From shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) to oceanic system pathways (OSPs): Building policy-relevant scenarios for global oceanic ecosystems and fisheries

There is an urgent need for developing policy-relevant future scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services. This paper is a milestone toward this aim focusing on open ocean fisheries. We develop five contrasting Oceanic System Pathways (OSPs), based on the existing five archetypal worlds of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) developed for climate change research (e.g., Nakicenovic et al., 2014 and Riahi et al., 2016). First, we specify the boundaries of the oceanic social-ecological system under focus. Second, the two major driving forces of oceanic social-ecological systems are identified in each of three domains, viz., economy, management and governance. For each OSP (OSP1 “sustainability first”, OSP2 “conventional trends”, OSP3 “dislocation”, OSP4 “global elite and inequality”, OSP5 “high tech and market”), a storyline is outlined describing the evolution of the driving forces with the corresponding SSP. Finally, we compare the different pathways of oceanic social-ecological systems by projecting them in the two-dimensional spaces defined by the driving forces, in each of the economy, management and governance domains. We expect that the OSPs will serve as a common basis for future model-based scenario studies in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).     

Unleashing expert judgment in assessment

Assessment evaluates accumulated knowledge and its limits. It informs and ideally empowers decisions and actions on complex, contested issues with persistent uncertainties. Applying rigorous expert judgment is an important dimension of assessment. Here we evaluate advances and challenges in approaches to expert judgment in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5). We find that revised guidance for author teams improved the development of balanced judgments on scientific evidence across disciplines. In particular, expert judgments underpinning conclusions are more extensively, transparently, and consistently communicated: degree-of-certainty terms are more abundant in AR5 policymaker summaries; wider ranges of possible outcomes are presented with greater inclusion of lower-certainty, decision-relevant findings; and expert judgments supporting conclusions are more comparable across working groups. But challenges in developing and communicating assessment conclusions persist, especially for findings with substantial uncertainties and for subjective aspects of judgments. Based on our evaluations and AR5 lessons learned, we propose a simpler, more rigorous framework for developing and communicating expert judgments in environmental assessment. We also describe practices for reducing expert-judgment biases, for advancing integration of evidence and expert judgment, and for addressing subjective dimensions of expert opinion directly and proactively.     

Governing epidemics in an age of complexity: Narratives,politics and pathways to sustainability

This paper elaborates a ‘pathways approach’ to addressing the governance challenges posed by the dynamics of complex, coupled, multi-scale systems, while incorporating explicit concern for equity, social justice and the wellbeing of poor and marginalised groups. It illustrates the approach in relation to current policy challenges of dealing with epidemics and so-called ‘emerging infectious diseases’ such as avian influenza and haemorrhagic fevers, which involve highly dynamic, cross-scale, often-surprising viral–social–political–ecological interactions. Amidst complexity, we show how different actors in the epidemics field produce particular narratives which frame systems and their dynamics in different ways, promote particular goals and values, and justify particular pathways of disease response. These range from ‘outbreak narratives’ emphasising threat to global populations, to alternative but often marginalised narratives variously emphasising long-term structural, land use and environmental change, local knowledge and livelihood goals. We highlight tendencies – supported by cognitive, institutional and political pressures – for powerful actors and institutions to ‘close down’ around narratives that emphasise stability, underplaying longer term, less controllable dynamics. Arguing that governance approaches need to ‘open up’ to embrace strategies for resilience and robustness in relation to epidemics, we outline what some of the routes towards this might involve, and what the resulting governance models might look like. Key are practices and arrangements that involve flexibility, diversity, adaptation, learning and reflexivity, as well as highlighting and supporting alternative pathways within a progressive politics of sustainability.     

