Modeling Streamflow and Water Quality Sensitivity to Climate Change and Urban Development in 20 U.S. Watersheds

Watershed modeling in 20 large, United States (U.S.) watersheds addresses gaps in our knowledge of streamflow, nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus), and sediment loading sensitivity to mid‐21st Century climate change and urban/residential development scenarios. Use of a consistent methodology facilitates regional scale comparisons across the study watersheds. Simulations use the Soil and Water Assessment Tool. Climate change scenarios are from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program dynamically downscaled climate model output. Urban and residential development scenarios are from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Climate and Land Use Scenarios project. Simulations provide a plausible set of streamflow and water quality responses to mid‐21st Century climate change across the U.S. Simulated changes show a general pattern of decreasing streamflow volume in the central Rockies and Southwest, and increases on the East Coast and Northern Plains. Changes in pollutant loads follow a similar pattern but with increased variability. Ensemble mean results suggest that by the mid‐21st Century, statistically significant changes in streamflow and total suspended solids loads (relative to baseline conditions) are possible in roughly 30‐40% of study watersheds. These proportions increase to around 60% for total phosphorus and total nitrogen loads. Projected urban/residential development, and watershed responses to development, are small at the large spatial scale of modeling in this study.     

Reducing Fertilizer‐Nitrogen Losses from Rowcrop Landscapes: Insights and Implications from a Spatially Explicit Watershed Model

We present conceptual and quantitative models that predict changes in fertilizer‐derived nitrogen delivery from rowcrop landscapes caused by agricultural conservation efforts implemented to reduce nutrient inputs and transport and increase nutrient retention in the landscape. To evaluate the relative importance of changes in the sources, transport, and sinks of fertilizer‐derived nitrogen across a region, we use the spatially explicit SPAtially Referenced Regression On Watershed attributes watershed model to map the distribution, at the small watershed scale within the Upper Mississippi‐Ohio River Basin (UMORB), of: (1) fertilizer inputs; (2) nutrient attenuation during delivery of those inputs to the UMORB outlet; and (3) nitrogen export from the UMORB outlet. Comparing these spatial distributions suggests that the amount of fertilizer input and degree of nutrient attenuation are both important in determining the extent of nitrogen export. From a management perspective, this means that agricultural conservation efforts to reduce nitrogen export would benefit by: (1) expanding their focus to include activities that restore and enhance nutrient processing in these highly altered landscapes; and (2) targeting specific types of best management practices to watersheds where they will be most valuable. Doing so successfully may result in a shift in current approaches to conservation planning, outreach, and funding.     

New York City Environmental Justice Alliance Waterfront Justice Project

This paper reviews key challenges and opportunities addressed by the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance's (NYC-EJA) Waterfront Justice Project, a citywide campaign to promote climate resilience and sustainability in urban industrial waterfront communities of New York City. NYC-EJA is a non-profit membership-driven network linking grassroots organisations from low-income neighbourhoods and communities of colour in their struggle for environmental justice. The Waterfront Justice Project is documenting community vulnerability in the context of climate change impacts, sources of industrial pollution, and demographic and socio-economic trends. This campaign is enabling community-based organisations, environmental justice communities, city planners, local and state government agencies, local business-owners, and other stakeholders to work in partnership to achieve community resilience while advocating for local jobs and promoting best practices in pollution prevention. New York City's waterfront policies ease the siting and clustering of public infrastructure, water pollution control plants, waste transfer stations, energy facilities, and heavy manufacturing uses in six areas designated as Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (SMIAs). The SMIAs are located in environmental justice communities, largely low-income communities and communities of colour, in the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. New York City's local waterfront land use and zoning policies create cumulative risk exposure not only to residents and workers in the host waterfront communities, but also, in the event of storm surge or sea-level rise, to neighbouring, upland communities.     

Governing Quasi-Public Network Services for adaptation to climate change

Adaptation takes place in both private and public sectors, or as an interrelation between the two, and often under the realm of public regulation. Thispaper uses the Swedish and the Norwegian electricity grid sector, as providers of a vital public good under strict public regulation, to analyse reforms' effects on adaptive capacity in this area. The paper shows that transformational changes in both sectors during the 1990s shifted both the formal organisational structure (rules and regulations), as well as the organisational culture, in the direction of economic efficiency. These two dimensions individually reduced adaptive capacity to climate change, although differently in the two countries. However, the formal structure and organisational culture also yielded substantial influence on each other. This leads to the conclusion that when designing public regulations and implementing reforms, organisational culture must be considered in the design. Also the paper contests previous findings in the literature by showing that under given conditions there exist some substitution between the two dimensions in influencing adaptive capacity, implying that both dimensions should be included when analysing adaptation since analysing them in isolation is likely to lead to wrong conclusions.     

Mainstreaming climate change adaptation at the local level

National authorities in many countries aim at having climate change adaptation mainstreamed into existing policy domains in order to achieve coherence and synergies, and to avoid mal-adaptation. Because of local variations in climate change impacts, the lion's share of climate adaptation work will have to take place at the local level. This means also that the mainstreaming process needs to occur locally. This article examines the mainstreaming of climate change adaptation into existing sectors in five Norwegian municipalities. Applying theories of mainstreaming and policy integration we find that policy development is slower, but perhaps more robust in the municipalities that have chosen a horizontal, cross-sectoral approach to mainstreaming than in the municipalities that have chosen a vertical sector approach to mainstreaming.     

