Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, ...providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.
Humans are no longer spectators who need to adapt to their natural environment. Our impact on the earth has caused changes that are outside the range of natural variability and are equivalent to such ...major geological disruptions as ice ages. Some scientists argue that we have entered a new epoch in planetary history: the Anthropocene. In such an era of planet-wide transformation, we need a new model for planet-wide environmental politics. In this book, Frank Biermann proposes "earth system" governance as just such a new paradigm.Biermann offers both analytical and normative perspectives. He provides detailed analysis of global environmental politics in terms of five dimensions of effective governance: agency, particularly agency beyond that of state actors; architecture of governance, from local to global levels; accountability and legitimacy; equitable allocation of resources; and adaptiveness of governance systems. Biermann goes on to offer a wide range of policy proposals for future environmental governance and a revitalized United Nations, including the establishment of a World Environment Organization and a UN Sustainable Development Council, new mechanisms for strengthened representation of civil society and scientists in global decision making, innovative systems of qualified majority voting in multilateral negotiations, and novel institutions to protect those impacted by global change. Drawing on ten years of research, Biermann formulates earth system governance as an empirical reality and a political necessity.
Program Earth Gabrys, Jennifer
04/2016, Volume:
49
eBook
Open access
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, ...water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available.
Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world,Program Earthexamines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing,Program Earthasks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become?
Program Earthsuggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new "technogeographies" that connect technology, nature, and people.
The impacts of climate change are already being felt. Learning how to live with these impacts is a priority for human development. In this context, it is too easy to see adaptation as a narrowly ...defensive task – protecting core assets or functions from the risks of climate change. A more profound engagement, which sees climate change risks as a product and driver of social as well as natural systems, and their interaction, is called for.
Adaptation to Climate Change argues that, without care, adaptive actions can deny the deeper political and cultural roots that call for significant change in social and political relations if human vulnerability to climate change associated risk is to be reduced. This book presents a framework for making sense of the range of choices facing humanity, structured around resilience (stability), transition (incremental social change and the exercising of existing rights) and transformation (new rights claims and changes in political regimes). The resilience-transition-transformation framework is supported by three detailed case study chapters. These also illustrate the diversity of contexts where adaption is unfolding, from organizations to urban governance and the national polity.
This text is the first comprehensive analysis of the social dimensions to climate change adaptation. Clearly written in an engaging style, it provides detailed theoretical and empirical chapters and serves as an invaluable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in climate change, geography and development studies.
Mark Pelling is Reader in Geography at King’s College London and before this at the University of Liverpool and University of Guyana. His research and teaching focus on human vulnerability and adaptation to natural hazards and climate change. He has served as a lead author with the IPCC and as a consultant for UNDP, DFID and UN-HABITAT.
Part 1: Framework and Theory 1. Intellectual and Policy Context 2. Understanding Adaptation Part 2: The Resilience-Transition-Transformation Framework 3. Adaptation as Resilience: Social Learning and Self-Organization 4. Adaptation as Transition: Risk and Governance 5. Adaptation as Transformation: Risk Society, Human Security and the Social Contract Part 3: Living with Climate Change 6. Adaptation Within Organizations 7. Adaptation as Urban Risk Discourse and Governance 8. Adaptation as National Political Response to Disaster Part 4: Adapting with Climate Change 9. Conclusion: Adapting with Climate Change
Transparency -- openness, secured through greater availability of information -- is increasingly seen as part of the solution to a complex array of economic, political, and ethical problems in an ...interconnected world. The "transparency turn" in global environmental governance in particular is seen in a range of international agreements, voluntary disclosure initiatives, and public-private partnerships. This is the first book to investigate whether transparency in global environmental governance is in fact a broadly transformative force or plays a more limited, instrumental role.After three conceptual, context-setting chapters, the book examines ten specific and diverse instances of "governance by disclosure." These include state-led mandatory disclosure initiatives that rely on such tools as prior informed consent and monitoring, measuring, reporting and verification; and private (or private-public), largely voluntary efforts that include such corporate transparency initiatives as the Carbon Disclosure Project and such certification schemes as the Forest Stewardship Council. The cases, which focus on issue areas including climate change, biodiversity, biotechnology, natural resource exploitation, and chemicals, demonstrate that although transparency is ubiquitous, its effects are limited and often specific to particular contexts. The book explores in what circumstances transparency can offer the possibility of a new emancipatory politics in global environmental governance.
