Scope
This collection aims to synthesize cutting-edge research, innovative methodologies, and interdisciplinary approaches to enhance understanding of extreme events, their links to climate change, and their impacts on human and natural systems. The collection welcomes contributions that explore both the physical mechanisms by which climate change and natural variations affect extreme events, and the broader implications for society and the environment. Key focus areas include:

1. Attribution Studies: Investigating the extent to which climate change influences the frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution of extreme events in tandem with natural variability, with a focus on events that are not addressed in an operational context.
2. Regional Perspectives: Analyzing region-specific vulnerabilities, impacts, and adaptation strategies in the face of extremes related to climate variability and change.
3. Connections to Modeling and Forecasting: Exploring connections between attribution research and advancing predictive capabilities through state-of-the-art climate models, statistical approaches, and forecasting techniques.
4. Socioeconomic Impacts: Assessing the socioeconomic costs of extreme events, including impacts on agriculture, infrastructure, health, and livelihoods.

This collection includes all AMS journals and the Bulletin of the AMS (BAMS): Authors should submit to the journal appropriate to their manuscript’s subject matter.

Collection Organizers:
Stephanie Herring, NOAA NCEI
Andrew Hoell, NOAA PSL
Peter Stott, UK Met Office Hadley Centre and University of Exeter

Contact: [email protected]

Scope
In the past decade, the world has experienced uncharacteristic sequences of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. In 2014-15, a strong El Niño developed over two years and led to a weak double-dip La Niña. In 2020, a weak El Niño was followed by a rare triple-dip La Niña. This was then followed by a notable El Niño event in 2023-2024. In a changing climate, it is crucial to understand, characterize, and forecast ENSO variability, as it plays a key role in climate adaptation and risk management. This special collection seeks contributions targeting the recent unusual evolution of ENSO, changes in its variability, the underlying processes driving these atypical conditions, its associated atmosphere-ocean teleconnections, and physical-biogeochemical climate impacts, including both terrestrial and marine environments, as well as predictability and prediction efforts. Contributions based on observations, reanalyses, modeling, and theoretical frameworks are welcomed.

Collection Organizers:
Andrea Taschetto, [email protected], University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Sophie Cravatte, LEGOS, IRD, New Caledonia
Antonietta Capotondi, NOAA, USA
Yuko Okumura, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Magdalena Balmaseda, ECMWF, UK
Lei Zhang, SCSIO, China
Agus Santoso, CLIVAR Office, China

Scope
The United Nations' Early Warning for All initiative aims to ensure that all people across the globe are protected by multi-hazard early warning systems within five years by 2027. This ambitious endeavor will mean that early warning systems need to be developed for half the countries worldwide who do not currently have adequate multi-hazard early warning systems. For many other countries improvements to early warning systems are required to ensure they are fit-for-purpose for increasingly hazardous weather induced by climate change, take advantage of innovations in weather forecasting and utilize emerging communications capabilities enabled by technological innovation.

Effective early warning systems depend on the existence, operation, and bi-directional flow of information across the 4 essential pillars of an end-to-end, people centered Multi-Hazard Early Warning System. They require information and expertise to be integrated across a multitude of domains including environmental observation, weather and hazard modeling, impact prediction, warning communication and decision making.

The information value chain provides a useful framework for describing and understanding the many different groups, skills, tools, relationships, and data/information flows that combine to produce and deliver warnings. It can be utilized for the design of new early warning systems, the improvement of existing systems and the evaluation of the impact, successes and failures of the operation of these systems in high-impact weather events.

We welcome contributions on tools to support the use of the value chain method, case studies of its application to the development of new and existing early warning systems and its utilization in the evaluation of existing systems generally and in specific high-impact weather events.

