With increasing awareness of the potential impacts posed by climate change, many ports and their surrounding regions have undertaken adaptation planning and proactive actions so as to build a resilient and sustained business. However, most of them are still at the embryonic stage in understanding the problem and find it very challenging regarding adaptation planning and implementation. This thesis addresses the current issue in adaptation to climate change impacts at ports, regions and supply chains through quantitative and qualitative analyses. A global survey is designed to investigate port decision-makers’ perceptions and knowledge about climate change adaption. It explores the existing impacts posed by sea level rise (SLR), and high winds and storms, and demonstrates the potential impacts of adaptation measures. Analytical results suggest that, despite the forecast of more serious impacts posed by these climate change risks in the near future, port decision-makers still have strong doubts about the effectiveness of adaptation measures and planning. In-depth interviews in a case study on Port Metro Vancouver (Canada) are conducted to further investigate the barriers (especially institutional ones) that hinder the process of climate change adaptation, and thus calls attention for its regional efforts. Based on the literature review and analysis, this study argues that a paradigm shift in adaptation planning, notably from ‘go it alone’ to ‘collaborative’ approach involving all major port stakeholders, is urgently needed. The thesis also highlights the pivotal role of tailor-made adaptation methods in accordance with a specific climate change risk in the adaptation planning. Besides, two innovative, ‘paradigm shift’ recommendations are proposed to climate adaptation planning: (1) a method based on usage unit to allocate investment responsibility; and (2) the establishment of a neutral agency (e.g., a collaborative network) with the power to promote the adaptation process. In addition, a flexible combination of engagement in collaborative projects and individual efforts for ports is suggested so as to implement adaptation works. / October 2016

Climate change is expected to have a strong impact on subarctic ecosystems. Increased temperatures as well as altered precipitation and snow cover patterns are predicted to change species distribution and affect biogeochemical processes in the subarctic tundra. Bryophytes are an essential vegetational component in northern ecosystems, due to their high abundance and importance in many ecological processes. In this study the effects of elevation and altered snow cover on the temporal dynamics of freezing damage in three subarctic bryophyte species (Hylocomium splendens, Ptilidium ciliare, and Sphagnum fuscum) were studied in a snow manipulation field experiment in Abisko, during early spring. Soil temperature and field moisture of moss shoots were collected. A freeze-thaw incubation experiment was conducted to investigate the freeze-thaw cycle resistance of H. splendens and P. ciliare originating from habitats with two differing snow-cover thicknesses. Freezing damage differed significantly between the bryophytes species with P. ciliare experiencing the least and S. fuscum the highest damage. Damage was higher at the low elevation, possibly attributable to acclimation effects. Snow removal led to higher damage in moss shoots, but no interactions of the different snow cover treatments with elevation, species or time were found. Freezing damage increased over time and no recovery occurred, likely due to temporal patterns in soil freeze-thaw cycles during early spring. Soil freeze-thaw cycles were the main factor influencing damage in bryophytes after snow melt. Measured environmental parameters could not explain the entire variation in damage. Damage might additionally be attributable to increased UV radiation or disturbances by herbivores.

The purpose of this report was to investigate how municipals in the county of Västra Götaland work with climate adaptation of storm water management and to identify problems that occur in the work. As with the rest of the world, Sweden will be affected by expected climate changes and it is therefore important that Swedish municipalities work with climate adaptation and to help them make the work manageable. The method used was semi-structural qualitative interviews where 13 municipalities were interviewed in April 2016. The result of the interviews shows that there is an ambition to work with climate adaptation of storm water management but that there are different problems associated with the work that have made it difficult to start. 69% of the municipalities include climate adaptation to some extent when they work with master plans and 5 out of 8 municipalities are or will be including climate adaptation strategies in their storm water management document. A majority of the municipalities don’t prioritize climate adaptation and could be doing more to include climate adaptation in their work. The most common problems reported by the municipalities were too little resources/lack of finance, undecided responsibility and not clear enough laws regarding the subject.

