Structuring problems in sustainability science: The multi-level DPSIR framework

Sustainability science needs approaches that allow for the integration of knowledge across disciplines and scales. This paper suggests an approach to conceptualize problems of unsustainability by embedding the Drivers-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) scheme within a multi-level institutional framework represented by Hägerstrand’s system of nested domains. The proposed taxonomy helps to decipher and to better understand key casual chains and societal responses at the appropriate spatial levels for particular sustainability problem areas. To illustrate the scheme more concretely the example of recent problem-solving efforts for Baltic Sea eutrophication driven by Swedish agriculture is examined. The discussion focuses on how the scheme fulfills the four research strategy requirements within the field of sustainability science and how the scheme is distinct from alternative approaches.     

Social geography: its place and formation

The Soviet geographical literature of the last decade has adopted four principal, alternative premises about the place of social geography within the overall system of geography. These are that social geography: (1) does not exist as a separate branch of the subject; (2) belongs to a lower hierarchical order of geography, usually as a sub-division of population geography; (3) belongs to a medium level within the hierarchy of geography, broadly equivalent in status to economic geography; or (4) belongs to the highest hierarchical level of the subject, being synonymous with the geography of human society (sodetal geography). The author stresses the difference between the wider definition of social geography, which takes it to be the geography of society, studying the arrangement of sodetal objects in their geographical interrelations, and the narrow view, which defines ‘social’ as sociological. In this case, social geography is synonymous with sociological geography; it studies sociological objects in their geographical setting. The paper also discusses the process of the sociologization of geography.     

Earth science training and development in Africa: a United Kingdom perspective

The paper discusses earth science training and development in Anglophone Africa, focusing particularly on support to geological survey organisations (GSOs). A distinction is drawn between ‘education’ and ‘training’, the latter used here in a vocational sense. Both are part of a continuing process of career development for earth scientists. First degree level education underpins all subsequent training. The onus for the latter lies with the employers, which need to develop appropriate training programmes for their staff that are compatible with an individual's career development and their own organisations' needs. There are relatively few graduate employees as a percentage of total staff in most African GSOs compared with GSOs elsewhere in the world and the experience of many of the younger scientists may be limited. This, and the often limited resources available, indicate a continuing need for support through development and institutional strengthening programmes. The main approaches to training and development are outlined and examples are given of some applications of these approaches. The training providers include ‘western’ and former Soviet earth science institutions, organisations such as the Association of Geoscientists in Development, and geological societies such as the Geological Society of Africa. The changing emphasis of developing country technical assistance requirements is reviewed. These include a shift from the leader-trainee approach by the provider to an advisory approach. The encouraging emergence of cross-border and regional training and development programmes within Africa is noted.     

Social geography — Welfare state ideology or critical social science?

The theme of the paper is the question of whether social geography has an ideological or a critical function in society. This question is approached from four different perspectives: (i) the history of ideas, (ii) the philosophy of science, (iii) the development of theory, and (iv) the view of practice.Having identified the two main directions of social geography as being a liberal (positivist) and a radical (marxist) approach, they are subjected to a brief epistemological examination.The development of theory of the liberal and marxist directions differ in three ways. These are the positioning of production vis-à-vis distribution, the conception of the relationship between the individual and society, and the understanding of space. The concept of relative space, making geography the science of space (chorology), is criticized. An alternative conceptualization of space, where space is not separated from and understood independent of the object under study, is formulated. Space is here considered as a property of the object (society), which totally integrates space and object.In the last section of the paper it is pointed out that the liberal approach represents either ‘counter-revolutionary’ or ‘status-quo’ theories, while the radical approach is ‘revolutionary’. The concept of space as the property of the object makes social geography more politically relevant, in that the actors in the political struggle became more precisely identified as groups in regional social structures.     

