Global Environmental Change最新文献

Research has frequently found that less-educated citizens are more skeptical about climate change and show less trust in climate science than their more-educated counterparts. We advance insights on why this educational divide exists by: 1) scrutinizing the relevance of the dominant knowledge-deficit explanation by uniquely using an objective measure of scientific knowledge; and 2) theorizing and empirically testing a novel explanation on the importance of subjective social status. Building on recent sociological insights, we theorize that less-educated citizens have a lower subjective social status and feel misrecognized by more-educated citizens, inciting frustration and opposition toward the attitudes and lifestyle of the latter. Because belief in and concern about climate change are predominantly embraced by more-educated citizens and have strong status connotations, less-educated citizens’ opposition to the lifestyle of more-educated citizens is likely also directed at the issue of climate change. We test hypotheses derived from both approaches by analyzing unique survey data gathered among members of a high-quality panel representative of the Dutch population. We focus on two outcome measures: climate change skepticism and distrust in climate science. We find that both the knowledge-deficit approach and the novel explanation involving subjective social status contribute to understanding the educational divide in climate change attitudes, in addition to other approaches covered by control variables such as income and political ideology. Our study concludes with a reflection on the theoretical implications of these findings and their practical implications for information campaigns, which our study suggests should be careful not to prime less-educated citizens’ perceived lower social standing.

This study investigates the relationship between a creation-oriented culture and environmental, social, and governance activities in Chinese listed companies between 2008 and 2022. We conduct a textual analysis of firms’ annual reports to quantify the creation-oriented culture and environmental, social, and governance levels. The results reveal that a creation-oriented culture positively affects environmental, social, and governance activities. The findings also show that creation-oriented culture can positively affect environmental, social, and governance activities through the channels of corporate green innovation and chief executive officers’ career horizons. The findings of this study have implications for stakeholders and policymakers aiming to enhance environmental, social, and governance activities at the corporate level.

Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) are certification schemes, which offer a guarantee that labelled products comply with a related quality standard. They differ from the prevailing Third-Party Certification (TPC) because in a PGS, food system stakeholders are involved in the decision to award a label. With TPC, a single certification body takes the decision and certification costs may be too high to be borne by smallholder producers. According to PGS guidelines (IFOAM, 2019), shared rights to actively contribute to the inspections, participate in exclusion decisions for certification and to manage the contents of the standard are key features of a PGS. Producers have significantly more rights on the label in a PGS than in TPC. Each PGS has a specific governance structure, which reflects how they have adapted to their respective institutional environments. In this paper, we compare the distribution of power in TPC for the European organic label and four PGS, Nature & Progrès (N&P) in France; Ecovida Agroecology Network (EAN) in Brazil; Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) in the US; and Kilimo Hai (KH) in Tanzania. Drawing on the bundle of rights concept developed by Schlager and Ostrom (1992), we discuss how the common property regimes in PGS have potential for bridging the gap between organic labels and their users. We describe each governance structure, by drawing on data from in-depth interviews with key informants and on the analysis of framework documents and regulatory texts specific to each initiative. We show that the distribution of stakeholders’ rights varies considerably between the different PGS. Similar to the commons, these differences can impact the label’s legitimacy, the PGS members’ involvement and mobilization, and the effectiveness of the rules relating to implementation and compliance.

The global steel sector is responsible for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting the need for significant changes in production practices and the adoption of low-carbon breakthrough technologies to achieve net-zero emissions. This study was conducted to explore positive tipping points at the company level, taking into account socio-political, economic and industry pressures that initiate the tipping process. The study operationalizes tipping points using the Triple Embededdness Framework, which incorporates indicators from the socio-political and economic environment, as well as the industry regime of companies. An analysis is performed of secondary data from four steel companies: BlueScope (Australia), POSCO (South Korea), voestalpine (Austria), and U.S. Steel (USA). The findings indicate that voestalpine is on the verge of reaching a positive tipping point, and POSCO is also on a promising track. In contrast, both BlueScope and U.S. Steel are lagging behind. In the tipping process, national policies play a critical role in expediting the transition to low-carbon steel production for frontrunners, while global climate policy has a greater leverage by influencing producers who operate in a less stringent national policy context. Additionally, the customer demand for low-carbon steel serves as a driving force for innovation and can incentivize steelmakers to produce low-carbon products.

Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its mitigation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of contextual nuance widely acknowledged to be required for effective and just conservation action. To address these challenges, we have developed a conceptually consistent, scalable land system typology and demonstrated its usefulness for the world's tropical dry woodlands. Our typology identifies key land-use actors and activities that represent typical threats to biodiversity and opportunities for conservation action. We identified land systems in a hierarchical way, with a global level allowing for broad-scale planning and comparative work. Nested within it, a regionalized level provides social-ecological specificity and context. We showcase this regionalization for five hotspots of land-use change and biodiversity loss in dry woodlands in Argentina, Bolivia, Mozambique, India, and Cambodia. Unlike other approaches to present land use, our typology accounts for the complexity of overlapping land uses. This allows, for example, assessment of how conservation measures conflict with other land uses, understanding of the social-ecological co-benefits and trade-offs of area-based conservation, mapping of threats, or targeting area-based and actor-based conservation measures. Moreover, our framework enables cross-regional learning by revealing both commonalities and social-ecological differences, as we demonstrate here for the world's tropical dry woodlands. By bridging the gap between global, top-down, and regional, bottom-up initiatives, our framework enables more contextually appropriate sustainability planning across scales and more targeted and social-ecologically nuanced interventions.

