In government we trust? Micro-business adaptation to climate change in four post-colonial and transitional economies of China

Public expectations of government influence private action for managing climate change risks. Institutional neglect or incompetence result in a loss of trust in public institutions, consequently discouraging the public from taking added responsibility for risk management. This has been explained in terms of social contract, but evidence suggests that a politics of distrust can reinforce alternative social drivers of action, rather than displacing action. This is empirically confirmed by the present study, which examines the tendencies for adopting private protective measures across a gradient of institutional trust. Surveys were conducted in four jurisdictions within China that operate under two different political-economic systems, namely, Hong Kong and Macao (liberal market economy), and Zhuhai and Sanya (socialist market economy). Structured interviews were conducted with 569 business operators to explore how their stated adaptation practice is related to institutional trust and social capital. We found that trust predicted action only in Sanya, which is characterized by a high level of public confidence in authorities. In places of lower institutional trust, social capital became a salient and powerful driver of action. The weakening of the social contracts in Hong Kong and Macao turned their people to alternative social mechanisms. We explain the results in terms of the development trajectories, socio-political norms and institutional settings of these jurisdictions. This study provides insights into how adaptation practice can be mediated by the consequences of a change in political leadership, policy, or governance arrangements that alters the relationship of trust.     

Shaping climate policy in the housing sector in northern Chinese cities

What are relevant urban development investment strategies for improving building energy efficiency (BEE) and decarbonizing the urban district heating supply in rapidly urbanizing China? Different trajectories of BEE and energy supply technologies are compared in the urban context in a northern Chinese city. Vigorous improvement of BEE will significantly enhance the prospective financial capacity to facilitate deployment of backstop technologies (e.g. carbon capture and storage) in order to decarbonize the energy supply and achieve the long-term targets of low-carbon buildings. Carbon finance instruments should be used to facilitate public policy to accompany the necessary transition in the urban development process. The government-run efficiency procurement scheme will overcome the problem of insufficient incentive and high transaction costs associated with individual Clean Development Mechanism projects. Appropriate investment strategies (allocation of financial resources over the time frame) will allow local governments to harness the large potentials of carbon emissions mitigation while minimizing the risk of long-term technical lock-in in the built environment in Chinese cities.     

Impact of justice and solidarity variables on the acceptability of managed realignment

Sea-level rise due to climate change will have significant effects on coastal areas and populations. Adaptation policies recommend the managed realignment of the most vulnerable assets and activities. Despite their medium- and long-term benefits, these policies face significant friction due to social acceptability in the communities where they are implemented.

This article investigates the hypothesis that respecting principles of justice in the implementation of managed realignment should increase its acceptability. We compare preferences of those people who are exposed to the risk of climate-change-induced flooding and those who are not, as regards funding managed retreat policies and defining compensation criteria for assets at risk. The main theories of social justice provide the four principles included in the analysis: efficiency, need, responsibility and priority assigned to property rights.

A choice experiment survey was conducted with 258 residents of coastal and hinterland communities in the south of France. Four attributes were selected to define the managed realignment policy: the dialogue arrangements, the implementation period, the policy implementation schedule and the cost. The results show support for a relatively fast launch of these policies (within 15 years) but in stages and through a process of dialogue with the population. People's perceptions of the funding criteria reveal a preference for national solidarity. Finally, national funding of managed retreat policies and compensation criteria based on market prices have a significant positive influence on the acceptability of managed realignment policies, whereas introducing responsibility-based compensation criteria tends to favour the status quo over the adaptation policy.

Policy relevance

Prioritization of the funding criteria reveals the preference for national solidarity. Preferences for the justice criteria underpinning compensation reveal a great diversity of values. Besides implantation modalities, preferences for managed realignment policies depend on which level they are implemented at, on the expropriation criteria (the emphasis given to property rights, i.e. market price), on the attachment (people perceived as worst off, i.e. the property is their main residence rather than a second home or they have lower levels of income) and on the degree of responsibility (related to the date of purchase, i.e. on the information given at the time on the risk).     

The role of social norms in climate adaptation: Mediating risk perception and flood insurance purchase

Flood insurance plays an important role in climate adaptation by recovering insured losses in the event of catastrophic flooding. Voluntary adoption of flood insurance has been seen as a function of risk perception that is shaped by social norms. This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between these factors. It is based on a household survey conducted in the eastern cities of Australia and involving a total of 501 randomly selected residents. Results of a path analysis show that the likelihood of having flood insurance cover was associated with perceived social norms, but not perceived flood risk. In addition, perceived norms and risk were statistically related to each other. It is concluded that social norms played a mediating role between insuring decision and risk perception. Risk perception might influence the insuring decision indirectly through shaping perception of social norms. This implies that adaptive behaviour is not necessarily a function of risk perception, but an outcome of its impacts upon the ways in which the individuals situate themselves in their social circles or the society. There is a feedback process in which individual perceptions of risk manifest as both a cause and effect, shaping and being shaped by the socio-cultural context.     

