汉石桥湿地自然保护区环境教育体系设计

从汉石桥湿地自然保护区自身特点出发,通过分析受众类型、设计原则、展示形式、内容等方面,对解说系统、展示系统和环境教育活动三方面进行设计,最终形成汉石桥湿地自然保护区的环境教育体系。     

Sustaining marine life beyond boundaries: Options for an implementing agreement for marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

For nearly a decade, governments have been discussing the need to improve efforts to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Support for a new international agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) – an Implementing Agreement – on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in ABNJ has been growing. In June 2012, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, States agreed to take a decision on the development of an international instrument under UNCLOS before the end of the 69th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which runs from September 2014 to August 2015. In follow-up to this commitment, it was agreed to consider the “scope, parameters and feasibility” of this instrument. To inform these international discussions, this article highlights some potential options for the content of a new UNCLOS Implementing Agreement. It first reviews the history of UN discussions, and then elaborates on options to address key elements identified as priorities for States in 2011: marine genetic resources, including the sharing of benefits, area-based management tools, including marine protected areas, environmental impact assessments, capacity-building and the transfer of marine technology. It addresses cross-cutting issues such as the governing principles, institutional structure as well as on other critical points such as High Seas fishing and flag State responsibilities. The article concludes with suggestions on possible next steps in order to succeed in the negotiations for an agreement.     

Integrating environmental variables and WorldView-2 image data to improve the prediction and mapping of Thaumastocoris peregrinus (bronze bug) damage in plantation forests

This study integrated environmental variables together with high spectral resolution WorldView-2 imagery to detect and map Thaumastocoris peregrinus damage in Eucalypt plantation forests in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The WorldView-2 bands, vegetation indices and environmental variables were entered separately into PLS regression models to predict T. peregrinus damage. The datasets were then integrated to test the collective strength in predicting T. peregrinus damage. Important variables were identified by variable importance (VIP) scores and were re-entered into a PLS regression model. The VIP model was then extrapolated to map the severity of damage and predicted T. peregrinus damage with an R² value of 0.71 and a RMSE of 3.26% on an independent test dataset. The red edge and near-infrared bands of the WorldView-2 sensor together with the temperature dataset were identified as important variables in predicting T. peregrinus damage. The results indicate the potential of integrating WorldView-2 data and environmental variables to improve the mapping and monitoring of insect outbreaks in plantation forests. The result is critical for plantation health monitoring using a new sensor which contains important vegetation wavelengths.     

Understanding climate coping as a basis for strategic climate change adaptation – The case of Queenstown-Lake Wanaka,New Zealand

Weather conditions that influence natural resource-based tourist destinations are likely to be affected by climate change, but our understanding of how businesses and destinations manage for present and future conditions is limited. In this study we report on the relationships between weather and tourism activities in the Queenstown-Lake Wanaka region, South Island, New Zealand. Key stakeholder interviews and a workshop form the empirical basis of this paper. Coping range application ideas derived from ecological management literature are used to develop a framework to understand and inform thinking and strategies around how tourism businesses and destinations are currently responding to the weather and perhaps could in future respond to climate change. Results show that within a destination individual businesses have widely varying relationships with the weather, with each type of activity operating within its own coping range to particular environmental gradients, for example temperature. Coping, which can be observed outside the ‘ideal’ range of a particular environmental gradient, requires business adjustments so as to cope with increasingly marginal conditions, up to a Critical Stop Point – the ultimate threshold. The data suggest that increased need for adjustments impacts on business viability, and more planned adaptation measures would be necessary to increase viability under increasingly detrimental climatic conditions. Discussion at a destination level workshop indicates that at and beyond thresholds, keystone industry and destination level strategic adaptation planning is required to ensure the viability of the destination as a whole.     

Forest law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon: Costs and income effects

Despite recent success in reducing forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon, additional forest conservation efforts, for example, through ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD+), could significantly contribute to global climate-change mitigation. Economic incentives, such as payments for environmental services could promote conservation, but deforestation often occurs on land without crucial tenure-security prerequisites. Improving the enforcement of existing regulatory disincentives thus represents an important element of Brazil's anti-deforestation action plan. However, conservation law enforcement costs and benefits have been much less studied than for conditional payments. We develop a conceptual framework and a spatially explicit model to analyze field-based regulatory enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon. We validate our model, based on historical deforestation and enforcement mission data from 2003 to 2008. By simulating the current conservation law enforcement practice, we analyze the costs of liability establishment and legal coercion for alternative conservation targets, and evaluate corresponding income impacts. Our findings suggest that spatial patterns of both deforestation and inspection costs markedly influence enforcement patterns and their income effects. Field-based enforcement is a highly cost-effective forest conservation instrument from a regulator's point of view, but comes at high opportunity costs for land users. Payments for environmental services could compensate costs, but will increase budget outlays vis-à-vis a command-and-control dominated strategy. Both legal and institutional challenges have to be overcome to make conservation payments work at a larger scale. Decision-makers may have to innovatively combine incentive and disincentive-based policy instruments in order to make tropical forest conservation both financially viable and socially compatible.     