The use of PPP or MER in the construction of emission scenarios is more than a question of ‘metrics’

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES, IPCC, 2000) has been a matter of debate since Ian Castles and David Henderson claimed that the scenarios were based on unsound economics, giving rise to improbably high emission growth. A main point in their critique was that the scenario-makers converted national gross domestic product (GDP) data to a common measure using market exchange rates (MER) rather than purchasing power parity (PPP) rates. The IPCC responded to the critique by claiming that the use of PPP- or MER-based measures is just a question of ‘metrics’, as important as the ‘switch from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit’. This paper addresses both the critique from Castles and Henderson and the response from the IPCC. It builds on our earlier argument that the use of MER-based measures, although misleading in some respects, probably has not given rise to seriously exaggerated emission forecasts because comparing regional income levels by the use of MER has two types of implications that draw in different directions and effectively neutralize one another. Nevertheless, we argue that the choice between MER and PPP in the construction of emission scenarios is far more than just a question of metrics. Finally, we discuss whether the SRES scenario with the lowest cumulative emissions is a reasonable lower limit with respect to global emission growth.     

Big brand sustainability: Governance prospects and environmental limits

This article introduces and evaluates the implications for global environmental change of the rising power and authority of big brand companies as global environmental governors. Contributing to the private governance literature and, in particular, addressing the gap in this research with respect to the political implications of individual firm ‘buyer power’, the article provides evidence and analysis of how big brand sustainability is altering the power relations within global supply chains, and the governance prospects and limits of this trend. The authors argue that recent brand company efforts through their global supply chains, while still a long way off from their goals, are achieving environmental gains in product design and production. Yet, these advances are also fundamentally limited. Total environmental impacts of consumption are increasing as brand companies leverage corporate sustainability for competitive advantage, business growth, and increased sales. Big brand sustainability, while important, will not on its own resolve the problems of global environmental change. In conclusion, the article highlights the importance of a co-regulatory governance approach that includes stronger state regulations, sustained advocacy, more responsible individual consumerism, and tougher international legal constraints to go beyond the business gains from big brand sustainability to achieve more transformational, ‘absolute’ global environmental progress.     

Environmentalities of urban climate governance in Maputo,Mozambique

Interest in the role that cities can play in climate change as sites of transformation has increased but research has been limited in its practical applications and there has been limited consideration of how policies and technologies play out. These challenges necessitate a re-thinking of existing notions of urban governance in order to account for the practices that emerge from governments and a plethora of other actors in the context of uncertainty. We understand these practices to constitute adaptive governance, underpinned by social learning guiding the actions of the multiplicity of actors. The aim here is to unpack how social learning for adaptive governance requires attention to competing understandings of risk and identity, and the multiplicity of mechanisms in which change occurs or is blocked in urban climate governance. We adopt a novel lens of ‘environmentalities’ which allows us to assess the historical and institutional context and power relations in the informal settlements of Maputo, Mozambique. Our findings highlight how environmental identities around urban adaptation to climate change are constituted in the social and physical divisions between the formal and informal settlements, whilst existing knowledge models prioritise dominant economic and political interests and lead to the construction of new environmental subjects. While the findings of this study are contextually distinct, the generalizable lessons are that governance of urban adaptation occurs and is solidified within a complex multiplicity of socio-ecological relations.     

Institutional analysis of actors involved in the governance of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes

In this study, we used institutional analysis to investigate the design of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes. The aim of such contracts is to better incentivize farmers for the provision of environmental public goods in comparison to current ‘mainstream’ contracts. For the analysis, we differentiated four contract types: result-based, collective, land tenure, and value chain contracts. To represent each type in the analysis, we selected 19 case examples from six European countries. Cases were identified through a mix of methods, combining literature review, web search, and expert consultation. After a structured data collection based on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, we focused our analysis on the involved actors and their roles in contract governance. Our results highlight the great diversity of public, private, and civil actors involved from the local, regional, national or international governance level, each performing one or several critical roles in contract governance. We found that it is highly context-dependent which actors assume certain roles. We also discuss how provision of environmental public goods through the contracts might potentially be impacted by certain roles and their assignment to specific actors.     

