Call for Papers (Special Issue) on Institutional Adaptation and Transformation in Climate Change
in Frontiers in Environmental Science
I. Aim and Scope
The issue of global climate change has drastically intensified both the risk and rate of floods, droughts, heatwaves and other natural hazards. Whilst these risks result in abrupt hazards to humans and societies, including infrastructure damage and displacement of people, many lead to incremental and gradual changes in the behaviour of people, the institutions that govern societies and the technological advancements that are being made. Climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies are heavily reliant upon our understanding of the social dimensions, including the behaviour of people and their institutions, which calls for empirically-solid quantification of distributional impacts and adaptation dynamics. The recognition of the crucial role of human actors and the institutional structures that they are embedded in triggers a paradigm shift in climate risks assessments and drives the proliferation of models that include these social dynamics.
The aim of this Research Topic is to collate high-quality articles that address how institutions (i.e. a set of rules that organize activities among actors) must adapt or transform into entirely new ones to better accommodate for incremental and abrupt changes to our society resulting from climate change and climate disasters. These institutions can be formal in the form of policies, regulations and laws devised by various levels of governance from the UN to local councils. They could also be the unwritten and informal agreements among people, leading to collective behaviour that may have a huge impact on the course of climate change. Studying the role of formal and informal institutions in climate change in combination with environmental, behavioural, and technological factors can unveil solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation. We, therefore, aim to bring researchers from various disciplines together to collaboratively and decisively think about how institutions can be incorporated in various forms of climate models for a more comprehensive climate risk assessment that can prepare us for both the near and far future.
The primary list of topics covers the following points (but not limited to):
- Institutional Risk Assessment
- Modelling and Simulation for studying institutions
- Learning from history to mitigate and adapt to climate change
- Complex systems approaches to climate change
- Sustainable development
We are looking for original research articles that showcase various models addressing these topics but we also very much welcome theoretical and empirical contributions in these areas.
II. Submission and timeline
Please submit your manuscript via the Research Topic homepage.
- Deadline for abstract submission: March 30, 2022
- Deadline for manuscript submission: May 27, 2022
Please note that these deadlines are only indicative and that all submitted papers will be reviewed as soon as they are received and will be available online as soon as they are published.
III. Guest Editors
- Amineh Ghorbani – Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
- Giangiacomo Bravo – Linnaeus Univesrity, Sweden
- Saba Siddiki – Syracuse University, US
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
