Historical Groundwater Trends in Northern New England and Relations with Streamflow and Climatic Variables

Water‐level trends spanning 20, 30, 40, and 50 years were tested using month‐end groundwater levels in 26, 12, 10, and 3 wells in northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont), respectively. Groundwater levels for 77 wells were used in interannual correlations with meteorological and hydrologic variables related to groundwater. Trends in the contemporary groundwater record (20 and 30 years) indicate increases (rises) or no substantial change in groundwater levels in all months for most wells throughout northern New England. The highest percentage of increasing 20‐year trends was in February through March, May through August, and October through November. Forty‐year trend results were mixed, whereas 50‐year trends indicated increasing groundwater levels. Whereas most monthly groundwater levels correlate strongly with the previous month's level, monthly levels also correlate strongly with monthly streamflows in the same month; correlations of levels with monthly precipitation are less frequent and weaker than those with streamflow. Groundwater levels in May through August correlate strongly with annual (water year) streamflow. Correlations of groundwater levels with streamflow data and the relative richness of 50‐ to 100‐year historical streamflow data suggest useful proxies for quantifying historical groundwater levels in light of the relatively short and fragmented groundwater data records presently available.     

National,regional and local attitudes towards climate change: identifying appropriate target audiences for communications

A government-funded scheme, the UK Climate Change Communications Initiative (UKCCCI), has provided money for organisations to deliver projects that attempt to impact positively on people's attitudes towards climate change. This devolution of communications is a relatively novel approach after previous centralised campaigns. This paper considers what size of target audience is most appropriate for attitude change initiatives. It compares data from a regional UKCCCI project aimed at residents of two counties with a nationally representative dataset. Regional data are also analysed to see if there are differences in attitudes within the two-counties target audience. The study suggests that attitude change interventions must strike a balance between personalisation of information and the higher cost of targeting smaller groups with more specific material.     

“Lead has become carbon dioxide”: framing sustainable travel in an age of climate change

This paper explores the promotion of environmentally sustainable travel and the ways in which individual citizens engage with exhortations to adopt environmentally responsible travel modes. In local contexts, the arguments for promoting modal shifts have focused on issues like congestion, noise reduction and the improvement of local environmental quality. However, in recent years, concerns about global climate change have reframed the promotion of sustainable travel around carbon emissions reductions and more fundamental changes to lifestyle choices as a way of combating climate change. Within this context, this paper considers the ways in which individuals frame sustainable travel through using focus group data collected as part of a wider research project on travel behaviour in the UK. The paper will demonstrate that notions of “sustainable” travel are still largely dominated by localised environmental concerns that have resonances with the everyday experiences and practices of individuals, with many of the factors underlying established discourses of travel behaviour being focused on pragmatic issues like convenience and cost. In contrast, the issue of climate change presents a number of challenges for policy-makers seeking to change behaviour because of the contestations surrounding climate science, political leadership and the perceived role of individual consumers in tackling climate change.     

The local governance of climate change: new tools to respond to old limitations in Esmeraldas,Ecuador

This article argues that climate change, seen as a socially constructed anticipation of natural disasters and a future-risk that plays out in present politics, is enabling the emergence of new modes of governance in cities of the global south. The article focuses on the process by which the city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, developed a Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Strategy. Within the context of climate change adaptation, Esmeraldas mobilised new discourses, stakeholders, and planning mechanisms to address pre-existing urban planning and development limitations. This discursively enabled the municipality's ongoing governance project by leveraging resources, creating consensus, and informing practice. Climate change adaptation thus became an important mechanism for engaging with local priorities, particularly those of the most vulnerable populations, and for bridging the gap between the formal world of policymaking and the reality of life in the city, which is more often structured by informality.     

