Managed out of existence: over-regulation of Indigenous subsistence fishing of the Yukon River

Humans are adversely affected by the loss of vital fishery resources, specifically Indigenous peoples and the traditional knowledge systems that are foundationally tied to their culture. Discounting the ability and knowledge of Indigenous peoples stems from concepts rooted in “Tragedy of the Commons” in which a shared resource, in this case fisheries, if left unchecked will be destroyed by the mismanagement of users. The Alaskan fisheries policy regime is recognized as one of the best managed and influential fisheries in the world, but the state is predominantly driven by a conservation approach that discounts other knowledge systems. Alaskan Native fishers, for example the Gwich’in, who maintain a sustainable 30,000 year (conservatively) relationship with their environment, possess culturally specific Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) that is a result of the mechanisms or physical act of fishing, thus giving meaning to the term we will use in this paper, Indigenous Fishers’ Knowledge (IFK). Alaskan Natives along the Yukon River derive specific knowledge about their environment and King Salmon through the act of fishing. TEK is not static nor is IFK as it is transmitted to younger generations through the practice of fishing. TEK and IFK play a large role in the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, they both connect knowledge to culture and play a role in creating culture and traditions, they are in fact very intricate systems. Indigenous fishers seek inclusion and involvement that does not separate them from their knowledge but recognizes and implements their practices/control on a local level.     

Ethics of care across professional and everyday positionalities: The (un)expected impacts of participatory video with young female carers in Slovakia

The paper offers a critical intervention into the debates on research impact, theorising the potential of underpinning research agendas by ethics of care. We explore how a range of vectors of care, both intimate and distant, emerged in collaborative activities between researchers based in the UK and community youth workers and teenage female carers in Slovakia, leading to a series of (un)expected outcomes. We argue that while all research impacts cannot be planned in advance, an ethics of care embedded in relationships within and beyond research settings may form conditions in which outcomes exceeding the initial expectations can be anticipated. To achieve this, we argue for questioning the distinctions between academic and non-academic collaborators, legitimising diverse forms of knowledge, action and impact in institutional policies, and for conceiving research projects from the beginning as “more-than-research” avenues.     

Precarious residence: Indigenous housing and the right to the city

Drawing on findings from a study of Indigenous housing in a regional Western Australian city, this paper examines the experiences of Indigenous peoples as a particular set of ‘right bearers’ within the right-to-the-city discourse. In settler-states, colonial discourses of absence, threat, and authenticity have informed policy frameworks that have militated against various Indigenous claims of belonging, rights, and aspiration in relation to urban places. Housing has been a representative domain of struggle in this respect. Consequently, today, Indigenous peoples have disproportionately high rates of dependence on more volatile and discriminatory forms of tenure than their non-Indigenous counterparts.The paper examines the incongruence between State aspirations to move (Indigenous) people along a housing continuum in urban environments, and the actual experiences of Indigenous urban residents, which fix discursively on barriers to such movements. It also traces the deleterious, displacing impacts for urban Indigenous households of the retreat of the State in its role as a landlord for the socio-economically disadvantaged, and in responding to market signals and particular sociological theses regarding poverty, with specific spatial logics. In so doing, we advance two interwoven arguments. First, we assert that Indigenous people face a unique precarity in the Australian urban housing system, which is a result of both colonial and racially discriminatory forces, and economically discriminating processes such as capital concentration and the commodification of land. Second, we contend that this precarity sets many Indigenous people on housing career trajectories that are antithetical to policy intentions.     

Institutions,indigenous peoples,and climate change adaptation in the Canadian Arctic

GeoJournal - Climate change impacts on Indigenous peoples in remote regions pose unique institutional challenges and opportunities for governments. Reducing vulnerability and enabling collaborative...     

