Christopher B Field
Biographic Data
| ID | 4870281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher B Field |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher B |
| FAMILY NAME | Field |
| SIGNATURE | FIELD C B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carnegie Institution for Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1684-8247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Towards environmental justice: A framework and strategic approach for implementing community based participatory research in the earth and environmental sciences
Enabling pathways for sustainable livelihoods in planned relocation
The planned relocation of entire communities to less hazard-exposed destinations is an increasingly salient climate change adaptation strategy but often results in maladaptive livelihood outcomes. There needs to be understanding of how planning decisions affect outcomes—relocated people’s access to sustainable livelihoods, including physical, economic, natural, human, social and cultural assets. Here, drawing on data from 14 completed flood-relat…
Enhancing the review process in global environmental assessments: The case of the IPCC
External review is a fundamental component of Global Environmental Assessments, ensuring their processes are comprehensive, objective, open and transparent, and are perceived as such. Here, we focus on review of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports. The review process has received little scrutiny, although review comments and author responses are public. Here we analyse review documents from the Fourth and Fifth Ass…
Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests
Risks to mitigation potential of forests Much recent attention has focused on the potential of trees and forests to mitigate ongoing climate change by acting as sinks for carbon. Anderegg et al. review the growing evidence that forests' climate mitigation potential is increasingly at risk from a range of adversities that limit forest growth and health. These include physical factors such as drought and fire and biotic factors, including the depre…
Factors influencing adoption and rejection of fire hazard severity zone maps in California
Community wildfire preparedness programs are an important means of protecting residents living in hazardous areas like the wildland-urban interface. Different programs rely on various sets of drivers, such as legal enforcement or engaged citizens. Here, sociopolitical motivations and barriers for participation are evaluated in a state-recommended, though not legally required, local program in California (Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones). Thr…
Reply to: Practical constraints on atmospheric methane removal
Barriers and enablers for prescribed burns for wildfire management in California
Managed retreat through voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties
Experiences with voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties provide lessons for managed retreat under climate change.
Methane removal and atmospheric restoration
Net-zero emissions energy systems
Path to zero carbon emissions Models show that to avert dangerous levels of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions must fall to zero later this century. Most of these emissions arise from energy use. Davis et al. review what it would take to achieve decarbonization of the energy system. Some parts of the energy system are particularly difficult to decarbonize, including aviation, long-distance transport, steel and cement production, and …
Unprecedented rates of land-use transformation in modelled climate change mitigation pathways
Managed retreat as a response to natural hazard risk
Unleashing expert judgment in assessment
Assessment evaluates accumulated knowledge and its limits. It informs and ideally empowers decisions and actions on complex, contested issues with persistent uncertainties. Applying rigorous expert judgment is an important dimension of assessment. Here we evaluate advances and challenges in approaches to expert judgment in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5). We find that revised guidance for author …
Summary for Policymakers
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Emergent Risks and Key Vulnerabilities
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Water, Climate, Energy, Food: Inseparable & Indispensable
Water issues are rarely simple. At the global scale, water is at the focus of a powerful multifaceted challenge. Demands for both consumptive and nonconsumptive uses are growing, while climate change is at the same time decreasing availability in some places and increasing risks of heavy precipitation in many others. Through diverse mechanisms that interact with natural processes, human activities impact not only the quantity of water available b…
Climate Change 2014 Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
This latest Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will again form the standard reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences, including students, researchers and policy makers in environmental science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy
Seasonal energy storage using bioenergy production from abandoned croplands
Bioenergy has the unique potential to provide a dispatchable and carbon-negative component to renewable energy portfolios. However, the sustainability, spatial distribution, and capacity for bioenergy are critically dependent on highly uncertain land-use impacts of biomass agriculture. Biomass cultivation on abandoned agriculture lands is thought to reduce land-use impacts relative to biomass production on currently used croplands. While coarse g…
Modeling the impact of carbon farming on land use in a New Zealand landscape
Summary for Policymakers
This Summary for Policymakers presents key findings from the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX). The SREX approaches the topic by assessing the scientific literature on issues that range from the relationship between climate change and extreme weather and climate events ("climate extremes") to the implications of these events for society and sustainable development. The…
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SREX) explores the challenge of understanding and managing the risks of climate extremes to advance climate change adaptation. Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. Changes in the frequency and severity of the physical events affect disaster risk, but so do the spatially diverse and temporally…
