ALBERT

Beschreibung: No abstract is available for this article.

Beschreibung: Global environmental images have become part of our everyday life experience. We encounter them in news reports, scientific articles and artistic interventions. Yet so far, only the most iconic of these images have received close critical attention from scholars coming mostly from two related fields, science studies and cultural geography. Some of those studies, as for instance research carried out on the famous Apollo photographs, have revealed that the icons of our environmental age do not provide simple readings, that they carry multiple, often contradicting messages, and that they can be vectors of highly ambiguous and even conflicting political beliefs. However, historically informed interdisciplinary research on visual cultures from an environmental perspective is still at its beginning. This essay thus calls for a systematic exploration of the crucial role the visual plays in the creation, circulation, interpretation and adaptation of global environmental knowledge. It is argued that this inquiry cannot be left solely to historians or geographers but calls for a truly interdisciplinary engagement. One central claim is that we need to better understand the constitutive role the visual and associated knowledge practices, conventions and infrastructures play in mediating global environmental phenomena. One possibility, it is argued, is to develop a broader historical framework for understanding how the visual actively shaped scientific and environmental discourse, and how it stimulated the rise of holistic and dynamic understandings of the environment from the nineteenth century onwards. A second important research area that is suggested concerns the crucial role global environmental images play at the interface of science discourse and environmental policy and governance. The essay concludes by suggesting three basic theses which seem particularly promising for future interdisciplinary inquiries into global environmental images. The paper calls for a historically informed interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images. e00020

Beschreibung: A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the ‘whole Earth’ have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional – ‘if x, then y’ – has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these ‘global montages’ problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making. This article explores photomontage depictions of future cities under climate change as a novel form of global environmental image. Montages assemble new viewpoints through the juxtaposition of photographic fragments from diverse spaces, in a fashion which can reify conceptions of geographical otherness, but which also contains the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making. Montage makes the choices which underpin any image an object of representation itself, and therefore has a radical potential which is yet to be fully realised in imagings of climatic futures. e00019

Beschreibung: The contemporary tea industry in China is associated with high tea production and high nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions, due to the application of large quantities of nitrogen (N) fertilisers, and the intrinsic characteristics of tea field soils. In total, the Chinese tea plantations may have emitted 40.9 Gg N year –1 of N 2 O for 2013, accounting for 85% of emissions from global tea plantations. Such emissions are significant, unneglectable and need to be incorporated into the national greenhouse gas inventory. The current average N 2 O emission rate and emission intensity of tea plantations in China are as high as 16.6 kg N 2 O-N ha –1 year –1 and 21.3 g N 2 O-N per kg tea production (several times greater than in other croplands), respectively, severely damaging the ‘green’ signature of Chinese green teas. To reduce the risk of a sudden collapse of the currently booming tea industry, due to the dramatic decline of economic profit in the event of an agricultural carbon tax scheme being implemented in the near future, investigations of the mechanisms for the high rate of N 2 O emissions and the effective N 2 O mitigation practices in tea plantations are urgently needed. Of the counties with large tea plantations, only China, India and Japan have contributed data. The measurement and research of N 2 O emissions from other large tea plantations in Africa, South and Central Asia should be alerted by this report to close the global gap of N 2 O emissions from tea plantations. This paper raised an issue on the significant contribution of Chinese contemporary tea industry to greenhouse gas emissions, which has not yet been incorporated into the current national greenhouse gas inventory. It reported that the average nitrous oxide emission rate and emission intensity of tea plantations in China are as high as 16.6 kg N ha -1 yr -1 and 21.3 g N per kg tea production, respectively, suggesting that the current Chinese tea industry is not on the right track for “green” or sustainable development, and therefore steps need to be taken to decrease its nitrous oxide emissions. e00021

Beschreibung: No abstract is available for this article.

Beschreibung: This commentary highlights problems of inequity in academic publishing in geography that arise from the increasing use of metrics as a measure of research quality. In so doing, we examine patterns in the ranking of geographical journals in the major global databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) and compare these with a more inclusive database developed by the International Geographical Union. The shortcomings of ranking systems are examined and are shown to include, inter alia , linguistic bias, the lack of representation of books and chapters in books, the geographical unevenness of accredited journals, problems of multi-authorship, the mismatch between ranking and social usefulness and alternative or critical thinking, as well as differences between physical and human geography. The hegemony of the global commercial publishing houses emerges as problematic for geography in particular. It is argued that the global community of geographers should continue to challenge the use of bibliometrics as a means of assessing research quality.

Beschreibung: Interdisciplinary research between social and environmental sciences can meet difficulties when attempting to combine qualitative and quantitative field methods. Natural history, largely sidelined from professional science, may have value as a practice with elements common to the social and environmental sciences. In this commentary, I reflect on my own natural history knowledge and practice related to my primary research habitat in central Chile, and how natural history has helped me to generate interdisciplinary approaches. I propose that three key elements of natural history practice in an interdisciplinary context are observation, interpretation, and the human context of engagement with nature. Natural history practice can help to build consensual knowledge and trust within interdisciplinary teams. It can also generate novel research directions through a return to direct engagement with nature. Interdisciplinary research between social and environmental sciences can meet difficulties when attempting to combine qualitative and quantitative field methods. Natural history, largely sidelined from professional science, may have value as a practice with elements common to the social and environmental sciences. In this commentary, I reflect on my own natural history practice related to my primary research habitat in central Chile, and how it has helped me to generate interdisciplinary approaches. e00015

