Geo-Geography and Environment最新文献

In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate and sustainability.

This paper analyses the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the revisions of China's primary, secondary and high school curriculum standards. Employing a word frequency analysis of SDGs-related keywords across ten disciplines, the study reveals an increasing trend in SDGs integration, particularly in Physical Education and Health, and Biology, but notes a lack of growth in the Arts discipline. Key findings include the widespread presence of SDG3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), with a notable absence of SDG5 (Gender Equality) and SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). This study suggests enhancing SDGs coverage in Arts education, broadening the scope to include underrepresented SDGs and promoting a balanced integration of all SDGs across disciplines. It emphasizes the critical role of Geography Education in addressing global challenges and advocates for interdisciplinary teaching methods. The study highlights the importance of regular assessment in curriculum standards to ensure effective SDGs integration, aiming to align China's educational framework with global developmental objectives for a sustainable future.

This work examines the flawed narrative linking ecological crises to overpopulation, with a focus on its impact on women in the Global South. The paper argues that this perspective enables control over women's bodies under the pretence of environmental concern, aligning with necropolitics and a new form of eugenics. It calls for a nuanced understanding of the effects of environmental crisis on women, advocating for a human-centred approach that elevates the experiences and rights of historically marginalized groups. The discussion includes a critical analysis of the Malthusian discourse, highlighting alternative views on food scarcity and the problematic nature of family planning initiatives. The paper promotes reproductive environmental justice, challenging the overpopulation narrative and underscoring the need for equitable and respectful solutions that support the rights and well-being of women in the Global South.

This paper focuses on everyday encounters between environmentalists and Indigenous activists during a dispute around a proposed gas hub development in the Kimberley, NW Australia, to explore the possibilities of practising environmentalism differently. It makes visible the complexity, contestations and dilemmas of putting environmentalism into practice in particular places and calls for the specificness of how environmentalisms are negotiated and developed through encounters to be more carefully attended to. It draws on 32 face-to-face in-depth interviews conducted with activists from national Australian environmental organisations working in the Kimberley, Kimberley-based environmental groups, Kimberley Indigenous organisations, participant observations at protest camp site visits and analysis of campaign literature. Closely interrogating lived environmentalisms—how environmentalists put into practice their values in everyday encounters—reveals not only evidence of white environmentalists expanding their conceptions of the environment beyond dualisms and engaging with multispecies justice, but also a hesitancy and complexity in supporting Indigenous self-determination and a limited capacity to challenge colonial-capitalist frameworks.

In the intricate tapestry of environmental discourse, the field of political ecology emerges as a powerful lens through which we scrutinise the interplay of power, nature and society. This paper stages a dialogue with Paul Robbins to examine environmental justice, the decolonisation of political ecology, colonialism, sovereignty, climate change and capitalism. The dialogue challenges the conventional narratives of sovereignty and underscores the imperative of genuine decolonisation—beyond metaphorical interpretations—calling for the restitution of land and authority to Indigenous Peoples and other historically marginalised communities. The dialogue highlights the importance of moving away from capitalist systems that exacerbate environmental degradation. The dialogue calls for decolonising political ecology by including diverse perspectives, methodologies and ontologies and underlines the importance of control over productive resources. It emphasises that addressing the impacts of colonialism requires recognising and honouring the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples and suggests that political ecology can contribute to decolonisation by focusing on sovereignty and supporting legal and institutional frameworks that empower marginalised communities. The paper discusses the way forward and the future trajectory of political ecology by suggesting that future research in political ecology should focus on diverse economies, embrace emerging technologies and rework academic institutions to value knowledge co-production.

