This book provides a detailed treatment of the ecological, economic and social impacts in the context of environmental impact assessment (EIA) and makes clear the necessary link between EIA and the sustainability principles of protecting biodiversity, risk aversion, and inter and intra-generational equity. It proposes that the benefits and costs of a project need to be weighted according to who bears them, giving particular attention to the planet's poor. Furthermore, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of environmental offsetting which has come to be commonly resorted to when negative impacts cannot be mitigated. In this context, the book argues that offsetting is only viable if advanced offsets are quarantined through a Strategic Environmental Impact approach. Finally, the book explores the role of the various disciplines which need to be mastered in undertaking an EIA. This book takes you on a journey from the beginning of environmental impact assessment to the present day. It is a scholarly warts and all study. For each trial and tribulation, Hundloe presents a remedy. It is essential reading and an invaluable reference for environmental practitioners, politicians, policy makers, academics and, the most important group, future environmental practitioners.

A good understanding of the status quo is necessary for the success of efforts to develop and maintain nature in built space. Accordingly, this book conducts an environmental scan of the context of these efforts in global perspective. In particular, it develops and employs a novel environmental scanning model (ESM) designed to rigorously analyze the political, economic, social, technological, ecological, cultural and historical (PESTECH) contexts of initiatives to promote biodiversity in the built environment. The focus is on four specific substantive areas of environmental policy, namely forestry, water, food, and energy. The units of analysis roughly correspond with the major United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Middle-East and North Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Western Europe, North America, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

The negotiation of the Canada–U.S. Free Trade agreement in 1985–88 initiated a period of substantially increased North American, and later, global economic integration. However, events since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 have created the potential for major policy shifts arising from NAFTA’s renegotiation and continuing political uncertainties in the United States and with Canada’s other major trading partners. Navigating a Changing World draws together scholars from both countries to examine Canada–U.S. policy relations, the evolution of various processes for regulating market and human movements across national borders, and the specific application of these dynamics to a cross-section of policy fields with significant implications for Canadian public policy. It explores the impact of territorial institutions and extra-territorial forces – institutional, economic, and technological, among others – on interactions across national borders, both within North America and, where relevant, in broader economic relationships affecting the movement of goods, services, people, and capital. Above all, Navigating a Changing World represents the first major study to address Canada’s international policy relations within and beyond North America since the elections of Justin Trudeau in 2015 and Donald Trump in 2016 and the renegotiation of NAFTA.

In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis. The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty presents a new explanation, vision, and action plan based on the idea of commoning the land. The book argues that by commoning the land, rather than privatising it, we can develop the foundation for prosperity without destructive growth and address both local and global challenges. Making the land the most fundamental priority of all commons does not only give hope, it also opens the doors to a new world in which economy, environment, and society are decolonised and liberated.

Is safe and sustainable water and sanitation for all an unaffordable pipedream? This book surveys the worldwide development of water and sewage services and the challenges in meeting Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6) along with climate change, population growth and urbanisation. It explores the reasons why current SDG6 progress is failing, including weak policy implementation, staff shortages and inadequate funding, as well as the limited impact of aid funding. The author contends that despite a series of innovations, debt finance remains too small to address needs of developing economies. Therefore, instead of advocating new funding, this book proposes addressing the funding gap through technological innovation and more efficient management and procurement through a series of examples that have challenged traditional assumptions. After four decades of good intentions, SDG6 is making a difference in monitoring shortfalls for the first time, allowing for more effective responses. This book outlines the role of innovation in hardware development, procurement and installation, and discusses how network management and operations can most effectively address funding gaps. The potential for savings is considerable, if effectively replicated. New approaches are driving forward affordable resilience, including nature-based solutions such as upstream habitat enhancement to retain water and improve downstream water quality; the circular economy, including water, nutrient, energy and heat recovery from wastewater; and demand management. This book will be of great value to scholars, policy makers and practitioners interested in the global finance of sustainable water and sanitation.

