thousands of submitted comments by experts and governments in two rounds of review. Important for the dignity of IPCC assessments in the political sphere is the formal acceptance of the reports by the 195 member countries and the line-by-line approval of the summary for policymakers [ 5 – 8 ].

IPCC has been designed and used as the prime scientific input to international climate diplomacy under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change–and as such contributed to international climate agreements–most importantly, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile, climate policy has become an integral part of most national policy programs. These programs include political actions that governments take to achieve the goal of limiting climate change and its consequences [see 9 ].

In its summary for policymakers, the Climate change 2014 synthesis report [ 3 ] states that “human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems” (p. 2). A recent study found that detectable and attributable climate impacts are documented in tens of thousands of scientific studies affecting 80% of the world’s land area, where 85% of the world population resides [ 10 ]. As such, it is unsurprising that the topic of climate change has become a hot topic in political and public debates and now features widely on political agendas across many different fields.

In this study, we deal with the question of how research on climate change and policy are connected. According to Yin, Gao [ 11 ], the systematic understanding of the connection between science and policy is still limited, since reliable data are missing on a global scale. In 2019, however, the new Overton database of policy documents was released including links to research papers that are cited by policy documents. Yang, Huang [ 9 ] define policy documents in this context as “‘carriers’ of policies … [that] provide a channel through which policy science researchers can study the main contents of policies, policymaking processes and policy instruments”. Using Overton data, Yin, Gao [ 11 ] analyzed the connection between science and policy with respect to COVID-19. They found that “many policy documents in the COVID-19 pandemic substantially access recent, peer-reviewed, and high-impact science. And policy documents that cite science are especially highly cited within the policy domain. At the same time, there is a heterogeneity in the use of science across policy-making institutions. The tendency for policy documents to cite science appears mostly concentrated within intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and much less so in national governments, which consume science largely indirectly through the IGOs” (p. 128).

Impact measurement of scientific papers on the policy area is part of a new branch in scientometrics: measurement of societal impact [ 12 ]. Whereas science impact measurements of papers were restricted to citation analyses (using Web of Science, WoS, or Scopus data) until recently, societal impact measurements are focused on impact analyses of papers on other parts of society than science [ 13 ]. One part of the society is of special interest in this respect: the policy area. The policy area is permanently required to find answers on certain societal demands (such as COVID-19 or climate change). Since science permanently produces research results that can (and should) be used in the response to these demands, it is interesting to know, whether and to what extent this happens. Fang, Dudek [ 14 ] defines the term ‘policy impact’ in this respect as impact that “tells the story of how research outputs provide concrete evidence to support policy-making processes, which can be reflected by the references to research outputs in policy documents”. The use of research findings in the policy-making process is denoted as evidence-based policy-making [ 15 ] or science-based policy-making [ 16 ]. OPENing UP [ 17 ] regards “informing policy and influencing decisions … as one of the most notable effects of scientific research” (p. 24).

Overview of studies on policy impact

The overview of studies dealing with the use of scientific information/publications in policy making by Vilkins and Grant [ 18 ] reveals that a number of studies exists that are based on interviews and surveys (with policymakers). These studies show, e.g., that the use of scientific publications in policy documents seems to depend on organizational culture and perspectives towards their use. Furthermore, some policy areas (such as information technology) use scientific information more frequently than others (e.g., immigration or justice). The use of scientific information in policy might be distinguished according to three stylized purposes: “‘instrumental’ use is direct and measurable for policy; ‘conceptual’ use … [is] indirect but rather affects thinking over a longer period of time; ‘symbolic’ use is when specific findings are selected for rhetorical or political argument” [ 18 ]. Sources of scientific information preferred by policymakers are the internet, meetings, and emailing colleagues. Yang, Huang [ 9 ] reviewed some studies that have analyzed networks of policymaking institutions to gain insights into their relationships. These studies focused on policymaking organizations’ networks, public service organizations’ networks, and policy collaboration networks.

In the area of altmetrics research, a recent overview of studies on measuring policy impact using altmetric data can be found in Fang, Dudek [ 14 ] and Yang, Huang [ 9 ]. A number of studies has used policy impact data from Altmetric ( https://www.altmetric.com ) or PlumX ( https://plumanalytics.com ) [see 19 , 20 ]. Very recent studies used Overton data [e.g., 11]. In the following, we summarize some of these policy impact studies chronologically. One of the first studies in this new altmetrics area was published by Bornmann, Haunschild [ 21 ] using an extensive publication set of climate change papers. The authors were interested in the question of how intensively policy documents have cited science publications. Although climate change is an ongoing policy topic worldwide, they found that only 1.2% out of 191,276 papers on climate change in the dataset have at least one policy citation (using data from Altmetric). The results of Bornmann, Haunschild [ 21 ] revealed that review papers were more frequently cited in policy documents than articles. In order to investigate whether the percentage of 1.2% can be thought of as high or low, two of the authors investigated the percentage of papers indexed in the WoS that are mentioned in policy-related documents [ 22 ]. They found that less than 0.5% are mentioned at least once. Thus, the results show that although only 1.2% of climate change papers were relevant for policy documents, this percentage is substantially higher than the percentage among all papers from the database.

Vilkins and Grant [ 18 ] did not use data from Altmetric or PlumX for their empirical study, but used publications from policy-focused Australian Government departments. The authors were interested in the research and reference practices of Australian policymakers. The study is based on 4,649 cited references in 80 government publications from eight departments. They found that mostly peer-reviewed journal articles, federal government reports, and Australian business information have been cited. The study also revealed “a possible increased chance for academic research to be cited if it was open access. Despite criticisms of citation analysis, at least in the field of research utilisation we cannot solely rely on interview or survey data, as cited evidence use differs from reported evidence use” [ 18 ].

Tattersall and Carroll [ 23 ] used Altmetric policy documents data to investigate policy impact of papers published by authors at the University of Sheffield. They found that 0.65% of the papers were cited by at least one policy document. This percentage is slightly higher than that mentioned by Haunschild and Bornmann [ 22 ] for the WoS database. The field-specific policy-impact analysis revealed that “the research topics with the greatest policy impact are medicine, dentistry, and health, followed by social science and pure science” [ 23 ]. In a more recent study, Yang, Huang [ 9 ] used the Chinese database iPolicy that includes policy documents issued by the Chinese government since 1949. The authors used the data to construct networks of policy-making ministries and government departments. They were interested in identifying core policymakers in China and possible changes of their positions in the networks. Yang, Huang [ 9 ] present 15 ministries in China with the highest eigenvector centrality as core government ministries in the policy networks.

Fang, Costas [ 24 ] focused on hot research topics reflected by citations in policy documents (using Altmetric.com data). The study is based on more than 10 million WoS papers published in various disciplines. The authors identified the hot topics in various broad disciplines. For example, they found that infectious diseases were typically of concern to policy-makers, but also topics that focus on industry and finance as well as child and education. In addition, “potential health-threatening environment problems (e.g., ‘ambient air pollution’, ‘environmental tobacco smoke’, ‘climate change’, etc.) drew high levels of attention from policy-makers too” [ 24 ].

Hicks and Isett [ 25 ] published a case study that investigated the policy impact of papers published in the area of quantitative studies of science. The authors speculated that many papers in this area have limited policy impact, but some papers such as the papers selected for their case study received a lot of policy impact. Hicks and Isett [ 25 ] explain in detail the policy impact of the selected papers. For example, the authors selected the well-known study by Mansfield [ 26 ], Mansfield [ 27 ] that estimated the social rate of return to public research spending. Hicks and Isett [ 25 ] describe the diverse policy impact reached by this paper using several sources.

In the most recent study, Pinheiro, Vignola-Gagné [ 28 ] used publication data from Framework Programmes (FPs) for Research and Technological Development. The authors investigated the relationship of cross-disciplinarity on the paper level and policy impact measured by policy citation data from the Overton database. Pinheiro, Vignola-Gagné [ 28 ] conclude as follows: “Our approach enables testing in a general way the assumption underlying many funding programs, namely that cross-disciplinary research will increase the policy relevance of research outcomes. Findings suggest that research assessments could benefit from measuring uptake in policy-related literature, following additional characterization of the Overton database; of the science-policy interactions it captures; and of the contribution of these interactions within the larger policymaking process” (p. 616).

Dataset used

For many years, policy documents’ and policy citations’ data were aggregated only by the companies Altmetric and PlumX. Recently, however, the Overton database (see https://www.overton.io ) was launched with the goal of becoming the largest database of policy documents and citations [ 29 ]. In Overton, policy documents are defined “very broadly as documents written primarily for or by policymakers” (see http://help.overton.io/en/articles/3823271-what-s-your-definition-of-a-policy-document ). Overton includes documents from governments, think tanks (i.e., research institutions that perform research and advocacy in climate change), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs, i.e., organizations that are composed of states) (see http://help.overton.io/en/articles/5062448-which-publications-does-overton-collect ). The database includes not only various bibliographic information on policy documents (e.g., title and appearance), but also the citation links that exist between policy and science as well as among the policy documents in the database themselves. The citation relations are identified by Overton by using text-mining methods. According to Yin, Gao [ 11 ], the Overton database “includes all major economies and large population centers, with a notable exception of mainland China” (p. 128). The database is updated on a weekly basis. In December 2020, the database includes 799,716 policy documents with citation relations to either other policy documents or scientific papers in 66 different languages from 168 countries (including the European Union and IGOs) and more than 1250 different policy sources.

Yin, Gao [ 11 ] studied the reliability of the science-policy citations in the Overton database, by comparing them with the citation links provided by the Microsoft Academic Graph database (see https://academic.microsoft.com/home ). The results show that “although the two datasets are collected for different purposes using different approaches and technologies, the measurements carried out independently across the two datasets show remarkable consistencies” (p. SI). Since the results by Yin, Gao [ 11 ] confirm the reliability of the Overton data, we decided to use the data for the current study on climate change. Overton provided a snapshot (dated December 04, 2020) of their database to some of us (LB and RH). This snapshot has been imported into a local PostgreSQL database at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Stuttgart, Germany). After an analysis of publication dates of policy documents and consultation with Euan Adie (Overton), we excluded the policy documents with the publication dates ‘1970-01-01’, ‘1970-01-02’, and ‘2002-07-01’ from our analysis because they were confirmed as ‘dummy’ publication dates by Euan Adie or contained many policy documents published later than the specified date (see https://help.overton.io/article/why-am-i-seeing-unknown-date-instead-of-a-publication-date ). We used PostgreSQL and R [ 30 ] commands including the R package ‘tidyverse’ [ 31 ] for data analysis.

We searched in the fields ‘title’, ‘translated title’, and ‘snippet’ for climate-change-related terms in the Overton snapshot. We searched for ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ (note that both terms were truncated on both sides and a single arbitrary character was allowed instead of the white space between the words) to cover the bulk of policy documents that are related to climate change. The search strategy is based on keyword analyses in connection with search queries of previous climate change related papers [ 21 , 22 ]. We found 10,846 policy documents that met the climate change search criteria out of 799,716 policy documents with any citation relation to a scientific paper or another policy document.

The Overton database includes links to scientific publications via digital object identifiers (DOIs)–“scholarly” references in Overton must have a DOI. There are 8,533,973 citation relations from 492,958 policy documents to 3,242,626 scientific papers. We used the SciTech Strategies’ in-house version of Scopus containing 52.04 million items indexed as of May 2020 and published between 1996 and 2019 as a database for scientific papers. 76.7% of these items have a DOI. We were able to match 2,071,085 DOIs cited in Overton to Scopus papers. Thus, nearly 4.98% of Scopus items with a DOI have been cited by policy documents indexed in the Overton database. This is substantially higher than the 1.12% mentioned in Fang, Costas [ 24 ].

We used the journal metric CiteScore to measure the citation impact of journals [ 32 ]. It is the mean number of citations for papers published in a journal. For the current study, CiteScore values were downloaded from https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri on November 10, 2020. The most current CiteScore values from 2019 were used for our analyses.

Policy documents

This study is based on 10,846 climate change policy documents covered in the Overton database. This corresponds to 1.36% of all policy documents in the database. Fig 1 shows the distribution of the climate change policy documents across publication years. For a better interpretation of this distribution, we also included distributions for all policy documents in the Overton database and the papers on climate change in the Scopus database. The comparison of climate change with all policy documents reveals that the climate change policy documents reached a plateau in 2015 whereas all policy documents steadily increased until 2018. Since the scientific paper distribution also shows a steadily increasing trend, it seems that the discussion of climate change in the policy area reached its maximum several years ago (at least temporarily).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g001

Policy documents can be published by various types of institutions. Based on the classification of these institution types used in Overton, Fig 2 shows the percentage of policy documents published by think tanks, governments, and IGOs. The comparison of climate change policy documents with all policy documents in Fig 2 reveals that climate change documents were published by think tanks and IGOs at higher than expected rates given their overall share of policy documents; fewer climate change documents were published by governments than expected.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g002

This substantially lower share of climate documents issued by governments could be a reflection of their hesitance in dealing with the problem of climate change as documented in continued emissions growth [ 33 – 35 ] as well as the gap between long-term ambition and short-term actions [ 36 , 37 ]. NGOs and IGOs might be particularly active in the field of climate change. IGOs, for example, may consider climate change as a problem of international coordination in nature.

