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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Social impact of environmental issues > General
Why do business organisations contribute to climate change governance in areas of limited statehood? In many countries, governments are too weak and often also not willing to set and enforce climate change regulations. While companies have the capacities to fill the resulting governance gap, conventional wisdom expects them to take advantage by relocating their production sites in order to escape strict national regulation. Studies on South Africa, Kenya and Germany demonstrate that business contributions to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change vary significantly between countries, sectors and firms. In order to explain these variations, the contributors bring together two important literatures that rarely speak to each other - governance and business management - arguing that the threat of public regulation has an important role in motivating business efforts.
From climate change over shale gas to the race for the Arctic, energy makes headlines in international politics almost daily. Thijs Van de Graaf argues that energy is in dire need of global governance. He traces the history of international energy cooperation from the notorious 'Seven Sisters' oil-companies cartel to the recent creation of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). He analyses how international institutions have been created for securing oil rents, coordinating consumer-countries' energy security policies, promoting producer-consumer dialogue, managing regional gas markets, and dealing with energy-related environmental externalities. Drawing on the emerging regime complexity literature, he constructs a novel analytical framework to explain the fragmented architecture of global energy governance, and studies prospects for institutional reform at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the G8/G20.
Introduces students to current environmental hazards to human and related ecosystem health. Explains detrimental policy changes to existing policies and recently developed policies that impact the health of the environment and that of communities. Presents a perspective for global sources of pollution and how actions have emerged for control of environmental hazards such as climate change and global air pollution. Includes foundation lectures, case studies, and practice questions to help create student led discussions for both in-class and homework assignments. Describes social justice issues and COVID-19 impacts in relation to environmental hazards.
The history of the Cold War has focused overwhelmingly on statecraft and military power, an approach that has naturally placed Moscow and Washington center stage. Meanwhile, regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery have received little attention. However, such environments were of no small importance during the Cold War: in addition to their symbolic significance, they also had direct implications for everything from military strategy to natural resource management. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of "East" and "West."
Disaster by Design: The Aral Sea, Lessons for Sustainability addresses the impacts of the Aral Sea disaster. The virtual disappearance of what was the world's fourth largest inland body of water was neither natural nor accidental. It was the result of deliberate policy decisions. The sea's disappearance is hardly the entire disaster. Instead, we find an accumulation of cascading effects, beginning with the decision to grow cotton, reached remotely in Moscow that altered the farming practices surrounding the Aral Sea. Unsustainable choices resulted in soil salinization, water pollution and toxic blowing sands, impacting the entire bioregion and beyond. A remote island was used to test biological weapons. Uzbekistan, most notably Karakalpakstan, was the autonomous republic at the epicenter of the disaster. Sustainable prospects exist, including renewable energy, permaculture and strengthening the social fabric amidst poverty and ecological collapse. This volume of Research in Social Problems and Public Policy is essential reading for everyone concerned with averting environmental disaster and instead creating livable, sustainable communities. Disaster by Design is a clarion call and an insightful study of Central Asia today.
This volume presents twenty updated and new theories of travelers' decisions and behaviors. It describes the advances in theory construction and practical applications of theory in the disciplines of tourism, hospitality, leisure, and entertainment (THLE) research. The chapters all build on the grand models appearing in these four literature streams during 1965-2015. This approach is comprehensive in both coverage and depth with regard to constructing, testing, and applying theories of travelers' decisions and behaviors, which includes original work in updating grand theories and micro (algorithm-conscious and non-conscious based) theories of travelers' decisions and behavior. This volume is the first to fully recognize and construct theories across the THLE discipline. This volume describes the synergies, symbioses, and serendipity occurring in THLE behavior. It tears down researchers' parochial fences of what is and is not tourism, hospitality, leisure, and entertainment. The time has arrived tor tourism to embrace hospitality, hospitality to embrace tourism, and all to embrace leisure and entertainment, and this volume serves as a catalyst to accomplish this embrace.
Future Sustainable Ecosystems: Complexity, Risk, Uncertainty provides an interdisciplinary, integrative overview of environmental problem-solving using statistics. It shows how statistics can be used to solve diverse environmental and socio-economic problems involving food, water, energy scarcity, and climate change risks. It synthesizes interdisciplinary theory, concepts, definitions, models and findings involved in complex global sustainability problem-solving, making it an essential guide and reference. It includes real-world examples and applications making the book accessible to a broader interdisciplinary readership. Discussions include a broad, integrated perspective on sustainability, integrated risk, multi-scale changes and impacts taking place within ecosystems worldwide. State-of-the-art statistical techniques, including Bayesian hierarchical, spatio-temporal, agent-based and game-theoretic approaches are explored. The author then focuses on the real-world integration of observational and experimental data and its use within statistical models.
