Among the foremost challenges of the 21st century are sustainable development and climate change mitigation. In light of these challenges, this thesis seeks to analyse and compare the extent to which development and climate change mitigation are aligned on a policy level in three countries in the global south, namely South Africa, India and Mexico. These three middle-income countries are plagued by high levels of poverty and large inequality gaps, and address the challenge of reducing GHG emissions in this context. The objectives of this study are fourfold: (1) an analysis of each country’s climate change policies mainly its Nationally Determined Contributions and climate response strategies and assesses to which extent development is addressed; (2) analysis of each country’s national development plans and the extent to which climate change mitigation is addressed; (3) based on the initial analysis, assessing the overall extent to which the development and climate policies are aligned; and (4) a comparative analysis of how each country performed in this regard. The study found that South Africa, India and Mexico are in pursuit of lower carbon development in the years to come. Targets for reducing their emissions in light of climate change considerations have been set and sectoral approaches to low carbon development are illustrated to varying degrees. South Africa was found to have done relatively well in integrating development and poverty alleviation into its national climate policy. The detailed analysis presented in the thesis found this at national scale, while a focus on co-benefits was particularly well integrated in Mexico’s and India’s climate policy. Thus the thesis shows that each country could learn or adopt some approaches to alignment from the other – and that there are several benefits associated with aligning development and climate policies. More research would need to be conducted at a finer scale to identify the trade-offs of certain mitigation actions and this information should be used in future national and sectoral development.

This thesis focuses on the economics of climate change and wildlife utilization in privately owned parcels of land in South Africa. A significant proportion of agricultural land in the Southern Africa region has undergone transition with many farmers opting to move away from livestock farming to either wildlife farming, ranching or conservancies. In other instances, farmers in areas which were predominantly under irrigation are also switching to wildlife land use. One of the biggest claims to this transition has been the effects of climate change on livestock and crop production. The increasing cost of production associated with worsening climate continue to force farmers into abandoning livestock and crop production in favor of wildlife, which has been considered more profitable in the marginal areas in the southern Africa region. However, several uncertainties engulf wildlife utilization on private land, this may hinder its ability to bring about development that might improve the welfare of the communities and those individuals who directly participate in wildlife conservation in the private areas. The most pressing issue in wildlife utilization on private land includes; i). Its effects on the welfare of the communities living around the wildlife farms, ranches or conservancies. The livelihood of these communities revolved around livestock and livestock production for employment, food provision and other socioeconomic and cultural provisions. Therefore, the transition from livestock to wildlife production inevitably can improve or worsen the living standards of these communities, ii). Sustainability of wildlife production as alternative land use in the face of prevailing and future climate scenarios. While it has been cited that wildlife and wildlife revenues are more resilient to climate change, there is every indication that climate change affects wildlife conservation, iii). The role of wildlife in climate change adaptation. Farmers in South Africa are known to mix wildlife with livestock as one way of adapting to climate change. Over time, such farms have transited into wildlife ranches. The issue therefore is how vulnerable are wildlife ranches compared to livestock and mixed wildlife-livestock ranches?