Green supply chain management in the electronic industry

Green supply chain management has emerged as a proactive approach for improving environmental performance of processes and products in accordance with the requirements of environmental regulations. Various approaches for implementing green supply chain management practices has been proposed and recognized in previous literatures, yet no investigation has identified the reliability and validity of such approaches particularly in electronic industry. This study examines the consistency approaches by factor analysis that determines the adoption and implementation of green supply chain management in Taiwanese electronic industry. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method is applied to prioritize the relative importance of four dimensions and twenty approaches among nine enterprises in electronic industry. The findings indicate that these enterprises would emphasize on supplier management performance in the crucial role of implementing green supply chain management. Establishing an environmental database of products, asking for product testing report and top management support are among the most important approaches. The results for the implications of green supply chain management implementation in electronic industry investigated in this work generate a generic hierarchy model for decision-makers who can prioritize those approaches for implementing green supply chain management in Taiwan.     

Astroinformatics: data-oriented astronomy research and education

The growth of data volumes in science is reaching epidemic proportions. Consequently, the status of data-oriented science as a research methodology needs to be elevated to that of the more established scientific approaches of experimentation, theoretical modeling, and simulation. Data-oriented scientific discovery is sometimes referred to as the new science of X-Informatics, where X refers to any science (e.g., Bio-, Geo-, Astro-) and informatics refers to the discipline of organizing, describing, accessing, integrating, mining, and analyzing diverse data resources for scientific discovery. Many scientific disciplines are developing formal sub-disciplines that are information-rich and data-based, to such an extent that these are now stand-alone research and academic programs recognized on their own merits. These disciplines include bioinformatics and geoinformatics, and will soon include astroinformatics. We introduce Astroinformatics, the new data-oriented approach to 21st century astronomy research and education. In astronomy, petascale sky surveys will soon challenge our traditional research approaches and will radically transform how we train the next generation of astronomers, whose experiences with data are now increasingly more virtual (through online databases) than physical (through trips to mountaintop observatories). We describe Astroinformatics as a rigorous approach to these challenges. We also describe initiatives in science education (not only in astronomy) through which students are trained to access large distributed data repositories, to conduct meaningful scientific inquiries into the data, to mine and analyze the data, and to make data-driven scientific discoveries. These are essential skills for all 21st century scientists, particularly in astronomy as major new multi-wavelength sky surveys (that produce petascale databases and image archives) and grand-scale simulations (that generate enormous outputs for model universes, such as the Millennium Simulation) become core research components for a significant fraction of astronomical researchers.     

Geography and the pragmatic tradition: The threefold engagement

Geography has had only limited interchange with the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This paper claims that a closer engagement with pragmatism has much to offer to geography, not least in providing an arena within which very different types of geographical inquiry - qualitative and quantitative, human and physical - may find some common ground for useful conversation and debate. However, this will only be fully achieved if geography embarks on a threefold engagement with pragmatism: (1) studies that develop and deploy specific pragmatist ideas and concepts within particular geographical research; (2) studies that attempt to relate geographical research to the wider arena of the pragmatic tradition; (3) historical examination of early links between pragmatism, social science and geography. The history and contemporary revival of pragmatism is described, together with its impacts on social theory and social science. The existing literature on geographical engagement with pragmatism is then examined, and it is argued that there is a much broader relevance within both human and physical geography, not linked to particular styles of research. The question of the history of earlier influences of pragmatism on American geography is then raised, and some linkages charted. The philosopher Hilary Putnam has used the term ‘pragmatist enlightenment’ to describe what he sees as the promise of pragmatism, and the paper concludes by suggesting that this also promises an exciting and fruitful engagement for geography.     

