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Bibliography User Guide

Welcome to CCRUN’s online bibliography!

Introduction:

This bibliography is envisioned as a tool for researchers, CCRUN stakeholders, and the public. It is meant to provide a baseline, or current 'state of the world,' with respect to impact assessments, vulnerability, adaptation efforts, and evaluation of adaptation efforts within three research themes covered by the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN). It is also envisioned as a living database, and will be updated and expanded with time. However, the purposes of the bibliography is not to provide every piece of literature on climate change. The scope of the bibliography is specific to the work being conducted by CCRUN, resources relevant to informing this research, or other valuable information specific to the urban areas of the Northeast U.S.

Scope:

CCRUN focuses in four broad sectors: Water, Coasts, Green Infrastructure and Health. Research in each of these sectors is linked through cross-cutting themes of climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. Evaluation is another cross-cutting theme, which develops ways in which climate science information can help design policies and make decisions to reduce vulnerability to climate events. The evaluation team is currently focusing on three areas: water (including problems of flooding, water availability, and quality); health (including the effect of heat waves and air quality); and coastal zones that are vulnerable to storm surges.

The evaluation team has begun this ‘live’ bibliography by uploading references collected for evaluation purposes. Thus, the research themes that the bibliography currently covers comprehensively are storm surge risks along the coasts, street-level green infrastructure, and the risk to health from heat waves.

Each sector team continues to provided literature on climate impact assessments specific to their sector. Impact assessments aim to “evaluate the likely impacts of climate change under a given scenario and to assess the need for adaptation and/or mitigation to reduce any resulting vulnerability to climate risks”[1].

The database also includes vulnerability assessments. A vulnerability assessment “focuses on the risks themselves by concentrating on the propensity to be harmed, then seeking to maximize potential benefits and minimize or reverse potential losses”[2]. The vulnerability assessments, in other words, take the impact assessment as a starting point and then analyzes the exposure to risk and the likely size of the harm and ability to recover from the harm, depending on a variety of physical and/or socioeconomic factors (that can influence the size of the harm and the ability to recover).

Lastly, the database includes information about methods, frameworks, and literature reviews on vulnerability and adaptation. For example, a document is included if it provides an adaptation, vulnerability or evaluation framework, or a methodology for measuring vulnerability, even if a document focuses on an area outside of the Northeast or, in most cases, is not location specific.

We have only reviewed comprehensively literature that is specific to the Northeast, and especially the urban centers of Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. The bibliography lists some documents which report on areas in the U.S. outside the Northeast (and in some cases outside the U.S.). However, these documents were obtained in the process of searching for literature relevant to the four sectors in the Northeast and are not comprehensive representations of the four sectors in other geographical areas, nor a comprehensive representation of vulnerability, adaptation, and/or evaluation in other thematic and/or geographic contexts.

We have collected literature from peer-reviewed journals obtained using Web of Science and Google scholar, grey literature from well-known sources, and government documents from city and state government websites.

The CCRUN team will continue to update and expand the types of literature included in the bibliography over time.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Gaining full access to many of the journal articles require either a subscription or payment per article to the journal.

Navigation:

Articles are searchable through several categories. You can use these filters to help narrow your search and find the information you are looking for.

The filters include:

  • Author (Last name)
  • Keyword*
  • Title
  • Year
  • Type

*The keyword filters have been customized to directly reflect CCRUN’s sectors and cross-cutting themes. The keywords have been written as tiers, separated by a dash (“-“). The first tier relates to the overarching theme of the document. The second tier, if applicable, specifies the content in the document. A document can be tagged with more than one keyword. Multiple keywords are separated by semicolons. The keywords and the abstract give the reader an idea about what the article is about.

For example, if a document is about vulnerability to climate in coastal zones in New York City then the document would be tagged “Coastal-vulnerability; New York City” (explanation of each tag provided below).

Note on citations: Citation information in the database has been copied from their sources. Some journals require different formatting in articles, such as capitalization in article titles or the use of author initials instead of full names. Please note that if a citation is downloaded (RIS is available for downloading to Endnote), it may need to be edited to fit your desired citation style.

How To Search the Bibliography

There are several ways to search for articles using the various filters.

Filters
Select one of the filters, listed in the top-center of the webpage to reorganize the bibliography under that criterion. For the tabs “Author”, “Keyword”, and “Title”, you can further specify the list of articles based on the first letter. “Type” and “Year” cannot be further specified.

