Stress-testing development pathways under a changing climate: water-energy-food security in the lake Malawi-Shire river system.

Malawi depends on Lake Malawi outflows into the Shire River for its water, energy and food (WEF) security. We explore future WEF security risks under the combined impacts of climate change and ambitious development pathways for water use expansion. We drive a bespoke water resources model developed with stakeholder inputs, with 29 bias-corrected climate model projections, alongside stakeholder elicited development pathways, and examine impacts on stakeholder-elicited WEF sector performance metrics.

From advocacy to action: Projecting the health impacts of climate change.

In a Perspective, Hannah Nissan and Declan Conway discuss the implications of uncertainty about projected impacts of climate change on health.

Transmission of climate risks across sectors and borders.

Systemic climate risks, which result from the potential for cascading impacts through inter-related systems, pose particular challenges to risk assessment, especially when risks are transmitted across sectors and international boundaries. Most impacts of climate variability and change affect regions and jurisdictions in complex ways, and techniques for assessing this transmission of risk are still somewhat limited. Here, we begin to define new approaches to risk assessment that can account for transboundary and trans-sector risk transmission, by presenting: (i) a typology of risk transmission that distinguishes clearly the role of climate versus the role of the social and economic systems that distribute resources; (ii) a review of existing modelling, qualitative and systems-based methods of assessing risk and risk transmission; and (iii) case studies that examine risk transmission in human displacement, food, water and energy security.

Water Resource Planning Under Future Climate and Socioeconomic Uncertainty in the Cauvery River Basin in Karnataka, India.

Decision-Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) approaches have been less utilized in developing countries than developed countries for water resources contexts. High climate vulnerability and rapid socioeconomic change often characterize developing country contexts, making DMUU approaches relevant. We develop an iterative multi-method DMUU approach, including scenario generation, coproduction with stakeholders and water resources modeling.

Rainfall variability in East Africa: implications for natural resources management and livelihoods.

This note examines the effects of climate variability on natural-resources management in East Africa. The bimodal rainfall regime in much of East Africa brings rainy seasons from March to May and October to December with greater interannual variability from October to December. We discuss the impacts of rainfall extremes in 1961 and 1997 and explore three examples of natural-resources management in the context of rainfall variability: inland fisheries in East and southern Africa; fluctuations in the level of Lake Victoria; and lake-shore communities around Lake Kyoga in Uganda.