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This paper analyzes the relation between COVID-19, air pollution, and public transport mobility in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). We test if the restrictions to economic activity introduced to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 are associated with a structural change in air pollution levels and public transport mobility. Our results show that mobility in public transportation was significantly reduced following the government's recommendations. Nonetheless, we show that the reduction in mobility was not accompanied by a reduction in air pollution. Furthermore, Granger-causality tests show that the precedence relation between public transport mobility and air pollution disappeared as a product of the restrictions. Thus, our results suggest that air pollution in the MCMA seems primarily driven by industry and private car usage. In this regard, the government should redouble its efforts to develop policies to reduce industrial pollution and private car usage.

Land is a key input in economic production and production-waste sink. This links land to the causes of and responses to climate change. The dominant climate action ideas are based on the concept of 'land tenure security' which, in a global context marked by land-based inequities, means ratifying what already exists. This reinforces undemocratic social structures and institutions that themselves contribute to climate change. A restructuring of global land politics is called for, without which any analyses of and responses to climate change are at best superficial, and at worst, flawed and self-defeating. What is needed is to acknowledge the pervasive land-based social inequities in the world, and to end such inequities by pursuing a redistribution of a range of access to a range of land and resources in ways that categorically benefit the working people.

Cities around the world are confronted with the need to put in place climate adaptation policies to protect citizens and properties from climate change impacts. This article applies components of the framework developed by Moser and Ekström (2010) onto empirical qualitative data to diagnose institutional barriers to climate change adaptation in the Municipality of Beirut, Lebanon. Our approach reveals the presence of two vicious cycles influencing each other. In the first cycle, the root cause barrier is major political interference generating competing priorities and poor individual interest in climate change. A second vicious cycle is derived from feedbacks caused by the first and leading to the absence of a dedicated department where sector specific climate risk information is gathered and shared with other departments, limited knowledge and scientific understanding, as well as a distorted framing or vision, where climate change is considered unrelated to other issues and is to be dealt with at higher levels of government. The article also highlights the need to analyze interlinkages between barriers in order to suggest how to overcome them. The most common way to overcome barriers according to interviewees is through national and international support followed by the creation of a data bank. These opportunities could be explored by national and international policy-makers to break the deadlock in Beirut.

Natural resource conflicts in Mali in the last decade represent an important case to visualise the interconnection between land and climate issues. The country has received significant international attention in recent years both due to the announcement of large-scale land deals and due to its perceived vulnerability to climate stress. At the same time, Malian peasant movements have formed important networks of resistance and have been leading the pilot implementation of village land commissions to recognise and manage community resources, based on a new Agricultural Land Law. This paper explores emerging trends in natural resource politics through the lens of interactions between land and climate policies and discourses. We analyse the growing use of the frame of 'climate security' to associate climate change, conflict and migration in relation to countries such as Mali, by looking into the possibilities that this frame could shift focus and blame towards conflicts between marginalised groups and further close space for bottom-up participation. As an alternative, we explore the relevance of a platform of agrarian climate justice and the possibilities and challenges of enacting some of its principles through the implementation of the village land commissions.

Well on our way into the 21st century, the rapidly unfolding ecological crisis keeps on problematising our human condition of being-in-air. From Covid-19 to rising levels of CO2 and suffocating political climates, we are faced with less-than-breathable atmospheres whereas we – human beings just like other earth inhabitants – are conditioned by that which we breathe in. As our lifeworld turns out to be also our life support, we are in need of a philosophical anthropology to help us make sense of our role and responsibilities. In this article, such anthropological approach is developed based on Peter Sloterdijk's Foams (2016). Starting from Sloterdijk's description of being as 'being-in' and 'being-with' in 'atmospheres', the question in this article is to what extent atmospherical thinking can help us make sense of our human role in ecological crises, and of our relatedness to other beings in them. In elaborating Sloterdijk's (mostly implicit) anthropology with an eye especially for the openings he offers towards addressing ecology-related questions, three topics demand further attention: being-in and being-with are by Sloterdijk conceptually related to human becoming, yet Foams is easily read as an (essentialising) explanation of man's confinement to/in places. In order not to get stuck in increasingly suffocating structures (Morin, 2009) nor with a 'killer story' as origin of human becoming (Le Guin, 1996), becoming-in and becoming-with need to be better embedded in the theory. Next, even though Sloterdijk makes note of bubbles as places of multispecies becoming and relations, Foams is rather anthropocentric: It takes on a human perspective, but also seems to confine moral/ethical consideration to human experiences. Such anthropocentrism needs to be addressed in light of the inherently multispecies climate crisis. Last, Sloterdijk posits human's openness to a larger world. This openness (including its apparent status as a sole human attribute), however, comes somewhat as an afterthought in Foams, and it needs ...

