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This chapter reviews factors responsible for climate change, impacts of the change on animal health, zoonotic diseases, and their linkage with One-Health program.

This chapter is based on the available literature related to climate change and its effect on animal health and production from different points. The causes and change forcers of climate change, direct and indirect effects of the change on animal health management, host–pathogen–vector interaction, and zoonotic diseases are included. Inter-linkage between climate change and One-Health program are also assessed.

Beside natural causes of climatic change, greenhouse gases are increasing due to human activities, causing global climate changes which have direct and indirect animal health and production performance impacts. The direct impacts are increased ambient temperature, floods, and droughts, while the indirect are reduced availability of water and food. The change and effect also promote diseases spread, increase survival and availability of the pathogen and its intermediate vector host, responsible for distribution and prevalence of tremendous zoonotic, infectious, and vector-borne diseases. The adverse effect on the biodiversity, distribution of animals and micro flora, genetic makeup of microbials which may lead to emerging and re-emerging disease and their outbreaks make the strong linkage between climate change and One-Health.

Global climate change is receiving increasing international attention where international organizations are increasing their focus on tackling the health impacts. Thus, there is a need for parallel mitigation of climate change and animal diseases in a global form.

Most research on climate change is limited to environmental protection, however this chapter provides a nexus between climate change, animal health, livestock production, and the One-Health program for better livelihood.

Purpose – To investigate the potential impacts of future climate change in the United Kingdom on its road and rail networks.

Methodology/approach – The climate change impacts of increasing summer temperatures, decreasing winter temperatures, increased heavy precipitation, greater numbers of extreme weather events and rises in sea level are reviewed.

Findings – Surface transportation is the most exposed element to the localised impacts of climate change. High summer temperatures will result in road rutting, rail buckling and decreased thermal comfort, whereas more intense winter precipitation will cause flooding, landslips and bridge scour across all modes. For all impacts, it is the extreme events (e.g. heat waves and storms) that are potentially the most devastating. As shown, there are some positive climate change impacts. For example, in the case of winter maintenance, all transport networks stand to benefit.

Originality/value – In order for transport to react appropriately to the potential changes in climate, it is essential to understand how the road and rail networks may be affected and to build strategies for both adaptation and mitigation into plans for future developments for both modes.

It is not surprising that the dominant cognitive frame through which most audiences view climate change is that of an environmental problem. However, this messaging strategy has proven susceptible to counter-attacks, defensing processing, and other cognitive biases. As such, many environmental advocates are switching gears. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the environment-as-public-health-concern narrative is increasingly found in climate change messages. This strategy involves making the abstract issue of climate change more concrete by tying it to negative health impacts, like asthma, heat-related illness, and the spread of disease. Understanding why and for whom this strategy is persuasive, particularly in a social media context where users often encounter persuasive climate change messages, can help advance theory and practice.

The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: 1.) Test the effects of climate message frame (damage to nature or damage to public health), message source (liberal or conservative organization), and the use of visual human exemplars (present or absent) in social media messages; and, 2.) Assess the predictive utility of different conceptual frameworks (personification, construal level theory, and moral foundations theory) as explanatory mechanisms for persuasive social media climate message effects. The results of a nation-wide experiment reveal that the use of visual exemplars matters when climate change is framed as an environmental problem, but otherwise message frame, source, and visual exemplar use have little impact on policy attitudes. Further analyses demonstrated that multiple conceptual mechanisms related to the aforementioned theories help explain social media effects on climate change attitudes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the trends of climate change and their impact on businesses in Kenya’s Public Listed Companies (PLCs).

Out of 66 PLCs, the researchers interviewed 10 companies, and therefore obtained a 15% sample. The methodology was utilization of both primary and secondary data and by use of a combination of the structured and unstructured interviews.

