Environmental Conservation最新文献

This paper establishes a theoretical connection between China’s Five-Year Plan (FYP) and environmental pollution. We propose a target allocation cycle theory to explain the periodic feature of environmental pollution, which advances political business theory in different institutional contexts. By analysing industrial SO2 and PM2.5 data as well as the political career data of officials in 277 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2019, we reveal a significant influence of China’s political business cycles, as dictated by the FYP, on the periodicity of environmental pollution. Specifically, the emissions of industrial SO2 and PM2.5 exhibit a U-shaped periodic trend, peaking during the initial 2 years of each FYP, followed by a gradual decline in subsequent years, only to peak again in the first year of the succeeding FYP. These findings suggest that local political leaders strategically allocate their efforts in managing environmental pollution. Initially, there is a relaxation of environmental regulation during the early stages of a FYP, which is then followed by a shift towards more stringent environmental governance after the midpoint of the FYP.

In the West Asia region, the vulnerability of Ramsar Convention wetlands due to unsustainable utilization driven by water scarcity continues to grow. Here, a global surface water product generated by the European Joint Research Centre was used to assess changes in surface water in 77 wetlands listed under the Ramsar Convention over a 37-year period (1984–2021). By combining this product with a quantitative valuation model, estimates were made of the economic value of the ecosystem services provided by these wetlands, enabling the determination of the economic losses resulting from any reduction in surface water. We show that 20% (7550 km2) of permanent surface waters in Ramsar sites have disappeared or are no longer classified as permanent. Based on this, USD 106 billion of the economic value of wetlands ecosystem services have been lost. Additionally, 33% (12 100 km2) of seasonal surface waters in these wetlands have experienced a decrease in area. Iran and Iraq account for 90% of water losses, primarily in 34 wetlands (30 in Iran and 4 in Iraq). These findings underscore the urgent need for water management policies and conservation strategies in the West Asia region.

The concept of a forest transition – a regional shift from deforestation to forest recovery – tends to equate forest area expansion with sustainability, assuming that more forest is good for people and the environment. To promote debate and more just and ecologically sustainable outcomes during this period of intense focus on forests (such as the United Nations’ Decade on Ecological Restoration, the Trillion Trees initiative and at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conferences), we synthesize recent nuanced and integrated research to inform forest management and restoration in the future. Our results reveal nine pitfalls to assuming forest transitions and sustainability are automatically linked. The pitfalls are as follows: (1) fixating on forest quantity instead of quality; (2) masking local diversity with large-scale trends; (3) expecting U-shaped temporal trends of forest change; (4) failing to account for irreversibility; (5) framing categories and concepts as universal/neutral; (6) diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into single-purpose conservation forests or intensive production lands; (7) neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions; (8) neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force; and (9) ignoring local agency and sentiments. We develop and illustrate these pitfalls with local- and national-level evidence from Southeast Asia and outline forward-looking recommendations for research and policy to address them. Forest transition research that neglects these pitfalls risks legitimizing unsustainable and unjust policies and programmes of forest restoration or tree planting.

Tropical insectivorous birds comprise a diverse group that has a distinct response to habitat degradation. However, knowledge on birds’ ecological functions and their large-scale functional responses to human impacts across various habitats is scarce. We sampled 22 1-km-radius buffer landscapes within the Cantareira-Mantiqueira region (south-east Brazil), including native forests, pastures and marshes, to assess how landscape and habitat characteristics might affect insectivorous birds within the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We studied whether bird species and functional diversity might respond to habitat turnover and nestedness and to native forest cover using generalized linear mixed models. We found negative effects of increased native forest cover on functional diversity indices. Bird communities in pastures show more nestedness, whereas marsh areas exhibit higher turnover. Forest areas receive a balanced contribution from both nestedness and turnover. These results are attributable to the predominantly secondary growth and early successional stages of the native forest fragments in the region, emphasizing the connection between landscape characteristics, habitat types and bird functional diversity in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.