ALBERT

Description: ▪ Abstract  In this review, we highlight new insights into the conceptualization of the vulnerability of social-environmental systems and identify critical points of convergence of what otherwise might be characterized as disparate fields of research. We argue that a diversity of approaches to studying vulnerability is necessary in order to address the full complexity of the concept and that the approaches are in large part complementary. An emerging consensus on the issues of critical importance to vulnerability reduction—including concerns of equity and social justice—and growing synergy among conceptual frameworks promise even greater relevancy and utility for decision makers in the near future. We synthesize the current literature with an outline of core assessment components and key questions to guide the trajectory of future research.

Description: ▪ Abstract  Since the 1970s, supply augmentation strategies to meet water needs have waned, and governments have increasingly focused on demand management measures, including voluntary water transfers. Water demands have also changed as expanding urban growth, changes in agriculture, and increasing concern for the environment compete for water. Water rights regimes based on queuing principles lead to an inefficient allocation of water resources and may also result in other inefficiencies, such as overuse of land and inadequate adoption of capital-intensive conservation technologies. Water trading based on transferable water rights has been advanced as a solution to these problems. Trading helps equalize the marginal prices faced by various water users, thereby providing information about the value of water in alternative uses and creating compatible incentives. Putting water markets into practice introduces real-world complications of transaction costs and third-party externalities. We present these complications along with some major criticisms of water markets, and actual cases of water trading are discussed. We conclude with avenues of potential future research.

Description: ▪ Abstract  This review surveys five major efforts to identify and declare values essential to global sustainability; describes empirical trends (as measured by multinational and global-scale surveys) in values, attitudes, and behaviors related to human and economic development, the environment, and driving forces (population, affluence, technology, and entitlements); and describes empirical trends in attitudes toward contextual values that condition sustainable development (e.g., freedom and democracy, capitalism, globalization, and equality). Finally, the review identifies important barriers between attitudes and behavior; draws several conclusions regarding the value, attitudinal, and behavioral changes needed to achieve global sustainability; and suggests future research directions.

Description: Most modeling studies on terrestrial feedbacks to warming over the twenty-first century imply that the net feedbacks are negative—that changes in ecosystems, on the whole, resist warming, largely through ecosystem carbon storage. Although it is clear that potentially important mechanisms can lead to carbon storage, a number of less well-understood mechanisms, several of which are rarely or incompletely modeled, tend to diminish the negative feedbacks or lead to positive feedbacks. At high latitudes, negative feedbacks from forest expansion are likely to be largely or completely compensated by positive feedbacks from decreased albedo, increased carbon emissions from thawed permafrost, and increased wildfire. At low latitudes, negative feedbacks to warming will be decreased or eliminated, largely through direct human impacts. With modest warming, net feedbacks of terrestrial ecosystems to warming are likely to be negative in the tropics and positive at high latitudes. Larger amounts of warming will generally push the feedbacks toward the positive.

Description: This chapter reviews recent literature assessing the impacts of regulatory policies on the environmental performance of manufacturing firms. After showing substantial industry and national variation in resource consumption and pollution impacts, the review examines the role environmental policy instruments play in changing industry's burdens on the environment. Policies clearly shape industrial impacts, although the effect seems to be diminishing. Moving to uncouple economic and environmental performance, the review examines how regulations affect competitiveness, innovation, and capital flight. Similarly, corporate environmental voluntarism promises—and sometimes delivers—improved environmental performance; however, meaningful indicators are still few and far between. The article concludes with a call for research that further explains why some sectors perform better than others, and what lessons policy makers can draw upon, especially to move firms toward the best performance that is technologically possible and environmentally sustainable.

Description: Ecosystem services, the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems, are a powerful lens through which to understand human relationships with the environment and to design environmental policy. The explicit inclusion of beneficiaries makes values intrinsic to ecosystem services; whether or not those values are monetized, the ecosystem services framework provides a way to assess trade-offs among alternative scenarios of resource use and land- and seascape change. We provide an overview of the ecosystem functions responsible for producing terrestrial hydrologic services and use this context to lay out a blueprint for a more general ecosystem service assessment. Other ecosystem services are addressed in our discussion of scale and trade-offs. We review valuation and policy tools useful for ecosystem service protection and provide several examples of land management using these tools. Throughout, we highlight avenues for research to advance the ecosystem services framework as an operational basis for policy decisions.