A preliminary discussion on the opportunities and challenges of linking climate change adaptation with disaster risk reduction

Managing the risks of extreme events such as natural disasters to advance climate change adaptation (CCA) has been a global focus. However, a critical challenge in supporting CCA is to improve its linkage with disaster risk reduction (DRR). Based on discussions on similarities and differences between CCA and DRR concerning their spatial–temporal scales, main focuses, preferred research approaches and methodologies, etc., this paper tentatively put forward an analytical framework of “6W” for linking DRR with CCA. This framework presented preliminary answers to a series of fundamental questions, such as “What is adaptation with respect to disaster risk?” “Why adaptation is needed?” “Who adapt to what?” “How to adapt?” “What are the possible principles to assess the adaptation effect?” To bridge the research gaps between CCA and DRR, it is imperative to associate the adaptation actions with both near-term disaster risk and long-term climate change and formulate adaptation strategies at various spatial–temporal scales by embracing uncertainty in a changing climate.     

A Guugu Yimmithir Bam Wii: Ngawiya and Girrbithi: Hunting, planning and management along the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

The integration of Indigenous cultural rights with biodiversity protection can be explored in multiple dimensions and occupy contested grounds. This paper outlines the results of a research project that applied discourse analysis as both a theoretical and methodological tool to examine the power and knowledge relations within a case study of the development of a turtle and dugong hunting management plan by the Hope Vale Aboriginal Community in northern Australia. This paper reports on the results of this analysis and shows how multiple binaries exist within and between the different actors in a resource management problem. Findings show that contested constructions of the environment are hugely influential to the success or failure of natural resource management endeavours. The ontological frames that are adopted in supporting Indigenous peoples to manage their land and seas must be understood, otherwise there is a risk of reinforcing the very binaries that need to be avoided.     

Political-industrial ecology: Integrative,complementary, and critical approaches

“Political-industrial ecology” has been proposed as an emerging subfield of nature-society geography. In mapping out the landscape of this subfield, this paper develops a typology of three approaches to connecting politics and industrial ecology: (1) Integrative research that incorporates social, political, policy, institutional, and/or spatial considerations into industrial ecology analyses (“politics in industrial ecology”); (2) Complementary research that couples findings or frameworks from industrial ecology with social and political research (“politics and industrial ecology”); and (3) Critical research that examine how values, norms, groups, political relations, or institutions shape the production, interpretation, and usage of industrial ecology knowledge (“politics of industrial ecology”). This broad framing of political-industrial ecology invites contributions from many social sciences, including political ecology, political geography, political economy, sociology, public policy, management, environmental history, and science and technology studies.     

An integrated assessment of INDCs under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways: an implementation of C<Superscript>3</Superscript>IAM

A series of global actions have been made to address climate change. As a recent developed climate policy, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) have renewed attention to the importance of exploring temperature rise levels lower than 2 °C, in particular a long-term limit of 1.5 °C, compared to the preindustrial level. Nonetheless, achieving the 2 °C target under the current INDCs depends on dynamic socioeconomic development pathways. Therefore, this study conducts an integrated assessment of INDCs by taking into account different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). To that end, the CEEP-BIT research community develops the China’s Climate Change Integrated Assessment Model (C³IAM) to assess the climate change under SSPs in the context of with and without INDCs. Three SSPs, including “a green growth strategy” (SSP1), “a more middle-of-the-road development pattern” (SSP2) and “further fragmentation between regions” (SSP3) form the focus of this study. Results show that after considering INDCs, mitigation costs become very low and they have no evident positive changes in three SSPs. In 2100, a temperature rise would occur in SSP1-3, which is 3.20, 3.48 and 3.59 °C, respectively. There are long-term difficulties to keep warming well below 2 °C and pursue efforts toward 1.5 °C target even under INDCs. A drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed in order to mitigate potentially catastrophic climate change impacts. This work contributes on realizing the hard link between the earth and socioeconomic systems, as well as extending the economic models by coupling the global CGE model with the economic optimum growth model. In C³IAM, China’s energy consumption and emissions pattern are investigated and refined. This study can provide policy makers and the public a better understanding about pathways through which different scenarios could unfold toward 2100, highlights the real mitigation and adaption challenges faced by climate change and can lead to formulating effective policies.     

