Geo-Geography and Environment最新文献

Climate change poses a threat to water security where both current and future generations are concerned, with its accompanying impacts set to be greater in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). As a result, questions pertaining to climate change adaption in LMICs are receiving increased attention from academics and policymakers alike. It is broadly accepted that top-down approaches to developing resilience to climate change challenges have been shown to be limited and that concerted efforts need to be made to engage local communities in advancing adaptive strategies. Based on the above, we make two main arguments: (1) while there has been a shift towards acknowledging the importance of community-driven data in generating a broader and deeper understanding of climate change, far better use could be made of local knowledge and (2) efforts at community-based solutions to problems of resilience are currently limited by issues of capacity, specifically linked to the need for further education and training, and improved representation with respect to gender, class and caste (as well as financial support). To illustrate these arguments, we present evidence provided by rural communities located in two countries affected heavily by climate change: Ethiopia and Nepal.

Novel combinations of global conditions, issues under investigation and research alliances require constant reassessment of how to conduct cross-cultural research. Here we recount an exploratory investigation considering cross-cultural research between Australian and Indonesian researchers. This paper sets out a range of considerations for practitioners of cross-cultural research between our two countries. This investigation supports intentions to develop trans-disciplinary climate change adaptation research but is applicable across multiple research topics and disciplines. We engaged a small multi-disciplinary mix of researchers, from both countries, conducted two initial focus groups, and subsequently involved participants in drafting of this paper as an exploration of how being cross cultural could manifest. We highlight that cross-cultural collaborations occur in environments of both cultural differences and power differences. Four main strategies emerged for dealing with the challenges (or opportunities): working respectfully, being reflective of cross-cultural research practice, being flexible, and learning about culture. Overarching these strategies, we found cross-cultural research requires considerable extra (long term) effort to tackle and that this is sustained by researchers' intrinsic motives to care for people and place, making this type of research a distinctive labour of love. Finally, we found similarities between cross-cultural research and climate change adaptation research (even when conducted within one country) where both endeavours call for boundaries of places, cultures and disciplines to be crossed in order to effectively engage with complex topics and environments. Negotiating the liminalities here often defies set formulas and requires a willingness to engage with and ‘muddle through’ the messiness. Our findings will be of value to those undertaking cross-cultural research across a wide range of issues.

This commentary reflects on the experiences of a cohort of human and physical geographers in enacting environmental collaborations during their doctoral studies. The authors identify three key structural barriers encountered whilst attempting a collaborative approach: (1) doctoral funding priorities, (2) doctoral resourcing and (3) assessing doctoral collaboration. The authors discuss how the negotiation of these encounters came to frame their understanding of collaborative approaches to environmental knowledge creation. Competitive application processes for doctoral studentships can encourage the overpromising of the impact of planned environmental collaboration, potentially co-opting the voices of partners/communities to satisfy doctoral funding requirements. Given insufficient funding of collaborations, the authors argue that this overpromising of doctoral research's impact can later result in difficult trade-offs between undertaking additional commitments at the expense of the career progression of the doctoral student, contributing to educational inequalities and scaling-back the initial plans at the cost of collaborators encountering environmental crises. The trade-off is further problematised by institutional assessment procedures that do not adequately recognise the more nuanced contributions of environmental collaborations and a prevailing culture promoting peer-review publishing. Overall, the commentary argues that these barriers help to reproduce inequalities in the distribution of voice in environmental scholarship, undermining efforts to democratise environmental knowledge creation in doctoral research. The authors call for specific structural reforms of doctoral programmes to help address these challenges and support a broader resistance to the inadequate resourcing and evaluation of environmental collaborative research in UK higher education.