Search
Typing a word into the search box will pull any article that has that word appearing in its reference, abstract, or if it is the first word in a keyword string. The database is sensitive to permutations and will not pull up a document if the permutation between tier one and tier two have been switched. Similarly, searching for "impact assessment" will only pull articles with that term in its reference or abstract, NOT its keywords, because "impact assessment" is never used as the first term in the keyword tier system.

These limitations can be avoided by selecting a keyword from the drop-down menu within the “Show only items where” option. Because the keywords have been crafted specifically for this database, there are only a select number of categories to choose from. If you are interested in searching for documents via keywords, the easiest method is to select “Search”, select “Show only items where”, then select “Keyword” in the drop down menu. From here you can select a Keyword, and "Filter" for those articles.

Keyword Tier System
Tier One: CCRUN Sectors
  1. Coastal
  2. Green Infrastructure
  3. Health
  4. Water
This keyword represents each CCRUN sector. Documents will be labeled with a specific sector if it provides information directly relevant to the sector.

Tier Two for Sectors:
  1. Vulnerability – literature that identifies, discusses, or quantifies the variables that contribute to differential impacts of climate risks within a population
  2. Adaptation – literature on adaptation strategies or adaptation planning, including estimates of likely benefits from planned adaptation measures
  3. Evaluation – literature on systematic determinations of the effectiveness of an adaptation strategy, including cost-benefit analysis and ex ante (before the event) assessments
  4. Impact assessment – literature that evaluates the likely impacts of climate change on the sector under a given scenario and assesses the need for adaptation and/or mitigation to reduce any resulting vulnerability to climate risks
Tier Three for Impact Assessment only:
  1. Methodology – ways to measure or analyze climate impacts, such as techniques in modelling, and dynamical and statistical downscaling.

Tier One: CCRUN Cross-Cutting Themes
  1. Vulnerability
  2. Adaptation
  3. Evaluation

Tier Two for Cross-Cutting themes:
  1. Methodology – ways to measure or analyze the cross-cutting theme
  2. Framework – ways to describe or conceptualize the cross-cutting theme
  3. Literature Review – a synthesis of definitions, concepts, state of knowledge, best practices, or strategies within a sector or a cross-cutting theme
Tier Three for Evaluation only:
  1. Adaptive management – exploring adaptive management as an organizational process for continual monitoring and evaluation of adaptation strategies.
Tier One: CCRUN Location
  1. New York City OR New York
  2. Boston OR Massachusetts
  3. Philadelphia OR Pennsylvania
  4. Regional
Tier Two for Location:
  1. Impact assessment – literature that evaluates the likely impacts of climate change under a given scenario and assesses the need for adaptation and/or mitigation to reduce any resulting vulnerability to climate risks for a specific location and covering all (or most) CC impacts (not one sector in particular).
Tier Three for Impact Assessment only:
  1. Methodology – ways to measure or analyze climate impacts, such as techniques in modelling, and dynamical and statistical downscaling.

A document will be tagged with a City if it provides information directly relevant to that city, or includes one of our three cities in its examination of several cities.

A document will be tagged with a State if the document is directly relevant to the state. A document will also be labeled with a state if it is directly relevant to another urban area (e.g. Pittsburg, PA will be tagged with “Pennsylvania”).

A document will be tagged Regional if it is specific to the Northeast or if it examines a number of regions in the U.S. including the Northeast. A document will also be tagged with Regional if it covers other cities or states in the Northeast outside of Massachusetts, New York or Pennsylvania.

Tier One: RISA

This tier tags any studies written by members of our CCRUN teams that are relevant to, though not necessarily reporting on, CCRUN activities. This tier also tags studies which document lessons learned from the RISA program. It should be a comprehensive list of publicly available literature. We know of other evaluations of RISA programs, but the results are not publicly available.

Tier One: Action Plan

Traditionally, action plans are government documents that layout a set of strategies intended to guide that area’s efforts for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or mitigation. An area’s action plan may also sometimes include information about adaptation options. In many cases, however, there is a discrete adaptation plan, if any at all. For the purposes of this bibliography, we expand the Action Plan label to include all government documents with information directly relevant to adaptation planning and/or implementation, as well as any journal article reviewing U.S. action plans.

