scholarly journals Beyond solutionist science for the Anthropocene: To navigate the contentious atmosphere of solar geoengineering

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinichiro Asayama ◽  
Masahiro Sugiyama ◽  
Atsushi Ishii ◽  
Takanobu Kosugi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Future ◽  
Solar Geoengineering ◽  
New Space ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
The One

The emerging narrative of the Anthropocene has created a new space for changes in global environmental change (GEC) science. On the one hand, there is a mounting call for changing scientific practices towards a solution-oriented transdisciplinary mode that can help achieve global sustainability. On the other hand, the scientists’ desire to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries has broken a taboo on researching solar geoengineering, a dangerous idea of deliberately cooling the Earth’s climate. Whilst to date the two features have been discussed separately, there is a possible confluence in the future. This paper explores this close yet precarious relationship between transdisciplinary GEC science and solar geoengineering in the context of Future Earth, a new international platform of Earth system science. Our aim is to understand how a transdisciplinary mode of science can navigate the contention over solar geoengineering and its course of research without breeding polarization. By seeking the immediacy of ‘problem-solving’, Future Earth is drawn into the solutionist thinking that orders the mode of engagement in pursuing consensus. However, because conflict is inescapable on the solar geoengineering debate, transdisciplinary engagement might as well aim at mapping out plural viewpoints and allowing people to disagree. In transdisciplinary engagement, as co-design signifies the engagement of stakeholders with decision-making in science, a fair and transparent procedure of making decisions is also needed. From our own experience of co-designing research priorities, we suggest that, if carefully designed, voting can be a useful tool to mediate the contentious process of transdisciplinary decision-making with three different benefits for collective decision-making, namely, efficiency, inclusivity and learning. For the future directions of transdisciplinary GEC science, since the Anthropocene challenges are truly uncertain and contentious, it is argued that the science for the Anthropocene should move away from a solutionist paradigm towards an experimentalist turn.

Livelihoods with multiple stressors: Gendered youth decision-making under global change in rural Northwest Mexico

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 1096-1119
Author(s):  
Stephanie Buechler ◽  
América Lutz-Ley
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Multiple Stressors ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Feminist Political Ecology ◽  
Northwest Mexico ◽  
Livelihood Systems ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Future

Livelihoods in rural communities have become increasingly complex due to rapidly changing socio-economic and environmental forces, with differing impacts on and responses by female and male youth. This study contributes to feminist political ecology through an explicit focus on youth and an examination of the intersections of age and gender in educational choices, livelihood systems, and human–environment interactions. We undertake double exposures analysis to explore female and male youths’ livelihood-related decision-making in Rayón, a semi-arid rural community in Northwest Mexico, undergoing global environmental change and globalization-related shifts in agriculture, climate, water, and socio-economic conditions. Global environmental change exacerbates an already fragile, local ecological context. A focus on gender issues among youth in three age categories (14–15, 16–19, and youth in their 20s) with respect to their decision-making concerning the future is critical to gaining a better understanding of the roles women and men will play in linked agricultural and non-agricultural, rural to urban livelihood systems. Agricultural employment increasingly includes global agribusiness where local youth compete with people from other areas. Access to employment, education, as well as water and land resources varied by gender, age, and social class, and played significant roles in livelihood diversification and migration decisions and outcomes. Mothers’ access to government assistance for their natural resource-based livelihoods positively impacted daughters’ opportunities. Educational curricula failed to link environmental change with local livelihoods and to prepare students for urban careers. This study offers insights related to female and male youths’ needs associated with environmental education, technology access, job training, and child and sibling care in order for them to more successfully confront the future across village, town, and city spaces.

El Protagonismo Dialéctico-Social del Ser Humano en el Desarrollo Intelectual de Rodolfo Mondolfo

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Jesús Víctor Alfredo Contreras Ugarte
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
Descriptive Method

Summary: Reflecting on the role humans take into nowadays society, should be of interest in all our social reflections, even for those that refer to the field of law. Any human indifferent and unconscious of the social role that he ought to play within society, as a member of it, is an irresponsible human detached from everything that surrounds him, regarding matters and other humans. Trying to isolate in an irresponsible, passive and comfortable attitude, means, after all, denying oneself, denying our nature, as the social being every human is. This is the reflection that this academic work entitles, the one made from the point of view of the Italian philosopher Rodolfo Mondolfo. From a descriptive development, starting from this renowned author, I will develop ideas that will warn the importance that human protagonism have, in this human product so call society. From a descriptive development, from this well-known author, I will be prescribing ideas that will warn the importance of the protagonism that all human beings have, in that human product that we call society. I have used the descriptive method to approach the positions of the Italian humanist philosopher and, for my assessments, I have used the prescriptive method from an eminently critical and deductive procedural position. My goal is to demonstrate, from the humanist postulates of Rodolfo Mondolfo, the hypothesis about the leading, decision-making and determining role that the human being has within society. I understand, to have reached the demonstration of the aforementioned hypothesis, because, after the analyzed, there is no doubt, that the human being is not one more existence in the development of societies; its role is decisive in determining the human present and the future that will house the next societies and generations of our historical future.

Scientific or Social Priorities for Brain Science? – Making a Difference

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Ashcroft
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
The One ◽  
Research Resources

How we ought to prioritise research spending is a difficult problem. On the one hand, we may wish to target research resources on the problems of most pressing social need, but this may be to pose questions which science is not in a position to answer. On the other hand, we may wish to target research resources on the problems which are for scientific reasons most interesting or most tractable, accepting that this might not be to target the most pressing social needs. Current thinking is that research priorities can be set most fairly not by specifying principles of justice in research spending, but rather by making the decision-making process more open, transparent and perhaps democratic. This can involve patient or citizen involvement in research programme design or research funding decision-making.

