Recent (post-1950s) climate change impacts on society and ecosystems have been recognised globally. However these global impacts are not uniform at regional or local scales. Despite research progress on such scales there are still gaps in the knowledge as to 'what' is happening and 'where'? The goal of this study addresses some of these gaps by analysing climate variability and vegetation response at the furthest south westerly peninsula of the United Kingdom. This research is focused on West Cornwall (South West England) - an area dominated by a strong maritime influence. The first part of this PhD research analysed archive and contemporary instrumental data in order to detect any trends in climate variability. The weather data was retrieved from the Met Office archive for Camborne 1957-2010 and Culdrose 1985-2011 stations; Trengwainton Garden (1940-2010), and from the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, for Falmouth (1880-1952) and Helston (1843-1888). The data showed positive trends in mean annual and maximum temperature with the largest trend magnitude in the 20th and 21st century. Seasonal temperature change varies locally with the highest increase in autumn spring and summer. Precipitation trends were only positive for the 19th century for Helston. Correlation between precipitation data and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO index) was negative, however the opposite result was detected when the NAO index was correlated with temperatures. Surprisingly, return period analysis showed a decrease in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events post 1975 for Camborne and Trengwainton Garden stations. The second part of this study analysed changes in vegetation distribution in West Cornwall using historical and contemporary vegetation records. Historical vegetation records were used from the Flora of Cornwall collection of herbarium records and contemporary vegetation records which were available online, containing mainly the 'New Atlas of British and Irish flora'. Data sets were geo-referenced using ArcGIS in order to analyse changes in species geographical distribution pre and post-1900. Analysis showed that historical vegetation records can be used to assess any changes in geographic distributions of vegetation. Analysis for the area of West Cornwall showed a loss of range for 18 species, for 6 species this loss was larger than 50% of the area, and there was no change in overall range area for 10 species. Ellenberg values and environmental indicator values showed that they can be used as an indicator of environmental change, showing a decrease in species with lower January temperatures. Analysis also showed an increase in moderate wetter species, where species with extreme low and high precipitation environmental indicator values showed a greater loss. Furthermore species with a higher requirement for light showed a loss as well as species with lower nitrogen values. To analyse the loss of species at the local scale, West Cornwall was divided into three areas (North Border Cells, Central West Cornwall Cells and South Border Cells). The highest loss of 11 species was detected for South Border Cells, where the loss for Central West Cornwall Cells was 6 and for North Border Cells 8 species. It was found that 17 species were experiencing loss on different local sites. For 9 of these 17 species, change at the local scale was different to the national scale change at the individual species level, group level and habitat level. Furthermore, the whole area of West Cornwall lost two species post-1900, with a different loss locally. This showed that species could be protected locally in appropriate microclimate refugia, which will be of benefit for the preservation of regional identity ecosystem services and overall genetic pool of the species.

Scientific knowledge is often relied upon for informing crucial societal decisions. Where this knowledge is uncertain, and/or where these decision are made amidst a contexted political landscape, science tends to become the focus of intense scrutiny, as has been evident throughout the history of climate change politics. One consequence is that instead of "scientising" decision-making, science itself becomes more explicitly politicised. This thesis argues that in order to contribute to contemporary debates about the governance of science, it is essential to move beyond the question of whether or not policy-relevant scientific knowledge is credibly and to examine how scientific knowledge is made to be credible. Drawing upon the concept of co-production and other insights from Science & Technology Studies (STS), this thesis presents a detailed examination of how research into the health impacts of climate change (infectious diseases especially) gradually gained in prominence in both public health and climate change circles. Particular analytical attention is paid to an epistemic community of climate change and health (CCH) researchers, following the ways in which they interacted with global political entities such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). Based upon in-depth interviews with actors intimately involved in CCH research, this thesis documents how the rise of CCH research influenced and was influenced by particular scientific and political contexts related to the governance of climate change as well as emerging infectious disease. The examination of a longstanding controversy surrounding CCH research reveals many socio-economic and political assumptions embedded in it, further demonstrating its contingency. However, despite that CCH research is both uncertain and contested, actors in the political world often need to know what the state-of-the-art of the field is. To examine the implications of this, the CCH controversy as treated by the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) is explored. Although IPCC follows a complicated set of procedures aimed at ensuring scientific and political legitimacy, this thesis demonstrates that values and normative judgements are important components of scientific assessments, helping to co-construct particular science-policy orderings at the expense of alternative ones. Amidst ongoing debates about how to shore-up the credibility of climate change science and politics, this thesis argues that the way in which IPCC assessments are currently performed, as well as their tendency to present findings as "consensus", may undermine their political and scientific credibility.

