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1.
Negative learning   总被引:1,自引:1,他引:0  
New technical information may lead to scientific beliefs that diverge over time from the a posteriori right answer. We call this phenomenon, which is particularly problematic in the global change arena, negative learning. Negative learning may have affected policy in important cases, including stratospheric ozone depletion, dynamics of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and population and energy projections. We simulate negative learning in the context of climate change with a formal model that embeds the concept within the Bayesian framework, illustrating that it may lead to errant decisions and large welfare losses to society. Based on these cases, we suggest approaches to scientific assessment and decision making that could mitigate the problem. Application of the tools of science history to the study of learning in global change, including critical examination of the assessment process to understand how judgments are made, could provide important insights on how to improve the flow of information to policy makers.  相似文献   

2.
The main objective of this study was to assess the level of environmental awareness among ozone depleting substances (ODSs) distributors and consumers in the solvent sector in the Arabian Gulf country of Oman. The focus was on ozone depleting substances that are usually released in cleaning, formulation solvent and process agent processes (CFC-113, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, CTC-carbon tetrachloride). A comparison between importers and end-users of ODSs and the public in relation to environmental awareness regarding ozone layer depletion was carried out. The results showed that environmental knowledge about ozone layer depletion was higher among the importers and end-users of ODSs than amongst the public. Nevertheless, there were much smaller differences in environmental attitudes and behaviors between the importers and end-users of ODSs, and the public toward ozone layer depletion. This showed that the public in the case study country has a very positive attitudes and behaviors towards the environment.  相似文献   

3.
Negotiations that involve the use and interpretation of scientific information and assessment are often particularly difficult, especially when the scientific input is uncertain or contested. Parties can exploit this uncertainty in order to stall progress, where they might prefer a very different policy outcome. In addition, scientific input often changes as new research is done and disseminated. In order to facilitate decision-making where science is involved, a number of international environmental agreements have established regimes, as well as assessment processes, that are designed to incorporate new information, review decisions, and modify judgments—that is, they are dynamic or adaptable. However, there is little systematic evaluation by policymakers or academic analysts of the type and qualities of such dynamism that might contribute to effective assessment and regulatory processes, or of whether this lesson is truly applicable across very different environmental issues. Examination of the recent protocol on persistent organic pollutants to the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), in comparison to LRTAPs two previous protocols on sulfur emissions, offers a way to compare across different types of issues whether and how “adaptable” assessment processes influence consensus negotiations. The results of this comparison indicate that a type of adaptability likely to facilitate decision-making is “dependable dynamism”—the quality of assessment and decision-making processes that allows policymakers with ease to put off particular decisions for addressing in the future, with confidence that issues so put off will indeed be addressed later. The ability to modify such conclusions at a later time facilitates decision-making processes by offering a new dimension of compromise on both scientific assessment and policy decisions, and lowering the threshold of credibility necessary for decision-making.  相似文献   

4.
In the past several decades, decision makers in the United States have increasingly called upon publicly funded science to provide “usable” information for policy making, whether in the case of acid rain, famine prevention or climate change policy. As demands for usability become more prevalent for publicly accountable scientific programs, there is a need to better understand opportunities and constraints to science use in order to inform policy design and implementation. Motivated by recent critique of the decision support function of the US Global Change Research Program, this paper seeks to address this issue by specifically examining the production and use of climate science. It reviews empirical evidence from the rich scholarship focused on climate science use, particularly seasonal climate forecasts, to identify factors that constrain or foster usability. It finds, first, that climate science usability is a function both of the context of potential use and of the process of scientific knowledge production itself. Second, nearly every case of successful use of climate knowledge involved some kind of iteration between knowledge producers and users. The paper argues that, rather than an automatic outcome of the call for the production of usable science, iterativity is the result of the action of specific actors and organizations who ‘own’ the task of building the conditions and mechanisms fostering its creation. Several different types of institutional arrangements can accomplish this task, depending on the needs and resources available. While not all of the factors that enhance usability of science for decision making are within the realm of the scientific enterprise itself, many do offer opportunities for improvement. Science policy mechanisms such as the level of flexibility afforded to research projects and the metrics used to evaluate the outcomes of research investment can be critical to providing the necessary foundation for iterativity and production of usable science to occur.  相似文献   

