Global Environmental Change最新文献

Peri-urban transformations in emerging economies like India demand scientific attention given their impact on global environmental change processes. Some studies examine past or ongoing peri-urban adaptation processes, but insight into future adaptation needs and aspirations of peri-urban communities is lacking. Also, it is unknown how the high degree of informality that characterizes peri-urban areas, interacts with formal institutions to shape or enable more sustainable adaptation pathways. This study addresses these scientific gaps, using an existing typology of adaptation processes to investigate plausible future adaptation pathways in three peri-urban villages in India, near Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata cities. On-site field research followed by a Delphi-study were used to develop normative adaptation pathways for livelihood and household water use with local actors. The pathways represent development trajectories and adaptation strategies over the next 15 years in the livelihood and household water sectors. Pathways data was thereafter analyzed and compared in terms of drivers of vulnerability and opportunity, adaptation processes, and formal and informal institutions. Our ex-ante study identifies general and context specific drivers of vulnerability and opportunity shaping different peri-urban transformations. Results reveal similarities in future drivers, whose impact on peri-urban livelihoods and household water is context dependent. This comparative analysis contributes a deeper understanding of future adaptation needs by highlighting patterns in locally preferred adaptation processes for different drivers and water-use sectors. This normative understanding reveals preferences of local communities who are otherwise marginalized from decision-making arenas. A combination of adaptation processes will be needed to respond to the various drivers, only some of which are achievable through informal institutions. Formal government intervention will be essential for stimulating innovation, intensification, and revitalization forms of adaptation. Institutional adjustments will be key to shaping local agency and future adaptive capacity away from a business-as-usual trajectory.

Zimbabwe intends to build resilience mechanisms against climate change while at the same time ensuring sustainable development in recognition of its climate change vulnerability and national circumstances, in line with the demands of the Paris Agreement of reducing emissions by 2030. The study examined the consistency of government policies in reducing emissions by 1278GgCO₂ by 2030. The study reviewed government policies and environmental projects intended at reducing carbon emissions. The results indicated that, on paper, the government has promising targets; but in reality, there are inconsistencies indicating the release of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The inconsistencies include the commissioned Hwange thermal power station and fossil fuel-powered locomotives. The study found that there is strategic coherence between policy objectives, aimed at building resilient and low-carbon human settlement, and objectives of international policies such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Paris Agreement and SENDAI Framework. The compulsory mixing of petrol and ethanol and the introduction of electric cars in the transportation sector demonstrated the limited but commendable efforts by the government in embracing renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions. The study established that poor policy implementation and lack of policy harmonisation have led to the failure of the Zimbabwean government to have policy consistency in terms of the decarbonisation roadmap resulting in policy conflicts and contradictions. An example of policy duplication is in, the Environmental Management Act and Forestry Act which can have sections dealing with climate change harmonised into the Climate Change Policy. The study recommends that the government establishes a National Climate Financing mechanism for cleaner technologies and practices to reduce emissions by 2030.

Climate change mitigation is mostly assessed through the lens of technologies and policy instruments. However, governance and social capital are crucial factors in complex social systems and may be relevant in the formation of effective climate policies. Here, we investigate the role of quality of governance (QoG), social capital, and equality as preconditions for enacting climate policies. Relying on indicators of social systems at nation state level, we investigate relationships with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Structural Equation Models (SEM). We find that quality of governance, measured as impartiality, underpins social capital and interpersonal trust, equality and effective climate mitigation policies, indicated by the level of carbon pricing. Impartiality and social capital are necessary conditions for climate policies. Socio-economic inequalities reduce trust and political engagement, and thus compromise the overarching goal of climate change mitigation. Evidence from complementary literature indicates that fairly implemented climate policies could foster a virtuous cycle that further improves quality of governance, and thus the capacity for implementing strong climate policies. Our results demonstrate that impartial governance and resulting social capital form the underpinnings of effective climate policies.

