“All transport problems are essentially mathematical”: The uneven resonance of academic transport and mobility knowledge in Brussels

This paper presents an inquiry into the capacity of transport and mobility studies to critically engage with contemporary policies. Drawing on the conceptualization of circuits of knowledge, the paper scrutinizes the extent to which transport policy agendas are framed around various approaches within academia. An extensive literature review reveals that the academic field of transport and mobility is organized around a hegemonic core of “neoclassical” and “sustainable” approaches. Meanwhile, a critique of these dominant approaches is emerging in an attempt to (re)embed mobility issues in urban political economy. This threefold knowledge typology visibly resonates within transport policy agendas in Brussels, where we detect a growth-oriented and largely depoliticized dual hegemony of neoclassical and sustainable narratives, with critical academic voices rarely entering official agendas. The paper concludes with a reflection on the difficulties, yet also the need to mobilize critical academic knowledge in the field of transport and mobility.     

Accessing Flexibility: A Historical Institutional Analysis of Water Use for Oil and Gas Development in Colorado

US Mountain West Water access and allocation institutions have a history of adapting policy and practice to increase flexibility for diverse water uses. We examine how flexible access has developed over time and space by operationalizing the historical institutional (HI) theoretical and methodological framework. We trace historical water access for oil and gas (OG) development in Colorado, working from contemporary water right data to examine historical critical events, policies, and political contexts. OG water use has iteratively shaped water governance institutions in the top OG producing regions of Colorado, Weld, and Garfield Counties. The analysis suggests that to more accurately capture institutional change and continuity in resource allocation systems, an analysis of informal institutions is an essential theoretical contribution to the HI framework. While increased flexibility makes multiple uses easier, policies favor the most economically lucrative beneficial uses and generate issues of transparency, an important consideration for the public’s resource. Future practices of flexibility are contingent on market structures and institutional access mechanisms shaped during previous government policy processes, illuminating the value of the HI framework to inform future water policy.     

Urban growth simulation by incorporating planning policies into a CA-based future land-use simulation model

Urban land-use change is affected by urban planning and government decision-making. Previous urban simulation methods focused only on planning constraints that prevent urban growth from developing in specific regions. However, regional planning produces planning policies that drive urban development, such as traffic planning and development zones, which have rarely been considered in previous studies. This study aims to design two mechanisms based on a cellular automata-based future land-use simulation model to integrate different planning drivers into simulations. The first update mechanism considers the influence of traffic planning, while the second mechanism can model the guiding effect of planning development zones. The proposed mechanisms are applied to the Pearl River Delta region, which is one of the fastest growing areas in China. The first mechanism is validated using simulations from 2000–2013 and demonstrates that simulation accuracy is improved by the consideration of traffic planning. In the simulation from 2013–2052, the two mechanisms are implemented and yield more realistic urban spatial patterns. The simulation outcomes can be employed to identify potential urban expansion inside the master plan. The proposed methods can serve as a useful tool that assists planners in their evaluation of urban evolvement under the impact of different planning policies.     

The participation of core stakeholders in the design of,and challenges to,the US Clean Power Plan

We examine the participation of stakeholders in the rule-making process leading to the design of the US Clean Power Plan (CPP), which was the cornerstone regulation developed during the Obama administration to lower GHG emissions from power plants in the US. Using publicly available information, we identify the core stakeholders that participated in the different stages of the rulemaking process, from the early draft of the rule to its publication in final form, and examine variables that could help explain their decisions to litigate, either against or in favour of the final version of the rule. We show that the ‘pro-CPP’ stakeholders were (a) more likely to participate during the early stages of the rule-making process, attending meetings with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff to discuss rule content, and (b) less likely to get involved during the litigation process. ‘Anti-CPP’ stakeholders, on the other hand, did the opposite, being in general less active during the rulemaking stages, and more active during the litigation stage. However, we also find that the ‘anti-CPP’ stakeholders were more tightly organized as a coalition when compared to the ‘pro-CPP’ stakeholders throughout the process (even in the early stages when they participated less). Our results shed new light on the way advocacy coalitions operate in the climate policy subsystem in the US, and help inform debates about the likelihood of conflict and cooperation across a variety of environmental policy topics.

Key policy insights

• The design of the Clean Power Plan was a long and contentious process in which ‘Pro’ and ‘Anti-CPP’ coalitions operated to support and undermine the rule, respectively.

• ‘Pro-CPP’ stakeholders were more active in meetings organized to discuss the CPP with EPA staff, and in submitting written comments.

• ‘Anti-CPP’ stakeholders were more active during litigation, in response to perceived EPA overreach in designing the rule and negative financial impacts on states’ economies.

• Joint participation by ‘Anti-CPP’ stakeholders in meetings conveyed by the EPA to discuss the potential content of the rule helps explain their joint litigation efforts, which hints at their considerable capacity to self-organize as a coalition throughout the process.