5.
Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change   总被引:2,自引:1,他引:1  
Climate change is a problem which is global both in terms of causes and consequences. The uncertainties are large and likely to persist. Meanwhile, the political and economic stakes of both action and inaction are much higher than those in other transboundary concerns such as acid rain and ozone depletion. The public policy impact of scientific opinions on climate change, therefore, not only depends upon what is being said, but also, who is advancing those conclusions and how they were arrived at. This was the rationale behind the setting up of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The paper examines the IPCC in the context of prior assessment efforts. It attempts to unravel the processes which caused the IPCC to be set up when it was and how it was, as opposed to different times and different forms.  相似文献   

6.
Vulnerability, adaptation and resilience are concepts that are finding increasing currency in several fields of research as well as in various policy and practitioner communities engaged in global environmental change science, climate change, sustainability science, disaster risk-reduction and famine interventions. As scientists and practitioners increasingly work together in this arena a number of questions are emerging: What is credible, salient and legitimate knowledge, how is this knowledge generated and how is it used in decision making? Drawing on important science in this field, and including a case study from southern Africa, we suggest an alternative mode of interaction to the usual one-way interaction between science and practice often used. In this alternative approach, different experts, risk-bearers, and local communities are involved and knowledge and practice is contested, co-produced and reflected upon. Despite some successes in the use and negotiation of such knowledge for ‘real’ world issues, a number of problems persist that require further investigation including the difficulties of developing consensus on the methodologies used by a range of stakeholders usually across a wide region (as the case study of southern Africa shows, particularly in determining and identifying vulnerable groups, sectors, and systems); slow delivery of products that could enhance resilience to change that reflects not only a lack of data, and need for scientific credibility, but also the time-consuming process of coming to a negotiated understanding in science–practice interactions and, finally, the need to clarify the role of ‘external’ agencies, stakeholders, and scientists at the outset of the dialogue process and subsequent interactions. Such factors, we argue, all hinder the use of vulnerability and resilience ‘knowledge’ that is being generated and will require much more detailed investigation by both producers and users of such knowledge.  相似文献   

7.
Transdisciplinary research is a promising approach to address sustainability challenges arising from global environmental change, as it is characterized by an iterative process that brings together actors from multiple academic fields and diverse sectors of society to engage in mutual learning with the intent to co-produce new knowledge. We present a conceptual model to guide the implementation of environmental transdisciplinary work, which we consider a “science with society” (SWS) approach, providing suggested activities to conduct throughout a seven-step process. We used a survey with 168 respondents involved in environmental transdisciplinary work worldwide to evaluate the relative importance of these activities and the skills and characteristics required to implement them successfully, with attention to how responses differed according to the gender, geographic location, and positionality of the respondents. Flexibility and collaborative spirit were the most frequently valued skills in SWS, though non-researchers tended to prioritize attributes like humility, trust, and patience over flexibility. We also explored the relative significance of barriers to successful SWS, finding insufficient time and unequal power dynamics were the two most significant barriers to successful SWS. Together with case studies of respondents’ most successful SWS projects, we create a toolbox of 20 best practices that can be used to overcome barriers and increase the societal and scientific impacts of SWS projects. Project success was perceived to be significantly higher where there was medium to high policy impact, and projects initiated by practitioners/other stakeholders had a larger proportion of high policy impact compared to projects initiated by researchers only. Communicating project results to academic audiences occurred more frequently than communicating results to practitioners or the public, despite this being ranked less important overall. We discuss how these results point to three recommendations for future SWS: 1) balancing diverse perspectives through careful partnership formation and design; 2) promoting communication, learning, and reflexivity (i.e., questioning assumptions, beliefs, and practices) to overcome conflict and power asymmetries; and 3) increasing policy impact for joint science and society benefits. Our study highlights the benefits of diversity in SWS - both in the types of people and knowledge included as well as the methods used - and the potential benefits of this approach for addressing the increasingly complex challenges arising from global environmental change.  相似文献   