Planning for resettlement: building partnerships for,by, and with Indigenous peoples

Efforts in the United States to plan or implement relocation in response to climate risks have struggled to improve material conditions for participants, to incorporate local knowledge, and to keep communities intact. Mixed methodologies of community geography provide an opportunity for dialogue and knowledge-sharing to collaboratively diagnose the challenges of climate adaptation led by communities. In this article, we advance a participatory practice model for the co-creation of knowledge initiated during a two-day workshop with members from the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe from Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, Yup’ik people from Newtok Village in Alaska, and researchers from the MIT Resilient Communities Lab. Building on prior scholarship of indigenizing climate change research, this article shares the experience of the workshop to support knowledge exchange and dialogue, with the goal of understanding how to build participatory and non-extractive community-academic partnerships. We reflect on the community values and principles used to guide this workshop to inform more inclusive and co-produced research partnerships, and pedagogies that can improve and assist the self-determination of groups impacted by climate change. Workshop presentations and discussions highlight interconnected themes of resources, systems & structures, regulatory imbalance, and resilience that underpin climate resettlement. We reflect on the narratives presented by members of both Indigenous tribes and NGO partners that illustrate the shortcomings of resettlement planning practices past and present as perpetuating existing inequality. In response to this structured knowledge exchange, we identify potential roles for community-academic partnerships that aim to improve the equity of existing resettlement models. We propose approaches for incorporating traditional knowledge into the pedagogy, discourse, and practice of academic planning programs.

     

A critical political ecology of consensus: On “Teaching Both Sides” of climate change controversies

In the United States, contemporary anti-science education coalitions are increasingly linking climate change and evolution using “teach the controversy” campaigns. Awareness of this political phenomena raises questions about the extent to which portrayals of global warming predictions as mere knowledge claims undermine efforts to increase public understanding of scientific consensus about global warming. This paper uses a critical political ecology framework to explore the problematization of climate change consensus located and performed across discourses of secondary science teaching and learning. Theories of resistance are used to analyze teachers’ everyday experiences with classroom pushback about climate change. Data collection included key informant interviews with state science education stakeholders and on-line survey of 5th–12th grade science teachers in Oklahoma, USA. The article synthesizes the situated discourses of Oklahoma science teachers’ and their attitudes about teaching climate change in the face of public controversy. Our analysis demonstrates teachers marginalized by anti-science controversies but engaged in everyday acts of resistance to political, ideological, and religious norms. Most notably, science teachers re-purpose “teach the controversy” frames as a way to introduce climate change where it might not otherwise be included. We argue that, contextualized within a history of contestation over the teaching of evolution, the practice of teaching ‘both sides’ is an important boundary ordering device that bridges convinced and skeptical discourses in the classroom. This research informs new roles and possibilities for science education on global environmental change by reminding climate scientists, educators, and policy advocates that all climate change knowledge is coproduced.     

Sustainable indigenous futures in remote Indigenous areas: relationships, processes and failed state approaches

In many Indigenous territories, continuing processes of primitive accumulation driven by governments?? claims to resources and territory simultaneously deny Indigenous rights and insist on market forces as the foundation for economic and social futures in Indigenous domains. Drawing on research in North Australia, this paper identifies the erasure of Indigenous governance, the development of wickedly complex administrative systems, continuing structural and procedural racism and state hostility to Indigenous rights as constructing Indigenous vulnerability to poverty, addiction and underdevelopment. Shaping sustainable Indigenous futures in remote areas that are characterised by long-term development failure requires rethinking of remote local and regional economic relationships. Recognising remote regional economies as hybrid economies that rely on environmental, social and cultural wealth is an important first step in reorienting policy settings. It is also crucial that we acknowledge sustainable Indigenous futures cannot arise from policy interventions that rely on creating wealth for state and corporate appropriation and assume enough of this wealth can be redistributed to local Indigenous communities to constitute ??development??. Politically constructed crisis interventions, such as Australia??s recent actions in remote Northern Territory communities, represent a failure of state relationships rather than an appropriate and sustainable response to the challenge of Indigenous vulnerability. This paper argues that attention to Indigenous rights and development of good relationships and good processes of governance, autonomy and responsibility within communities as well as between them and governments is fundamental to sustainable Indigenous futures. Without this, neither government programs nor large-scale natural resource-based development projects can deliver sustainable futures for remote Indigenous groups.     

