Drivers of sustainability transformations: leverage points, contexts and conjunctures.

While increasing hopes are being attached to deliberate societal transformative change to achieve the targets of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement, questions remain about whether and whereby such profound systemic change can be governed. This paper analyses how transformative changes are intended to be encouraged and achieved, where and when. The paper explores critical drivers and how they relate to leverage points at different places in the societal systems. The paper builds on a comprehensive sense-making analysis of scholarly literature, policy documents, including countries' contributions to the Paris Agreement and national reviews of progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, international news media and lay focus group discussions on five continents. There are great variations in how drivers were made sense of in the data. The many ongoing interacting transformations across societies involve different social, cultural, and political contexts, while the implementation of the 2030 Agenda also contains goal conflicts and unavoidable trade-offs. The paper highlights four categories of drivers as particularly important to consider in view of international transformation efforts: technological innovations, political economy redistribution, new narratives, and transformative learning. Four features are important for bringing clarity on how deliberate transformations can be encouraged: (1) the function of drivers in enabling and restricting transformations of societal systems characterised by detailed or dynamic complexity, (2) cultural and geographical contexts of transformations, (3) where in the systems the drivers are intended to intervene, and (4) the role of critical junctions in time, where transformative trajectories can branch out. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-00957-4.

VisAdapt: A Visualization Tool to Support Climate Change Adaptation.

The web-based visualization VisAdapt tool was developed to help laypeople in the Nordic countries assess how anticipated climate change will impact their homes. The tool guides users through a three-step visual process that helps them explore risks and identify adaptive actions specifically modified to their location and house type. This article walks through the tool's multistep, user-centered design process. Although VisAdapt's target end users are Nordic homeowners, the insights gained from the development process and the lessons learned from the project are applicable to a wide range of domains.

The legitimacy of leadership in international climate change negotiations.

Leadeship is an essential ingredient in reaching international agreements and overcoming the collective action problems associated with responding to climate change. In this study, we aim at answering two questions that are crucial for understanding the legitimacy of leadership in international climate change negotiations. Based on the responses of the three consecutive surveys distributed at COPs 14-16, we seek first to chart which actors are actually recognized as leaders by climate change negotiation participants. Second, we aim to explain what motivates COP participants to support different actors as leaders. Both these questions are indeed crucial for understanding the role, importance, and legitimacy of leadership in the international climate change regime. Our results show that the leadership landscape in this issue area is fragmented, with no one clear-cut leader, and strongly suggest that it is imperative for any actor seeking recognition as climate change leader to be perceived as being devoted to promoting the common good.

Socio-economic research in support of climate policy development: Mistra's Research Program Clipore.

Mistra's Climate Policy Research Program, Clipore, is one of the largest research programs directed to support international climate policy development, involving research groups in Sweden, Norway, United States and India. It has been running from 2004 to 2011 with a budget of more than 100 MSEK (15 M USD). The paper briefly describes the program and its outcomes in relation to climate policy development. Discussion focuses on how the program has been able to be in the front of and include the development of emissions trading systems in Europe and the United States and how the program has been able to follow and produce inputs to the agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The paper also discusses how the program has managed to present its outcomes and maintain an active dialogue with the various stakeholders. The paper emphasises options and obstacles in the communication between science and policy.

A registry of nationally appropriate mitigation actions: goals, outcomes, and institutional requisites.

This article examines key issues in operationalizing a registry of nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs) undertaken by developing countries party to the United Nations framework convention on climate change. It analyzes goals, outcomes, and institutional prerequisites underlying various proposals to determine how a NAMA mechanism could work in international climate cooperation. The different proposals for how NAMA shall be designed relate to three basic effort-sharing arrangements in a future climate regime: binding commitments for all Parties, purely voluntary commitments for all, and legally binding commitments for Annex I countries but voluntary ones for others. We conclude that a NAMA registry could be designed so as initially to suit all three types of effort-sharing regimes. The article identifies three areas of potential common ground in a registry irrespective of effort-sharing type: the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, the sustainable development objectives of the Convention, and the need for a systemic transition toward low-carbon energy technologies.