Global Environmental Change最新文献

The urgent need to address climate change requires widespread behavioural changes and structural reforms. However, the adoption of low-carbon practices is limited by individual, social and structural constraints. Carbon capability (CC) is an interdisciplinary, integrative framework which bridges the gap between individual-level behaviours and systemic change. This article develops a new theoretical framework for CC, with insights from the capability approach, social practice theory, and recent work in environmental psychology. Drawing on a nationally representative survey from the UK, CC is evaluated across six key domains of practice: energy, transport, food, shopping, influence, and citizenship. Our revised theory emphasises the diverse forms that CC can take, highlighting the multiple roles that individuals (and other actors) can play in driving climate action, as consumers, influencers, organisational members, and citizens. Results show that the UK population is becoming more carbon capable over time, with increasing knowledge about climate change and some adoption of low-carbon practices. However, transformative change is still lacking. The study highlights the importance of reorienting systems of provision to enable low-carbon practices and set capability ceilings to limit excessive consumption.

In many places around the world, the continuing expansion of agricultural land into forested areas is a context which urgently needs transformative change towards more sustainable pathways. Defining and implementing such transformations requires critical reflection to avoid reproducing business-as-usual practices. Transformative alternatives need to be capable of challenging detrimental power structures underlying social injustices and environmental degradation. Implementing such alternatives therefore needs a deeper and plural understanding of the historical processes underpinning the interrelation between social and environmental dynamics. In this paper we focus on the northeastern Nicaraguan agricultural frontier to analyze the historical emergence and consequences of a dominant cattle-based territorial pathway and to unveil local actors’ practices and perspectives on possible transformative change. We thereby aim to enrich the debates on Transformations to Sustainability and the identification of alternatives capable of challenging hegemonic dynamics. Our methodological contribution lies in adopting an original mixed-methods strategy based on the joint use of agrarian diagnoses and Q-method. First, our results provide an in-depth understanding of the historical evolution of agricultural practices and processes of social differentiation, and how these processes relate to techno-economic conditions influencing farmers' strategies. Second, we identify four perspectives within a specific network of actors regarding the processes of social-environmental change and analyze the perceived opportunities and limitations of actual and imagined alternatives. Based on these insights, we show that certain alignment of practices and motivations generally reinforces the dominant cattle-based territorial pathway. We also indicate that the most commonly promoted alternative strategies (often by external organizations) tend to reinforce the incumbent pathway rather than addressing the related social and environmental concerns. Yet, we also identified a subaltern niche of perspectives and practices from which a bottom-up actor coalition could emerge, addressing power imbalances and re-assembling ideas and practices towards transformative change.

The urgent need for transformations to sustainability has been widely established, but the seeming lack of swift and comprehensive progress have led to well-founded doubts about meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and other related global agreements. Often vacuous and potentially misleading pointers to partial progress are not reassuring, while defeatist statements on blanket failure conceal important breakthroughs and advances. This paper resists the unhelpful extremes of this dichotomy and takes a closer look at the work done by activists, researchers and other supporters to mobilize for and foster transformative efforts even if they are often not easily visible. Based on an integrative synthesis of three international, multi-case research projects on transformations to sustainability, it introduces the concept of transformative labor – the work, inner and outer, that has the power to affect transformative change. Often hidden and largely underappreciated, transformative labor helps break through existing systems, and puts creativity, courage, persistence and other physical, social, cognitive and emotional qualities and skills along with physical and financial resources toward achieving system-transcending change. Seven overlapping and interacting categories of transformative labor are described: (1) Detecting & Naming Conditions (Symptoms); (2) Creating Transformative Spaces; (3) Fostering Agency & Empowerment; (4) Enacting Steps to Change Conditions; (5) Visioning & Moving toward Desired Outcomes (Purpose, Horizons); (6) Caring, Tending & Learning; and (7) Scaling Out, Up and Deep. Transformative labor is performed by advocates, researchers and other allies and is always political because it intends to advance a profound change in the status quo. The paper concludes with proposed future research directions to test and advance this novel concept.