Fig 3 analyzes sectors publishing policy documents in more detail by considering single institutions. The figure shows the relationship for single institutions between number of policy documents and number of climate change policy documents. On the one hand, the results reveal those institutions (with high output) that are focused on climate change and those institutions that deal with climate change besides other topics. For example, due to its focus on a sector that is highly vulnerable to climate change, documents by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations cover frequently the topic of climate change (please see the interactive version of Fig 3 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g003

This is different in the field of health. Policy documents by the World Health Organization often do not cover climate change, even though this is starting to change now. This corresponds to the comparatively small share of publications in the field of medicine related to climate change research [ 38 ]–even though there is a sizable and fast-growing number of research papers on climate and health in absolute terms [ 39 ]. On the other hand, the colors of the institutional dots in Fig 3 point out the relatively high number of think tanks and IGOs with a focus on climate change–of which some like the Global Warming Policy Foundation are alleged to focus on global warming misinformation and ‘climate sceptic’ contents ( https://www.desmog.com/climate-disinformation-database/ ).

Papers cited in policy documents

In this section, we additionally consider the literature cited by climate change policy documents. We would like to know, for example, (1) whether these documents focus on recently published or older science literature and (2) the research institutions that seem to be very important for the policy area (since they were frequently cited). Fig 4 shows the document types of the publications cited by climate change policy documents. In order to facilitate the interpretation of the results, the results for all policy documents have been added. We have aggregated “article in progress” with “article”. The type “other” contains empty document type entries, “abstract”, and “missing”. The results in the figure show that most policy documents reference “articles”, followed by “reviews” and “conference papers”. The other document types play a minor role. The referencing behavior seems rather similar in policy documents in general and in policy documents that are related to climate change.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g004

Yin, Gao [ 11 ] found that “the COVID-19 policy frontier appears to be deeply grounded in extremely recent, peer-reviewed scientific insights” (p. 129). We expect there to be a similarly short time lag for climate change research on the one hand; but we can imagine a “classics” effect that certain foundational papers are referred to over and over again on the other hand (some of the policy documents might actually reiterate outdated findings/outliers as well). For scientific papers that cite other scientific papers, the results indicate a “classics” effect: If we look at cited references in papers, the average reference age is 13.1 years for all items in Scopus from 1996 to 2019. However, on average, climate change papers (published between 2010 and 2019) cite other scientific papers that are on average 9.7 years old. In this study, we also investigated the time between appearance of the policy document and its cited scientific papers. This difference is on average 5.8 years for climate change policy documents and 6.7 years for all policy documents. Both differences are significantly shorter than the average references ages in scientific papers and correspond to the results by Yin, Gao [ 11 ].

Fig 5 shows the proportions of accumulated citations of scientific papers in climate change policy documents over time. These proportions are compared with the proportions in all policy documents. We expected that climate change policy documents cite more recently published papers than other policy documents because of the great societal relevance of the topic. The results in Fig 5 show that this is indeed the case: The distribution for climate change policy documents increases faster than the distribution that refers to all policy documents. Yin, Gao [ 11 ] found a similar result for COVID-19 policy documents–another topic with high societal relevance.

The publication year differences are the time between publication year of the policy document and publication year of the scientific paper.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g005

We expected that policy documents preferentially cite papers published in reputable journals. The most valuable papers can be expected to be published in these journals. The results by Yin, Gao [ 11 ] show, for example, that “COVID-19 policy documents disproportionately reference peer-reviewed insights, drawing especially heavily on top medical journals, both general (such as Lancet) and specialized (such as Clinical Infectious Diseases)” (p. 129). In this study, we used CiteScore as the indicator for measuring reputation. Fig 6 shows the correlation between number of policy document citations received by papers in various scientific journals and the CiteScore of these journals. With a Spearman rank correlation coefficient of 0.24 (on the journal level), the relationship between journal reputation and policy citations is quite low.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g006

One reason for the low correlation might be that Citescore values at the top of the distribution are very spread out. If one were to use journal ranks rather than using Citescore, the coefficient would likely be much higher. In fact, this is the argument made in Fig 7 . We found that scientific literature cited in policy documents is frequently published in high-impact journals: 69.31% of the papers with at least one policy citation were published in first-quartile journals. Thus, one can expect that policy citations of scientific papers correlate with citations of these papers in the scientific literature.

In the first journal quartile, e.g., are those journals that belong to the 25% of the journals with the highest CiteScore in their subject areas. For about 7% of the journals, a CiteScore was not available.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g007

The results by Yin, Gao [ 11 ] for COVID-19 policy documents show that “the coronavirus research used by policy-makers aligns with what scientists heavily engage with themselves” (p. 129). In this study, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient between Scopus citations and policy citations of papers (n = 2,071,085) that were cited by policy documents at least once is 0.16. The correlation coefficient is slightly higher (0.20) between Scopus citations and policy citations of papers (n = 102,372) that were cited by climate change policy documents at least once. However, climate change papers that are cited in climate change policy documents received significantly more citations (between 3.3 and 5.6 times) on average than climate change papers that are not cited in these documents (see Fig 8 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g008

Fig 9 includes the journal perspective to show the correlation between the number of climate change policy document citations and Scopus citations. The Spearman rank correlation between both citation counts is high at 0.81. The results in the figure point out that some journals receive more policy citations than can be expected based on science citations such as Climatic Change and Nature Climate Change . These climate change specific journals have emerged more recently. We speculate that the scientific communities of some highly specialized research topics are comparatively small, thereby limiting the mean number of citations per paper. Nature and Science papers received many citations in both areas of science and policy.

The size of the circles reflects the CiteScore of the journals (Spearman rank correlation = 0.81; an interactive version can be viewed at: https://s.gwdg.de/4weLvb ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g009

The journal analyses in the previous figures could not reveal the field-specific orientation of the papers cited in climate change policy documents. The journals that are labeled in the figures are mostly multi-disciplinary journals such as Science or Nature or are directly related to climate change. In order to explore the fields in which papers cited in climate change policy documents were published, we produced so called overlay maps that are presented in Fig 10 . The overlay maps were created using the global mapping process outlined in Boyack and Klavans [ 40 ]. Here, clustering was done on 46.14 million Scopus-indexed documents (1996–2019) and 27.23 million non-indexed documents cited at least twice with over 1.1 billion citation links using the Leiden algorithm [ 41 ]. Graph layout was then done on the resulting 104,677 clusters using OpenOrd/DrL [ 42 ] and cluster-level relatedness based on the bm25 text relevance measure, which has been shown to produce better clustering than a simple tf-idf measure [ 43 – 45 ].

The maps include (1) all papers, (2) climate change papers, (3) climate change papers with at least one policy citation, (4) all papers in Scopus with at least one policy citation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g010

Over 11% of Scopus-indexed documents were not included in clusters or the map because they had no references and were not cited. Each cluster is represented as a dot on the map and was assigned to its dominant field (and colored) using the journal-to-field assignments from the UCSD map of science [ 46 ]. Clusters with similar topical content are close to each other on the map. Aggregations of clusters can be perceived as discipline-level structures; local areas that contain clusters of many colors are multidisciplinary. Although dot sizes for overlays are based on the number of documents matching overlay criteria, the intent is to provide a qualitative (gestalt) visual view of the data, e.g. to show where result sets are concentrated or if they are evenly spread throughout the map.

Fig 10 shows four maps for comparison: (1) All papers from Scopus, (2) Climate change papers in total, (3) Climate change papers with at least one policy citation, and (4) Papers with at least one policy citation. Comparing map (2) with map (3), for example, one can see that there are areas with climate change papers (such as computer science, pink in map 2) that are not well cited by climate change policy documents–there is far less pink in map 3 than in map 2.

Similar to all papers from the Scopus database shown in map (1) of Fig 10 , papers with at least one policy citation extend across all scientific fields [see map (4) of Fig 10 ]. However, some major fields appear less pronounced in map 4: in particular chemistry, physics, computer sciences, and engineering. Biology, disease sciences, and health sciences are accentuated, indicating that in general these fields are more policy relevant. The fields of climate change papers in map 2 of Fig 10 are concentrated in biology, earth sciences, engineering, disease sciences, and physics (less pronounced). Climate change papers with at least one policy citation [see map 3 of Fig 10 ] show a field-specific pattern similar to the overall climate change policy papers in map 2. It seems that politics does not have a specific field, but reflects the field-specific orientation of climate change research.

For COVID-19 research, Yin, Gao [ 11 ] investigated the temporal shift of the literature cited in policy documents concerning the field-specific distribution (compared to the whole policy literature). Their results reveal “a clear shift from drawing primarily on the biomedical literature to citing economics, society, and other fields of study, which is consistent with overall shifts in policy focus” [ 11 ]. In this study, we also investigated whether there is a field-specific shift using the 27 high-level ASJC journal categories. Fig 11 shows the field-specific orientation of papers (with policy citations) over the entire period (1996–2019). For better readability of the figure, we used the top 10 ASJCs of both sets of papers (Scopus papers with policy citations and Scopus papers that were cited by climate change policy documents) and obtained twelve ASJCs as common top 10 ASJCs (the interactive version of the figure shows the same analysis with all 27 ASJCs). Fig 11 demonstrates that there are some subtle shifts but the early years (2000–2010) suffer from small number effects relative to the most recent decade. Climate change policy documents cite different fields than the whole. The large shifts shown in Yin, Gao [ 11 ] aren’t seen here, but COVID-19 is a rather unique situation where social concerns followed after the medical ones on a short time scale.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.g011

Scientific institutions and policy sources involved in political climate change discussions

In the final section of the empirical results, we focus on the scientific institutions and policy sources that are involved in the political climate change discussions. We are interested in the policy sources that are very active in political climate change discussions (and decisions) and science institutions that provide research results as inputs for the discussions. Table 1 shows the policy sources with the highest number of climate change policy documents. The table also reveals the number of scientific papers cited by these institutions and the number of climate change papers (the number in brackets is the number of policy documents citing the climate change papers). The results show that Publications Office of the European Union and World Bank are the institutions with the most climate change policy documents. According to Euan Adie (founder and director of Overton) the Publications Office of the European Union is a special case as it aggregates documents from many different EU agencies. Cross-regional institutions such as European Union and World Bank are best-suited for dealing with global issues and thus are focused on major problems such as global warming.

The table also reveals the number of scientific papers cited by these institutions and the number of climate change papers (the number in brackets is the number of policy documents citing the climate change papers).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t001

Table 2 focuses on policy sources that are rooted in climate change research. The results in the table reveal that IPCC is the source that referenced the largest number of papers. Considering the large amount of scientific information collected and presented in the various IPCC reports over many years, this is not surprising as the assessment of the scientific literature on climate change is its core mandate.

The table shows policy sources that cited more than 4.000 papers.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t002

We differentiated the results in Table 2 further by specifically looking at government, IGO, and think tank sources: We show policy sources in Table 3 that cite science for governments, IGOs, and think tanks. Yin, Gao [ 11 ] reveal the results of similar analyses based on COVID-19 datasets. The results show that governments and IGOs are of similar importance, both with regard to the overall number of policy documents and climate change related policy documents. The top ranked think tanks produced about half of the overall number of policy documents compared to the top ranked governmental organizations and IGOs. Their share of climate change research related documents is roughly the same.

The table differentiates between all documents of the sources citing these papers and documents focussing on climate change.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t003

Table 4 is related to the cited institution side of the science-policy link: Which science institutions received the most citations from policy documents? The table presents reputable institutions of climate change research or research units located at universities, with the University of East Anglia with its long-lasting tradition in climate change research and meteorology at the top.

The table includes all institutions with more than 2000 papers cited.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274693.t004

It is noteworthy that throughout Tables 2 to 4 , we find institutions that are alleged to focus on climate misinformation according to the Climate Disinformation Database ( https://www.desmog.com/climate-disinformation-database/ ) like the Heartland Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Heritage Foundation, and Acton Institute; those are very active publishers of policy documents. The Acton Institute also features among the most prolific think thanks publishing policy documents related to climate change. In the overall climate change dataset, we found 17 policy organizations that are listed in the Climate Disinformation Database. The organizations produced 99 policy documents (that cited any Scopus paper) within our dataset; these documents cited 6507 Scopus papers. That is 1.4% of the policy documents and 4.1% of the cited Scopus papers in our dataset.