Can Protection Motivation Theory predict pro-environmental behavior? Explaining the adoption of electric vehicles in the Netherlands

Scholars have proposed that the Protection Motivation Theory provides a valuable framework to explain pro-environmental choices, by employing a wide set of predictors, such as the costs and benefits of current (maladaptive) behavior as well as prospective adaptive behavior. However, no comprehensive empirical tests of the Protection Motivation Theory in the slow onset environmental risk domain have been published yet to our knowledge. This paper aims at closing this gap. We first conceptualized the Protection Motivation Theory for the use in this environmental domain. Next, we present results of a questionnaire study among a large representative sample of Dutch drivers that showed that the Protection Motivation Theory is a relevant theory for modeling different indicators of full electric vehicle adoption. Notably, all theoretical antecedents proved to be significant predictors of different adoption indicators. Respondents were particularly more likely to adopt an electric vehicle when they perceived the negative consequences caused by conventional vehicles as more severe, and when they expected electric vehicles to decrease these consequences. The most important barriers for electric vehicle adoption were perceived high monetary and non-monetary costs of electric vehicles, and benefits associated with the use of a conventional vehicle. Interestingly, we found that environmental risks are more prominent in predicting close adoption indicators; while energy security risks are more prominent in predicting distant adoption indicators. As expected, our findings suggest that both collective concerns and individual concerns predict different indicators of adoption. Individual concerns (in particular perceived costs of driving an electric vehicle) played a more prominent role when predicting close measures of adoption, while collective concerns (e.g., perceived severity of environmental and energy security risks) played a somewhat more prominent role when predicting distant measures of adoption. Implications for research and practice are provided.     

Safe and just operating spaces for regional social-ecological systems

Humanity faces a major global challenge in achieving wellbeing for all, while simultaneously ensuring that the biophysical processes and ecosystem services that underpin wellbeing are exploited within scientifically informed boundaries of sustainability. We propose a framework for defining the safe and just operating space for humanity that integrates social wellbeing into the original planetary boundaries concept (Rockström et al., 2009a,b) for application at regional scales. We argue that such a framework can: (1) increase the policy impact of the boundaries concept as most governance takes place at the regional rather than planetary scale; (2) contribute to the understanding and dissemination of complexity thinking throughout governance and policy-making; (3) act as a powerful metaphor and communication tool for regional equity and sustainability. We demonstrate the approach in two rural Chinese localities where we define the safe and just operating space that lies between an environmental ceiling and a social foundation from analysis of time series drawn from monitored and palaeoecological data, and from social survey statistics respectively. Agricultural intensification has led to poverty reduction, though not eradicated it, but at the expense of environmental degradation. Currently, the environmental ceiling is exceeded for degraded water quality at both localities even though the least well-met social standards are for available piped water and sanitation. The conjunction of these social needs and environmental constraints around the issue of water access and quality illustrates the broader value of the safe and just operating space approach for sustainable development.     

Going green or going away: Environmental regulation,economic geography and firms’ strategies in China’s pollution-intensive industries

The high-growth, resource- and pollution-intensive industrialization model that China has pursued has caused severe environmental pollution and deterioration, particularly in a number of clusters in the coastal regions of East and Southeast China, where the Reform and Opening-up policies first started. The lack of uptake of environmental norms/values, deficit of regulatory enforcement of environmental policies, and insufficient institutional capacity have been compounding factors. As environmental standards were raised by China’s central government, the enforcement of environmental regulation has been compromised more in inland China than in coastal regions, due to China’s “decentralized governance structure” and regional disparity in terms of both economic development and environmental pollution. This paper therefore argues that rising environmental regulations, as well as firm characteristics, regional hub effect and political environment, have all been particularly important in forcing China’s pollution-intensive enterprises to restructure their production, through innovation, upgrading, geographical relocation, outsourcing and plant closure, especially in China’s coastal regions. It contributes to recent studies by developing a heuristic analytical framework that aims to be sensitive to the impacts of environmental regulation, political environment and regional hub effect over firm restructuring, but which does so by stressing these impacts are simultaneously inflected by the nature and attributes of firms. The empirical analysis suggests a roughly inverted “U”-shaped relationship between firm relocation tendency and firm size (or firm capability), resulting from complex interactions between political environment, regional hub effect and environmental regulation.     

The new politics of pastoralism: Identity,justice and global activism

Concerns with the politics and practices of resource rights and access are integral to contemporary debates over environmental justice. Struggles over identity politics, especially the strategic articulation and deployment of particular identities at diverse geographical scales, have recently emerged as important mediators of justice claims in respect of resources rights, but also of recognition and procedural justice. To date, critical, multi-scalar analyses of identity-based claims for environmental justice have focused largely on the indigenous peoples’ movement. In doing so, they have failed to embrace an emergent dimension of identity-based, trans-scalar justice, namely the fledgling global pastoralists’ movement, the empirical focus for this paper. In the early years of the 21st century mobile pastoralists have begun to carve out new global spaces, through which diverse groups have attempted to negotiate common ground and forge common identities in their struggles for justice. In particular, mobile pastoralists have become increasingly visible in conservation politics and contests over land rights as they lay claim to both discursive and material ground as ‘custodians of the commons’ in an era of global climatic change. This paper draws on empirical work amongst pastoralists, NGOs and activists from Kenya, Mongolia and Spain to explore these identities, their implications for resource rights and access and the multi-scalar chains of accountability and legitimacy between global activists and their local constituents.     

The impact of anoxia on pelagic macrofauna during the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (Early Jurassic)

Extreme environmental change during the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event had widespread impacts on marine biota. This study provides new evidence, from the Yorkshire coast sections, UK, that the event was associated with periods of elevated fish and ammonite mortality. Using a synthesis of pelagic macrofaunal changes, benthic macrofaunal data and geochemical proxies we show that there are stratigraphical correlations between: (1) pelagic macrofaunal ranges and abundance, (2) benthic macrofaunal abundance, and (3) geochemical proxies that indicate deoxygenation. We identify eight stratigraphical intervals of differing character. Results suggest two major phases of relatively persistent deoxygenation with photic zone euxinia. The cyclostratigraphic timescale indicates that each phase lasted at least tens of thousands of years. Belemnite migration during the event probably resulted from increased seawater temperatures and low food supply similar to that observed for many marine taxa, including squid, within the present-day oceans.