This book examines the dangers and the patterns of adaptation that emerge through exposure to risk on a daily basis. By addressing the influence of environmental factors in Indian Ocean World history, the collection reaches across the boundaries of the natural and social sciences, presenting case-studies that deal with a diverse range of natural hazards - fire in Madagascar, drought in India, cyclones and typhoons in Oman, Australia and the Philippines, climatic variability, storms and flood in Vietnam and the Philippines, and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia. These chapters, written by leading international historians, respond to a growing need to understand the ways in which natural hazards shape social, economic and political development of the Indian Ocean World, a region of the globe that is highly susceptible to the impacts of seismic activity, extreme weather, and climate change.
"Sustainable Justice and the Community" is an attempt to locate justice in a workable and sustainable way within the community, introducing 'Sustainable Justice' as a key concept for the coming century. This volume is a critical examination of three key concepts which need to be understood for the management of today's flexible and fluid society, namely Sustainability, Justice and Community. Within this study, we seek to explore both through an analysis built from their original philosophical understandings, through to their contemporary usage and application, ultimately developing new understandings through a combination of the essential thematic notions underpinning these salient concepts.
Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of An Ecological History of Modern China, a comprehensive account of China's transformation since the founding of the People's Republic from the perspective not of the economy but of the biophysical world. Examples throughout illustrate how agricultural, industrial, and urban development have affected the resilience of China's ecosystems—their ability to withstand disturbances and additional growth—and what this means for the country's future. Drawing on decades of research, Stevan Harrell demonstrates the local and global impacts of China's miraculous rise. In clear and accessible prose, An Ecological History of Modern China untangles the paradoxes of development and questions the possibility of a future that is both prosperous and sustainable. It is a critical resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in environmental change, Chinese history, and sustainable development.
Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.
Lakes, wetlands and coastal regions provide essential services critical to the survival of human, wildlife and, by and large, the ecosystems, which are constantly threatened by anthropogenic activities, environmental degradation and climate change. Marine resources, particularly mangroves and corals, are vulnerable to coastal developments, including coastal reclamation, and human settlements that discharge large quantities of wastes into the seas. Climate change impacts, such as increased salt intrusion and sea level rise, may additionally induce regime shifts detrimental to these delicate ecosystems. And the warmer climate has increased the frequency, duration and intensity of catastrophic coastal disturbances, implicating profound uncertainty to the sustainability of coastal infrastructures and resources essential for human populations.This book is written for students, researchers and practitioners pursuing teaching and research related to sustainable development, and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). It provides a unique approach on sustainable development, viewed from the perspectives of providing solutions via model simulation, to solve sustainable development issues related to human population growth, and impacts due to climate change. It provides the scientific knowledge and technical skills necessary to achieve valuable insights for mitigating the predicted adverse impacts and for developing sustainable development strategies, incorporating climate and environmental adaptations.
The first comprehensive survey of Chinese environmental history, this book crystallizes a new field of scholarship that studies the creation of distinct environments as a result of the interaction of human social systems with the natural world. Pioneering essays explore new methodologies of historical environmental research, comparisons of China with the West and Japan, and the impact of the early modern ecological transformation on the spread of disease. An indispensable book for those trying to understand the foundations of modern China or the origins of many of contemporary China's most daunting challenges.
Concepts from justice and ethics can significantly inform energy decision-makers. Benjamin K. Sovacool introduces readers to the injustices and insecurities inherent in the global energy system before presenting an energy justice conceptual framework consisting of availability, affordability, due process, good governance, prudence, intergenerational equity, intragenerational equity, and responsibility. He showcases the application of these principles to eight real-world case studies involving national energy planning in Denmark, the Warm Front program in the United Kingdom, the World Bank's Inspection Panel, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Sao Tome e Principe's Natural Resource Fund, solar energy in Bangladesh, climate change adaptation efforts in least developed countries, and the Yasuni-ITT Initiative in Ecuador.
The aim of Landscape Ecological Applications in Man-Influenced Areas is not only to expand concept of landscape ecology, but also to apply its principle to man-influenced ecosystems. New dimensions of landscape ecological research in a global change such as urbanization, biodiversity, and land transformation are explored in this book. This book also includes several case studies concerning landscape analysis and evaluation using spatial analysis and landscape modelling for establishing sustainable management strategy in urban and agricultural landscapes. The subtitle of the book suggests the integrative and ubiquitous landscape planning considering harmony of man and nature systems in the socio-economic and cultural background. Such key issues and technology of landscape research will provide implements and guidebook for decision makers and land planners as well as teachers and students at universities.
This book is the first authored overview of resilience in tourism and its relationship to the broader resilience literature. The volume takes a multi-scaled approach to examine resilience at the individual, organisation and destination levels, and with respect to the wider tourism system. It covers the different approaches to understanding resilience (the ecological and engineering approaches) and identifies issues with their understanding and application. The book connects issues of resilience to related key concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, networks, systems, change and social capital. It is designed to be an upper level undergraduate and postgraduate primer on resilience in a tourism context and will be of interest to tourism researchers in planning, development, geography, impacts, sustainability, disaster management and environmental studies.