This book focuses on the present and future challenges of managing ecosystem transformation on a planet where human impacts are pervasive. In this new epoch, the Anthropocene, the already rapid rate of species loss is amplified by climate change and other stress factors, causing transformation of highly-valued landscapes. Many locations are already transforming into novel ecosystems, where new species, interactions, and ecological functions are creating landscapes unlike anything seen before. This has sparked contentious debate not just about science, but about decision-making, responsibility, fairness, and human capacity to intervene. Clement argues that the social and ecological reality of the Anthropocene requires modernised governance and policy to confront these new challenges and achieve ecological objectives. There is a real opportunity to enable society to cope with transformed ecosystems by changing governance, but this is notoriously difficult. Aimed at anyone involved in these conversations, be those researchers, practitioners, decision makers or students, this book brings together diffuse research exploring how to confront institutional change and ecological transformation in different contexts, and provides insight into how to translate governance concepts into productive pathways forward.

Describing the natural state of eight important lakes in Asia and the human impact on these lake ecosystems, this book offers a valuable reference guide. Over the past several decades the Aral Sea, Dead Sea, Lake Balkhash and other major lakes in Asia have undergone significant changes with regard to their size, water level, chemical composition, and flora and fauna. Most of these changes resulted from the loss of water from tributaries (now used for irrigation farming) or increasing consumption in local industries and households. However, significant human impacts may have begun as early as 2000 years ago. In addition to the three lakes mentioned above, Lake Sevan (Armenia), the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkmenistan), Lake Issyk-Kul (Kyrgyzstan), and Lake Lop Nur (China) are discussed as the most prominent examples of changing lake ecosystems. In contrast, an example of an almost pristine lake ecosystem is included with the report on Lake Uvs Nuur (Mongolia). For each lake, the book summarizes its origin and early geological history, and reconstructs its natural state and variability on the basis of proxy records from drilled or exposed lake sediments that have accumulated since the last ice age. The frequently observed reductions in lake level and size during most recent decades led often to significant environmental impacts in the respective lake catchments including vegetation deterioration, soil erosion and badland formation, soil salinization or the formation of sinkholes.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment provides an in-depth and accessible analysis and theorization of environmental issues in the region. It will help readers make connections between Latin American and other regions' perspectives, experiences, and environmental concerns. Latin America has seen an acceleration of environmental degradation due to the expansion of resource extraction and urban areas. This Handbook addresses Latin America not only as object of study, but also as a region with a long and profound history of critical thinking on these themes. Furthermore, the Handbook departs from the environment as a social issue inextricably linked to politics, economy and culture. It will be an invaluable resource for those wanting not only to understand the issues, but also to engage with ideas about environmental politics and social-ecological transformation. The handbook covers a broad range organized in three areas: physical geography, ecology and crucial environmental problems of the region, key theoretical and methodological issues used to understand Latin America's ecosocial contexts, and institutional and grassroots practices related to more just and sustainable worlds. The Handbook will set a research agenda for the near future and provide comprehensive research on most subregions relative to environmental transformations, challenges, struggles and political processes. It stands as a fresh and much needed state of the art introduction for researchers, scholars, post-graduates and academic audiences on Latin American contributions to theorization, empirical research and environmental practices.

From Kim Heacox, the acclaimed author of The Only Kayak and John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire, comes Rhythm of the Wild, an Alaska memoir focused on Denali National Park. Music runs through every page of this book, as do stories, rivers and wolves. At its heart, Rhythm of the Wild is a love story. It begins in 1981 and ends in 2014, yet reaches beyond the arc of time. Author and mountaineer Jonathan Waterman has called Heacox "our northern Edward Abbey." In this book we find out why. We hitchhike with Kim through Idaho, camp on the Colorado Plateau, and fly off the sand cliffs of Hangman Creek with a little terrier named Super Max, the Wonder Dog. We meet Zed, the Aborigine; Nine Fingers, the blues guitarist; and Adolph Murie, the legendary wildlife biologist, who dared to say that wolves should be protected, not persecuted. Kim also reprises in this book his friend Richard Steele, a beloved character from The Only Kayak. Some books are larger than their actual subject-this is one. Part memoir, part exploration of Denali's inspiring natural and human history, and part conservation polemic, Rhythm of the Wild ranges from funny to provocative. It's a celebration of-and a plea to restore and defend-the vibrant earth and our rightful place in it.