Description: ▪ Abstract  The Arctic is a key part of the global climate system because the net positive energy input to the tropics must ultimately be resolved through substantial energy losses in high-latitude regions. The Arctic influences the global climate system through both positive and negative feedbacks that involve physical, ecological, and human systems of the Arctic. The balance of evidence suggests that positive feedbacks to global warming will likely dominate in the Arctic during the next 50 to 100 years. However, the negative feedbacks associated with changing the freshwater balance of the Arctic Ocean might abruptly launch the planet into another glacial period on longer timescales. In light of uncertainties and the vulnerabilities of the climate system to responses in the Arctic, it is important that we improve our understanding of how integrated regional changes in the Arctic will likely influence the evolution of the global climate system.

Description: Traditional biomass remains the dominant contributor to the energy supply of a large number of developing countries, where it serves the household energy needs of over a third of humanity in traditional cookstoves or open fires. Efforts to reduce the enormous human health, socioeconomic, and environmental impacts by shifting to cleaner cookstoves and cleaner biomass-derived fuels have had some success, but much more needs to be done, possibly including the expanded use of fossil-derived fuels. Concurrently, biomass is rapidly expanding as a commercial energy source, especially for transport fuels. Bioenergy can positively contribute to climate goals and rural livelihoods; however, if not implemented carefully, it could exacerbate degradation of land, water bodies, and ecosystems; reduce food security; and increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For large-scale commercial biofuels to contribute to sustainable development will require agriculturally sustainable methods and markets that provide enhanced livelihood opportunities and equitable terms of trade. The challenge lies in translating the opportunity into reality.

Description: ▪ Abstract  A broadening research program focused on environment and security emerged over the past 30 years. But the meaning and operationalization of environment and security have been an implicit and increasingly explicit part of the scholarly debate. Approaches range from the more specific focus on the linkages between environmental change and violent (deadly) conflict, the possible role of environmental conservation, cooperation, and collaboration in promoting peace, and the broader focus on potential relationships between environmental change and human security (understood as freedom from both violent conflict and physical want). In addition to the different conceptions of environment and security, the type and direction of causal relationships among different factors continue to be a focus of research. With respect to the environment and violent conflict, which constitute the largest explicit research stream on environment and security, the debate has centered on whether and why environmental scarcity, abundance, or dependence might cause militarized conflict. Less research has been conducted on the environmental effects of violent conflict and war or traditional security institutions such as militaries and military-industrial complexes. Rigorous research on the consequences of peace or human security for the environment is virtually nonexistent.

Description: Global environmental standards are emerging as an increasingly important influence on the environmental performance of industry. In this chapter, we develop a new definition and a categorization of global environmental standards that reflect the different agents involved in their development and the particular network architecture through which environmental standards achieve global reach. We examine new forms of global environmental standards, such as firm-based standards and standards initiated by third-party organizations, such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and industry associations. The growing interest in global environmental standards is shown to arise from processes of economic globalization as well as from increasing external pressure on firms and industries with respect to environmental concerns. The chapter reviews what is known about the prevalence of different types of global environmental standards and the efficacy of these standards in influencing the environmental performance of firms and industries.

Description: ▪ Abstract  Marine biodiversity encompasses all levels of complexity of life in the sea, from within species to across ecosystems. At all levels, marine biodiversity has naturally exhibited a general, slow trajectory of increase, punctuated by mass extinctions at the evolutionary scale and by disturbances at the ecological scale. In historical times, a synergy of human threats, including overfishing, global warming, biological introductions, and pollution, has caused a rapid decline in global marine biodiversity, as measured by species extinctions, population depletions, and community homogenization. The consequences of this biodiversity loss include changes in ecosystem function and a reduction in the provision of ecosystem services. Global biodiversity loss will continue and likely accelerate in the future, with potentially more frequent ecological collapses and community-wide shifts. However, the timing and magnitude of these catastrophic events are probably unpredictable.

Description: Over a range of geological and historical timescales, warmer climate conditions are associated with higher atmospheric levels of CO2, an important climate-modulating greenhouse gas. Coupled carbon-climate interactions have the potential to introduce both stabilizing and destabilizing feedback loops into Earth's system. Here we bring together evidence on the dominant climate, biogeochemical and geological processes organized by timescale, spanning interannual to centennial climate variability, Holocene millennial variations and Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, and million-year and longer variations over the Precambrian and Phanerozoic. Our focus is on characterizing, and where possible quantifying, internal coupled carbon-climate system dynamics and responses to external forcing from tectonics, orbital dynamics, catastrophic events, and anthropogenic fossil-fuel emissions. One emergent property is clear across timescales: atmospheric CO2 can increase quickly, but the return to lower levels through natural processes is much slower. The consequences of human carbon cycle perturbations will far outlive the emissions that caused them.

