The intersection of climate variability and societal structures creates a complex landscape of risk that requires an interdisciplinary lens. While physical hazard modelling provides a necessary foundation, understanding the lived reality of climate change requires a deep dive into how climatic hazards and extreme events interact with socio-economic systems, structural and societal inequalities, as well as place-based vulnerabilities to amplify risks. There is an urgent need to move beyond traditional metrics to explore the climate -society nexus through localised insights and integrated frameworks that capture the distributional and systemic impacts of climate hazards across economies and societies.
This focus by IOP journal “Environmental Research: Climate” collection seeks to bridge the gap between the physical aspects of climate risk and their multi-dimensional socio-economic and distributional consequences. By focusing on the diverse ways in which communities experience and respond to climate impacts, this collection intends to highlight evidence-based pathways for risk reduction, equitable adaptation, and informed decision-making.
This focus collection invites contributions that:
- Present interdisciplinary methods for understanding and assessing socioeconomic impacts of climate change on the society.
- Explore socio-economic evaluations, including equity- and capability-based approaches, to understand how climate change affects households, communities, labour markets and economies.
- Showcase participatory and stakeholder methods (e.g., co-production processes, community-based consultations, Living Labs, scenario co-development) for designing climate risk pathways and transformative adaptation strategies.
Guest Editors
Francesco Bosello, Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) & Department of Environmental Sciences Informatics and Statistics Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Edward Byers, IIASA, Austria
Sarah Greenham, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Shreya Some, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark/ India
Nicholas Vasilakos, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
Aleš Urban, Czech University of Life Science Prague, Czech Republic
Zoi Vrontisi, E3-Modelling Energy-Economy-Environment, Greece
Submissions from all authors whose work fits with the scope of this focus collection are encouraged. The collection will also feature invited contributions. All focus collection articles are subject to the same review process as regular articles. Authors are invited to contact one of the guest editors, or the ERCL team (ercl@ioppublishing.org) directly, to discuss the suitability of their work prior to submission.
The target deadline for submissions is 31 October 2026.
For more information, visit the journal website