Understanding climate,adapting to change: indigenous cultural values and climate change impacts in North Queensland

Many authors have suggested that Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, yet there remains a paucity of fine-grained geographic data on the particular impacts of climate change on specific places and on local communities, especially Australian Indigenous communities. While there are some recent studies being undertaken with Australia's Torres Strait Island people, our research takes up the issues of vulnerability and resilience with two Indigenous communities from different environments on the mainland in North Queensland. They are the Aboriginal peoples of the rainforest and reef environments of the Wet Tropics and the Aboriginal people of the discontiguous rainforest, grasslands, dry forests and marine environments of Cape York. The results demonstrate variability in their understandings of climate change and in their capacities to anticipate and manage its impacts, while at the same time illustrating some common held themes about environmental and cultural values, observed environmental change, attributions of cause and effect, and of climate in general.     

Responding to climate change as a transformative stressor through metro-regional planning

This paper characterises climate change as a “transformative stressor”. It argues that institutional change will become increasingly necessary as institutions seek to reorientate governance frameworks to better manage the transformative stresses created by climate change in urban environments. Urban and metropolitan planning regimes are identified as central institutions in addressing this challenge. The operationalisation of climate adaptation is identified as a central tenet of a comprehensive urban response to the transformative stresses that climate change is predicted to create. Operationalisation refers to climate adaptation becoming incorporated, codified and implemented as a central tenet of urban planning governance. This paper has three purposes. First, it examines conceptual perspectives on the role of transformative stressors in compelling institutional change. Second, it establishes a conceptual approach that characterises climate change as a transformative stressor requiring institutional change within planning frameworks. Third, it reports emergent results and analysis from an empirical inquiry which examines how the metro-regional planning regime of Southeast Queensland has responded to climate change as a transformative stressor via institutional change and the operationalisation of climate adaptation.     

Harnessing community energy: the keys to climate mitigation policy adoption in US municipalities

Many US municipalities are engaged in climate change mitigation planning or efforts to reduce their communities' greenhouse gas emissions. However, most have adopted very few policies to implement their climate change mitigation goals, and many others are not pursuing climate change mitigation at all. This study examines municipalities' approaches to energy and climate issues and identifies the “keys to success” that influence the extent to which they adopt climate change mitigation policies.

Prior researchers have characterised climate change mitigation efforts as an example of multi-level governance, in which policies are formulated through a variety of networks and interactions between government actors and civil society. I find that municipalities that engage community interests and coordinate with neighbouring jurisdictions in their energy and climate planning processes are far more likely to adopt meaningful policies and conclude that such multi-level governance approaches are actually critical to the success of climate change mitigation planning.     

Risk and vulnerability analysis: A feasible process for local climate adaptation in Sweden?

Climate change is an important new challenge for local authorities. This study analyses the potential for using the Swedish mandatory process for risk and vulnerability analysis (RVA) as a vehicle to improve local climate adaptation work. An advantage with RVA is its comprehensive approach in dealing with all relevant threats and all vital functions of society. In order to test the applicability of incorporating climate adaptation into RVA, we studied practical experiences from three Swedish municipalities. In all municipalities, a pre-study to identify relevant climate-induced events was performed. In one municipality, this was followed by a more detailed analysis of the potential impacts of these events on the functions of the various administrations and companies within the local authority. Problems identified in successful integration of climate change into the municipal RVA process were lack of sufficient knowledge to identify the impacts of climate change on the level of the respective specialist or district administration and lack of resources to perform the analysis. There were also some difficulties in including a long-term perspective relevant for climate adaptation into RVA, which usually focuses on current threats. A positive outcome was that work on extreme climate events in RVA provided a traceable method to identify events with a potentially great impact on the function of local society and results that could be fed into other ongoing processes, such as spatial planning and housing plans.     

Cui bono: the Scottish Climate Challenge Fund and community benefits

This study adopted an open-ended exploratory approach to elicit the perspectives of a selection of six Climate Challenge Fund projects. This central idea is that communities' perspective on attempted carbon reduction initiative in their areas has use in other contexts and could enable better design of such interventions in future. The main finding was that emphasising local benefits was conducive to their achieving local involvement in the project. The results of this research should be tested in other contexts. Three broad implications for the design of community carbon reduction initiatives are raised in assuming these outcomes are correct. First, the community hosting such initiatives should be perceived to hold a degree of power over the project. Second, central authorities should not be overly prohibitive about the motivations of those participating in such projects. Finally, the use of non-environmental messaging has value in shifting people to more pro-environmental behaviours.