Continuous Negotiation in Climate Adaptation: The Challenge of Co-Evolution for the Capability Approach to Justice

The capability approach is increasingly presented as a promising approach to address questions of justice in local climate adaptation. In an attempt to integrate environmental protections into the capability approach, Breena Holland developed the meta-capability Sustainable Ecological Capacity to establish substantive ecological limits. This article, however, empirically demonstrates that defining ecosystem thresholds in co-evolving systems is subject to conflict and continuous negotiation. Taking the Haringvliet dam in the Dutch South-West Delta as an illustrative case, this paper shows how people uphold different views about the Haringvliet’s most desirable ecosystem state. Future shifts in the socio-ecological system, such as decreased fresh water availability and sea-level rise, are expected to uproot today’s compromise about chloride levels in the Haringvliet. This suggests that anticipatory water management should not only address climate impacts, but also prepare for re-negotiations of established ecological thresholds. The associated politics of climate adaptation deals with questions about which functions to protect, at what costs and for whom. Hence, it is critical to integrate procedural justice and attention to political inequalities in capabilities-based adaptation justice frameworks.

Ecological and economic integration of land use in the agrosphere of the Carpathian region

The urgency of solving environmental, economic and social problems requires a radical turn in the direction of scientific and technological progress. Now the efforts of science and technology should focus on the greening of technological processes, the introduction of non-destructive, non-polluting, resource-saving and environmentally friendly types of equipment and technology, methods of organizing production, forms of management and more. Environmental, environmentally friendly and resource-saving directions of scientific and technological progress should be a priority in all economic branches and fields. At the same time, a radical restructuring of nature management, especially land use, and their comprehensive measures in solving problems of nature protection, which is an extremely complex, unified, integrated system, must be carried out.In developing a set of measures to ensure the greening of environment, and especially land use, it is proposed to widely use the results of scientific and technological progress without ignoring such objective factors as depletion of certain natural resources, especially non-renewable, environmental vulnerability, its environmental stability and ecological capacity, limits of ecological durability and resistance.

Ecological Capacity of the Land Use System as a Determining Factor of its Productivity

The ability of the economic system to meet the growing needs of society without losing natural resources or significantly reducing their quality properties can be predicted by the factor of ecological capacity of agricultural land use, which harmonizes economic and environmental components of agricultural land use by harmonizing social welfare and resource potential. The implementation of this approach should lead to the reconciliation of differences in the growth rates of economic prosperity and environmental decline, which is the quintessence in the practice of sustainable agricultural land use, as an essential norm in long-term exploitation of natural resources by current and future generations. Therefore, taking into account the factor of ecological capacity of lands as a criterion of productivity of agricultural lands is not in doubt. Purpose. The goal of this research is substantiation of the essence of the factor of ecological capacity of lands, determination of its components and the need for its forecasting in order to preserve the productive properties of lands. Results. It is proved that unreasonable human actions year after year lead to the transformation of qualitative properties of productive soils. Direct depletion of lands occurs due to insufficient application of organic fertilizers, excessive plowing of landscapes, neglect of field crop rotations, and excessive removal of nutrients by commercial crops, reduction of organic residues entering the soil, and so on. In this situation, the system of agricultural land use needs to be restructured as soon as possible in order to increase human welfare as long as possible, and in the long run to significantly reduce the pressure on the environment. In this context, the available natural resources should be directed not only to the development of the current economy, but also to serve as a basis for a guaranteed extension of the life cycle of ecologically dependent human civilization. The introduction of the factor of ecological capacity of lands will allow warning landowners and landing users about the danger of crisis phenomena associated with the emergence of threatening facts or the emergence of dangerous conditions. Conclusions. After conducting research, we conclude that the factor of ecological capacity of lands is the ability of the system of agricultural land use, its constituent subsystems or individual elements to synthesize, identify, update, accumulate and multiply the value properties of land. This ensures the required level of productivity in the face of ever-increasing anthropogenic pressure from individual actors.