Collection Organizers:
Carla Mooney, [email protected], Bureau of Meteorology
Dr Beth Ebert, Bureau of Meteorology
Dr David Hoffmann, Bureau of Meteorology

Scope
From Sep. 2021- Sep. 2023, three field campaigns, the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL), the Study of Precipitation, the Lower Atmosphere and Surface for Hydrometeorology (SPLASH), and the Sublimation of Snow (SOS) experiment, took place in the mountains of the East River Watershed of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. While each field campaign had targeted, campaign-specific goals, the three campaigns shared a common goal of integrating atmospheric and surface observations of water and energy budgets in complex terrain to improve our understanding of the physical processes driving these budgets and, ultimately, their representation in models. Combined, the three field campaigns deployed a wide variety of instruments to make detailed measurements of cloud and precipitation processes, surface properties including snow characteristics, soil temperature, soil moisture, vegetation and elevation, the surface-air interface including radiative and turbulent fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum, and lower atmospheric thermodynamic and kinematic properties over the two-year campaign window. The analysis of the data collected from the three campaigns involves multiple research groups across several disciplines (meteorology, cryospheric sciences, hydrology, ecology) and agencies (DOE, NOAA, NSF, RMBL).

The three field campaigns were geographically and temporally co-located. This special collection provides an opportunity for the shared interests, observational synergies, and science results achieved across these campaigns to persist and propagate beyond those involved in the campaigns. We encourage papers using data from any of the three field campaigns to submit to this special collection.

Collection Organizers:
Mimi Hughs, [email protected], NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory
Gijs de Boer, [email protected], Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, and NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory
Dan Feldman, [email protected], Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jessica Lundquist, [email protected], University of Washington Civil and Environmental Engineering

Scope
Precipitation drives the atmospheric storage, movement, and quality of water. It is both the primary source of freshwater and a major driver of natural hazards. A fundamental hydrologic flux, precipitation comprises the most challenging processes to estimate, model, and predict, because of its variability at all scales and its evolving interactions with the water, energy, and carbon cycles under a changing climate. It is therefore a major component of uncertainty in weather predictions and climate projections, with significant implications for our ability to quantify water cycle dynamics, inform decision making, and predict hydro-geomorphic hazards in response to extremes. Precipitation research stands at the intersection of atmospheric, hydrologic, and climate sciences and demands dedicated attention in view of the tremendous implications for water availability and the impact of extremes for the safety, economy, and sustainability around the globe. A key to these efforts is model-observations synergy to advance precipitation science by jointly enhancing the accuracy of modeled processes and our insight into observations across space and time scales. This special collection of papers is based on advances in precipitation research and applications presented at the 14th International Precipitation Conference (IPC14), which brought together the international community to integrate research, discuss challenges and opportunities, and craft future directions.

The support by the NSF Hydrologic Sciences, Physical & Dynamic Meteorology, and Climate and Large-scale Dynamics programs (grant EAR-2330156) to organize the 14th International Precipitation Conference (IPC14), Norman, Oklahoma, June 2023, and produce the IPC14 special collection of papers is gratefully acknowledged.

Note for Submitting Authors
This collection is labeled in the AMS submission system as “IPC14”.

Collection Organizer:
Pierre-Emmanuel Kirstetter
[email protected]
School of Meteorology & School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science and Advanced Radar Research Center
University of Oklahoma, & NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory

Scope
This special collection includes articles related to a series of major field campaigns held in the vicinity of Houston, Texas from August 2021 through September 2022. The representation of the interactions among clouds, aerosols, precipitation, radiation, air quality and the environment remains a significant challenge for Earth system modeling. These processes are further complicated in the coastal urban environment where strong gradients in pollution and aerosol sources and environmental forcing present unique challenges. To better understand these processes, a multi-agency set of field campaigns collected a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art measurements on cloud, aerosol, precipitation, radiative, air quality and meteorological properties. These campaigns include the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Facility TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) the NASA – Texas Commission on Environmental Quality TRACER – Air Quality campaign, and the National Science Foundation Experiment of Sea Breeze Convection, Aerosols, Precipitation and Environment (ESCAPE) and Convective cloud – Urban Boundary-layer Experiment (CUBE). The Houston region serves as an ideal environment to study these processes lying within a humid subtropical climate regime where onshore flow and copious sea-breeze driven convection interacts with local urban and industrial emissions to degrade air quality.

