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Gender-specific perceptions and needs are critical to better understanding climate change adaptation capacities of local smallholder communities in Africa and elsewhere. As many rural agricultural practices are heavily impacted by male-centered traditional customs and mores, gender dimensions can determine the level of success for policy interventions. To better understand how and what gender dimensions can be important factors for farmer’s climate change adaptations, this study attempts to examine smallholder farmers’ adaptation needs and perspectives in Ghana’s Upper East Region. A focus group discussion and a questionnaire survey were conducted among 200 smallholder farmers. We found that the female respondents, who mostly belonged to low/middle-income groups, emphasized their urgent need for financial support to improve their income. They needed more farmland as 94% of them had only less than 5 acres to farm. In addition, 91% of the female respondents expressed the importance of being connected to farmers’ mutual-help groups to share information about common farming needs. We also found gender-specific needs for extension services, farm inputs, climate information, mechanization, and infrastructure. Regarding access to resources, the women respondents had little interest in investing more in farming as the land they borrowed could be taken away by male owners. The study recommends the need for gender-specific support initiatives that prioritize social protection and gender equality.

It is essential to understand how adaptation needs and options differ among stakeholders in protected areas (PAs) to effectively implement climate change (CC) adaptation strategies. Using the Qiangtang PA in Xizang as a case study, this research examines CC adaptation needs and options from the perspectives of stakeholders across multiple administrative levels, including provincial, prefectural, county authorities, 73 protection stations, and 13 364 pastoralists residing within the PA. The findings show that stakeholders at the provincial level, as well as those from the Ali and Naqu prefectures and six counties, place greater emphasis on institutional and resource-related needs than on other categories (attention score: 7.0–9.3 vs. 5.0–7.0). In contrast, stakeholders from the 73 protection stations prioritize technological and capacity-building needs more strongly than other types (attention score: 8.0–9.0 vs. 4.0–8.0). The 13 364 pastoralists assign the highest importance to social needs relative to other categories (attention score: 9.0–9.5 vs. 3.0–8.0). Most of the eight existing protection measures were found to indirectly support broader climate adaptation efforts. In particular, protective actions addressing fire, pests, and weather-related disasters can be classified as autonomous adaptation, while other measures generate outcomes that enhance adaptation capacity under specific conditions. Adaptation options, grouped into three main types and 13 subcategories, differ across stakeholder groups, although substantial overlap exists between these options and current protective actions, including ecosystem-based adaptation strategies, adaptation-related practices, autonomous adaptation measures, and emergency interventions. Overall, these findings highlight the critical role of all stakeholders—especially staff from the 73 protection stations and the 13 364 pastoralists—in the effective implementation of adaptation actions within the PA.

Adaptation to climate impacts will be necessary for small-scale fisheries and fishers (SSFs) to safeguard their food security, livelihoods, and cultural heritage. SSFs are often vulnerable to environmental impacts due to the place-based, multi-scale and direct dependencies on local ecosystems, and generally fewer resources or abilities for relocation, diversification, and modification of their fishing practices. Strategic adaptation is therefore essential. This study emphasizes the timelines, requirements, and burdens of implementing existing and proposed adaptations, e.g., who pays, who does the work, and how long would it take? To categorize possible actions (tools) for analysis, we adapt the FAO climate adaptation framework and propose five areas of action: Institutional, Communication, Livelihood, Risk Resilience, and Science. Our results highlight two interconnected trends; first, the burdens and benefits of proposed climate adaptations are unevenly distributed, usually against fishers themselves. Second, there is a general lack of research focusing on the equity implications of current governance structures that de-emphasize fisher’s needs. This creates a lack of understanding among policy makers about the adaptation priorities of SSFs, and what resources or support they would need to implement them. We applied this framework to a case study involving octopus SSFs in Yucatán, Mexico. Interview results reinforce the finding that adaptation strategies that fishers thought would be most important for them (e.g. changes in policies/regulations to improve healthcare, reduce excess capacity, or reinforce fishing laws) were actions they could not often realize without external support; conversely, tools often proposed as “easier” by non-fishers (e.g. changing jobs, fishing gears, or going further out to sea) were not seen as particularly viable to fishers. Due to these mismatches, we argue there is a need to go beyond the classical focus on quantifying climate vulnerability towards a stronger emphasis on prioritizing adaptation strategies to meet the goals of fisherfolk themselves and aligning organizational and governance structures accordingly. The toolbox organization framework we propose can serve as an initial guidance for many fishing communities, decision makers and other stakeholders to anticipate implementation needs and find the right tools to adapt to future climatic conditions and prevent negative socioeconomic and ecological impacts.

