Suchergebnisse

Tendo em mente o cenário imposto pelas alterações climáticas na Europa, as páginas seguintes procurarão contribuir para fazer um balanço geral da situação nos países ibéricos, no contexto da União Europeia, com dois tipos de dados complementares. Por um lado, dados objetivos assentes no conhecimento técnico-científico, avançados pelo Índice de Desempenho em Alterações Climáticas (CCPI – Climate Change Performance Index). Por outro lado, fazendo uso do Eurobarômetro Especial 490 de 2019, analisar-se-ão dados de origem fundamentalmente leiga e mais subjetiva que, versando as mesmas matérias, assentam no ponto de vista dos cidadãos, suas percepções e atitudes. Procura-se, fundamentalmente, contrapor duas fontes de conhecimento distintas (perito e leigo) e, a partir daí, retirar ilações para o futuro da Europa e, particularmente, para o futuro dos dois países ibéricos aqui em foco.

O desastre nuclear de Fukushima veio relembrar desastres nucleares anteriores tais como os de Three Miles Island e Chernobyl, trazendo de volta à esfera pública o debate em torno dos problemas de segurança das centrais nucleares. No entanto, enquanto o risco associado à energia nuclear tradicional (fissão) foi amplificado pela mídia, uma nova tecnologia de energia nuclear em investigação (fissão) não foi afetada. Uma comparação entre a cobertura midiática das tecnologias de fusão e fissão nuclear em três países (Alemanha, Espanha e Portugal), bem como na imprensa internacional de língua inglesa dirigida à elite transnacional, de 2008 a 2012, mostrou que o desastre de Fukushima não teve um impacto significativo no enquadramento midiático da fusão nuclear na maior parte dos jornais analisados. Neste artigo procura-se explicar o que conduziu a esta situação.

Local Agenda 21 is essentially a process of democratic practicing, insofar as it involves sharing political competencies in decision making by the local authorities, and the mobilisation of all citizens and civil society organisations in the process. It is, thus, a course of action in which the willingness and openness of local political leaders is as important as the ability of citizens to take the initiative of learning about and getting involved in local public life. Unfortunately, there are no more than twenty LA21 processes running in Portugal, and most of them do not fulfil all the parameters required. This paper discusses some hypotheses on the lack of success of LA21 in Portugal, which are related to structural political conditions for local governance and public participation. Resorting to some surveys on environmental policy issues (applied to both the municipal leaders and the population), the aim is to characterise the trends of mobilisation on local sustainability in Portuguese society, particularly with regard to the citizenry and local administrations.

This paper takes the case of Lisbon to explore four different water management regimes – liberal, republican, fascist, and democratic – defined by distinctive historical combinations of politics, environment, technology, and capital. Building on proposals from urban political ecology, it argues that water should be seen as constitutive of the political realm, instead of just considering its management and infrastructure as a reflection of the general political context. The water sector defined in important ways what those political regimes were about: liberalism and private companies with close relations to the state, pushing to convert Lisbon residents into consumers; republicanism and the emergence in the public space of mass protest and biomedical power; fascism and the juxtaposition of private capital and state authoritarianism; democracy and universal access to infrastructure entangled with European Union bureaucracy. We suggest that each water regime corresponds to a nonpredetermined arrangement that escapes traditional deterministic accounts of urban water supply such as the linear sequence of pre-modern systems, the networked modern city, and post material values. The cityscape is understood as a palimpsest in which new layers of historical complexity are added to previous historical dynamics without total erasing of the latter. ; Prenant le cas de Lisbonne, cet article présente quatre régimes de gestion de l'eau – libéral, républicain, fasciste et démocratique – définis par des combinaisons historiquement différenciées de la politique, de l'environnement, de la technologie, et des capitaux. Partant des propositions de l'écologie politique urbaine, nous soutenons que l'eau doit être considérée comme constitutive de la sphère politique, au lieu de ne voir sa gestion et son infrastructure que comme un reflet du contexte politique général. Le secteur de l'eau a largement contribué à donner le sens de ces régimes politiques: le libéralisme et les entreprises privées, en étroite relation avec l'État, poussant ...

The aim of this study was to identify, characterise, collect and systematise data on initiatives of environmental education in Portugal. Currently, there is no integrated governmental program on environmental education in this country, but only unrelated voluntary initiatives. Although surveys indicated a growing concern by young people on environmental issues, systematic studying on the issue was lacking. The field seemed to be characterised by wide diversity and disperse voluntary action by non-governmental agents and self-mobilised teachers. In the context of the Decade Dedicated to Education for Sustainable Development of UNESCO, governmental and non-governmental organisations dedicated to the environment now have a new opportunity to enhance and coordinate contributions to make environmental issues a priority for the next generation.

As the 21st century settles in, an array of tightly intertwined migratory, social, economic, financial, political, and ecological unrest has brought to the fore the restrictive adaptability of contemporary political arenas, institutions, development models, and policy instruments, inviting us to interpret and to address the causes underlying these upheavals (Ferrão 2016; Kolb 2010; Castles 2004; Smith and Wiest 2012) and attempt to mitigate their negative impacts (Akyüz 2014). Beyond that looms an unpredictable regime of climate change that may permanently undermine the Planet's habitability (O'Brien 2014). We appear to have reached what is today conceptually identified as the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Barry and Maslin 2016; Steffen et al. 2011), interpreted as Earth's newest epoch in which humankind has turned into a collective geochemical force profoundly altering the planet's natural cycles (Biermann et al. 2015). Rickards (2015) and Ferrão (2017) argue that the Anthropocene provides an opportunity, however, not only to produce new thinking, but also to bring about new actions in the field of sustainability. In line with the latter, a rising call for structural change that catalyzes societal transformations toward sustainability has appeared concurrently with – or seemingly as a result of – the predominant neo-liberal capitalist, productivityand growth-led hegemonic worldview (McMichael 2010). Among the reasons underlying this call are that continued and distributed economic growth can no longer be taken for granted (Krugman 2014), that growth endangers socio-ecological sustainability, and that there exists increasing awareness and wariness of its limits (Rydin 2013; Eastin et al. 2011). Alarmingly, the mainstream understanding of sustainability underpinning contemporary development politics and policies is still to openly embrace and exploit the discussion and experimentation of non-growth-dependent development solutions (Bina 2013; Martinez Alier 2009). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Accepted version. ; This paper presents results of a comparison of media coverage of fusion and fission energy technologies in three countries (Germany, Spain and Portugal) and in the English language international print media addressing transnational elite, from 2008 to 2012. The analysis showed that the accident in Fukushima in March 2010 did not have significant impact on media framing of nuclear fusion in the major part of print media under investigation. In fact, fusion is clearly dissociated from traditional nuclear (fission) energy and from nuclear accidents. It tends to be portrayed as a safe, clean and unlimited source of energy, although less credited when confronted with research costs, technological feasibility and the possibility to be achieved in a reasonable period of time. On the contrary, fission is portrayed as a hazardous source of energy, expensive when compared to research costs of renewables, hardly a long-term energy option, susceptible to contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons or rogue military use. Fukushima accident was consistently discussed in the context of safety problems of nuclear power plants and in many cases appeared not as an isolated event but rather as a reminder of previous nuclear disasters such as Three Miles Island and Chernobyl. ; Data presented in this paper was part of a report prepared for the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) Work programme 2012 WP12-SER-ACIF-1 with its financial support through the IST-UL in the case of Portugal. EFDA does not endorse or take responsibility for the content of this paper.