The complex regulations of the Endangered Species Act can be challenging for environmental professionals who must comply with them or assist clients in compliance. This volume discusses the Act using clear scientific prose that all professionals can readily comprehend. It explores the history and the basic scientific theory underlying the Act. It provides an overview of its key provisions and examines the Act in the context of other key environmental planning statutes. The book also details the regulatory processes faced by other government agencies and private developers who must routinely ensure that their actions are in compliance.
The concept of biocultural diversity is confronted with contemporary changes that impact on local communities, such as globalization and digital transformations. Engaging the conceptual flexibility of &lsquo ; biocultural diversity&rsquo ; we studied nature-based tourism at the intersection of indigenous communities and the digital realm. We employed a political ecology perspective to examine online and offline representations of biocultural diversity in the Brazilian Pantanal, one of the biggest wetlands in the world, and home to groups of peoples known as the Pantaneiros. Data from interviews with 48 stakeholders in the tourist sector were structured along three &lsquo ; myths&rsquo ; &mdash ; the Uncivilised, Unrestrained, and Unchanged&mdash ; for which we have also constructed counter narratives. Each myth denoted the primacy of biodiversity, and ignored broader dimensions of the Pantanal as a bioculturally diverse landscape. The relationships of the Pantaneiros with their environment were found to be intricate and had clear repercussions for tourism, but ironically, reference to the Pantaneiro culture in nature-based tourism was superficial. Moreover, thriving on the myths, this form of tourism perpetuates skewed power structures and social inequalities. Lower-class Pantaneiros likely suffer most from this. We recommend stakeholder engagement with a biocultural design that facilitates the integration of other-than-biodiversity values, and that thereby promotes sustainability of the entire social-ecological system.
The planet is facing many environmental challenges. One way to address these challenges is through environmental education and engagement. In this report, 6 nature organizations from Greater Vancouver were interviewed in hopes of improving environmental program development and delivery at the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre (LCEC). Several commonalities emerged from the interviews. First, funding for these organizations comes from multiple sources including governmental and corporate. A lot of this funding is directed at youth development. All organizations focused on providing skills and career development to youth. Second, most of the organizations run their programs in multiple locations. These locations are bound by municipal jurisdictions but, in one case, programs run province wide. Finally, all organizations said that their social media presence was lacking but, nevertheless, social media was cited as a valuable outreach tool. In this vein, it is recommended that the LCEC shift focus to youth and young adult skills/career development. There is grant money available for this, such as a Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) grants. Further, the LCEC should increase its sensitivity to multicultural programming by partnering with local organizations, such as the Green Club (http://www.greenclub.bc.ca/), which routinely conducts tours of Lynn Canyon. Also, it is recommended that the LCEC increase its social media presence. This can be done by pursuing creative engagement techniques such as creating online polls, asking timely questions to spark discussion or conducting a photo contest. Additionally, the LCEC should decentralize their outreach presence throughout the District of North Vancouver. For example, consider bringing elements of LCEC's youth programs, such as Canyon Quest and Rainforest Biodiversity Study, to nearby high schools. Given the organizations interviewed and literature engaged, this study focuses on broad strokes environmental program development. It provides an overview of 'best practices' regarding environmental engagement. In the future, it is recommended that research be dedicated to one of the following topics; multicultural environmental engagement, youth skills/ career development within environmental organizations or social media usage amongst environmental organizations. ; Arts, Faculty of ; Geography, Department of ; Unreviewed ; Undergraduate
This book systematically analyzes how and why China has expectedly lost and then surprisingly gained ground in the quest to solve the complicated environmental problem of air pollution over the past two decades. Yuan Xu shines a light on how China's sulfur dioxide emissions rose quickly in tandem with rapid economic growth but then dropped to a level not seen for at least four decades. Despite this favorable mitigation outcome, Xu details how this stemmed from a litany of policy stumbles within the Chinese context of no democracy and a lack of sound rule of law. Throughout this book, the author examines China's environmental governance and strategy and how they shape environmental policy. The chapters weave together a goal-centered governance model that China has adopted of centralized goal setting, decentralized goal attainment, decentralized policy making and implementation. Xu concludes that this model provides compelling evidence that China's worst environmental years reside in the past.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese environmental policy and governance, air pollution, climate change and sustainable development, as well as practitioners and policy makers working in these fields.