Four million residents of a major modern city faced the very likely existential and physical threat of running out of water. The water crisis continues to be an extremely complex threat with many complicated aspects to the drought, which resulted in residents of Cape Town reacting with intensity to this danger. The crisis is an example of how ignoring environmental issues can lead to catastrophic outcomes for society. For South Africa, which is characterized by a turbulent history, Homer-Dixon (1999) predicted there would be violent conflict in the future over resource scarcities. The drought was not a shock, it was a stress; what the drought fashioned were instances of shock which mostly related to the media campaign for Day Zero. Although no violent conflict on a mass scale has transpired as a result of the ongoing water crisis, there have been cases of civil violence. From protests at the greater Cape Town scale to physical altercations witnessed at Newlands Spring, the results of the present study demonstrate that mass violent conflict is not a far-off consequence of water scarcity. This research aimed to determine whether environmental violence was a lived experience for the residents of Cape Town due to the water crisis. One of the objectives was to understand whether the water crisis-induced feeling of distress and anxiety and whether indicators of slow violence and “Solastalgia” could be identified; a concept put forth to provide clarity to distresses which are environmentally caused (Albrecht et al., 2007; Higginbotham et al., 2007). Over the course of October 2018, semi-structured interviews were conducted with security and informal workers and a public survey was conducted with 100 residents who collect water at the Newlands Spring. The outcomes observed in this research is that when people feel as though their security is threatened, people tend to respond violently to the scarcity of a vital resource. The key finding of this study is that environmental violence was experienced over the crisis period. This leads to the conclusion that Solastalgia was likely to be experienced by those engaging within this Newlands Spring environment and elsewhere. The Structural violence and Supply induced violence have meant that people across South Africa experience water crises of different scales. Climate change is to aggravate these existing forms of violence and produce more complex psychological, social and economic impacts on those affected by water scarcity. Furthermore, this research contributes to the knowledge that droughts and water scarcity pose immeasurable threats to humanity.

Agro-pastoralists of Bobirwa sub-district depend mainly on rain-fed agriculture as a source of their livelihood. However, this agro-pastoralism is affected by climatic variability. Advanced warning of upcoming weather information is, therefore, important in informing farming decisions. Traditional weather forecasting is often a major planning tool used to inform agro-pastoralists’ decision making and has been handed from one generation to another. For instance, local knowledge indicators are used to determine onset of rainfall and quality of the rainfall expected. However, there are numerous factors that may have affected the effective use of and dependence on traditional weather forecasting over the years. For this reason, it is critical to examine the current state and use of traditional weather forecasting among the agro-pastoralists. This thesis describes the traditional weather forecasting that agro-pastoralists in Bobirwa sub-district Botswana hold and use in planning for agricultural activities to cope with climate variability. It also examines changes that have been observed in the use of traditional weather forecasting over time. By exploring the knowledge used to generate early warning systems and coping strategies to climate variability of agro-pastoralists, we examine underlying vulnerabilities and resilience possibilities. Data was collected through purposively selecting a total of 101 agro-pastoralists who were further stratified by age and gender. The following qualitative techniques were used in data collection: semi-structured interviews (54 interviewees constituting 37 forecasters and 17 non-forecasters), focus group discussions (47 participants consisting of between 4 and 12 participants), and key informant interviews (11 forecasters who use multiple indicators). The snowballing technique was the main sampling strategy. Knowledgeable traditional forecasters in FGD’s were used to identify key informants with whom semi-structured interviews were conducted. All data was analysed using the thematic analysis method. Data was constructed using a cyclical process to generate themes which consisted of the initialisation (capturing participants’ accounts), construction of themes, relating the themes and developing results. From the study, it was found that male and female elderly agro-pastoralists in Bobirwa are more knowledgeable about traditional weather forecasting and use the traditional weather forecasting techniques to inform their decisions, while the less-knowledgeable adults and youth expressed having limited use of traditional weather forecasting in decision making. There were also differences in the use of specific traditional indicators based on the positionality of an individual in the society as well as age and gender. While the participants indicated that traditional weather forecasting is a reliable technique, climate change is believed to have resulted in unpredictable trends in recent years. For example, excessive floods, patchy and reduced rainfall, extensive heat spells with no specific patterns, changes in biological indicators, and thus, present a challenge to these agro-pastoralists. In all, traditional weather forecasting remains a cultural artefact in the community and will always be practised by the agro-pastoralists. However, many elements threaten the existence of the traditional weather forecasting such as the death of custodians of knowledge, the disruptive nature of climate change, youth migration to cities and the ubiquity of modern practices. Further to this, the prevalence of modern practices, for example Christianity, is transforming the use and beliefs of individuals in traditional weather forecasting leading to reduced intergenerational transfers of the traditional weather forecasting. It is prudent to expect that as cultural practices change within societies, cognisant of the fact that culture is dynamic, it is also expected that the use of traditional weather forecasting will change. It should, however, not be construed that the changes in the use of traditional weather and seasonal forecasting are an indication of the unreliability of traditional indicators, but inability of individuals to forecast. In turn, the study recommends the conservation of the traditional weather forecasting and traditionally important biological indicators. This can be promoted through documentation and teaching of traditional weather and seasonal forecasting techniques in conventional educational programmes. Alongside this, integration of traditional and scientific weather forecasting could be used to develop national policies to facilitate effective drought and flood coping strategies that are inclusive and aimed at limiting the traditional weather forecasting knowledge gap among agro-pastoralists of different age and gender groups. Interventions by the government can be redirected to traditional leaders or elders who bear extensive knowledge on traditional weather indicators to create awareness and facilitate knowledge exchange especially in aiding agro-pastoralists to cope with climate variability. Also, for those who are sceptical of traditional weather forecasting, the use of religious gatherings of different denominations can be an option to facilitate awareness raising of coping strategies that can be explored to reduce vulnerability amongst this group of agro-pastoralists by teaching them to adapt to the changing weather using local knowledge.