This open access book focuses on the meanings, agendas, as well as the local and global implications of bioeconomy and bioenergy policies in and across South America, Asia and Europe. It explores how a transition away from a fossil and towards a bio-based economic order alters, reinforces and challenges socio-ecological inequalities. The volume presents a historically informed and empirically rich discussion of bioeconomy developments with a particular focus on bio-based energy. A series of conceptual discussions and case studies with a multidisciplinary background in the social sciences illuminate how the deployment of biomass sources from the agricultural and forestry sectors affect societal changes concerning knowledge production, land and labour relations, political participation and international trade. How can a global perspective on socio-ecological inequalities contribute to a complex and critical understanding of bioeconomy? Who participates in the negotiation of specific bioeconomy policies and who does not? Who determines the agenda? To what extent does the bioeconomy affect existing socio-ecological inequalities in rural areas? What are the implications of the bioeconomy for existing relations of extraction and inequalities across regions? The volume is an invitation to reflect upon these questions and more, at a time when the need for an ecological and socially just transition away from a carbon intensive economy is becoming increasingly pressing.

This book explores how a handful of liberal foundations contributed to establish and orientate the international climate regime. Looking back at the origins of international climate philanthropy and its evolution over the past three decades, the author examines the role of philanthropic foundations in the international climate debate. The research presented in this book shows that foundations, through their grant-making and convening activities, are at the heart of the climate debate. In fact, many credit them with having, through their activities prior to and at the COP, significantly contributed to laying the basis for the Paris Agreement in December 2015.

This study focuses on impacts of the environmental and socio-economic transformation on the indigenous people's livelihoods in Vietnam's Central Highlands recent decades since the country's reunification in 1975. The first empirical section sheds light on multiple external conditions (policy reforms, population trends, and market forces) exposed onto local people. The role of human and social capital is examined again in a specific livelihood of community-based tourism to testify the resilience level of local people when coping with constraints. The study concludes with an outlook on implications of development processed which still places agriculture at the primary position livelihood, and pays attention to human capital and social capital of indigenous groups in these highlands.

This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors' historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. "Multipolar" or "multipolarity" in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize respectively in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies and ecology.

This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world's altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors' historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. "Multipolar" or "multipolarity" in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize respectively in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies and ecology.

This book takes a critical look at solar geoengineering as an acceptable means for addressing climate change. Baskin explores the assumptions and imaginaries which animate 'engineering the climate' and discusses why this climate solution is so controversial. The book explains geoengineering's past, its revival in the mid-2000s, and its future prospects including its shadow presence in the Paris climate accord. The main focus however is on dissecting solar geoengineering today - its rationales, underpinning knowledge, relationship to power, and the stance towards nature which accompanies it. Baskin explores three competing imaginaries associated with geoengineering: an Imperial imaginary, an oppositional Un-Natural imaginary, and a conspiratorial Chemtrail imaginary. He seeks to explain why solar geoengineering has struggled to gain approval and why resistance to it persists, despite the support of several powerful actors. He provocatively suggests that reconceptualising our present as the Anthropocene might unwittingly facilitate the normalisation of geoengineering by providing a sustaining socio-technical imaginary. This book is essential reading for those interested in climate policy, political ecology, and science & technology studies.