The Adaptation Gap Report AGR2021 builds on the framing first introduced in the 2020 edition of the report to further advance knowledge on adaptation progress around the world. It focuses on adaptation progress at the global and national scales, relying primarily on publications from national governments (for example, documents submitted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] process). It has also expanded the sources of information to include recent peer-reviewed scientific literature and reports by multilateral organizations and think tanks. This chapter frames the report both in terms of the climate risk context within which adaptation is taking place (section 2.2) and the conceptual and methodological approach used to understand adaptation progress (section 2.3).

The American evangelist Hal Lindsey (b. 1929), colloquially referred to as the father of modern prophecy, is the author of twenty-five books and host of a long running TV series called The Hal Lindsey Report. The most influential work of his prolonged career is his book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) which sold over 28 million copies (Melling 1999, 77) and according to the New York Times was the 'number one non-fiction best-seller of the decade' (Harding 1994, 33). Bart Ehrman went so far as to state that Lindsey is 'probably the single most read author of religion in modern times' (1999, 7). His key success, as Kirsch observes, was 'leveraging the apocalyptic idea out of the fundamentalist churches and into the mainstream of American civilization' (2006, 225). Still, Lindsey owes parts of his accomplishments to his ghost-writers and assistants. The Late Great Planet Earth (henceforth Late Great), among six other books that credit Hal Lindsey as author, were ghost-written by Carole C. Carlson (b. 1925). Initially published by Zondervan in 1970, then a small theological press, Late Great was reissued by the non-religious publisher Bantam Books in 1973. In 1976, the book was made into a film narrated by Orson Wells that appeared in theatres across the United States of America. The book chronicles a near future apocalyptic vision of wars to come and Christ's imminent return to earth by reinterpreting the prophetic books of the Bible such as Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation to make sense of the present. Framing American anxieties in relation to the counterculture movement of the 1960s and the Cold War (1947-1989), the Vietnam War (1955–1975), and the Six-Day War (1967) as signs of the End Times, the book sought to give answers to the uncertainties of the time. In so doing, Late Great provided a template for many other evangelical prophecy authors like Tim LaHaye and John Walvoord and was thus the foundation for a billion-dollar apocalyptic prophecy writing industry in the United States. Lindsey capitalised on the success of Late Great via talking tours, publishing other books, and his TV programme The Hal Lindsey Report. Late Great remained the leading text in popular evangelical eschatology of world affairs until it was dethroned by his 'imitator,' Tim LaHaye, with the publication and success of his Left Behind fiction series of the 1990s co-written with Jerry Jenkins (Hill 2002, 1). In this entry we will first give a short biographical account of Hal Lindsey, including his education, social and political influences, and development of his eschatological thought. In the section following, we give some detail on Lindsey's beliefs, specifically premillennial dispensationalism. The next sections cover four of his major books which map the evolution of his thinking: The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1980), The Everlasting Hatred (2002), and The Road to Holocaust (1989). The last section before concluding deals with one of Lindsey's most recent intellectual interests, that of climate change, via an engagement with an episode of his TV Show, The Hal Lindsey Report.

Local governments are increasingly considering blue and green infrastructure (BGI) in order to climate-proof cities. Because BGI can have multiple benefits beyond climate adaptation, policy integration is required. Since drainage services have traditionally been within the remit of a single department, this is new territory for water management. This article provides a dynamic perspective on the messy process of policy integration 'on the ground' in two BGI projects in Dordrecht, NL and Bradford, UK. Drawing on interviews with key actors involved in the cases, our research question is: How are ambitions to integrate policies resulting in multi-functional BGI projects? While previous research typically defines organisational structures as barriers for policy integration, our findings demonstrate instances of actors who are successfully navigating these structures as a route towards policy integration. Nevertheless, we found that actors who push for BGI lack resources and authority, so they mainly rely on more voluntary forms of policy integration that involve concerted action over a number of years. Overall, our cases demonstrate that space for policy integration exists and powerful agencies are sympathetic to this, but more support is needed to achieve this mandate.

