This paper presents a detailed analysis of a composite Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) to examine and compare climate change vulnerability and its dimensions adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure. Thereby, we are mainly interested on climate change vulnerability at community-level watershed development programmes and how the different implementing agencies could help to address the problems associated with climate change in future planning and implementation. The primary data used for this study was obtained from household surveys (n=215) in three watershed communities of Kerala, India. We use bootstrap sampling and a leave-one-out sensitivity analysis to compare the climate vulnerability of the three examined watersheds in detail. By introducing the bootstrapping method and sensitivity analysis into the research field of climate vulnerability, the paper describes significant differences in CVI values and the influencing indicators to the overall vulnerability at the watershed community level. The results show that there are significant differences in the exposure and sensitivity dimensions of vulnerability even if the overall CVI shows less variability and no significant differences among the three watersheds. The sensitivity analysis emphasizes that ‘Livelihood Strategies’ and ‘Social Network’ are the most influencing major components of vulnerability. This suggests that implementing agencies should focus on these two major components in order to improve the watershed development programmes. The bootstrapping approach is transferable to evaluate the degree of influence of indicators on a composite index like the CVI. Moreover, it allows us to evaluate the potential effectiveness of various other climate change programmes where the evaluation is commonly done by field surveys. This thereby helps to increase the credibility in the examination of the impacts of climate change at different scales in order to find key areas for better policy planning.

We focus on how different global temperature increases represented in IPCC reports have shifted over time. While the first four assessment reports had a roughly equal focus on temperatures above and below 2°C, the more recent fifth and sixth assessment reports have a considerably stronger focus on warming below 2°C. This is concerning as warming above 2°C is more likely given current emissions trajectories and is more influential on climate risk assessments.

India ranks first among the rainfed agricultural countries in the world. The impact of changing climate threatens rainfed food production as well as the food security of millions of people in the tropics and subtropics. The Government of India initiated Watershed Development Programmes (WDPs) for the overall development of these areas. We, therefore, established a comprehensive, location-specific, bottom-up tool to analyse and compare the climate vulnerability of watershed areas. For this, we deducted a new Climate Vulnerability Index for Rainfed Tropics (CVI^RFT) to evaluate the potential effectiveness of programmes to adapt to climate change impacts. The CVI^RFT comprises of three dimensions of vulnerability, i.e., adaptive capacity, exposure and sensitivity. These dimensions consist of ten major components and 59 indicators with emphasis on rainfed farming and WDP interventions. To test the tool, we collected primary data through household surveys (n = 215, split among three watershed communities) in Kerala. We show that there were strong variations in the exposure dimension, moderate in sensitivity and negligible in adaptive capacity across the watersheds. After analysing the major components under the dimensions, we suggest focusing on policy orientation towards redesigning of the WDPs with emphasis to economic diversification, livelihood strategies, social networking coupled with stakeholder participation, natural resource management and risk spread through credit and insurance flexibility. The CVI^RFT is replicable to similar physio-geographic areas of rainfed farming, with the refinement of indicators suited to the locality.

Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) provide a platform for participating countries to share their experiences, failures, and successes in achieving the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The objective of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of the narrative elements, particularly the sentiment, in VNRs in order to more effectively assess and support global SDG progress. A total of 232 VNRs from 166 countries are analyzed using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to extract each country’s sentiment toward the 17 SDGs. The sentiment scores are then compared to the corresponding official UN SDG scores, and countries are grouped by their sentiment toward all 17 SDGs to identify potential common development pathways. The analysis uncovers a notable positive correlation between the reported sentiment and official SDG scores for SDG 2 (zero hunger) and SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), and a negative correlation for SDG 5 (gender equality). Conversely, this relationship is not significant for the majority of SDGs, suggesting that VNR narratives may not directly reflect actual progress. A t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) approach indicates a consistent sentiment score among developed countries. In contrast, there are greater differences in reporting sentiment among Emerging Markets, Frontier Markets, and Least Developed Countries (LDCs), where there is greater dispersion (especially among LDCs) and sentiment in reporting on SDG progress that appears to have changed from one reporting year to another. These findings highlight the need to interpret VNRs in the context of each country’s unique situation and challenges specific to each country.