The occurrence of farmer suicides has come to symbolize what is likely widespread and deep, but often hidden, agrarian distress. While this tragic phenomena has attracted tremendous attention in public discourse, its primary drivers remain poorly understood. In particular, climatic stress is often considered to be one such driver, but the mechanisms through which it triggers suicide remain disputed. Here, we provide evidence that factors related to agricultural income mediate the impact of climatic variability on farmer suicides in India. An analysis of temporal variation in suicide occurrence reveals that droughts, which impact farmers’ incomes, increase male farmer suicides by 19%, but have much smaller and insignificant impacts on other occupational or demographic groups. Moreover, whereas suicides by non-farmers are evenly distributed throughout the year, farmer suicides are concentrated during the agricultural season. These results help shed light on the mechanisms driving some of the most extreme and drastic social impacts of climatic variability and change.

European coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs) face the intricate challenge of navigating destabilization-reconfiguration pathways, requiring a nuanced understanding of how phase-out intertwines with innovation and lock-in mechanisms. The success of this transformation depends on a multitude of factors, including socio-political, economic, and material conditions, as well as psychosocial and cultural dimensions of place. This study examines how feedback loops between structural factors (i.e., socio-political, socio-economic, and infrastructural) and sense of place can either disrupt or reinforce lock-in mechanisms and path dependency in CCIRs. The study focuses on Sulcis CCIR (Sardinia, Italy), where extractive and metal industries are deeply ingrained in the region's culture and economy. To reconstruct the trajectory of the CCIR and gain in depth understanding of feedback mechanisms of path dependency across time, we triangulate different data sources including policy documents, newspapers, participatory workshops, and interviews with key stakeholders. The findings reveal the profound influence of a sense of place grounded in a shared industrial myth along with associated place meanings, identities, and memories on lock-in mechanisms. Positive feedback loops between sense of place and structural factors of lock-in have legitimated the dominance of coal and carbon-intensive industries across time, impeding the recognition of the need for change and obscuring windows of opportunity for low-carbon transformation. Following the definite destabilization of coal, dominant place meanings are being actively challenged, while the legacy of sense of place is serving as a guiding frame for shaping the legitimacy and imaginaries of place transformation and defining a just transition pathway. The study discusses the importance of recognizing and addressing the role of sense of place and its interaction with structural factors in perpetuating lock-in to ensure effective deliberate destabilization efforts and navigate a just reconfiguration of CCIRs.

In light of societal shifts such as an aging population, delayed marriages, and higher rates of divorce, there's a notable rise in solitary living, affecting society, the economy, and the environment. To understand the implications of these demographic shifts, our research examines the nexus between solo living and its broader social-environmental consequences. Using Japan, one of the countries with the highest proportion of the elderly, as a reference, we explore the temporal fluctuations, gender-specific variances, and long-term trends in carbon footprints influenced by alterations in consumption behaviors. Results indicate that housing energy and food consumption remain the dominant carbon footprint contributors across all demographic sectors. Interestingly, single households present higher carbon footprints than non-single households, with those of single females surpassing their male counterparts due to increased household energy use and expenditures on clothing and healthcare. Following the demographic shifts, single households are expected to account for approximately 31.1% of Japan's emissions from households by 2040, challenging national decarbonization efforts due to their higher per capita emissions. This highlights the imperative for bespoke strategies, especially in resource allocation and sharing, to address the solo living challenge and ensure congruence with Japan's sustainability and decarbonization goals.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, considered as a pivotal tool in mitigating climate change within the fossil energy system, particularly in China, has experienced slower development than expected. The exploration of direct incentive policies to facilitate its growth remains relatively underdeveloped. This study developed a hybrid dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the substantial impacts of CCS incentive policies on China within the context of carbon neutrality target. Two potential incentive policies, carbon emission trading system (ETS) and 45Q tax credit, were simulated, with different sectoral coverage. The results indicate that CCS technologies can reduce carbon emissions by 960 ∼ 1,604 MtCO₂ annually by 2060 through the strategic implementation of these incentive policies. The 45Q tax credit demonstrates its effectiveness in promoting early-stage research and development (R&D) and demonstration of CCS, while the ETS policy facilitates the commercial development of CCS in the later stage of development. By 2060, the implementation of CCS incentive policies could potentially result in 7.7 ∼ 17.4 % reduction in China’s primary energy consumption, 71.2 ∼ 82.7 % decrease in the carbon price of ETS and 5.64 ∼ 6.59 % increase in the GDP compared with the no-policy scenario. In addition, the sectoral output in various sectors and the welfare of urban and rural households also increase. This paper provides an important reference for the realization of China’s carbon neutrality goal and the model framework can be applied to other countries.

As individuals and households have increasingly suffered the effects of climate change, substantial research has focused on understanding behavioral adaptation, the process of individuals and households responding to climate change to reduce future risk and improve well-being. However, this research is limited by the challenge of evaluating adaptation and differentiating it from coping. The theoretical literature suggests that planned, proactive, and transformative responses are more consistent with the concept of adaptation, while autonomous, reactive, and incremental efforts are more consistent with the concept of coping. We developed an index based on these features for evaluating behavioral responses to climate change in terms of coping and adaptation. We tested the index with a regression model of variables theorized to foster adaptation. Our empirical context was small woodland owners responding to climate change-related stressors (storms, insect and disease outbreaks, winter thaws, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires) by managing their forests in the Northwoods, USA. We found that a small but notable proportion of the owners exhibited behavior more consistent with adaptation than coping. A larger proportion of owners exhibited behavior more consistent with coping than adaptation. The greatest proportion exhibited mixed coping-adaptation behavior, confirming theories that coping and adaptation occur on a continuum, with interplay between the two. We also found the regression model explained how consistent their responses were with adaptation relative to coping. Our findings advance scholarly understanding of behavioral adaptation and how to evaluate it more consistently and coherently. Our findings also enhance practical understanding of how small woodland owners adapt to climate change.