Climate change

About: Climate change is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 99222 publications have been published within this topic receiving 3572006 citations.

The value of indigenous knowledge in climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies in the African Sahel

Abstract: Past global efforts at dealing with the problem of global warming concentrated on mitigation, with the aim of reducing and possibly stabilizing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere. With the slow progress in achieving this, adaptation was viewed as a viable option to reduce the vulnerability to the anticipated negative impacts of global warming. It is increasingly realized that mitigation and adaptation should not be pursued independent of each other but as complements. This has resulted in the recent calls for the integration of adaptation into mitigation strategies. However, integrating mitigation and adaptation into climate change concerns is not a completely new idea in the African Sahel. The region is characterized by severe and frequent droughts with records dating back into centuries. The local populations in this region, through their indigenous knowledge systems, have developed and implemented extensive mitigation and adaptation strategies that have enabled them reduce their vulnerability to past climate variability and change, which exceed those predicted by models of future climate change. However, this knowledge is rarely taken into consideration in the design and implementation of modern mitigation and adaptation strategies. This paper highlights some indigenous mitigation and adaptation strategies that have been practiced in the Sahel, and the benefits of integrating indigenous knowledge into formal climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Incorporating indigenous knowledge can add value to the development of sustainable climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies that are rich in local content, and planned in conjunction with local people.

Timing of abrupt climate change at the end of the Younger Dryas interval from thermally fractionated gases in polar ice

Abstract: Rapid temperature change fractionates gas isotopes in unconsolidated snow, producing a signal that is preserved in trapped air bubbles as the snow forms ice The fractionation of nitrogen and argon isotopes at the end of the Younger Dryas cold interval, recorded in Greenland ice, demonstrates that warming at this time was abrupt This warming coincides with the onset of a prominent rise in atmospheric methane concentration, indicating that the climate change was synchronous (within a few decades) over a region of at least hemispheric extent, and providing constraints on previously proposed mechanisms of climate change at this time The depth of the nitrogen-isotope signal relative to the depth of the climate change recorded in the ice matrix indicates that, during the Younger Dryas, the summit of Greenland was 15 ± 3 °C colder than today

The Influence of Late Quaternary Climate-Change Velocity on Species Endemism

Abstract: The effects of climate change on biodiversity should depend in part on climate displacement rate (climate-change velocity) and its interaction with species’ capacity to migrate We estimated Late Quaternary glacial-interglacial climate-change velocity by integrating macroclimatic shifts since the Last Glacial Maximum with topoclimatic gradients Globally, areas with high velocities were associated with marked absences of small-ranged amphibians, mammals, and birds The association between endemism and velocity was weakest in the highly vagile birds and strongest in the weakly dispersing amphibians, linking dispersal ability to extinction risk due to climate change High velocity was also associated with low endemism at regional scales, especially in wet and aseasonal regions Overall, we show that low-velocity areas are essential refuges for Earth’s many small-ranged species