青藏高原气候变化若干前沿科学问题

在全球变化的背景下,青藏高原冰冻圈和大气圈正在发生快速变化,对“亚洲水塔”和“第三极”的生态环境带来深刻影响。研究并梳理了近年来青藏高原气候变化的若干前沿科学问题的研究进展,如高原极端气候事件变化及其与大气环流的关系;高原变暖放大效应及海拔依赖型变暖的物理机制;再分析资料在高原气候变化应用的适用性;气候模式在高原资料稀缺地区的模拟偏差特征及不确定性;以及不同升温阈值下高原气候变化的预估及其风险等。同时展望了高原气候变化研究的前沿问题和科学难点。认清高原气候变化研究的前沿科学问题,可为“一带一路”倡议顺利实施提供科学依据。     

Déjà vu or something new? The adaptation concept in the climate change literature

This paper reflects on the resurgence and meaning of the adaptation concept in the current climate change literature. We explore the extent to which the early political economic critique of the adaptation concept has influenced how it is used in this literature. That is, has the current conceptualization been enriched by the political economic critique of the 1970s and 1980s and thus represent something new? Or is the concept used in a way today that echoes previous debates; that is, is this a déjà vu experience? To answer this question, we review the early political economic critique of the natural hazards school’s interpretations of vulnerability and adaptation. We then examine the revival of the adaptation concept in the climate change literature and discuss its main interpretations. For the purposes of this paper, the climate change literature encompasses the four IPCC reports and adaptation-focused articles in four scholarly journals: Global Environmental Change, Climatic Change, Climate and Development, and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change. Our content analysis shows the dominance (70%) of “adjustment adaptation” approaches, which view climate impacts as the main source of vulnerability. A much smaller percentage (3%) of articles focus on the social roots of vulnerability and the necessity for political–economic change to achieve “transformative adaptation.” A larger share (27%) locates risk in both society and the biophysical hazard. It promotes “reformist adaptation,” typically through “development,” to reduce vulnerability within the prevailing system. We conclude with a discussion of continuity and change in the conceptualization of adaptation, and point to new research directions.     

Making risk real: Urban trees and the ontological politics of risk

Over the past several decades, risk has become a distinct field of social inquiry as scholars in a variety of disciplines have developed theories about the ‘nature’ of risk and the role it plays in contemporary society. Collectively, these theories enrich our understanding of the politics of risk, the dynamics of risk perception, and the way risk shapes and is shaped by space, culture, social change, and modes of governing in the neoliberal era. In this paper, however, we argue these theories are helpful but not entirely suited to understanding risk when it becomes the subject of something Whatmore (2009, p. 587, 2013) calls “environmental knowledge controversies”. These controversies are generative events where more-than-human agencies and the political and knowledge making practices of heterogeneous actors reshape our sense of the real. To address this issue, we draw on the concepts of enactment, multiplicity, and ontological politics to explore how different kinds of risk and tree were made more or less real during a contentious debate over the risk posed by a group of urban trees in Newcastle, Australia. This case study suggests we can think of risk and hazardous entities like trees as effects that also affect because they elicit interventions that transform bodies and spaces in more or less enduring ways. Attending to the enactment, multiplicity, and ontological politics of risk, we argue, provides an alternative way to navigate moments of political contestation over the assessment and management of risk that has implications for how these processes are conceived and conducted in the future.     

Climate Change and Silk Road Civilization Evolution in Arid Central Asia: Progress and Issues

Arid central Asia is one of the regions most sensitive to global climate change, as well as the region with dramatically hydrological changes and fragile ecosystems. The region includes the main body of the ancient Silk Road, which played a key role in the cultural exchange and the rise and fall of Silk Road civilization. Scientific assessment of the risks faced by the sustainable development of human society in the arid central Asia under the background of global warming is a major scientific issue that has received much attention. The study of the relationship between cultural exchange, development of Silk Road civilization and climate change can provide a scientific basis for understanding the evolution rules of human-land relationship on different timescales in this area. This study summarized the research progress in the history of cultural exchanges, the rise and fall of Silk Road civilization, climate change during the Holocene, forcing mechanisms of climate and hydrological change on different timescales, as well as the process and rule of human-environment interaction. On this basis, we proposed that the study of the temporal and spatial patterns of Holocene climate change and the evolution of Silk Road civilization in arid central Asia, as well as the research on the interaction mechanisms between human and environment, are obviously insufficient. Solving the problems of regional imbalance of climate change and cultural evolution in arid central Asia and strengthening the cross-disciplinary study of geoscience and archaeology are effective ways to promote the study of climate change and changes of Silk Road civilization, which has important scientific and practical significance for understanding the evolution of human-land relations in the region, coping with the challenges of climate change, and serving the “One Belt, One Road” strategy.     

