How and why do business organisations contribute to climate change governance? The contributors' findings on South Africa, Kenya and Germany demonstrate that business contributions to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change vary significantly.

This book will help business executives to (1) rethink their perceptions of climate risk (2) evaluate whether their company is effectively positioned, and (3) make informed and prudent business decisions about climate change risk in an environment rife with policy uncertainty.Business risk associated with climate change is commonly assumed to be primarily policy driven. Many companies internalize the current stalemate over global climate policy into a perception that climate risk is no longer a critical issue. Business climate risks, however, include: Operational and Supply Chain (Physical) Risk, Brand Risk, Market-driven Structural Risk, Liability Risk.As national and global policy to materially reduce climate change is delayed, it is business-prudent to assume that the level of climate risk is increasing. Even if policy risk might seem lower today than a few years ago, political will can change quickly. Should physical impacts of climate change manifest in dramatic ways, for example, draconian climate policy is likely to follow quickly. These conditions create a complex and shifting business risk environment, and most companies either overlook or substantially underestimate key climate risks. How many companies, for example, are positioned for material climate change outcomes, whether physical or regulatory? Companies with little climate change exposure may not face much downside risk from taking a wait-and-see approach. For those with greater exposure, being "too late" to respond will mean costs and competitive impacts that could have been avoided. Being "too early," however, can mean being penalized later for actions that reduce a company’s emissions today, or competitive disadvantage from getting too far out in front of competitors.

Summarizing the current state of knowledge on the links between business and climate change, this timely Handbook analyzes how businesses contribute to and are affected by climate change, looking closely at their centrality in developing and deploying solutions to address this problem. Contributions from a global collection of scholars and practitioners explore a broad range of key industries’ impacts and responses to climate change, examining corporate strategy and leadership in the climate economy, functional perspectives and corporate practice, and climate finance.

This book provides an overview of the large and interdisciplinary literature on the substance and process of urban climate change planning and design, using the most important articles from the last 15 years to engage readers in understanding problems and finding solutions to this increasingly critical issue. The Reader’s particular focus is how the impacts of climate change can be addressed in urban and suburban environments—what actions can be taken, as well as the need for and the process of climate planning. Both reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as adapting to future climate are explored. Many of the emerging best practices in this field involve improving the green infrastructure of the city and region—providing better on-site stormwater management, more urban greening to address excess heat, zoning for regional patterns of open space and public transportation corridors, and similar actions. These actions may also improve current public health and livability in cities, bringing benefits now and into the future. This Reader is innovative in bringing climate adaptation and green infrastructure together, encouraging a more hopeful perspective on the great challenge of climate change by exploring both the problems of climate change and local solutions.

This latest Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will again form the standard reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences, including students, researchers and policy makers in environmental science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy.

Rising temperatures are affecting organisms in all of Earth's biomes, but the complexity of ecological responses to climate change has hampered the development of a conceptually unified treatment of them. In a remarkably comprehensive synthesis, this book presents past, ongoing, and future ecological responses to climate change in the context of two simplifying hypotheses, facilitation and interference, arguing that biotic interactions may be the primary driver of ecological responses to climate change across all levels of biological organization. Eric Post's synthesis and analyses of ecological consequences of climate change extend from the Late Pleistocene to the present, and through the next century of projected warming. His investigation is grounded in classic themes of enduring interest in ecology, but developed around novel conceptual and mathematical models of observed and predicted dynamics. Using stability theory as a recurring theme, Post argues that the magnitude of climatic variability may be just as important as the magnitude and direction of change in determining whether populations, communities, and species persist. He urges a more refined consideration of species interactions, emphasizing important distinctions between lateral and vertical interactions and their disparate roles in shaping responses of populations, communities, and ecosystems to climate change.

Abstract: "This report documents trends and impacts of climate change on America's forests as required by the Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974. Recent research on the impact of climate and elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide on plant productivity is synthesized. Modeling analyses explore the potential impact of climate changes on forests, wood products, and carbon in the United States."

"Climate Change\U+2014\Who\U+2019\s Carrying the Burden? rallies the call of climate justice advocates and activists concerned with \U+2018\system change not climate change\U+2019\. This call demands control of local resources, the restitution of past wrongs, and the willingness to conceive and accept different modes of living and seeing."--Back cover.

This Handbook examines the diverse ways in which climate change impacts Indigenous Peoples and local communities and considers their response to these changes. While there is well-established evidence that the climate of the Earth is changing, the scarcity of instrumental data oftentimes challenges scientists’ ability to detect such impacts in remote and marginalized areas of the world or in areas with scarce data. Bridging this gap, this Handbook draws on field research among Indigenous Peoples and local communities distributed across different climatic zones and relying on different livelihood activities, to analyse their reports of and responses to climate change impacts. It includes contributions from a range of authors from different nationalities, disciplinary backgrounds, and positionalities, thus reflecting the diversity of approaches in the field. The Handbook is organised in two parts: Part I examines the diverse ways in which climate change – alone or in interaction with other drivers of environmental change – affects Indigenous Peoples and local communities; Part II examines how Indigenous Peoples and local communities are locally adapting their responses to these impacts. Overall, this book highlights Indigenous and local knowledge systems as an untapped resource which will be vital in deepening our understanding of the effects of climate change. The Routledge Handbook of Climate Change Impacts on Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities will be an essential reference text for students and scholars of climate change, anthropology, environmental studies, ethnobiology, and Indigenous studies.