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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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: ▪ 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.