14 pages., via online journal., While dealing with weather variability has always been a source of stress for farmers, a generally warmer, wetter climate with the potential for increasingly intensive precipitation poses a threat to long-term farm viability. Knowing how farmers think about increasingly variable weather patterns (IVWP) is important for educators, agency staff, and others to learn how to work with producers on adaptation strategies to protect natural resources and prevent crop failure. In 2011, the University of Maine Cooperative Extension conducted focus group sessions with farmers from seven different commodity groups, five mixed farmer sessions, and two sessions with consultants, educators, and agency staff who work with growers to learn about grower perceptions of environmental changes, and to learn about changes they may be making to their farming operations to protect their operations from IVWP. Farmers discussed over 40 practices that could be construed as adaptation measures to buffer against IVWP. Fruit (apple and blueberry) growers spent the most time on the subject and expressed the most concern about the effects of IVWP, while dairy and potato growers spent the least. Given the divergence of opinion on the subject of climate change that Maine growers expressed, successful outreach education through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Cooperative Extension should likely emphasize short-term risk management, resilience, and stability of farm operations as opposed to communicating the need to adopt strategies based on climate change.
7 pages., Via online journal., Recent GHG emissions trends are in stark contrast with the Paris Agreement’s target to hold the increase in average global warming to “well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to stay below 1,5 °C” by the end of the century compared with preindustrial times. This disconnect has further unveiled the limitations of current knowledge production and communication processes in Southern European countries, where fast institutional changes are needed to address the potential impacts as well as the opportunities for transformation derived from High-End Climate Change (HECC). The prevailing knowledge deficit-model – aimed at producing ‘more knowledge’ about climate impacts, vulnerabilities and long-term scenarios to decision makers – has long proven inadequate in tackling the many complexities of the present socio-climate quandary. The growing emphasis on assessing and implementing concrete solutions, demand new and more complex forms of agent interactions in the production, framing, communication and use of climate knowledge; and in particular, explicit procedures able to tackle difficult normative questions regarding assessment of solutions and the allocation of individual and collective responsibilities. To explore these challenges, we analyse the views of 30 Spanish knowledge contributors and users of the latest UN IPCC AR5 report and share the insights gained from the implementation of a participatory Integrated Assessment procedure aimed at developing innovative solutions to high-end climate scenarios in Iberia. Our analysis supports the view of the need to institutionalise transformation, and in particular underlines the potential role that transformative climate boundary organisations could play to address such difficult ethical choices in different contexts of action.