Reforming Watershed Restoration: Science in Need of Application and Applications in Need of Science

Coastal and inland waters are continuing to decline in many parts of the world despite major efforts made to restore them. This is due in part to the inadequate role that ecological science has played in shaping restoration efforts. A significant amount of fundamental ecological knowledge dealing with issues such as system dynamics, state changes, context-dependency of ecological response, and diversity is both under-used by managers and practitioners and under-developed by ecologists for use in real-world applications. Some of the science that is being ‘used’ has not been adequately tested. Thus, restoration ecology as a science and ecological restoration as a practice are in need of reform. I identify five ways in which our ecological knowledge should be influencing restoration to a far greater extent than at present including a need to: shift the focus to restoration of process and identification of the limiting factors instead of structures and single species, add ecological insurance to all projects, identify a probabilistic range of possible outcomes instead of a reference condition, expand the spatial scale of efforts, and apply hierarchical approaches to prioritization. Prominent examples of restoration methods or approaches that are commonly used despite little evidence to support their efficacy are highlighted such as the use of only structural enhancements to restore biodiversity. There are also major gaps in scientific knowledge that are of immediate need to policy makers, managers, and restoration practitioners including: predictive frameworks to guide the restoration of ecological processes, identification of social-ecological feedbacks that constrain ecosystem recovery and data to support decisions of where and how to implement restoration projects to achieve the largest gains. I encourage ecologists to respond to the demand for their scientific input so that restoration can shift from an engineering-driven process to a more sustainable enterprise that fully integrates ecological processes and social science methods.     

An examination of midwestern US cities’ preparedness for climate change and extreme hazards

Disasters continue to have a dramatic impact on lives, livelihoods and environments communities depend on. In response to these losses, the global community has developed various theories, assessment methodologies and policies aimed at reducing global losses. A contemporary outcome of these interventions is to build the disaster resilience. However, despite the disaster resilience-building endeavours espoused by policies, theories and methodologies, very little progress is being made in reducing disaster losses. This paper argues that a possible reason behind the limitations of current resilience-building policies and methodologies could be that most of these policies are based a mechanistic scientific paradigm that places an emphasis on system components that are perceived to build resilience and not the function of systems as a whole. This often leads to resilience-building initiatives that are based on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. This paper argues for the use of a complex adaptive systems approach to building resilience. This approach argues that contextual factors within different social systems will have a nonlinear affect on disaster resilience-building efforts. Therefore, it is crucial to move away from ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to more flexible approaches to building resilience. These hypotheses are tested by means of a correlation statistical analysis of agricultural communities in Southern Africa. Results of this analysis indicate that unique resilience profiles are evident in almost all of the communities studied. This indicates that resilience is not the same for everybody, and that resilience-building endeavours should be flexible enough to be adapted for different contexts.     

区域地质环境的定量评价和预测

文章简略介绍当前国内外区域地质环境定量评价和预测的几种主要方法：（１）自然单元分级体系为基础的评价方法，主要用于现状评价；（２）经济评估与风险评估方法，以地质灾害和地质问题作为评价的主体，用货币值表征地质环境质量的优劣及人类活动对其产生的影响；（３）以系统论为基础的评价预测方法。按地质环境的组分及其与外部系统的关系，建立地质环境系统体系，以各子系统的环境地质问题为基本评价要素，外部因素为影响交量，用质量指数表征地质环境质量的现状和未来的态势。     

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.     

网络信息空间的城市地理学研究：综述与展望

20世纪90年代,互联网飞速发展,不仅深刻地影响了我们的社会系统和经济结构,同时也重构了全球城市的物理和虚拟空间结构形式。近几年,在西方发达国家,网络信息空间的相关研究已经成为多学科研究的热点,有关城市网络信息空间的地理学研究也不断涌现。从技术与经济的角度入手,在已有文献资料基础上,对西方地理学界关于网络信息空间与城市发展的研究进展进行了评述。首先界定网络信息空间的概念及其相对于物理空间的各种特征,然后总结城市学者研究网络信息空间的几种理论方法,并从三个空间层次分别评述现有的实证研究成果。在此基础上,对网络信息空间的测量方法和关于城市地理学的研究内容进行了进一步展望。     

Two tools for integrating geology into ecosystem studies

Increased interest in understanding ecosystems as a basis for land management requires new approaches for incorporating geology into the process. Limited work performed by geologists to ensure adequate information about geologic interrelationships with the biosphere is available to land managers and other earth scientists. This paper proposes two processes that will aid in increasing the amount and quality of geologic information available to land managers and other earth scientists. First, the geologic integration with ecosystem matrix is a computer data-base format presenting the chemical and physical interrelationships of geology with the biosphere. Second, the geologic terrane land unit hierarchy is an approach to segregating the earth's surface into a hierarchy of land units to simplify applying data-base information to the land.     