Agricultural net primary production in relation to that liberated by the extinction of Pleistocene mega-herbivores: An estimate of agricultural carrying capacity
Mega-fauna (defined as animals > 44 kg) experienced a global extinction with 97 of 150 genera going extinct by ∼ 10 000 years ago. We estimate the net primary production (NPP) that was liberated following the global extinction of these mega-herbivores. We then explore how humans, through agriculture, gradually appropriated this liberated NPP, with specific calculations for 800, 1850, and 2000 AD. By 1850, most of the liberated NPP had been approp…
The velocity of climate change
Crop Yield Gaps: Their Importance, Magnitudes, and Causes
Future trajectories of food prices, food security, and cropland expansion are closely linked to future average crop yields in the major agricultural regions of the world. Because the maximum possible yields achieved in farmers' fields might level off or even decline in many regions over the next few decades, reducing the gap between average and potential yields is critical. In most major irrigated wheat, rice, and maize systems, yields appear to …
Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle
Thawing permafrost and the resulting microbial decomposition of previously frozen organic carbon (C) is one of the most significant potential feedbacks from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere in a changing climate. In this article we present an overview of the global permafrost C pool and of the processes that might transfer this C into the atmosphere, as well as the associated ecosystem changes that occur with thawing. We show that account…
Unleashing expert judgment in assessment
Assessment evaluates accumulated knowledge and its limits. It informs and ideally empowers decisions and actions on complex, contested issues with persistent uncertainties. Applying rigorous expert judgment is an important dimension of assessment. Here we evaluate advances and challenges in approaches to expert judgment in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5). We find that revised guidance for author …
Enhancing the review process in global environmental assessments: The case of the IPCC
External review is a fundamental component of Global Environmental Assessments, ensuring their processes are comprehensive, objective, open and transparent, and are perceived as such. Here, we focus on review of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports. The review process has received little scrutiny, although review comments and author responses are public. Here we analyse review documents from the Fourth and Fifth Ass…
Modeling the impact of carbon farming on land use in a New Zealand landscape
Barriers and enablers for prescribed burns for wildfire management in California
Agricultural net primary production in relation to that liberated by the extinction of Pleistocene mega-herbivores: An estimate of agricultural carrying capacity
Mega-fauna (defined as animals > 44 kg) experienced a global extinction with 97 of 150 genera going extinct by ∼ 10 000 years ago. We estimate the net primary production (NPP) that was liberated following the global extinction of these mega-herbivores. We then explore how humans, through agriculture, gradually appropriated this liberated NPP, with specific calculations for 800, 1850, and 2000 AD. By 1850, most of the liberated NPP had been approp…
Unprecedented rates of land-use transformation in modelled climate change mitigation pathways
Water, Climate, Energy, Food: Inseparable & Indispensable
Water issues are rarely simple. At the global scale, water is at the focus of a powerful multifaceted challenge. Demands for both consumptive and nonconsumptive uses are growing, while climate change is at the same time decreasing availability in some places and increasing risks of heavy precipitation in many others. Through diverse mechanisms that interact with natural processes, human activities impact not only the quantity of water available b…
Terrestrial ecosystem production: A process model based on global satellite and surface data
This paper presents a modeling approach aimed at seasonal resolution of global climatic and edaphic controls on patterns of terrestrial ecosystem production and soil microbial respiration. We use satellite imagery (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer and International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project solar radiation), along with historical climate (monthly temperature and precipitation) and soil attributes (texture, C and N contents) from…
Primary Production of the Biosphere: Integrating Terrestrial and Oceanic Components
Integrating conceptually similar models of the growth of marine and terrestrial primary producers yielded an estimated global net primary production (NPP) of 104.9 petagrams of carbon per year, with roughly equal contributions from land and oceans. Approaches based on satellite indices of absorbed solar radiation indicate marked heterogeneity in NPP for both land and oceans, reflecting the influence of physical and ecological processes. The spati…
Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges
In a seminal paper, Garrett Hardin argued in 1968 that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend. This article discusses new insights about such problems and the conditions most likely to favor sustainable uses of common-pool resources. Some of the most difficult challenges concern the management of large-scale resources that depend on international cooperation, such…
Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO 2 emissions
CO 2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1% y −1 for 1990–1999 to >3% y −1 for 2000–2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s. Global emissions growth since 2000 was driven by a cessation or re…
Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO 2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks
The growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), the largest human contributor to human-induced climate change, is increasing rapidly. Three processes contribute to this rapid increase. Two of these processes concern emissions. Recent growth of the world economy combined with an increase in its carbon intensity have led to rapid growth in fossil fuel CO 2 emissions since 2000: comparing the 1990s with 2000–2006, the emissions growth rate in…
Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming
Changes in the global production of major crops are important drivers of food prices, food security and land use decisions. Average global yields for these commodities are determined by the performance of crops in millions of fields distributed across a range of management, soil and climate regimes. Despite the complexity of global food supply, here we show that simple measures of growing season temperatures and precipitation—spatial averages bas…
Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle
Thawing permafrost and the resulting microbial decomposition of previously frozen organic carbon (C) is one of the most significant potential feedbacks from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere in a changing climate. In this article we present an overview of the global permafrost C pool and of the processes that might transfer this C into the atmosphere, as well as the associated ecosystem changes that occur with thawing. We show that account…
Protecting climate with forests
Policies for climate mitigation on land rarely acknowledge biophysical factors, such as reflectivity, evaporation, and surface roughness. Yet such factors can alter temperatures much more than carbon sequestration does, and often in a conflicting way. We outline a framework for examining biophysical factors in mitigation policies and provide some best-practice recommendations based on that framework. Tropical projects—avoided deforestation, fores…
The velocity of climate change
Crop Yield Gaps: Their Importance, Magnitudes, and Causes
Future trajectories of food prices, food security, and cropland expansion are closely linked to future average crop yields in the major agricultural regions of the world. Because the maximum possible yields achieved in farmers' fields might level off or even decline in many regions over the next few decades, reducing the gap between average and potential yields is critical. In most major irrigated wheat, rice, and maize systems, yields appear to …
Agricultural net primary production in relation to that liberated by the extinction of Pleistocene mega-herbivores: An estimate of agricultural carrying capacity
Mega-fauna (defined as animals > 44 kg) experienced a global extinction with 97 of 150 genera going extinct by ∼ 10 000 years ago. We estimate the net primary production (NPP) that was liberated following the global extinction of these mega-herbivores. We then explore how humans, through agriculture, gradually appropriated this liberated NPP, with specific calculations for 800, 1850, and 2000 AD. By 1850, most of the liberated NPP had been approp…
Summary for Policymakers
This Summary for Policymakers presents key findings from the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX). The SREX approaches the topic by assessing the scientific literature on issues that range from the relationship between climate change and extreme weather and climate events ("climate extremes") to the implications of these events for society and sustainable development. The…
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SREX) explores the challenge of understanding and managing the risks of climate extremes to advance climate change adaptation. Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. Changes in the frequency and severity of the physical events affect disaster risk, but so do the spatially diverse and temporally…
Seasonal energy storage using bioenergy production from abandoned croplands
Bioenergy has the unique potential to provide a dispatchable and carbon-negative component to renewable energy portfolios. However, the sustainability, spatial distribution, and capacity for bioenergy are critically dependent on highly uncertain land-use impacts of biomass agriculture. Biomass cultivation on abandoned agriculture lands is thought to reduce land-use impacts relative to biomass production on currently used croplands. While coarse g…
Modeling the impact of carbon farming on land use in a New Zealand landscape
Climate Change 2014 Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
This latest Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will again form the standard reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences, including students, researchers and policy makers in environmental science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy
Summary for Policymakers
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Emergent Risks and Key Vulnerabilities
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Water, Climate, Energy, Food: Inseparable & Indispensable
Water issues are rarely simple. At the global scale, water is at the focus of a powerful multifaceted challenge. Demands for both consumptive and nonconsumptive uses are growing, while climate change is at the same time decreasing availability in some places and increasing risks of heavy precipitation in many others. Through diverse mechanisms that interact with natural processes, human activities impact not only the quantity of water available b…
Managed retreat as a response to natural hazard risk
Unleashing expert judgment in assessment
Assessment evaluates accumulated knowledge and its limits. It informs and ideally empowers decisions and actions on complex, contested issues with persistent uncertainties. Applying rigorous expert judgment is an important dimension of assessment. Here we evaluate advances and challenges in approaches to expert judgment in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5). We find that revised guidance for author …
Net-zero emissions energy systems
Path to zero carbon emissions Models show that to avert dangerous levels of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions must fall to zero later this century. Most of these emissions arise from energy use. Davis et al. review what it would take to achieve decarbonization of the energy system. Some parts of the energy system are particularly difficult to decarbonize, including aviation, long-distance transport, steel and cement production, and …
Unprecedented rates of land-use transformation in modelled climate change mitigation pathways
Managed retreat through voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties
Experiences with voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties provide lessons for managed retreat under climate change.
Methane removal and atmospheric restoration
Environmental Science (24 works) · Geography (17 works) · Climate change (16 works) · Business (13 works) · Environmental resource management (13 works) · Ecology (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Ecology (11 works) · Environmental planning (10 works) · Biology (9 works)