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Impacts of climate change on natural and human systems will become increasingly severe as the magnitude of climate change increases. Climate change adaptation interventions to address current and projected impacts are thus paramount. Yet, evidence on their effectiveness remains limited, highlighting the need for appropriate ecological indicators to measure progress of climate change adaptation for the natural environment. We outline conceptual, analytical, and practical challenges in developing such indicators, before proposing a framework with three process-based and two results-based indicator types to track progress in adapting to climate change. We emphasize the importance of dynamic assessment and modification over time, as new adaptation targets are set and/or as intervention actions are monitored and evaluated. Our framework and proposed indicators are flexible and widely applicable across species, habitats, and monitoring programmes, and could be accommodated within existing national or international frameworks to enable the evaluation of both large-scale policy instruments and local management interventions. We conclude by suggesting further work required to develop these indicators fully, and hope this will stimulate the use of ecological indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of policy interventions for the adaptation of the natural environment across the globe.

European physical journal special topics 228(2), 261-623 (2019). doi:10.1140/epjst/e2019-900045-4 Published by Springer, Berlin ; Heidelberg

Buildings account for over one-third of global emissions and energy use. Meeting climate pledges will require achieving high operational energy efficiency with low embodied impacts in new construction. Yet, a systematic identification of the relative influence of building design parameters on both operational and embodied efficiencies has rarely been attempted. In this paper we explore for the first time the sensitivity of a wide range of design and operation parameters in terms of embodied carbon, construction cost, as well as heating and cooling loads for multi-storey buildings. We devised a model to estimate the relative importance of a large set of input variables, describing a building’s shape, size, layout, structure, ventilation, windows, insulation, air, and use for residential and office multi-storey buildings, across different climates. We found that increasing building compactness, using steel or timber instead of concrete frames, lowering window-to-wall ratio, choosing the most suitable glazing, and employing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery are the most important measures to decrease embodied emissions and operational energy. The most significant trade-offs with construction cost were found for the choice of frame material and in the decision whether to install mechanical ventilation. We estimate that 28–44% of yearly heating and cooling energy and 6 Gt cumulative embodied CO2e until 2050 could be saved in multi-storey buildings, without employing new technologies.