Programme management is increasingly used in The Netherlands to realize more integrated regional development, where different sectoral policy objectives are combined. To understand how integration of different objectives is realized in programme management approaches, it is important to have in depth knowledge on how actors manage social, cognitive and physical boundaries. Therefore, this article analyses how actors manage boundaries in a regional integrative programme. Within this case we focus on two integration attempts: one which has succeeded relatively well and one which was less successful. The analysis shows the importance of boundary spanning actions, such as jointly working on strategy documents, organizing events where actors can formally and informally interact, and the activities of a political change agent. Adding to previous insights, we find four additional explanations for successful integration which shed new light on how boundaries can be best managed in future programmatic approaches: the influence of contextual factors on boundary management and its success, the need to address both the social and cognitive dimension of boundaries, the need to make the programme attractive for the actors governing the issues it wants to integrate with, and the role of boundary drawing to create an understanding and respect for boundaries.

With recent transitions from unilateral to joint river basin management, distances between social systems for negotiating water issues has largely increased. Thus, riparian local governments have resorted to the use of mediated technology for the management of water issues. Physical presence is thus replaced by mediated presence, to bridge the distance and facilitate joint actions. Mediated presence is commonly employed to resolve short-term water management problems with rare instances of negotiating long-term water system changes. This has led to the inextricable coupling of river basin management to short-term actions at the detriment of the much-needed long-term changes. In this paper, we assess the potential for a climate change game known as Nzoia We-Share-It in enabling long-term water planning. To do this, we use the YUTPA framework that models mediated presence for long-term climate …

Like buses, crises (including the opportunities that can also accompany them) seem to come in threes. First, since June 2016 we have Brexit and now, July 2020, the real possibility of a no-deal Brexit since the landslide election of Boris Johnston's Conservative party in December 2019. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic and the uneven manner in which governments, populations, businesses, trades unions etc. across the devolved administrations in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland have responded, have devastated lives, communities and economies. And finally, looming above both of these in terms of urgency and negative impact potential, is the planetary crisis – climate breakdown and the erosion of the life supporting systems of the earth. But not only do we face all three, they are also interrelated in complex and unpredictable ways such that addressing one of them could have impacts on the others. This is the trilemma of the turbulent times we live in. And this list does not include another connected crisis: the rise of right wing populism, xenophobia and 'post-truth' politics and 'fake news' Lest you get too depressed too early in reading this, there is some good news. The good news is that we have seen some progress on green issues. The climate crisis in particular has crept up the political agenda. This can be observed in the rise of social mobilisations such as Extinction Rebellion and the Youth Strike for Climate movements which unexpectedly just emerged in the last year. We can also point to the 'green wave' which saw support for Green Parties across Europe increase in the 2019 European elections, and the rise in Green Party support in local and parliamentary elections in the Republic and Northern Ireland in 2019-20. In particular I want to draw attention to the rise and importance of non-state actors and action, issues and forms of cooperation (existing and potential) across these islands organised around responding to the planetary crisis at local and global scales. Too often the media, academia, think tanks and public discussion focus on the state, corporations/business, large organisations such as churches, trades unions to the neglect of civil society, localised political actors and agency. This article will provide some commentary on the 'usual suspects and themes' of how Brexit, the pandemic and the planetary crisis may impact governmental and policy coordination and cooperation across the different levels and dimensions of 'big P politics', inter alia, political parties, national and devolved governments, significant business sectors such as agriculture, tourism, ICT etc. However, I wish to mostly concentrate on more local, non-electoral, non-policy, often more confrontational, oppositional, decentralised and grassroots forms of 'small p politics' now discernible around our planetary calamity. But this is not to discount, undermine or ignore the importance of nation-state level and especially more local state/council level politics and initiatives. As the pandemic has demonstrated in times of crisis such state action is vital, but we need to reconnect state action with civil society and localised mobilisation.