This book addresses the relevance of geographical indication (GI) as a tool for local and socio-economic development and democratization of agri-food, with case studies from Asia, Europe and the Americas. A geographical indication is a sign used on products that have a specific geographical origin and possess qualities or a reputation that are due to that origin. It provides not only a way for businesses to leverage the value of their geographically unique products, but also to inform and attract consumers. A highly contested topic, GI is praised as a tool for the revitalization of agricultural communities, while also criticized for being an instrument exploited by global corporate forces to promote their interests. There are concerns that the promotion of GI may hamper the establishment of democratic forms of development. The contributing authors address this topic by offering theoretically informed investigations of GI from around the world. The book includes case studies ranging from green tea in Japan, olive oil in Turkey and dried fish in Norway, to French wine and Mexican Mezcal. It also places GI in the broader context of the evolution and trends of agri-food under neoliberal globalization. The book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and students in agri-food studies, sociology of food and agriculture, geography, agricultural and rural economics, environmental and intellectual property law, and social development.
The field of public participation is developing fast, with phenomena such as citizen science and crowdsourcing extending the resource base of research, stimulating innovation and making science more accessible to the general population.Promoting public participation means giving more weight to citizens and civil society actors in the definition of research needs and in the implementation of research and innovation. As yet, there is limited understanding of the implications of widespread use of public participation and as a result, there is a risk that it will become a burden for research and an obstacle to bridging the gap between research and society. This volume presents the findings of a three-year international study on innovative public participation. The resulting work studies the characteristics and trends of innovative public participation through a global sample of 38 case studies. It provides theoretical generalisations on the dynamics of public participation, suggestions for an evaluation framework and clear empirical examples of how public participation works in practice. Illustrated by best practice cases, the authors identify characteristics which contribute to successful public participation. The book is aimed primarily at scholars and practitioners of public participation, as well as research managers, policy makers and business actors interested in related issues. There is also a secondary market for students and scholars of European governance studies, sociology and political sciences.
With changes in technology and a renewed effort to catalog the world's biodiversity, huge amounts of data are being generated on biodiversity issues. As response to the call for better information systems to manage the biodiversity crisis, a wide range of solutions are being developed for inventorying, managing, and disseminating taxonomic data. This book brings together a diverse array of authors, expertise, and assessors that discuss technical developments to improve the construction, population, and dissemination of biodiversity information. It is designed to inform students and researchers of biodiversity about the changes and challenges that need to be understood by everyone in this information age.
Luang Island is a small island located near Timor Leste and southwest of Australia. Geographical location, global economic considerations, global climate, and the policies of the Indonesian government all have an impact on the existence and culture of the Luang Island people. The people of Luang Island have local wisdom called Hygera Lai that assists them in developing a relationship with nature. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between Hygera Lai and the environment among Luang Island residents. This is a qualitative study using an ecological anthropological lens. Content analysis was used to analyze the data collected. This study establishes a link between Hygera Lai and the Luang people's natural environment. ; Luang-sziget egy kis sziget Kelet-Timor közelében, Ausztráliától délnyugatra. A földrajzi elhelyezkedés, a globális gazdasági megfontolások, a globális éghajlat és az indonéz kormány politikája egyaránt hatással van a Luang-szigeti nép létezésére és kultúrájára. A Luang-sziget lakosságának van egy Hygera Lai nevű helyi bölcsessége, amely segíti őket a természettel való kapcsolat kialakításában. A tanulmány célja, hogy megvizsgálja a Hygera Lai és a környezet kapcsolatát a Luang-sziget lakói között. Jelen kutatás egy ökológiai antropológiai lencsét használó kvalitatív vizsgálat.
The Circular Economy in Europe presents an overview and a critical discussion on how circularity is conceived, imagined, and enacted in current EU policy-making. In 2013, the idea of a circular economy entered the stage of European policy-making in the efforts to reconcile environmental and economic policy objectives. In 2019 the European Commission declared in a press release that the Circular Economy Action Plan has been delivered. The level of circularity in the European economy, however, has remained the same.Bringing together perspectives from social sciences, environmental economics and policy analysis, The Circular Economy in Europe provides a critical analysis of policies and promises of the next panacea for growth and sustainability. The authors provide a theoretical and empirical basis to discuss how contemporary societies conceive their need to re-organise production and consumption and explores the messy assemblage of institutions, actors, waste streams, biophysical flows, policy objectives, scientific disciplines, values, expectations, promises and aspirations involved.This book is essential reading for all those interested in understanding how ideas about the circular economy emerged historically, how they gained traction and are used in policy processes, and what the practical challenges in implementing this policy are.