Thesis advisor: Christopher Maxwell / Reducing carbon dioxide emissions and strengthening the economies of developing countries are among the most pressing issues within Sustainable Development. In order to enact effective policies to move toward Sustainable Development Goals, a deep understanding of the pollution-income relationship, and how it differs between developed and developing countries, is imperative. Using advanced panel data analysis techniques, and using the IPAT and EKC models, my results find that the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and economic development differs for developed and developing countries. Additionally, my analysis uses carbon dioxide emissions, a global pollutant, to proxy environmental quality. My results, however, oppose those of existing literature which use local pollutants as the proxy. This may suggest that the utility gained from reducing local pollutants differs from the utility gained by reducing global pollutants. Further exploration of the differing pollution-income relationship for local and global pollutants serves as an area for future research. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Economics.

Climate change is a threat to food security. A substantial body of research supports this conclusion for climate change threats to plants with agricultural value, as well as wild-harvested food from animals, such as fish. However, much less is known about climate change threats to wild-harvested food plants despite these species meeting important dietary needs for a large number of households in developing countries, especially when crops fail or during other times of hardship. My study was the first to look at climate change risk to a broad group of wild edible plants and focussed on the wild food plants (WFPs) of southern Africa. The aims of my study were to determine where WFPs occur in southern Africa; whether these WFPs will be threatened by climate change; and how climate change risk for WFPs intersects with climate change risk to staple crops. Species distribution models were used to obtain the historical geographic range of 1190 WFP species and to make projections of range change for 2070 under both low (Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 2.6) and high (RCP 8.5) greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. I also mapped percentage change between historical and future yields for maize and sorghum to identify regions where both crops and WFPs, or just one of these are at risk from climate change. WFP species richness in southern Africa generally increases from west to east across the region, with the Eastern Cape, Kwazulu-Natal and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa having the highest WFP species richness. It is projected that for RCP 2.6, 40% of WFP species will experience a decrease in range extent within southern Africa, increasing to 66% of WFP species for RCP 8.5. For RCP 2.6, the loss of suitable climatic conditions is projected to decrease local WFP species richness most in the north-eastern parts of southern Africa, while increases in WFP species richness are projected in the south and east of South Africa. For RCP 8.5, decreases of more than 200 species are projected for multiple regions in north-eastern South Africa, and local WFP species losses of more than 50% are projected for most of Botswana. Despite these decreases, WFPs could still play an important role in food security during times of low agricultural yield as a result of changing climate conditions, especially in low-income, rural communities that are reliant on smallholder farming. For instance, in parts of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and northern Namibia, WFP species richness is projected to increase while maize and sorghum yield are projected to decrease. People may be more able to rely on WFPs as a nutritional safety net in these regions into the future. This safety net, however, may be lost in large regions of South Africa's North West and Free State provinces, on the north-eastern border between South Africa and Botswana, as well as parts of northern Namibia, where declines in both crop yield and WFP species richness are projected. This research could prove valuable for climate change adaptation planning, especially in more vulnerable rural regions of southern Africa. Furthermore, by integrating traditional knowledge of WFPs into food security risk assessments and response options, it could provide a more inclusive range of food supply options people can use in order to mitigate risk. However, in order to ensure future food security, more research is needed on WFP uses, nutritional value, responses to climate change, and suitability for cultivation. Still, by looking beyond the farm level and conventional crops to the exceptional diversity of WFPs people obtain from their environment, my research has made a first step towards understanding the linkages between WFPs, agriculture, food security, and climate change.