This book provides a comprehensive study of the notion of responsibility in environmental governance. It starts with the observation that, although the rhetoric of responsibility is indeed all-pervasive in environmental and sustainability-related fields, decisive political action is still lacking. Governance architectures increasingly strive to hold different stakeholders responsible by installing accountability and transparency mechanisms to manage environmental problems, yet the structural background conditions affecting these issues continue to generate unevenly distributed, socially unjust, and ecologically devastating consequences. Responsibility in Environmental Governance develops the concept of responsibility as an analytical approach to map and understand these dynamics and to situate diverse meanings of responsibility within larger socio-political contexts. It applies this approach to the study of food waste governance, uncovering a narrow governance focus on accountability, optimization, and consumer behavior change strategies, opening up spaces for organizing more democratic solutions to a truly global problem.

This book proves, through empirical research, that indigenous and traditional agricultural communities have experienced severe climate change impacts, and have developed corresponding livelihood strategies to strengthen their resilience in a variable climate. With a focus on indigenous minority farming communities in the developing region of South-Western Zimbabwe, the study presents both qualitative and quantitative approaches of data analysis to assess sustainability problems amid climate change and climate variability challenges, and proposes potential solutions. In eight chapters, the book expands on the scarce availability of community-based research on climate change and variability in Zimbabwe. The book is meant for college and university students and stakeholders involved in development work in rural minority farmer communities, especially in climate change prone regions of Africa and other developing countries who have very few options of adaptation and mitigation.

The IPCC (2007) warned that the Ganges Brahmaputra Meghna (GBM) basin will be at greatest risk due to increased flooding, and that the region s poverty would reduce its adaptation capacity. This book investigates autonomous adaptation using a multi-method technique comprising PRA and a questionnaire survey applied in the case study area Islampur "Upazila" in Bangladesh.
The study has four key approaches. First, it reviews the flood literature for Bangladesh from 1980 to 2014. Second, it examines farmers' crop adaptation processes in a case study area at Islampur, Bangladesh. Third, it assesses the vulnerability and adaptation (V & A) in response to three extreme flood events (EFEs). Fourth, the book assesses the economic consequences of failure effects of autonomous crop adaptation in response to EFEs. The results show that Bangladeshi farmers are highly resilient to EFEs, but the economic consequences of failure effects of autonomous crop adaptation (FEACA) on marginal farmers are large.
The book contributes to current knowledge by filling three important research gaps as follows, 1) farmers autonomous crop adaptation processes in response to various types of extreme floods; 2) methodological contribution for assessing vulnerability and adaptation through PRA; and 3) the economic consequences of the failure effects of autonomous crop adaptations.

"This book provides a good account of autonomous adaptation and its impact on flood vulnerable communities in Bangladesh. Anyone wishing to fully understand the impact of climate change should read the book."
Professor Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Laureate

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Hotspots are enigmatic surface features that are not easily explained in the framework of plate tectonics. Investigating their origin is the goal of this thesis, using field evidence collected in the Cape Verde Islands, a prominent hotspot archipelago in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. The approach taken is to document uplift of the islands relative to sea level and use the uplift features to test various models of hotspot development. Island uplift is thought to arise from the growth of the anomalously shallow seafloor on which the islands rest, known as the bathymetric swell, which is characteristic of hotspots. The work comprises a geological summary and detailed mapping of paleo sea level markers on Cape Verde. Isotopic dating of the markers shows that uplift on the islands over the last 6 Myr is up to 400 m, and that the uplift chronology varies among islands. Two processes act to raise the Cape Verde Islands. The dominant process is one that is local to individual islands. The regional, swell-related component is smaller, and possibly episodic. The observations provide strong constraints on swell development and on hotspot models.

First published in 1984, The Mediterranean Region considers the broad economic and political problems facing the region from a variety of perspectives. The book features the work of international experts on the Mediterranean region. It discusses the changing legal environment and covers the Law of the Sea as applied to the Mediterranean, and the position of the Arab countries in the region. Chapters are also devoted to exploring the different policies of Russia, the United States, and Europe, towards the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Region is a detailed contribution to research and understanding of the area.