This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-economic processes in human-wildlife interactions (HWI) to support efforts to transform wildlife conservation governance. To date, the majority of research and advocacy addressing HWI focuses on micro-level processes, while even the small body of existing literature exploring social dimensions of such interactions has largely neglected attention to political-economic forces. This is consonant with efforts to transform conservation policy and practice more broadly, which tend to emphasize “circular” change within current political-economic structures rather than “axial” transformation aiming to transcend these structures themselves. Our analysis thus advances understanding of potential for axial transformation in HWI via confrontation with, and “unmaking” of, constraining political-economic structures. It does so through cross-site analysis of conservation policy and practice in relation to three apex predator species (lions, jaguars and wolves) in varied geographic and socio-political contexts, grounded in qualitative ethnographic study within the different sites by members of an international research team. We explore how the relative power of different political-economic interests within each case influences how the animals are perceived and valued, and how this in turn influences conservation interventions and their impact on HWI within these spaces. We term this analysis of the “production-protection nexus” (the interrelation between process of resource extraction and conservation, respectively) in rural landscapes. We emphasize importance of attention to this formative nexus both within and across specific locales in growing global efforts to transform situations of human-wildlife conflict into less contentious coexistence.

Participation and collaboration of citizens and organized stakeholders in public decision-making is widely believed to improve environmental governance outputs. However, empirical evidence on the benefits of participatory governance is largely scattered across small-N case studies. To synthesize the available case-based evidence, we conducted a broad case-based meta-analysis across 22 Western democracies, including 305 individual cases of public environmental decision-making. We asked: How do ‘more’ participatory decision-making processes compare against ‘less’ participatory ones in fostering – or hindering – strong environmental governance outputs, (i.e. environmental provisions in plans, agreements or permits)? Which design features make a difference? What role does the decision-making context play? How do results change if we control for the intentions of the leading governmental agency? To capture the central design features of decision-making processes, we distinguish three dimensions of participation: the intensity of communication among participants and process organizers; the extent to which participants can shape decisions (“power delegation”); and the extent to which different stakeholder groups are represented. Our regression analysis yields robust evidence that these three design features of participation impact upon the environmental standard of governance outputs, even when controlling for the goals of governmental agencies. Power delegation is shown to be the most stable predictor of strong environmental outputs. However, communication intensity only predicts the conservation-related standard of outputs, but not the environmental health-related standard of outputs. Participants’ environmental stance was another strong predictor, with considerable variation across different contexts. While our results remain broadly stable across a wide range of contexts, certain contextual conditions stood out in shaping the relation between participation and environmental outputs. Overall, our findings can inform the design of participatory processes that deliver governance outputs of a high environmental standard.

Tropical peatlands lie at a nexus of competing sustainable development demands of enhancing food security, mitigating climate change, improving resilience and supporting rural livelihoods. Meeting United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires balancing these various demands. Progress in meeting SDGs has been slow in low to middle income countries because of difficulties in identifying and quantifying the trade offs associated with natural resource exploitation, including on extensive areas of tropical peatlands.

Here, by using secondary data from the literature, Indonesian and international agencies, we examine how land-use allocation in Indonesia has developed over the last three decades by investigating trends of key food and woody crops (oil palm and rubber) and evaluate the role that peatland provinces have played in food security and climate forcing. Overall, food crop production has been marginal in peatland provinces compared to monoculture woody crops, with the latter associated with increased carbon emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) over the last thirty years. Our analysis shows that synergies between responses to looming food security and climate change crises can also promote less damaging forms of tropical peatland management. For instance, the conversion of degraded shallow peatlands to agroecological practices (e.g., paludiculture) can be promoted. However, we stress that peatland conservation and restoration must remain the top priority. Impediments due to lack of a common definition for peatland and planning/management units, the use of multiple sectoral maps by different government agencies and uncoordinated sectoral policy targets can, however, hinder the implementation of less damaging peatland management.