A radical vision for a better future: an economy that works for us, rather than the other way around. As this major German bestseller reports, our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. Costs are rising, the gap between the rich and poor is increasing, natural resources are depleted, and the effects of climate change are starting to take hold. We are under increasing social and environmental stress. But, as leading economist Maja Göpel argues here, there is another path forward. She invites us to imagine what we want our future to look like, and offers solutions that will help us to get there. It’s time to question our principles, set new goals, and re-evaluate our priorities. Time to rethink our world and find new ways of living that don’t drain our planet any further. We need a fair distribution of wealth, and a way to reconcile the social with the ecological. We need to work smarter, not harder. Critical, yet full of encouragement, Maja Göpel chooses surprising and enlightening examples to illustrate how we can leave behind our familiar ways of living to achieve a better future.
WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2020 An exquisitely written, heartbreaking and hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering and empowerment 'A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia' Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North Knowing that he will soon die, Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind. After his passing, Poppy's granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory of growing up in poverty before her mother's incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river. Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place "home." A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.
Earth and its inhabitants face an unprecedented crisis--the human-caused destruction of the planet's life support systems. Deteriorating climate bringing super storms, mass forest fires, melting glaciers, droughts, extreme heat and rising seas, a decline in food production, soil loss, water pollution and declining fisheries all threaten the future of life on earth with a looming extinction event not seen for 60 million years. Beginning in the 17th century, we developed a civilization based on radical materialism, exploitation of natural resources and the myth of endless economic growth. For all its technological wonders, this "hypercivilization" has proven unsustainable. This book explores ways we can create an "ecocivilization" compatible with the laws and limits of nature--a new way of living already developing, with new technologies, new forms of social organization and a new story about ourselves and the Earth.
This book develops the concept of feminist technoecologies as a theoretical and methodological tool for examining the co-constitutive relation between technology and ecology, which have typically been considered as distinct objects of studies. In underscoring how their dynamic relationality troubles the location of agency, this book challenges the idea that technology, as the marker of the innovative capacity of the human, either corrupts or saves ecology. The contributions to the volume present feminist approaches that contextualise and historicize such issues as multi-species survival, border control regimes, solar power, bioart, artificial intelligence and air pollution. They insist on the centrality of corporeality, affects, ethics and vulnerability in the materialisation of technoecological relations, and call into question the exceptional status of the figure of (hu)Man. Together they offer critical and creative tools or modes of inquiry for imagining alternative modalities of practicing care and thinking environmental sustainability. As a creative contribution to the growing literature on new configurations of bodies, technologies and environments against the backdrop of ecological degradation, digital technologization, and precarity in late capitalism, Feminist Technoecologies extends the interchanges between feminist materialisms, environmental humanities and feminist technosciences studies, and will be a resource for all those interested in these fields. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.
This book examines social and natural environmental changes in present-day Laos and presents a new research framework for environmental studies from an interdisciplinary point of view. In Laos, after the Lao version of perestroika, Chintanakaan Mai, in 1986, for better or worse, rural development and urbanization have progressed, and people's livelihoods are about to change significantly. Compared to those of the neighboring countries of mainland Southeast Asia, however, many traditional livelihoods such as region-specific/ethnic-specific livelihood complexes, which combined traditional rice farming with a variety of subsistence activities, have been carried over into the present in Laos. The biggest challenge this book presents is to elucidate livelihood strategies of people who cope successfully with both social and environmental changes and to illustrate how to maintain this rich social and natural environment of Laos in the future. The book includes chapters on social, cultural, and natural concerns and on ethnicity, urbanization, and regional development in Laos. All chapters are based on original data from field surveys. These data will greatly contribute not only to local studies in Laos but also to environmental studies in developing countries.
Ecological Restoration and Management of Longleaf Pine Forests is a timely synthesis of the current understanding of the natural dynamics and processes in longleaf pine ecosystems. This book beautifully illustrates how incorporation of basic ecosystem knowledge and an understanding of socioeconomic realities shed new light on established paradigms and their application for restoration and management. Unique for its holistic ecological focus, rather than a more traditional silvicultural approach, the book highlights the importance of multi-faceted actions that robustly integrate forest and wildlife conservation at landscape scales, and merge ecological with socioeconomic objectives for effective conservation of the longleaf pine ecosystem.
This new volume of Chinese Research Perspectives on the Environment (formerly the China Environment Yearbook) includes selected articles from the 2013 annual environmental report compiled by Friends of Nature, a leading environmental protection NGO in China, with contributions from academics, environmental protection activists, public service activists, and the media. In this volume, readers are brought up to date on the main environmental issues and events of 2012, including environmental health, dams and cross-border water issues, a rise in environmental awareness and public action in China, sustainable consumption, and heavy metal pollution. Air pollution control has continued to attract attention from the public, media, academics, and government. This volume also discusses the controversy of the revision of the Environmental Protection Law. Like other volumes in the Chinese Research Perspectives on the Environment series, this one aims to record, evaluate, and reflect on China's current environmental conditions.
The Achuar Indians of the Upper Amazon have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. The author documents their knowledge of the environment, and explains how it is interwoven with cosmological ideas that endow nature with the characteristics of society. |
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