Getting Started:

There are over 450 references in CCRUN’s online database, and it will only get larger as we continue to update the list! To help get you started, we’ve selected some documents that are publicly available and also provide a good overview of the concepts and sectors CCRUN works within. These documents will introduce the reader to some of the projected climate change impacts for the Northeast, the concepts of vulnerability and a method for identifying vulnerable populations, as well as some examples of adaptation strategies and adaptation assessment methods currently being used in the Northeast.

What are the climate change impacts projected for the Urban Northeast?

Earlier this year team members from CCRUN contributed to the National Climate Assessment (NCA), scheduled for completion in early 2014. While the NCA will be a summary of over 240 author contributions, our team has released the Draft Technical Input Report prepared for the NCA. The report builds upon previous regional assessments (Frumhoff et al. 2007; Fisher et al. 2000; Rosenzweig and Solecki 2001), all of which are available in this bibliography as well. This document assesses information about climate variability and change, impacts, and adaptation in the Northeast. It provides a good overview of the climate change impacts projected for the region, across a variety of sectors, and illustrates the diversity of input that goes into creating these types of reports. Reviewing this document will give the reader an overview of the impacts projected for the Northeast region, and the activities going on to adapt to these impacts.

What is vulnerability to climate change?
There is a wide array of conceptual literature on vulnerability. Some examples of definitions in the literature include [3]:
  • “[…] the characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard.”(Blaikie et al. 1994);
  • “[…] the interplay of social, economic, and demographic characteristics that determine the resiliency of individuals and communities to climate change” (Cox et al. 2006).
  • “The degree to which a system is susceptible to and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes (Parry et al. 2007)”.

Because “vulnerability” spans a wide range of disciplines, there are a variety of perspectives, methods and interpretations of the conceptualization of vulnerability.

Cutter et al. (2009) provides a literature review of social vulnerability to climate variability hazards in their report to Oxfam America. The authors review the major theoretical models and conceptual advances of vulnerability to hazards and disasters. They then provide a review of hazard vulnerability assessments, methodologies for measuring vulnerability, existing vulnerability indices, social metric and mapping techniques, and social vulnerability in the context of climate change. Despite this wide range of conceptualizations of vulnerability, all fields are at very least interested in reducing mortality rates and economic losses. The reader will gain a comprehensive review of vulnerability concepts, frameworks, and methodologies by starting here. There are many more vulnerability literature reviews, the majority of which are available in the database but whose full text may not necessarily be available to every reader.

Who is vulnerable to climate change in the Northeast?
Though there is a large amount of literature dedicated to the conceptualization of climate change vulnerability, there are far less empirical studies, and even fewer still that focus specifically on social vulnerability to climate change in the Northeast.

Over time, researchers have identified trends in the characteristics of the people who are impacted the most by a disaster. Often times, these variables are aggregated together using different statistical techniques to create a vulnerability index. From these indexes, the ‘amount’ of vulnerability in one area can be compared to another area. During a heat wave, for example, elderly people, people who are isolated, and people with certain preexisting health issues are at a higher risk of being negatively impacted by the event than other types of people who do not have these characteristics. Using Census data, as well as GIS data in some cases, one can compare the number of people with the above mentioned characteristics from one area to another and make assumptions about which area may need more support or more resources before, during or after a heat wave. The same can be said for a coastal community that may, for example, have a large portion of its population unable to leave home without transportation or health care assistance.

One example of a social vulnerability assessment conducted for the Northeast is a white paper by Cox et al. (2006). Like most social vulnerability assessments to date, the researchers use Census data to construct neighborhood compositions of various information about the population, such as age, race, income level, housing type, etc. The paper describes how they use the Census data to calculate a vulnerability index and a relative measure of social vulnerability per neighborhood. Using the results, the authors create maps to illustrate differences in neighborhood composition between neighborhoods. This type of analysis can be used for policy analysis, initiatives, urban planning tools, as a response tool for hazards, and as a way of illustrating those areas that may be in need of more assistance during or after a disaster.

What are people in the Urban Northeast doing to adapt to these impacts?

There are a number of adaptation plans, reports, and studies specific to the Northeast that describe the efforts to adapt to climate change impacts in this region. There are several existing resources online that provide links to these plans.

Clean Air Cool Planet has produced a Northeast needs assessment, a report based on direct outreach to over 200 communities from Maine to New Jersey, including survey responses from 34 local governments, 6 regional governments, and 8 state agencies. It provides a region-wide snapshot at multiple levels of government on how communities are preparing for climate change, and more importantly, what resources and assistance is needed to succeed.