Climate change is an increasingly urgent problem. How it is communicated and represented are of interest to those seeking to understand action or inaction on the issue. There is increasing interest on how it is being communicated visually. This research speaks to the growing body of literature on the visual communication of climate change in order to contribute to the wider critical literature addressing the role of images in the communication of climate change. It does so by considering a neglected site of climate change imagery: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) report covers. The IPCC's report covers from the first ones in 1990, to the latest ones of 2014, are investigated in this quantitative and qualitative case study where the subject matter, both literal and symbolic of this (hitherto unexamined) body of images, is interrogated. This dissertation sought to identify and investigate what, exactly, the IPCC is using to visually represent and communicate climate change outside the realm of its scientific graphs and diagrams. It sought to compare these findings with the larger lexicon of climate change imagery and look at how the IPCC negotiates the communicational and representational problems inherent in the visual communication of climate change. The question ultimately asked was whether the IPCC's cover images are effective representations of climate change. What was found was that the IPCC images departed significantly from standard climate imagery. The conclusions drawn from the initial content and thematic analysis was that the IPCC images are frequently too banal, bland and decontextualized to be effective representations or communicators of climate change but do offer some potentially effective avenues overlooked in other representations.

It already seems preposterous to be able to sufficiently meet global food demand of the expected nine billion people by 2050 while at the same time maintain our emissions levels below 2ᵒC by the end of the century. This is more so for a continent such as Africa where much of this population is expected to arise from considering the fact that the continent is ranked to have the highest proportion of food insecure population. In order to overcome this challenge, we will need a total revolution of our agricultural production systems to systems that not only focus on increasing food production but also build our resilience to climate change. An example of one such practice is System of Rice Intensification (SRI) which is acclaimed to increase rice production while at the same time reducing the pressure on scarce water resources, minimizing agricultural greenhouse gases emissions and improving the farmers' households' adaptive capacity to climate change impacts by increasing their income. However, despite the success attributed to SRI, its uptake across Sub Saharan Africa is arguably low. This is puzzling considering the high proportion of food insecurity in the region and the region's susceptibility to damage from increased severity and frequency of climate extreme events such as droughts and floods due to its geographical positioning and the limited adaptive capacity of its people. In this work, the researcher sought to understand the barriers and enablers to the adoption of the System of Rice intensification in Mwea irrigation scheme (MIS) in Kenya. The findings show that most barriers to the uptake of SRI in MIS occur during the dissemination of SRI. Further critical barriers to the uptake of SRI in MIS were identified as follows: lack of formal SRI training, high costs of rice production, failure to involve key stakeholder institutions such as SACCOs while marketing SRI and farmer's age. Moreover, the study also depicted that most barriers to SRI adoption were intertwined, thus focusing on a single barrier would be myopic. Furthermore, enablers to the uptake of SRI in MIS are tied to the benefits of SRI pre-empted by lead farmers. This correlation implies that the benefits of SRI are key motivators for SRI adoption. Other enablers include training. However, informal training on SRI through social networks which play a crucial role at disseminating climate adaptation activities amongst small scale farmers, is marked with a lot of inconsistencies which makes it a barrier for SRI uptake. In this regard, we advise that SRI trainers clearly highlight the activities involved in SRI and their resultant benefits during initial SRI information dissemination.