     

The influence of social movements on policies that constrain fossil fuel supply

Mounting evidence suggests that a large portion of the world's fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground to prevent dangerous climate change. Yet, the fossil fuel industry continues to invest in new infrastructure to expand fuel supply. There appears to be a prevailing logic that extraction is inevitable, in spite of growing climate change concerns. Few political leaders seem to be willing to challenge this logic. The absence of adequate political action on climate change has sparked a burgeoning social movement focused on constraining fossil fuel supply. This article describes this movement, and explores the role that social mobilization may play in enabling policies that limit fossil fuel extraction. Drawing from literature on social mobilization and political change, this work: (1) discusses some of the social and political barriers to mobilization focused on restricting fossil fuel supply; (2) describes the pathways through which mobilization efforts may influence climate policy; and (3) highlights insights from studies of successful social movements that have relevance for the issue of fossil fuel extraction. The article concludes with directions for future research on social mobilization focused on supply-side climate policy.

Key policy insights

• Enacting policies to limit fossil fuel supply has proven challenging in many contexts.

• There is renewed interest in the role social movements may play in shifting the political landscape, to make it more likely that policies to restrict fossil fuel extraction may succeed.

• Effective social mobilization requires a combination factors aligning at the right time to influence policy outcomes, such as windows of political opportunity opening, and compelling framing that calls citizens to action.

• Critical examination of the factors that lead to movement success is necessary to understand the circumstances where social mobilization may influence supply-side climate policies.

     

近36年东北地区春玉米气候资源利用率评估

应用1981—2016年中国东北三省170个气象台站的逐日气象资料和50个农业气象观测站的春玉米发育期资料,在前人研究的基础上,采用基于层次分析法和熵权法的组合权重赋权法,对农业气候资源适宜指数模型进行了改进,分析了东北地区春玉米气候资源利用率的时空分布特征。结果表明:东北地区春玉米不同发育阶段的气候资源利用率从大到小排序是,抽雄-成熟期的出苗-拔节期的拔节-抽雄期的播种-出苗期的。从空间分布看,气候资源利用率在播种-出苗期吉林东部的长白山区的最低,热量不足是主要影响因素;出苗-拔节期大兴安岭东部、黑龙江北部和吉林东部长白山区利用率较低,其余大部利用率较高,水分是主要限制因子;拔节-抽雄期吉林和辽宁东部的长白山区的最低;抽雄-成熟期大部分地区利用率较高,且从北到南呈明显递增趋势,黑龙江后期热量不足可能对玉米成熟不利。从时间演变看,播种-出苗期各省利用率在2010年之前增高,之后开始下降,其他发育阶段黑龙江的年代际波动较大,吉林和辽宁的年波动较小。     

The challenges of monitoring national climate policy: learning lessons from the EU

One of the most central and novel features of the new climate governance architecture emerging from the 2015 Paris Agreement is the transparency framework committing countries to provide, inter alia, regular progress reports on national pledges to address climate change. Many countries will rely on public policies to turn their pledges into action. This article focuses on the EU’s experience with monitoring national climate policies in order to understand the challenges that are likely to arise as the Paris Agreement is implemented around the world. To do so, the research employs – for the first time – comparative empirical data submitted by states to the EU’s monitoring system. Our findings reveal how the EU’s predominantly technical interpretation of four international reporting quality criteria – an approach borrowed from reporting on GHG fluxes – has constrained knowledge production and stymied debate on the performance of individual climate policies. Key obstacles to more in-depth reporting include not only political concerns over reporting burdens and costs, but also struggles over who determines the nature of climate policy monitoring, the perceived usefulness of reporting information, and the political control that policy knowledge inevitably generates. Given the post-Paris drive to achieve greater transparency, the EU’s experience offers a sobering reminder of the political and technical challenges associated with climate policy monitoring, challenges that are likely to bedevil the Paris Agreement for decades to come.

Policy relevance

The 2009 Copenhagen summit ushered in a more bottom-up system of international climate governance. Such systems typically depend on strong monitoring approaches to assess past performance and estimate future national contributions over time. This article shows why decision makers at multiple governance levels should pay serious attention to empirical data on the experiences and challenges that have emerged around monitoring in the EU, a self-proclaimed climate leader. The analysis highlights key political and administrative challenges that policy makers will likely encounter in implementing climate policy monitoring and ensuring transparency in the spirit of the Paris Agreement.     