Decarbonizing industrial sectors is a critical global challenge, involving the creation of new industrial spaces—‘net zero industrial clusters’—co-locating energy sectors and ‘hard-to-abate’ industries such as oil refining and steelmaking. This paper provides the first empirically grounded geographical investigation of these emerging spaces. It employs a place-based research agenda to unpack how UK net zero industrial clusters (ICs) are imagined and emplaced in policy and industry discourses through place-based naming, spatial configuring and mapping activities. By conducting document analysis, 33 in-depth stakeholder interviews and five field trips to three UK case studies, we show how cluster imaginaries vary across cases and policy contexts in terms of constituents, focus and purpose. Ontological complexity is compounded by different rationales among stakeholders in configuring clusters and by contested cluster naming and boundary setting. This ambiguous, evolving spatiality raises important political and justice concerns over who and where is excluded in cluster building. These findings advance the geographies of low-carbon transitions by showing: (1) ways that ICs' spatial embeddedness, which underlies cluster spatial configurations, helps increase industry actors' recognition of their economic, social and cultural ties with the places of their making, even if this risks path dependency; (2) how fluid cluster boundaries, reflected in cluster names and maps, emphasize the value of a network topology of scale to enable spatially inclusive, multi-scalar climate mitigation. Finally, we argue that a place-sensitive net zero policy mindset is vital for fulfilling ICs and the UK's decarbonization potential in a manner that is both fair and locally grounded.

Those concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. In truth, both may be said to be forms of self-governance. Climate and AI intersect firstly in how they are imagined: dominant climate and AI discourses are both symptoms of Anthropocene thinking and ‘capitalist realism’. They also intersect in as much as ‘AI for Good’ initiatives propose that AI is ethical because it can help to address climate change. What seems missing, however, is any consideration of this climate AI as a procedure—is its knowledge valid, what knowledges does it displace or exclude, what biases are reproduced?—and consideration for its consequences, including harms. Does it actually result in climate mitigation and/or adaptation in a given context? What ‘maladaptive’ outcomes might it drive? What alternatives does it foreclose? These sorts of questions are ones where geographers will continue to have a lot to say.

Being a deltaic country and for its geographic location, Bangladesh faces devastating damages every year. In a new global index, Bangladesh has been ranked 7th among the countries most affected by extreme weather events in 20 years since 1998. The ability of a community to recover from a disaster is very much associated with strong social connections. For this research, both secondary and primary data sources have been considered. Socio-demographic characteristics have been identified from a community-based general questionnaire and BBS. Also, a newly developed integrated method has been used to measure the social capital of the community. Several statistical methods were used to analyse the data, such as factor analysis (PCA), ROC curve analysis and several GIS techniques, throughout the research. Results show that significant socio-demographic variables help to develop a specific type of social capital. Consequently, social capital indirectly works as a key for recovering from any disaster impact and could build resilience to hazards.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Global Climate Change are two developments that will come to define the twenty-first century. As such, examining their intersections is crucial and can yield important insights. Geography is well positioned to study these intersections through its diverse conceptual and methodological toolkit, which bridges the physical and environmental science, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as the human and more-than-human worlds. A first step in deploying a geographic analysis can be to ground the links between AI and Global Climate Change in concrete geographic contexts. I illustrate this exercise in the paragraphs that follow and identify its productive potential. Specifically, this text deploys a geographic perspective grounded in political economy to connect concerns about the data and energy inequalities embedded in various AI applications while showing how such inequalities are intertwined both with the monitoring of Global Climate Change and with its material impacts.

The need to swiftly transition to clean energy and expand electricity access is pressing; however, the goals of SDG7 are unlikely to be met by 2030, with the UN specifically mentioning land-locked states as being off track. Through the conceptual lens of ‘leapfrogging’ fossil fuels, straight from traditional fuel sources to renewable energy, this paper discusses the relationship between electricity production and independence. It makes a conceptual contribution by introducing the term ‘energy independence through leapfrogging’, which is used to characterise the process of reducing dependency on another country – in the case of Eswatini, electricity is supplied by South Africa. Drawing from empirical research in Eswatini involving document analysis and in-depth interviews, this paper discusses the potential for the country to move from being primarily an importer of electricity to generating its own supply from renewable sources. With Eswatini's current electricity supply from South Africa at risk/expiring in 2025, this research argues that the country faces a moment of opportunity for Eswatini to build further generation capacity, with a recommended focus on solar energy. The paper identifies potential challenges/barriers to this energy transition, examining power generation, storage, maintenance and affordability as key areas for intervention. Drawing on previous theories of electricity access, the paper argues that ‘access’ to electricity requires consideration of the affordability and reliability of energy systems. Eswatini is an understudied geographical area, and this paper makes a contribution to the literature on energy transitions by examining the specific circumstances attending this transition and examining these with relevance for other land-locked nations in sub-Saharan Africa.