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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Pollution & threats to the environment > Global warming
The book provides a comprehensive overview of the hydrology of the Nile River, especially the ecohydrological degradation and challenges the basin is facing, the impact of climate change on water availability and the transboundary water management issues. The book includes analysis and approaches that will help provide different insights into the hydrology of this complex basin, which covers 11 countries and is home to over 300 million people. The need for water-sharing agreements that reflect the current situations of riparian countries and are based on equitable water- sharing principles is stressed in many chapters.This book explores water resource availability and quality and their trends in the basin, soil erosion and watershed degradation at different scales, water and health, land use and climate change impact, transboundary issues and water management, dams, reservoirs and lakes. The link between watershed and river water quantity and quality is discussed pointing out the importance of watershed protection for better water resource management, water accessibility, institutional set-up and policy, water demand and management. The book also presents the water sharing sticking points in relation to historical treaties and the emerging water demands of the upstream riparian countries. The need for collaboration and identification of common ground to resolve the transboundary water management issues and secure a win-win is also indicated. "
This volume, proceedings of a symposium on global warming and energy policy, explores two major environmental concerns that arise from fuel use: the prospect that the globe will become warmer as a result of emissions of carbon dioxide, and the effect upon health of the fine particles emitted as combustion products. In regards to the former, in the second half of the 20th century there were major increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and it is generally agreed that these were responsible for an increase in CO2 concentrations. However, the relationship between global temperature and CO2 is unclear. It is known, though, that water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 and that the concentrations of water vapor vary widely in time and space. It is generally believed that as temperature increases so does the water vapor, leading to further temperature increases. Some scientists agree with this model, and some disagree with it. This volume (a) outlines the situation of predicting temperature rise, (b) outlines the present situation on the effect of temperature on economic activity, (c) discusses what steps can be taken to clarify this situation, and (d) discusses what society might do while waiting for these steps to produce results. In regards to the effect of combustion products on health, the situation in this case is less global, although many parts of the world are affected. Depending on epidemiological study alone, it is hard to be sure about a risk caused by a substance unless it at least doubles the frequency of an outcome which occurs naturally. The scientific uncertainties, therefore, remain almost as large as those for global warming.
Climate change, energy production and consumption, and the need to improve the sustainability of all aspects of human activity are key inter-related issues for which solutions must be found and implemented quickly and efficiently. To be successfully implemented, solutions must recognize the rapidly changing socio-techno-political environment and multi-dimensional constraints presented by today's interconnected world. As part of this global effort, considerations of climate change impacts, energy demands, and incorporation of sustainability concepts have increasing importance in the design, construction, and maintenance of highway and airport pavement systems. To prepare the human capacity to develop and implement these solutions, many educators, policy-makers and practitioners have stressed the paramount importance of formally incorporating sustainability concepts in the civil engineering curriculum to educate and train future civil engineers well-equipped to address our current and future sustainability challenges. This book will prove a valuable resource in the hands of researchers, educators and future engineering leaders, most of whom will be working in multidisciplinary environments to address a host of next-generation sustainable transportation infrastructure challenges. "This book proposes a broad detailed overview of the actual scientific knowledge about pavements linked to climate change, energy and sustainability at the international level in an original multidimensional/multi-effects way. By the end, the reader will be aware of the whole global issues to care about for various pavement technical features around the world, among which the implications of modelling including data collection, challenging resources saving and infrastructures services optimisation. This is a complete and varied work, rare in the domain." Dr. Agnes Jullien Research Director Director of Environmental, Development, Safety and Eco-Design Laboratory (EASE) Department of Development, Mobility and Environment Ifsttar Centre de Nantes Cedex- France "An excellent compilation of latest developments in the field of sustainable pavements. The chapter topics have been carefully chosen and are very well-organized with the intention of equipping the reader with the state-of-the-art knowledge on all aspects of pavement sustainability. Topics covered include pavement Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), pervious pavements, cool pavements, photocatalytic pavements, energy harvesting pavements, etc. which will all be of significant interest to students, researchers, and practitioners of pavement engineering. This book will no doubt serve as an excellent reference on the topic of sustainable pavements." Dr. Wei-Hsing Huang Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Pavement Research and Technology (IJPRT) and Professor of Civil Engineering National Central University Taiwan
Sustainability Communication across Asia distils the core components of environmental communication in the diverse milieu of Asian nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and China. The chapters in this book engage readers in a clear-sighted view of issues, challenges, and strategies related to sustainability communication in Asia, examining fundamental principles, digital strategies, and the role of language, as well as community engagement. The first part of the book features underpinning ideologies of sustainability communication. The authors go on to explore the prevalent trends and approaches in sustainable communication in the digital realm, examining the internet in general, social media, and gaming platforms. Finally, the book discusses the green efforts adopted among selected Asian communities, the role of communication, and the resulting societal impacts. Readers will be introduced to many related examples of Asian sustainability cases and issues that may differ from Western experiences. Interesting topics such as environmental gamification, edutainment and sustainability communication, and social media and sustainability are among those presented and elaborated at length by 21 writers with industrial and academic backgrounds. Practical and inspiring, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability and environmental communication, and Asian studies in general.