The use of results and recommendations from research on climate change might be reflected in citations of scientific papers in policy documents. Studies analyzing the impact of research on policy belong to the area of societal impact measurements in scientometrics [ 13 ]. According to Vilkins and Grant [ 18 ], “capturing this impact on policy has significant potential benefits, including showing the impact of research on real-world settings, and building a better case for support for researchers and institutions or even broader research directions” (p. 1682). For Yin, Gao [ 11 ] policy-science citations may occur “for different reasons … including (i) instrumental uses (knowledge directly applied to solve problems); (ii) conceptual uses (research influences or informs the way policymakers think); (iii) tactical uses (citing research to support or challenge an idea) among others, suggesting the need to understand the semantics of the policy science citations” (p. SI).

This study focusses on the connection of climate change research and policy. The study is based on data from the (new) Overton database including policy documents (10,846 climate change policy documents covered in the database) and their citations of scientific publications. With this study, we followed other studies using Overton data investigating links between policy and research (e.g., on COVID-19). Although the Overton database captures a large collection of policy documents, potential biases in coverage and data sample cannot be excluded [ 11 ]. For example, the Overton providers will not have access to many governmental archives, and if they have access, it will be restricted to only a part of the existing documents. Other shortcomings of Overton are mentioned by Yang, Huang [ 9 ]: “the metadata of such policy documents cannot reveal the semantic information contained in the policy process. At the same time, some policy documents have unstructured features, so attribute identification and labeling may be required”.

Overton uses a very broad definition of policy documents, i.e., “documents primarily written by and for policy makers”. The idea behind this is to cover not only text that documents the policy or legislation itself in the corpus, but also documents that were written to inform or influence decisions. Our analyses do not distinguish between those two fundamentally different classes of policy documents. Documents written for policymakers are often written with the purpose to inform or influence documents authored by policymakers and are as such fundamentally different from documents authored by scientists. Moreover, under this wide umbrella definition there are very different types of documents: scientific assessments by the scientific community, legislations, policy reports by IGOs and NGOs, policy briefs, speeches etc.

The different nature of these documents explains some of the results here. For example, it is the main purpose of scientific assessments as those by IPCC to assess the state of knowledge in climate change research and inform international climate diplomacy and national climate policy with robust evidence. In nature, these assessments are comprehensive reviews of the literature with tens of thousands of references. On the other hand, policy briefs are designed for communications and often deliberately strip out literature sources. The policy impact analysis in this study, therefore to some extent simply highlights different policy document types. Any interpretation of policy impact of research can only be undertaken based on such an important caveat.

In this study, we empirically targeted several aspects of the connection between climate change research and policy. Focusing on the time trend of this connection reveals that the discussion of climate change in policy seems to have had its peak some years ago. Although we suspect a lot of uncertainty related to the coverage of policy documents in Overton, there seems to be an impact of international climate policy cycles on policy document publication. We observe local peaks in climate policy documents around major decisions in international climate diplomacy. For example, we observe temporal peaks in policy documents around the failed Copenhagen Summit in 2009 and the Paris Agreement; there is a growth in policy documents from IPCC’s Fifth Assessment in 2013/2014 with a peak in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was made. IPCC reports might play a particular role as they are usually released 2–3 years ahead of major international climate diplomacy events and could trigger substantial co-publication activities. In 2023, the first Global Stocktake on progress with the Paris Agreement is scheduled with IPCC AR6 being released during 2021 and 2022. We might thus expect to see increases in climate change policy documents and citations to the scientific literature in the 2–3 years following.

Various types of institutions publish policy documents. Our results point out that IGOs and think tanks–with a focus on climate change–have published more climate change policy documents than expected given their overall share of policy documents (this result may be partly driven by the biased coverage of the Overton database). The policy documents published by the different types of institutions have especially cited more recent publications. Since climate change is of great societal relevance worldwide, research activities are on a high level (compared to other topics) that can be picked up in a timely manner by the policy area. Although one might expect that policy and science impact correlate (what is relevant for the scientific discourse might be equally relevant for the policy discourse), we found the opposite: The correlation between policy citations and science citations and the correlation between policy citations and the impact factor of the journals publishing the papers are both low. Thus, it seems that both areas of society (science and policy) focus on different papers from climate change research. If the scientific discourse and the policy discourse are scarcely related in terms of citation counts, one might expect that they focus on different fields. Our results reveal, however, that this is not the case: Climate change papers with at least one policy citation are concentrated on similar fields as all climate change papers (biology, earth sciences, engineering, and disease sciences). Since field differences scarcely exist between both publication sets of interest, it would be interesting to explore in future studies how the differences can be characterized by other means.

What are the policy sources that are very active in the political climate change discourse and which scientific institutions provide the necessary scientific information? Our results show that the Publication Offices of the European Union, World Health Organization, and World Bank have published the most climate change policy documents. Since climate change is a worldwide problem and demand, it comes as no surprise that these cross-regional institutions have the highest publication output. The relevant science institutions for policy sources are mostly institutions with high reputation in science–this might be in contrast to the low correlation between science and policy citations on the single paper level. On the institutional level, policy sources seem to trust scientific institutions being renowned for reputable research on climate change (e.g., the University of East Anglia).

In this study, we found that some research outcomes seem to be more relevant for the scientific discourse and some outcomes that seem to be more relevant for the policy area. This discrepancy has been found also in other studies. One reason for the differences might be barriers to academic outcomes from policy institutions such as access to climate change publications [ 18 ]. Another reason might be missing summaries of research results that are understandable for people outside academia. Bornmann and Marx [ 47 ] recommend therefore that researchers should write assessment reports (such as the IPCC) summarizing “the status of the research on a certain subject … Societal impact is given when the content of a report is addressed outside of science (in a government document, for example)” (p. 211).

Our analyses revealed the challenges in measuring policy impact via citation patterns. In fact, the closer a document is related to actual decision-making the fewer citations it may contain. For example, scientific assessments of the literature contain large numbers of citations, but they are not directly used in policy-making. Instead they are further built upon and “translated” in policy briefs, policy reports, briefing notes or ministerial expertise. The final political decision–usually a legal text–usually does not contain any citations. As we move towards real decisions it therefore gets increasingly challenging to measure impact in this way. Future work may therefore be organized around a simple model of policy impact considering a chain of different document types. Scientific assessment reports, systematic reviews or meta-analyses–as recommended by Bornmann and Marx [ 47 ]–may be the starting point as rigorous syntheses of the available summaries. Next might be science communication documents such as policy briefs, policy reports or plain language summaries. Government reports might be compiled to directly inform particular decisions and, finally, legislative documents cover the policies themselves. In this context, Isett and Hicks [ 48 ] speak about knowledge intermediaries in document chains. Future research could attempt measuring the impact on policy along such a document chain. As citations would be expected to fade away as you move down the chain, it will become increasingly relevant to use text mining or other methods from natural language processing (e.g., text similarity approaches; argumentation mining) to measure impact.

Finally, as primary studies are very dependent on their specific research design, data and methods applied, there is a widespread argument that policy should be informed by the most robust scientific evidence and as such be built from secondary research (reviews) whenever possible [ 49 ]. Therefore, future scientometric research may explore to what extent primary and secondary research is used in policy documents and how this varies across different sectors.

Acknowledgments

The bibliometric data used in this paper are from an in-house database developed and maintained by SciTech Strategies, Inc. derived from Scopus, prepared by Elsevier BV (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The policy document data were shared with us by Overton on December 04, 2020.

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A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

• Review Article
• Published: 04 April 2022
• Volume 29 , pages 42539–42559, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

• Kashif Abbass 1 ,
• Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim 2 ,
• Huaming Song 1 ,
• Muntasir Murshed   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9872-8742 3 , 4 ,
• Haider Mahmood   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6474-4338 5 &
• Ijaz Younis 1  

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Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

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Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Source : constructed by authors

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table 2 ).

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Seasonal variations and cultivation practices

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

New varieties of crops

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

Changes in management and other input factors

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Availability of data and material

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

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Kashif Abbass, Huaming Song & Ijaz Younis

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KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

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Abbass, K., Qasim, M.Z., Song, H. et al. A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29 , 42539–42559 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19718-6

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What Is Climate Change?

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun’s activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change , primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures.

The main greenhouse gases that are causing climate change include carbon dioxide and methane. These come from using gasoline for driving a car or coal for heating a building, for example. Clearing land and cutting down forests can also release carbon dioxide. Agriculture, oil and gas operations are major sources of methane emissions. Energy, industry, transport, buildings, agriculture and land use are among the main sectors  causing greenhouse gases.

Humans are responsible for global warming

Climate scientists have showed that humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years. Human activities like the ones mentioned above are causing greenhouse gases that are warming the world faster than at any time in at least the last two thousand years.

The average temperature of the Earth’s surface is now about 1.2°C warmer than it was in the late 1800s (before the industrial revolution) and warmer than at any time in the last 100,000 years. The last decade (2011-2020) was the warmest on record , and each of the last four decades has been warmer than any previous decade since 1850.

Many people think climate change mainly means warmer temperatures. But temperature rise is only the beginning of the story. Because the Earth is a system, where everything is connected, changes in one area can influence changes in all others.

The consequences of climate change now include, among others, intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, catastrophic storms and declining biodiversity.

People are experiencing climate change in diverse ways

Climate change can affect our health , ability to grow food, housing, safety and work. Some of us are already more vulnerable to climate impacts, such as people living in small island nations and other developing countries. Conditions like sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion have advanced to the point where whole communities have had to relocate, and protracted droughts are putting people at risk of famine. In the future, the number of people displaced by weather-related events is expected to rise.

Every increase in global warming matters

In a series of UN reports , thousands of scientists and government reviewers agreed that limiting global temperature rise to no more than 1.5°C would help us avoid the worst climate impacts and maintain a livable climate. Yet policies currently in place point to a 3°C temperature rise by the end of the century.

The emissions that cause climate change come from every part of the world and affect everyone, but some countries produce much more than others .The seven biggest emitters alone (China, the United States of America, India, the European Union, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and Brazil) accounted for about half of all global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.

Everyone must take climate action, but people and countries creating more of the problem have a greater responsibility to act first.

We face a huge challenge but already know many solutions

Many climate change solutions can deliver economic benefits while improving our lives and protecting the environment. We also have global frameworks and agreements to guide progress, such as the Sustainable Development Goals , the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement . Three broad categories of action are: cutting emissions, adapting to climate impacts and financing required adjustments.

Switching energy systems from fossil fuels to renewables like solar or wind will reduce the emissions driving climate change. But we have to act now. While a growing number of countries is committing to net zero emissions by 2050, emissions must be cut in half by 2030 to keep warming below 1.5°C. Achieving this means huge declines in the use of coal, oil and gas: over two-thirds of today’s proven reserves of fossil fuels need to be kept in the ground by 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change.

Adapting to climate consequences protects people, homes, businesses, livelihoods, infrastructure and natural ecosystems. It covers current impacts and those likely in the future. Adaptation will be required everywhere, but must be prioritized now for the most vulnerable people with the fewest resources to cope with climate hazards. The rate of return can be high. Early warning systems for disasters, for instance, save lives and property, and can deliver benefits up to 10 times the initial cost.

We can pay the bill now, or pay dearly in the future

Climate action requires significant financial investments by governments and businesses. But climate inaction is vastly more expensive. One critical step is for industrialized countries to fulfil their commitment to provide $100 billion a year to developing countries so they can adapt and move towards greener economies.

To get familiar with some of the more technical terms used in connection with climate change, consult the Climate Dictionary .

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Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, which poses many risks to all forms of life on Earth. Learn more .

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What is net zero? Why is it important? Our  net-zero page  explains why we need steep emissions cuts now and what efforts are underway.

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Changes in ENSO impacts in a warming world

At the ENSO blog we’ve spoken previously of the latest research into human-caused climate change and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). So you might be thinking, “Why another article? Didn’t you cover everything already?” Well, first of all, new science comes out all the time and, second, this time instead of looking at ENSO itself, we are going to talk about climate change’s influence on ENSO’s impacts far away from the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Specifically, we are going to look at provocative recent research that suggests that while we may not know exactly how ENSO itself will change in the future, ENSO’s impacts on temperature and wildfire probability in places like North America are likely to get stronger thanks to climate change. Oh, and we’re also going to talk with the lead author of the paper, Dr. John Fasullo.

These maps illustrate the typical impacts of El Niño and La Niña on U.S. winter weather. Typical means "common," but not guaranteed because each event is unique. NOAA Climate.gov drawings, adapted from originals by the Climate Prediction Center.