This thesis is a study of the cultural politics of environmentalism in an era of climate change and the public curriculum that it generates. Scientists and the policy elite alone are unlikely to solve the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change, even in the unlikely scenario that consensus was reached and concerted international action was forthcoming. Increasingly, it is recognised that institutional learning through technocratic refinements of the status quo are inadequate. Although there is widespread belief that anthropogenic global warming is an urgent problem, political action has not followed scientific knowledge, because we have been slow to recognise the problem’s cultural implications. A range of voices within the environmental movement (broadly conceived) have increasingly challenged technocratic policy framing, with new ways of thinking. By widening the debate these critical voices increase the possibility of learning to react in new ways, which increase the capacity for collective agency. Based on this assessment, the aim of this thesis is to explore the ways in which the cultural politics of particular activist milieus generate public curriculum, through catalyzing the relationship between the cultural politics of civil society and the political culture of the state. From the 1960s onwards, the environmental movement has undergone a process of differentiation and specialisation, such that distinct cultural formations – oriented around direct action, relocalisation, and professional campaigning – emerged. Different ideal typical modes of “climate change communication” – agonistic pluralism, public participation, and social marketing (Carvalho & Peterson, 2012) – can be mapped onto the public pedagogies of these activist cultures. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005, p. 20) uses the term agonistic pluralism to describe a situation where the “adversary” is understood in a productive sense to be “a crucial category for democratic politics”: where this is denied, we/they relations are understood to be “antagonistic” in the sense that conflicting parties do not recognise the legitimacy of one another. This view recognises the power play and affective commitments that determine modes of political association. On the other hand, “public participation” views politics as constituted through non-partisan rational deliberation in legitimate public fora. Finally, “social marketing” approaches discard the notion of people as rational decision makers, but also discard the principle of public participation in favour of the notion that political communication can be improved through expert evidence-based interventions. Cultures of direct climate action tend towards agonistic communicative styles, characterised by contestatory moments and a public pedagogy of “defining the enemy” (Newman, 1994). On the other hand, this approach has been perceived as problematic by movement intellectuals in relocalisation movements, who have argued that the non-politicised experimental practices of local communities, which engage optimistically with a sense of the possible, may in the long run, be more productive of the kind of mass cultural value shift required in order to tackle climate change. More recently, reflecting their own situated organisational structures and actor-networks, knowledge workers in the professional campaigning sector have increasingly applied insights from social psychology, behavioural economics, and cognitive science in order to find ways that engage tacit cultural values and norms in their public pedagogical efforts. In seeking to ascertain the ideal conditions for communication, the ENGO sector aligns most closely with a ‘social marketing approach’ to public pedagogy. Working with the ‘agonistic’ discourse theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, I believe that all cultures of activism necessarily engage in a contingent politics of articulation, at the heart of which lies antagonism and hegemonic struggle. In this thesis, I construct an intertextual research model, capable of exploring the contingent processes of articulation within cultures of climate change activism, between them, and between the movement at large, and the wider public, as they engage (implicitly or explicitly) in hegemonic struggles that provide moments of educative potential to activists, bystanders and politicians. I argue that the public pedagogies of these cultures of activism cohere around the articulation of what Laclau (2005) would call “empty signifiers”, which link particular claims, interests, and identities through creating a frontier separating them from an outside, which partially constitutes the inside’s identity.

<p> The goal of this qualitative single-case study was to investigate the problem with more than 50% of Americans admitting they are not prepared for natural disasters before they occur. The sample for this study was 24 purposively selected Hurricane Sandy survivors in New York and New Jersey who were 25 years of age or older. Data was collected through ten open-ended interview questions presented during telephone interviews. This study was guided by the theoretical framework of normative risk management decision making. Thematic analysis was used to code and analyze the data collected. This study was focused on answering two broad research questions related to why more than 50% of Americans are not prepared for natural disasters before they occur and the factors that prevent them from preparing. The major recommendations for future research and practice were related to the lack of a distinction between individuals who perceive they are prepared (who are deemed unprepared according to regulatory guidelines) and the possibility they are included with the more than 50% of Americans who are not prepared although they require modification of preparedness behavior while individuals who are not prepared require adoption of preparedness behavior. The other recommendations describe the factors that prevent individuals from preparing as lack of notification and signaling communications that indicate a natural disaster is imminent and expected to be severe; and individual disbelief in the validity of the communications. This study contributes to filling the gap in the literature related to the lived experience with natural disasters. </p>