These campaigns are introduced in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Nowcast article “A succession of cloud, precipitation, aerosol and air quality field experiments in the coastal urban environment (Jensen et al. 2022). [Jensen, M. P., L. Judd, P. Kollias, J. Sullivan, R. Nadkarni, C. Kuang, G. McFarquhar, H. Powers and J. Flynn, 2022: A succession of cloud, precipitation, aerosol and air quality field experiments in the coastal urban environment. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0104.1.]

Note for Submitting Authors
This collection is labeled in the AMS submission system as “TRACER/TRACER-AQ/ESCAPE/CUBE”.

Organizers:
Michael Jensen, Brookhaven National Laboratory, [email protected]
James Flynn, University of Houston
Laura Judd, NASA Langley Research Center
Pavlos Kollias, Stony Brook University/Brookhaven National Laboratory
Chongai Kuang, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Greg McFarquhar, University of Oklahoma
Prathap Ramamurthy, City College of New York
John Sullivan, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Scope
Manuscripts submitted to this special collection should cover topic areas focused on in the 10th Workshop of the International Precipitation Working Group (IPWG) and the 6th International Workshop on Space-based Snowfall Measurement (IWSSM) that took place in Fort Collins, Colorado, 13–17 June 2022, hosted by the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University.
The International Precipitation Working Group was initiated in 2000 after the 52nd session of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Executive Council recommended involving relevant science groups in a systematic manner to improve satellite system utilization. IPWG was then endorsed by the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS). IPWG provides a forum for operational and research users of satellite precipitation measurements to exchange information and fosters the development of better measurements and improvement of their utilization, the improvement of scientific understanding, and the development of international partnerships.
The first International Workshop on Space-based Snowfall Measurement was held in 2005. The goal of IWSSM is to bring together researchers focusing on the measurement of snowfall from space using active and passive microwave sensors for the purpose of assessing the state of the science and measurement technology and to recommend future directions in research and technology development.
The collection will give authors and readers the opportunity to gather prominent research work in the field of satellite precipitation and snowfall. Focus areas include (but are not limited to) satellite precipitation algorithm improvement and development, current challenges in forecasting precipitation, estimation of orographic and high-latitude precipitation, satellite precipitation applications in climate services and hydrologic modeling, analysis of precipitation spatial and temporal variation, validation and error characterization of precipitation datasets.

Submission Deadline
August 31, 2023

Organizers:
Viviana Maggioni, George Mason University, [email protected]
Philippe Chambon, Météo-France, [email protected]
Christian Kummerow, Colorado State University, [email protected]

Scope
We hope to capture the increasing scope of weather, water and climate impacts on the security of nations and their peoples. The area of Environmental Security is very interdisciplinary, and submissions should encompass current research into the ways that extreme weather and climatic events impact national and human security within the context of 1) energy security; 2) food security; 3) water security; and 4) environmental health/security. Relevance of the weather, water, and climate enterprise to compiling a more complete picture of environmental security around the world is important for this collection.
Submissions are sought from scholars studying the environmental and security aspects of water quality/scarcity, energy, food and health/diseases, allowing AMS members to see the “downstream” linkages from their traditional, physical science-based research. In turn, it is hoped that the exchanges of information resulting from this special collection will become a "two-way street", enabling AMS members to help the policy experts learn more about how our enterprise can inform their efforts.

Organizer:
John Lanicci, University of South Alabama, [email protected]

Scope
The Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) workshop demonstrated a need for building a strong “AI-ready” Earth System community capable of keeping up with technological advancements and overcoming significant challenges. We propose a special collection of visionary articles aiming to further propagate the information gathered and research continuing to help inform the Earth System scientific community about the current state of knowledge, challenges, and opportunities to advance ESP using AI and ML approaches. We are seeking manuscripts and articles providing perspectives and vision on new artificial intelligence methods, analytical techniques, and applications to advance Earth and environmental systems science and Earth system predictability, as well as unpublished original research papers describing applications of AI to problems in Earth and environmental systems science. We anticipate that many of the chapters of the report from this workshop will be potential candidates for submitting papers to this special collection.