As I previously wrote about for the ENSO Blog, the jury is still out on what sort of changes to ENSO could occur in a warming world. There is evidence for all sorts of outcomes, whether it is more El Niños, stronger overall events, or even a decrease in the number of El Niños or La Niñas. This uncertainty is because ENSO is a complicated give-and-take between the atmosphere and ocean with a lot of different tuning knobs that each get adjusted by climate change. But this doesn’t mean that scientists cannot look at changes to ENSO impacts .

Enter Dr. John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and his colleagues. They took a climate model that generates realistic ENSO events, and ran it multiple times out to the year 2100 using slightly modified input data but with the same increase in greenhouse gases each time. The creation of multiple model runs is called an “ensemble” or different projections for what the future may hold. By slightly changing the beginning data, scientists can observe just how different the future outcomes can be.

The scientists then isolated just the variability associated with earth’s climate system (by essentially removing the background warming after the models were run) to see how ENSO’s impacts on temperature and wildfire probability changed in that warmer world.

The July-June temperature response to Niño3.4 region sea surface temperature during the twentieth century (1920-1980) in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) for North America. The stippled areas are locations where the statistical significance of the sign of the change exceeds 95%. Blue areas refer an opposite relationship between surface temperatures and ENSO. While red areas refer to a relationship of the same sign. For instance, El Niños are associated with above-average ocean temperatures and below-average temperatures (blue colors in the figure) across the southern tier of the United States. La Niña is associated with below-average ocean temperatures and above-average temperatures (also the blue colors) in the same locations. Units are in degrees K of surface temperature per degrees K of Nino3.4 region sea surface temperature. NOAA Climate.gov modified image from Fasullo et al. 2018.

The authors found an intensification of ENSO’s impact on temperature and wildfire probability over the southern tier of North America (1). This means, for instance, that during El Niños in the future, the colder-than-average temperature signal over the southern tier of the United States was even colder. And since temperature and wildfire probability are connected, it means that the year-to-year wildfire probability anomaly would decrease even more during El Niños in the future (2).  For La Niñas, this means that the warmer-than-average temperature signal is even warmer, and that wildfire anomalies would increase even more compared to La Niñas of the past.

The change in the July-June temperature response to Niño3.4 region sea surface temperature between the twenty-first (2040-2100) and the twentieth century (1920-1980) in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) for North America. The stippled areas are locations where the statistical significance of the sign of the change exceeds 95%. Blue areas refer a stronger opposite relationship between surface temperatures and ENSO in the twenty-first century than the twentieth century. While red areas refer to a stronger relationship of the same sign. For instance, El Niños in the twenty-first century have a stronger below-average temperature response (blue colors) across the southern tier of the United States than in the twentieth century. Units are in degrees K of surface temperature per degrees K of Nino3.4 region sea surface temperature. NOAA Climate.gov modified image from Fasullo et al. 2018.

These findings were backed up by an additional climate model lending credence to the authors’ conclusion.

The scientists even noted that these enhanced El Niño or La Niña impacts occurred regardless of changes in the ENSO phenomenon itself.  In fact, the two models they examined have very different projected changes in ENSO. One predicts increased variance (higher highs (El Niño) and lower lows (La Niña), and the other less variance (more muted events). But both indicated that an El Niño or La Niña event of a given strength would produce more extreme impacts in the future.  

The July-June wildfire probability response to Niño3.4 region sea surface temperature during the twentieth century (1920-1980) in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) for North America. The stippled areas are locations where the statistical significance of the sign of the change exceeds 95%. Blue areas refer an opposite relationship between surface temperatures and ENSO. While red areas refer to a relationship of the same sign. For instance, El Niños are associated with above-average ocean temperatures and below-average wildfire probabilities (blue colors in the figure) across the southern tier of the United States. La Niña is associated with below-average ocean temperatures and above-average wildfire probabilities (also the blue colors) in the same locations. Units are in wildfire probability % per degrees K of Nino3.4 region sea surface temperature. NOAA Climate.gov modified image from Fasullo et al. 2018.

Of course, this research, while provocative, could not discover everything there is to know about future ENSO impacts. The influence of climate change on ENSO’s precipitation impacts, for instance, was less clear, and that could be important when discussing changes in wildfire risk in some regions such as South America (3).

Regardless, this research highlights an important potential climate change impact on seasonal climates across the globe. And additional research will be needed to try and sort the signal out of the noise even more. 

Still curious about this research? So was I. Luckily enough for us, Dr. Fasullo was able to take some time to shed more light on what this research means, why it’s important and what questions are left to answer.

The change in the July-June wildfire probability response to Niño3.4 region sea surface temperature between the twenty-first (2040-2100) and the twentieth century (1920-1980) in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) for North America. The stippled areas are locations where the statistical significance of the sign of the change exceeds 95%. Blue areas refer a stronger opposite relationship between wildfire probability and ENSO in the twenty-first century than the twentieth century. While red areas refer to a stronger relationship of the same sign. For instance, El Niños in the twenty-first century have a stronger below-average wildfire probability response (blue colors) across the southern tier of the United States than in the twentieth century. Units are in wildfire probability % per degrees K of Nino3.4 region sea surface temperature. NOAA Climate.gov modified image from Fasullo et al. 2018.

Question 1: Wait, I thought things would get warmer in the future. Does your research mean that El Niños will make it colder in the southern US, for instance?

Keep in mind that I’m essentially subtracting out the background warming and isolating the year-to-year variability associated with ENSO. So if the variability increases, and the background warms, the cold extremes are made less extreme and warm extremes get even warmer. For the southern tier of the United States, the cooling associated with the intensification of the ENSO impact on temperature would be overwhelmed by the warming of the background climate.

Question 2: Ok, but how? Do you have any thoughts on just how a warming world makes ENSO’s impacts more extreme?

While the physical mechanisms remain somewhat unclear (as they were not the immediate subject of our study), the answer is likely related to the land-sea contrast seen in the images above. Generally, the land regions where we see the temperature signal increase become drier and experience greater evaporative stress (more liquid water from land evaporating into the air) in a warmer climate. It is likely that this drier base state provides less moisture to buffer the energetic influences of ENSO (such as an increase in sunlight due to reduced clouds), leaving warming as the main response. That said, we have some modeling experiments that will help us isolate this effect and our goal is to answer this question more definitively in the coming months.

Question 3: What led you to investigate changes to ENSO’s impacts due to climate change to begin with?

The influence of recent ENSO events in North America and Australia was pretty extreme. The events included heatwaves in the southern tier of the US in 2011 and floods in Australia in 2010/11 that were so large they caused global sea levels to drop , followed by heatwaves in 2010 and early 2013 ( the “Angry Summer "). 

Question 4: What additional questions did your research raise and where are you investigating further?

We are exploring some issues looking at why there is such a land/sea contrast in the signal, specifically regarding exactly what mechanisms are at play and why extremes over the ocean seem to decrease in some models.

Question 5: What does this research mean for folks living in areas that see considerable climate influences from an El Niño or La Niña?

Fundamentally it means that they need to prepare not only for an increase in climate baselines (warming, wildfire, drought) but also for a likely increase in the “whiplash” from one year to the next of 20-30% , depending on where they live.

(1) For the sake of blog post length, I’ve only written about the findings for North America. The authors also looked at similar influences on ENSO impacts by climate change in Australia and South America to varying degrees of confidence. In short, Australia also saw an intensification of ENSO impacts on temperature and wildfire probability due to climate change in the future. For South America, it was a bit more complicated as ENSO impacts on temperature and wildfire probability were of different signs in some places, and rainfall was identified to be an important influence that is difficult to predict. This indicates that climate change could make El Niño impacts on temperature warmer while also reducing the wildfire probability.

(2) This research was done using regressions, which are expressed as impacts per Nino3.4 sea surface temperature anomaly degree Celsius. Therefore the changes shown are under the assumption that the ENSO amplitude is held constant in the future. But ENSO’s amplitude could change in the future. By how much, though, is a much more uncertain question. For example, it’s possible that the total impact of ENSO could decrease even with an increase in the regression coefficients if we have much weaker ENSO events in the future. 

(3) In South America, for instance, potential changes in precipitation could decrease the risk for wildfires even while temperatures increase. This causes an odd scenario where El Niños in the future could increase temperatures more than El Niños of the past but the risk for wildfires could decrease.

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Advancing the Science of Climate Change (2010)

Chapter: 5 recommendations for meeting the challenge of climate change research, chapter five recommendations for meeting the challenge of climate change research.

Meeting the diverse information needs of decision makers as they seek to understand and address climate change is a formidable challenge. The research needs and cross-cutting themes discussed in Chapter 4 (and listed in Box 4.1 ) argue for a new kind of climate change science enterprise, one that builds on the strengths of existing activities and

Focuses not only on improving understanding, but helps to inform solutions for problems at local, regional, national, and global levels;

Integrates diverse kinds of knowledge and explicitly engages the social, ecological, physical, health, and engineering sciences;

Emphasizes coupled human-environment systems rather than individual human or environmental systems in isolation;

Evaluates the implications of particular choices across sectors and scales so as to maximize co-benefits, avoid unintended consequences, and understand net effects across different areas of decision making;

Develops and employs decision-support resources and tools that make scientific knowledge useful and accessible to decision makers;

Focuses, where appropriate, on place-based analyses to support decision making in specific locations or regions, because the dynamics of both human and environmental systems play out in different ways in different places and decisions must be context-specific; and

Supports adaptive decision making and risk management in the face of inevitable uncertainty by remaining flexible and adaptive and regularly assessing and updating research priorities.

These points, and the discussion in the preceding chapters, lead to the following conclusion.

Conclusion 2: The nation needs a comprehensive and integrative climate change science enterprise, one that not only contributes to our fundamental under standing of climate change but also informs and expands America’s climate choices.

This comprehensive, integrative program of science will need to continue current research but also engage in new research themes and directions, including research in the physical, social, ecological, environmental, health, and engineering sciences, as well as research that integrates these and other disciplines. Creating and implementing this more integrated and decision-relevant scientific enterprise will require fundamental changes in the way that research efforts are organized, the way research priorities are set, the way research is linked with decision making across a broad range of scales, the way the federal scientific program interfaces and partners with other entities, and the way that infrastructural assets and human capital are developed and maintained. This chapter examines some of the steps that will be needed to implement this new era of climate change research.

AN INTEGRATIVE, INTERDISCIPLINARY, AND DECISION- RELEVANT RESEARCH PROGRAM

Climate change research efforts that address the seven crosscutting themes described in Chapter 4 have several important distinguishing characteristics.

Climate Change Research Needs to Be Integrative and Interdisciplinary

Climate change affects a wide range of human, ecological, and physical properties and processes, and it interacts in complex ways with other global and regional environmental changes. The response of human and environmental systems to this spectrum of changes is likewise complex. Given this complexity, understanding climate change, its impacts, and potential responses inherently requires integration of knowledge bases from different areas of the physical, biological, social, health, and engineering sciences. Science that supports effective responses to climate change also will require integration of information across spatial and temporal scales. For example, global-or regional-scale information about changes in the climate system often needs to be analyzed in the context of local data on economic activity, vulnerable assets and resources, human well-being, and other place-specific information. Climate change science in the coming decades will need to be more multi- and interdisciplinary and integrative than in the past.

In some ways, the call for cross-disciplinary and cross-scale integration is a step, albeit a large one, in a progression that has been under way in national and international climate science for quite some time. As described later in the chapter, a number of domestic and international scientific programs have organized the research community to focus on climate and other regional and global environmental changes. These

programs have played a critical role in establishing our present understanding. However, in general they have not been as successful in bridging the gaps between those who study the physical climate system; those who study the impacts of and responses to climate change in human, ecological, and coupled human-environment systems; and those who study the technical, economic, political, behavioral, and other aspects of various responses to climate change (ICSU-IGFA, 2009; NRC, 2009k). Moreover, a concerted effort is needed to increase the engagement of some disciplines, such as the social, behavioral, economic, decision, cognitive, and communication sciences.

Achieving better integration will require significant increases in interdisciplinary science capacity among scientists, managers, and decision makers. It will require changes in cultures within and actions across a range of institutions, including universities, government, the private sector, research institutes, professional societies, and other nongovernmental organizations, including the National Research Council. It will also require the creation of new institutions to facilitate the needed research at the appropriate scales and in appropriate contact with decision makers.

Climate Change Research Efforts Should Focus on Fundamental, Use-Inspired Research

This report recognizes the need for research to both understand climate changes and assist in decision making related to climate change. In categorizing types of scientific research, we have found that terms such as “pure,” “basic,” “applied,” and “curiosity driven” have different definitions across communities, are as likely to cause confusion as to advance consensus, and are of limited value in discussing climate change. A more compelling categorization is offered by Stokes (1997), who argues that two questions should be asked of a research topic: Does it contribute to fundamental understanding? Can it be expected to be useful? Research that can answer yes to both of these questions, or “fundamental, use-inspired research,” warrants special priority in a climate science enterprise that seeks to both increase understanding and assist in decision making. Research that addresses one or the other of Stoke’s questions, which describes the full range of scientific inquiry, is also valuable. Priority setting is discussed in further detail in the next section.

