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Are we making a difference? UWI Staff Part of Global stocktake of adaptation!

Photo caption: Dr. Aidan D. Farrell (left) and Dr. Donovan Campbell (right)

With increasingly frequent and severe natural hazard events but little progress at reducing carbon emissions it has never been clearer that there is an urgent need to adapt to present and future climate change. But how well has the world been doing? A global network of 126 researchers including The UWI’s own Dr. Donovan Campbell (Dept. of Geography and Geology, Mona) and Dr. Aidan Farrell (Dept. of Life sciences, St. Augustine) sought to answer this question by producing the most systematic and comprehensive assessment of implemented human to climate change to date. The study was published online Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Climate Change. In the study machine learning methods were used to systematically screen more than 48,000 articles of which 1,682 were eventually synthesized. The researchers found that there was limited evidence of transformational adaptation and negligible evidence of risk reduction outcomes. As documented in the scientific literature, adaptation is mostly fragmented and incremental, undertaken primarily by individuals and households, rather than comprehensive and coherent efforts by communities and institutions. On this basis the researchers identify eight priorities for global adaptation research.

To learn more and read the paper: Berrang-Ford, L., Siders, A.R., Lesnikowski, A. et al. A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 989–1000 (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01170-y

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published on 10 Dec, 2021

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