Droughts: The impact of semantics and perceptions

Water Policy ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir U. Smakhtin ◽  
E. Lisa F. Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Preventive Action ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Land Degradation And Desertification ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Source Duration

Global environmental change coupled with increased demand for food and competition for diminishing water places the issue of disaster risk management high on the global political agenda. Drought is one of the most complex natural hazards, affecting natural resources and human development recurrently. Drought affects agricultural production globally, triggering significant food and health insecurity and habitat loss through land degradation and desertification. While the consequences of droughts can usually be predicted, preventive action is frequently absent or insufficient to prevent serious impacts in many regions of the world. We believe that lack of a common understanding of what drought is stands in the way of cohesive anti-drought action. This paper examines drought definitions emerging from influential scholarship, practitioners' discourse and multilateral policy processes that emphasise diverging aspects of the phenomena of dry periods, including the source, duration, spatial extent, impact and affected stakeholders. This paper begins by examining the concepts of hazard and disaster. It then explores the various perceptions associated with drought and the problems posed by inconsistency in definitions. It concludes that a common conceptual understanding of drought is essential for effective action to address the growing need for reliable food supply, poverty alleviation and increased agricultural productivity globally.

scholarly journals Impact of Environmental Issues on Consumer Senses Leading to Ecofriendly Buying Decisions

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4S3) ◽  
pp. 93-98
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Sustainable Consumption ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Consumer Perception ◽  
Sensory Marketing ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Buying Decisions

Inducing Sustainable consumption in individuals is one of the important challenges in the path to Sustainability. Buying decision can be influenced by Consumer Perception. Sensory Marketing practices are effective tools for influencing Consumer Perception. This paper introduces sensory marketing as a new replica in the field of Sustainable Consumption. Senses stimulate cognitive thinking which is the need of the hour for global environmental change. Sensory marketing may be a new tool in the field of solving Environmental issues, as it influence buying decisions of consumer and also encourage consumer to pay more through perception. This study tries to analyse the impact of environmental Issues on consumer senses which influences to Eco friendly buying decisions..

scholarly journals Context-Dependency of Enemy Impact on Plant Communities in a Changing World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Kempel ◽  
Harald Auge ◽  
Eric Allan
Keyword(s):  
Global Change ◽  
Plant Communities ◽  
Fungal Pathogens ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Biotic Interactions ◽  
Plant Productivity ◽  
Context Dependency ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Impact

Global environmental change is strongly altering biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Antagonistic biotic interactions affect the diversity and functioning of plant communities but are notoriously context dependent and are therefore likely to be altered by global change drivers. Global change can directly affect biotic interactions and can also indirectly alter the abundance, diversity and composition of plant enemy communities, via changes to plant productivity, diversity and functional composition. Changes in the enemy community feedback to alter the plant community. However, we lack predictions for how different global change drivers may alter enemy communities and their impact on plant communities. In this review we summarize current knowledge on the impact of invertebrate herbivores and fungal pathogens on plant productivity, diversity and community composition, and outline theory and expectations on how important global change drivers – nitrogen enrichment, warming and elevated CO2, as well as the loss of plant and insect diversity, may affect the impact of plant-enemies on plant communities.

Sustainable Development Ideas: an “Apple of Discord" or a Platform for Unification?

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (6) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Zhanna Mingaleva
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Urbanization Rate ◽  
The Impact

The article analyzes the main foreign approaches to the interpretation of the “sustainable development” definition, the directions for the formation of various concepts, programs, political attitudes based on the definition and ideas of sustainable development, identifies shortcomings of the most common approaches and concepts. An overview of the main approaches and theories of sustainable development is compiled, their classification is proposed, a spatial model of the conceptual areas of the concept of “sustainable development” and spheres of its application is presented. The study concluded that the alternative approaches to understanding the role of the environment in the existence of mankind, to the assessment of both the impact of industrial and agricultural production and the results of people’s livelihoods (especially in the context of a sharp increase of urbanization rate) on the global environmental situation, have led to the formation of various concepts of sustainable development that form the basis of national strategies and programs of sustainable development. As a result, the ideas, and the very concept of sustainable development, are increasingly becoming a field of disagreements and contradictions between states and individual regions of the world, rather than a common platform for combining efforts to solve global problems of mankind.

scholarly journals Anthropocene in Friction. Dis-Encounters Between Geology and History

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-168
Author(s):  
German Alfonso Palacio Castañeda ◽  
Alberto Vargas ◽  
Elizabeth Hennessy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
Natural Scientists ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
The Way

This article brings attention to the need to introduce social sciences to the Global Environmental Change conversation in order to discuss the notion of the “Anthropocene” postulated by prominent natural scientists (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002). The focus of analysis concentrates on and the way the local and the global are put into friction (Tsing 2005). If natural scientists have achieved to show the dangers Earth currently confronts, what is not yet clear is if they understand how human societies, the main driver of this geological era, work. They tend to consider humans as a specie, so they make a reductionist idea of humans as a compact unity, taking away our knowledge that teaches that they are “social” (Moore 2015). This article starts with a discussion about the apparent common understanding on the “global,” by natural and social sciences. This article poses important challenges to social scientists, is critical toward the Anthropocene concept, and aspires to suggest critical thinking contributions on the global and its friction with the local. This article illustrates how, through the idea of the Anthropocene, Geology meets History in ways that are not easy to accept for social scientists because, they are right when they argue that the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to a “specie” because he/she is a socio-ecological entity.