Climate Change Research Should Support Decision Making at Local, Regional, National, and International Levels

Although making choices about how to respond to climate change fundamentally involves values, ethics, and trade-offs, science can inform and guide such decisions.

In particular, science can help identify possible courses of action, evaluate the advantages and disadvantages associated with different choices (including trade-offs, unintended consequences, and co-benefits among different sets of actions), develop new options, and improve the options that are available. It can also assist in the development of new, more effective decision-making processes and tools. These goals require interactive processes that engage both scientists and decision makers to identify research topics and improve methods for linking scientific analysis with decision making. Active dialogue with stakeholders at local, regional, national, and international levels can also enhance the utility and credibility of, and support for, scientific research. Strategies, tools, and approaches for improving linkages between science and decision making are described in Chapter 4 and discussed in detail in the companion volume Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change (NRC, 2010b).

Climate Change Research Needs to Be a Flexible Enterprise, Able to Respond to Changing Knowledge Needs and Support Adaptive Risk Management and Iterative Decision Making

As climate change progresses, past climate conditions and human experiences will serve as less and less reliable guides for decision makers (see Chapter 3 and also NRC, 2009g). Even with continued advances in scientific understanding, projections of the future will always include some uncertainties. Moreover, because climate changes interact with so many resource and infrastructure decisions, from power plant design to crop planting dates, responses to climate change will need to be developed and implemented in the context of continuously evolving conditions. Furthermore, as actions are taken to limit the magnitude of future climate change and adapt to its impacts, decision makers will need to understand and take the effectiveness and unintended consequences of these actions into account.

As a direct result of these complexities and uncertainties, all responses to climate change, including the next generation of scientific research, will require deliberate “learning by doing.” Actions and strategies will need to be periodically evaluated and revised to take advantage of new information and knowledge, not only about climate and climate-related changes but also about the effectiveness of responses to date and about other changes in human and environmental systems. The nation’s scientific enterprise should support adaptive risk management (i.e., an ongoing decision-making process that takes known and potential risks and uncertainties into account and periodically updates and improves plans and strategies as new information becomes available—see Box 3.1 ) by monitoring climate change indicators, providing timely information about the effectiveness of actions taken to respond to climate risks, im-

proving the effectiveness of our responses over time, developing new responses, and continuing to build our understanding of climate change and its impacts. These tasks require flexible mechanisms for identifying and addressing new scientific challenges as they emerge and also ongoing interactions with decision makers as their needs change over time. Continued progress will also be needed in monitoring, projecting, and assessing climate change, especially abrupt changes and other “surprises”. Individually and collectively, these demands will require significant changes in the way research is funded, conducted, evaluated, and rewarded.

Recommendation 1: The nation’s climate change research enterprise should include and integrate disciplinary and interdisciplinary research across the physical, social, biological, health, and engineering sciences; focus on funda mental, use-inspired research that contributes to both improved understanding and more effective decision making; and be flexible in identifying and pursuing emerging research challenges.

SETTING PRIORITIES

Recommendation 1 calls for a broad, integrative research program to assist the nation in understanding climate change and in supporting well-crafted and coordinated opportunities to adapt to and limit the magnitude of climate change. In Chapter 4 , seven crosscutting, integrative research themes were identified that would provide effective focal points for such a program:

Climate Forcings, Feedbacks, Responses, and Thresholds in the Earth System

Climate-Related Human Behaviors and Institutions

Vulnerability and Adaptation Analyses of Coupled Human-Environment Systems

Research to Support Strategies for Limiting Climate Change

Effective Information and Decision-Support Systems

Integrated Climate Observing Systems

Improved Projections, Analyses, and Assessments

Progress in these areas would advance the science of climate change in ways that are responsive to the nation’s needs for information, and progress in all seven themes is needed (either iteratively or concurrently) because they are synergistic. However, due to limits in capacity—for example, many of the key research needs are in fields that have not yet been fully incorporated into or developed within the nation’s climate change science enterprise—and in financial resources, priorities will ultimately need to be set within these themes, and perhaps also across them.

Setting priorities has been and will continue to be a critical part of the scientific process. Priority setting can be accomplished via community-based long-range planning mechanisms, national and international assessments and advisory reports, federal agency and interagency advisory and strategy planning processes, and federal budget development processes. Indeed, the U.S. federal government has already developed and established legislation, policies, and practices for developing climate and global change research budgets and priorities (for example, see Appendix E for a description of some of the USGCRP’s past and current priority-setting practices).

Given these detailed, well-established processes, this panel can contribute to priority setting only at a comparably coarse level—for example, by suggesting the high-level research themes discussed in Chapter 4 . The development of more comprehensive, exhaustive, and prioritized lists of specific research needs within each theme will need to involve members of the relevant research communities. It is critical, however, that priority setting also include the perspective of societal need, which necessitates input from decision makers and other stakeholders. Implementation of such priority-setting activities will further require the establishment of agreed-upon priority-setting criteria, strong leadership of and support for the research program, and new mechanisms for stakeholder input.

Priority-Setting Criteria

The establishment of criteria by which prospective priorities should be evaluated is critical for effective priority setting. There have been a number of efforts to establish priority-setting criteria for climate-related research (see, e.g., NRC, 2005a, 2009k). Drawing on these analyses, we identify the following three main criteria for setting research priorities for the nation’s climate change research enterprise, including (but not limited to) the entity or program responsible for coordinating and implementing research at the federal level (see Recommendation 5 later in this chapter). The numbering of these criteria do not imply relative importance; rather, it is important to consider all three criteria. Bulleted points after each criterion are ways of thinking about priorities in the context of that criterion, not separate criteria.

1. Contribution to fundamental understanding

Addresses key theoretical, observational, process, or modeling uncertainties;

Adds new information to important scientific debates; and/or

Extends research to understudied areas and questions.

2. Contribution to improved decision making

Addresses topics that have been identified as decision-maker needs or that are key to the nation’s economic vitality, its security, or the well-being of its citizens;

Provides scientific foundations for new solutions or options, especially those that have co-benefits for other environmental or socioeconomic challenges;

Contributes useful results that can be communicated effectively to decision makers and affected parties or have the potential to establish ongoing dialogue between researchers and users of scientific information; and/or

Supports risk assessment and management by improving projections or predictions, providing information on probabilities, clarifying societal consequences of key outcomes, or creating decision-support resources.

3. Feasibility of implementation (practical, institutional, and managerial concerns)

Is ready for implementation (infrastructure, personnel, and facilities are available or could be available to execute the research);

Will provide usable results on time scales relevant for decision making or improved understanding;

Contributes to more than one application or scientific discipline; and/or

Is cost effective (anticipated outcomes or value of information generated by the activity is sufficient to justify both financial and opportunity costs).

The climate change research program envisioned by the Panel on Advancing the Science of Climate Change and encapsulated by these criteria focuses on fundamental, use-inspired research that increases understanding and supports decision making. To develop research that is both fundamental and useful, assessments of research priorities will need to engage both the scientific community and those who will make use of new scientific understanding in decision making, ideally through interactive and ongoing dialogues. A multidirectional flow of information between the decision-making and research communities helps decision makers understand the uses and limits of scientific information and helps the scientific community understand what information and innovations would be most useful to decision makers. This should not be a process in which decision makers have undue influence on the conduct of science or scientific conclusions. Rather, our vision is one of ongoing dialogues that lead to better understanding and improved collaboration. Interactions between decision makers and scientists have the additional benefits of enhancing the trust decision makers place in the scientific process and ensuring that researchers use actual input from decision makers, rather than educated guesswork, to help identify and prioritize research topics.

The research program envisioned in this report involves a broad range of scientific disciplines, including multi- and interdisciplinary science. Identifying and setting research priorities across such a broad and diverse range of scientific activities is much more challenging than priority setting within individual disciplines, which usually share common practices, understandings, and language. Working across areas of research where no unified community has yet been assembled represents an additional challenge, one that requires both careful sampling of views across communities and time to develop mutual understanding.

Because the costs associated with the different climate change research themes described in Chapter 3 are likely to vary by several orders of magnitude, appropriate ranking requires an understanding of the budget constraints agencies will face as well as the benefits that could potentially be realized. As discussed in the preceding recommendation, climate change research should be a flexible and adaptive enterprise, so priorities, and priority-setting criteria and processes, need to be revisited regularly. In addition to changing knowledge needs, advances in methodology or research technology can also motivate a reassessment of priorities in the context of evolving environmental conditions, changing budgets, and other variables that inform research agendas. Given that both climate change and responses to it are ongoing, and that they interact with each other as well as with other changes, such reassessments will be a key element of a healthy research program.

Recommendation 2: Research priorities for the federal climate change research program should be set within each of the seven crosscutting research themes outlined above. Priorities should be set using the following three criteria:

Contribution to improved understanding;

Contribution to improved decision making; and

Feasibility of implementation, including scientific readiness and cost.

INFRASTRUCTURAL ELEMENTS OF THE RESEARCH PROGRAM

Scientific progress in measuring climate change, attributing it to human activities, projecting future changes, and informing decisions about how to respond has and will continue to rely on significant investments in a wide range of global observational programs and modeling efforts. As noted in Chapter 4 , these efforts are limited in part by infrastructure, especially the lack of a comprehensive, integrated climate observing system and of reliable, detailed projections of climate and climate-related changes at regional and local scales. Because these infrastructural areas underpin progress in virtually all other areas of climate change science, we have identified observations and

modeling as critical themes in climate science research, and below we offer specific recommendations related to these key themes. Many previous reviews of climate science needs (e.g., NRC, 2009k) have also highlighted observations and models as key research needs.

Observing Systems

As discussed in Chapter 4 , long-term, stable, and well-calibrated observations across a range of scales and a spectrum of human and environmental systems are essential for diagnosing, understanding, and responding to climate change and its impacts. Observations provide ongoing information about the health of the planet and clues about which components of the Earth system are at risk due to climate change and other environmental stressors. Observations are also critical for developing, initializing, and testing models of future human and environmental changes, and for monitoring and improving the effectiveness of actions taken to respond to climate change. Unfortunately, many of the critical observational assets needed to support climate research and climate change responses are either in decline or seriously underdeveloped, and the data that are being collected are not always managed as effectively or used as widely as they could be. A number of specific steps are needed to rectify this situation and develop a coordinated, comprehensive, and integrated climate observing system.

A Careful, Comprehensive Review Should Be Undertaken to Identify Current and Planned Observational Assets and Identify Critical Climate Monitoring and Measurement Needs

An observing system strategy for the new era of climate change research will need to consider not only existing and planned assets, which have largely been developed by the scientific community without much input from decision makers, but also the observations needed to support effective responses to climate change. In considering available resources and data sources, federal programs should work with international partners to identify opportunities for collaboration, leveraging, and synergy with observational systems in other countries. A special effort should be made to evaluate observations and databases from areas that have historically been neglected. Where possible, the review should consider assets in the intelligence community that could serve scientific purposes without compromising national security interests. Finally, the climate observing system should be coordinated with other environmental and social data collection efforts to take advantage of synergies and ensure interoperability.

The federal climate change research program (see Recommendation 5) is the entity

best suited to lead a comprehensive assessment of current and planned observational assets and needs in support of climate research. However, the research community will need to work closely with a broad range of responsible entities and stakeholders, including programs for adapting to, limiting the magnitude of, and supporting effective decisions related to climate change, to ensure that the scope and structure of the observing system can support both fundamental research on and responses to climate change. Such partnerships are critical in light of the costs of creating and maintaining a comprehensive and long-term observing system. As the recent problems with NPOESS have demonstrated (NRC, 2008d), planning for climate observations will require clearly defined roles and responsibilities of the partners and a systems approach to the design of the overall architecture of the observing system.

A Comprehensive and Integrated Climate Observing System Should Be Developed, Built, and Maintained by the Federal Program and Relevant National and International Partners

The climate observing system should be able to monitor a broad spectrum of changes, including changes in the physical climate system (such as sea level rise, sea ice declines, and soil moisture changes); changes in related biological systems (such as species shifts and changes in crop yield or the amount of carbon stored in forests); the impacts of these changes on human systems (including human health and economic impacts); trends in human systems (such as human population and consumption changes and GHG emission trends); indicators of climate vulnerability and adaptive capacity across a range of sectors and spatial scales; and indicators of the effectiveness of actions taken to limit the magnitude of climate change and adapt to its impacts. In addition to a robust and flexible network of remote and in situ assets to monitor physical, chemical, and biological changes, observations and data sets from a wide range of human systems are needed. Observations of emission trends and the effectiveness of various climate policies and action plans are particularly important for informing actions taken to limit the magnitude of future climate change, while observations of climate change impacts at regional to local scales are particularly important for informing adaptation decisions.