Organizers:
Contact via email: [email protected]
Nicki Hickmon, Argonne National Laboratory
Olga Tweedy, AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at DOE/BER
Charuleka Varadharajan, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Haruko Wainwright, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Forrest M. Hoffman, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Scott Collis, Argonne National Laboratory

Scope
Atmospheric River Reconnaissance (AR Recon) has operated across the northeast Pacific Ocean in 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. This observational campaign - which has been formally incorporated in the US National Winter Season Operations Plan since summer 2019 - involves the deployment of targeted airborne and drifting buoy observations during the winter season to improve weather forecasts and decision making on the U.S. west coast. During the first five years, this research and operations partnership has grown considerably, and the number of observations collected has increased significantly year upon year.

This special collection will include studies that detail the purpose and approach of AR Recon, as well as research findings relating to the study of atmospheric river dynamics and the impact of observational data on numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Research using all types of AR Recon data, namely from dropsondes, drifting buoys, and airborne radio occultation, as well as several modeling systems including but not limited to the Global Forecast System (GFS) run at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), NAVy Global Environmental Model (NAVGEM) run at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) run at European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and the Weather and Research Forecasting model (WRF) will be included.

This special collection solicits studies that span multiple American Meteorological Society (AMS) journals, and is organized by scientists involved in both the operational and research aspect of this campaign. The collection will contain contributions from AR Recon participants, but also seeks community-wide contributions.

Organizers:
Alison Cobb, [email protected], Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego
F. Martin Ralph, Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
David A. Lavers, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
Anna M. Wilson, Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Vijay Tallapragada, NOAA/NWS/NCEP/Environmental Modeling Center
Christopher A. Davis, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
James D. Doyle, Naval Research Laboratory
Luca Delle Monache, Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Florian Pappenberger, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
Carolyn Reynolds, Naval Research Laboratory
Aneesh Subramanian, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

Scope
We aim to encourage the use of evidence-based teaching and learning practices, and ultimately for improved education in the field of atmospheric sciences. For this special collection in the Bulletin of the AMS (BAMS), we seek studies that aim to improve atmospheric science education through reflective teaching and systematic evaluation of student learning (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL). We invite articles that share new teaching strategies or activities. We also solicit formal education research articles that examine teaching and learning in an effort to understand how people build foundational knowledge and apply atmospheric science concepts (Atmospheric Science Education Research, ASER). Articles for this collection can describe studies conducted in a formal classroom, or they may also be investigations into informal learning that occurs in museums or during outreach activities. Submissions of research on continuing education courses and survey research are also encouraged.

Organizers:
Dawn Kopacz, [email protected], University of Nebraska – Lincoln 
Casey E. Davenport, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Wendilyn J. Flynn, University of Northern Colorado
Zachary J. Handlos, Georgia Institute of Technology
Lindsay C. Maudlin, Iowa State University
Peggy McNeal, Towson University

Scope
There is growing community interest in moving beyond typical model evaluation metrics to process-oriented diagnostics. These diagnostics better constrain poorly-represented physics components in climate models, provide actionable feedback to model developers, and are expected to play a key role in advancing the next-generation climate and earth system models. The scope of this collection encompasses studies developing new process-oriented diagnostics – and the underlying understanding of climate system processes —as well as those applying existing diagnostics to climate models. Of particular interest are applications to models participating in the Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) models but the scope is open to diagnostics of models beyond CMIP6, including higher-resolution models. The special collection solicits studies from all realms of the climate system, and will therefore span several American Meteorological Society (AMS) journals. The special collection will be organized by members of the NOAA Model Diagnostics Force (MDTF). The collection will contain contributions from current task force members, but will also seek community-wide contributions.