Aim
Urbanization profoundly changes environments, ecosystems and biodiversity. The urban heat island (UHI) effect represents one of the most consistent human‐induced environmental change in urbanized ...areas. Recently, it was observed that the UHI causes community‐wide shifts towards species with smaller body sizes in urban communities of ectotherms due to increased metabolic costs. We here assembled a large dataset of published data of geographically distant carabid communities collected along urbanization gradients to examine whether we could confirm this consistent change in body size distribution.
Location
Rural and urban forests at 11 northern temperate locations, spanning 25 latitudinal degrees.
Time period
2002–2018.
Major taxa studied
Species of ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae).
Methods
We evaluated size distribution changes using community‐weighted mean body sizes of ground beetles collected from similarly vegetated rural and urban habitats between 2002 and 2018. We separately examined the UHI effect on the various sub‐assemblages of the carabid community.
Results
When analysing the entire dataset, we could not detect any clear trend in the community body size mean, with urban communities showing similar values to those sampled in rural areas. However, the sub‐assemblage of forest habitat specialists consistently displayed a significant shift towards smaller species from rural to urban habitats. The inconsistent trend at the community level was likely due to the influx into urban habitat fragments of non‐specialist species. The UHI effect also had a significant influence but only on the forest specialist sub‐assemblage.
Main conclusions
Our results indicated that forest‐specialist species were most affected by the UHI as a powerful urbanization‐related environmental filter, whereas this effect was not evident for the overall community. Urban management practices should aim to minimize the intensity of urbanization‐related environmental filters such as the UHI, to enable habitat specialists to survive in habitat fragments under urbanized conditions.
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Extreme weather events radically alter ecosystems. When ecological damage persists, selective pressures on individuals can change, leading to phenotypic adjustments. For group-living animals, social ...relationships may be a mechanism enabling adaptation to ecosystem disturbance. Yet whether such events alter selection on sociality and whether group-living animals can, as a result, adaptively change their social relationships remain untested. We leveraged 10 years of data collected on rhesus macaques before and after a category 4 hurricane caused persistent deforestation, exacerbating monkeys’ exposure to intense heat. In response, macaques demonstrated persistently increased tolerance and decreased aggression toward other monkeys, facilitating access to scarce shade critical for thermoregulation. Social tolerance predicted individual survival after the hurricane, but not before it, revealing a shift in the adaptive function of sociality.
Editor’s summary Changing environments generally lead to shifts in the availability of essential resources. Such shifts can be major selective forces and will happen especially rapidly when changes are caused by extreme events such as hurricanes. Testard et al . looked at the response of an isolated population of rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico to the loss of tree cover caused by the category 4 Hurricane Maria. Reduced tree cover led to a reduction in shade, which is critical for the monkeys. In response, there was a general increase in social tolerance among the animals in the population. The most tolerant animals had the highest survival. —Sacha Vignieri
Learn how ethical principles and concepts apply to global environmental problems
This fully updated and expanded textbook gives you new reflections on global environmental issues. It looks at issues ...including climate change, sustainable development and biodiversity preservation, and sensitively addresses global developments such as the Summits at Durban on climate and at Nagoya on biodiversity. Robin Attfield gives an ethical critique of current international environmental problems and negotiations, and explains how international regimes will need to change to be able to cope with global environmental problems.
New for this editionA new chapter on the ethics of climate changeUp-to-date case studies on issues such as Haiti's re-forestation project, food sovereignty and resistance to the Xayaburi DamNew passages on lobbying websites and the Yasuni Reserve in EquadorFind out moreRead the introduction for free now (pdf)Visit Robin Attfield's ResearchGate profile
For many species, human-induced environmental changes are important indirect drivers of range expansion into new regions. We argue that it is important to distinguish the range dynamics of such ...species from those that occur without, or with less clear, involvement of human-induced environmental changes. We elucidate the salient features of the rapid increase in the number of species whose range dynamics are human induced, and review the relationships and differences to both natural range expansion and biological invasions. We discuss the consequences for science, policy and management in an era of rapid global change and highlight four key challenges relating to basic gaps in knowledge, and the transfer of scientific understanding to biodiversity management and policy. We conclude that range-expanding species responding to human-induced environmental change will become an essential feature for biodiversity management and science in the Anthropocene. Finally, we propose the term neonative for these taxa.
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