Scope

The impact of climate change is arguably the greatest threat to humanity’s well-being and the health of the global ecosystem. Climate change affects communities, economies, and natural resources, often differently and disproportionately, critically threatening our ability to thrive in an equitable and sustainable world. Understanding and managing the risks associated with such threats is both an intellectual pursuit and a practical problem for all levels of decision-making, from the individual to governments and global governance organizations.

Globally, there is growing consensus that climate risk management cannot be accomplished without deep and intentional integration across different disciplines studying climate change, and between the science of climate change and decision-making. To inform risk management, we also need to integrate across climate mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development, across multiple stressors (including climate and non-climate drivers) and across interventions and evaluation, for example. The goal of the Climate Risk Management section of the journal Frontiers in Climate is to accomplish this integration by inviting submissions from all areas of climate-driven risk, with a special focus on how this knowledge can inform, support and be actionable to decision-makers managing risk on scales ranging from the household to the globe.  Here, the intellectual challenge and reward is to put together different strains of available knowledge through well-crafted reviews that synthetize, evaluate and reframe the existing literature, with the goal of informing and supporting decision-making. While our scope is broad across climate mitigation, adaptation, sustainable development and sustainability, our focus on risk management invites our contributors to think about informing gaps and catalyzing future research, as well as action. 

We welcome research from areas including but not limited to:

• Risk-driven approaches to development and governance

• Understanding, comparing and critiquing different ways of formulating and governing climate risk

• Issues of equity, power and fairness in risk management

• Vulnerability, adaptation, risk assessment and resilience metrics and indicators

• Risk mitigation, adaptive capacity and sustainability

• Climate-resilient pathways (integration of mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development)

• Actionable knowledge for risk management and resilience

• Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methods and frameworks for studying and acting on climate risk

• Climate impact, extreme events, health, migration and security

• Political, economic and cultural dimensions of risk assessment, adaptation and mitigation.

Climate Risk Management focuses primarily on the social and economic aspects of disaster risk mitigation. For articles that focus more closely on the physical aspects of climate extremes and/or how monitoring and modeling systems track such events, please consider submitting to our Climate Services section. 

Submission

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