Despite global recognition of the need to protect and preserve Indigenous knowledge and values in the context of land use change, the extent and significance of these values on Indigenous lands remains not well understood and poorly considered in environmental management and planning. Including Indigenous values in the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) may be one way to better ensure that Indigenous values are reflected in government environmental management and planning frameworks and that these frameworks are useful for Indigenous people. To do this, the SEEA must reflect the complex and interconnected values that underpin many Indigenous people’s relationships with land and sea. We use practical examples to illustrate how the SEEA may be adapted to better reflect the cultural values in an Indigenous living cultural landscape using an example from Yawuru Country, in northern Australia. We show how extending ecosystem asset accounts to reflect cultural knowledge and combining the SEEA Central Framework with the SEEA Ecosystem Accounting to develop a novel service to ecosystem account better represents the interconnected relationships between Yawuru People, culture, and Country. To consolidate the recognition of Indigenous values in the SEEA, we recommend establishing a working group under the auspices of the United Nations to share experiences and develop a guidebook “SEEA Indigenous values”. This would promote coordinated and corporative work and improve the relevance of the SEEA.

Many people are highly exposed to climate change through tourism activities. However, conventional evaluations of tourism climate suitability have consistently relied on uniform indicators. In reality, the combination of meteorological factors that tourists are sensitive to and the threshold ranges for their comfort vary across different climate zones. This study, for the first time, utilizes a dataset of 2,326,954 tourist behaviors in hiking to validate the differences in sensitivity to meteorological conditions among tourists in different climate zones and to assess the historical and future tourism suitability in various climate zones. The findings reveal the following key results: (1) The sensitivity of hiking activities to meteorological factors varies among tourists in different climate zones. For instance, tourists in the mid-subtropics and south temperate zones show a lesser sensitivity to precipitation, while those in the southern subtropics are less affected by temperature fluctuations. Tourists in plateau climate zones appear to be insensitive to both precipitation and average relative humidity. (2) Significant differences exist in the climate comfort ranges for tourists from different climatic regions when engaging in hiking activities. Tourists in the mid-subtropics exhibit the highest tolerance for daily maximum temperatures during hiking, whereas those in arid and semiarid regions have a greater comfort threshold for average relative humidity compared to individuals in humid and subhumid regions. (3) Over the past decade, the southern subtropics experienced the highest number of days suitable for hiking among tourists, while the plateau climate zone recorded the fewest. The frequency of comfortable hiking days per year (CDY) increased for tourists in the north subtropics, mid-subtropics, southern subtropics, and plateau climate zones but declined for tourists in the mid-temperate and south temperate zones. (4) Looking ahead to the future, climate conditions conducive to hiking for tourists in different climate zones are generally trending towards deterioration. By the year 2080, both the mid-subtropics and south temperate zones are projected to have the fewest CDY. While the southern subtropics may still have the most CDY for tourists’ hiking, it is anticipated to experience the most rapid decrease.

Motivating climate action is challenging because the worst consequences of climate change are in the future, triggering a conflict between short- and long-term interests. Prior research suggests that orienting to the future facilitates pro-environmental behavior whereas orientation to the present inhibits it; however, we consider whether different temporal orientations simply make some kinds of climate action more attractive than others. The present study tests this using structural equation modeling with two Australian samples. In a first exploratory model (N = 967), followed by a direct, pre-registered replication (N = 953), we examine how two facets of temporal orientation – consideration of future and immediate consequences – predict intentions to engage in three kinds of climate action at individual and collective levels: conventional private-sphere, conventional public-sphere, and radical public-sphere climate action. Consistent with past research, higher consideration of future consequences and lower consideration of immediate consequences are associated with intentions to take conventional action directly and indirectly via eco-anxiety and/or access to environmental cognitive alternatives. In contrast, consideration of future and immediate consequences are only indirectly related to intentions to take radical action.

Activists, scholars, and policymakers worldwide have increasingly recognised the intrinsic linkages between energy transitions and justice issues. However, little research exists on how groups affected by renewable energy siting interpret and mobilise justice narratives to legitimise their actions and question development plans. Building on the notion of 'framing' in social movement theory, this study addresses this gap by examininig the discourses adopted by people resisting wind energy developments in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. The study relies on 64 interviews and participant observation. The findings indicate that anti-wind activists used health and environmental concerns instrumentally: as a framing device to avoid social rejection and legitimise other, subtler distributive concerns about the uneven allocation of economic benefits such as tenancy payments. Although this framing was counterproductive and left their concerns unaddressed, activists adopted this strategy because of community norms and practises that stigmatise the explicit discussion of economic inequalities and their fear of challenging existing power structures. This paper therefore highlights the social mechanisms through which energy transitions reproduce economic inequalities. As a policy recommendation, it is critical to consider how inequalities are framed and the underlying reasons for these interpretive schemes to advance socially just net-zero scenarios.