Description: ▪ Abstract  This review examines how neoliberal policies that include free trade and less government have altered environmental management of industry, forests, water, agricultural land, and fisheries in Latin America. We examine theories and case studies about the privatization and pricing of environmental services and common property resources, the environmental impacts of free trade, and the transfer of environmental management to local or nongovernmental institutions. We conclude that neoliberalism has had some profound influences on the environment and on environmental management in Latin America and that the implementation and impacts of neoliberal policies on local environments have varied greatly by nation and by place as a result of different political, institutional, economic, environmental, and social conditions. Although many studies of neoliberalism and environment paint a negative picture, there are places and people that have adapted well to and benefited from neoliberal policies. Unfortunately, judgments on the success of neoliberal policies are limited by data and by the lack of detailed and balanced case studies.

Description: ▪ Abstract  Earth continues to have a third of the ice that it had at the peak of the last ice age, although that ice continues to decrease, as it has, overall, for the past 18,000 years. Over the last 100 years, the retreat signal has been especially strong in ice shelves of the Arctic and along the Antarctic Peninsula, with a more mixed signal elsewhere. For instance, since the early 1990s, the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have thinned along the coasts but thickened in the interior, and since the late 1970s, sea ice has decreased in the Arctic but increased (slightly) in the Antarctic. Major difficulties in the interpretations of the climate record come from the high interannual variability of most cryosphere components and the lack of consistent long-term global data records; the latter problem is now being slowly remedied, in part, through satellite technology.

Description: That women play a central role in the provision, management, and safeguarding of water is one of the four internationally accepted principles of water management. This principle is especially important for the developing world where millions of women lack access to water for their basic needs. The objectives of this chapter are to summarize what is known about women with respect to water and about water with respect to women as well as to provide a sense of the current debates around these themes. A review of the literature suggests that the lack of gender-disaggregated data on the impacts of water policies, and underlying disagreements on how gender and development should be theorized, makes it difficult to reach robust conclusions on which policies can best assure poor women reliable access to water for their lives and livelihoods.

Description: ▪ Abstract  It is now commonplace to assert that actions toward sustainable development require a mix of scientific, economic, social and political knowledge, and judgments. The role of research-based knowledge in this complex setting is ambiguous and diverse, and it is undergoing rapid change both in theory and in practice. We review conventional views of the linkages between research-based knowledge and action, and the early response to concerns that these links could and should be improved, through efforts at translation and transfer. We then examine the range of critiques that challenge those conventional views by highlighting different aspects of the relationships between science and society, focusing on the implications for action toward sustainable development. We then review the theories and strategies that have emerged in the attempt to improve the linkages between research-based knowledge and action in the context of sustainability across four broad categories: participation, integration, learning, and negotiation. These form a hierarchy with respect to how deeply they engage with the various critiques. We propose that the relationships between research-based knowledge and action can be better understood as arenas of shared responsibility, embedded within larger systems of power and knowledge that evolve and change over time. The unique contribution of research-based knowledge needs to be understood in relation to actual or potential contributions from other forms of knowledge. We conclude with questions that may offer useful orientation to assessing or designing research-action arenas for sustainable development.

Description: Adaptation is a process of deliberate change in anticipation of or in reaction to external stimuli and stress. The dominant research tradition on adaptation to environmental change primarily takes an actor-centered view, focusing on the agency of social actors to respond to specific environmental stimuli and emphasizing the reduction of vulnerabilities. The resilience approach is systems orientated, takes a more dynamic view, and sees adaptive capacity as a core feature of resilient social-ecological systems. The two approaches converge in identifying necessary components of adaptation. We argue that resilience provides a useful framework to analyze adaptation processes and to identify appropriate policy responses. We distinguish between incremental adjustments and transformative action and demonstrate that the sources of resilience for taking adaptive action are common across scales. These are the inherent system characteristics that absorb perturbations without losing function, networks and social capital that allow autonomous action, and resources that promote institutional learning.

Description: Research traditions across the social sciences have explored the drivers of individual behavior and proposed different models of decision making. Four diverse perspectives are reviewed here: conventional and behavioral economics, technology adoption theory and attitude-based decision making, social and environmental psychology, and sociology. The individual decision models in these traditions differ axiomatically. Some are founded on informed rationality or psychological variables, and others emphasize physical or contextual factors from individual to social scales. Each perspective suggests particular lessons for designing interventions to change behavior. Throughout the review, these lessons are applied to decisions affecting residential energy use. Examples are drawn from both intuitive and reasoning-based types of decision as well as from a range of decision contexts that include capital investments in weatherization and repetitive behaviors such as appliance use. Areas of difference and similarity between various theoretical approaches and their practical implications are highlighted. Conclusions are drawn on how to develop a more integrated approach to both behavioral research and intervention design in a residential energy context.