Confronting the nitrogen challenge: Options for governance and target setting

The release of excessive anthropogenic nitrogen contributes to global climate change, biodiversity loss, and the degradation of ecosystem services. Despite being an urgent global problem, the excess nitrogen is not governed globally. This paper considers possible governance options for dealing with excessive nitrogen through target setting, which is an approach commonly adopted to address global environmental problems. The articulation of the nitrogen problem and the numerous international institutions dealing with it, provide evidence of a nitrogen regime characterised by limited coordination and targets covering sources and impacts only partially. This calls for improving the nitrogen governance in the direction of more integrated approaches at the global scale. In this vein, the paper investigates two opposite governance options – here labelled as ‘holistic’ and ‘origin-based’ – and evaluates them for their capability to define solutions and targets for human-induced nitrogen. From the analysis, it emerges that origin-based solutions can be preferable to holistic solutions as they can be more specific and potentially have greater immediate results. Independent from which governance arrangement is chosen, what matters most is the speed at which an arrangement can deploy solutions to combat (fast-growing) nitrogen pollution.     

Tinker,tailor or transform: Gender equality amidst social-ecological change

Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological systems change is uncertain. We use the case of small-scale fisheries in the Pacific Islands region to explore the proposition that different social-ecological narratives: (1) ecological, (2) social-ecological, and (3) social, shape the gender equality priorities, intentions and impacts of implementing organizations. We conducted interviews with regional and national fisheries experts (n = 71) and analyzed gender commitments made within policies (n = 29) that influence small-scale fisheries. To explore these data, we developed a ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ gender assessment typology. We find that implementing organizations aligned with the social-ecological and social narratives considered social (i.e., human-centric) goals to be equally or more important than ecological (i.e., eco-centric) goals. Yet in action, gender equality was pursued instrumentally to achieve ecological goals and/or shallow project performance targets. These results highlight that although commitments to gender equality were common, when operationalized commitments become diluted and reoriented. Across all three narratives, organizations mostly ‘Tinkered’ with gender equality in impact, for example, including more women in spaces that otherwise tended to be dominated by men. Impacts predominately focused on the individual (i.e., changing women) rather than driving communal-to-societal level change. We discuss three interrelated opportunities for organizations in applying the ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ assessment typology, including its utility to assist organizations to orient toward intrinsic goals; challenge or reconfigure system attributes that perpetuate gender inequalities; and consciously interrogate discursive positions and beliefs to unsettle habituated policies, initiatives and theories of change.     

How does the World Bank shape global environmental governance agendas for coasts? 50 years of small-scale fisheries aid reveals paradigm shifts over time

Small-scale fisheries are becoming a global social and environmental concern. The contribution of marine small-scale fisheries to global food security and coastal livelihoods, coupled with the significant challenges they face, has attracted increasing attention and aid from environmental organizations, philanthropies, and multilateral agencies over recent decades. Our study attends to the understudied role of the World Bank, the largest individual funder shaping present and future sustainability of coastal marine regions, as a key actor shaping global environmental governance paradigms. We asked how funding to the sector has changed over the last 50 years and why, outlining distinct patterns in the flow of small-scale fisheries aid and the underlying intervention models. We contextualize our quantitative analysis of aid patterns over time with qualitative interview data with bank staff, identifying underlying paradigm shifts driven by internal and external factors. More than $2.48 billion was allocated by the World Bank to marine fisheries over the last 50 years, approximately 47% (~$1.17 billion) of which was targeted to marine small-scale fisheries. Three distinct funding periods are identified: rising support to SSF from the 1970s to mid-1980s; a sharp decline in funding in the mid-to-late 1980s and low levels of funding throughout the 1990s; and a steady return to funding SSF in the mid-2000s up to the present. Over time, Bank-funded interventions shifted from pure economic development in the earlier era, to an emphasis on governance and multi-dimensional environmental goals in the recent period. To understand why, we used key-informant interviews to unpack major internal drivers: internal staff changes and presence of key individuals, the decentralization and recentralization of decision-making, and the organization’s shifting emphasis from traditional economic growth to multi-dimensional objectives of poverty reduction, among others. External drivers behind funding and paradigm shifts included pressure from the environmental movement, the rise of sustainable development discourses, key global environmental summits in the 1990s, and rising levels of interest in the fisheries sector by the governments of both donor and recipient countries. Processes of ‘paradigm shifts’ were not swift or singular, rather they were affected by multiple, convergent factors over time. Our findings contribute to the literature on multi-lateral institutions as key actors in environmental governance shaping global development thinking, illustrating the arc of the last half-century of fisheries aid at the Bank while highlighting present dilemmas and future challenges that actors interested in working towards sustainable marine small-scale fisheries face.     