As climate impacts intensify, local governments across the United States are developing ad-hoc policies and plans to increase their resilience to climate hazards across all sectors, but there is limited assessment of what policies currently exist in U.S. communities to adapt to climate change. In this article, we develop a novel policy inventory for adaptation policies in five U.S. counties. Using a comprehensive definition of adaptation policy that includes policies that do not explicitly mention climate change, and a new taxonomy for coding these policies in a U.S. context, we identify 508 policies across these five locations. Through analysis of these policy inventories and interviews with local stakeholders, we identify four thematic policy gaps, as well as a major gap in policies to address extreme heat across all five locations. This first-of-its-kind climate policy assessment provides both a novel methodology to benchmark progress as well as recommendations for investment in local adaptation to climate change across the United States.

Rapid expansion and upgrading of wastewater treatment facilities globally, driven by stricter wastewater policies, significantly contribute to carbon emissions. China has contributed 30 % of carbon emissions in the world, 1 % of which comes from wastewater treatment, necessitating more understanding of the impact of policies, especially the stringent “10-Point Water Plan” policy. From a micro perspective, this study uses the difference-in-differences method to analyze the impact of wastewater treatment policies on water and carbon issues in China’s 2894 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and delves into the heterogeneity, and mechanisms across various dimensions. The results show that stricter sewage treatment policy decrease effluent concentration of the chemical oxygen demand (COD) by 2.35 %, and also cause a 1.74 % rise in carbon emissions per 10,000 m³ of wastewater treated, intensifying the short-term contradiction, while the contradictions may fall in the long term. It is more significant in southern regions and the cities with lower environmental regulation intensity. Also, there are significant differences in different wastewater treatment technology and scale. Significant improvements in effluent water quality are observed in WWTPs with 100,000 to 200,000 m³/day capacity and those using biofilm treatment technology. Through mechanism analysis, reasonable expansion of urban pipelines and WWTPs, promotion of biofilm treatment technology, reduction of energy consumption, and improvement of pollutant reduction efficiency are feasible paths to improve water quality and reduce carbon emissions. This research provides a perspective on solving water-carbon contradictions in WWTPs, holding critical significance for urban wastewater treatment and carbon emission management.

The piece outlines the contributions of key works in the field of the political ecology of desalination over the past decade. We note that the field is diverse in terms of contributions from geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and public policy scholars. The research to date has been concerned with the ways in which the deployment of desalting techniques can reflect and reinforce social processes of inequality, political power and economic flows. In this way, desalination has been opened up for intellectual debate beyond technical considerations of the desalting industry and engineers. A critical perspective that complements the recent discussions of environmental harm caused by the desalination industry has emerged as well across a number of global and transboundary contexts. A number of themes emerged that will continue to be of interest to scholars and that need to be addressed in the years ahead. First, desalination intersects transboundary water governance and geopolitics between different water uses and emerges from complex assemblages of local and global actors, including financial actors, water companies, governments, technologies, and natural forces. Second, critical scholarship on desalination needs to continue to pay attention to the interests in and overarching patterns of, the Green New Deal and Blue Economy, each of which intersect with the worlds of academia and policymaking, and involve issues of climate adaptation and mitigation. Third, questions about equity remain with desalination as it is a solution deeply imbricated in the unequal distribution of resources, and questions about representation in decision-making remain. Fourth, research on finance and infrastructure have been at the core of critical desalting research and should remain so. Fifth, there is a growing heterogeneity in terms of research in types of desalting, from reverse osmosis to inland desalting to nuclear and more. This variety will make for rich research for the years ahead. Our hope is that the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological flexibility of this area of research will remain a strong point continuing its rigor, as well as the already robust collegiality among scholars in this interesting, and still nascent field.