Organizers:
J David Neelin, [email protected], University of California, Los Angeles
John Krasting, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
Fiaz Ahmed, University of California, Los Angeles 
Allison Wing, Florida State University
Eric Maloney, Colorado State University

Scope
Human and environment systems are adaptive and complex. They are highly interrelated through impact and feedback loops with nonlinear, reciprocal, and emergent properties across multiple organizational, spatial, and temporal scales. Understanding the complexities and dynamics of the human and environmental systems is crucial to sound environmental policy-making for sustainable development. Traditional studies mainly focus on either human or environmental systems, which have serious limitations in revealing their complex interrelations. The recent development of science and technology, particularly data acquisition and computational capacity, has made a significant contribution to new theory development and methodological innovation, which allows us to explore the complex systems as well as conduct site-specific empirical investigations. This special collection will include papers that focus on the most recent advancements in theory and application in understanding complex human-environment systems. Specifically, we seek research work on the following topics:

• The formulation and development of generalizable theories (e.g., complex systems theory, sustainability science) that explain the dynamics of complex human-environment systems in a given place or telecoupling of human-environmental systems across space. Theories regarding the mechanisms and pathways that cross the human and environmental systems or cross different human-environmental systems through telecoupling are of high interest for this special issue.
• Impacts of environmental policies on the dynamics of the human-environmental systems, particularly the mechanisms and pathways that strengthen or weaken the anticipated environmental policy effects or surprise effects in the human-environmental systems.
• Practical applications of human-environment interactions theories based on innovative platforms, such as remote sensing, GIS, agent-based modeling, big data, and machine learning/artificial intelligence to understand the dynamics of specific human-environmental systems, including, but not limited to, human-environmental system’s structure and functions changes and the implications to its sustainability, influence of disturbance (e.g., human and natural hazards) on system’s behavior.

Organizers:

Li An, Department of Geography, San Diego State University, [email protected]
Conghe Song, Department of Geography, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dapeng Li, Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences, South Dakota State University

Scope
Ken Melville made remarkable contributions to a variety of different research areas, including our understanding of internal wave processes, edge waves, surface gravity and surface capillary waves, remote sensing, upper ocean dynamics, air-sea mass flux, the behavior of wind above waves, and a variety of technical instrument advancements, to name just a few. These contributions took the form of theoretical, numerical, laboratory, and/or field studies.

Papers in the collection should focus on theory, numerics, laboratory, and/or field studies of the dynamics of the upper ocean, and the atmosphere above it. A special collection dedicated to these topics, with contributions solicited from the leading scientists in these fields, will serve to establish a benchmark for the state of the art of our understanding of these processes in the new decade.

Ken’s legacy is closely connected with an ability to elucidate the underlying physics of a phenomena in question. Often driven by fundamental considerations (Ken often said to be wary of chasing epsilons), this collection would seek to attract important contributions to the field in this spirit. However, even these basic contributions shed new light on many aspects of air-sea interaction, and questioned many long-standing ideas in wave modeling. Therefore, we also encourage submissions to look into the future, not only regarding the basic physics of the upper ocean and lower atmosphere, but also for practical applications.

ORGANIZERS
Nicholas Pizzo, [email protected], Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD
Luc Lenain, SIO
Luigi Cavaleri Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute of Marine Science ISMAR

Scope
Anthropogenic land use and land cover changes (LULCC) are exerting increasingly strong controls on hydrologic cycling at multiple spatial and temporal scales. These human-forced hydrologic changes perturb land-atmosphere interactions, feedbacks, and coupling strength, which can further affect land surface greenhouse gas fluxes, vegetation dynamics, and ecosystem services. These changes occur broadly across latitudinal gradients and within human-natural ecotones, ranging from rural to urban areas. Moreover, hydroclimate processes are increasingly influenced by systemic social and ecological changes, and thus it is necessary to highlight how human water pressures and demand are also reshaping regional climates and ecosystem processes at the watershed scale.