The Low-Carbon Good Life is about how to reverse and repair four interlocking crises arising from modern material consumption: the climate crisis, growing inequality, biodiversity loss and food-related ill-health. Across the world today and throughout history, good lives are characterised by healthy food, connections to nature, being active, togetherness, personal growth, a spiritual framework and sustainable consumption. A low-carbon good life offers opportunities to live in ways that will bring greater happiness and contentment. Slower ways of living await. A global target of no more than one tonne of carbon per person would allow the poorest to consume more and everyone to find our models of low-carbon good lives. But dropping old habits is hard, and large-scale impacts will need fresh forms of public engagement and citizen action. Local to national governments need to act; equally, they need pushing by the power and collective action of citizens. Innovative and engaging and written in a style that combines storytelling with scientific evidence, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, sustainability, environmental economics and sustainable consumption, as well as non-specialist readers concerned about the climate crisis.
Climate Change: Observed Impacts on Planet Earth, Third Edition, brings together top global researchers across many disciplines to provide a comprehensive review on the complex issue of climate change and weather patterns. The third edition continues its tradition of focusing on the science and evidence on this highly politicized topic. Every chapter is updated, with this new edition featuring new chapters on topics such as glacier melt, the impacts of rising temperatures, extreme weather, modeling techniques, biodiversity, and more. This book is essential for researchers, environmental managers, engineers, and those whose work is impacted by, or tied to, climate change and global warming.
Global warming poses a serious threat to the quality of life in the 21st century. Taking Japan as an example, this book explains the anticipated impact of global warming on modern society-natural ecosystems; agriculture, forestry, and fisheries; water resources and environments; the infrastructure and socioeconomic system; and human health. The most recent scientific and technical information is presented by more than 30 prominent researchers who are assessing the potential impact of global warming on nature and society. The results of their research provide dramatic evidence of the urgency of the task faced by policy makers in responding to climate change. For scientists and government officials alike, this volume may be considered required reading.
Get cutting-edge agroforestry research and data Deforestation and the rampant use of fossil fuels are major contributors to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and are enormous influences on global warming. Agroforestry systems and tree plantations can help mitigate the resulting climate change and degradation of biodiversity and accelerating climate change. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems addresses these global concerns with an essential collection of presentations on biodiversity and climate change from the First World Congress in Agroforestry (Orlando, Florida, 2004). Respected experts discuss the latest research and data on how agroforestry systems can help solve environmental problems through carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. Years ago, agroforestry's environmental benefits were mainly seen as being soil amelioration, erosion control, microclimate control, and the alleviation of the effects of drought in semiarid areas. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems goes beyond the regional considerations of years past to focus on the challenges of today's most pressing global environmental concerns. The contributors describe the latest research and concepts in agroforestry systems, reforestation efforts, soils, vegetation, and agriculture while reviewing their economic aspects. Incentives for reforestation and agroforestry are explored in detail. Each chapter is carefully referenced and includes tables to clarify ideas and data. Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems addresses: advantages of mixed-species plantations tropical pasture and silvo-pastoral systems tropical forest ecosystem management research on the economic feasibility of various land-use systems socio-economic considerations of coffee-growing ecosystems agroforestry systems in Costa Rica Environmental Services of Agroforestry Systems is essential reading for researchers and scientists, as well as professionals in agroforestry, forestry, soils, global change, climate change, and environmental studies, educators, and graduate and undergraduate students.
Shortly, this book is the written up-graded version of the topics discussed during the Small Meeting of the 2nd International School Congress: Natural Resources, Sustainability and Humanity, held in Braga, Portugal, 5-8 May 2010 with the diverse participation of scientists, educators and governmental representatives. The Earth hosts an immense ecosystem, colonized by millions of species for billions of years but only for a few tens of thousands of years by humans. Environmental history tells though that it was humankind that shaped the environment as no other species. History, geography, religion and politics among other reasons have differentiated populations with respect to access to safe food and water, education, health, and to space and natural resource utilization. The globalization era of trade, information and communication is shortening distances and increasing overall wealth, but, as is pointed out in this book, it is also contributing to the propagation of diseases, and to the modification or even destruction of native ecosystems by exotic invasive species. Man is the only species that has the perception of its history, evolution, of the consequences of its decisions, and that there is a future ahead. It is also the only species that has the potential to change it. This awareness can be a source of anxiety and contradictory behaviours, but it is also the key to changing attitudes towards the construction of a common sustainable home, by committed education, interdisciplinary approaches, mobilization and empowerment of people and political consonant actions.