Incorporating blue carbon sequestration benefits into sub-national climate policies

The emissions reduction pledges made by individual countries through the 2015 Paris Agreement represent the current global commitment to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in the face of the enduring climate crisis. Natural lands carbon sequestration and storage are critical for successful pathways to global decarbonization (i.e., as a negative emissions technology). Coastal vegetated habitats maintain carbon sequestration rates exceeding forest sequestration rates on a per unit area basis by nearly two orders of magnitude. These blue carbon habitats and their associated carbon sequestration benefits are vulnerable to losses from land-use change and sea-level rise. Incorporation of blue carbon habitats in climate change policy is one strategy for both maintaining these habitats and conserving significant carbon sequestration capabilities. Previous policy assessments have found the potential for incorporation of coastal carbon sequestration in national-level policies, yet there has – to date – been little inclusion of blue carbon in the national-scale implementation of Paris commitments. Recently, sub-national jurisdictions have gained attention as models for pathways to decarbonization. However, few previous studies have examined sub-national level policy opportunities for operationalizing blue carbon into climate decision-making. California is uniquely poised to integrate benefits from blue carbon into its coastal planning and management and its suite of climate mitigation policies. Here, we evaluated legal authorities and policy contexts addressing sequestration specifically from blue carbon habitats. We synthesized the progressive action in California’s approaches to mitigate carbon emissions including statutory, regulatory, and non-regulatory opportunities to incorporate blue carbon ecosystem service information into state- and local-level management decisions. To illustrate how actionable blue carbon information can be produced for use in decision-making, we conducted a spatial analysis of blue carbon sequestration in several locations in California across multiple agencies and management contexts. We found that the average market values of carbon sequestration services in 2100 ranged from $7,730 to $44,000 per hectare and that the social cost of carbon sequestration value was 1.3 to 2.7 times the market value. We also demonstrated that restoration of small areas with high sequestration rates can be comparable to the sequestration of existing marshes. Our results illustrate how accessible information about carbon sequestration in coastal habitats can be directly incorporated into existing policy frameworks at the sub-national scale. The incorporation of blue carbon sequestration benefits into sub-national climate policies can serve as a model for the development of future policy approaches for negative emissions technologies, with consequences for the success of the Paris Agreement and science-based decarbonization by mid-century.     

Scenario archetypes reveal risks and opportunities for global mountain futures

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are transforming rapidly due to changes in multiple environmental and socioeconomic drivers. However, the complexity and diversity of MtSES present challenges for local communities, researchers and decision makers seeking to anticipate change and promote action towards sustainable MtSES. Participatory scenario planning can reveal potential futures and their interacting dynamics, while archetype analysis aggregates insights from site-based scenarios. We combined a systematic review of the global MtSES participatory scenarios literature and archetype analysis to identify emergent MtSES archetypal configurations. An initial sample of 1983 rendered 42 articles that contained 142 scenarios within which were 852 ‘futures states’. From these future states within the scenarios, we identified 59 desirable and undesirable futures that were common across studies. These ‘common futures’ were grouped into four clusters that correlated significantly with three social-ecological factors (GDP per capita, income inequality, and mean annual temperature). Using these clusters and their associated significant factors, we derived four MtSES scenario archetypal configurations characterized by similar key adaptation strategies, assumptions, risks, and uncertainties. We called these archetypes: (1) “revitalization through effective institutions and tourism”; (2) “local innovations in smallholder farming and forestry”; (3) “upland depopulation and increased risk of hazards”; and (4) “regulated economic and ecological prosperity”. Results indicate risks to be mitigated, including biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, cultural heritage change, loss of connection to the land, weak leadership, market collapse, upland depopulation, increased landslides, avalanches, mudflows and rock falls, as well as climate variability and change. Transformative opportunities lie in adaptive biodiversity conservation, income diversification, adaptation to market fluxes, improving transport and irrigation infrastructure, high quality tourism and preserving traditional knowledge. Despite the uncertainties arising from global environmental changes, these archetypes support better targeting of evidence-informed actions across scales and sectors in MtSES.     

Risk-opportunity analysis for transformative policy design and appraisal

The climate crisis demands a strong response from policy-makers worldwide. The current global climate policy agenda requires technological change, innovation, labour markets and the financial system to be led towards an orderly and rapid low-carbon transition. Yet progress has been slow and incremental. Inadequacies of policy appraisal frameworks used worldwide may be significant contributors to the problem, as they frequently fail to adequately account for the dynamics of societal and technological change. Risks are underestimated, and the economic opportunities from innovation are generally not assessed in practice. Here, we identify root causes of those inadequacies and identify them to structural features of standard analysis frameworks. We use a review of theoretical principles of complexity science and the science of dynamical systems and formulate a generalisation of existing frameworks for policy analysis and the appraisal of outcomes of proposed policy strategies, to help better identify and frame situations of transformational change. We use the term “risk-opportunity analysis” to capture the generalised approach, in which conventional economic cost-benefit analysis is a special case. New guiding principles for policy-making during dynamic and transformational change are offered.