Two Recent Articles re Socio-Political Impact

The first one i would like to highlight is Climate change impacts on glaciers and runoff in Tien Shan (Central Asia),

 

Nature Climate Change, Volume: 2,

Pages: 725–731 Year published: (2012) DOI:doi:10.1038/nclimate1592 Published online 29 July 2012           

 

"Abstract: Climate-driven changes in glacier-fed streamflow regimes have direct implications on freshwater supply, irrigation and hydropower potential. Reliable information about current and future glaciation and runoff is crucial for water allocation, a complex task in Central Asia, where the collapse of the Soviet Union has transformed previously interdependent republics into autonomous upstream and downstream countries. Although the impacts of climate change on glaciation and runoff have been addressed in previous work undertaken in the Tien Shan (known as the 'water tower of Central Asia'), a coherent, regional perspective of these findings has not been presented until now. Here we show that glacier shrinkage is most pronounced in peripheral, lower-elevation ranges near the densely populated forelands, where summers are dry and where snow and glacial meltwater is essential for water availability. Shifts of seasonal runoff maxima have already been observed in some rivers, and it is suggested that summer runoff will further decrease in these rivers if precipitation and discharge from thawing permafrost bodies do not compensate sufficiently for water shortfalls."

I am post the one above, since it is about the Central Asian glacier melt rate which is i feel a key factor in the global political arena when looking at adaptation.

And

Changing social contracts in climate-change adaptation

 

Nature Climate Change

 

Year published: (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1751 Received 19 October 2012   Published online 25 November 2012

"Abstract:
Risks from extreme weather events are mediated through state, civil society and individual action. We propose evolving social contracts as a primary mechanism by which adaptation to climate change proceeds. We use a natural experiment of policy and social contexts of the UK and Ireland affected by the same meteorological event and resultant flooding in November 2009. We analyse data from policy documents and from household surveys of 356 residents in western Ireland and northwest England. We find significant differences between perceptions of individual responsibility for protection across the jurisdictions and between perceptions of future risk from populations directly affected by flooding events. These explain differences in stated willingness to take individual adaptive actions when state support retrenches. We therefore show that expectations for state protection are critical in mediating impacts and promoting longer-term adaptation. We argue that making social contracts explicit may smooth pathways to effective and legitimate adaptation."