Chapter 4 develops a framework for understanding how multinational corporations (MNCs) manage climate risks. It identifies five distinct strategies: accepting the risk as a cost of doing business, adapting through proactive investments or compliance measures, transferring risk to other actors, diversifying operations geographically, and avoiding risk by limiting exposure to vulnerable regions. After outlining the logic and trade-offs of each approach, the chapter investigates whether firms systematically avoid the countries that are most exposed to climate threats. Using cross-national data on foreign direct investment, the analysis explores variation across sectors and dimensions of climate vulnerability, such as ecosystem, infrastructure, and water-related risks. The findings demonstrate that MNCs avoid climate-vulnerable countries, while also showing that firms’ risk management strategies vary by sector and climate risk type.

This chapter explores the psychological impacts of climate change, focusing on how communities adjust to disruptions in place caused by extreme events. It argues that global adaptation frameworks, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, often overlook psychological factors such as grief, place attachment, and the need to repurpose or redefine damaged environments. Drawing on examples from Australia and the United States, the chapter shows how these psychological dimensions shape community resilience, adaptation, and collective action. By critically examining existing adaptation policies, it identifies significant gaps in acknowledging the central role of psychology in shaping sustainable responses. The chapter advocates for integrating psychological insights into policymaking and community engagement to support more effective, equitable climate strategies. Ultimately, it stresses that recognising these relationships with place is essential for addressing the difficult choices that arise when beloved environments become unliveable due to escalating climate risks.

This chapter selects two case studies to examine the presence of global experimentalist governance in ocean acidification governance: the Ocean Acidification Alliance and the International Maritime Organization. The selection distinguishes between ‘suitable’ institutions (addressing one OA activity) and those with ‘significant potential’ (addressing multiple activities within one concern or across concerns). Using a comprehensive table that maps actors and instruments, the chapter analyses how institutions address OA’s three concerns: causes (CO2, NOx/SOx), stressors (e.g., climate change, pollution, and fishing), and adaptation (blue carbon, marine protected areas, and fisheries management). Most institutions show significant potential by addressing concerns in depth and/or breadth. The OA Alliance was selected as the only institution explicitly focused on OA, addressing CO2 emissions and coastal activities. The IMO was chosen for its role in shipping emissions (both CO2 and NOx/SOx) and broader pollution control mandate. These cases differ in legalisation levels and institutional structure, providing diverse perspectives on experimentalist governance challenges. Both have significant potential and focus on CO2, the primary OA driver, making them ideal candidates for testing the implementation of global experimentalist governance.

Ocean acidification (OA) science has rapidly developed since 2005; however, international action remains limited. This chapter explains the complex scientific background of OA to non-scientists. OA is measured on a logarithmic pH scale, with oceans becoming 40 per cent more acidic since pre-industrial times. Three groups of compounds contribute to acidification: CO2 (the primary driver), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and sulphur oxides (SOx). These substances enter the oceans through various means, such as anthropogenic emissions, geoengineering, coastal activities, and scrubber effluents from ships. Additional ocean stressors, such as climate change, pollution, and overfishing, compound the effects of OA, making adaptation more challenging. OA threatens calcifying organisms such as corals and oysters, disrupts food webs, and impacts human ecosystem services valued at potentially $1 trillion annually by 2100. Adaptation options include blue carbon ecosystems, marine protected areas, and fisheries management. The issue encompasses ocean, atmosphere, and land systems across multiple timescales and spatial levels, necessitating diverse governance approaches that address both global CO2 emissions and local stressors.