Zoogeographical affinities and the use of vertebrates in Xochicalco (Morelos, Mexico)

Xochicalco is a Mesoamerican locality that developed after the fall of Teotihuacan, and became one of the most important urban, ceremonial and military communities of its time. Chronologically, it is situated in the Epiclassic period (700–900 A.D.) and its buildings show a marked hierarchical distribution. The site is located in the current State of Morelos (Mexico), embedded in the Mexican Transition Zone between the two major American zoogeographic regions: Nearctic and Neotropic. The animal remains identified show a mixed assemblage from both regions. With the aim of exploring the relationship between the zoogeographical affinities of identified fauna and differential uses due to the hierarchical distribution of the site, the data were processed using two multivariate analyses in order to find the animals that characterize each social level. This comparison shows that some animals are common to all the social levels, suggesting easy availability, while a few others, mainly from the Neotropic area, were associated only with the elite places suggesting their quality as social markers. This approach offers an initial hypothesis about the different cultural attitudes toward the animals in a Mesoamerican locality, little studied, showing a positive relationship between the zoogeographic affinity and the social hierarchy.     

Geography and general system theory,philosophical homologies and current practice

General system science, like geography, is an integrative discipline that spans the divide between the physical and social sciences. Geography, like general system science, seeks to examine the universe of observation as a functioning whole and attempts to study together the things other disciplines study separately. However, within both geography and the system sciences at large, there are many different philosophies and methodologies. A special attribute of the general system approach is an explicit adoption of an organismic rather than a mechanistic world view. This has caused general system practitioners to develop theory in more bioscientific areas of concern such as growth, hierarchical organisation and the theory of evolution. To date, much of the systems science in geography has preferred the static, mechanistic ethos of systems analysis and systems engineering. However, general system science's concern with historic processes and the dynamic self-determined relationships between systems structure, functioning and selfcreation may be more appropriate to geographical research. A search is made for general system methodologies in current geographical research and for particular applications of aspects of the new general systems theory of evolution and theory of systems attractors as defined by Ilya Prigogine and Erich Jantsch to geography.Today, we seem to be at the tip of an iceberg of scientific change... Every discipline is in the midst of a revolution... What is exciting about this theoretical chaos is not that each discipline will emerge with a new paradigm to guide future investigations but that a new grand paradigm may be forming, one that will integrate all structure and processes from the farthest reaches of the Universe to the reasonances of subatomic particles. The Grand Paradigm is somewhere in the future and we may live to see it THEISEN, (1981, p. 758).     

Integrated risk assessment method of waterlog disaster in Huaihe River Basin of China

Regional waterlog disaster integrated risk system, affected by natural, social, and economic systems and its combination relationship, is a complex system with certain structure and function. Waterlog disaster integrated risk results from the combined effects of regional environment, impact factors, vulnerability, and disaster-reducing capability of flood hazards in the drainage area. Waterlog disaster integrated risk system can be divided into four subsystems of hazard, vulnerability, disaster-reducing capability, and disaster conditions. Evaluation indexes are selected using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method, and the evaluation index system is established. Then, the waterlog disaster integrated risk evaluation model is proposed based on set pair analysis method. Taking Huaihe river in Anhui Province of China as the typical area in this study, the results show that the proposed approach is able to obtain the spatial distribution characteristics of waterlog hazard, vulnerability, mitigation capabilities, and integrated disaster risk within the study area. From the quantitative point of view, identification of the areas with high flood risk can provide a scientific basis for the flood management and technical support.