The findings indicated that, although climate change issues are mentioned or implied in strategic plans and core values, they rarely however, translate to normal or day-to-day conversation or operation of the businesses. PESTEL factors are cited as having a very positive impact on businesses that are technological and economic, contrary to environmental/climate change factors which have a more negative than positive effect on the business. Electricity outages/shortages will have serious impact, while agricultural, tourism, insurance, and aviation sectors are likely to be most severely affected by climate change. The hypothesis that climate change is affecting all businesses was accepted while that stating that climate change is significantly impacting businesses negatively rather than positively by increasing operating costs which may result to closure if not mitigated by 2030 was rejected.

Companies should not adopt a “business as usual” attitude but invest in training on effects and strategies for mitigation as well as adaptation and translate climate issues into action as well as create synergy in tackling climate change issues.

The research is valuable to environmentalists, meteorologists, business community, academicians, as well as scientists and scholars alike both nationally and internationally.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report revealed an important increase in the level of consensus concerning the reality of human-caused climate warming. The scientific basis for global warming has thus been sufficiently established to enable meaningful planning of appropriate policy responses to address global warming. As a result, the world's policy makers, governments, industries, energy producers/planners, and individuals from many other walks of life have increased their attention toward finding acceptable solutions to the challenge of global warming. This laudable increase in worldwide attention to this global-scale challenge has not, however, led to a heightened optimism that the required substantial reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions deemed necessary to stabilize the global climate can be achieved anytime soon. This fact is due in large part to several fundamental aspects of the climate system that interact to ensure that climate change is a phenomenon that will emerge over extensive timescales.

Although most of the warming observed during the 20th century is attributed to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, because of the high heat capacity of the world's oceans, further warming will lag added greenhouse gas concentrations by decades to centuries. Thus, today's enhanced atmospheric CO2 concentrations have already “wired in” a certain amount of future warming in the climate system, independent of human actions. Furthermore, as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase, the world's natural CO2 “sinks” will begin to saturate, diminishing their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Future warming will also eventually cause melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which will contribute substantially to sea level rise, but only over hundreds to thousands of years. As a result, current generations have, in effect, decided to make future generations pay most of the direct and indirect costs of this major global problem. The longer the delay in reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, the greater the burden of climate change will be for future life on earth.

Collectively, these phenomena comprise a “global warming dilemma.” On the one hand, the current level of global warming to date appears to be comparatively benign, about 0.6°C. This seemingly small warming to date has thus hardly been sufficient to spur the world to pursue aggressive CO2 emissions reduction policies. On the other hand, the decision to delay global emissions reductions in the absence of a current crisis is essentially a commitment to accept large levels of climate warming and sea level rise for many centuries. This dilemma is a difficult obstacle for policy makers to overcome, although better education of policy makers regarding the long-term consequences of climate change may assist in policy development.

The policy challenge is further exacerbated by factors that lie outside the realm of science. There are a host of values conflicts that conspire to prevent meaningful preventative actions on the global scale. These values conflicts are deeply rooted in our very globally diverse lifestyles and our national, cultural, religious, political, economic, environmental, and personal belief systems. This vast diversity of values and priorities inevitably leads to equally diverse opinions on who or what should pay for preventing or experiencing climate change, how much they should pay, when, and in what form. Ultimately, the challenge to all is to determine the extent to which we will be able to contribute to limiting the magnitude of this problem so as to preserve the quality of life for many future generations of life on earth.

The observed increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases since the industrial period, due to human activities, is very likely causing the warming of the climate system. Anthropogenic warming and rising sea levels will continue for centuries due to the time scales associated with climate processes and feedbacks. Even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, different types of adaptation measures are needed to cope with the inevitable change. At the same time mitigation measures aiming at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing carbon sinks must be taken in order to reduce the potential extent of global warming. This chapter covers the main aspects of the current understanding of the physical basis of climate change, including the directly measured observations and estimated projections for the 21st century. Causes and effects of climate change are also addressed. Finally, the main uncertainties of climate projections and a few general considerations on the different ways to respond to the climate change issue are discussed.