Rescaling political ecology? World regional approaches to climate change in the Asia Pacific

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona P. Miller ◽  
Andrew McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
Potential Benefits

The potential benefits of developing a research agenda that explicitly reconstructs a world regional political ecology are explored through a focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation in the Asia Pacific. Through an examination of scale in political ecology, world regional political ecology is identified as a promising analytical and political approach to understanding and addressing the current challenges associated with climate change. In light of this, political ecology scholarship in the region is reviewed to identify current strengths and lacunae. Whilst there is indeed a rich tradition of political ecology research across the Asia Pacific, much of this research focuses upon local/national/global dynamics with relatively little attention devoted to supra-national processes, missing important social, political, financial and material processes constructed at the world regional scale. It is argued that a world regional political ecology of climate change should build upon strengths in previous political ecology work yet extend these in three generative directions: comparative analysis of place-based, single issue research; generation of diverse counter-narratives at the regional scale; and consideration of flows and networks. We argue a rescaled political ecology that incorporates world regional scales opens a range of possibilities for practicing and pursuing more just and progressive climate politics and initiatives.

scholarly journals From emission scenarios to spatially resolved projections with a chain of computationally efficient emulators: MAGICC (v7.5.1) – MESMER (v0.8.1) coupling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Beusch ◽  
Zebedee Nicholls ◽  
Lukas Gudmundsson ◽  
Mathias Hauser ◽  
Malte Meinshausen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Greenhouse Gas Emission ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Natural Variability ◽  
Climate Response ◽  
Computationally Efficient ◽  
Spatially Resolved ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Uncertainty Space

Abstract. Producing targeted climate information at the local scale, including major sources of climate change projection uncertainty for diverse emissions scenarios, is essential to support climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Here, we present the first chain of computationally efficient Earth System Model (ESM) emulators allowing to rapidly translate greenhouse gas emission pathways into spatially resolved annual-mean temperature anomaly field time series, accounting for both forced climate response and natural variability uncertainty at the local scale. By combining the global-mean, emissions-driven emulator MAGICC with the spatially resolved emulator MESMER, ESM-specific as well as constrained probabilistic emulated ensembles can be derived. This emulation chain can hence build on and extend large multi-ESM ensembles such as the ones produced within the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The main extensions are threefold. (i) A more thorough sampling of the forced climate response and the natural variability uncertainty is possible with millions of emulated realizations being readily created. (ii) The same uncertainty space can be sampled for any emission pathway, which is not the case in CMIP6, where some of the most societally relevant strong mitigation scenarios have been run by only a small number of ESMs. (iii) Other lines of evidence to constrain future projections, including observational constraints, can be introduced, which helps to refine projected future ranges beyond the multi-ESM ensemble's estimates. In addition to presenting results from the coupled MAGICC-MESMER emulator chain, we carry out an extensive validation of MESMER, which is trained on and applied to multiple emission pathways for the first time in this study. The newly developed MAGICC-MESMER coupled emulator will allow unprecedented assessments of the implications of manifold emissions pathways at regional scale.

scholarly journals A survey of ASEAN instruments relating to peatlands, mangroves and other wetlands: The REDD+ context

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kheng-Lian Koh
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Sustainable Use ◽  
Lao Pdr ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Change Mitigation ◽  
Selection Of

Since the 13th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in November 2007, held in Singapore, ASEAN has accelerated its response to climate change issues, including REDD+ as a mechanism for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to enhance conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. There are many wetlands in ASEAN including more than 25 million ha of peatlands spread over Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, Philippines, Vietnam and Lao PDR. The peatlands account for 60 per cent of global tropical peatland resources. They are of significance for sequestration of carbon. However, degraded wetlands, including peatlands, are also a major source of greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. Of the types of wetlands, ASEAN has focused attention predominantly on peatlands in relation to REDD+, mainly because of the ‘Indonesian Haze’. The Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law (APCEL) organised a Workshop titled, REDD+ and Legal Regimes of Mangroves, Peatland and Other Wetlands: ASEAN and the World, in Singapore from 15-16 November 2012. The articles contained in this special themed edition of the International Journal of Rural Law and Policy (IJRLP) contains a selection of the papers presented. This editorial will provide a brief background to some aspects of REDD+. Included in this issue of IJRLP is a summary of the proceedings of the workshop as interpreted by the assigned rapporteur and editors of APCEL. These summaries were reviewed and approved by the presenters.

scholarly journals Spatial Planning of Green Infrastructure for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change at a Regional Scale

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (24) ◽  
pp. 10525
Author(s):  
Andrés M. García ◽  
Inés Santé ◽  
Xurxo Loureiro ◽  
David Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Spatial Planning ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Infrastructure Planning ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Multi Criteria Evaluation ◽  
Protected Natural Areas

Green infrastructure has acquired greater importance in recent years in relation to climate change adaptation. Green infrastructure planning has been identified as a new and innovative means of land planning that can contribute to preventing the impacts of climate change. However, this has been explored more thoroughly in urban areas than at the regional scale. The present study proposes a methodology including multi-criteria evaluation techniques for assessing the ESS involved in the fight against climate change and for the spatial planning of multifunctional green infrastructure areas based on the results of this assessment. Application of the methodology for green infrastructure planning aimed at confronting climate change at landscape level in the region of Galicia (NW Spain) successfully delimited multifunctional green infrastructure zones. Results show that delimited zones have a higher provision potential for more ESS than protected natural areas and areas that are not part of the green infrastructure.

scholarly journals Exclusive Minilateralism: An Emerging Discourse within International Climate Change Governance?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scott McGee
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Small Peak ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
International Climate ◽  
Decision Making Rule ◽  
Climate Change Governance ◽  
International Climate Change