The climate is changing, and the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region is vulnerable to the consequences. Many of the region's countries are facing warmer temperatures, a changing hydrology, and more extremes, droughts, floods, heat waves, windstorms, and forest fires. This book presents an overview of what adaptation to climate change might mean for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It starts with a discussion of emerging best-practice adaptation planning around the world and a review of the latest climate projections. It then discusses possible actions to improve resilience organized around impacts on health, natural resources (water, biodiversity, and the coastal environment), the 'unbuilt' environment (agriculture and forestry), and the built environment (infrastructure and housing). The last chapter concludes with a discussion of two areas in great need of strengthening given the changing climate: disaster preparedness and hydro-meteorological services. This book has four key messages: a) contrary to popular perception, Eastern Europe and Central Asia face significant threats from climate change, with a number of the most serious risks already in evidence; b) vulnerability over the next 10 to 20 years is likely to be dominated by socioeconomic factors and legacy issues; c) even countries and sectors that stand to benefit from climate change are poorly positioned to do so; and d) the next decade offers a window of opportunity for ECA countries to make their development more resilient to climate change while reaping numerous co-benefits.

The effects of climate change on agriculture are often characterised by changes in the average productivity of crops; however, these indicators provide limited information regarding the risks associated with fluctuations in productivity resulting from future changes in climate variability that may also affect agriculture. In this context, this study evaluates the combined effects of the risks associated with anomalies reflected by changes in the mean crop yield and the variability of productivity in European agro-climatic regions under future climate change scenarios. The objective of this study is to evaluate adaptation needs and to identify regional effects that should be addressed with greater urgency in the light of the risks and opportunities that are identified. The results show differential effects on regional agriculture and highlight the importance of considering both regional average impacts and the variability in crop productivity in setting priorities for the adaptation and maintenance of rural incomes and agricultural insurance programmes.

This paper provides and tests a methodology to compute surface water (SW) availability for irrigation on regulated systems at large scale, considering different alternatives of streamflow monthly time series derived from regional climate models. SW availability for consumptive use for a river basin is estimated through the concept of maximum potential water withdrawal (MPWW). MPWW is defined as the maximum demand that can be supplied at a given point in the river network under certain conditions: management restrictions (such as ecological flows), demand priorities, monthly distribution of demand and required reliability. Calculation was applied in 567 basins that cover the entirety of mainland Spain to evaluate adaptation needs for agriculture by comparing MPWW for irrigation in the current situation and under climate change projections. The results show that streamflow monthly time series obtained from the regional climate model simulations and bias corrected by University of New Hampshire/Global Runoff Data Centre (UNH/GRDC) dataset and Schreiber's formula provide MPWW values similar to those obtained with the observed data under current situations. Under climate change projections, the capability to satisfy water requirements for agricultural production is significantly reduced and adaptation measures are necessary to mitigate the expected long-term impact.