Description: ▪ Abstract  Energy-technology innovation (ETI) is the set of processes leading to new or improved energy technologies that can augment energy resources; enhance the quality of energy services; and reduce the economic, environmental, or political costs associated with energy supply and use. Advances achieved through ETI have made large contributions to the improvement of the human condition over the past 100 years. Still more will be required of ETI during the decades ahead if civilization is to succeed in meeting what we believe are the three greatest energy challenges still before it: reducing dependence on oil, drastically upgrading the energy services provided to the world's poor, and providing the energy required to increase and sustain prosperity everywhere without wrecking the global climate with the emissions from fossil-fuel burning. This will require significant enhancements to ETI through deeper analysis of ETI processes, greater investments in ETI, improved innovation policies, and better coordination and partnerships across sectors and countries.

Description: ▪ Abstract  This chapter reviews the literature relevant to environmental governance in four domains of scholarship: globalization, decentralization, market and individual incentives-based governance, and cross-scale governance. It argues that in view of the complexity and multiscalar character of many of the most pressing environmental problems, conventional debates focused on pure modes of governance–where state or market actors play the leading role–fall short of the capacity needed to address them. The review highlights emerging hybrid modes of governance across the state-market-community divisions: comanagement, public-private partnerships and social-private partnerships. It examines the significant promise they hold for coupled social and natural systems to recover from environmental degradation and change and explores some of the critical problems to which hybrid forms of environmental governance are also subject.

Description: This review looks at the role of the livestock sector in carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles from a global perspective and considers impacts at the various stages of the commodity chain. With regard to livestock, N and C cycles are closely connected to livestock's role in land use and land-use change. Livestock's land use includes grazing land and cropland dedicated to the production of feed crops and fodder. Considering emissions along the entire commodity chain, livestock currently contribute about 18% to the global warming effect. Livestock contribute about 9% of total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but 37% of methane (CH4), and 65% of nitrous oxide (N2O). The latter will substantially increase over the coming decades, as the pasture land is currently at maximum expanse in most regions; future expansion of the livestock sector will increasingly be crop based. The chapter also reviews mitigation options to reduce C and N emissions from livestock's land use, production, and animal waste.

Description: Scenarios for the future of renewable energy through 2050 are reviewed to explore how much renewable energy is considered possible or desirable and to inform policymaking. Existing policy targets for 2010 and 2020 are also reviewed for comparison. Common indicators are shares of primary energy, electricity, heat, and transport fuels from renewables. Global, Europe-wide, and country-specific scenarios show 10% to 50% shares of primary energy from renewables by 2050. By 2020, many targets and scenarios show 20% to 35% share of electricity from renewables, increasing to the range 50% to 80% by 2050 under the highest scenarios. Carbon-constrained scenarios for stabilization of emissions or atmospheric concentration depict trade-offs between renewables, nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) from coal, most with high energy efficiency. Scenario outcomes differ depending on degree of future policy action, fuel prices, carbon prices, technology cost reductions, and aggregate energy demand, with resource constraints mainly for biomass and biofuels.

Description: Soils are viewed in the context of ecosystem services, soil processes and properties, and key attributes and constraints. The framework used is based on the premise that the natural capital of soils that underlies ecosystem services is primarily determined by three core soil properties: texture, mineralogy, and soil organic matter. Up-to-date descriptions and geographical distribution of soil orders as well as soil attributes and constraints are given, along with the relationships between soil orders, properties, and biomes. We then relate ecosystem services to specific soil processes, soil properties, and soil constraints and attributes. Soil degradation at present is not adequately assessed and quantified. The use of an approach combining digital soil maps, pedotransfer functions, remote sensing, spectral analysis, and soil inference systems is suggested for simultaneous characterization of various chemical, physical, and biological properties to overcome the great limitations and costs of conventional methods of soil assessments.

Description: ▪ Abstract  We review literature on several types of energy efficiency policies: appliance standards, financial incentive programs, information and voluntary programs, and management of government energy use. For each, we provide a brief synopsis of the relevant programs, along with available existing estimates of energy savings, costs, and cost-effectiveness at a national level. The literature examining these estimates points to potential issues in determining the energy savings and costs, but recent evidence suggests that techniques for measuring both have improved. Taken together, the literature identifies up to four quads of energy savings annually from these programs—at least half of which is attributable to appliance standards and utility-based demand-side management, with possible additional energy savings from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) ENERGY STAR, Climate Challenge, and Section 1605b voluntary programs to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Related reductions in CO2 and criteria air pollutants may contribute an additional 10% to the value of energy savings above the price of energy itself.