4. The Great Acceleration

2018 ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Erle C. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
System Level ◽  
Earth System ◽  
System A ◽  
The Earth ◽  
System P ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
Great Acceleration

The challenge for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) in 1999 was how to integrate the evidence of humans transforming Earth’s functioning as a system into a coherent overview of global environmental change. The IGBP report Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (2004) identified a dramatic mid-20th-century step-change in anthropogenic global environmental change, which would come to be called ‘The Great Acceleration’. ‘The Great Acceleration’ outlines the complex, multi-causal, system-level set of processes that have altered the Earth system, from domestication of land to human alterations of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. It also discusses tipping points that result in relatively rapid, non-linear, and potentially irreversible ‘step-changes’ in Earth’s climate system.

The Anthropocene Begins

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz ◽  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Reasonable Doubt ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Climate History ◽  
World Government ◽  
Weather Patterns ◽  
Naked Eye ◽  
The Future ◽  
Deep Boreholes ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
The One

What is the future for the planet, and for climate? Gazing into crystal balls is a pastime that humans have a fascination for. It is also one in which they have a dismal record. A generation or two ago, there were predictions of cities made of glass or plastic, clothes of aluminium or asbestos, flying cars, the fall of nationalism and the rise of world government, the demise of religion, and robots taking over our tasks and ushering in an age of universal leisure for all. So much for all that. When we move, then, to the almost limitless complexities and intersecting feedbacks of Earth’s climate system, one might be forgiven for throwing in the towel straight away. This is a system, we must eternally remember, of which we have only partial understanding, even as we see today’s weather patterns spin off from it. Go back into the deep past, and that climate and those long-vanished weather patterns leave only traces in strata that are, in large part, invisible to the naked eye. And of the future, of course, we have no samples, no deep boreholes, no fossils: the canvas is blank—indeed, as yet there is no canvas at all. Yet, from those ancient stratal traces we can construct a picture of events that is both vivid and (within our levels of uncertainty) true. There is no reasonable doubt that 20,000 years ago massive ice sheets spread out from the poles—or, that 125,000 years ago there was a climate on Earth as temperate, within a degree or so, as the one we enjoy today. So, there are patterns, real patterns that we can use as guides to help us try, with the utmost caution and scepticism, to create pictures, scenarios, sketches of the climate of the future. One might imagine alternative futures—or create them—particularly with the help of those elapsed realities. For instance, one might take that striking five-million year slice of climate history put together by Lorraine Lisiecki and Maureen Raymo (see Ch. 8 ).

scholarly journals Towards Just Resilience: Representing and Including New Constituencies in Adaptive Governance and Law

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Margherita Pieraccini
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Adaptive Governance ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Regulatory Strategy ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Abstract Resilience has become a key concept in the era of global environmental change in both academic and policy circles. Social scientists have singled out adaptive governance as the most appropriate regulatory strategy to build resilience. Although adaptive governance scholars are proponents of participatory decision-making, they have not explored in depth the democratic potential of adaptive governance. Questions of who should be represented and why have not been fully addressed from a normative viewpoint. Building on political theories of justice and green political thinking, this article explores more in depth the issue of procedural justice and representation in adaptive governance. In doing so the article makes a first attempt at developing the theoretical foundations for ‘just resilience’.

Contingent valuation: what needs to be done?

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Smith ◽  
Tracey H. Sach
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Contingent Valuation ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Right ◽  
Benefit Valuation

AbstractContingent valuation (CV) has been argued to have theoretical advantages over other approaches for benefit valuation used by health economists. Yet, in reality, the technique appears not to have realised these advantages when applied to health-care issues, such that its influence in decision-making at national levels has been non-existent within the health sector. This is not a result of a lack of methodological work in the area, which has continued to flourish. Rather, it is a result of such activities being undertaken in a rather uncoordinated and unsystematic fashion, leading CV to be akin to a ‘ship without a sail’. This paper utilises a systematic review of the CV literature in health to illustrate some important points concerning the conduct of CV studies, before providing a comment on what the remaining policy and research priorities are for the technique, and proposing a guideline for such studies. It is hoped that this will initiate some wider and rigorous debate on the future of the CV technique in order to make it seaworthy, give it direction and provide the right momentum.

scholarly journals Economics and environment: An impossible reconciliation?

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 242
Author(s):  
Alberto Díaz de Junguitu ◽  
Iñaki Heras Saizarbitoria ◽  
Olivier Boiral
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Future ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
Student Mobilization ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recurrent Theme

It should be noted that the relationship between economics and the environment has never previously featured as one of mankind’s primary or principal concerns. It presently does. The recent worldwide student mobilization for climate action, the Climate Change Congress in Paris (December 2015) or the dieselgate related to the scandals involving companies in the automobile sector not complying with regulatory environmental norms (which started also in 2015), among many other issues, provide evidence that this relationship is presently of central concern to questions regarding the future of mankind. Nevertheless, we should remind ourselves of the fact that, despite being a recurrent theme in the media, the environment continued to be a treated by economists as a subsidiary issue until, in relatively recent times, the effects of the global environmental crisis grew to proportions that meant it became of serious concern to the future of mankind. The aim of this paper is to trace the historical relationship between the environment and economics. In fact, the focus is more modest: we aim to illustrate the principal traces of the presence of the environment in economic science in an attempt to exhibit a path which might lead to the reconciliation of the one (the environment) with the other (economics).

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