Global Environmental Change最新文献

As global change accelerates, natural resource-dependent communities must respond and adapt. Small-scale fisheries, essential for coastal livelihoods and food security, are considered among the most vulnerable of these coupled social-ecological systems. While previous studies have examined vulnerability and adaptation in fisheries at the individual, household, and community level, these scales of organization are inconsistent with many of the legal and regulatory frameworks that function in practice to mediate behavior, decision-making, and adaptation. Here, we use cooperative- and privately-owned fishing enterprises in Northwest Mexico as a case study to examine how different forms of marine self-governance experience and respond to climate shocks. Leveraging social-ecological network methods to examine changes in fisheries participation and vulnerability during a recent period of pronounced regional oceanographic change, our analysis suggests that: 1) different forms of SSF self-governance (and the fishing strategies and harvest portfolios with which they are associated) help determine the impacts of and response to environmental change; and 2) that there may be important trade-offs between short-term responses which function to prevent or mitigate lost fishing revenue and long-term changes in climate vulnerability. In particular large fishing cooperatives, predicted to be highly vulnerable on the basis of network theoretic metrics, exceeded expectations (maintaining or increasing resource revenues) while demonstrating a degree of path dependency that may function to increase sensitivity and undermine resilience as climate change progresses. In providing an empirical evaluation of how self-governance arrangements characterized by different group sizes, access regimes and levels of cooperation respond to system perturbation, we aim to advance common pool resource theory while offering targeted guidance for the development of more nuanced and equitable climate adaptation policies.

In this paper we introduce the concept of ambient vulnerability. Ambience concerns the overlapping and shifting material forms that constitute a person’s surroundings – including (but not limited to) air quality, flow, temperature, humidity, noise and light – that contribute to their health, wellbeing and (dis)comfort. Building on a growing movement across a range of disciplines towards the study of socialmaterial relations, we suggest that ambience is an important approach for critically understanding the complex interconnections among nature, society, and technology in the production of lived ecologies. The vulnerability framing locates our expressly political understanding of ambience, reflecting and reinforcing social inequalities. Moreover, different types of vulnerability across the dimensions of the ambient environment are interdependent and accumulate, often intensifying one another. We delineate some of the key features of ambient vulnerability, specifically: cumulative impacts; permeability; unevenness; phenomenological differentiation; and multiple temporalities. The paper shows how ambient environments are shifting and complex, a turbulent milieu of contextual factors, but they are essential to our understanding of social and ecological vulnerability in the 21st century.

Around the world, drinking water systems provide safe, accessible drinking water to the communities they serve. While they are faced with a growing number of short and long-term challenges, assessing the resilience of drinking water systems—or their ability to cope with disturbances and surprise and continuously adapt to stress and change—is an ongoing challenge. Many drinking water resilience assessment methodologies focus narrowly on the technical dimensions of the resilience of infrastructure systems, ignoring the human or environmental dimensions, and consider resilience to the present, ignoring resilience to future change. To fill this gap, we developed a conceptual framework and scoring methodology for evaluating municipal-scale policy and planning for drinking water system resilience. Our approach considers social, technical, and environmental elements of resilience at broad spatial and temporal scales. We then used this methodology to assess policy and planning for drinking water resilience in 100 U.S. cities. We found that municipalities are at very different stages in their policy and planning for drinking water resilience, particularly in terms of the attention they give to climate change and their consideration of the broader social dimensions of resilience. Overall, larger cities and those with more liberal populations are likely to have higher policy and planning scores. The findings highlight the variation in municipal policy and planning for drinking water system resilience, and the importance of community characteristics as drivers of resilience planning. Our approach is transferable to assessing resilience for drinking water systems within and beyond the U.S.