It's a real shame, but all political and social movements, at some point, break up into factions. The factions debate their relative necessity, claim authority over areas of discourse and action, and generally vie for power. They stop coordinating and communicating with each other. There are occasional acts of sabotage. The competition of the market economy (including the grant-funded non-profit sector) and the expanse of human vanity demand this distinction. Everyone needs to find their niche. An ecologist understands this as well as an economist, an activist as well as a lobbyist, a rabbi as well as a lawyer. In her Introduction to the thirty seven essays collected in Ecology and the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature and the Sacred Meet, Ellen Bernstein, founder of Shomrei Adomah, an institution dedicated to illuminating Jewish ecological perspectives and renewing Jewish spirituality, identifies the environmental crisis as "at heart, a crisis of values." This identification, a response to the piecemeal, problem-solving approach prevalent in the mainstream legislative, legal, scientific, technological, and academic communities, informs Bernstein's purposes in editing this book: to further the work of Shomrei Adomah, to reinject a sense of mystery and reverence into the debates about the environment, and to endorse the inherent value of Nature.
This volume explores institutional change and performance in the resource-rich Andean countries during the last resource boom and in the early post-boom years. The latest global commodity boom has profoundly marked the face of the resource-rich Andean region, significantly contributing to economic growth and notable reductions of poverty and income inequality. The boom also constituted a period of important institutional change, with these new institutions sharing the potential of preventing or mitigating the maladies extractive economies tend to suffer from, generally denominated as the "resource curse". This volume explores these institutional changes in the Andean region to identify the factors that have shaped their emergence and to assess their performance. The interdisciplinary and comparative perspective of the chapters in this book provide fine-grained analyses of different new institutions introduced in the Andean countries and discusses their findings in the light of the resource curse approach. They argue that institutional change and performance depend upon a much larger set of factors than those generally identified by the resource curse literature. Different, domestic and external, economic, political and cultural factors such as ideological positions of decision-makers, international pressure or informal practices have shaped institutional dynamics in the region. Altogether, these findings emphasize the importance of nuanced and contextualized analysis to better understand institutional dynamics in the context of extractive economies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the extractive industries, natural resource management, political economics, Latin American studies and sustainable development.
The Arctic-Barents Region is facing numerous pressures from a variety of sources, including the effect of environmental changes and extractive industrial developments. The threats arising out of these pressures result in human security challenges.This book analyses the formation, and promotion, of societal security within the context of the Arctic-Barents Region. It applies the human security framework, which has increasingly gained currency at the UN level since 1994 (UNDP), as a tool to provide answers to many questions that face the Barents population today. The study explores human security dimensions such as environmental security, economic security, health, food, water, energy, communities, political security and digital security in order to assess the current challenges that the Barents population experiences today or may encounter in the future. In doing so, the book develops a comprehensive analysis of vulnerabilities, challenges and needs in the Barents Region and provides recommendations for new strategies to tackle insecurity and improve the wellbeing of both indigenous and local communities. This book will be a valuable tool for academics, policy-makers and students interested in environmental and human security, sustainable development, environmental studies and the Arctic and Barents Region in particular.
Energy Poverty and Vulnerability provides novel and critical perspectives on the drivers and consequences of energy-related injustices in the home. Drawing together original research conducted by leading experts, the book offers fresh and innovative insights into the ways in which hitherto unexplored factors such as cultural norms, environmental conditions and household needs combine to shape vulnerability to energy poverty.
Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars spent, two thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity, a vital pre-cursor to economic development and poverty reduction. Ambitious international policy commitments seek to address this, but scholarship has failed to keep pace with policy ambitions, lacking both the empirical basis and the theoretical perspective to inform such transformative policy aims. Sustainable Energy for All aims to fill this gap. Through detailed historical analysis of the Kenyan solar PV market the book demonstrates the value of a new theoretical perspective based on Socio-Technical Innovation System Building. Importantly, the book goes beyond a purely academic critique to detail exactly how a Socio-Technical Innovation System Building approach might be operationalized in practice, facilitating both a detailed plan for future comparative research as well as a clear agenda for policy and practice.
Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these 'grassroots innovation movements' identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools.This book examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches.With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.