8.
To date the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concerned itself with gathering a state of the art review of the science of climate change. While significant progress has been made in enhancing our integrated understanding of the climate system and the dynamics of the social systems that produce an array of potential greenhouse gases, it is also clear from the panel's reports how far the science community is from being able to present a dynamic and synoptic view of the climate system as a whole. Clear evidence of these complexities and uncertainties inherent in the climate system is evident in efforts aimed at designing robust policy interventions. In this paper, we argue that the adaptive management framework in ecosystem management may be a useful model for guiding how the IPCC can continue to be relevant both as a scientific establishment and as a policy-relevant scientific endeavor.  相似文献   

9.
With the gradual yet unequivocal phasing out of ozone depleting substances(ODSs), the environmental crisis caused by the discovery of an ozone hole over the Antarctic has lessened in severity and a promising recovery of the ozone layer is predicted in this century. However, strong volcanic activity can also cause ozone depletion that might be severe enough to threaten the existence of life on Earth. In this study, a transport model and a coupled chemistry–climate model were used to simulate the impacts of super volcanoes on ozone depletion. The volcanic eruptions in the experiments were the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption and a 100 × Pinatubo size eruption. The results show that the percentage of global mean total column ozone depletion in the 2050 RCP8.5 100 × Pinatubo scenario is approximately 6% compared to two years before the eruption and 6.4% in tropics. An identical simulation, 100 × Pinatubo eruption only with natural source ODSs, produces an ozone depletion of 2.5% compared to two years before the eruption, and with 4.4% loss in the tropics. Based on the model results,the reduced ODSs and stratospheric cooling lighten the ozone depletion after super volcanic eruption.  相似文献   

10.
The goals and objectives of ‘climate stabilization’ feature heavily in contemporary environmental policy and in this paper we trace the factors that have contributed to the rise of this concept and the scientific ideas behind it. In particular, we explore how the stabilization-based discourse has become dominant through developments in climate science, environmental economics and policymaking. That this discourse is tethered to contemporary policy proposals is unsurprising; but that it has remained relatively free of critical scrutiny can be associated with fears of unsettling often-tenuous political processes taking place at multiple scales. Nonetheless, we posit that the fundamental premises behind stabilization targets are badly matched to the actual problem of the intergenerational management of climate change, scientifically and politically, and destined to fail. By extension, we argue that policy proposals for climate stabilization are problematic, infeasible, and hence impede more productive policy action on climate change. There are gains associated with an expansion and reconsideration of the range of possible policy framings of the problem, which are likely to help us to more capably and dynamically achieve goals of decarbonizing and modernizing the energy system, as well as diminishing anthropogenic contributions to climate change.  相似文献   

11.
The leading mode of southern hemisphere (SH) climatic variability, the southern annular mode (SAM), has recently seen a shift towards its positive phase due to stratospheric ozone depletion and increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations. Here we examine how sensitive the SAM (defined as the leading empirical orthogonal function of SH sea level pressure anomalies) is to future GHG concentrations. We determine its likely evolution for three intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) special report on emission scenarios (SRES) for austral summer and winter, using a multi-model ensemble of IPCC fourth assessment report models which resolve stratospheric ozone recovery. During the period of summer ozone recovery (2000–2050), the SAM index exhibits weakly negative, statistically insignificant trends due to stratospheric ozone recovery which offsets the positive forcing imposed by increasing GHG concentrations. Thereafter, positive SAM index trends occur with magnitudes that show sensitivity to the SRES scenario utilised, and thus future GHG emissions. Trends are determined to be strongest for SRES A2, followed by A1B and B1, respectively. The winter SAM maintains a similar dependency upon GHG as summer, but over the entire twenty-first century and to a greater extent. We also examine the influence of ozone recovery by comparing results to models that exclude stratospheric ozone recovery. Projections are shown to be statistically different from the aforementioned results, highlighting the importance of ozone recovery in governing SAM-evolution. We therefore demonstrate that the future SAM will depend both upon GHG emissions and stratospheric ozone recovery.  相似文献   

