Geo-Geography and Environment最新文献

Access to public transport increases vulnerable people's social mobility, facilitates economic integration and improves general well-being. This is possible given the low vehicular acquisition and low cost required to enjoy public transport services. Unfortunately, the discourse on the responsiveness of public transport services to the disability community in the Global South has been viewed from users' perspectives, leaving out key stakeholders whose actions impact persons with disability (PWDs') mobility needs. This study seeks to fill the gap by exploring stakeholders' responses to the travel needs of commuters with disability in the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. Employing an exploratory research design, this study purposively engaged five national stakeholders on transport and disability issues. All interviews and transcripts were transcribed using MaxQDA. The qualitative data analysis was iterative as the study adopted a thematic analytical approach to explore participants' opinions. From the data, all stakeholders did not have a disability-inclined transport agenda or policy despite making various attempts to meet the travel needs of PWDs. Some attempts include the reliance on one's discretion as seen in the case of transport operators, while other stakeholders appeared to offer little support due to financial and administrative bottlenecks. Transport-oriented stakeholders cared little about PWD while disability-oriented stakeholders cared little about transport issues. This study recommends a consultative action framework to guide all stakeholders in ensuring the delivery of barrier-free transport services to the disability community.

Natural environments provide a myriad of health benefits, yet the role of species diversity within these spaces remains underexplored. Bird diversity may yield mental health benefits for humans, through birdsong or feelings of connection to nature. In an initial effort to establish whether bird diversity may be linked with human health in a US context and to test the consistency in such trends from year to year, we combine widely available community (aka citizen) science data (eBird) estimating bird diversity across the state of Michigan with anxiety/mood disorder hospitalisation records (2008–18). We found a negative, significant association between bird species diversity and anxiety/mood disorder hospitalisations (β = −0.36, 95% CI = −0.69 to −0.04). The relationship between bird diversity and hospitalisations found at this scale is significant, given the potential for biodiversity to affect severe mental health outcomes. Thus, these initial findings should be further explored in studies with finer resolution of exposure to bird species and longitudinal or experimental designs that account for other demographic characteristics, risk factors and other neighbourhood features. If future studies confirm these findings, there are important implications for urban greening efforts, some of which are explicitly focused on increasing bird habitat.

This critical analysis examines the geopolitics of planetary environmental injustice and the imperative for systems change to address the intertwined crises of climate breakdown and unsustainable economic growth. Climate breakdown has heightened attention to uneven anthropogenic use and abuse of the planet's biosphere and common pool resources. Recent arguments by climate scholars suggest that various planetary boundaries have already been breached, resulting in dramatic and harmful socio-ecological consequences. These trends raise crucial questions of equity and justice, especially concerning responsibilities and impacts. By centring Global South perspectives, prevailing ideologies promoting hyperconsumption, overproduction and waste are interrogated. The incommensurability of socioecological justice with ongoing unsustainable extractive and exploitative economic growth paradigms, which contribute to further transgressions of planetary boundaries, underscore the urgency of decolonising underlying colonial-capitalist ideologies and practices. This entails a fundamental reformulation of paradigms to envision a more just and sustainable future, one that dismantles oppressive systems and advances justice-oriented praxis.

In this study the spatial perceptions of students about the likelihood of natural and environmental risks were examined, considering both mainland Portugal and island of Madeira. It intends to understand how students perceived the risks, taking into account the causal attributions, future tendency, and the support from public entities, as well as the willingness of attitudinal changes with respect to mitigating and reducing risks. The results suggest that students have a relatively low perception of analysed risks, considering the risk of forest fires, heatwaves, air and water pollution, and floods the most likely to occur, mainly as a consequence of climate change intensification. Gender proved to be the variable with the greatest influence on perception, particularly in terms of risk occurrence and personal perception of risk. These results could be important for the improvement of strategies and resources to be applied in the educational context in order to reduce disaster risk and strengthen the resilience of the community at large.

Sustainable urbanisation assumes the maintenance of nearby wetlands and farms from an environmental standpoint. With rare exceptions, Third World cities are systematically urbanising, polluting and destroying their vital environmental support systems. For instance, uncollected trash frequently covers open areas in cities, creating mini-utopias for rodents and mosquito-borne disease carriers. The persistent gaps in the rates of waste production and disposal are frequently startling. Urban migration, unemployment, food prices, and growing rental housing costs have emerged as major urban problems in many Ethiopian cities. The study's primary objective was to analyse the status of food security indicators experienced by urban households and their coping mechanisms for policy implications using empirical data. The study used a mixed method research strategy that combines quantitative and qualitative research methods. Focus groups, key informant interviews, and questionnaire surveys were used to collect the data. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to assess the data gathered. In development studies, establishing exact, accurate, trustworthy and meaningful indicators of urban food security continue to be difficult. Despite the developing world's significant incidence of food insecurity being acknowledged, the precise number of people who lack access to food and the extent to which they are impacted remain unknown. Food security measures, such as the dietary energy supply (DES), household dietary diversity score (HDDS), and reduced coping strategy index (rCSI), were used to identify households that were food insecure. The survey found that 54% of households consumed less than 2100 kcal per adult daily and experienced food insecurity. A baseline of 2100 kcal per adult equivalent per day revealed that 56.7% of families in Bahir Dar and 52.7% of households in Gondar experienced food insecurity. Less than four food groups were consumed by 64% of households, which is far below the FAO's recommendation. The findings also showed that eating fewer meals per day, choosing fewer quality foods, and limiting portion sizes at times were the most often used coping mechanisms during food shocks. The overall findings of the study highlight an urgent need for actions that might increase the food security of the urban poor, such as price stability, the building of communal housing, enabling micro-finance and providing starting money.

