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Climate change is increasingly threatening coastal communities around the world. This article reviews the literature on climate change impacts and adaptation in the Chesapeake Bay region (USA). We reviewed both climate impacts and adaptation literature (n = 283) published in the period 2007–2018 to answer the questions: (i) how are indicators of climate impacts measured and reported by different types of authors (e.g., scientists, government, and NGOs), document types (e.g., academic articles or reports), and geographic focus (e.g., State, region, county, or municipal level)? (ii) what are the current approaches for measuring the most pressing climate impacts in the Chesapeake Bay? We found that scientists produce the most amount of data but are increasingly shifting towards engaging with practitioners through reports and online resources. Most indicators focus on the Chesapeake Bay scale, but data is most needed at the local level where adaptive policies are implemented. Our analysis shows emerging approaches to monitoring climate hazards and areas where synergies between types of authors are likely to increase resilience in the 21st century. This review expands the understanding of the information network in the Chesapeake Bay and explores the institutional landscape of stakeholders involved in the production and consumption of environmental and social change data. The analysis and insights of this review may be extended to similar regions around the planet experiencing or anticipating similar climate hazards to the Chesapeake Bay.

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Participatory research engages a transdisciplinary team of stakeholders in all aspects of the research process. Such engagement can lead to shifts in the research design, as well as who is considered a participant. We detail our experiences of studying an evolving stakeholder network in the context of a 2.5-year transdisciplinary, participatory project. We show how participation leads to shifts in the network boundary overtime and how a transdisciplinary effort was needed to retrospectively redefine the network boundary. Through tacking back and forth between ethnographic insights, research aims, and modeling assumptions, the team eventually reached agreement on what determined network membership and how to code network members according to their timing and level of participation. Our account advances literature on boundary and modeling approaches to shifting, evolving networks by demonstrating how participatory transdisciplinarity can be both a driver of, and solution to, capturing the complexity of evolving networks.

To adapt to a changing climate, decision-makers design, evaluate, and implement measures that have an implication of justice on citizens in the present and well into the future. Decision-makers are often required to make decisions without certainty of the consequences and understanding their effects on intergenerational justice. Thus, managing the impacts of climate change requires novel decision-aiding approaches that consider climate impacts’ temporal and spatial heterogeneity and the uncertainty in climate predictions, preferences, and values. We reviewed the literature on the extent to which principles of intergenerational justice—conservation of options and resources for future generations—have been integrated to traditional approaches in climate resilience decision-making. We explore the extent to which flexibility, i.e., the conservation and expansion of options in subsequent decision periods, can contribute to upholding the principles of intergenerational justice under uncertainty. We illustrate the approach in the case of the Delta Programme in the Netherlands, a complex system designed to protect against sea-level rise (SLR). Designing adaptation strategies to SLR with flexibility as a core concept brings significant advantages in circumstances of uncertainty. The conservation of options in flexible pathways, in this case, contributes to the principles of intergenerational justice. Our civilization’s long-term sustainability and survival may depend on the extent to which individuals can see beyond their gains and toward the gains of the collective society at an intergenerational scale.

In the age of big data, case studies build the foundation for the large-scale models that are increasingly being used for decision and policymaking. In this systematic literature review, we investigated the geographic, methodological, and conceptual characteristics of case studies in climate change science to evaluate the extent they provide policy recommendations to answer the questions: how can researchers best gather and report policy-relevant information for climate change adaptation, resilience, and/or recovery? What are the current themes within the literature, and how can these areas best advance as policy-relevant fields within climate change science? Findings highlight that policy recommendations were more robust, and significantly more likely, in case studies that employ participatory research methods; and geographic characteristics and use of theoretical frameworks are associated with providing policy recommendations. On the other hand, studies that focus on biophysical parameters of climate change offered weak or no policy recommendations. Thus, we conclude that local-level case study research can serve as validation and calibration data for large-scale models as long as they accurately represent the local values and perceptions of the people in the study area. We elaborate on the opportunities that exist in non-human, biophysical, research for communicating findings to policy-friendly audiences.

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