Will a drier climate result in more lightning?

With recent projections of a warmer climate in the future, one of the key questions is related to the impact of global warming on thunderstorms, and severe weather. Will lightning activity increase in a warmer world? Since the majority of global lightning activity occurs in the tropics, changes in future global lightning activity will depend on changes in the tropical climate. The latest IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2007] projections show a partial drying out of the tropical landmasses as the global climate gets warmer. This is caused by both changes in rainfall patterns, but also due to increases in evapo-transpiration. We would expect a drier climate to produce fewer thunderstorms, and less lightning. However, experimental and modeling studies have shown that as tropical regions dry in the present climate, they experience greater lightning activity. This paradox may be explained by noting that while drier climate conditions result in fewer thunderstorms and less rainfall, the thunderstorms that do occur are more explosive, resulting in more lightning activity.     

代表性浓度路径情景下的全球温室气体减排和对中国的挑战

介绍了政府间气候变化专门委员会（IPCC）为第五次评估报告开发的新情景——代表性浓度路径（RCPs）,分析了RCPs情景的内在优势,并描述了4类代表性RCPs（RCP8.5、RCP6、RCP4.5和RCP3-PD）的特征。利用IPCC最新发布的RCPs数据,分析了高端、中端稳定和低端浓度路径下,全球温室气体的排放空间、区域分担和减排成本,并着重探讨了低端路径与全球温度升幅限制在2℃以下目标之间的关系及其给中国带来的主要挑战和应对途径。     

Key themes in the Working Group II contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th assessment report

Assessments conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are significant undertakings that require input from experts and practitioners in multiple scientific disciplines, integrating local to international information across spatial and temporal scales. An IPCC report is a unique collaboration between the scientific community and policymakers, with governments (through their Focal Points) providing guidance and input to the scientists conducting an assessment at several stages during the process. This commentary reviews the IPCC mandate and process; summarizes key themes to be addressed in the Working Group II contribution to the 5th assessment report; discusses challenges for the WGII report when assessing qualitative literature, incorporating local knowledge, and identifying particularly vulnerable groups; and touches on the expertise and commitment of the WGII authors. Active engagement of the wider scientific community in IPCC assessments through publication and review will enhance their relevance to decision- and policy-makers.     

Exiting,enduring and innovating: Farm household adaptation to global zoonotic disease

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has been found in 25 countries, costing billions of dollars in those affected economies, and has had profound social and environmental impacts at multiple scales of organization. As a global phenomenon, the impacts of BSE were mediated directly through the environment (animal and human health) but in Canada the indirect socioeconomic impacts of BSE were far more damaging, especially for farm households. Yet, very little research has been conducted on adaptation to the indirect impacts of global environmental change, such as those mediated through the market and governance. Our goal was to examine how farm households adapted to the Canadian BSE crisis in order to better understand rural adaptations to global zoonotic diseases and to agriculture-related global environmental change as a whole. We conducted our mixed methods research in 2004–2006. Data sources included 826 survey responses, 27 individual interviews and 12 group interviews with farmers and ranchers in western Canada. Factor analysis separated out responses into three general adaptation strategies: ‘innovating’ to pursue new opportunities; ‘enduring’ or adaptations that seek stability; and ‘exiting’ from beef production or agriculture altogether. Farm household and community level innovation was a crucial adaptive strategy in the absence of governmental and expert-based support. Enduring adaptations were important to farm household survival in the short term, yet “chronic enduring” can compromise long-term adaptive capacity. Farm exiting was highly problematic during the BSE crisis as these responses were largely unexpected and often left households more vulnerable. Government support at the farm level promoted stability, with little support provided for change-orientated adaptations. Effective farm adaptation will require support for all three types of adaptive strategies and ones that are both expert-based and grassroots in nature to enable farm households in their pursuit of pluriactive and multifunctional livelihood strategies.     

