Locally adapted genotypes have higher fitness in their native site in comparison to foreign genotypes. Recent studies have demonstrated both local adaptation to and genomic associations with a range of climate variables. For climate adaptation, the most common genomic pattern is conditional neutrality, as proven by weak across-environment correlations, frequent SNP×environment interactions, and...

R ecent years have seen adaptation come to the fore of the international climate change debate. The focus is centred largely upon enhancing the capacity of developing countries and the poorest to adapt to the impacts of climate change. As a result, interventions to facilitate adaptation need to identify and address key barriers to ensure that societies are resilient in the face of a changing cl...

The strong trends in climate change already evident, the likelihood of further changes occurring, and the increasing scale of potential climate impacts give urgency to addressing agricultural adaptation more coherently. There are many potential adaptation options available for marginal change of existing agricultural systems, often variations of existing climate risk management. We show that im...

Given the far-ranging adverse impacts of climate change, adaptation must be an integral component of an effective strategy to address climate change, along with mitigation. Adaptation should be approached as an opportunity to rethink development as usual, and should be based on “upstream” interventions that will yield benefi ts regardless of specifi c, climate-related events in the future. This...

Estimates of the response of crops to climate change rarely quantify the uncertainty inherent in the simulation of both climate and crops. We present a crop simulation ensemble for a location in India, perturbing the response of both crop and climate under both baseline (12 720 simulations) and doubled-CO2 (171 720 simulations) climates. Some simulations used parameter values representing genot...

1 The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program, Integrated Assessment Program, Grant No. DE-SC0005171. Integrated assessment models (IAMs), models that couple the human and natural systems, have been widely used by the climate change research community to project the emissions consequences of economic activity and the technical potential and co...

Agricultural adaptation is necessary to reduce the negative impacts of climate change on crop yields and to maintain food production. However, few studies have assessed the course of adaptation along with the progress of climate change in each of the current major food producing countries. Adaptation pathways, which describe the temporal sequences of adaptations, are helpful for illustrating th...

The Arctic’s climate is changing rapidly, to the extent that ‘dangerous’ climate change as defined by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change might already be occurring. These changes are having implications for the Arctic’s Inuit population and are being exacerbated by the dependence of Inuit on biophysical resources for livelihoods and the low socio-economic–health status of many north...

The Upper Guinean region of West Africa exhibits strong geographic variation in land use, climate, vegetation, and human population and has experienced phenomenal biophysical and socio-economic changes in recent decades. All of these factors influence spatial heterogeneity and temporal trends in fires, but their combined effects on fire regimes are not well understood. The main objectives of th...

Despite growing recognition of the importance of climate change adaptation, few global estimates of the costs involved are available for the water supply sector. We present a methodology for estimating partial global and regional adaptation costs for raw industrial and domestic water supply, for a limited number of adaptation strategies, and apply the method using results of two climate models....