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia) and blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur) are the inhabitants of remote areas at higher altitudes with extreme geographic and climatic conditions. The habitats of these least-studied species are crucial for sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem. We employed the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) species distribution model to predict the potential habitat suitability of snow leopards and blue sheep and extracted common overlapped niches. For this, we utilised presence location, bio-climatic and environmental variables, and correlation analysis was applied to reduce the negative impact of multicollinearity. A total of 134 presence locations of snow leopards and 64 for blue sheep were selected from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The annual mean temperature (Bio1) was found to be the most useful and highly influential factor to predict the potential habitat suitability of snow leopards. Annual mean temperature, annual precipitation and isothermality were the major influencing factors for blue sheep habitat suitability. Highly influential bio-climatic, topographic and environmental variables were integrated to construct the model for predicting habitat suitability. The area under the curve (AUC) values for snow leopard (0.87) and blue sheep (0.82) showed that the models are under good representation. Of the total area investigated, 47% was suitable for the blue sheep and 38% for the snow leopards. Spatial habitat assessment revealed that nearly 11% area from the predicted suitable habitat class of both species was spatially matched (overlapped), 48.6% area was unsuitable under niche overlap and 40.5% area was spatially mismatched niche. The presence of snow leopards and blue sheep in some highly suitable areas was not observed, yet such areas have the potential to sustain these elusive species. The other geographical regions interested in exploring habitat suitability may find the methodological framework adopted in this study useful for formulating an effective conservation policy and management strategy.

As one approach to publicising sustainability efforts at the local level for a wider audience, international resource management certification schemes and their eco-label programmes have been widely used as a verification tool. The case of Japanese shark fishery based in Kesennuma, Miyagi shows the full picture of the current global context behind a highly controversial commodity: shark fins. Campaigns against shark finning directed by environmental NGOs have led to shark fin being taken off the menu at some Chinese high-class hotels. The shark fishery in Kesennuma is currently working toward obtaining Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification to prove that their shark products are not the result of finning, with the expectation that the certification will provide a clear distinction between human moral issues and sustainable resource management issues. Drawing on this case, this paper analyses the network of cooperative stakeholders in order to re-configure a global sustainable commodity network for shark fins. It has been almost a quarter century since MSC was officially launched as an independent organisation in 1997. Initially, MSC certification was a major strength of differentiation, allowing producers of certified seafood to sell at a higher price, but the acquisition of certification by multiple fisheries targeting the same or similar species has reduced the economic benefits for individual fisheries. By analysing the shark fishery, which require resource management on the high seas, this paper provides new insights into how MSC certification can be mobilised by producers.

Cities are lived and made and constantly in a state of flux, and the same urban spaces can be used by a variety of people in very different ways. I propose the concept of ‘liquid urbanisms’ to understand these provisional uses of urban space. Liquid urbanisms are provisional places and spaces, connected through the loose and flexible networks of people and projects, that are not immediately obvious but which solidify around a certain project or topic, then become liquid again, until another time in the future. Liquid urbanisms was a helpful concept for me in my research, but also has a wider resonance in how we think about and conceptualise provisional locations in the city. Liquid urbanisms builds on and adds to work in urban studies, focusing attention on the spatial practices of urban actors at the local scale and acknowledging the importance of the temporal in understanding space and place and acknowledging the fluidity of cities. My research conducted in 2013–17 in Dublin initially looked at so-called ‘temporary spaces’ but quickly grew to include parks, squats, art spaces, urban gardens, autonomous social centres, networking groups and direct actions. I created the conceptual framework of liquid urbanisms to be able to discuss these projects together, as empirically from my research I could see that the projects I was researching had two main shared characteristics: a looser understanding of temporality than existed in mainstream urban planning understandings of the city, and a shared network of people, places and resources, but no body of literature encompassed both of these characteristics. The focus of this article is the concept of liquid urbanisms and how the framework of liquid urbanisms can highlight the different temporalities, spatialities and networks that exist in city spaces, reminding scholars to pay attention to the diverse fluidity of cities.

Municipal and regional leaders' achievements for synchronised sustainability transitions are still not enough. Systemic, systematic and strategic cross-sectoral collaboration and co-creation are needed. However, sectors isolated in silos leads to suboptimal measures and strategies, and a reductionist view on what hinders and enables joint action towards full sustainability. Consequently, methodological support for addressing the coordinative challenge is often not asked for. This study investigates the observed reductionist perspective as foundation for developing enhanced methodological support for strategic sustainable development (SSD) and further aimed to gain insight into how leaders can be better supported to understand their current reality of barriers and enablers for cross-sectoral SSD work and to prototype such support. Results from fieldwork with leaders in six municipalities and regions suggest that both frequency and depth of barriers and enablers in relation to elements for SSD are insufficient. Nine categories were identified and combined with SSD core elements into a diagnostic tool.