Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Công bố khoa học tiêu biểu
Sắp xếp:
WETLAND RESOURCES: Status, Trends, Ecosystem Services, and Restorability ▪ Abstract Estimates of global wetland area range from 5.3 to 12.8 million km2 . About half the global wetland area has been lost, but an international treaty (the 1971 Ramsar Convention) has helped 144 nations protect the most significant remaining wetlands. Because most nations lack wetland inventories, changes in the quantity and quality of the world's wetlands cannot be tracked adequately. Despite the likelihood that remaining wetlands occupy less than 9% of the earth's land area, they contribute more to annually renewable ecosystem services than their small area implies. Biodiversity support, water quality improvement, flood abatement, and carbon sequestration are key functions that are impaired when wetlands are lost or degraded. Restoration techniques are improving, although the recovery of lost biodiversity is challenged by invasive species, which thrive under disturbance and displace natives. Not all damages to wetlands are reversible, but it is not always clear how much can be retained through restoration. Hence, we recommend adaptive approaches in which alternative techniques are tested at large scales in actual restoration sites.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 30 Số 1 - Trang 39-74 - 2005
Payments for Environmental Services: Evolution Toward Efficient and Fair Incentives for Multifunctional Landscapes Payments for environmental services (PES), the non-provisioning part of ecosystem services, target alignment of microeconomic incentives for land users with meso- and macroeconomic societal costs and benefits of their choices across stakeholders and scales. They can interfere with or complement social norms and rights-based approaches at generic (land-use planning) and individual (tenure, use rights) levels; they interact with macroeconomic policies influencing the drivers to which individual agents respond. In many developing country contexts, community scale factors strongly influence land users' decisions, whereas unclear land rights complicate the use of market-based instruments. PES concepts need to adapt. Multiple paradigms have emerged within the broad PES domain. Evidence suggests that forms of “coinvestment in stewardship” (CIS) alongside rights are the preferred entry point. Commodification of environmental services (ES) and ES markets might evolve later on, but require strong government regulation to set and enforce rules of the game. We frame hypotheses for wider testing and “no-regrets” recommendations for practitioners.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 37 Số 1 - Trang 389-420 - 2012
Environmental Burden of Traditional Bioenergy Use Approximately 40% of the global population relies on traditional bioenergy, accounting for 9% of global energy use and 55% of global wood harvest. However, knowledge about the environmental impacts of traditional bioenergy is fragmented. This review addresses several persistent questions and summarizes recent research on land cover change (LCC) and pollution emissions resulting from traditional bioenergy use. We also review recent studies analyzing transitions from traditional bioenergy to cleaner stoves and fuels. Between 27 and 34% of the wood fuel harvest in 2009 was unsustainable, with large geographical variations. Almost 300 million rural people live in wood fuel “hotspots,” concentrated in South Asia and East Africa, creating risks of wood-fuel-driven degradation. Different fuels and stoves show variation in climate-forcing emissions. Many, but not all, nontraditional stoves result in lower emissions than traditional models. Traditional bioenergy makes substantial contributions to anthropogenic black carbon (BC) emissions (18–30%) and small contributions to total anthropogenic climate impacts (2–8%). Transitions from traditional fuels and devices have proven difficult. Stacking, i.e., the use of multiple devices and fuels to satisfy household energy needs, is common, showing the need to shift stove interventions from the common approach that promotes one fuel and one device to integrated approaches that incorporate deep understanding of local needs and practices, and multiple fuels and devices, while monitoring residual use of traditional technologies.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 40 Số 1 - Trang 121-150 - 2015
Concepts and Methodologies for Measuring the Sustainability of Cities In recent decades, better data and methods have become available for understanding the complex functioning of cities and their impacts on sustainability. This review synthesizes the recent developments in concepts and methods being used to measure the impacts of cities on environmental sustainability. It differentiates between a dominant trend in research literature that concentrates on the accounting and allocation of greenhouse gas emissions and energy use to cities and a reemergence of studies that focus on the direct and indirect material and resource flows in cities. The methodological approaches reviewed may consider cities as either producers or consumers, and all recognize that urban environmental impacts can be local, regional, or global. As well as giving an overview of the methodological debates, we examine the implications of the different approaches for policy and the challenges these approaches face in their application in the field.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 39 Số 1 - Trang 519-547 - 2014
Environmental Governance ▪ Abstract This chapter reviews the literature relevant to environmental governance in four domains of scholarship: globalization, decentralization, market and individual incentives-based governance, and cross-scale governance. It argues that in view of the complexity and multiscalar character of many of the most pressing environmental problems, conventional debates focused on pure modes of governance–where state or market actors play the leading role–fall short of the capacity needed to address them. The review highlights emerging hybrid modes of governance across the state-market-community divisions: comanagement, public-private partnerships and social-private partnerships. It examines the significant promise they hold for coupled social and natural systems to recover from environmental degradation and change and explores some of the critical problems to which hybrid forms of environmental governance are also subject.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 31 Số 1 - Trang 297-325 - 2006
ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES ▪ Abstract Values are often invoked in discussions of how to develop a more sustainable relationship with the environment. There is a substantial literature on values that spans several disciplines. In philosophy, values are relatively stable principles that help us make decisions when our preferences are in conflict and thus convey some sense of what we consider good. In economics, the term values is usually used in discussions of social choice, where an assessment of the social value of various alternatives serves as a guide to the best choice under a utilitarian ethic (the greatest good for the greatest number). In sociology, social psychology, and political science, two major lines of research have addressed environmental values. One has focused on four value clusters: self-interest, altruism, traditionalism, and openness to change and found relatively consistent theoretical and empirical support for the relationship of values to environmentalism. The other line of research suggests that environmentalism emerges when basic material needs are met and that individuals and societies that are postmaterialist in their values are more likely to exhibit pro-environmental behaviors. The evidence in support of this argument is more equivocal. Overall, the idea that values, especially altruism, are related to environmentalism, seems well established, but little can be said about the causes of value change and of the overall effects of value change on changes in behavior.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 30 Số 1 - Trang 335-372 - 2005
Certification Schemes and the Impacts on Forests and Forestry Certification schemes have emerged in recent years to become a significant and innovative venue for standard setting and governance in the environmental realm. This review examines these schemes in the forest sector where, arguably, their development is among the most advanced of the sustainability labeling initiatives. Beginning with the origins, history, and features of schemes, the review synthesizes and assesses what we know about the direct effects and broader consequences of forest certification. Bearing in mind underlying factors affecting producers' decisions to certify, direct effects are examined by describing the uptake of schemes, the improvements to management of audited forests, and the ameliorative potential of certification for landscape-level concerns such as deforestation and forest protection. In assessing broader consequences, we look beyond the instrument itself to detail positive and negative unintended consequences, spillover effects, and longer-term and slow-moving effects that flow from the emergence of the certification innovation.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 33 Số 1 - Trang 187-211 - 2008
Sustainability Transitions Research: Transforming Science and Practice for Societal Change The article describes the field of sustainability transitions research, which emerged in the past two decades in the context of a growing scientific and public interest in large-scale societal transformation toward sustainability. We describe how different scientific approaches and methodological positions explore diverse types of transitions and provide the basis for multiple theories and models for governance of sustainability transitions. We distinguish three perspectives in studying transitions: socio-technical, socio-institutional, and socio-ecological. Although the field as a whole is very heterogeneous, commonalities can be characterized in notions such as path dependencies, regimes, niches, experiments, and governance. These more generic concepts have been adopted within the analytical perspective of transitions, which has led three different types of approaches to dealing with agency in transitions: analytical, evaluative, and experimental. The field has by now produced a broad theoretical and empirical basis along with a variety of social transformation strategies and instruments, impacting disciplinary scientific fields as well as (policy) practice. In this article, we try to characterize the field by identifying its main perspectives, approaches and shared concepts, and its relevance to real-world sustainability problems and solutions.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 42 Số 1 - Trang 599-626 - 2017
Pharmaceuticals in the Environment Pharmaceuticals are chemicals that are used because of their biological activity. They are often excreted unchanged and can reach the environment. Throughout developed countries, the pharmaceutical concentrations in the aquatic environment are in the same range (μg L−1 and below); however, it is not clear whether this holds for less-developed countries too. The health risks of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) remain poorly understood. Although there are no known short-term effects on humans, long-term effects cannot be ruled out until there is more research. The significance of metabolites and transformation products resulting from the parent APIs is not yet known. Awareness of the presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment, coupled with some evidence of effects, suggests that precautionary management action to reduce the release of pharmaceuticals to the environment should be considered. As for effluent treatment, no technology works well for all compounds. Advanced effluent treatment is not sustainable because of energy consumption, efficiency, and efficacy. Therefore, its appropriateness must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Increased handling and use measures at the source and better biodegradable pharmaceuticals are necessary in the long run for the new paradigm called “sustainable pharmacy.”
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 35 Số 1 - Trang 57-75 - 2010
Transformative Environmental Governance Transformative governance is an approach to environmental governance that has the capacity to respond to, manage, and trigger regime shifts in coupled social-ecological systems (SESs) at multiple scales. The goal of transformative governance is to actively shift degraded SESs to alternative, more desirable, or more functional regimes by altering the structures and processes that define the system. Transformative governance is rooted in ecological theories to explain cross-scale dynamics in complex systems, as well as social theories of change, innovation, and technological transformation. Similar to adaptive governance, transformative governance involves a broad set of governance components, but requires additional capacity to foster new social-ecological regimes including increased risk tolerance, significant systemic investment, and restructured economies and power relations. Transformative governance has the potential to actively respond to regime shifts triggered by climate change, and thus future research should focus on identifying system drivers and leading indicators associated with social-ecological thresholds.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Tập 41 Số 1 - Trang 399-423 - 2016
Tổng số: 33
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4