Theories of practices: Agency, technology, and culture : Exploring the relevance of practice theories for the governance of sustainable consumption practices in the new world-order

Within the environmental social sciences, theories of practices are used by an increasing number of authors to analyze the greening of consumption in the new, global order of reflexive modernity. The use of practices as key methodological units for research and governance is suggested as a way to avoid the pitfalls of the individualist and systemic paradigms that dominated the field of sustainable consumption studies for some decades. With the help of practice theory, environmental governance can be renewed in three particular ways: First, the role and responsibilities (not) to be assigned to individual citizen-consumers in environmental change can be specified. Secondly, objects, technologies and infrastructures can be recognized for their crucial contribution to climate governance without lapsing into technological determinism. Third, the cultural framing of sustainability can be enriched by looking into the forms of excitement generated in shared practices of sustainable consumption. We conclude by discussing the need to investigate the globalization of practices from a post-national perspective in both science and policy.     

The discourses of climate change science: Scientific reporting,climate negotiations and the case of Papua New Guinea

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.     

Orchestrating transnational environmental governance in maritime shipping

Maritime shipping is the transmission belt of the global economy. It is also a major contributor to global environmental change through its under-regulated air, water and land impacts. It is puzzling that shipping is a lagging sector as it has a well-established global regulatory body—the International Maritime Organization. Drawing on original empirical evidence and archival data, we introduce a four-factor framework to investigate two main questions: why is shipping lagging in its environmental governance; and what is the potential for the International Maritime Organization to orchestrate emerging private ‘green shipping’ initiatives to achieve better ecological outcomes? Contributing to transnational governance theory, we find that conditions stalling regulatory progress include low environmental issue visibility, poor interest alignment, a broadening scope of environmental issues, and growing regulatory fragmentation and uncertainty. The paper concludes with pragmatic recommendations for the International Maritime Organization to acknowledge the regulatory difficulties and seize the opportunity to orchestrate environmental progress.     

Approaching moisture recycling governance

The spatial and temporal dynamics of water resources are a continuous challenge for effective and sustainable national and international governance. The watershed is the most common spatial unit in water resources governance, which typically includes only surface and groundwater. However, recent advances in hydrology have revealed ‘atmospheric watersheds’ – otherwise known as precipitationsheds. Water flowing within a precipitationshed may be modified by land-use change in one location, while the effect of this modification could be felt in a different province, country, or continent. Despite an upwind country's ability to change a downwind country's rainfall through changes in land-use or land management, the major legal and institutional implications of changes in atmospheric moisture flows have remained unexplored. Here we explore potential ways to approach what we denote as moisture recycling governance. We first identify a set of international study regions, and then develop a typology of moisture recycling relationships within these regions ranging from bilateral moisture exchange to more complex networks. This enables us to classify different types of possible governance principles and relate those to existing land and water governance frameworks and management practices. The complexity of moisture recycling means institutional fit will be difficult to generalize for all moisture recycling relationships, but our typology allows the identification of characteristics that make effective governance of these normally ignored water flows more tenable.     

Down to Earth: Contextualizing the Anthropocene

The ‘Anthropocene’ is now being used as a conceptual frame by different communities and in a variety of contexts to understand the evolving human–environment relationship. However, as we argue in this paper, the notion of an Anthropos, or ‘humanity’, as global, unified ‘geological force’ threatens to mask the diversity and differences in the actual conditions and impacts of humankind, and does not do justice to the diversity of local and regional contexts. For this reason, we interpret in this article the notion of an Anthropocene in a more context-dependent, localized and social understanding. We do this through illustrating examples from four issue domains, selected for their variation in terms of spatial and temporal scale, systems of governance and functional interdependencies: nitrogen cycle distortion (in particular as it relates to food security); ocean acidification; urbanization; and wildfires. Based on this analysis, we systematically address the consequences of the lens of the Anthropocene for the governance of social-ecological systems, focusing on the multi-level, functional and sectoral organization of governance, and possible redefinitions of governance systems and policy domains. We conclude that the notion of the Anthropocene, once seen in light of social inequalities and regional differences, allows for novel analysis of issue-based problems in the context of a global understanding, in both academic and political terms. This makes it a useful concept to help leverage and (re-)focus our efforts in a more innovative and effective way to transition towards sustainability.