scholarly journals The implications of the recently recognized mid-20th century shift in the Earth system

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962199552
Author(s):  
Chris Turney ◽  
Chris Fogwill
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Earth System ◽  
High Quality ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Future Warming ◽  
Atmospheric Interactions ◽  
Great Acceleration ◽  
The Impact

Satellite observations offering detailed records of global environmental change are only available from 1979. Emerging studies combining high-quality instrumental and natural observations highlight that the Earth system experienced a substantial shift across the mid-20th century, one that appears to have taken place before the Great Acceleration of human activities from the 1950s. These new results have far-reaching implications for understanding ice-ocean-atmospheric interactions in the Anthropocene and highlight the urgent need for drastic cuts in carbon emissions to limit the impact of future warming.

Cancer and Global Environmental Politics: Proposing a New Research Agenda

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-13
Author(s):  
Peter Dauvergne
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
World Health ◽  
Global Environmental Politics ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Cancer Rates ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Impact

More than six million people die of cancer every year. Over the next two decades, the World Health Organization predicts global cancer rates will rise to 10 million deaths annually. What is the impact of the global political and economic processes of environmental change on cancer rates? Why, given the strong intuitive reasons to worry about the carcinogenic effects of global environmental change, is there so little research on this topic? What is the political role of science, corporations, nongovernmental organizations and international institutions on cancer research and cancer rates? What is the impact of global patterns of trade, financing, production and consumption on research and rates? This article charts the current social science literature on cancer and global environmental change with the hope of encouraging scholars of global environmental politics to pursue a new research agenda around questions like these.

scholarly journals Rising CO2 enhances hypoxia tolerance in a marine fish

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Montgomery ◽  
Stephen D. Simpson ◽  
Georg H. Engelhard ◽  
Silvana N. R. Birchenough ◽  
Rod W. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Dicentrarchus Labrax ◽  
Aquatic Organisms ◽  
Sea Bass ◽  
Hypoxia Tolerance ◽  
Bacterial Respiration ◽  
European Sea Bass ◽  
Hypoxic Conditions ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Global environmental change is increasing hypoxia in aquatic ecosystems. During hypoxic events, bacterial respiration causes an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) while oxygen (O2) declines. This is rarely accounted for when assessing hypoxia tolerances of aquatic organisms. We investigated the impact of environmentally realistic increases in CO2 on responses to hypoxia in European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax). We conducted a critical oxygen (O2crit) test, a common measure of hypoxia tolerance, using two treatments in which O2 levels were reduced with constant ambient CO2 levels (~530 µatm), or with reciprocal increases in CO2 (rising to ~2,500 µatm). We also assessed blood acid-base chemistry and haemoglobin-O2 binding affinity of sea bass in hypoxic conditions with ambient (~650 μatm) or raised CO2 (~1770 μatm) levels. Sea bass exhibited greater hypoxia tolerance (~20% reduced O2crit), associated with increased haemoglobin-O2 affinity (~32% fall in P50) of red blood cells, when exposed to reciprocal changes in O2 and CO2. This indicates that rising CO2 which accompanies environmental hypoxia facilitates increased O2 uptake by the blood in low O2 conditions, enhancing hypoxia tolerance. We recommend that when impacts of hypoxia on aquatic organisms are assessed, due consideration is given to associated environmental increases in CO2.

scholarly journals Untangling interactions: do temperature and habitat fragmentation gradients simultaneously impact biotic relationships?

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1787) ◽  
pp. 20140687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Poppy Lakeman-Fraser ◽  
Robert M. Ewers
Keyword(s):  
Habitat Fragmentation ◽  
Plant Density ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Trophic Levels ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Abundance And Diversity ◽  
Plant Herbivore ◽  
The Impact

Gaining insight into the impact of anthropogenic change on ecosystems requires investigation into interdependencies between multiple drivers of ecological change and multiple biotic responses. Global environmental change drivers can act simultaneously to impact the abundance and diversity of biota, but few studies have also measured the impact across trophic levels. We firstly investigated whether climate (using temperature differences across a latitudinal gradient as a surrogate) interacts with habitat fragmentation (measured according to fragment area and distance to habitat edges) to impact a New Zealand tri-trophic food chain (plant, herbivore and natural enemy). Secondly, we examined how these interactions might differentially impact both the density and biotic processes of species at each of the three trophic levels. We found evidence to suggest that these drivers act non-additively across trophic levels. The nature of these interactions however varied: location synergistically interacted with fragmentation measures to exacerbate the detrimental effects on consumer density; and antagonistically interacted to ameliorate the impact on plant density and on the interactions between trophic levels (herbivory and parasitoid attack rate). Our findings indicate that the ecological consequences of multiple global change drivers are strongly interactive and vary according to the trophic level studied and whether density or ecological processes are investigated.

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