Over the past five years there have been a series of significant international climate change agreements involving only elite state actors. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, APEC Sydney Leaders Declaration and US Major Economies Process all displayed a shift towards a model of international climate change governance involving a small group of economically powerful states, to the exclusion of less powerful states and environmental NGOs. The modest result from the UNFCCC COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 and subsequent UNFCCC meetings has strengthened calls for international climate governance to be pared down to smaller decision making forums of key states only. This article argues that these developments evidence an emerging discourse of ‘exclusive minilateralism’ in international climate policy that is challenging the inclusive multilateral discourse that has formed the bedrock of international climate change governance since the inception of UN climate regime in the early 1990s. The exclusive minilateralism discourse offers a significant challenge to both the cosmopolitan and discursive democratic aspirations of international climate change governance. One response to the exclusive minilateral discourse is to reform the UNFCCC consensus-based decision making rule to provide the COP with greater ease of decision making on key issues relating to mitigation and adaptation. Another response is to more formally include the exclusive minilateralism discourse within the UNFCCC COP process. This could be achieved by forming a small peak body of states and key NGO groups to act as an influential advisor to the COP process on key issues requiring expedition and resolution.

Three Faces of Climate Justice

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nives Dolšak ◽  
Aseem Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Disadvantaged Communities ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Change Climate ◽  
Climate Crisis

There is overwhelming consensus about the science of climate change. Climate politics, however, remains volatile, driven by perceptions of injustice, which motivate policy resistance and undermine policy legitimacy. We identify three types of injustice. The first pertains to the uneven exposure to climate change impacts across countries and communities within a country. Socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged communities that have contributed the least to the climate crisis tend to be affected the most. To address climate change and its impacts, countries and subnational units have enacted a range of policies. But even carefully designed mitigation and adaptation policies distribute costs (the second justice dimension) and benefits (the third justice dimension) unevenly across sectors and communities, often reproducing existing inequalities. Climate justice requires paying careful attention to who bears the costs and who gets the benefits of both climate inaction and action. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Linking stakeholder scenarios and shared socioeconomic pathways for policy making in human-water systems

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammadreza Alizadeh ◽  
Jan Adamowski ◽  
Azhar Inam
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Water Systems ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Development Scenarios ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Storylines

<p>Climate change has caused many environmental problems, as well as water and food insecurity, and health and social impacts in many parts of the world, and especially in the world’s vulnerable regions such as developing countries. Studies have demonstrated the impacts of socio-economic and climate changes and how they result in water and environmental problems at global and regional scales. Socio-economic variation and climatic change influence the dynamic interaction of human and water systems, and our ability to address environmental problems at sub-regional scales. From this perspective, the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), as a form of alternative development scenarios, were recently introduced to help decision-makers to cope with uncertain futures and improve their policies for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. To take advantage of SSP scenarios for policy guidance at regional and national scales, it is necessary to explore the socio-economic feedbacks and water management policies informed by different sub-regional knowledge sharing through stakeholders’ narratives. In this study, we link SSP scenarios developed with regional stakeholders using a coupled socio-economic and environmental model, in conjunction with stakeholder-generated narrative storylines for a sub-region of Pakistan. The framework allows for linking corresponding scenarios across different uncertainty levels to improve regional scale policy making, while providing knowledge regarding the future of human-water systems under a range of plausible future climate and socio-economic scenarios.</p>

scholarly journals Navigating climate’s human geographies: Exploring the whereabouts of climate politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Bulkeley
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Spatial Relation ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

Just as global institutions and environmental assessment processes embark on the latest effort to integrate more social science into global environmental change research, it appears that the social sciences of climate change are unable or unwilling to address this challenge. In this article, I explore the nature of these dynamics within human geography and argue that climate change occupies a curiously ambiguous position within our discipline of both an explicit presence and an underlying absence. Framed predominantly in terms of a biophysical challenge requiring some form of social response, work on climate change retains an assumed socio-nature divide – a position which has yet to be substantively challenged by the different strands of political ecology, new materialism and environmental humanities that now pervade the discipline. To advance new geographies of climate change, the article argues that our understanding of climate change needs to shift from that of a problem that needs specific responses to a condition that is constituted through specific forms of socio-spatial relation and in turn constitutes the politics, ethics and meaning of particular socio-spatial orderings, from the citizen to the city, the community to the corporation.

The Role of Late-Night Infotainment Comedy in Communicating Climate Change Consensus

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward John Roy Clarke ◽  
Anna Klas ◽  
Joshua Stevenson ◽  
Emily Jane Kothe
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Mitigation Policy ◽  
Behavioural Intentions ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Adaptation Policies ◽  
Diverse Audience

Climate change is a politically-polarised issue, with conservatives less likely than liberals to perceive it as human-caused and consequential. Furthermore, they are less likely to support mitigation and adaptation policies needed to reduce its impacts. This study aimed to examine whether John Oliver’s “A Mathematically Representative Climate Change Debate” clip on his program Last Week Tonight polarised or depolarised a politically-diverse audience on climate policy support and behavioural intentions. One hundred and fifty-nine participants, recruited via Amazon MTurk (94 female, 64 male, one gender unspecified, Mage = 51.07, SDage = 16.35), were presented with either John Oliver’s climate change consensus clip, or a humorous video unrelated to climate change. Although the climate change consensus clip did not reduce polarisation (or increase it) relative to a control on mitigation policy support, it resulted in hyperpolarisation on support for adaptation policies and increased climate action intentions among liberals but not conservatives.

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