This special collection seeks contributions focused on one or more of the following: the effects of LULCC on the water cycle and interactions with other key biogeochemical cycles; impacts and interactions of LULCC and climate change; changing interactions, coupling, and feedbacks between the land surface and the atmosphere; changes in surface energy and mass fluxes related to changes in the land surface; irrigation impacts and interactions, changes to water cycling and recycling, and related processes; changing relationships between evapotranspiration, precipitation, and the hydroclimatic system; and changing water-related ecosystem services.

Organizers:

Nathan Moore, [email protected], Michigan State University
Sonali McDermid, NYU

Scope
Years of the Maritime Continent (YMC) is an international program with the ultimate goal of observing the weather-climate system of the Earth’s largest archipelago, the Indo-Pacific Maritime Continent (MC), to improve understanding and prediction of its local variability and global impact. The program is endorsed by CLIVAR and other WCRP/WWRP groups. Its participants come from over 15 countries. The program started in 2017 and is continuing through and beyond 2021 with several international field campaigns in the region. 

YMC has motivated a surge of research activities on various topics related to the MC. Publications on these topics have appeared in the journals of AMS, AGU, EGU, MSJ, RMS, and CGU. To better serve readers of these journals, the YMC Science Steering Committee is coordinating with these organizations on a cross-organization special collection of papers on YMC topics.  A master list of this special collection is hosted on the YMC homepage (http://www.jamstec.go.jp/ymc/ymc_sp_collection.html).

The five themes of YMC are Atmospheric Convection, Upper-Ocean Processes and Air-Sea Interaction, Stratosphere-Troposphere Interaction, Aerosol, and Prediction improvement. Main activities of YMC include field observations, data sharing, modeling, prediction applications, and capacity building. Authors are encouraged to submit their manuscripts relevant to YMC to the participating journals of their choice.  This special collection covers the period from January 2020 through December 2025. Authors of papers on YMC topics published in 2016-2019 in the participating journals may request their papers to be retroactively included in the special collection. 

More information on YMC is available at http://www.jamstec.go.jp/ymc/.
 
For questions specific to AMS journals, please contact [email protected].

Lead Organizers
Chidong Zhang and Kunio Yoneyama
Co-Chairs of YMC Science Steering Committee
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/ymc/

Deadline for submitting abstracts to the collection organizers: 15 September 2020
Deadline for submitting manuscripts to Weather, Climate, and Society (WCAS): 31 December 2020

Scope
This special collection (SC) is about the relationships between the goal of a sustainable development and the concept of climate change adaptation (CCA). In general, the idea is to investigate to what extent and in what ways the goal of a sustainable development may influence - positive or negative - the way society should adapt to climate change.

The specific discourse on sustainable climate change adaptation started less than 10 years ago, and still have rather few contributions – many of which focus on the need for CCA actions taking place in global south countries. In this special issue we want to focus on the consequences of applying the goal of sustainable development on CCA efforts and strategies in global north countries, but we also want to address the consequences for CCA actions taking place in global north countries of taking into account the perspectives on global justice embedded in the goal of a sustainable development. One aspect of the latter is to address the common destiny of climate change vulnerabilities in global north and global south created by the ever-increasing and pervasive internationalization of the global economy – referred to as transnational climate risks and vulnerabilities. We call for trans- as well as multi- and monodisciplinary contributions, and we are open to both theoretical as well as empirical oriented contributions.

Special Collection Organizers
The collection organizers are selected from the research partners of the Norwegian Research Centre on Sustainable Climate Change Adaptation (Noradapt). The Center seeks to build knowledge on sustainable climate change adaptation through a user-oriented approach, applying methods such as co-production of knowledge. Importantly, Noradapt holds that all adaptation efforts should be in accordance with the principles of sustainable development to avoid adding to the problem of climate change. The research partners of Noradapt are Western Norway Research Institute (leader of Noradapt); NORCE; Nordland research institute; CICERO Center for International Climate Research; Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) at the University of Bergen; Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences, Department of Geography at the Technical University of Norway (NTNU); SINTEF Community; and the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL).