Through interlinked theoretical and empirical analysis, this paper explores some important but neglected questions concerning efforts to achieve sustainability. To what extents do currently dominant forms of academic study and policy visions in this field, satisfactorily address the full political depth and scope of vital complexities in pathways for emerging social transformations? Are there dangers that common simplifications in mainstream ways of thinking about transformation, inadvertently help invisibly to reproduce entrenched patterns of privilege and power that drive focal problems of unsustainability? In particular, does a ‘monothetic’ focus on circumscribed sites or sectoral formations with notionally few clear-cut dimensions of distinction before and after, risk missing more multiple and messy ‘polythetic’ dimensionalities in which power and privilege can hide? What are the implications of common assumptions that pathways for change proceed ‘monotonically’ – neatly and cumulatively in a particular direction, if real world transformations actually unfold according to more plural, undulating and unruly ‘non-monotonic’ temporalities? In order to investigate these questions, the paper employs the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to explore the constituting dimensions of contrasting understandings of ‘urban transformations’ in Kenya and ‘the nuclear renaissance’ in the UK. Q method and in-depth interpretive policy analysis are used to test patterns in relationships between imagined transformations and their unfoldings over time. The findings suggest that current mainstream approaches may indeed unduly simplify vital complexities in the ways these political dynamics play out – with potentially important practical implications.

The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this gap, this paper proposes that local initiatives that pursue three particular pathways are more likely to generate improvements in social-ecological outcomes: (1) maintaining close connections with local grassroots, (2) pursuing diversity in productive activities performed and partnership choices, and (3) developing cross-scale collaborations. To test these ideas we collected and analyzed observations of 157 initiatives in Brazil and Peru, applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our results show that initiatives maintaining groundedness in representing the interests and concerns of local actors while partnering with other organizations at multiple scales are more likely to develop joint solutions to social-ecological problems. Partnerships and support from external organizations may strengthen and enhance local capabilities, providing a platform for negotiating interests and finding common ground. Such diversified pathways demonstrate the power of local actors to transcend their own territories and have broader impacts in sustainability objectives. Our findings highlight the need to make governmental and non-governmental support (e.g., financial, technical, political) available according to local needs to enable local initiatives’ own ways of addressing global environmental change.

Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) we challenge the presumed benefits of neoliberal, infrastructural-focussed climate adaptation, and advocate for far greater engagement with multiple subjectivities and intersecting inequalities in the design of climate adaptation in Global North, settler colonial contexts. Focussing on a government-led water storage project that aims to enhance local communities’ economic wellbeing through climate-adapted horticulture, we demonstrate how interlinked forms of marginalisation and privilege mediate the distribution of benefits from climate adaptation and decrease rather than increase wellbeing for multiply marginalised subjectivities. Combining the concept of racial capitalism with intersectionality we advance a novel theoretical framework to advance insights about more equitable and nuanced adaptation in an under-researched, settler colonial context. Using this framework, we explore the maladaptive potential of the water project which grows regional economic resilience through violent climate-related alterations to low-income, single and/or older Māori women’s bodies. We demonstrate how settler colonial legacies, structures, and intergenerational traumas are lived through and collide with intersecting racial, class, gender, and age-based disadvantages, that together mediate local labour relations and decision-making processes that ultimately exacerbate climate vulnerability for particular groups of Māori women in the region.

This article explores deforestation and reforestation dynamics over 415,749 hectares of 25 titled Indigenous Community Lands (ICLs) in the Peruvian Amazon over forty years at three scales: total area, regions, and communities. We focus on ICLs as the territorial unit of analysis, as they are increasingly discussed regarding their importance for conservation. Additionally indigenous communities (ICs) are a too-marginalized group in the Amazon that merit more attention. Analyses of this kind are often short-term and use only large-scale Earth Observation methodologies. We use a multi-method approach linking remote sensing with ground verification, and qualitative historical political ecology work with ICs. We find that overall accumulated deforestation was low at 5%, but that when reforestation is considered, net deforestation was only 3.5%. At the community level deforestation and afforestation dynamics are complex, except for one period that indicates a macro state driver in the region. Results suggest inadequate accounting for forest regeneration in deforestation analyses and challenge the notion that presenting stakeholders with accumulated forest loss values is helpful in tropical areas where forests and people are dynamic. Furthermore, our work with communities highlights that categorizing them and their lands as pro-environment or not in general terms is unhelpful for determining fund flows to ICLs for environmental or development purposes.