Building resilience to climate change – the role of cooperation in alpine tourism networks

While there is ample – though partially contradictory – evidence regarding the effects climate change will have on various regions of the world, there is only very limited work dedicated to the analysis of different governance structures, and how these structures are likely to influence the resilience of alpine tourism systems in the face of climate change. We present an analytical framework based on network theory, and apply this to the Swiss case study destination of Engelberg, in order to deduct a number of insights for the future assessment of resilience based on the cooperation of local actors. The main aim of the paper is to come up with comparable resilience metrics based on social network analysis in order to assess the structural strengths and weaknesses of a geographically delimited tourism system in the face of climate change. Together with the action potential of the individual actors these structural properties influence the adaptive capacity of both individual actors, and the tourism system as a whole. In line with comparable studies, we identify structural strengths and weaknesses around the core-periphery distribution (centrality), subgroups (modularity) and information flows (path length). We find that the Engelberg network follows an almost ideal-typical scale-free structure and the overall cooperation rate (density) is comparable to other tourism networks. The main weaknesses of the network with regard to climate change resilience are the lacking integration of public sector actors and the relatively high number of actors in the periphery of the network.     

Adapting to changing climate risk by local government in New Zealand: institutional practice barriers and enablers

Adaptation to climate change has been reviewed in several developed nations, but in none where consideration of the effects of climate change is required by statute and devolved to local government. We examine the role of institutional arrangements, the players operating under them, the barriers and enablers for adaptation decision-making in the developed nation of New Zealand. We examine how the roles and responsibilities between national, regional and local governments influence the ability of local government to deliver long-term flexible responses to changing climate risk. We found that the disciplinary practices of law, engineering and planning, within legal frameworks, result in the use of static mechanisms which create inflexible responses to changing risk. Several enablers are identified that could create greater integration between the different scales of government, including better use of national policy instruments, shared professional experience, standardised information collection and risk assessment methods that address uncertainties. The framing of climate risk as dynamic and changing that differentiates activities over their lifetime, development of mechanisms to fund transitions towards transformational change, are identified as necessary conditions for delivering flexible responses over time.     

“In common nature”: an ethnography of climate adaptation in the Lesotho Highlands

In Lesotho, climate change adaptation funding is being managed and distributed by the same mechanisms which have traditionally operationalised humanitarian aid and international development assistance in the country. Lessons from the HIV/AIDS disaster, along with insights into the value of participatory approaches foregrounding the expertise of indigenous communities, must be heeded in order to ensure that those most affected by climate change have a say in how adaptation is carried out. This paper proposes that indigenous people have developed and actively maintained resilience strategies, encoded in social practices and farming techniques, designed out of long experience with climatic variability. Through case studies, indigenous resilience strategies are explored, with emphasis on the anarchistic, improvisational nature of traditional ecological knowledge. Future directions for policy-makers and practitioners dealing with climate change adaptation are suggested, namely the need to foreground indigenous knowledge and the experiences of frontlines experts in key policy arenas.     

Diurnal and spatial variations of soil NOx fluxes in the northern steppe of China

NO_x emissions from biogenic sources in soils play a significant role in the gaseous loss of soil nitrogen and consequent changes in tropospheric chemistry. In order to investigate the characteristics of NO_x fluxes and factors influencing these fluxes in degraded sandy grasslands in northern China, diurnal and spatial variations of NO_x fluxes were measured in situ. A dynamic flux chamber method was used at eight sites with various vegetation coverages and soil types in the northern steppe of China in the summer season of 2010. Fluxes of NO_x from soils with plant covers were generally higher than those in the corresponding bare vegetation-free soils, indicating that the canopy plays an important role in the exchange of NO_x between soil and air. The fluxes of NO_x increased in the daytime, and decreased during the nighttime, with peak emissions occurring between 12:00 and 14:00. The results of multiple linear regression analysis indicated that the diurnal variation of NO_x fluxes was positively correlated with soil temperature (P < 0.05) and negatively with soil moisture content (P < 0.05). Based on measurement over a season, the overall variation in NO_x flux was lower than that of soil nitrogen contents, suggesting that the gaseous loss of N fromthe grasslands of northern China was not a significant contributor to the high C/N in the northern steppe of China. The concentration of NO_x emitted from soils in the region did not exceed the 1-hr National Ambient Air Quality Standard (0.25 mg/m³).     

基于改进灰色关联分析法在居民环境消费结构中的研究

依据平顶山市2005年-2012年的统计年鉴,平顶山市居民环境人均消费性数据,选取食品、衣着、居住、家庭设备用品及服务、医疗保健、交通和通信、教育文化娱乐服务、杂项商品及服务八大类,将改进的灰色关联度分析方法和综合评价模型相结合,建立灰色关联度分析模型,对平顶山市居民环境结构关系进行分析.结果表明:教育文化娱乐环境服务的关联性最高,食品、交通通信、居住医疗保健、衣着、家庭设备用品及服务、杂项商品和服务环境位居其后.