Lead Organizer
Professor Carlo Aall, Western Norway Research Institute, +47 99 12 72 22, [email protected]

Organizers
Dr Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke, Western Norway Research Institute, +47 94 97 75 94, [email protected]
Professor Grete Hovelsrud, Nordlandsforskning, +47 95 80 60 46, [email protected]
Dr Helene Amundsen, CICERO, +47 22 00 47 21, [email protected]
Dr Marte Lange Vik, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, +47 47 63 65 52, [email protected]

Reason for the Special Collection on sustainable climate change adaptation
In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a collection of 17 goals and associated 169 targets and 232 indicators^[i]. Only one of the SDG-goal (number 13) addresses specifically the climate issue (“Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”), only five out of the SDG-targets address climate, and only one of which considers climate change adaptation: “Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate related hazards and natural disasters in all countries”. However, an important footnote is attached to goal 13: “Acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change”. Thus, the challenge of aligning efforts of achieving the Paris agreement goals with the SDGs lies somewhere in between these two streams of policy-making.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) special report from 2012 on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change” discusses the need to shift from a modus operandi of climate change adaptation (CCA) from ‘adjustment’ to ‘transformation’ of society, defining the former as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities” and the latter as “the altering of fundamental attributes of a system (including value systems; regulatory, legislative, or bureaucratic regimes; financial institutions; and technological or biological systems)”^[ii]. If moving CCA efforts from an ‘adjustment’ to a ‘transformative’ modus operandi, it seems fair to expect that the potential for creating conflicts between CCA and other SDGs will - all other factors alike -increase.

A growing amount of literature exists on the challenges relating to transformation in the face of climae change, but most of this relates to either mitigation or adaptation. If moving CCA efforts from an ‘adjustment’ to a ‘transformative’ modus operandi, it seems fair to expect that the potential for creating conflicts between adaptation and mitigation, between CCA and other susainable development goals – and even within CCA - will increase. Thus, addressing these issues is urgent as the time is running out for achieving the goals of the Paris agreement.

Since the above cited IPCC report from 2012, an increasing number of studies have questioned the chances of reaching the 1.5 or even the 2-degree goal^[iii]. Parallel to this, the evidences of current negative climate change impacts have increased, as have evidence of increasing CCA needs^[iv], adding to the potential of conflicts between CCA and SDGs. Furthermore, if society fails to conduct deliberate transformative CCA efforts, and society is instead affected by a non-voluntary transformation^[v], the chances that CCA efforts will conflict with major SDGs increase even more.

The goal of a sustainable development was launched in 1987 by the United Nations (UN) World Commission on Environment and Development (UNWCED)^[vi]. The commission outlined two major environmental policy approaches in its report: The effect- and the cause-oriented approach. The former represents an attitude to environmental policy, acts and institutions with the main emphasis on mitigating environmental effects; whereas the latter focuses on the roots causing these effects. The UNWCED emphasized that the former had prevailed until then, whereas the latter must be included in any policy approach aimed at promoting a sustainable development. 30 years after this point was made by the UN Commission it is uncontroversial to state that environmental policy still seems to be stuck within the effect-oriented approach^[vii]. The quest for shifting towards a cause-oriented environmental policy also applies for CCA, which in the case of this special collection would be to discuss societal drivers that produce an increase in exposure to the anticipated negative effects of climate change, and furthermore to discuss how to influence these drivers in order to avoid such negative effects.

The specific discourse on sustainable climate change adaptation started less than 10 years ago, and still have rather few contributions – many of which focus on the need for CCA actions taking place in global south countries^{[viii], [ix]}. In this special collection we want to focus on the consequences of applying the goal of sustainable development on CCA efforts and strategies in global north countries, in particular we want to focus on the consequences of taking into account the perspectives on global justice embedded in the goal of a sustainable development. One aspect of the latter is to address the common destiny of climate change vulnerabilities in global north and global south created by the ever-increasing and pervasive internationalization of the global economy – referred to as transnational climate risks and vulnerabilities^[x].

We call for trans- as well as multi- and monodisciplinary contributions, and we are open to both theoretical as well as empirical oriented contributions.