12.
The ongoing devolution of climate policy-making to sub-national levels has prompted growing interest in policy entrepreneurship by individuals who are politically and technically creative and institutionally resourceful. This paper investigates the case of the materials-management programme in the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality which has emerged as a national and international leader by focusing on the role of household consumption in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Two noteworthy innovations involve the development of a consumption-based GHG emissions inventory and introduction of policies aimed at facilitating construction of small homes (so-called Accessory Dwelling Units, ADU). The case traces over several decades the higher order learning processes within the group and their entrepreneurship toward affecting broader changes in emission accounting and climate policies in Oregon. The paper identifies the enabling factors for these innovations, and considers: how to create the conditions for learning, experimentation, and policy entrepreneurship; how to reproduce these conditions in different locales; and how to recognize and foster innovations that arise outside the established mainstream ‘climate community’. It also stresses the benefits of breaking down the barriers between science-based analysis and policy. The two questions frequently raised in the climate policy debate – how to bring researchers and practitioners together to develop efficacious policies; and how to replicate successful programmes and policies across different communities, jurisdictions, and locations – should be re-examined. It may be more appropriate to ask instead: How to create conditions for learning, experimentation, and policy entrepreneurship; and how to reproduce these conditions in different locales.

Key policy insights

  • Using a consumption-based greenhouse gas emission inventory instead of a sector-based inventory radically changes climate policy priorities, shifting the emphasis from technological fixes to curbing household consumption.

  • Policy innovations thrive in teams that combine technical and scientific competencies with: a commitment to addressing societal problems; interest in inquiry, experimentation, and learning; entrepreneurship; and strategic and political savvy.

  • These qualities require breaking down artificial barriers between science and policy.

  • Transformative policy ideas can originate within institutional nodes that operate outside of an established community of expertise and authority; and these should be identified and fostered.

  相似文献   

13.
Myanna Lahsen 《Climatic change》2009,97(3-4):339-372
The IPCC and other global environmental assessment processes stress the need for national scientific participation to ensure decision makers’ trust in the associated scientific conclusions and political agendas. The underpinning assumption is that the relationship between scientists and decision makers at the national level is characterized by trust and interpretive synergy. Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, this article challenges that assumption through a case study of the policy uptake of divergent scientific interpretations as to whether or not the Amazon is a net carbon sink. It shows that the carbon sink issue became a site for struggles between important Brazilian scientists and decision-makers with central authority over the definition of the country’s official position in international climate negotiations. In a geopolitically charged scientific controversy involving scientific evidence bearing on the Kyoto Protocol, Brazilian decision makers studied revealed critical distance from national scientists advancing evidence that the Amazon is a net carbon sink. As such, the decision-makers’ interpretations were at odds also with dominant framings in the Brazilian media and closer to those of American scientists involved in carbon cycle research in the Amazon. Seeking to explain this disconnect, the paper discusses the divergent policy preferences of key scientists and decision-makers involved, and the correlations of these preferences with interpretations of the available scientific evidence. It identifies the continued impact of a national political tradition of limited participation in decision making and suggests that this tradition—while increasingly challenged by countervailing democratizing trends—is reinforced by key Brazilian decision makers’ constructions of science as a medium through which rich countries maintain political advantage. Reflecting this, key Brazilian decision-makers justified rejecting national scientists’ interpretations of the Amazon as a significant overall carbon sink by suggesting that the scientists’ scientific training and associated foreign interactions bias them in favor of foreign interests, compromising their ability to accurately identify national interests. The paper situates its analysis in terms of theories of the science–policy interface and argues for greater attention to the role of culturally and politically laden understandings of science and the role of science in policy and geopolitics.  相似文献   

