Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited ...volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action. Composed of twenty-eight essays, this volume is organised around seven main themes: paradigms; what counts?; extraction; dispatches from a climate change frontline country; governance; finance; and action(s). Through this multifaceted approach, the contributors ask pressing questions about how we conceptualise and respond to the climate crisis, providing both ‘big picture’ perspectives and more focussed case studies. This unique and extensive collection will be of great value to environmental and social scientists alike, as well as to the general reader interested in understanding current views on the climate crisis. This is the author-approved edition of this Open Access title. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at http://www.openbookpublishers.
Climate change and poverty offers a timely new perspective on the 'ecosocial' understanding of the causes, symptoms and solutions to poverty and applies this to recent developments across a number of ...areas, including fuel poverty, food poverty, housing, transport and air pollution.
Debating climate change Malone, Elizabeth L
2009, 20091201, 2009-12-01, 20090101, 20091001
eBook, Book
As greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and contentious voices fill the air, the question gains urgency: How can people with widely varying viewpoints agree to address climate change? Each ...participant in the debate seems to have a different agenda, from protecting economic growth in developing countries to protecting the energy industry in industrialized countries, from those aghast at the damage done to the Earth to optimists who think we just need to adjust our technological approach.
Debating Climate Change sorts through the tangle of arguments surrounding climate change to find paths to unexpected sites of agreement. Using an innovative sociological approach - combined discourse and social network analyses - Elizabeth L. Malone analyzes 100 documents representing a range of players in this high-stakes debate. Through this she shows how even the most implacable adversaries can find common ground - and how this common ground can be used to build agreement.
Written in a clear, accessible style, this original research and insightful use of communication analysis will help advance understanding and negotiation on climate change throughout the pivotal times to come.
Published with Science in Society
The West without water Ingram, B. Lynn; Malamud-Roam, Frances
2013., 20130702, 2013, 2013-08-01
eBook
The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change ...on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is “normal” climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future. The West without Water merges climate and paleoclimate research from a wide variety of sources as it introduces readers to key discoveries in cracking the secrets of the region’s climatic past. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in 1861–62. The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region. They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.
As the effects of climate change continue to be felt, appreciation of its future transformational impact on numerous areas of public law and policy is set to grow. Among these, human rights concerns ...are particularly acute. They include forced mass migration, increased disease incidence and strain on healthcare systems, threatened food and water security, the disappearance and degradation of shelter, land, livelihoods and cultures, and the threat of conflict. This inquiry into the human rights dimensions of climate change looks beyond potential impacts to examine the questions raised by climate change policies: accountability for extraterritorial harms; constructing reliable enforcement mechanisms; assessing redistributional outcomes; and allocating burdens, benefits, rights and duties among perpetrators and victims, both public and private. The book examines a range of so-far unexplored theoretical and practical concerns that international law and other scholars and policy-framers will find increasingly difficult to ignore.
Analysis of climate change policy innovations across North America at transnational, federal, state, and local levels, involving public, private, and civic actors.
Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity brings together scientific, archaeological and historical evidence on the interplay of social change and environmental phenomena at the end of ...Antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages, ca. 300-800 AD.
This book challenges the widely accepted notion that globalization encourages economic convergence--and, by extension, cultural homogenization--across national borders. A systematic comparison of ...organizational change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain since 1950 finds that global competition forces countries to exploit their distinctive strengths, resulting in unique development trajectories.
Even as the evidence of global warming mounts, the international response to this serious threat is coming unraveled. The United States has formally withdrawn from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; other key ...nations are facing difficulty in meeting their Kyoto commitments; and developing countries face no limit on their emissions of the gases that cause global warming. In this clear and cogent book-reissued in paperback with an afterword that comments on recent events--David Victor explains why the Kyoto Protocol was never likely to become an effective legal instrument. He explores how its collapse offers opportunities to establish a more realistic alternative.
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