ALBERT

Description: Democracy and Climate Change explores the various ways in which democratic principles can lead governments to respond differently to climate change. The election cycle can lead to short-termism, which often appears to be at odds with the long-term nature of climate change, with its latency between cause and effect. However, it is clear that some democracies deal with climate change better than others, and this book demonstrates that overall stronger democratic qualities tend to correlate with improved climate performance.Beginning by outlining a general concept of democratic efficacy, the book provides an empirical analysis of the influence of the quality of democracy on climate change performance across dozens of countries. The specific case study of Canada’s Kyoto Protocol process is then used to explain the mechanisms of democratic influence in depth. The wide-ranging research presented in the book opens up several new and exciting avenues of enquiry and will be of considerable interest to researchers with an interest in comparative politics, democracy studies and environmental policies.

Description: The Arctic is one of the world’s regions most affected by cultural, socio-economic, environmental, and climatic changes. Over the last two decades, scholars, policymakers, extractive industries, governments, intergovernmental forums, and non-governmental organizations have turned their attention to the Arctic, its peoples, resources, and to the challenges and benefits of impending transformations. Arctic sustainability is an issue of increasing concern as well as the resilience and adaptation of Arctic societies to changing conditions.This book offers key insights into the history, current state of knowledge and the future of sustainability, and sustainable development research in the Arctic. Written by an international, interdisciplinary team of experts, it presents a comprehensive progress report on Arctic sustainability research. It identifies key knowledge gaps and provides salient recommendations for prioritizing research in the next decade.Arctic Sustainability Research will appeal to researchers, academics, and policymakers interested in sustainability science and the practices of sustainable development, as well as those working in polar studies, climate change, political geography, and the history of science.

Description: How risks are regulated can affect domestic outcomes, such as the benefits and costs of protecting consumers, health and environment, and it can also foster or limit opportunities for international trade. A question addressed in this report is whether different approaches to risk regulation lead to different levels of protection.Based on a study commissioned by the European Parliament in 2016, this report offers a descriptive transatlantic comparison of regulatory standards in four key sectors: Food, automobiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. It shows that EU risk regulation is not always or generally more stringent than US regulation. The reality is a complex mix of parity and particularity between EU and US risk regulation.The reality of transatlantic regulation is not a simple dichotomy of a European approach versus an American approach. It is not EU precaution versus US reaction, or ex-ante versus ex-post legal systems, or civil law versus common law, or uncertainty-based versus evidence-based regulatory systems. Rather, the reality is overall EU-US parity as well as some particular variation in policies on both sides of the Atlantic. This includes both cases of greater European stringency and cases of greater US stringency.On the other hand, regulatory variation can also be the basis for learning to improve future regulatory design, both by comparing outcomes across regulations in different jurisdictions, and by planning adaptive regulation over time. International regulatory cooperation involves collaboration to review existing regulations and design new approaches that improve outcomes for all. The EU and US can learn from this variation, and from evolving understanding, to improve regulatory standards through monitoring, evaluation, impact assessment, and planned adaptive regulation.