Abstract

The capacity to manage local climate change (LCC) effects will depend upon the stakeholders’ capacity to manage the data, information, interpretation, and knowledge (semiotics) about it. The stakeholders include governments, researchers, businesses, educators, non-government organizations (NGOs), and the people affected by and affecting the LCC. The public managers must build this semiotics management capacity among the stakeholders to minimize a locality’s vulnerability to LCC, and to handle the associated uncertainty and ambiguity. It is a complex, ill-structured task. The locality must be resilient in the face of LCC – it will have to resist, respond to, recover from, restore, and be renascent to the effects. The LCC effects themselves may be a combination of agricultural, coastal, ecological, hydrological, human health, land use, and meteorological effects. The capacity to manage the semiotics of LCC effects will depend upon the infrastructure, organizations, systems, policies, and procedures (informatics structure) to acquire, store, retrieve, process, distribute, and delete (informatics functions) for the four elements of semiotics. The above logic is encapsulated in the ontological framework below. The first three columns represent the structure, functions, and semiotics dimensions of informatics. The next two columns represent the stakeholders and resilience dimensions of management. The last column represents the LLC effects. The concatenation of an element from each column with the connectors in between is a natural English statement of a component of the problem. There are 99,000 possible components – some of them may be meaningless or irrelevant. The framework articulates the combinatorial complexity of the public managers’ problem and the large number of components they must address to build the necessary capacity. The paper will present a systematic review of the global scientific literature on LCC effects management. It will highlight the frequently emphasized, infrequently emphasized, and ignored areas in policy research on the topic. It will analyze the potential reasons for and the consequences of the different emphases. It will conclude with a roadmap for future research. The framework will also help coordinate the multi-level governance necessary to manage LCC effects.