Problems of Formation of Ecological Networks for Environmental Safety of Odesa Region

Currently, the concept of sustainable development of nature and society is gaining relevance, a key aspect of which is the development of the ecological network. In Ukraine, there is a regulatory framework for the formation of an ecological network of three levels - Pan-European, National and regional. One of the important problems is that in the developed schemes of regional eco-networks should be interconnected to the eco-networks of neighboring regions and countries. The main features of the ecological network of the Odesa region are due to its coastal position and location mainly in the Steppe, partly Forest-Steppe landscape zones. The region includes vast areas of coastal territories and coastal waters - coastal zones, which concentrate unique protected areas. Mandatory basis for the formation of ecological networks is land use. The proposed concept of geoplanning is based on planning developments of the main components of the territory: the natural environment; population; economic activity. The basic characteristics of the natural environment are the landscape map and physical and geographical zoning of the territory. Maps of resilience of the natural environment to man-caused load, natural and ecological potential of the territory, levels of ecological and economic balance have already been drawn up. This series of maps for the needs of planning the territory of Ukraine should be continued by project maps of national and regional ecological networks, as well as maps of ecological capacity of the territory for population settlement, various economic activities and the general level of economic development in general. For the needs of spatial planning it is necessary to emphasize the levels of anthropogenic and urban pressures on the natural environment in the settlement of the population. Allocation of water fund lands in kind and strict regulation of their use is the main prerequisite for the formation of ecological networks of Ukraine and its regions.

Analysis of the reasons for the resettlement of Western Siberia in the context of sustainable development

The construction of a new railway is considered as a way to successfully solve many socio-economic problems of regional significance, the development of regional production complexes (in particular, petrochemical), the transfer of the center of gravity from the South of Western Siberia, where the reserves of ecological capacity are almost exhausted, to the regions of the Near North, where such reserves are available. The authors note that this will create real prerequisites for expanding the main settlement zone within Western Siberia at the expense of the Near North, eliminating the “Irtysh settlement gap”.

Methodological approaches to optimization of agroecosystems

Within the framework of the article, the methodology of the energy assessment of the functioning of the social ecological-economic system is considered, using the example of a specific agroecosystem as a self-organizing, operationally closed structure; its energy analysis is carried out. A model for the development of the studied agroecosystem was formed, suggesting three options, taking into account the characteristics of land use. The index of sustainability of the agro-ecosystem was calculated; guidelines for the transformation of the structure of the agroecosystem are proposed.; The parameters of the ecological capacity of the soil of the agroecosystem were investigated; revealed the specific weight of ecologically stabilizing lands in the group of lands “arable land-forest-meadows and pastures-water”. The prospects for the development of the agroecosystem on the basis of the formation of a comprehensive technical and technological long-term plan for the functioning and development of the agroecosystem are assessed.

The concept of ecological carrying capacity: current state and algorithm of assessment for different types of tourist areas

The concept of capacity, traditional for classical ecology, in the context of sustainable development has also been used to assess the prospects for the development of sustainable tourism in the territory, it is also included in the Strategy for the Development of Tourism in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2035. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the existing domestic and foreign approaches to the assessment of environmental capacity and to develop on their basis algorithms for assessing capacity for different tourist areas. The analysis of the transformation of the existing methods of assessing environmental capacity, used in Russian and foreign practice since the 1970s, allowed, first, to identify the similarities and differences of scientific and practical approaches to solving this problem, and secondly, to identify the most valuable developments of world practice that are relevant to the Russian reality. Modern ideas about carrying capacity indicate the flexibility and multivariance of this concept, its dependence on both the natural properties of the territory and the types of recreational activities, as well as the degree of satisfaction of the recreational expectations of the tourist. The article proposes a universal algorithm for determining the ecological capacity for different types of tourist areas, based on the assessment of its technogenic and recreational components. The division into two components is fundamental for the methodology, since technogenic capacity is largely regulated by various provisions of existing legislation (codes, regulations, sanitary norms and rules), the indicators of compliance with which are evaluated by normalization and assignment of expert points, and recreational capacity, to a greater extent, depends on the properties of the territory and recreational activities. Among the environmental factors determining tourism capacity factors relating to environmental risks (such as fire hazard, the entropy of the relief, the likelihood of adverse exogenous geodynamic processes), and factors influencing the environment-stabilizing potential of the area (urbanization, plowed, and their) are included in the assessment. The methodology is being tested for two types of tourist territories – the Kenozersky National Park and the Greater Yalta region.