Nutrition has long been considered more the domain of medicine and agriculture than of the biological sciences, yet it touches and shapes all aspects of the natural world. The need for nutrients determines whether wild animals thrive, how populations evolve and decline, and how ecological communities are structured.The Nature of Nutritionis the first book to address nutrition's enormously complex role in biology, both at the level of individual organisms and in their broader ecological interactions. Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer provide a comprehensive theoretical approach to the analysis of nutrition--the Geometric Framework. They show how it can help us to understand the links between nutrition and the biology of individual animals, including the physiological mechanisms that determine the nutritional interactions of the animal with its environment, and the consequences of these interactions in terms of health, immune responses, and lifespan. Simpson and Raubenheimer explain how these effects translate into the collective behavior of groups and societies, and in turn influence food webs and the structure of ecosystems. Then they demonstrate how the Geometric Framework can be used to tackle issues in applied nutrition, such as the problem of optimizing diets for livestock and endangered species, and how it can also help to address the epidemic of human obesity and metabolic disease Drawing on a wealth of examples from slime molds to humans,The Nature of Nutritionhas important applications in ecology, evolution, and physiology, and offers promising solutions for human health, conservation, and agriculture.

Increases in global population and seafood demand are occurring simultaneously with fisheries decline in an era of rapid climate change. Aquaculture is well positioned to help meet the world's future seafood needs, but heavy reliance of most global aquaculture on the ambient environment and ecosystem services suggests inherent vulnerability to climate change effects. There are, however, opportunities for adaptation. Engineering and management solutions can reduce exposure to stressors or mitigate stressors through environmental control. Epigenetic adaptation may have the potential to improve stressor tolerance through parental or early life stage exposure. Stressor-resistant traits can be genetically selected for, and maintaining adequate population variability can improve resilience and overall fitness. Information at appropriate time scales is crucial for adaptive response, such as real-time data on stressor levels and/or species' responses, early warning of deleterious events, or prediction of longer-term change. Diet quality and quantity have the potential to meet increasing energetic and nutritional demands associated with mitigating the effects of abiotic and biotic climate change stressors. Research advancements in understanding how climate change affects aquaculture will benefit most from a combination of empirical studies, modelling approaches, and observations at the farm level. Research to support aquaculture adaptation requires an increasing amount of environmental data to guide biological response studies for regional applications. Increased experimental complexity, resources, and duration will be necessary to better understand the effects of multiple stressors. Ultimately, in order for aquaculture sectors to move beyond short-term coping responses, governance initiatives incorporating the changing needs of stakeholders, users, and culture ecosystems as a whole are required to facilitate planned climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Implementing interventions with a previous evidence base in new contexts might be more efficient than developing new interventions for each context. Although some interventions transfer well, effectiveness and implementation often depend on the context. Achieving a good fit between intervention and context then requires careful and systematic adaptation. This paper presents new evidence and consensus informed guidance for adapting and transferring interventions to new contexts.

As the impacts of climate change increasingly and disproportionately affect indigenous peoples, equitable approaches to regional climate change adaptation must center the voices, needs, and priorities of Indigenous communities. Although the tribal climate change principles identify actionable recommendations to address the unique needs of Indigenous peoples in the contexts of climate change adaptation efforts undertaken at the Federal level in the United States (U.S.), there has yet to be exploration of how such principles might be applied at the regional level. Through semi-structured qualitative interviews with 18 representatives from inter-Tribal organizations and non-Tribal organizations engaged in regional climate adaptation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, this research sought to describe challenges faced by, and opportunities available to, non-Tribal entities when engaging with Tribes on regional climate adaptation initiatives. All respondents reported high levels of motivation to work with Tribes on climate adaptation and identified several perceived benefits of integrating Tribal partnerships and indigenous ways of knowing into regional climate adaptation initiatives. Respondents underscored the need for strong, trusted relationships that respect the sovereignty and priorities of Tribal nations to guide engagement. However, non-Tribal organizations’ own capacity constraints, perceived Tribal capacity constraints, and institutional cultures rooted in colonialism and structural racism were discussed as obstacles to meaningful engagement. As such, we identify an urgent need to prioritize sustained investments in both Tribal and non-Tribal actors’ partnership capacities and climate change adaptation capabilities to place Indigenous voices and needs at the forefront of regional climate change adaptation planning and implementation.