Tree-ring chronologies are widely used to reconstruct high-to low-frequency variations in growing season temperatures over centuries to millennia. The relevance of these timeseries in large-scale climate reconstructions is often determined by the strength of their correlation against instrumental temperature data. However, this single criterion ignores several important quantitative and qualitative characteristics of tree-ring chronologies. Those characteristics are (i) data homogeneity, (ii) sample replication, (iii) growth coherence, (iv) chronology development, and (v) climate signal including the correlation with instrumental data. Based on these 5 characteristics, a reconstruction-scoring scheme is proposed and applied to 39 published, millennial-length temperature reconstructions from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Southern Hemisphere. Results reveal no reconstruction scores highest in every category and each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Reconstructions that perform better overall include N-Scan and Finland from Europe, E-Canada from North America, Yamal and Dzhelo from Asia. Reconstructions performing less well include W-Himalaya and Karakorum from Asia, Tatra and S-Finland from Europe, and Great Basin from North America. By providing a comprehensive set of criteria to evaluate tree-ring chronologies we hope to improve the development of large-scale temperature reconstructions spanning the past millennium. All reconstructions and their corresponding scores are provided at www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb09climatology. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This D.Phil. thesis is an international comparative study looking at the development and implementation stages of policies tasked to reduce emissions from transport. The substance of policy is all too often the primary focus of research, leaving the settings in which these policies are developed and implemented relatively underexplored. Examining the relationships and interplay that exists between departments responsible for climate change and transport at the sub-national (state) level and those with their local and national counterparts, this research tries to unpick the organisational intricacies that may act as barriers to delivery. State governments have become a promising source of action to reduce emissions from other sectors for which they have legislative responsibility; however, the private road transport sector remains a challenge. This research examines the barriers preventing such progress and whether the lack of collaboration between departments and across levels of government are responsible in part for these challenges. Taking a specific policy intervention designed to reduce transport-related emissions from four case study governments (Bavaria, California, Scotland and South Australia) this research is about organisational structures of government and policy processes. The main hypothesis of the research is that conventional environmental/climate change- and transport-policymaking practices are incompatible – and that this incompatibility is hampered by organisational structures of government. Together these factors render implementation of policies to reduce the climate impact of transport difficult. The hypothesis is guided by four research themes – scale, scope, leadership and process. Each of these themes has a distinct yet important part to play in understanding and comparing the case study contexts, in terms of the cross-departmental and cross-level interactions occurring within each of the sub-national governments. Each of the subject case study governments have been chosen since they are self-determined ‘leaders’ on climate change. This research serves to highlight some of the governance issues that need to be overcome or removed for such positive political intent to be realised. It posits that without successfully linking frameworks and interested stakeholders in the process, tangible emissions reductions will be difficult to achieve. The main objective of the research is to investigate the frameworks, interplay and dynamics at the sub-national level of government across departments and between levels of government. The relationship and collaboration with industry is also examined as a supplementary consideration. The second objective is to look at how and whether climate change policy can be more closely integrated with transport policy and the barriers to this integration. This investigation is underpinned by cross-disciplinary governance theory, as well as notions from socio-political governance and applies the concept of institutional interplay in this context between levels of government. It develops the concept of sub-national governance which argues that relationships between levels are distinct and non-hierarchical in terms of policy development and implementation.

Understanding of climate change and policy responses thereto rely on accurate measurements as well as models of both socio-economic and physical processes. However, data to assess impacts and establish historical climate records are non-stationary: distributions shift over time due to shocks, measurement changes, and stochastic trends - all of which invalidate standard statistical inference. This thesis establishes econometric methods to model non-stationary climate data consistent with known physical laws, enabling joint estimation and testing, develops techniques for the automatic detection of structural breaks, and evaluates socio-economic scenarios used in long-run climate projections. Econometric cointegration analysis can be used to overcome inferential difficulties stemming from stochastic trends in time series, however, cointegration has been criticised in climate research for lacking a physical justification for its use. I show that physical two-component energy balance models of global mean climate can be mapped to a cointegrated system, making them directly testable, and thereby provide a physical justification for econometric methods in climate research. Automatic model selection with more variables than observations is introduced in modelling concentrations of atmospheric CO₂, while controlling for outliers and breaks at any point in the sample using impulse indicator saturation. Without imposing the inclusion of variables a-priori, model selection results find that vegetation, temperature and other natural factors alone cannot explain the trend or the variation in CO₂ growth. Industrial production components, driven by business cycles and economic shocks, are highly significant contributors. Generalizing the principle of indicator saturation, I present a methodology to detect structural breaks at any point in a time series using designed functions. Selecting over these break functions at every point in time using a general-to-specific algorithm, yields unbiased estimates of the break date and magnitude. Analytical derivations for the split-sample approach are provided under the null of no breaks and the alternative of one or more breaks. The methodology is demonstrated by detecting volcanic eruptions in a time series of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature derived from a coupled climate simulation spanning close to 1200 years. All climate models require socio-economic projections to make statements about future climate change. The large span of projected temperature changes then originates predominantly from the wide range of scenarios, rather than uncertainty in climate models themselves. For the first time, observations over two decades are available against which the first sets of socio-economic scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports can be assessed. The results show that the growth rate in fossil fuel CO₂ emission intensity (fossil fuel CO2 emissions per GDP) over the 2000s exceeds all main scenario values, with the discrepancy being driven by underprediction of high growth rates in Asia. This underestimation of emission intensity raises concerns about achieving a world of economic prosperity in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