This book examines the "oil-tourism interface", the broad range of direct and indirect contact points between offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism. Offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism are pursued as development paths across the North Atlantic region. Offshore oil promises economic benefits from employment and royalty payments to host societies, but is based on fossil fuel-intensive resource extraction. Nature-based tourism, instead, is based on experiencing natural environments and encountering wildlife, including whales, seals, or seabirds. They share social-ecological space, such as oceans, coastlines, cities and towns where tourism and offshore oil operations and offices are located. However, they rarely share cultural or political space, in terms of media coverage, public debate, or policy discussion that integrates both modes of development. Through a comparative analysis of Denmark, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Norway, and Scotland, this book offers important lessons for how coastal societies can better navigate relationships between resource extraction and nature-based tourism in the interests of social-ecological wellbeing.

This book examines social processes that have contributed to growing pesticide use, with a particular focus on the role governments play in urban aerial pesticide spraying operations. Beyond being applied to sparsely populated farmland, pesticides have been increasingly used in densely populated urban environments, and when faced with invasive species, governments have resorted to large-scale aerial pesticide spraying operations in urban areas. This book focuses on New Zealand's 2002-2004 pesticide campaign to eradicate the Painted Apple Moth, which is the largest operation of its kind in world history, whether we consider its duration (29 months), its scope (at its peak the spraying zone was 10,632 hectares/26,272 acres), the number of sprayings that were administered (the pesticide was administered on 60 different days), or the number of people exposed to the spraying (190,000+). This book provides an in-depth understanding of the social processes that contributed to the incursion, why the government sought to eradicate the moth through aerial pesticide spraying, the ideological strategies they used to build and maintain public support, and why those strategies were effective. Urban Aerial Pesticide Spraying Campaigns will be of great interest to students and researchers of pesticides, environmental sociology, environmental history, environmental studies, political ecology, geography, medical sociology, and science and technology studies.

1. Provides a holistic understanding of Polar Geoscience and its trajectory of change. 2. Presents four decades of scientific research by Indian scientists in Polar regions and the data obtained to address global climate issues. 3. Includes case studies on geological, glaciological, and geophysical investigations done in polar regions. 4. Highlights glaciological studies that explain changes with time in polar regions. 5. Discusses the use of natural archives to explain the cryosphere region's climate scenario.

This book conceptualizes community nutrition resilience as a critical area that is currently lacking the attention it requires from both the public and private sectors. The book spotlights Greater Miami's resilience efforts, both responding to slowly developing challenges such as immigration, environmental deterioration, and the wealth distribution gap, as well as sudden disasters such as hurricanes or flooding driven by climate change. Drawing on existing literature as well as interviews with professionals working in the field, the author makes recommendations on how to incorporate food systems into urban resilience planning, how to prioritize resilience on urban food agendas, and how to strengthen food system resilience through public, private, and third sector level engagement. She also highlights how the availability of and access to nutritious food impact the health, performance, and well-being of communities in the region, thus making a strong case for the prioritization of this growing issue.

This handbook is recognition of the need to better integrate physical and human geography. It combines a collection of work and research within the new field of Critical Physical Geography, which gives critical attention to relations of social power with deep knowledge of a particular field of biophysical science. Critical Physical Geography research accords careful attention to biophysical landscapes and the power relations that have increasingly come to shape them, and to the politics of environmental science and the role of biophysical inquiry in promoting social and environmental justice. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography lays out the scope and guiding principles of Critical Physical Geography research. It presents a carefully selected set of empirical work, demonstrating the range and intellectual strength of existing integrative work in geography research. This handbook is the first of its kind to cover this emerging discipline and will be of significant interest to students and academics across the fields of geography, the environment and sustainability.