This book aims to initiate among students and other readers critical and interdisciplinary reflections on key problems concerning development, gender relations, peace and environment, with a special emphasis on North-South relations. This volume offers a selection of the author's research in different parts of the world during 50 years of contributing to an interdisciplinary scientific debate and addressing social answers to urgent global problems. After the author's biography and bibliography, the second part analyses the development processes of several countries in the South that resulted in a dynamic of underdevelopment. The deep-rooted gender discrimination is also reflected in the destructive exploitation of natural resources and the pollution of soils, water and air. Since the beginning of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, the management of human society and global resources has been unsustainable and has created global environmental change and multiple conflicts over scarce and polluted resources. Peace and development policies aiming at gender equity and sustainable environmental management, where water and food are crucial for the survival of humankind, focus on systemic alternatives embedded in a path of sustainability transition. * This book reviews multiple influences from Europe, Africa and Latin America on a leading social scientist and activist on gender, development and environment aiming at a world with equity, sustainability, peace and harmony between nature and humans.* This pioneer volume analyses social and environmental conflicts and peace processes in Latin America, with a special focus on Mexico, by addressing the development of under-development, global environmental change, poverty, nutrition and the North-South gap.* This volume focuses on environmental deterioration with a special emphasis on food and water and proposes systemic changes towards a sustainability transition with peace, regional development and gender equity.* This pioneering work offers alternative approaches to regional development, food sovereignty and holistic development processes from a gender perspective.
This volume discusses a broad range of vital issues encompassing the production and consumption of food in the current period of climate change. All of these add up to looming, momentous challenges to food security, especially for people in regions where malnutrition and famine have been the norm during numerous decades. Furthermore, threats to food security do not stop at the borders of more affluent countries - governance of food systems and changes in eating patterns will have worldwide consequences. The book is arranged in four broad sections. Part I, Combating Food Insecurity: A Global Responsibility opens with a chapter describing the urgent necessity for new paradigm and policy set to meet the food security challenges of climate change. Also in this section are chapters on meat and the dimensions of animal welfare, climate change and sustainability; on dietary options for mitigating climate change; and the linkage of forest and food production in the context of the REDD+ approach to valuation of forests. Part II, Managing Linkages Between Climate Change and Food Security offers a South Asian perspective on Gender, Climate Change and Household Food Security; a chapter on food crisis in sub-Saharan Africa; and separate chapters on critical issues of food supply and production in Nigeria, far-Western Nepal and the Sudano-Sahelian zone of Cameroon. Part III examines Food Security and patterns of production and consumption, with chapters focused on Morocco, Thailand, Bahrain, Kenya and elsewhere. The final section discusses successful, innovative practices, with chapters on Food Security in Knowledge-Based Economy; Biosaline Agriculture in the Gulf States; Rice production in a cotton zone of Benin; palm oil in the production of biofuel; and experiments in raised-bed wheat production. The editors argue that technical prescriptions are insufficient to manage the food security challenge. They propose and explain a holistic approach for adapting food systems to global environmental change, which demands the engagement of many disciplines - a new, sustainable food security paradigm.
A revolutionary vision of how we can create a sustainable planet, this book focuses on two critical global issues: rapid population growth and a human-induced climate change. Firor and Jacobsen summarize the current status of these two issues, show how they are related to one another, and prescribe steps that governments, societies, and individuals can adopt to stabilize both population and climate. Illustrations.
First book on the market to look at climate change and coaching. International and diverse case studies and coaching examples. Applies theory and concepts to practice. Additional materials available on the editors' website.
This volume brings together scholars working in diverse traditions of the humanities in order to offer a comprehensive analysis of the environmental catastrophe as the modern-day apocalypse. Drawing on philosophy, theology, history, literature, art history, psychoanalysis, as well as queer and decolonial theories, the authors included in this book expound the meaning of the climate apocalypse, reveal its presence in our everyday experiences, and examine its impact on our intellectual, imaginative, and moral practices. Importantly, the chapters show that eco-apocalypticism can inform progressively transformative discourses about climate change. In so doing, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of understanding the environmental catastrophe from within an apocalyptic framework, carving a much-needed path between two unsatisfactory approaches to the climate disaster: first, the conservative impulse to preserve the status quo responsible for today's crisis, and second, the reckless acceptance of the destructive effects of climate change. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in the contributions of both apocalypticism and the humanities to contemporary ecological debates.