The observing system, like other research activities and responses to climate change, should be integrated and flexible, and it should support adaptive risk management and decision making. For example, although observational assets with long-term and global coverage will play a critical role in monitoring climate change, its impacts, and our responses to it, we may also need easily deployable short-term observational technologies to monitor potential abrupt changes or important regional trends. The

observing system should also be designed both to take advantage of advances in technology and to explicitly support adaptive risk management and decision making. External advisory boards, user councils, and other formal and informal stakeholder groups (see Recommendation 5) can play an important role in ensuring that the observing system is supplying the information required by stakeholders.

Adequate Climate Data Access, Management, and Stewardship Are Needed

Linking, integrating, and providing access to data of dramatically different types and scales will call for new and improved approaches and standards for climate and climate-related data management, including data collection, storage, and stewardship. To ensure a stable, long-term record of climate and climate-related changes, funding for data-generating activities should always include resources for long-term data management (NRC, 2007d). An equally important activity, described in further detail in Chapter 4 , is the integration of data from different sources through data assimilation, analysis, and reanalysis. Finally, the system should allow ready access to data by a wide range of users, including decision makers. This will require the federal climate change program to work closely with programs involved in informing and supporting effective responses to climate change.

Recommendation 3: The federal climate change research program, working in partnership with other relevant domestic and international bodies, should redouble efforts to design, deploy, and maintain a comprehensive observing system that can support all aspects of understanding and responding to climate change.

Enhanced Modeling Capabilities and Other Analytical Tools

Improved predictions and scenarios of future climate change, its impacts, and related changes in ecosystems and human systems are critical for understanding and guiding plans to respond to climate, many of which require local- or regional-scale information at decadal time scales. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 6 , great strides have been made in improving the spatial resolution, comprehensiveness, and fidelity of global climate and Earth system models. However, improvements are still needed in the ability of climate models to represent key climate feedback processes (such as the carbon cycle and changes in ice sheets) and to resolve and simulate the physical processes, interactions, and feedbacks that govern climate change at regional scales. Another emerging research need is integrated assessment models that can connect emissions projec-

tions, GHG concentrations, climate trends, and the social, economic, and environmental impacts of these trends on human and environmental systems. Other kinds of assessment tools and models, including those that allow integrated analysis of trade-offs and unintended consequences among combinations of actions or across different sectors, would also be valuable both to improve understanding and to support climate-related decision making. Chapter 4 includes a more extended description of these and other research needs related to improved projections, analyses, and assessments.

As noted in Chapter 4 , and in many previous reports (e.g., NRC, 2009k), a national strategy is needed to improve (and to coordinate existing efforts to improve) regional climate modeling, global Earth system modeling, and various integrated assessment, vulnerability, impact, and adaptation modeling efforts. Developing improved models and analytical tools is strongly dependent on the availability of high-performance computing capacity as well as the infrastructure and human resources needed to develop, manage, analyze, and improve modeling approaches. The output from such models needs to be made readily available to a wide range of decision makers in formats that allow them to incorporate model analyses and projections into their decision-making processes. As with the integrated climate observing system—and perhaps more so, given the highly technical and interdisciplinary nature of many model development activities—the federal climate change research program is the logical entity for coordinating and integrating these development efforts. Input and buy-in will be needed from its partner agencies, action-oriented response programs, and other stakeholders. Likewise, international coordination and leveraging will be vital.

Recommendation 4: The federal climate change research program should work with the international research community and other relevant partners to sup port and develop advanced models and other analytical tools to improve under standing and assist in decision making related to climate change.

ORGANIZING THE RESEARCH

A research effort that can improve understanding of and support effective responses to climate change across a broad range of scales will require the engagement of universities, professional societies, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and governments at many levels, including international partners. To date, the federal government, under the auspices of the USGCRP, has played a leadership role in the nation’s climate change research enterprise. This section summarizes the history, structure, and current goals of the USGCRP, evaluates its capacity to carry out the seven research themes identified in Chapter 4 , and recommends elements that would be

needed for the USGCRP, or another federal entity, to lead and coordinate the nation’s climate change research efforts. Additional background on the history and organization of the USGCRP can be found in Appendix E .

Evaluation of the U.S. Global Change Research Program

Congress established the USGCRP with the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606, Title 15, Chapter 56A). The act set the objective of “assist[ing] the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change systems.” With federal support ranging from $2.2 billion in 1990 (in 2008 dollars) to $1.8 billion in 2008, the USGCRP 1 has made enormous contributions to the understanding of climate change over the past two decades, including a considerable fraction of the advances summarized in Chapter 2 (see, e.g., USGCRP, 2009b).

There have been a wide range of assessments, observations, and reviews of the USGCRP, including mandated formal reviews by the NRC (1999a, 2003a, 2004b, 2005e, 2007f, 2009k) and assessments and observations by other groups (e.g., the Congressional Research Service). Most of these reviews have praised the USGCRP for its support and facilitation of major advances in our understanding of the natural science aspects of global change, including the physical climate system, atmospheric chemistry, hydrology, and ecosystems, and also for supporting national and international scientific assessments. Earlier reviews of the program also noted significant progress in establishing a comprehensive and inclusive national climate change assessment process and in providing strategic guidance that promoted major advances in observations and modeling, although later reviews have noted a decline in the support for and effectiveness of these activities.

One persistent area of criticism has been the scope and balance of the program. In its early years, the primary research emphasis of USGCRP was on the physical climate system. The program has consistently aspired to call increasing attention to human interactions with the Earth’s climate and other environmental systems, but these aspirations have for the most part fallen short (NRC, 2007f). Another persistent criticism has focused on decision support, including progress in decision-support science and whether the program has lived up to its mandate of providing useful information for decision making (NRC, 2007f, 2009k). Identified reasons for these shortcomings include a lack of consistent and adequate funding and institutional support for fundamental

and applied research in the social sciences and a lack of adequate integration across scientific disciplines. Moreover, the failure to follow through with periodic, comprehensive national climate change assessments weakened the program’s ability to build a consistent and sustainable relationship with stakeholders. Other troubling signs include a decline in congressional oversight of and interest in the program—measured, for example, by the number of hearings convened to review aspects of the program—and an overall decline of 18 percent (in constant 2008 dollars) in program funding from 1990 to the present (NRC, 2007f, 2009k).

Past NRC reviews have also pointed out weaknesses in the program’s structure and institutional processes. For example, the program has relied on individual federal agencies to identify and engage in areas of climate change research aligned with their missions, with only a few, typically episodic and informal, mechanisms for supporting research in areas that do not map onto agency missions. One result of this “stove-piping” has been uneven progress, with some research elements receiving significant funding and making excellent progress, while other research areas—including those associated with several of the crosscutting themes identified in Chapter 4 —receiving much less attention. Moreover, without strong coordination, leadership, and buy-in from the full range of federal agencies affected by climate change, the program has been limited in its ability to support the evolving needs for climate science, including research that could support more effective responses to climate change. Additionally, as discussed in the next section of the chapter, the activities of the USGCRP have not been very well coordinated with the Climate Change Technology Program (NRC, 2007f, 2009k) or with preliminary efforts to establish mechanisms to provide “climate services.”

Needs for the Climate Change Research Program of the Future

The USGCRP currently involves 13 federal departments and agencies, and many of these organizations have several different agencies or groups active in climate change research. This scope of engagement is essential given the broad range of public interests that will be affected by climate change. However, this broad scope and inconsistencies between the mandates of the Global Change Research Act and the narrower missions of the participating agencies create a difficult and complex management environment. For example, as noted in the previous subsection, gaps between agency missions have led to weaknesses and gaps in certain research areas. Furthermore, progress on several key crosscutting issues, such as maintaining and improving climate-related observational programs, have suffered from a lack of leadership and coordination (e.g., NRC, 2008d). Thus, it is not clear that the USGCRP as presently con-

stituted can adequately address the full set of research challenges posed by current demands for climate change research.

How then might the federal climate change research effort be structured to meet these new challenges? The Panel on Advancing the Science of Climate Change considered several alternatives, each with its strengths and weaknesses. One model is to create a new office or agency that aggregates all federal climate change research into one organizational structure. This harkens to the call in the 1990s for a National Institute of the Environment to be the home for all federal environmental research. An NRC report examined this proposal and saw several problems with as well as several advantages to this approach (NRC, 1993). For example, a consolidated aproach would improve cross-agency coordination and planning, while a more distributed responsibility for environmental research leads to improved linkages between researchers and decision makers. The report called for “cultural changes” in the practice of environmental research in the federal government, including greater engagement of the ecological, social, and engineering sciences. It also considered several options for organizing these changes and suggested that the best immediate step would be to retain the multiagency support of environmental research but with better coordination and attention to neglected priorities, rather than consolidate research into a single agency.

For climate change research, a consolidated agency would facilitate coordination and allow for priority setting based on a systematic analysis, such as the seven research themes identified in Chapter 4 . Neglected high-priority areas could thus be allocated the resources needed to move them forward. Decision makers and the public would also have a single entity to consult on climate change. However, there are many disadvantages to consolidation, and those may outweigh its benefits. First, given the many challenges facing the federal government at present, it is unlikely that a proposal to create a new agency that would pull current research functions out of existing agencies could reach an actionable level on the federal agenda. Second, one of the strengths of the USGCRP is that it encourages engagement by multiple agencies and, thus, has been able to adapt relatively easily as concerns about and needs for scientific understanding of climate change have spread to affect the missions of more and more agencies. This trend is likely to continue, especially as more agencies are involved in efforts to respond to climate change. Openness to new partnerships, which is a strength of the current USGCRP, would likely be reduced with the creation of a new agency. In addition, a single agency would be limited in its ability to draw on the strengths of the non-USGCRP components of currently participating agencies. For example, NASA’s Earth science activities benefit significantly from their integration with other complementary aspects of NASA’s portfolio. These benefits could be significantly compromised if the Earth science activity were moved from NASA to another entity.

While there are surely other alternative arrangements for organizing federal climate research, the main alternative to a consolidated agency is some sort of interagency program, ideally one that retains the current and historical strengths of the USGCRP while addressing its known weaknesses. The major advantage of the continuance of the USGCRP in this coordinating role is that the program already exists and has the legal authority and mandate to engage in a cross-agency research program. In fact, a careful reading of the Global Change Research Act of 1990 indicates that the program was intended to accomplish many of the goals identified in this report. The main disadvantages of a continuation of the USGCRP are the weaknesses highlighted in the previous subsection. Hence, provided that these weaknesses can be addressed, the panel finds that a modified USGCRP could serve the role of leading and coordinating an integrated, decision-relevant, and expanded climate change research enterprise that continues to pursue an enhanced understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change while also improving understanding of and support for responses to climate change. Indeed, as of the writing of this report, the USGCRP is already engaging in a strategic planning process to address the weaknesses and pursue the opportunities identified in past reviews of the program. The next two subsections describe ways in which the current program might be reshaped to better meet the challenges of the new era of climate change research while maintaining its existing strengths.

Improving the Relevance of the USGCRP to Decision Making

A common finding among many past reports (for example, NRC, 2007a, 2008b, 2009g), and this one, is that improving the relevance and utility of scientific research and infusing scientific information into the decision-making process require increased dialogue and engagement between scientists and decision makers. Several mechanisms help connect scientific and decision-making entities in the context of the USGCRP. For example, the USGCRP could establish an external advisory board to provide input on research needs, to review and provide advice on research priorities, and to guide activities designed to enhance communication and interactions with the broader stakeholder community. An external advisory board would help to ensure that priorities for research are informed by and responsive to the needs of decision makers and other information users, and it could assess and improve the program’s decision-support capabilities. If established, such a board should be composed of decision makers and stakeholders from a broad range of communities (e.g., leaders in state, local, and tribal governments; relevant businesses and industries; citizen groups; and other non-governmental organizations), including communities that are currently not strongly

linked with the program, as well as members from across the scientific research community.

Mechanisms should also be developed for regular interaction between users and researchers at the individual research project level. A number of federal agencies have already taken steps to increase such engagement, but more comprehensive and coordinated efforts are needed. For example, “user councils” focusing on a particular type of decision or research area could help researchers understand the questions that are most critical for decision makers and other stakeholders, help users understand the information that science can and cannot provide, and assist in the development of enhanced decision-support processes and tools. Workshops and dialogues, such as the “listening sessions” USGCRP has held at various venues across the country, are also a valuable contribution.