14.
This paper explains why nine criteria and indicator schemes for forest management are little used instrumentally to monitor sustainability, at most being used to structure reports or statistics, and why the schemes lack coherent designs, with only 29% of indicators in five schemes suited to practical monitoring. It outlines a new Knowledge-Action Framework, devised to analyse governing across the spectrum from government to the new style of governance, in which society steers itself. This proposes that conceptual and symbolic uses may be as important in governance as instrumental uses; science is less privileged; and indicator choice must satisfy a wider range of stakeholders than previously. Conceptual uses enable unambiguous learning by multiple stakeholders with conflicting views in governance; symbolic uses promote an ambiguous consensus between them; and the large numbers of indicators accumulated achieve ‘plurality of satisfaction’ but make monitoring impractical. Conceptual and symbolic uses are examples of new procedural policy instruments that facilitate multidirectional interactions between diverse groups in governance. Criteria and indicator schemes are termed procedural policy tools as they combine various procedural instruments. A new generic taxonomy shows continuity as substantive policy instruments long used by governments evolve into procedural instruments. Evaluation of the schemes finds evidence for conceptual and symbolic uses, indicator accumulation and restrictions on scientific inputs. The paper advances global environmental governance theory, and argues that the best way to overcome constraints on sustainability monitoring is through autonomous scientific research.  相似文献   

15.
Analyses of emissions, and consequent chlorine loading, show that projected use of 2,2-dichloro-1,1,1-trifluoroethane (HCFC-123) will result in a virtually indiscernible impact on stratospheric ozone. Parametric scenarios uphold this conclusion, even for extreme levels of emissions far exceeding those of current technologies and practices. Additional scenarios reaffirm the conclusion for continued use – beyond the scheduled phaseout date – as a refrigerant in closed systems. By contrast, use of this compound offers unique opportunities to reduce global warming. Moreover, time-dependent analyses show that the minimal contribution to stratospheric chlorine from HCFC-123 emissions will not peak until more than a decade after the residual peaks of chlorine and bromine, from prior chlorofluorocarbon and halon releases, subside. While no single index exists to compare the relative demerits of ozone depletion and climate change, three conclusions are clear. First, reversal of the buildup of bromine and chlorine (i.e., healing of the ozone layer) is underway and progressing on target, while sufficient practical remedies for global climate change are far more difficult. Second, the analyses show that phaseout of all chlorinated, and conceptually – but much less probably – all brominated, compounds of anthropogenic origin targets some compounds that provide environmental benefits. Most chlorinated and brominated compounds do warrant phaseout; the exceptions are those with very short atmospheric lifetimes, and consequent low ozone depletion potential (ODP), that also offer offsetting environmental benefits. And third, since new global environmental concerns may, and probably will, be identified in the future, a more scientific approach is needed to determine environmental acceptability or rejection.  相似文献   

16.
On a hemispheric scale, it is now well established that stratospheric ozone depletion has been the principal driver of externally forced atmospheric circulation changes south of the Equator in the last decades of the 20th Century. The impact of ozone depletion has been felt over the entire hemisphere, as reflected in the poleward drift of the midlatitude jet, the southward expansion of the summertime Hadley cell and accompanying precipitation trends deep into the subtropics. On a regional scale, however, surface impacts directly attributable to ozone depletion have yet to be identified. In this paper we focus on South Eastern South America (SESA), a region that has exhibited one of the largest wetting trends during the 20th Century. We study the impact of ozone depletion on SESA precipitation using output from 6 different climate models, spanning a wide range of complexity. In all cases we contrast pairs of model integrations with and without ozone depletion, but with all other forcings identically specified. This allows for unambiguous attribution of the computed precipitation trends. All 6 climate models consistently reveal that stratospheric ozone depletion results in a significant wetting of SESA over the period 1960–1999. Taken as a whole, these model results strongly suggest that the impact of ozone depletion on SESA precipitation has been as large as, and quite possibly larger than, the one caused by increasing greenhouse gases over the same period.  相似文献   

