About this Research Topic

Background

The issue of global climate change has drastically intensified both the risk and rate of floods, droughts, heatwaves and other natural hazards. Whilst these risks result in abrupt hazards to humans and societies, including infrastructure damage and displacement of people, many lead to incremental and gradual changes in the behaviour of people, the institutions that govern societies and the technological advancements that are being made. Climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies are heavily reliant upon our understanding of the social dimensions including the behaviour of people and their institutions, which calls for empirically-solid quantification of distributional impacts and adaptation dynamics. The recognition of the crucial role of human actors and the institutional structures that they are embedded in triggers a paradigm shift in climate risks assessments and drives the proliferation of models that include these social dynamics.

The aim of this Research Topic is to collate high-quality articles that address how institutions (i.e. a set of rules that organize activities among actors) must adapt or transform into entirely new ones to better accommodate for incremental and abrupt changes to our society resulting from climate change and climate disasters. These institutions can be formal in the form of policies, regulations and laws devised by various levels of governance from the UN to local councils. They could also be the unwritten and informal agreements among people, leading to collective behaviour that may have a huge impact on the course of climate change. Studying the role of formal and informal institutions in climate change in combination with environmental, behavioural, and technological factors can unveil solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation. We, therefore, aim to bring researchers from various disciplines together to collaboratively and decisively think about how institutions can be incorporated in various forms of climate models for a more comprehensive climate risk assessment that can prepare us for both the near and far future.

This Research Topic is proposed to provide a platform for researchers to address pre-defined topics, and thus will invite contributions on the following topics:

1 - Institutional Risk Assessment
2 - Modelling and Simulation for studying institutions
3 - Learning from history to mitigate and adapt to climate change
4 - Complex systems approaches to climate change
5 - Sustainable development

We are looking for original research articles that showcase various models addressing these topics but we also welcome theoretical contributions in these areas.

Keywords: climate change, institutions, collective action, adaptation, mitigation

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.

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