Unacceptable Agency

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-344
Author(s):  
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Earth System ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Authority Relations ◽  
Looking Back

The Earth System Governance Project is the largest scholarly body in the world devoted to articulating governance of the Earth’s systems. It recently published a “Harvesting Initiative” looking back on the first iteration of its Scientific Plan. This paper contributes to the decolonial and constructive critique of the theory of agency in that Initiative and argues that it displays “fragmentary coloniality” especially around problematic authority relations in governance. By turning to work on “worlding,” the paper argues for radicalizing questions of authority, leading us to focus not on agency but on moral relationships—work for a sequel to this paper.

scholarly journals Politics of Strata

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 211-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Power Source ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The Third ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways.

scholarly journals Deep-time organizations: Learning institutional longevity from history

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Hanusch ◽  
Frank Biermann
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Design Principles ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Initial Design ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Temporal Interdependencies

The Anthropocene as a new planetary epoch has brought to the foreground the deep-time interconnections of human agency with the earth system. Yet despite this recognition of strong temporal interdependencies, we still lack understanding of how societal and political organizations can manage interconnections that span several centuries and dozens of generations. This study pioneers the analysis of what we call “deep-time organizations.” We provide detailed comparative historical analyses of some of the oldest existing organizations worldwide from a variety of sectors, from the world’s oldest bank (Sveriges Riksbank) to the world’s oldest university (University of Al Quaraouiyine) and the world’s oldest dynasty (Imperial House of Japan). Based on our analysis, we formulate 12 initial design principles that could lay, if supported by further empirical research along similar lines, the basis for the construction and design of “deep-time organizations” for long-term challenges of earth system governance and planetary stewardship.

scholarly journals Past climates inform our future

Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 370 (6517) ◽  
pp. eaay3701
Author(s):  
Jessica E. Tierney ◽  
Christopher J. Poulsen ◽  
Isabel P. Montañez ◽  
Tripti Bhattacharya ◽  
Ran Feng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Model Evaluation ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Earth System ◽  
High Carbon ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Earth System Models ◽  
High Carbon Dioxide

As the world warms, there is a profound need to improve projections of climate change. Although the latest Earth system models offer an unprecedented number of features, fundamental uncertainties continue to cloud our view of the future. Past climates provide the only opportunity to observe how the Earth system responds to high carbon dioxide, underlining a fundamental role for paleoclimatology in constraining future climate change. Here, we review the relevancy of paleoclimate information for climate prediction and discuss the prospects for emerging methodologies to further insights gained from past climates. Advances in proxy methods and interpretations pave the way for the use of past climates for model evaluation—a practice that we argue should be widely adopted.

Navigating the anthropocene: the Earth System Governance Project strategy paper

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Biermann ◽  
Michele M Betsill ◽  
Susana Camargo Vieira ◽  
Joyeeta Gupta ◽  
Norichika Kanie ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Earth System ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Project Strategy

Transforming governance and institutions for global sustainability: key insights from the Earth System Governance Project

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Biermann ◽  
Kenneth Abbott ◽  
Steinar Andresen ◽  
Karin Bäckstrand ◽  
Steven Bernstein ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Earth System ◽  
Global Sustainability ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth

scholarly journals The WGLC global gridded lightning climatology and time series

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3219-3237
Author(s):  
Jed O. Kaplan ◽  
Katie Hong-Kiu Lau
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Detection Efficiency ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Maritime Continent ◽  
Lightning Stroke ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Tropics ◽  
Direct Use

Abstract. Lightning is an important atmospheric phenomenon and has wide-ranging influence on the Earth system, but few long-term observational datasets of lightning occurrence and distribution are currently freely available. Here, we analyze global lightning activity over the second decade of the 21st century using a new global, high-resolution gridded time series and climatology of lightning stroke density based on raw data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN). While the total number of strokes detected increases from 2010–2014, an adjustment for detection efficiency reduces this artificial trend. The global distribution of lightning shows the well-known pattern of greatest density over the three tropical terrestrial regions of the Americas, Africa, and the Maritime Continent, but we also noticed substantial temporal variability over the 11 years of record, with more lightning in the tropics from 2012–2015 and increasing lightning in the midlatitudes of the Northern Hemisphere from 2016–2020. Although the total number of strokes detected globally was constant, mean stroke power decreases significantly from a peak in 2013 to the lowest levels on record in 2020. Evaluation with independent observational networks shows that while the WWLLN does not capture peak seasonal lightning densities, it does represent the majority of powerful lightning strokes. The resulting gridded lightning dataset (Kaplan and Lau, 2021a, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4774528) is freely available and will be useful for a range of studies in climate, Earth system, and natural hazards research, including direct use as input data to models and as evaluation data for independent simulations of lightning occurrence.

Start the Earth System Governance that Integrates “Climate-Altering Technologies”

2020 ◽  
pp. 2075006
Author(s):  
János PÁSZTOR
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Emissions Reduction ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Security Risk ◽  
Average Temperature ◽  
International Panel ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Decision Making Processes

Addressing climate emergencies requires a radical social change, and an “earth system” governance approach that combines different factors (including technologies that affect climate). As the Paris Agreement has been reached for four years and came into force for three years, there is a growing recognition that the global average temperature rise cannot be limited to 1.5–2∘C only by emissions reduction or existing carbon removal measures. The reason is that the world has not taken enough actions to deal with the crisis. As reported by IPCC (2018), hundreds of millions of people worldwide are already experiencing the harsh consequences of climate change, from storms to floods, to heatwaves and droughts [IPCC. 2018. “International Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees.” https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 (accessed November 5, 2019)]. According to Spratt and Dunlop (2019), as the climate change intensifies, all sectors of society have realized the need to avoid the risks brought by climate change and to deal with the severe disasters that already exist [Spratt, David, and Ian Dunlop. 2019. “Existential Climate-related Security Risk: A Scenario Approach.” https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0b2c0c79dc4344b279bcf2365336ff23b.pdf (accessed November 5, 2019)]. This raises some profound questions. For instances, should people consider a new responsive measure that is compatible with the natural system which sustains life on the earth, and within the limits of the earth’s tolerance? What forms of decision-making might we need, to help us make the smart collective choices needed for a world where no risk-free options remain? Are familiar governance and decision-making processes still suitable for the goals? Who will make the decisions to promote this transformation? If people really want to change the way they make decisions, they may need to create new forms of governance and decide how this transformation begins and which authority is subject to.

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