<p> The importance of effective leadership practices as related to environmental issues and climate change is well established by climate change policy negotiators and there has been an increasing trend in leadership roles being created in organizations to address environmental issues. Organizational change efforts focused on social responsibility initiatives, such as changing environmentally relevant behaviors, often generate significant costs for organizations without contributing to desired results and messages from leaders to stakeholders in organizations do not frequently align with performance related to those messages. The science of behavior analysis focuses on the prediction and influence of socially significant behavior and provides principles to address performance in organizational settings. In the current study, principles of behavior analysis were applied to examine the relationship between a leader&rsquo;s verbal behavior with an employee and that employee&rsquo;s performance. Antecedent rule statements about climate change and human behavior were emailed by a leader to employees to examine the effect of those communications on employee energy consumption as related to each individual employee&rsquo;s values about anthropogenic climate change. In an analysis of employee reported values as related to human-caused climate change and the effects of leader communication on energy consumption behavior based on those individual values, results provided additional information about the potential utility of tailoring leader communication to employee values and also provided findings that informed future research directions in the area of the effect of a leader&rsquo;s verbal behavior on employee performance in context of values.</p>

<p> Ocean tides worldwide have exhibited secular changes in the past century, simultaneous with a global secular rise in mean sea level (MSL). The combination of these two factors contributes to higher water levels, and may increase threats to coastal regions and populations over the next century. Equally as important as these long-term changes are the short-term fluctuations in sea levels and tidal properties. These fluctuations may interact to yield locally extreme water level events, especially when combined with storm surge. This study, presented in three parts, examines the relationships between tidal anomalies and MSL anomalies on yearly and monthly timescales, with a goal of diagnosing dynamical factors that may influence the long-term evolution of tides in the Pacific Ocean. Correlations between yearly averaged properties are denoted tidal anomaly trends (TATs), and will be used to explore interannual behavior. Correlations of monthly averaged properties are denoted seasonal tidal anomaly trends (STATs), and are used to examine seasonal behavior. Four tidal constituents are analyzed: the two largest semidiurnal (twice daily) constituents, M2 and S2, and the two largest diurnal (once daily) constituents, K1 and O1. </p><p> Part I surveys TATs and STATs at 153 Pacific Ocean tide gauges, and discusses regional patterns within the entire Pacific Ocean. TATs with statistically significant relations between MSL and amplitudes (A-TATs) are seen at 89% of all gauges; 92 gauges for M2, 66 for S2, 82 for K1, and 59 for O1. TATs with statistically significant relations between tidal phase (the relative timing of high water of the tide) and MSL (P-TATs) are observed at 55 gauges for M2, 47 for S2, 42 for K1, and 61 for O1. Significant seasonal variations (STATs) are observed at about a third of all gauges, with the largest concentration in Southeast Asia. The effect of combined A-TATs was also considered. At selected stations, observed tidal sensitivity with MSL was extrapolated forward in time to the predicted sea level in 2100. Results suggest that stations with large positive combined A-TATs produce total water levels that are greater than those predicted by an increase in MSL alone, increasing the chances of high-water events. </p><p> Part II examines the mechanisms behind the yearly (TAT) variability in the Western Tropical Pacific Ocean. Significant amplitude TATs are found at more than half of 26 gauges for each of the two strongest tidal constituents, K1 (diurnal) and M2 (semidiurnal). For the lesser constituents analyzed (O1 and S2), significant trends are observed at ten gauges. </p><p> Part III analyzes the seasonal behavior of tides (STATs) at twenty tide gauges in the Southeast Asian waters, which exhibit variation by 10 &ndash; 30% of mean tidal amplitudes. A barotropic ocean tide model that considers the seasonal effects of MSL, stratification, and geostrophic and Ekman velocity is used to explain the observed seasonal variability in tides due to variations in monsoon-influenced climate forcing, with successful results at about half of all gauges. The observed changes in tides are best explained by the influence of non-tidal velocities (geostrophic and Ekman), though the effect of changing stratification is also an important secondary causative mechanism. </p><p> From the results of these surveys and investigations, it is concluded that short-term fluctuations in MSL and tidal properties at multiple time scales may be as important in determining the state of future water levels as the long-term trends. Global explanations for the observed tidal behavior have not been found in this study; however, significant regional explanations are found at the yearly time scale in the Solomon Sea, and at the seasonal time scale in Southeast Asia. It is likely that tidal sensitivity to annual and seasonal variations in MSL at other locations also are driven by locally specific processes, rather than factors with basin-wide coherence. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)</p>

