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This book presents the most recent results of a research started at the end of 2011 in Africa South of the Sahara and then extended to the whole tropics. The focus of our work is climate planning. With this term, we mean all those plans to limit climate change (mitigation and sustainable action plans), to protect human settlements against its impacts (emergency, risk reduction, adaptation plans, and resilience strategies) and to pursue both the medium-term (municipal development plans) and long-term (comprehensive, general, and master plans) aims.

This book series Theory and Practice of Urban Sustainability Transitions is intended to explore the different dynamics, challenges, and breakthroughs in accelerating sustainability transitions in urban areas across the globe. We expect to find as much different and diverse stories, visions, experiments, and creative actors as there are cities: from metropolises to country towns, from inner city districts to suburbs, from developed to developing, from monocultural to diverse, and from hierarchical to egalitarian. But we also expect to find patterns in processes and dynamics of transitions across this diversity. Transition dynamics include locked-in regimes that are challenged by changing contexts, ecological stress and societal pressure for change as well as experiments and innovations in niches driven by entrepreneurial networks, and creative communities and proactive administrators. But also included are resistance by vested interests and sunken costs, uncertainties about the future amongst urban populations, political instabilities, and the erosion of social services and systems of provision. And finally there are the forming of transformative arenas, the development of coalitions for change across different actor groups, the diffusion and adoption of new practices, and exponential growth of sustainable technologies. For this series we seek this middle ground: between urban and transition perspectives, between conceptual and empirical, and between structural and practical. We aim to develop this series to offer scholars state-of-the-art theoretical developments applied to the context of cities. Equally important is that we offer urban planners, professionals, and practitioners interested or engaged in strategic interventions to accelerate and guide urban sustainability transition frameworks for understanding and dealing with on-going developments, methods, and instruments. This book series will lead to new insights into how cities address the sustainability challenges they face by not returning to old patterns but by searching for new and innovative methods and instruments that are based on shared principles of a transitions approach. Based on concrete experiences, state-of-the-art research, and ongoing practices, the series provides rich insights, concrete and inspiring cases as well as practical methods, tools, theories, and recommendations. The book series, informed by transition thinking as it was developed in the last decade in Europe, aims to describe, analyse, and support the quest of cities around the globe to accelerate and stimulate such a transition to sustainability. To sum up, the book series aims to: – Provide theory, case studies, and contextualized tools for the governance of urban transitions worldwide – Provide a necessary and timely reflection on current practices of how transition management is and can be applied in urban contexts worldwide – Further the theorizing and conceptual tools relating to an understanding of urban sustainability transitions – Provide best practices of cities across countries and different kinds of cities as well as across policy domains in shaping their city’s path towards sustainability

Human-caused climate change is perhaps the defining environmental issue of the early twenty-first century. We observe the earth’s climate in the present, but observations of future climate are not available yet. So in order to predict the future, we rely on simulation models to predict future climate. This book is designed to be a guide to climate simulation and prediction for the non-specialist and an entry point for understanding uncertainties in climate models. The goal is not to be simply a popular guide to climate modeling and prediction, but to help those using climate models to understand the results. This book provides background on the earth’s climate system and how it might change, a detailed qualitative analysis of how climate models are constructed, and a discussion of model results and the uncertainty inherent in those results. Throughout the text, terms in bold will be referenced in the glossary. References are provided as footnotes in each chapter. Who uses climate models? Climate model users are practitioners in many fields who desire to incorporate information about climate and climate change into planning and management decisions. Users may be scientists and engineers in fields such as ecosystems or water resources. These scientists are familiar with models and the roles of models in natural science. In other cases, the practitioners are engineers, urban planners, epidemiologists, or architects. Though not necessarily familiar with models of natural science, experts in these fields use quantitative information for decision-making. These experts are potential users of climate models. We hope in the end that by understanding climate models and their uncertainties, the reader will understand how climate models are constructed to represent the earth’s climate system. The book is intended to help the reader become a more competent interpreter or translator of climate model output.