Description: The interactions between human population dynamics and the environment have often been viewed mechanistically. This review elucidates the complexities and contextual specificities of population-environment relationships in a number of domains. It explores the ways in which demographers and other social scientists have sought to understand the relationships among a full range of population dynamics (e.g., population size, growth, density, age and sex composition, migration, urbanization, vital rates) and environmental changes. The chapter briefly reviews a number of the theories for understanding population and the environment and then proceeds to provide a state-of-the-art review of studies that have examined population dynamics and their relationship to five environmental issue areas. The review concludes by relating population-environment research to emerging work on human-environment systems.

Description: This review examines the state of conflict and cooperation over transboundary water resources from an environmental, political, and human development perspective. Although the potential for outright war between countries over water is low, cooperation is often missing in disputes over transboundary resources. This background chapter will ▪ Provide a brief overview of the nature of conflict and experiences of cooperation over transboundary resources. ▪ Provide a conceptual basis for understanding cooperation and the costs of noncooperation over water. ▪ Indicate the possible triggers for conflict over water sharing and the implications on the livelihoods of ordinary communities. ▪ Offer evidence on the potential costs of noncooperation or even conflict over water resources. ▪ Analyze power asymmetries between riparian states and how they affect the outcomes of negotiations. ▪ Analyze different examples of cases that countries have used to manage the competition for water resources. ▪ Propose general principles and conclusions on conflict and cooperation.

Description: ▪ Abstract  Species extinctions and the deterioration of other biodiversity features worldwide have led to the adoption of systematic conservation planning in many regions of the world. As a consequence, various software tools for conservation planning have been developed over the past twenty years. These tools implement algorithms designed to identify conservation area networks for the representation and persistence of biodiversity features. Budgetary, ethical, and other sociopolitical constraints dictate that the prioritized sites represent biodiversity with minimum impact on human interests. Planning tools are typically also used to satisfy these criteria. This chapter reviews both the concepts and technical choices that underlie the development of these tools. Conservation planning problems can be formulated as optimization problems, and we evaluate the suitability of different algorithms for their solution. Finally, we also review some key issues associated with the use of these tools, such as computational efficiency, the effectiveness of taxa and abiotic parameters at choosing surrogates for biodiversity, the process of setting explicit targets of representation for biodiversity surrogates, and dealing with multiple criteria. The review concludes by identifying areas for future research, including the scheduling of conservation action over extensive time periods and incorporating data about site vulnerability.

Description: The three Kyoto flexible mechanisms—emissions trading, the clean development mechanism (CDM), and Joint Implementation (JI)—have always been controversial. Proponents saw the mechanisms as clever tools to ensure environmental outcomes were achieved at least cost. Reducing the costs of compliance, they argued, would make tighter environmental targets possible, and certainly more politically feasible. Detractors have argued that the flexible mechanisms commoditize Earth's atmosphere in a manner that will allow dubious projects and the exchange of “hot air” to substitute for serious engagement on climate change. This chapter reviews the Kyoto flexible mechanisms, which will become fully operative during the period 2008 to 2012. The review assesses their progress and success to date, examines the problems that have emerged, and considers suggestions for future developments in climate policy.

Description: ▪ Abstract  Many aspects of Earth's climate system have changed abruptly in the past and are likely to change abruptly in the future. Although abrupt shifts in temperature are most dramatic in glacial climates, abrupt changes, resulting in an altered probability of drought, large floods, tropical storm landfall, and monsoon rainfall, are all important concerns even in the absence of significant anthropogenic climate forcing. Continued climate change will likely increase the probability of these types of abrupt change and also make abrupt changes in ocean circulation and sea level more likely. Although global warming may have already triggered abrupt change, current understanding and modeling capability is not sufficient to specify details of future abrupt climate change. Improved adaptation strategies are warranted, as well as efforts to avoid crossing climate change thresholds beyond which large abrupt changes in sea level, ocean circulation, and methane-clathrate release could greatly amplify the impacts of climate change.

Description: ▪ Abstract  The consequences of the invention of DNA-based molecular techniques and their application to agriculture have been pervasive. This review examines the key consequences for farmers and the public. These include widespread commercial applications of agricultural biotechnology in a limited number of countries, a large private-sector investment in biotechnology research, significant economic contributions to farmers, continuing controversy over its environmental impacts, a proliferation of regulations (both national and international as a consequence of the technology and property rights), a wide range of changing public reaction, and relatively little contribution of the technology to increasing food production, nutrition, or farm incomes in less-developed countries.