According to the recently released National Climate Assessment (NCA), climate change will disproportionally impact the health of the most vulnerable communities in Central Texas (Melillo, 2014). Exactly how climate change will impact these populations is unclear (Measham, 2011; Martens, 2014). Nationwide, there are few examples of cities looking at the impacts of climate change on existing public health issues and vulnerable communities. The NCA, Austin/Travis County Community Health Assessment (CHA) and Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP), broadly identifies vulnerable communities as children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color (Melillo, 2014: Luber, 2009). The 2014 release of the NCA, in addition to the 2013 completion of the CHA and CHIP, provides an opportunity to compare current public health issues with projected changes in climate. The deductive process starts with a review of the CHA and CHIP to identify issues that are directly impacted by hotter and longer heat waves including a lack of physical activity, a decrease in mobility, and greater social isolation. These issues are then compared to likely climate scenarios for Austin in the coming century. For Austin, climate scientists project longer and hotter heat waves and higher overnight average temperatures. The results of the process are a hypothetical framework and specific actions to incorporate increasing temperatures into short-term and long-term health improvement planning. Comparing the NCA and CHA/CHIP reveals that an increase in intensity and duration of heat waves will make it especially dangerous for vulnerable communities who already struggle with health issues sensitive to heat such as obesity, respiratory ailments, and social isolation (Martens, 2014). Further analysis finds that the health implications of climate change come down to three broad topics: outdoor physical activities, lack of access to healthcare facilities, and isolation. Austin’s increasing temperatures and growing population means that more resources and efforts are needed to ensure the safety of all Austin residents. In this thesis, I put forth a hypothetical decision-making framework that prioritizes the allocation of resources to advance Austin’s pathway to climate resiliency. In addition, tools and actions are proposed to increase the climate resilience of the most vulnerable community members in Austin. / text

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This thesis tests and applies a new, physically based snow distribution and melt model at spatial scales of tens of metres and temporal scales of days across sub-arctic landscapes, in order to assess the significance of snow variability in sub-arctic human ecodynamics at resolutions relevant to human activities. A wider goal is to contribute to planning in the face of future climate change. Model tests are undertaken based on original field data collected in Sweden and Norway, and secondary data from Idaho, France and Greenland. Model applications focus on the ‘completed experiment’ of the medieval Norse in Greenland, a comparatively isolated population that relied on a combination of pastoralism and hunting for survival. A combination of local calibration based on contemporary meteorological data, customised climate reconstructions based on GCM data, new archaeological survey and new DEM are used in order to apply the model. This thesis shows, for the first time, the likely range of snow depth and duration experienced across the medieval Norse Greenland landscape as a result of climate and vegetation change. Results show that increases in snow cover could have been significant drivers of transformative change in Norse Greenland, and are therefore likely to be key in understanding the potential impact of future climate changes on similar sub-arctic and relatively marginal communities. Selected model analyses simulate the total spring (April-June) snow cover at the homefields to range from 32% cover lasting 6 days in the most favourable climate to 100% cover lasting 45 days in the most unfavourable climate at key elite inner fjord farms. At the more isolated outer fjord farms, total spring snow cover ranges from 33% cover lasting 10 days in the most favourable climate to 100% cover lasting 60 days in the most unfavourable climate. Increased climate variance and recovery times, as experienced by the Norse, are potential early warning signals of threshold-crossing change. Model results show that these signals could have been masked for the Norse decision making elite because they were located in the most favourable and least snow covered locations. Masking could have been further increased through the intensified seal hunting implemented by the Norse as an adaption strategy, and these actions could have developed into a rigidity trap. When the conjunctures of the 15th century developed in terms of increased sea ice, snow cover, storminess, culture contact, changing trade and sea level rise, it was too late to develop different responses. Whilst current populations have improved technology and knowledge relative to the Norse Greenlanders, there is a risk that adaptations will lack long-term utility, spatially restricted indications of change may be ignored, and rigidity traps develop. This thesis provides an additional tool for understanding a key element of both the past and possible futures of subarctic human ecodynamics.