17.
极地气象与全球变化   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
目前,全球变化加快,极地地区变化尤为突出,这对区域或全球的社会、经济和生态系统都将产生显著的影响。最明显的证据是极区的冰川和冰雪范围持续减少,永久冻土在消融和消失,北冰洋海冰范围和厚度减小。极地环境的变化跟地球其它区域的变化息息相关,如臭氧洞的形成与来自低纬度的污染物积聚有关。极地地区的科学研究非常重要,不断地给我们提出新的科学挑战。极地冰盖下和大面积海冰下存在着大量的未知领域,许多极地研究的前沿问题实际上存在于传统学科的交叉领域。因此,世界气象组织(WMO)和国际科联(ICSU)共同发起并于2007年3月1日启动实施2007-2008年国际极地年(IPY),旨在为极地气象学、海洋学、冰川和水文学等领域的科学研究和观测做出贡献,有助于发展更精确的海一冰一大气环流模式,进一步提高对天气预报和气候变化的预测和预估水平。  相似文献   

18.
Reactive halogen species (RHS = X, XO, HOX, OXO; X = Cl, Br, I) are known to have an important influence on the chemistry in the polar boundary layer (BL), where they are responsible for ozone depletion events in spring. Recent field campaigns at Mace Head, Ireland, and the Dead Sea, Israel, identified for the first time iodine oxide (IO) at mixing ratios of up to 6.6 ppt and 90 ppt bromine oxide (BrO), respectively, by DOAS also at lower latitudes. These results intensified the discussion about the role of the RHS in the mid-latitude BL.Photochemical box model calculations show that the observed IO mixing ratios can destroy ~0.45 ppb ozone per hour. This is comparable to the rates of the known O3-loss processes in the boundary layer. The model studies also reveal that IO, at these levels, has a strong influence on the BL photochemistry, increasing the OH/HO2- and the NO2/NO - ratios. In combination these changes lead to a reduction of the photochemical ozone formation, which - in addition - reduces ozone mixing ratios by up to 0.15 ppb/h.The studies for the Dead Sea case give no information on the heterogeneous process responsible for the bromine release, but they show that a total of 2 – 4 ppb of total bromine have to be released to explain the observed complete depletion of 60 ppb ozone in 2 – 3 hours.  相似文献   

19.
This paper analyses climate science as a discourse to reveal how it enables and constrains climate change negotiations and action. Focusing on long-term outcomes projected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report and the World Bank’s “Turn Down the Heat” reports, this paper examines processes of discourse structuration and institutionalization to identify the dominant discourses which frame climate action. We trace the dominant discourses identified in the scientific reports – Survivalism, Ecological Modernisation and Economic Rationalism – through the Paris Agreement and selected Leader Statements and Intended Nationally Determined Contributions from COP21. From the 24 states included in this analysis, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is developed as a case study to investigate the hybridity and institutionalization of discourses. Even though PNG’s rhetoric and commitments at COP21 express Survivalism, the state’s policy frameworks rarely move beyond solutions found in Economic Rationalism and Ecological Modernisation. This suggests that states strategically adopt hybrid discourses drawn from climate science in line with their positionality, political economy and interests. Understanding how discourses drawn from climate science manifest in national policies has significant implications not only for how science is communicated at the international level but also for understanding different state positions in the global climate governance regime.  相似文献   

20.
Outcome and value uncertainties in global-change policy   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Choices among environmental policies can be informed by analysis of the potential physical, biological, and social outcomes of alternative choices, and analysis of social preferences among these outcomes. Frequently, however, the consequences of alternative policies cannot be accurately predicted because of substantial outcome uncertainties concerning physical, chemical, biological, and social processes linking policy choices to consequences. Similarly, assessments of social preferences among alternative outcomes are limited by value uncertainties arising from limitations of moral principles, the absence of economic markets for many environmental attributes, and other factors. Outcome and value uncertainties relevant to global-change policy are described and their magnitudes are examined for two cases: stratospheric-ozone depletion and global climate change. Analysis of information available in the mid 1980s, when international ozone regulations were adopted, suggests that contemporary uncertainties surrounding CFC emissions and the atmospheric response were so large that plausible ozone depletion, absent regulation, ranged from negligible to catastrophic, a range that exceeded the plausible effect of the regulations considered. Analysis of climate change suggests that, important as outcome uncertainties are, uncertainties about values may be even more important for policy choice.  相似文献   

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