Climate resilience and sustainability: Objectives and aspirations

We are pleased to present Climate Resilience and Sustainability (CRS), an exciting new journal that is right for this decade and this century. The journal is online only and open access, reflecting our goal to make the papers available to everyone. We are aiming for fast publication, while ensuring a robust peer-review process. The journal is published as a joint effort between the Royal Meteorological Society and Wiley.

With accelerating climate change and impacts, effective action requires bringing together sound knowledge from multiple disciplines as well as “on the ground” practice. CRS aims to publish such interdisciplinary research and practice to scale-up solutions and actions. We would also like to receive papers that reflect action research and co-production of knowledge.

Our motivation to establish this journal reflects the change in focus over the past few decades from physical aspects of climate science to solutions for climate resilient and sustainable development. In the early 1980s, the focus of climate change research was on detecting the changes in the atmosphere and ocean, and on using models to understand these changes. Sophisticated models were developed for the atmosphere–ocean systems to understand and to project the likely changes on specific variables such as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration, air/ocean temperatures, and precipitation. By the early 1990s, the changes in the atmosphere–ocean systems were shown to be affecting societies and ecosystems. To reflect this, by the late 1990s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the change to the title of Working Group II Report from “Impacts, Adaptations and Mitigation of Climate Change: Scientific-Technical Analyses” to “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.” This heralded an increased focus on vulnerability, resilience and sustainability of people, ecosystems, and economies. IPCC Working Group II and the IPCC Synthesis Reports also highlighted the need for climate resilient and sustainable development pathways. In other discussion within the United Nations, the Millennium Development Goals evolved into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Collectively this strengthened the emphasis on sustainability and climate resilience as part of the ambitions for development of all countries.

These three categories also aim to bring together researchers and practitioners across a range of relevant disciplines into a single readership. We are certain that such a process will help find timely resilient solutions for our world that is being affected by escalating impacts of climate change and development activities.

CRS is also planning to publish special issues that focus on challenges and resilient solutions in specific countries or regions and on specific sectors. We already have a range of special issues being planned and in production, for example, country level research and assessment toward climate resilient solutions in Brazil, China, and the UK. There are also topic-based special issues planned. These include one on “Is or should climate resilient development be distinguished from ‘good’ and sustainable development?” Also, one on “How and who should pay for the cost of climate resilience?”, as countries and communities implement solutions to the increasing impacts of climate change onto their development?

As Editors-in-Chief, we are very pleased to have an international, diverse, multidisciplinary, and distinguished Editorial Board for this journal. We are also delighted to have an Advisory Panel of international leaders in multiple and relevant fields to guide the direction of the journal. We look forward to receiving your papers in CRS—an open access journal that accepts submissions in free format—with a robust peer-review process. We would also welcome receiving ideas for special issues.