Yasuko Kameyama

Climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as their responses, including mitigation, adaptation and conservation measures, have human rights implications. An analysis of the linkages between...

Intergenerational issues encompass various future concerns ranging from climate change to government debt, which can potentially harm the well-being of future generations. Scholars have discussed intergenerational equity and justice, and efforts to incorporate future generations in decision-making in society have been growing, including establishing future-regarding institutions. Nevertheless, democratic governance often prioritizes short-term gains over long-term benefits. This thematic issue aims to present the current state of progress and academic discourse on incorporating considerations for future generations into current decision-making. The issue comprises 10 articles with a varied focus, including on young people and those who are yet to be born. Challenges such as misrepresentation and negligence in democratic deliberation are explored, along with legal obligations grounded in human rights. Proxies for future generations in political decision-making are examined, revealing limitations in enforcing their interests. The impact of political short-termism on government responses is discussed, and the role of narratives in moral philosophy is explored. Diverse cases, including climate litigation in the German Federal Constitutional Court, highlight the complexity of addressing future generations. These articles explore and identify challenges in incorporating consideration of future generations, which could be used to catalyze studies on actions that will be taken in the future.

Non-technical summary: We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.Technical summary: We synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and animals; (4) climate (im)mobility and the need for anticipatory action; (5) security and climate; (6) sustainable land management as a prerequisite to land-based solutions; (7) sustainable finance practices in the private sector and the need for political guidance; (8) the urgent planetary imperative for addressing losses and damages; (9) inclusive societal choices for climate-resilient development and (10) how to overcome barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.Social media summary: Science has evidence on barriers to mitigation and how to overcome them to avoid limits to adaptation across multiple fields.

As perception of climate change as a threat to humanity and to ecosystems grows, the rapidly growing literature increasingly refers to the notion of “climate change and security,” for which there is as yet no single agreed definition. Despite the extent of literature already published, there are at least three remaining gaps: (1) Added theoretical value: How does “climate change and security” differ from similar notions such as “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”? What theoretical gains can be made by securing against climate change? (2) Role of non-state actors: The traditional concept of security is tightly bound to the notion of national security, but the climate change and security discourse opens the door to the participation of non-state actors such as the business sector, local government, and citizens. How do they take part in ensuring security? (3) Regional imbalance: Most of the literature on climate change and security published so far comes from Europe and North America. As other regions, such as Asia, are just as affected, more voices should be heard from those regions. This issue aims to address some of these gaps. The nine articles in this issue address the notion of “climate change and security” through empirical work while theoretically contributing to several themes relating to the climate change and security discourse.

Understanding the criteria underlying development in a country is crucial to formulating developmental plans. However, it is not always clear which criteria are more important than others in different countries and at different times. The relationship between developmental criteria and the stage of economic development is also unclear in many countries. Therefore, we devised an indirect stated preference approach for the measurement of the importance of developmental criteria and employed it in four Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam—to measure the importance of sustainable development (SD) criteria perceived by the general public. Specifically, we evaluated the importance of 58 national goals linked to 1 of 11 SD criteria. Security, efficiency, accessibility, capability, and environmental capacity were perceived as relatively important by respondents in all four countries. The respondents perceived that the currently important criteria would be important in the future as well. The order of the importance in each country differed. For example, environmental capacity was ranked lower, and inclusiveness was ranked higher as the gross domestic product of a country increased. Thai and Vietnamese respondents had similar perceptions and, overall, tended to have higher levels of importance than South Korean and Japanese respondents, who also had similar perceptions of importance.

One of the major barriers to climate communication is that climate change is often presented to the public in such a way that impacts seem distant in time. To improve how climate change resonates with people, we propose a simple indicator: how many extreme events (hot days and heavy precipitation days) are grandchildren projected to experience that their grandparents will not experience in their lives? We analyse the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 ensemble. During grandchildren’s lifetime (2020–2100) under the shared socioeconomic pathway 5–8.5 (SSP5-8.5), in some tropical regions, they are projected to experience >1000 hot days and >5 heavy precipitation days breaking records set in their grandparents’ lifetime until 2040. These numbers of unprecedented hot days and heavy precipitation days under SSP5-8.5 are greater in countries with lower CO₂ emissions and income per capita than in countries with higher CO₂ emissions and income per capita. We show that not only the numbers of unprecedented hot days and heavy precipitation days but also their unevenness across countries can be significantly lowered in the SSP1-2.6 scenario, which is consistent with the 2 °C goal of the Paris Agreement. This new approach would help adults easily understand how their climate change mitigation efforts could decrease the unprecedented extreme events during youths’ lifetime and reduce the intergenerational and intragenerational inequalities regarding extreme events.