About this Research Topic
This Research Topic focuses on climate change adaptation as a form of risk management that requires coordinated governance, economic and other policies, science, and engineering and technological interventions. Disasters result from the combined effect of hazards (natural and anthropogenic) and vulnerability—and climate change is already creating pervasive but varying risks in multiple societal sectors. Therefore, the need for adaptation spans many systems, including urban communities, infrastructure, food security, water resources, economic systems, and ecosystems. Policy decisions regarding adaptation measures must be informed by reliable science (including the social sciences), technology, and engineering research, and that research agenda must be informed by policy goals and constraints. This Research Topic will gather articles from multiple disciplines that promote such coordinated adaptation strategies to effectively and effectively reduce climate risk.
The disruptions that climate change will impose on social-ecological systems are rapidly becoming salient and intensifying. Even if global governance achieves the goal of containing average warming to within 2°C, society faces a monumental challenge in managing the risks of these disruptions through adaptive measures, including building infrastructure to resist the harms, supporting resilient communities, and in some cases through managed retreat from the harms. The risk management challenges multiply geometrically beyond 2°C. Yet adaptation measures are often solely local in scale and unidisciplinary in perspective (e.g., political or legal or ecological).
Importantly, however, local and regional adaptation measures can impose trade-offs, either among societal goals or at different scales. Moreover, physical adaptation measures can have psychological and economic consequences or require new governance. As a result, all these measures will require coordinated policy and scientific research, planning, and implementation. Insufficient research attention has been paid to interdisciplinary and cross-scalar coordination of adaptation to maximize efficiency and effectiveness in climate risk management. This Research topic seeks to promote such attention.
This Research Topic focuses on the intersection of adaptation policy with science (including the social sciences), engineering, and/or technology through the lens or frame of risk management. Articles can focus on that interface by robustly engaging both policy and another discipline, but they may also focus primarily on a single discipline where that focus will improve interdisciplinary communication about and thoughtful coordination regarding the role of climate change adaptation as risk management, with the ultimately goal of shaping and promoting effective and efficient climate change adaptation policy. Potential themes include:
• The mutual resilience of interdependent infrastructure systems
• The psychology of climate change risk and adaptation
• Human-infrastructure interactions
• The role of the insurance industry
• The science of equitable adaptation
• Disaster management
• Legal and other governance improvements and changes
• Designing and governing managed retreat
• Food system security
• The economics of climate risk management
• Evaluating future scenarios and risk vulnerabilities
• Financing infrastructure adaptation
• Planning challenges of large-scale migration
• Agricultural adaptation and crop transition
• Assisted migration and other species/ecosystem protection
• The future of aquaculture, especially marine aquaculture
• Protecting tribal and indigenous natural resource rights in transition
• Engineering new forms of energy and renewable energy reliability
• Geoengineering as policy option
• The business case of resilience planning
• Data science for climate risk and adaptation
• Hazard mitigation and recovery
The disruptions that climate change will impose on social-ecological systems are rapidly becoming salient and intensifying. Even if global governance achieves the goal of containing average warming to within 2°C, society faces a monumental challenge in managing the risks of these disruptions through adaptive measures, including building infrastructure to resist the harms, supporting resilient communities, and in some cases through managed retreat from the harms. The risk management challenges multiply geometrically beyond 2°C. Yet adaptation measures are often solely local in scale and unidisciplinary in perspective (e.g., political or legal or ecological).
Importantly, however, local and regional adaptation measures can impose trade-offs, either among societal goals or at different scales. Moreover, physical adaptation measures can have psychological and economic consequences or require new governance. As a result, all these measures will require coordinated policy and scientific research, planning, and implementation. Insufficient research attention has been paid to interdisciplinary and cross-scalar coordination of adaptation to maximize efficiency and effectiveness in climate risk management. This Research topic seeks to promote such attention.
This Research Topic focuses on the intersection of adaptation policy with science (including the social sciences), engineering, and/or technology through the lens or frame of risk management. Articles can focus on that interface by robustly engaging both policy and another discipline, but they may also focus primarily on a single discipline where that focus will improve interdisciplinary communication about and thoughtful coordination regarding the role of climate change adaptation as risk management, with the ultimately goal of shaping and promoting effective and efficient climate change adaptation policy. Potential themes include:
• The mutual resilience of interdependent infrastructure systems
• The psychology of climate change risk and adaptation
• Human-infrastructure interactions
• The role of the insurance industry
• The science of equitable adaptation
• Disaster management
• Legal and other governance improvements and changes
• Designing and governing managed retreat
• Food system security
• The economics of climate risk management
• Evaluating future scenarios and risk vulnerabilities
• Financing infrastructure adaptation
• Planning challenges of large-scale migration
• Agricultural adaptation and crop transition
• Assisted migration and other species/ecosystem protection
• The future of aquaculture, especially marine aquaculture
• Protecting tribal and indigenous natural resource rights in transition
• Engineering new forms of energy and renewable energy reliability
• Geoengineering as policy option
• The business case of resilience planning
• Data science for climate risk and adaptation
• Hazard mitigation and recovery
Keywords: risk management, law, policy, climate change, climate adaptation, agriculture
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