In Somalia, extreme droughts, floods, and conflicts have generated a great wave of internally displaced persons (IDPs) involuntarily moving within the country’s boundaries. Despite increasing concerns about the IDP problem, we still do not fully understand the emergent properties of IDP flows from the network perspective. Particularly lacking is quantitative information on how natural disasters and conflicts differently or similarly shape IDP networks. These knowledge gaps are critical for IDP studies with complex interactions because the gaps may misconnect IDP flows with socio-environmental data at inappropriate spatial scales. To address these gaps, this study applies a series of network analyses to compare emergent patterns in disaster-induced and conflict-induced IDP networks. Push patterns were random without hub formation in both cases. Social connections were critical to incoming IDP flows but not to outgoing IDP flows. Natural disasters and conflicts produced similar triadic structures of IDP networks, suggesting possible interactions between natural disasters and conflicts in driving IDP flows. Community patterns were more scattered by the number and formation in the conflict-induced IDP network than in the disaster-induced IDP network. From the community detection, Natural disasters were likely to move IDPs within the regional boundaries, but conflicts relocated IDPs to relatively remote areas out of the boundaries. The communities were more modular in the disaster-induced IDP network than in the conflict-induced IDP network. These findings are useful for understanding IDP network patterns as a starting point for developing a nexus between climate, conflict, and migration.

Energy communities have mushroomed over the past decades. These initiatives have scaled, that is replicated their experiences, expanded membership, and diversified involved actors and technologies. The picture existing literature paints is hopeful that the scaling of local-scale action may translate into global-scale impact and thus effectively contribute to combating climate change. However, important gaps remain in understanding the (combinations of) conditions which are necessary for scaling with this goal in mind. This article pushes the boundaries of knowledge further by examining and comparing 28 energy communities through a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and by identifying the necessary conditions of actionable scaling mechanisms. Our analysis identifies a high number (8) of necessary (combinations of) conditions for scaling. Addressing a strong need amongst policy makers to facilitate broader scaling of community initiatives, this article offers concrete insights on mechanisms that need to be in place to scale energy communities. Insights are developed on – for example – the type of capacity support needed, support structures and the tools needed for connecting communities with each other. These insights help corroborate empirically, for the first time the crucial leverage points that will support strategies for upscaling the impact of energy communities, and will enable them to flourish as an essential element of the global climate governance system.

Protecting the world’s remaining forests is a global policy priority. Even though the value of the world’s remaining forests is global in nature, much of the protection has to come from national policies. Here, we combine global, high resolution remote sensing data on forest outcomes (tree-cover loss, forest degradation, net primary production) and two complementary econometric research designs for causal inference to first quantify how much it matters in which country a forest is located, secondly, the role of public policies, and third, under which conditions such pubic policies tend to be most successful. We find considerable border discontinuities in remotely sensed forest outcomes around the world (in a regression discontinuity design) and these are largely explained by countries’ policies (using a differences-in-discontinuities design). We estimate that public policies reduce the risk of tree cover loss by almost 4 percentage points globally, but there is large variation around this. The best explanations we find for these heterogenous treatment effects are a country’s policy enforcement, its policy stringency, its property rights, and its rule of law (in that order). Our results motivate international cooperation to finance and improve (a) countries’ public policies for forest protection and (b) countries’ capacity to implement and enforce them well.

The institutional predecessor of REDD+ is the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) that combines restrictions on forest access and conversion (negative interventions) with non-conditional direct benefits (positive interventions) to compensate local stakeholders for income losses from those restrictions. The idea of REDD+ was to improve on the ICDP model with a different kind of positive intervention: conditional direct benefits, often known as payments for environmental services or PES. How has this idea played out in reality? In a sample of 17 (out of 377) active REDD+ initiatives across the global South, we identified the combinations of interventions actually deployed and elicited household assessments of how those interventions affected their land use decisions with respect to forests. We found that 71 % of the households in our sample had participated in some number of forest interventions ranging from one to ten. About a quarter of those households were offered conditional direct benefits, most often in combination with non-conditional direct benefits. Nearly half of the households had received only non-conditional direct benefits. Many of those households were also subject to restrictions of various kinds. Thus, rather than abandoning the well-established ICDP approach in favor of the conditional incentives that conceptually define REDD+, most initiative proponents opted to deploy multiple interventions. Their approach is validated by our finding that the likelihood a household reports that the interventions caused them to adopt land use changes that could be classified as reducing carbon emissions is positively and significantly related to the number of interventions that they experienced, but not affected by whether any of those interventions are conditional. We also find that restrictions play an important role: 37 % of the households were subject to at least one negative intervention, and those households were significantly more likely to report that the interventions had induced land use changes that could be classified as reducing carbon emissions.

