Earth System Governance最新文献

Net Zero pledges have become the most prominent expression of political and business commitment to climate action in the 2020s. The article examines the relevance of this policy framework within the diverse context of Central American countries, which exemplify the varied experiences of middle-income economies outside the G20. The countries in the region have crafted long-term strategies and short-term policies amid rising climate ambition under significant capability gaps and the unfulfilled promises of climate development finance. This Perspective calls on the earth system governance community to draw on evidence from a larger and more diverse set of local circumstances to define expectations of climate target setting and the integration of carbon removal into climate policy. The article highlights the continued relevance of issues like capacity gap, for instance, to complete GHG inventories or to establish a carbon removal policy. But also the importance of past failures of the climate regime, notably the unfulfilled promises of finance under the Kyoto Protocol, which continue to influence policy debates in Central America.

In view of the multiple challenges faced by agriculture, agroforestry can promote multifunctional farming landscapes. While the law is a decisive factor for the adoption of agroforestry, it is not as yet comprehensively addressed in agroforestry and governance research. We operationalize Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework to analyze agri-environmental laws at EU, German federal and state level using doctrinal and non-doctrinal legal research methods. We show that current legal provisions disincentivize farmers to establish agroforestry system and do not adequately address the benefits and risks of agroforestry systems for ecosystem functions and services and thus overall multifunctionality. We identify terminological misconceptions on the term ’agroforestry’, contradictions between subsidy law and command-and-control law, and a lack of tailored steering towards multifunctionality as major legal barriers to the promotion of agroforestry. Therefore, the example of agroforestry illustrates the challenge inherent in reconciling agricultural and environmental targets in agri-environmental law.

Satellites permit (near) real-time visibility of a wide range of environmental conditions, across large areas, and to diverse audiences. In climate risk management, this technology is becoming entangled with parametric insurance technology. In areas with large uninsured populations and scarcity of environmental data, satellite-based parametric insurance is increasingly promoted as an efficient way to provide coverage against extreme weather events. Satellites can facilitate payouts for events like tropical cyclones using environmental proxies (e.g., wind speed) and demographic data, bypassing traditional post-disaster assessments. Using qualitative methods, we investigate how the entanglement impacts the understanding, management and governance of climate disasters. We find that both technologies reduce on-the-ground complexities through how such disasters are perceived, anticipated, and governed. The entanglement intensifies the depoliticization of climate disasters and further compromises climate justice. This development in climate risk governance is crucially relevant to consider in the ongoing Loss and Damage Finance negotiations.

This article focuses on how short-termism impacts on the quality of urban development and, in turn, both population and planetary health. The first section of the paper clarifies key terms - short-termism, health, urban development and upstream - then summarises the context of urban development in the United Kingdom, and the evidence linking urban environments to population and planetary health. The main analysis section draws on data from interviews with 132 participants carried out between May and September 2021. Using the Commercial Determinants of Health framework, six thematic areas are identified: Policy & Political Economy; Legislation and Regulation; Commercial Actors; Underlying Drivers (Power); Externalities; and Partnership. Analysis suggests 17 key messages, the majority of which point to the need for stronger government intervention, a position supported by private sector, if fairly enacted.

Bioeconomy policies aim at fostering economic growth while solving the sustainability challenges of the fossil-based economy. However, these policies do little to discuss the resilience challenges of bioeconomies and the bio-based production systems on which they rest. Specifically, the environmental stresses that are likely to threaten the delivery of the bioeconomy's desired functions are barely addressed. This paper aims to understand why the salience of environmental resilience challenges is low in bioeconomy strategies. We conduct an exploratory comparative analysis of the policy design processes of six countries - Malaysia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy and Germany - building on expert interviews and a conceptual approach that emphasizes the importance of the policy design space. Our findings suggest that key factors in explaining the low salience of environmental resilience challenges are the predominantly economic motivation among leading authorities and the under-representation of environmental actors across policy design spaces.