In New York City, PlaNYC (2007; 2011) is a comprehensive plan to respond to climate change, a growing NYC population, an aging infrastructure, and an evolving economy. The PlaNYC report is a great place to start to learn about the cities various activities, including their one million tree initiative, a Green Infrastructure Plan to improve the wastewater and sewer systems to respond to heavy storms, reflective roof coatings to reduce heat absorption in the city, and many more.

Philadelphia leads the region in heat wave preparedness. Since the early 1990s, Philadelphia has developed and implemented plans to prevent heat-related deaths. We provide several studies on our bibliography database that have evaluated Philadelphia’s Hot Weather Health Watch and Warning System, including Ebi et al.’s (2004) publicly available study, “Heat Watch/Warning Systems Save Lives: Estimated Costs and Benefits for Philadelphia 1995-98”. This study is one example of how researchers are determining whether or not an adaptation strategy to climate related impacts, like increased heat wave events, is working, for whom, and why. The Philadelphia Water Department is also experimenting with integrating several elements of green infrastructure, such as rain gardens, stormwater planters, and green roofs into their urban design. They have several written resources, data, and maps available on their website.

In Massachusetts, the Water Resource Authority incorporated sea level rise into their plans for the Deer Island wastewater treatment plant. The facility was built 1.9 feet higher to account for projected sea level rise in the area. In 2008, Kirshen et al. produced a multi-sector analysis of the climate's longer-term impacts on metro-Boston, better know as the "CLIMB" report. Their analysis looks at how climate change will affect key socio-economic activities in the Boston region. The report also tests overall monetary and environmental costs for three adaptive strategies: “Ride-It-Out”; “Build-Your-Way-Out”; and “The Green scenario”.

How can they tell if an adaptation strategy is working or not?

More and more information is being developed to assess adaptation strategies. One such example comes from the New York State ClimAID report, produced by the NY State Energy Research and Development Authority, with many contributing authors coming from the CCRUN teams. This report provides detailed climate risk information for New York State, across several sectors. The reports also provides an Adaptation Guidebook (Annex II), a tool for framing adaptation and for assessing adaptation strategies. While the guide is applied to New York, the eight-step process is general enough that it can be applied to a range of jurisdictions and sectors.

One of the key concepts in the guide is the use of 'flexible adaptation pathways'. The National Panel on Climate Change, a panel of experts charged with advising on adaptation to climate change, and some of whom are on the CCRUN team, stresses the importance of taking a risk-based approach to climate adaptation, which incorporates the uncertainties in future climate change and embeds flexibility into the operations and planning of agencies and organizations that run and manage critical infrastructure in NYC.

Another approach to assessing adaptation strategies under uncertainty is within a framework most commonly applied to resource management and conservation, Adaptive management. Adaptive management is a process for decision making under uncertainty with an aim of reducing uncertainty over time. Adaptive management is a structured iterative process that uses system monitoring to gather information, which is used to improve future management, and the cycle continues. The U.S. Department of the Interior, for example, uses this approach to make decisions about land management within the context of uncertainty as the bureaus accumulate more information. Decision making about climate change adaptation strategies are also decisions made under uncertainty. This process is one suggested framework for climate change adaptation and evaluation. However, there are currently no empirical studies of the application of adaptive management in climate change adaptation assessment for the region. There will likely be more literature on these topics as more adaptation strategies are implemented and evaluation is needed.

Conclusion:

We hope this provides a good starting off point for you! Please take the opportunity to explore the resources available here. We will continue to update the database as more resources are developed.

Enjoy!

[1] Carter, T.R., R.N. Jones, X. Lu, S. Bhadwal, C. Conde, L.O. Mearns, B.C. O’Neill, M.D.A. Rounsevell and M.B. Zurek, 2007: New Assessment Methods and the Characterisation of Future Conditions. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 133-171.

[2] Carter, T.R., R.N. Jones, X. Lu, S. Bhadwal, C. Conde, L.O. Mearns, B.C. O’Neill, M.D.A. Rounsevell and M.B. Zurek, 2007: New Assessment Methods and the Characterisation of Future Conditions. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 133-171.

[3] For more definitions of social vulnerability, see Cutter, S.L., 1996. “Vulnerability to environmental hazards”. Progress in Human Geography, 20(4), 529-539.