Place-based learning and knowing: critical pedagogies grounded in Indigeneity

For Indigenous peoples, knowledge and science are written onto the landscapes our languages ??talk into being?? through the ??individual and collective consciousness of our communities (Cajete 2000, 284).?? Our landscapes are the storied histories, cosmogonies, philosophies and sciences of those Indigenous knowledges which are increasingly being pushed aside by the ??gray uniformity?? of globalization and its progenitor, European colonization. It is within storied places that we can still glimpse alternatives to this gray uniformity of globalization which brings with it a rhetoric of capitalism, modernism, abstract space and Western science. It is this rhetoric produced through globalization which erases the storied landscapes, destroying the libraries embedded within Indigenous toponyms, creating a terra nullius: an empty land awaiting a colonial/neo-colonial history and economy. As Paulo Freire has challenged us to see, critical consciousness requires us to ??read our world,?? decoding the images of our own concrete, situated experiences with the world (Freire and Macedo 1987, 35). A critical pedagogy of place recognizes the concrete experiences of communities grounded in shared histories, stories and challenges based within a politics of place. A critical pedagogy of place seeks to decolonize and reinhabit the storied landscape through ??reading?? the ways in which Indigenous peoples?? places and environment have been injured and exploited. This paper seeks to discuss how through reading the places in the world as ??political texts,?? one may engage in reflection and praxis in order to understand, and where necessary, to change the world.     

Assessing the discourses and practices of urban regeneration in a growing region

Most research on the discourses and practices of urban regeneration in the UK has examined case studies located in areas of relative socio-economic distress. Less research has been undertaken on regeneration projects and agendas in areas characterised by strong economic growth. Yet, it is in such places that some of the best examples of the discourses, practices and impacts of contemporary urban regeneration can be found. In some areas of high demand regeneration projects have used inner urban brownfield sites as locations for new investment. With the New Labour government’s urban policy agendas targeting similar forms of regeneration, an examination of completed or on-going schemes is timely and relevant to debates over the direction that policy should take. This paper, drawing on a study of urban regeneration in one of England’s fastest growing towns, Reading in Berkshire, examines the discourses, practices and impacts of redevelopment schemes during the 1990s and 2000s. Reading’s experiences have received national attention and have been hailed as a model for other urban areas to follow. The research documents the discursive and concrete aspects of local regeneration and examines the ways in which specific priorities and defined problems have come to dominate agendas. Collectively, the study argues that market-driven objectives come to dominate regeneration agendas, even in areas of strong demand where development agencies wield a relatively high degree of influence. Such regeneration plays a symbolic and practical role in creating new forms of exclusion and interpretations of place.     

Precipitation forecasting using classification and regression trees (CART) model: a comparative study of different approaches

Interest in semiarid climate forecasting has prominently grown due to risks associated with above average levels of precipitation amount. Longer-lead forecasts in semiarid watersheds are difficult to make due to short-term extremes and data scarcity. The current research is a new application of classification and regression trees (CART) model, which is rule-based algorithm, for prediction of the precipitation over a highly complex semiarid climate system using climate signals. We also aimed to compare the accuracy of the CART model with two most commonly applied models including time series modeling (ARIMA), and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for prediction of the precipitation. Various combinations of large-scale climate signals were considered as inputs. The results indicated that the CART model had a better results (with Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, NSE?>?0.75) compared to the ANFIS and ARIMA in forecasting precipitation. Also, the results demonstrated that the ANFIS method can predict the precipitation values more accurately than the time series model based on various performance criteria. Further, fall forecasts ranked “very good” for the CART method, while the ANFIS and the time series model approximately indicated “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” performances for all stations, respectively. The forecasts from the CART approach can be helpful and critical for decision makers when precipitation forecast heralds a prolonged drought or flash flood.