A multidecadal cooling is known to have occurred in Europe in the final decades of the sixteenth-century. It is still open to debate as to what might have caused the underlying shifts in atmospheric circulation and how these changes affected societies. This book is the fruit of interdisciplinary cooperation among 37 scientists including climatologists, hydrologists, glaciologists, dendroclimatologists, and economic and cultural historians. The known documentary climatic evidence from six European countries is compared to results of tree-ring studies. Seasonal temperature and precipitation are estimated from this data and monthly mean surface pressure patterns in the European area are reconstructed for outstanding anomalies. Results are compared to fluctuations of Alpine glaciers and to changes in the frequency of severe floods and coastal storms. Moreover, the impact of climate change on grain prices and wine production is assessed. Finally, it is convincingly argued that witches at that time were burnt as scapegoats for climatic change.
Climate Change and Extreme Events uses a multidisciplinary approach to discuss the relationship between climate change-related weather extremes and their impact on human lives. Topics discussed are grouped into four major sections: weather parameters, hydrological responses, mitigation and adaptation, and governance and policies, with each addressed with regard to past, present and future perspectives. Sections give an overview of weather parameters and hydrological responses, presenting current knowledge and a future outlook on air and stream temperatures, precipitation, storms and hurricanes, flooding, and ecosystem responses to these extremes. Other sections cover extreme weather events and discuss the role of the state in policymaking. This book provides a valuable interdisciplinary resource to climate scientists and meteorologists, environmental researchers, and social scientists interested in extreme weather.
* An enormous contribution to the understanding of climate negotiations - the most complex and challenging international regime to date* Explains how governments need to organize ever more demanding multilateral negotiations successfully* Essential reading for those involved in climate negotiations and in planning or participating in other high-level negotiationsThe global negotiations over climate change involved over 180 countries and innumerable observers and other participants, addressing enormously complex and economically vital issues with conflicting agendas. For the UN to create an effective and well-supported international regime required enormous and very skilful organization. Using the metaphor of a theatrical production, this book shows how this was accomplished to produce the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and the subsequent Bonn and Marrakesh Accords. The author draws out the lessons and implications for other intricate and far-reaching negotiations, not all of which have succeeded so far, such as the WTO trade negotiations at Seattle and Cancun. She identifies six key elements that determine organizational effectiveness as a necessary condition for successful outcomes.
This book poses the question of whether identifiable individual-level attributes (e.g., values, interests, knowledge, demographic characteristics) lead to support for or opposition to the development and implementation of alternative energy technologies. In recent years, attempts to site alternative energy technologies (e.g., wind, solar, wave) have been met by intense opposition from a variety of sources, including many environmentalists from whom one might expect support for non-carbon based renewable energy initiatives. This volume argues that there are indeed such discernible attributes, and moreover that the identification and exploration are important for the development of support strategies for the well-informed and achievable siting of such technologies.
As climate change and urban development are closely interlinked and often interact negatively, this edited volume takes Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam's first mega-urban region as a case study to analyse its vulnerability to climate change and to suggest measures towards a more sustainable urban development. The book offers an overview on land use planning regarding the aspects of urban flooding, urban climate, urban energy and urban mobility as well as spatial views from the angle of urban planning such as the metropolitan level, the city, the neighbourhood and building level. It shows that to a significant degree, measures dealing with climate change can be taken from the toolbox of sustainable urban development and reflects how institutional structures need to change to enhance chances for implementation given socio-cultural and economic constraints. This is merged and integrated into a holistic perspective of planning recommendations, supporting the municipal government to increase its adaptive capacity. The authors are members of a German government funded research project on how to support HCMC's municipal government to adapt to risks related to climate change.
Written both for general readers and college students, Dialogues on Climate Justice provides an engaging philosophical introduction to climate justice, and should be of interest to anyone wanting to think seriously about the climate crisis. The story follows the life and conversations of Hope, a fictional protagonist whose life is shaped by a terrifyingly real problem: climate change. From the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until the 2060s, the book documents Hope's discussions with a diverse cast of characters. As she ages, her conversations move from establishing the nature of the problem, to engaging with climate skepticism, to exploring her own climate responsibilities, through managing contentious international negotiations, to considering big technological fixes, and finally, as an older woman, to reflecting with her granddaughter on what one generation owes another. Following a philosophical tradition established by Plato more than two thousand years ago, these dialogues are not only philosophically substantive and carefully argued, but also distinctly human. The differing perspectives on display mirror those involved in real-world climate dialogues going on today. Key Features: Written in an engaging dialogue form, which includes characterization, clear exchanges of ideas, and a compelling story arc Clearly organized to allow readers both in-depth consideration and rapid overviews of various topics Memorable examples that enable and encourage discussion inside and outside the classroom An Introduction to the book aimed at instructors, which includes helpful instructions for teaching the book and engaging student assignments
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