People with disabilities (PWDs) have an equal right to independent mobility and dignified involvement in society, which is intrinsically related to their access to inclusive public transit systems. Yet, very often PWDs face injustices of unequal mobilities emanating from a combination of access barriers. Based on qualitative interviews and Focus Group Discussions with PWDs and station managers, this exploratory study assessed the responsiveness of public intercity bus services to the needs of PWDs with vision, hearing and walking/climbing difficulties. The findings show that, despite the Persons with Disabilities Act's passage in 2006, intercity public bus transportation services in Tamale, Ghana, do not meet the needs of PWDs. Intercity bus stations and vehicles are not disability-friendly, leading to people with disabilities facing severe discrimination and having a more difficult time using intercity bus services. This is due to a combination of environmental barriers, legislative/policy inadequacies, negative public attitudes and low compliance of transport operators to transport provisions in the Disability Act. PWDs express deep-seated feelings of marginalisation and resentment about the uneven access to transport services and the violation of their rights to autonomy in movement. It is concluded that the journey experiences of PWDs have a significant adverse influence on their travel decisions and full participation in society. Hence, suggestions for further research and policy recommendations to promote inclusive transport systems have been proffered.

The daily lives of female artisanal and small-scale miners revolve around an array of complex and labour-driven activities. The complexities and labour demands vary depending on the type of artisanal and small-scale mining involved, the underground pit (ghetto) or surface mining. Few studies have explored how gender roles manifest in the two major mining types to inform policy on the creation of a gendered mining environment for women. This paper fills the lacuna in the literature by investigating gender roles and the consequential effects on female artisanal miners' daily lives and practices along the underground pit and surface mining. The liberal feminist theoretical lens is employed as a framework. Data were sourced through field observations and in-depth interviews with 13 lead miners (men) and 67 female miners in the Upper West Region of Ghana. Findings show that sociocultural marginalisation of women is predominant in underground pit/ghetto mining. Women are content to work in surface mining operations and can form gangs to operate independently; nevertheless, sociocultural framings have limited women's space and access to mineralised concessions. The study argues that steps towards promoting gender equality in artisanal and small-scale mining should explore a gendered mineralised concessions distribution; thus, the distribution of mining concessions under the community mining project by the government of Ghana should be gender-sensitive.

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.

Around the world, the environmental crisis is deepening. The atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and terrestrial ecosystems: all are under stress and many living species are being pushed towards extinction. Climate change, a key facet of this crisis, is unfolding rapidly, with glaciers melting in line with worst-case scenarios. Rising global temperatures are fuelling socio-ecological damage with distinctly uneven geographical consequences. We are, for instance, seeing the intensification of heat waves, droughts, floods, storms and fires, which in turn are exacerbating food and water insecurity, economic disruption and armed conflict. The impact of human activities is being written into the geological record at a pace never before seen.

These critical environmental issues, and our individual and collective responses to them, are profoundly reshaping the geographies of our lives and will continue to do so far into the future. As such, they pose some critical challenges for us, as geographers, to consider: how, for example, can we mobilise the capabilities of the discipline to conceptualise and describe these processes of social and environmental change? How, moreover, might we advance, and advocate for, more sustainable, lower carbon and fairer socio-ecological places and futures? As a discipline bridging the social and natural sciences, geographers are uniquely placed to provide answers to these questions and to play a vital role in accelerating solutions that ensure shared prosperity and well-being by advancing novel, collaborative approaches to tackle climate change, secure biodiversity and maintain ecosystems.

It is within this urgent context that Geo now positions itself: as a repository for innovative, experimental and impactful scholarship - addressing some of the biggest environmental challenges facing society today through a distinctly geographical lens. We seek contributions that push the envelope of geographical scholarship: breaking new intellectual ground, developing new formats and approaches, building new collaborations and communities, and working towards new policy.

In framing this agenda for Geo, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our predecessors who have so carefully nurtured and curated the journal since its inception in 2014, as the first fully open access journal published by the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Gail Davies and Anson Mackay, as inaugural editors, established Geo as a space for exploring collaborative research, pioneering the use of open access to support novel formats and build a diverse Geo community. Under their leadership, the journal rapidly became a place for exciting, interdisciplinary research and dialogue, often speaking across traditional geographical divides. Since 2019, Rosie Cox, Sarah Davies and David Demerit have, against the backdrop of the severe challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, continued to make the case for an open access, interdiscipl