One of the riddles of human communication is interlocutors’ ability to adapt to “noisy” inputs. It is argued that it is the interpersonal coordination of rhythmic structure underlying this ability, which can be selectively activated. This process is described as a set of mechanisms operating on linguistic and phonetic structures: Interaction Phonology. Interaction phonology provides the necessary scaffold for enabling an alignment of phonetic-phonological and potentially also higher-order linguistic representations. This coordination process relies on the rhythmic structure of the individual language or register pertaining to the ongoing communication. That way, interlocutors can attend to relevant phonetic detail unveiling higher-order symbolic information and adapt their own rhythmic pattern to enhance mutual comprehension. The testable predictions of Interaction Phonology are discussed in the light of recent empirical evidence, and the initial version of Interaction Phonology is modified: Perception–production coupling is marked as optional, and the automaticity between rhythmic entrainment and higher-order symbolic alignment is questioned.

One of the remarkable characteristics of spoken language is that it is constantly undergoing change. The plasticity of sound patterns, that is, their susceptibility to short- and long-term changes, is driven by processes of mutual adaptation during conversational interactions and thereby reflects a constant interplay of perceptual and motor processes of spoken language. Existing models of speech motor control largely neglect the environment-driven phonetic plasticity by focusing on single-person accounts of spoken language production. This chapter addresses the roles of cortical and subcortical structures in the accommodation of speakers and listeners in interactive language use. It reviews investigations of the propensity of patients with different neurologic conditions to align with or adapt to others’ speech, with a particular focus on the role of speech rhythm.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen’s relationship to audiovisual art forms. Given Bowen’s own relative lack of interest in film, one may wonder why adaptation should be included in an overall analysis of her work and its impact. One argument is largely commercial: be it through television, film, or radio, dramatisations of Bowen’s works contribute to increased public scrutiny of her fiction. For those already familiar with Bowen’s fiction, adaptations revitalise readings of her fiction. How her texts correspond to traditions and tropes of other media tells us much about the interplay of genres – from novel of manners and social satire to spy story or historical fiction – as they manifest themselves in the traditions of those media. Ultimately, an adaptation is also an interpretation and analysis of its source text. This examination of adaptations focuses on The Last September and The Heat of the Day, two of Bowen’s most-read works. These adaptations are the best known and most accessible audiovisual adaptations of her fiction.

While living in exile in a divided Berlin after the 1973 military coup and Pablo Neruda’s death twelve days later, Antonio Skármeta created his own version of Neruda in Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience), a humane image of the poet that contrasted with the one-dimensional communist martyr projected after his death. Skármeta wrote the base story for four different media under the same title: a radio drama, a play, a film, and a novel. The story has since been freely adapted by others, such as Michael Radford’s film Il Postino (The Postman), Daniel Catán’s opera, with Plácido Domingo as Neruda, and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s recent film released by Netflix. Aside from clarifying the confusion in the critical bibliography regarding these multiple stories, this chapter focuses on Skármeta’s two media versions of Ardiente paciencia, the play and the film, to show how a single artistic creation can captivate audiences worldwide.

This chapter surveys modern experiences with irregular warfare from the Second World War until today. Specific attention is paid to the ‘golden age of counterinsurgency’ during the Cold War as well as its more recent ‘renaissance’ and expansion, to include counterterrorism, in Iraq, Afghanistan and globally. The themes here are continuity and change: the former in the shape of relatively unchanging principles based on best practices, and the latter in terms of organisational adaptation, most frequently in the form of specialised units. The chapter identifies and explores four pathologies related to irregular warfare that make countering or conducting it difficult, including mistaking ways for ends, politicisation, over-inflating or mirror-imaging an opponent and the agency of groups too often assumed to be under your control. It concludes by addressing myths associated with specialised forces and irregular warfare and suggests that success results from understanding this form of warfare’s highly political nature.

This concluding chapter notes how changes in the strategic and intellectual environments have been reflected in the three editions of Understanding Modern Warfare. At the same time, it is noted that certain themes and principles have remained constant through all editions. This reflects warfare itself, which is characterised by continuity and change. To illustrate, the chapter identifies eleven constants and five areas of change. It is concluded that the art of war is, at least in part, concerned with finding an equilibrium between these two positions. The practitioner must adapt to change, while still respecting the enduring nature of war.