Regional Climate Change and Adaptation Capacity

This chapter describes the current state of understanding of the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability to climate change and their uncertainties. It builds upon the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and incorporates results from more recent research. Section 2 presents a number of general findings. Each of these findings addresses a different dimension of climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and no one dimension is paramount. Section 3 presents findings regarding individual natural and human systems, and Section 4 highlights some of the issues of concern for different regions of the world, especially for polar regions. Section 5 identifies priority research areas to further advance understanding of the potential consequences of and adaptation to climate change.