     

An essay on the interactions between climate and society

There has been increasing concern about the lack of involvement by social scientists and humanists in a global change program, although many social scientists are already directly involved in various aspects of research on environmental change, and their research interests are clearly central to a global change research agenda. Based on a historical review, the role of social science disciplines as well as social science institutes in an emerging multidecadal global change program is discussed. Both “plan of action” and “plan of inaction” are suggested to avoid potential pitfalls due to the rush development of a social science program into the existing global climate change problem.     

Questioning the virtues of pro-environmental behaviour research: Towards a phronetic approach

Drawing on Flyvbjerg’s (2001) call for the development of phronetic social science, this paper argues that much current research into pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) is misguided, and even potentially dangerous. After outlining Flyvbjerg’s argument, it reviews existing work on PEB and argues that, to date, it has predominantly sought after the Aristotelian intellectual virtues of either episteme or techne, and has neglected phronesis which Aristotle himself saw as most important. It then explores the ways in which aspects of a phronetic approach are being developed in cultural geography and environmental sociology, before offering a brief empirical case study of a PEB-change initiative to illustrate what a phronetic approach to research might look like. It concludes by calling for an improved and more reflexive dialogue between PEB researchers regarding the purpose and approach of their work, both in order to improve the relevance and impact of their research, and in order to help individuals and communities understand and confront the significant environmental challenges they currently face.     

Geography in Australian education

Geography in Australia has a heritage that is strongly British, but more recently has been influenced from other parts of the world, such as North America and New Zealand. Its popularity has fluctuated and it is now under threat as a separate subject in the compulsory years of schooling. In higher education, geography has retrieved lost ground to be a popular area of study, but not a research area in the current national priorities. Geography plays a focal role in the general education of Australians. It is a medium for education involving the education of people, about, in, and for the society and environment in which they live. Through education, geography will enable people to explore their life-roles as learners, social beings, recreators, producers, consumers and citizens. It will develop in people distinctive knowledge, thinking processes, attitudes and values, and encourage participation in social and environmental actions. Teachers in secondary and higher education have differing and distinctive roles. Being a geographer in Australia does have benefits including: working in an identifiable area of knowledge maintaining a bridge across the physical and social sciences; the promotion of inquiry approaches and as a focus for the various adjectival educations that have emerged. These are tempered by challenges such as: threats from emerging disciplines, current national research priorities and the movement to social science education. Therefore, promotion of geography in Australia needs to be much more forceful than it has until now. The work of groups such as the Institute of Australian Geographers and the Australian Geography Teachers' Association needs to be co-ordinated more closely to develop a strong lobby for geography in Australian education.     

Something in the Air: Civic science and contentious environmental politics in post-apartheid South Africa

The emergence of an environmental movement in post-apartheid South Africa has involved the reframing of the environment as a ‘brown’ issue, articulating the discourse of social and environmental justice and a rights-based notion of democracy. Environmental movements have pursued a dual strategy of deliberation and activist opposition. Environmental movements have deployed science to pursue the strategic task of democratic opposition and have established networks of environmental knowledge and expertise. Ecological modernization is the dominant approach to environmental governance and adopts a science-based policy approach. In this context the regulation and management of the environment is premised on the need for science, which provides the authoritative basis for a regulatory response. In local environmental movements, there exists a fundamental tension between a cumulative history of lay knowledge about pollution and the lack of official acknowledgement of qualitative narratives. This is accompanied by a lack and suspicion of reliable official data. Environmental movements have thus employed ‘civic science’ strategically to place the issue of air pollution on the political agenda. This paper uses the case of environmental politics in Durban to reflect on the ways in which civic science and lay knowledge, together constituting community hybrid knowledge, are produced and disseminated in order to pressure the state and capital. The three ways in which knowledge is deployed are: to frame environmental problems, in strategies of oppositional advocacy, and in deliberative policy forums. Empirical analysis shows that civic science is produced through knowledge networks, and both lay knowledge and civic science are opportunistically used by environmental movements to engage both inside and outside formal policy making arenas. This deployment of hybrid knowledge by environmental movements represents a broader challenge to the power of science and technology based on increasing evidence of the hazards and risks facing ordinary people in their daily lives.