The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE triggered a power struggle that ultimately endedthe Roman Republic and, eventually, the Ptolemaic Kingdom, leading to the rise of the RomanEmpire. Climate proxies and written documents indicate that this struggle occurred during aperiod of unusually inclement weather, famine, and disease in the Mediterranean region;historians have previously speculated that a large volcanic eruption of unknown origin wasthe most likely cause. Here we show using well-dated volcanic fallout records in six Arctic icecores that one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 2,500 years occurred in early 43BCE, with distinct geochemistry of tephra deposited during the event identifying the Okmokvolcano in Alaska as the source. Climate proxy records show that 43 and 42 BCE were among the coldest years of recent millennia in the Northern Hemisphere at the start of one of thecoldest decades. Earth system modeling suggests that radiative forcing from this massive,high-latitude eruption led to pronounced changes in hydroclimate, including seasonaltemperatures in specific Mediterranean regions as much as 7oC below normal during the twoyear period following the eruption, and unusually wet conditions. While it is difficult toestablish direct causal linkages to thinly documented historical events, the wet and very coldconditions from this massive eruption on the opposite side of Earth probably resulted in cropfailures, famine, and disease, exacerbating social unrest and contributing to politicalrealignments throughout the Mediterranean region at this critical juncture of Westerncivilization.

Like climate action itself, it is fair to say the 'just transition' debate is in its infancy in Ireland within public and policy discourse around addressing climate breakdown, the ecological/biodiversity crisis and the transition to a low-carbon, green economy. This chapter critically analyses policy proposals that safe, secure and well-paid green jobs can only be maintained by strong unions and that bargaining power through unionisation is a vital component to achieving a just transition from 'actually existing unsustainability' and the creation of a climate-resilient economy and society. It explores examples of 'unjust transition' in the Republic and Northern Ireland and the importance in both jurisdictions of an explicit focus on a 'just transition for agriculture'. While the idea of a just transition most often applies to workers in the energy sector, in Ireland, the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions is the agricultural sector. The chapter also discusses the evolution of trades' union engagement with both climate and energy decarbonisation and broader environmental politics across the island, noting that a 'post-carbon' just transition also raises challenges for unions embracing a 'post-growth' objective.

Central banks have already started to look at climate-related risks in the context of financial stability. Should they also take the carbon intensity of assets into account in the context of monetary policy? The guiding principle in the implementation of monetary policy has been 'market neutrality', whereby the central bank buys a proportion of the market portfolio of available corporate and bank bonds (in addition to government bonds). But this implies a carbon bias, because capital-intensive companies tend to be more carbon intensive. We first review the legal mandate of the Eurosystem. While the primary objective is price stability, the Treaty on European Union allows the greening of monetary policy as a secondary objective. We propose a tilting approach to steer or tilt the allocation of the Eurosystem's assets and collateral towards low-carbon sectors, which would reduce the cost of capital for these sectors relative to high-carbon sectors. This allocation policy must be designed so it does not affect the effective implementation of monetary policy. The working of the tilting approach is calibrated with data on European corporate and bank bonds. We find that a modest tilting approach could reduce carbon emissions in the corporate and bank bond portfolio by 44 per cent and lower the cost of capital of low carbon companies by 4 basis points. Our findings also suggest that such a low carbon allocation can be done without undue interference with the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. Price stability, the primary objective, is, and should remain, the priority of the Eurosystem.

The European Climate Research Alliance (ECRA) is an association of leading European research institutions in the field of climate research (http://www.ecra-climate.eu/, last access: 6 December 2018). ECRA is a bottom-up initiative and helps to facilitate the development of climate change research, combining the capacities of national research institutions, and inducing closer ties between existing national research initiatives, projects and infrastructures. ECRA works as an open platform to bring together climate researchers, providing excellent scientific expertise for policy makers and of societal relevance. The ECRA Board consists of representatives of ECRA partners and decides on governance, scientific priorities, and organisational matters. Currently organized into four Collaborative Programmes, climate scientists share their knowledge, experience and expertise to identify the most important research requirements for the future, thus developing a foresight approach. The CPs cover the topics: (1) Arctic variability and change, (2) Sea level changes and coastal impacts, (3) Changes in the hydrological cycle and (4) High impact events. The CP activities are planned in workshops and participation is open to all interested scientists from the relevant research fields. In particular, young researchers are actively encouraged to join the network. Each CP develops its joint research priorities for shaping European research into the future. Because scientific themes are interconnected, the four Collaborative Programmes interact with each other, e.g.Through the organization of common workshops or joint applications. In addition, the Collaborative Programme leads attend the Board meetings. The different formats of ECRA meetings range from scientific workshops to briefing events and side events at conferences to involve different groups of interests. This facilitates the interaction of scientists, various stakeholder groups and politicians. A biennial open ECRA General Assembly that is organised in Brussels represents an umbrella event and acts as a platform for discussion and contact with stakeholders. This event is an excellent opportunity to jointly discuss research priorities of high societal relevance. 2019