There are two important caveats that need to be kept in mind when designing and implementing strategies to increase interactions between the research community and its stakeholders. First, and most important, interactions between users and producers of scientific information should always preserve the integrity of the research process in reaching factual conclusions. Second, input from stakeholders needs to be considered in the context of the tractability of the proposed research and the resources required, and mechanisms are needed to ensure that the scientific enterprise is not totally dominated by near-term decision-support activities.

Next Steps for the USGCRP

A careful reading of the Global Change Research Act indicates that the legislation provides most of the necessary authority for implementing a strategically integrated climate change research program (see Appendix E ). The act envisions a program that covers the full spectrum of activities from understanding climate change and its interactions with other global changes and stresses through developing and improving responses to these changes. The act also mandates research that is closely aligned with decision-making needs, including decisions related to the nation’s energy, natural resources, and public policy programs.

The USGCRP has achieved many of the original goals of the act. However, as discussed above, in other areas some critical weaknesses and shortcomings have emerged. As the climate research program expands to include a greater emphasis on use-inspired and decision-relevant research, additional gaps and barriers are likely to arise unless steps are taken to address these deficiencies and help the program evolve. Some of the specific changes that are needed include

Setting priorities more effectively and transparently using clear criteria and evaluative information on program performance;

Promoting a closer connection between research and decision making by engaging a broader range of federal agencies whose stakeholders and mandates will be affected by climate change and by establishing mechanisms for sustained engagement of users in program decision making;

Addressing known weaknesses in the program, including development of decision-support resources and engagement of the social and behavioral sciences;

Fostering integration through targeted research funding opportunities, decision-relevant interdisciplinary research centers, and other means that build on established capacity in universities, national laboratories, and the private sector; and

Strengthening budget coordination and management to ensure the research activities of participating agencies are sufficiently focused on USGCRP priorities.

As a first step toward developing a more comprehensive and integrated program, a program-level effort could be initiated to identify, recruit, and leverage new partner agencies, including some that have not participated heretofore in climate change issues, and to expand participation by current partner agencies. For example, programs within the Departments of Agriculture or Interior that are responsible for protected lands, national parks, conservation reserves, and activities such as agricultural extension or water resources management have not been very active players in the USGCRP to date, yet they are in the process of developing responses to climate change because their missions will be directly affected by it. Such agencies and programs could play important roles in improving understanding of climate impacts and vulnerabilities and in formulating, evaluating, and improving response strategies. Data collection and research efforts performed by agencies and programs not specifically focused on climate change, such as those at the U.S. Census Bureau or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, could likewise contribute substantially to our understanding of both climate change and its interactions with other human and environmental systems. The relative ease with which the USGCRP structure can integrate new agencies or departments is a key advantage over a single consolidated entity or agency. Likewise, some of the traditional research and mission agencies could be more actively involved in engaging with decision makers to help shape the program’s scientific agenda and ensure the results are used effectively.

Flexibility is a key advantage of the current USGCRP structure, but, as noted above, this organizational structure has also led to research gaps. One problem is that while the USGCRP might be able to reach agreement about research priorities, the budgets to

implement those priorities reside within the partner agencies, where climate change research needs compete with other agency priorities. To address this problem, mechanisms are needed to ensure that research priorities identified by USGCRP are given greater weight by participating agencies, and the USGCRP needs the budgetary authority to implement the priorities it identifies. Improved review and oversight mechanisms, such as coordinated reviews of participating agency budgets (as opposed to merely designating established agency activities as contributions to USGCRP), would help promote accountability and would assist in evaluations of how well the priorities identified by USGCRP are reflected in the programs and budget requests of the participating agencies. Mechanisms are also needed to ensure that critical areas of research that are currently underrepresented in federal agency activities receive appropriate attention. Finally—and perhaps most difficult—program managers need to have the authority, willingness, and capability to emphasize the interdisciplinary, decision-relevant science needed to both improve understanding and support effective responses to climate change. Changes to the Global Change Research Act or other mechanisms, such as an Executive Order or performance measures, may be appropriate means to implement these changes and strengthen the program’s budget coordination and alignment with identified research priorities.

Changes in the USGCRP will require strong leadership. The importance of effective leadership, with adequate support and programmatic and budgetary authority to coordinate and prioritize across agencies, has been recognized in a number of previous NRC reviews of the USGCRP (NRC, 2004b, 2005e, 2007f, 2009k). Such leadership will be essential for setting priorities and building a more balanced and integrative program, ensuring effective interactions between federal research activities and action-oriented programs (as discussed in the next section of the chapter) and executing the other recommendations in this report. One step that could be taken to improve program leadership could be achieved by assigning higher-level leaders within the partner agencies and organizations to be liaisons to the program. The assignment of senior-level, experienced program managers to staff the USGCRP coordination office could increase buy-in from the participating agencies; experienced staff will be needed to address program gaps and help lead interagency program prioritization and coordination. Effective guidance and budget review could be provided by organizations such as the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the units within the Office of Management and Budget responsible for USGCRP partner agencies.

As noted in the first two sections of the chapter, setting research priorities needs to be an ongoing, iterative process. Such adaptive management of the federal research program would be facilitated by regular strategic planning and reviews that address both specific research areas and the program as a whole. The USGCRP is already required to

conduct a strategic review and submit a new strategic plan every 3 years. While there have occasionally been delays in the process, these review and planning exercises have provided useful opportunities for the program to remain flexible and to support emerging priorities. A major focus of future reviews and other ongoing assessment activities within the program should be mapping the priorities, activities, and capabilities of participating agencies onto the goals of the overall research program to identify weaknesses and gaps. Identifying impediments and obstacles that may be contributing to these weaknesses and gaps would also help the program develop specific actions to address these shortcomings and build a more balanced and effective program.

Finally, it might be beneficial to coordinate future reviews of the nation’s climate change research program with reviews of the effectiveness of the nation’s overall response to climate change in terms of limiting climate change, developing adaptation approaches, and informing effective climate-related decisions. Because coordinated federal efforts to inform, limit, and adapt to climate change are still in early stages of development, it is difficult to offer suggestions as to how this coordination can be achieved, but attention to such coordination will be important (see also Recommendation 6).

Recommendation 5: A single federal entity should be given the authority and re sources to coordinate and implement an integrated research effort that supports improving both understanding of and responses to climate change. If several key modifications are made, the U.S. Global Change Research Program could serve this role.

These modifications are described in the paragraphs above and include

An expanded mission that includes both understanding climate change and supporting effective decisions and actions taken to respond to climate change;

Establishing a wide range of activities and mechanisms to support two-way flows of information between science and decision making, including improved mechanisms for input from decision makers and other stakeholders on research priorities;

Establishing more effective mechanisms for identifying and addressing gaps and weaknesses in climate research, as well as the barriers that give rise to such gaps;

High-level leadership both within the program and among its partner agencies; and

Budgeting oversight and authority.

BROADER PARTNERSHIPS

Climate change is both a global problem and a local problem, and its impacts have implications for and interact with nearly every sector of human activity, including energy and food production, water and other natural resources, human health, business and industrial activities, and, in turn, political stability and international security. Efforts to limit climate change are also inherently cross-sectoral and international in scope—national efforts to limit GHG emissions are connected by the global climate system, making it necessary for the United States to formulate and coordinate its strategies for reducing emissions in the context of international agreements and the actions of other nations. At the same time, many of the actions taken to limit or adapt to climate change ultimately play out at local and regional scales. Thus, the engagement of institutions at all levels and of all sorts—academic, governmental, private-sector, and not-for-profit—will be required to meet the challenges of climate change.

The scientific enterprise is also inherently local to global in scope—scientific contributions to understanding or responding to climate change appear in international journals, get assessed by international scientific bodies, and contribute to improved understanding and responses to climate change worldwide. The international research community has established a number of scientific programs to coordinate and facilitate international participation in global change research. Some of these programs and partnerships include the following:

The World Climate Research Program (WCRP) was established by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the (nongovernmental) International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) in 1980 with the aim of determining the predictability of climate and the effect of human activities on climate.

ICSU established the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) in 1987 to more broadly address global environmental changes and their interactions in the biosphere and physical Earth system.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by WMO and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to provide an international assessment of the science that all governments could use in negotiating an international approach to addressing climate change.

In 1990, in partnership with the International Social Science Council, ICSU established the International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP) to address the social science components of global change research.

In 1991, DIVERSITAS was established with the goal of developing an interna-

tional, nongovernmental umbrella program that would address the complex scientific questions posed by the loss of and change in global biodiversity. It was founded jointly by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment; and the International Union of Biological Science.

In 1992, the START (System for Analysis, Research and Training) Programme was formed jointly by ICSU and its four international global change science programs. START is designed to assist developing countries, through research and education, in building the expertise and knowledge they need to explore the drivers of and solutions to global and regional climate and environmental change.

In 2002, the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) was established in order to provide integrated studies of the Earth system. ESSP is a joint initiative of WCRP, IGBP, IHDP and DIVERSITAS.

The United States has been a key scientific contributor to all of these programs—the U.S. policy of making satellite data freely available around the world is just one example—and has also been a beneficiary of international research efforts. Since the early 1990s, the International Group of Funding Agencies for Global Change Research (IGFA) has provided a forum through which national agencies that fund global change research identify issues of mutual interest and look for appropriate ways to coordinate. Continued participation in these international activities will be crucial to an effective climate science enterprise in the United States. In particular, as noted in this report and others (e.g., NRC, 2009k), the science needs for improved climate observing systems and improved model projections of future climate change can best be met through collaborations and partnerships at the international scale. Moreover, climate change is a global challenge; impacts on ecosystems and societies span the globe and some of these impacts will cascade from one region to another. Climate change science conducted in the United States can thus play an essential role in improving the knowledge of and scientific capacity to respond to climate challenges in the developing areas of the world, where knowledge about possible responses to climate change is much more limited.

National and international coordination are essential, but decision-relevant research is often focused at regional and local scales. Thus, there are many opportunities for states, municipalities, and other subnational entities to work with each other and with the federal government to build expertise, fund relevant research and research infrastructure, and create the kinds of networks and partnerships that enable effective collaborations among the research and decision-making communities. For example,

research in many academic and nonacademic institutions is supported in part by state funds, including the system of agricultural experiment stations and targeted initiatives on water and other resources. Because so many climate change challenges play out at local to regional scales, new kinds of partnerships and programs will be needed to link federal and local research and response approaches and to make research useful to decision making at all scales. So-called “boundary organizations” that purposefully link researchers and decision makers provide one model for doing so (see, e.g., Brooke, 2008; Moser and Luers, 2008; Pohl, 2008; Tribbia and Moser, 2008). The Regional Integrated Science and Assessments (RISA) program and, until recently, the Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP) organized by NOAA are examples of such programs (NRC, 2007h). Examples can also be found in other countries (for example, the United Kingdom Climate Impacts Program). Shared funding and governance can help ensure such programs provide both effective decision support and decision-relevant research.

Partnerships with Programs to Limit, Adapt to, and Inform Decisions Makers About Climate Change

As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 , climate change science can make a wide variety of contributions to action-oriented programs that focus on responses to climate change. Working collaboratively with action-oriented programs, both at the federal level and across the country, would help response programs take more effective actions and would help the federal climate change research program ensure that its research activities support effective decision making, in addition to improving fundamental understanding. The recent NRC reports Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change (NRC, 2009k) and Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate (NRC, 2009g) also called for an integrated, “end-to-end” climate change research program that is closely linked with relevant action-oriented programs. Achieving this integration will require careful and deliberate coordination, perhaps through an oversight committee that coordinates all federal actions to understand and respond to climate change, or through less formal partnerships led by dedicated managers. In this panel’s opinion, formal mechanisms have a greater chance of long-term success.

Limiting Climate Change

As discussed in Chapter 4 and in the companion report Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change (NRC, 2010c), scientific research can help support actions taken to limit the magnitude of future climate change in a variety of ways. Some technol-

ogy options in the energy sector are already commercially viable and could be implemented to achieve emissions reductions in the near term. However, research and development are needed to improve implementation success, lower costs, increase the effectiveness of current options, and expand the number of options available. Expanded investments will be needed in a wide range of research areas, such as energy sources that emit few or no GHGs, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency and conservation approaches (including strategies to promote adoption and use of energy-efficient technologies), and technologies to reduce emissions from agriculture and other land uses. Technologies that remove GHGs from the air or reflect more sunlight back to space (geoengineering approaches) may also warrant attention, provided that they do not replace other important research efforts (see Chapter 15 ).

