Regional Environmental Change最新文献

While there has been a considerable conceptual discussion of trapped populations in the environmental migration literature, the empirical evidence on their existence is scarce. I examine why many people remain in environmentally vulnerable areas by analyzing newly collected survey panel data of 1515 household heads living along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh, an area affected by riverbank erosion and flooding. To examine whether immobility is voluntary or involuntary, I assess the migration aspirations and capability to move of those who did not migrate after environmental shocks occurred in their village. The majority (82%) of non-migrants can be classified as voluntary non-migrants, while 13% can be considered "trapped" and the remaining 5% as acquiescent non-migrants. Being affected by erosion significantly increases the likelihood that immobility is involuntary by 7.9 percentage points, while also lowering the socio-economic status of the affected population. Taken together, these results suggest that environmental change may indeed lead to the "trapping" of parts of the population in exposed areas by eroding their capability to move while simultaneously increasing their migration aspirations. The findings have important policy implications, as they raise a word of caution against prematurely labeling all populations staying in environmentally exposed areas as "trapped" without considering their migration aspirations-a majority may in fact be voluntary non-migrants.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-025-02452-3.

In recent years, it has become evident that regions with historically wetter climates, such as the Netherlands, are rapidly becoming more prone to drought due to climate change. Given that these regions tend to be accustomed to having sufficient, or even surplus, water, these new climate realities confront policy makers with the need to identify governance approaches to adapt water and land use systems to prevent significant damages to agriculture, water-dependent nature, and drinking water reserves. This research details the complex, evolving landscape of the policies, laws, and instruments in a specific region with a historically wetter climate, namely the Twente region in the Netherlands. Rapid Policy Network Mapping is employed to map the intricate multi-level implementation setting currently in place in the region. Results show that the emphasis in drought governance across European Union and national and regional governance layers is currently still on formulating objectives and developing strategies to adapt to drought. Moreover, the instruments that are currently in place are largely voluntary in nature, which raises concerns about the degree to which the current instrument mix can steer drought adaptation if their uptake is low. More worryingly, this study also identifies several policies, laws, and instruments that could hinder the implementation of drought adaptation measures, due to exemptions in legislation, conflicting policy approaches across governance layers, and concerns over the (behavioral) effects of certain instruments.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-025-02449-y.

Natural resource management networks cohere due to mutual dependencies and fragment, in part, due to the perceived risks of interaction. However, research on these networks has tended to accept coherence a priori rather than problematizing dependence, and few studies exist on interorganizational risk perception. This article presents the results of a study operationalizing these concepts and measuring the distribution of three types of dependence (capital, legitimacy, and regulatory) and two types of perceived risk (performance and sanction) among nearly fifty stakeholder groups and organizations participating in the management of fisheries in the binational Gulf of Maine. The analysis reveals an organizationally diverse network with several stakeholder types participating, with communications clustered binationally, with low levels of perceived risk in interacting, and interdependencies cohering the network. The types of interorganizational dependence present varied across dyadic relationships, but legitimacy dependence, based on shared understandings that organizations should work together, was the most present and had the largest effect on collaboration-oriented network traits. Sanction risk was more common than performance risk but had the most substantial negative effect. The results suggest an opportunity for additional studies of interorganizational dependance and perceived risk to operationalize and measure the sources of network coherence and fragmentation and their effect on collaboration.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-024-02328-y.

Biodiversity and natural landscapes have been lost over time due to global agricultural expansion and urbanization. Our study assesses the non-market economic value of reclaiming natural landscapes in the Zuid-Limburg region of the Netherlands, a country in which large-scale intensive agriculture dominates rural landscapes. Through a discrete choice experiment conducted among non-residents of Zuid-Limburg, we find that individuals planning to visit the area are willing to contribute a similar (insignificantly different) monetary amount toward conservation efforts in the area as those who do not plan to visit. This implies that the area is largely valued for its indirect use values and non-use values rather than its option values. We further find that societal concerns explain some preferences in the choice experiment. In particular, increased levels of concern about the Dutch nitrogen crisis relate to a higher preference for agricultural businesses to be contributing to nature-inclusive farming. More concern about built-up area leads to a higher preference for natural landscapes. Furthermore, individuals with more concern about extinction risk prefer fewer animal species in Zuid-Limburg with threatened status. Moreover, our study reveals that individuals with greater patience and higher household incomes are more willing to invest in conservation efforts.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-025-02418-5.

Climate scientists have raised concerns about the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) or even its potential collapse in the future. Their messages should not hinder urgent adaptation to climate risks; rather, they underscore the growing need for adaptive planning across a range of possible futures, including high-impact, low-likelihood AMOC scenarios. There are five ways to consider the consequences of AMOC weakening or collapse in adaptation planning: (1) broaden the set of future adaptation scenarios considered; (2) develop adaptation pathways beyond the most likely range of possible outcomes; (3) create robustness and redundancy in adaptation portfolios; (4) expand the solution space, attuned to path dependencies and their implications; and (5) monitor emerging, weak signals of AMOC changes to inform adaptation planning. We argue that closer collaboration between climate scientists and the adaptation planning community is needed to generate timely, policy-relevant insights that can guide proactive and effective adaptation action.

This article investigates Dutch coastal risk management in light of recent scientific evidence on long-term sea level rise. While the so-called Delta Programme, meant as a national boost for flood safety, remains central to the Netherlands' coastal defence strategy, our analysis reveals that it does not offer sufficient protection beyond the year 2050. It is therefore evidence of a climate adaptation gap. Drawing on the concept of lock-ins, this study examines how certain mechanisms may be at play. The study uses a framework on "adaptation lock-ins" developed by Groen et al. (2022) in an attempt to study and explain this adaptation gap. A qualitative analysis of policy documents, secondary literature and semi-structured interviews with experts points to the existence of several lock-in mechanisms which are implied in the stagnation of Dutch coastal risk management. The insights gathered are relevant for practitioners and academics alike as it might be used to inform the upcoming revision of the Delta Programme in 2027. At the conceptual level, the study adds insights on previously undiscovered types of lock-ins, thus adding to the explanatory power of the lock-in concept. The article concludes that further research can focus on how lock-ins vary across time, regions or contexts, and how they can be addressed and overcome.