Beschreibung: Societies' growing global footprint is causing a rapid increase in the demand for natural resources (i.e. ecosystem services), while also reducing the capacity of ecosystems to provide them. Freshwater ecosystems contribute disproportionately to ecosystem services but are also particularly vulnerable to global environmental change. The provisioning of freshwater services, such as water and food production, is especially important in developing countries. Here, we review the evidence which demonstrates the impacts of key environmental stressors on these two important provisioning services in southern Africa. Land use change, species invasions and climate change can all be linked to a loss of the provisioning services provided by freshwater ecosystems in southern Africa. Water resources for drinking, agriculture, sanitation and power are expected to decline as a result of both climate and land use change. Fish production may be negatively or positively affected by the different stressors, highlighting the high context-dependency associated with their impacts. Evidence also suggests that these stressors can interact to alter one another's impacts or promote the proliferation of further stressors. For instance, land use change can promote aquatic plant invasions and, subsequently, the stressors may interact synergistically to cause fish kills. Stressors may also interact to mitigate one another's impact, for instance fish invasions may enhance total fish catch following a pollution event. Since stressors are unlikely to occur in isolation and multiple stressors frequently result in complex ‘ecological surprises’, it is urgent that we increase research effort on the links between multiple stressors and the loss of ecosystem services. Future research should, therefore, focus on the combined impacts of multiple environmental, social, and economic stressors on natural resources and provisioning ecosystem services in southern Africa. Freshwater ecosystem services are under threat from multiple environmental stressors. Here we review the evidence for their independent and combined impacts across southern Africa. e00026

Beschreibung: Sustainable climate change adaptation requires an understanding of people's place attachments, so that potential impacts and trade-offs are illuminated when making adaptation decisions. Methods are needed that elucidate these important, but often intangible, place attachments at risk. A study was undertaken to explore place attachment, and how these person–place bonds might be impacted by flooding and sea-level rise. It engaged with a small town in coastal Australia that is already highly vulnerable to flooding, and which has been subject to numerous policy directives intended to reduce climate change-induced flood risk. The town therefore acts as an analogue for climate change adaptation in other semi-rural coastal communities. Photo-elicitation was found to be highly effective at elucidating multifarious dimensions of residents' place attachment. The attachments that were likely to be affected by flooding (and adapting to flood risk) were encapsulated in: the personal and communal identities associated with the tourism and fishing industries, the sense of belonging from living and re-living family connections to local places, and the sense of community and enjoyment derived from diverse recreational activities. The photo-elicitation process provided different outcomes to conventional interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. Participants sought to both vision (by elucidating their current experiences) and re-envision (in advocating for different futures) their everyday experiences of adapting to flooding through their photographs and accompanying narratives. A video introduction to this paper is available at: https://vimeo.com/83484905 . We demonstrate how participants used photo-elicitation to both vision (by elucidating their current experiences) and re-envision (in advocating for different futures) their everyday experiences of adapting to flooding and sea-level rise through their photographs and accompanying narratives. We discuss what this means for carrying out climate adaptation policy and planning. e00028

Beschreibung: Climate science today makes use of a variety of red globes to explore and communicate findings. These transform the iconography which informs this image: the idealised, even mythical vision of the blue, vulnerable and perfect marble is impaired by the application of the colours yellow and red. Since only predictions that employ a lot of red seem to exist, spectators are confronted with the message that the future Earth that might turn out as envisaged here is undesirable. Here intuitively powerful narrations of the end of the world may connect. By employing methods of art history and visual analysis, and building on examples from current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and future scenario maps, this article explores how burning world images bear – intentionally or not – elements of horror and shock. My question explored here is as follows: should ‘burning world’ images be understood as a new and powerful cosmology? This article analyses contemporary world maps of climate change futures from a visual studies perspective, comparing the red temperature maps with the photograph of the Blue Marble with a special focus on color symbolism. The so called ‘burning world’ cartographies are understood as a current worldview based on maps and data visualisation. e00027

Beschreibung: Oceans and seas have long been considered as distinct areas, different from one another. At the end of the eighteenth century the idea began to appear (among romantic painters and poets) that they all formed a single space that would be a ‘global ocean’. Humboldt was the first scientist to take this idea seriously and to study oceans as a ‘whole’. He drew the first map (with isotherms) which could explain why oceans had to be understood as a global climatic machine. Since then the global behaviour of the ocean has become an undisputed scientific fact and many artists have produced paintings which ‘represent’ this state of knowledge. During the same period the coast lines were not considered as a global scientific object but as a discrete series of sites, all different from one another. Tourism was partly responsible for this division of coasts as each tourist place had to show it was unique and worth being visited. Many painters helped to highlight certain sites (Hudson River, Normandy, south coast of England). Then, at the end of the twentieth century some new equations dealing with sea level allowed the idea there was something like a global coastline, responding to a global climatic forcing. Few artists today tend to work with this global idea of local coasts but some of them, taking part in scientific cruises or fieldwork, do produce a new type of image for a global coastline. This paper explores how artists helped scientists to think of the ocean as a global object and, in turn, how scientists helped artists to think of coasts as a global object. e00029

Beschreibung: This paper stages a dialogue between a human geographer and a physical geographer about the concept of the Anthropocene. The aim of the dialogue is not to arrive at an agreement about how the Anthropocene should be defined, but rather to open up the question of the politics of the concept and its definition. The dialogue revolves around three issues: (1) the politics of the debate about the geoscientific definition of the Anthropocene Epoch; (2) the relation between the geoscientific debate about the Anthropocene and the burgeoning literature on the Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities, including human geography; (3) the relation between geoscientific and political concepts.