A variety of research programs on transportation and energy technology development and deployment already exist in the federal government (for example and most notably, the Climate Change Technology Program led by the Department of Energy), in several states (e.g., California’s PIER program), in corporations, and through public-private partnerships such as corporate-funded university research efforts (NRC, 2009a,b,c,d). The climate change research enterprise envisioned in this report—including the USGCRP—would complement and build on these efforts. For example, research will be needed to evaluate the overall effectiveness of different technologies, possible unintended consequences of large-scale deployment, and possible tradeoffs and co-benefits with other types of responses. New scientific knowledge about human behavior, public perception, and institutional structures can help identify potential barriers to widespread implementation of promising technologies or policies to limit climate change. Research is also needed on a wide range of technology implementation and deployment issues, such as research on cost and cost effectiveness, governance issues, barriers to technology adoption, and policies and programs designed to overcome these barriers. Finally, research can help to develop frameworks for decision making that allow these barriers, costs, benefits, co-benefits, and trade-offs to be explicitly evaluated and incorporated into strategies for reducing emissions.

As noted in Chapter 4 , an effective national research effort on limiting the magnitude of climate change will require integration of knowledge across a wide range of fields and collaboration with engineers, policy makers, and others involved in developing and implementing actions to limit climate change. However, collaboration and linkages between the USGCRP and existing programs relevant to limiting climate change—most notably the Climate Change Technology Program—are currently weak (NRC, 2009k). These linkages need to be improved, and any new programs that emerge to focus on limiting the magnitude of future climate change would surely benefit

from formal linkages to the USGCRP as well as other scientific research organizations, efforts, and activities.

Adapting to Climate Change

The companion report Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change (NRC, 2010a) concludes that there is an urgent need to better understand and project climate change and its impacts (especially at local and regional scales), convey this information to decision makers and other stakeholders, and develop options and strategies for reducing the vulnerability and increasing the resilience and adaptive capacity of both human and natural systems in the United States and abroad. As discussed in Chapter 4 , science can make major contributions in all of these areas. A national climate change research enterprise that has an expanded focus on adaptation strategies could, for example, provide region- and sector-specific information about climate change impacts and vulnerabilities in the context of multiple stressors acting on coupled human-environment systems. It could also evaluate and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of, trade-offs among, and the secondary environmental, social, and economic consequences of different adaptation options. Moreover, because it is difficult to assign a monetary value to some kinds of impacts (for example, biodiversity loss or threats to national security), the development of alternative metrics and assessment strategies is needed. Science can also support adaptation through research-based development and testing of decision-support strategies and tools designed to connect scientific information with decision making. Finally, there is a need for further research on human behavior and institutional barriers to implementation in the context of adaptation options and choices.

The companion report Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change (NRC, 2010a) recommends that a national adaptation strategy be established to engage decision makers, stakeholders, and researchers at all levels in developing and implementing adaptation plans. The USGCRP and other elements of the nation’s climate change science research enterprise will be essential partners in the success of these adaptation efforts. Connecting adaptation programs with scientific research is complicated, however, by the fact that many adaptation decisions are inherently local or regional in scale and can take years to implement. Federal centers established to address climate challenges may not effectively assist at these scales unless there are regional or local entities to provide integration in a place-based context and facilitate connections with local decision makers. Local, state, and regional partnerships between academic, public, and private institutions could serve the role of coupling adaptation efforts with scientific research to create end-to-end knowledge systems. Approaches for linking knowledge

about adaptation responses across these scales, and to international adaptation research efforts, will also be needed.

Informing About Climate Change

To respond effectively to climate change, decision makers at all scales from local to international will need up-to-date, cogent, accessible, and usable information. The companion report Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change (NRC, 2010b) provides analysis and advice on how to ensure that scientific information is used, and used effectively, by decision makers. Many previous reports (e.g., NRC, 2008h, 2009g) have also analyzed the information sources, assessment tools, decision-support mechanisms, and other aspects of informing effective climate-related decision making.

There have been several recent efforts at the federal level to establish programs to provide climate-related information, such as NOAA’s announcement of its intent to form a climate service (NOAA, 2010) and the Department of the Interior’s announcement of a coordinated climate change research and resource management strategy (DOI, 2009), as well as an international agreement to establish a global framework for climate services (WMO, 2009b). As discussed in Chapter 4 , these efforts, and those established in the future, will require the climate change science community’s assistance in providing more and better decision-relevant information, as well as scientific research on improved communication and decision-support tools and structures.

Scientific assessments are another way the climate research program can work collaboratively with national or international initiatives to inform effective climate-related decisions and responses. Climate change assessment processes, if carefully and deliberately designed, can engage a broad range of stakeholders in the assessment of risks, costs, and potential responses to climate change impacts (Farrell and Jäger, 2005; NRC, 2007a, 2008h). Assessment activities represent an important opportunity to improve linkages between the scientific and decision-making communities. The recent NRC report Restructuring Federal Climate Research (NRC, 2009k) called for the USGCRP to begin planning a comprehensive national assessment of climate change impacts, adaptation options, and actions to reduce climate forcing, as called for in the Global Change Research Act, and it is encouraging that planning for such an activity is now under way.

Recommendation 6: The federal climate change research program should be formally linked with action-oriented response programs focused on limiting the magnitude of future climate change, adapting to the impacts of climate change, and informing climate-related actions and decisions, and, where relevant, should

develop partnerships with other research and decision-making entities working at local to international scales.

CAPACITY BUILDING

The scale, importance, and complexity of the climate challenge implies a critical need to increase the workforce performing fundamental and decision-relevant climate research, implementing responses to climate change, and working at the interface between science and decision making. Thanks to more than three decades of research on climate change, the research community in the United States and elsewhere is strong, at least in research areas that have received significant emphasis and support. However, level or declining climate research funding over the past decade (as documented, for example, in NRC [2009k]) has limited the number of young scientists and engineers entering the research workforce at just the point when an influx of young scientists and engineers is critically needed to revitalize the nation’s climate research. Moreover, the more integrative and decision-relevant research program described in Chapter 4 will require expanded intellectual capacity in several previously neglected fields as well as in interdisciplinary research areas. It will also require greater intellectual capacity among state, local, and national government agencies, universities, and other public and private research labs, as well as among science managers coordinating efforts to advance the science of climate change. Building and mobilizing this broad research community will require both a concerted effort and a new approach.

Challenges Posed by the New Era of Climate Change Research

The broad, interdisciplinary, and integrated research enterprise envisioned in this report presents a number of implementation challenges. Among others, it requires scientists to work together in ways that are not well supported by many existing institutional structures, such as discipline-specific academic departments. It also requires researchers to engage with decision makers and other stakeholders to identify research topics and develop mechanisms for transferring research results, activities that are not a traditional strength or focus of scientific training. These challenges suggest that changes are needed within universities, federal laboratories, vocational training centers, and other research and educational institutions.

At the national scale, institutional changes are needed in federal research and mission agencies to increase the focus on interdisciplinary and decision-relevant research both in government laboratories and in the nationwide research efforts the agencies sup-

port. Some agencies will need to recruit or train scientists and program managers with the expertise needed to organize and manage such programs, especially expertise in the behavioral and social science fields that have not been as well represented or supported as the more “traditional” areas of climate and climate-related research.

Many universities are already experimenting with new interdisciplinary departments or schools focused on the environment, while others have developed multidepartment programs, centers, or institutes on sustainability, climate change, and other crosscutting topics. Many of these same university experiments include the training of undergraduate and graduate students through interdisciplinary academic programs, some of which are funded by special federal programs (such as the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program). Although in great demand by students, these programs face challenges from a lack of long-term funding and commitment by faculty and administrators.

Changes are also needed in professional societies, journals, and other institutions that influence rewards and incentives for scientists, engineers, managers, and others involved in the climate research enterprise. For example, venues for presentation and publication of interdisciplinary and decision-relevant climate research, as well as professional organizations that support and reward these efforts, are needed to build networks and provide professional rewards. Likewise, organizational changes in advice-giving bodies (such as the NRC) may help by enabling them to emphasize the integrative nature of climate change science when providing advice for the government and the larger science community. Other needed investments include fellowships and early career awards that can help direct researchers toward interdisciplinary work, and “summer institutes” and other training opportunities that provide extended interaction and promote cross-disciplinary engagement.

Finally, at the international scale, interdisciplinary science efforts focused on climate and global change have started to emerge (for example, the ESSP projects under ICSU). Not only do these programs facilitate engagement and capacity building for scientists from developing countries, they provide a way for U.S. scientists to contribute to international programs that focus on integrative research in support of both basic understanding of and responses to climate change. Strengthening these programs will require improving international research funding capacity (through IGFA and other mechanisms) and developing new mechanisms to engage the U.S. research community with international partners. One obstacle that impairs both international collaboration and U.S. research capacity is the difficulty that non-U.S. scientists encounter in obtaining visas to visit or train in the United States; another is the fact that most federal programs will not fund non-U.S. citizens as researchers or students.

Challenges Posed by Linkages with Other Activities and Programs

State and local governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations are key partners in the nation’s climate change research enterprise (see Recommendation 6). These partners will need a workforce that can engage effectively with the scientific community. There are many opportunities for sponsorship and leadership on climate-related research and decision support at the state and local levels. State, local, and tribal entities should work together with federal and nongovernmental partners to build expertise and create the kinds of networks, partnerships, and institutions that enable effective collaborations between the research community and decision makers. Progress in this direction is already being made. For example, climate advisory councils composed of experts from state universities, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, municipalities, tribal governments, and agencies have been mandated by executive orders or state legislatures in a number of states. In other cases, science-based nongovernmental organizations have provided leadership in developing impact assessments and climate action plans (both for GHG emissions reductions and adaptation) that have proven helpful for informing policy makers.

A number of corporations have also taken a leadership role in reducing GHG emissions (NRC, 2010b) and promoting other sustainable business practices. These efforts can be expected to increase intellectual capacity and practical experience, both of which will be useful to both the research community and society at large. Partnerships between the research community and the private sector are critical for building effective science-decision maker relationships, for linking knowledge and action, and for identifying critical science workforce needs. Federal programs, such as NOAA’s RISA program and the Regional Climate Centers, can aid in these efforts.

Finally, a strategy is needed for educating and training the next generation of climate change researchers as well as the personnel needed to design, build, and maintain the physical infrastructure and institutional assets needed to respond effectively to climate change. Climate researchers and research managers will also need training in decision-support and outreach activities needed to shape a decision-relevant science agenda. In addition, growing demands for climate information will require more people with skills and practice in effective communication, science-policy interaction, and activities at the interface between research and decision making. Much of the training in these areas will presumably need to take place at regional and local scales, but federal leadership and support are essential. Further discussion of the actions needed to educate and train future generations of scientists, engineers, technicians, managers, and decision makers for responding to climate change can be found in the companion report Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change (NRC, 2010b).

Recommendation 7: Congress, federal agencies, and the federal climate change research program should work with other relevant partners (including univer sities, state and local governments, the international research community, the business community, and other nongovernmental organizations) to expand and engage the human capital needed to carry out climate change research and response programs.

A NEW ERA OF CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH

We have entered a new era of climate change research. Although there are some uncertainties in the details of future climate change, it is clear that climate change is occurring, is largely due to human activities, and poses significant risks for people and the ecosystems on which we depend. Moreover, climate change is not just an environmental problem; it is a sustainability challenge that affects and interacts with other environmental changes and efforts to provide food, energy, water, shelter, and other fundamental needs of people today and in the future. In response to the risks posed by climate change, actions are now being taken both to limit the magnitude of future climate change and to adapt to its unavoidable impacts. These responses to climate change should be informed by the best possible scientific knowledge. Research is needed to improve understanding of the climate system and related human and environmental systems, to maximize the effectiveness of actions taken to respond to climate change, and to avoid unintended consequences for human well-being and the Earth system that sustains us. Acquiring the needed scientific knowledge, and making it useful to decision makers, will require an expanded climate change research enterprise. The challenge is tremendous, and so, too, should be our response, both in magnitude and in breadth.

Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for—and in many cases is already affecting—a broad range of human and natural systems. The compelling case for these conclusions is provided in Advancing the Science of Climate Change , part of a congressionally requested suite of studies known as America's Climate Choices. While noting that there is always more to learn and that the scientific process is never closed, the book shows that hypotheses about climate change are supported by multiple lines of evidence and have stood firm in the face of serious debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations.

As decision makers respond to these risks, the nation's scientific enterprise can contribute through research that improves understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change and also is useful to decision makers at the local, regional, national, and international levels. The book identifies decisions being made in 12 sectors, ranging from agriculture to transportation, to identify decisions being made in response to climate change.

Advancing the Science of Climate Change calls for a single federal entity or program to coordinate a national, multidisciplinary research effort aimed at improving both understanding and responses to climate change. Seven cross-cutting research themes are identified to support this scientific enterprise. In addition, leaders of federal climate research should redouble efforts to deploy a comprehensive climate observing system, improve climate models and other analytical tools, invest in human capital, and improve linkages between research and decisions by forming partnerships with action-oriented programs.

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