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Comment Late last year in 2020, the UK government announced their ten point plan for a green industrial revolution.1 It is excellent to see the government moving towards the UK's goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, focusing on sustainable energy, protecting our natural environment, and increasing green public transport, cycling and walking. However, the success of any net-zero carbon emissions strategy is contingent on public cooperation and support. The human complexities around rapid societal change is something the government has become well acquainted with over the past year with the COVID-19 pandemic. If the government want to fulfil the largely technological, green revolution they have planned, they would do well to pay attention and take notes in the coming months as they try to encourage a fatigued and nervous public to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As experts in vaccine hesitancy, we provide three key lessons in risk communication that are needed to successfully maintain public support for policies designed to quickly and substantially cut carbon emissions.

This article explores the role of broadcast news media decisionmakers in shaping public understanding and debate of climate change risks. It locates the media within a "tangled web" of communication and debate between sources, media, and publics. The article draws on new qualitative research in the British context. The main body of it focuses on media source strategies, on climate change storytelling in news, and the "myth of detachment" sustained by many news decisionmakers. The empirical evidence, gathered between 1997 and 2004, is derived primarily from recordings and notes drawn from a series of seminars that has brought together equal numbers of BBC news and television decisionmakers and environment/development specialists. The seminars have created a rare space for extended dialogue between media and specialist perspectives on the communication of complex climate change science and policy. While the article acknowledges the distinctive nature of the BBC as a public sector broadcaster, the evidence confirms and extends current understanding of the career of climate change within the media more broadly. The working group discussions have explored issues arising out of how stories are sourced and, in the context of competitive and time‐pressured newsrooms, shaped and presented in short news pieces. Particularly significant is the disjuncture between ways of talking about uncertainty within science and policy discourse and media constructions of objectivity, truth, and balance. The article concludes with a summary of developments in media culture, technology, and practice that are creating opportunities for enhanced public understanding and debate of climate change risks. It also indicates the need for science and policy communities to be more active critics and sources of news.

Climate change is giving rise to diverse risks, ranging from changing incidences of tropical diseases to increased risks of drought, varying widely in their potential severity, frequency and predictability. Governments must integrate the management of these climate risks into policy making if they are to successfully adapt to a changing climate. Economic analysis has a vital role to play in supporting these efforts, by identifying costs and benefits and supporting decision-making for an uncertain future. However, this analysis needs to be adapted to the institutions, policies and climate risks in a given country. Building on the experience of OECD countries, this report sets out how the latest economic evidence and tools can enable better policy making for adaptation.

Africa is projected to experience diverse and severe impacts of climate change. The need to adapt is increasingly recognized, from the community level to regional and national governments to the donor community, yet adaptation faces many constraints, particularly in low income settings. This study documents and examines the challenges facing adaptation in Africa, drawing upon semi-structured interviews (n = 337) with stakeholders including high-level stakeholders, continent-wide and across scales: in national government and UN agencies, academia, donors, non-governmental organizations, farmers and extension officers. Four key concerns about adaptation emerge: i) Climate data, scenarios and impacts models are insufficient for supporting adaptation, particularly as they relate to food systems and rural livelihoods; ii) The adaptation response to-date has been limited, fragmented, divorced from national planning processes, and with limited engagement with local expertise; iii) Adaptation policies and programs are too narrowly focused on explicit responses to climate change rather than responses to climate variability or broader development issues; and iv) Adaptation finance is insufficient, and procedures for accessing it present challenges to governments capacities. As a response to these concerns, we propose the 4-Cs framework which places adaptation for Africa at the center of climate projections, climate education, climate governance and climate finance, with corresponding responsibilities for government and non-government actors.

AbstractA growing body of research demonstrates that believing action to reduce the risks of climate change is both possible (self‐efficacy) and effective (response efficacy) is essential to motivate and sustain risk mitigation efforts. Despite this potentially critical role of efficacy beliefs, measures and their use vary wildly in climate change risk perception and communication research, making it hard to compare and learn from efficacy studies. To address this problem and advance our understanding of efficacy beliefs, this article makes three contributions. First, we present a theoretically motivated approach to measuring climate change mitigation efficacy, in light of diverse proposed, perceived, and previously researched strategies. Second, we test this in two national survey samples (Amazon's Mechanical Turk N = 405, GfK Knowledge Panel N = 1,820), demonstrating largely coherent beliefs by level of action and discrimination between types of efficacy. Four additive efficacy scales emerge: personal self‐efficacy, personal response efficacy, government and collective self‐efficacy, and government and collective response efficacy. Third, we employ the resulting efficacy scales in mediation models to test how well efficacy beliefs predict climate change policy support, controlling for specific knowledge, risk perceptions, and ideology, and allowing for mediation by concern. Concern fully mediates the relatively strong effects of perceived risk on policy support, but only partly mediates efficacy beliefs. Stronger government and collective response efficacy beliefs and personal self‐efficacy beliefs are both directly and indirectly associated with greater support for reducing the risks of climate change, even after controlling for ideology and causal beliefs about climate change.

Climate change poses a significant threat to future social and economic activities. This article seeks to understand how corporations respond to climate uncertainties and threats through the performance of different 'risks', including market, reputational, regulatory and physical risks. In doing this, we demonstrate how these risks are performative and political. Based on interviews and document analysis, we show how climate change risks are naturalized within market conventions through processes of reiterating climate change as risk, codifying the risk in monetary value, entangling the risk in market conventions and cementing the frame through political activities. We also show how these risk frames have political effects in that they fail to fully account for, or represent, the complexities of climate change. Indeed, the social and natural consequences of climate change undermine the risk models that seek to explain and predict these events. The consequences of these 'misfires' highlight the political nature of risk frames in that their effects are unequally distributed among less powerful actors. Importantly, however, these misfires also have the potential to provide space for new interventions in responding to climate change.

AbstractAbstractRapid climate change has been occurring for the past few decades (IPCC 2012). These climate changes are predicted to continue and possibly accelerate for many decades to come (IPCC 2012). One of the industries most affected by climate change is the insurance industry; for instance, changing weather patterns could lead to increases in damages from events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods (Mufson 2007). Fortunately, however, the insurance industry is uniquely positioned to lead the way with regard to climate change mitigation and risk management. Insurers can promote a more sustainable future through better risk‐based modeling and product pricing; through innovative green products; through partnering with businesses for better environmental governance; through alliances with policy‐makers and regulators to ensure voluntary market adjustments for risk; and by championing the enforcement of building code efforts (Lloyd's 2006; Liedtke, Schanz, and Stahel 2009). Finally, while insurers can potentially have a major influence over the management of climate change risk in society, they must first model sustainability in order to be credible advisors to customers and other constituents.