Geography of Climate Change Vulnerability: Exposure, Sensitivity and Adaptation explores the geographic dimensions of vulnerability of human- environmental systems to climate change. It provides information on the concepts, principles, methods and uses of GIS for climate change research and focuses on the spatial characteristics of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, which constitute the primary determinants of vulnerability. It starts with the fundamentals, reviewing the role geography plays in assessing climate change vulnerability beyond applied climatology. It then reviews the basics of GIS: what it is, what it can do and how to integrate climate science and research into existing GIS programs. Next it reviews the essentials of climate change and climate science. From there, the authors (editors) review vulnerability science and its role of in adapting to or mitigating issues stemming from climate change. The techniques of assessing climate change vulnerability are then explored, both on a theoretical and on a practical level. Finally, the applications of what the GIS data reveals are covered, including reviewing climate vulnerable human-environmental systems, scale, data sources, and more. The applications continue into specific areas of impact from water resource systems, to agricultural and ecological systems, human-land interactions and tying it in to the IPCC WGII assessment report of vulnerability.
Geography of Climate Change Vulnerability
will help readers learn a hands-on, problem-based approaches to providing real-world research across the different roles and modes of GIS applications in climate research. This is an essential resource for researchers across disciplines looking into issues and solutions stemming from climate variability, and for new ways to assess complex and diverse data while doing so.
- Reviews how to integrate current climate science with diverse environmental data to better model, analyze and predict climate impacts and vulnerabilities
- Emphasizes the implementation of a wide array of GIS concepts and techniques (e.g., geodatabases, geoprocessing, spatial modeling, mapping, etc.)
- All tasks of geospatial analytics, modeling and visualization are illustrated in the ArcGIS platform
Section 1: Introduction1. The Geography of Climate Change Vulnerability: An Overview2. Geographic Information Systems: The Basics3. Climate Change: Fundamentals4. Vulnerability Science: Emergent PrinciplesSection 2: Techniques5. GIS for Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment6. GIS for Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment: Methods7. GIS for Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment: Implementation RealitiesSection 3: Applications (Cases)8. Overview of Application Areas9. Vulnerability of Water Resource Systems10. Vulnerability of Agro-ecological Systems11. Vulnerability of Human-Land Interactions12. The Future of GIS for Climate Change
Dr. U. Sunday Tim is an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA. He received both his bachelors (with Distinction) and doctoral degrees from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Dr. Tims areas of research interest are focused on cyber-physical systems technologies for sustainable food, bioenergy and water systems, cloud-enabled geospatial modeling environments in eco-hydrology, and space-time modeling of human-environmental systems. Additionally, he is investigating impacts of climate change on coupled human-natural systems, including geospatial analysis of challenges for climate refugees. Dr. Tim has developed and taught a variety of courses focused on geospatial information and geographic information science. Dr Sharma is a researcher in Data Science Services at the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology, Iowa State University. His research interests relating to databases include issues in Big Data, Geospatial relationships, SpatioTemporal and GIS Technology. He is Editor in Chief of several international journals and on the advisory board for an additional 9 journals.