Development that is inclusive and sustainable requires significant social and environmental transformations from current trajectories, building on demographic realities such as changing profiles of populations, and increased levels of mobility. Migration is a major driving force of urbanisation in all global regions, partly facilitated through emerging technologies and declining costs of movement and communication. Social transformations associated with increased migration are highly uneven but include shifts in the location of economic activities, major urban growth, and changing individual incentives and social constraints on sustainability trajectories. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence on how observed population movements can both challenge and promote sustainable transformations. This paper examines how migration transforms places and societies, by providing new evidence on the behaviours and practices of individuals who are part of such transformations as they assimilate, converge or remain distinctive to prior populations. Focusing on individuals in rapidly expanding cities in the Global South, this study uses new biographical life-history survey data from Accra, Ghana, to examine the barriers and enablers of sustainability practices among diverse types of migrants and a sample of non-migrants. The study uses data from 1,163 individuals: international migrants from the West African sub-region (5 5 9), internal migrants (2 9 9), and non-migrants (3 0 5) in Accra. The findings show that sustainability practices established before migration are predictors of current sustainability practices, including proactive recycling, conservation activities, and choice of mode of transportation, but that there is some convergence between behaviours, reflecting assimilation, place attachment and other factors. Internal migrants in Accra exhibit stronger sustainability practices than international migrants. Individual levels of poverty, poor infrastructural development, and perceptions about life satisfaction in the neighbourhood negatively affect sustainability practices among all respondents. These results suggest that poverty and social exclusion are critical to addressing sustainability issues in urban contexts. It is important for policy makers to address issues of urban poverty, cumulative deprivation, and inequality as strong barriers to the adoption of sustainability practices in urban areas.

Warming and resulting degradation of near-surface permafrost in cold regions across the globe has and will continue to lead to a series of hazards. These include land subsidence and weakening of the substrate’s bearing capacity, thus threatening infrastructure and the socioeconomics in permafrost regions. These potential hazards shorten the lifespan of infrastructure, increase the cost of infrastructure maintenance and replacement, which is of great importance to a variety of stakeholders. In Northern Hemisphere permafrost regions, more than 34% of the population and 44% of the infrastructure will be at high risk by the end of this century. Due to the degradation of permafrost, infrastructure will require an additional investment of approximately $205–572 billion to maintain the operation of engineering and service infrastructure in 2085, based on projections with a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario.

Electric vehicle (EV) adoption in Africa is being driven by both structural and non-structural pressures. Hurdles to EV adoption as a tool for low carbon development are explained, drawing on interviews with energy specialists from Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Cameroon. Findings point to multiple-scale tensions between energy transition and access, between policy design and implementation, and between the spread of EVs and the power generation required to spur growth. Existing EV infrastructure is dependent on stranded assets from fossil fuel sources that are about to be abandoned for Africa’s power supply. Scaling up renewable energy systems will be more efficient if operational costs for fossil fuel infrastructure are switched to capital costs. This calls for a fresh business strategy designed to address Africa's desire to ensure energy efficiency that will spur the acceptance of EVs, while also deploying renewable energy to reach global climate goals. By using a combination of market and policy instruments, a new regulatory framework, accessible financing, and stronger price signals can help phase out aging fossil fuel infrastructure and spark an efficiency revolution.