Protected areas should be reviewed under expected future climate conditions so that conservation and expansion strategies can be developed appropriately. An assessment of the vulnerability of protected areas to climate change is a necessary step in developing such strategies. Indeed, a vulnerability assessment is an important step in developing adaptation strategies for conservation. This is important as substantial climate change has already been experienced at a park level in South Africa. The aim of this study was to develop a method for assessing the relative vulnerability of protected areas to climate change and to apply this to South Africa’s 19 national parks. The method includes identifying and quantifying potential impacts of climate change on each focal protected area, carried out by developing and/or using projections for species, ecosystems, infrastructure, tourism and neighbouring communities. Potential impacts were combined with measures of each park’s adaptive capacity to develop an overall park vulnerability score. This study has taken vulnerability assessment at a protected area level further than has been attempted before by assessing not only the biophysical but also the socioeconomic impacts of climate change on a protected area, quantifying the potential changes (potential impacts) and developing a relative index. The results indicate that climate change has the potential to contribute significantly to the threats faced by South Africa’s national parks. Apart from a potentially devastating impact on species and ecosystems, the effects on tourism demand, community relations and infrastructure are of concern. Not surprisingly, the most vulnerable parks are largely coastal, where tourist infrastructure is at risk of both flooding and sea-level rise, and there are higher population densities. Furthermore, coastal ecosystems are expected to transform significantly which will have consequences for range-restricted species. Management strategies need to take heed of the magnitude of potential impacts identified in this study and work towards developing adaptation pathways.

This dissertation assesses the extent to which data from the Climatological Database for the World's Oceans (CLIWOC) reflect newly digitized historical wind data captured at the Royal Astronomical Observatory (RAO) in Cape Town, South Africa from 1834-1854. This follows the historical precipitation reconstructions for Southern Africa by Hannaford et al. (2015), using wind data from the CLIWOC database. This project also forms part of a bigger project that is recovering and digitising historical instrumental meteorological data for Southern Africa that have never been analysed before. For Southern Africa, the opportunity to compare historical instrumental data seldom arises due to the paucity of reliable data. However, there is an opportunity to analyse and compare two different wind data sources for a twenty-one year cross over period for south western Africa. Wind, as an indicator of atmospheric conditions, has not been assessed extensively in South African, therefore this project fills an academic gap in historical climatology for the region, and provides newly digitised historical data. Digitisation and pre-processing steps ensure that the RAO dataset is comparable to the CLIWOC dataset. This is done by replicating wind direction and speed measurement conversions and formatting (Garcia-Herrera et al., 2005), and by mirroring the available time steps of data in each dataset (eliminating data were the other dataset has erroneous or missing data). Spatially scattered data recorded over the sea compared to data recorded at a fixed position introduces inherent limitations, error and noise into the data comparison. Therefore, to eliminate as many uncertainties as possible and minimise the noise in the data, the CLIWOC data are refined further by a) a single observation per day, b) separating three regions of differing seasonal synoptic air flow regimes (west coast, south west peninsula and south coast) and c) all analyses based on seasonally grouped data. Temporal, spatial and vector relationships are established for each season using scatter plot graphs and Pearson correlations. The different relationships between the data are derived from corresponding wind data (i.e. data of the same day and time), in each dataset for wind speed and wind direction separately. No significant correlation (all p values>0.05) or signal is evident over time, or as the difference in distance changes. However, seasonality is represented consistently in the wind vector distribution heat maps. Significant findings include the observations of anomalous north westerly winds in summer at the RAO, where the CLIWOC data did not pick up similar data for the corresponding region on the west coast. Historical wind data used herein prove to be reliable by the expected seasonal synoptic flow patterns and characteristics seen in each study region. There is no correlation between the datasets over time and space and the data do not present any clear signals or return events over time. Although corresponding data do not show any correlations, there are typical synoptic flow regimes in each study region which prove that wind data was recorded correctly. Therefore, the datasets are mutually exclusive, but accurate in their intrinsic value. It is only the anomalous summer north westerlies at the RAO which question the reliability of the data, as the same wind regimes were not identifiable in the corresponding CLIWOC data. This anomaly was noted but not studied further. This project highlights the major inconsistencies and limitations in the CLIWOC data. Researchers in the future should use CLIWOC data appropriately to suit the research question and be aware of the inconsistencies that may introduce noise.