This thesis examines the domestic politics that infuence government decison making. Specifically, how these domestic constituents, such as institutions, organizations and individuals, shape how the Canadian government formulates and impliments environmental policy. It will do so by providing a comparative analysis using the Chretien and Harper governments. / October 2016

Climate change is expected to disproportionately impact high elevation ecosystems by disrupting current temperature and precipitation regimes. The future carbon balance of these systems is uncertain, given the interplay between longer growing season length and the potential for increased drought. Currently, the most robust inferences about ecosystem responses to changing climate come from the integration of experimental and observational methods. In this thesis, I utilize evidence from a warming experiment and an elevational gradient to gain insights into how aspects of ecosystem productivity and community functional composition change in response to the abiotic environment. First, I show that ecosystem productivity was similar in the heated and ambient treatment groups of the warming experiment. Net ecosystem productivity (NEP) was similar between treatments with only slightly increased NEP in the early season in the heated treatment. Important leaf functional traits (leaf mass per area, LMA; leaf dry matter content, LDMC) shifted with heating in directions associated with higher productivity, both at the community level and within species. While these results are counterintuitive, potential insight was provided by a soil cooling effect found in the heated plots in the early season. Second, I investigate ecosystem productivity across spatial and temporal gradients using phenology cameras. I show strong relationships between greenness indices generated from camera images and on-the-ground measurements of gross primary productivity (GPP). I also used changes in greenness indices early season to infer green-up rates, and found a strong pattern of increasing green-up rate with increasing elevation. Together, these studies highlight the importance of comparing experimental and gradient methods to assess how different spatial and temporal scales influence our conclusions about the effect of climate change on ecosystems.

Climate change is one of the the world's biggest challenges. How media report about it has a big affect on how people interpret it and if government take action. Sources has a big importance for all journalism that is produced. Does the journalist or the source control what is reported about climate change, what does their relationship look like and how does that affect the result of the reporting? This is a study about the relationship between environmental journalists and their sources. We investigate in what way they are dependent on each other and who or what controls the reporting about climate change in Swedish Public Service. We are analyzing this by doing a case study of two climate journalists, one from Public Service Television (SVT) and one from Public Service Radio (SR). We are interviewing them and their sources to find the sources approach towards environmental journalist and vice versa. We also analyze if the journalist, the source or the circumstances controls the reporting and set the agenda about climate change. Our study shows that environmental sources have a positive attitude towards environmental journalists and that they find knowledge as a highly valued quality. Furthermore it shows that both the journalists and the sources actively works to initiate what is brought up in media. Sources write press releases, debate articles, tweet their work and contact journalists but in most cases it is the journalist who initiates contact with the source. In our study it becomes clear that environmental sources and environmental journalist depend on each other and have a dynamic relationship.

Changes in the marine environment have been reported for over three decades in terms of mean annual wave heights, exceedance probabilities and extreme conditions. More recently, the existence of a link between these changes and anthropogenic climate change has been postulated. This is not unreasonable, as climatic changes in regional warming and cooling are likely to alter wind patterns, and therefore the wave climate as well. In an attempt to mitigate climate change and increase energy security, the offshore environment is being looked at to provide sustainable energy from wind, waves and tides. As a result the number of marine structures is only likely to increase. While survivability in this environment is essential for all such installations, some devices such as wave energy converters also rely on the environment for energy production. In designing these offshore structures to survive the harshest conditions as well as to ensure optimum operation, knowledge of the evolution of the wave climate is essential. This study aims to identify and evaluate any historical trends that may be exhibited by the wave climate in the North East Atlantic and North Sea region. The study also aims to investigate the link between any observed changes and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels and projected wave conditions for the 21st century. This is achieved by producing a long-term, high resolution hindcast of wave conditions for 1871-2010 using the third-generation spectral wave model WAVEWATCH III. A dataset of wave climate projections for the high, medium and low emissions scenarios is also prepared by forcing the model with GCM winds for 2001-2100. In addition to dynamically projecting the wave climate in the 21st century for different IPCC climate change scenarios, statistical methods were applied to historic data to estimate extreme events in terms of 100-year return values of significant wave height. These, together, provide some idea of the plausible wave climate up to 2100. The results of the work show the existence of long-term trends in the historical wave climate in the region from 1921 onwards. However, based on the findings of the study, it is unlikely that these are a result of changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and are more likely due to internal variability in the system.