Novel insights on intensity and typology of direct human-nature interactions in protected areas through passive crowdsourcing

Recent advances in geotagging, sharing and automatically analyzing online content from Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer unprecedented opportunities for the analysis of human-nature interactions. Previous studies in this field, however, offer limited insights regarding the benefits of automated content analysis especially at large scales, biases arising from the selection of SNS sources, and the predictive power of visitation models based on SNS data. We explore quantitative and qualitative aspects related to intensity, interests and sentiments associated with on-site experiences in 568 protected areas in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. We analyze counts and content of >100,000 photographs and tweets from four different SNSs, calibrate visitation models and predict visitation in unmonitored sites, cluster sites based on the typology of human-nature interactions reflected in online photographs, and characterize the polarity of sentiments associated with experiences in individual sites and clusters thereof. We find benefits in combining data from multiple sources and controlling for biases related to sites’ photogenicity and type of human-nature interactions. Our results suggest that current best estimates of visitation in unmonitored sites underestimate by 39% the actual number of visits. We discuss how the techniques and findings in this study are applicable in the broader context of the management and conservation of sites of environmental or cultural interest.     

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) in the face of external biophysical stressors

Economic instruments such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes are increasingly promoted to protect ecosystems (and their associated ecosystem services) that are threatened by processes of local and global change. Biophysical stressors external to a PES site, such as forest fires, pollution, sea level rise, and ocean acidification, may undermine ecosystem stability and sustained ecosystem service provision, yet their threats and impacts are difficult to account for within PES scheme design. We present a typology of external biophysical stressors, characterizing them in terms of stressor origin, spatial domain and temporal scale. We further analyse how external stressors can potentially impinge on key PES parameters, as they (1) threaten ecosystem service provision, additionality and permanence, (2) add challenges to the identification of PES providers and beneficiaries, and (3) add complexity and costs to PES mechanism design. Effective PES implementation under external stressors requires greater emphasis on the evaluation and mitigation of external stressors, and further instruments that can accommodate associated risks and uncertainties. A greater understanding of external stressors will increase our capacity to design multi-scale instruments to conserve important ecosystems in times of environmental change.     

试论实施防震减灾社会动员的途径与方法

0前言中国是一个多地震国家,频繁而严重的地震灾害给人民生命和财产带来了巨大的损失,防震减灾任务任重而道远。回良玉副总理2004年在全国防震减灾工作会议讲话中指出:“防震减灾是全社会共同的责任,要广泛动员社会各方的力量,积极投入到这项事业中来,使防震减灾逐步成为全社会的自觉行动。”因此,总结近40年我国防震减灾工作和改革开放的实践经验,对社会公众进行各种防震减灾宣传教育,广泛动员全社会力量,建立健全防震减灾社会动员机制,增强全社会防震减灾意识,是提高我国综合防震减灾能力,有效地促进地震灾害综合防御各项措施落实的重要途…     

地震信息社会服务与地震安全探讨

提高地震安全,减轻地震灾害造成的经济损失和人员伤亡,地震信息社会服务是不可缺少的途径。地震信息主要包括法规建设、地震监测、震害防御和应急救援资料,服务内容包括法规宣传和普及、地震灾害影响服务、工程建设监管服务和防灾避震服务等。通过地震信息社会服务,可以增强社会防灾意识,提高建设工程安全,减轻地震灾害损失。     

The PISA grammar decodes diverse human–environment approaches

Human–environment interactions are studied by several groups of scholars who have elaborated different approaches to describe, analyze, and explain these interactions, and eventually propose paths for management. The SETER project (Socio-Ecological Theories and Empirical Research) analyzed and compared how “flag-holders” of distinct school of thought in human–environment scholarship approached a number of empirical problems of environmental management. This paper presents the findings from this experiment by concentrating on how representatives of four schools of thought approached one of these case studies: the plant health crisis in greenhouse tomato production in south of France. Our analysis suggests that these approaches share a common conceptual vocabulary composed of four explanatory elements of change (Power, Incentives, System and Adaptation-PISA). We argue that what distinguishes these schools from one another is the syntax—the “rules” by which researchers in each of the sub-disciplines tend to organize the components of this shared conceptual vocabulary. In other words, the schools under scrutiny are differentiated not so much by what they speak of, but rather in what order, or hierarchy, do they tend to rank the importance and/or the sequence of each of these concepts in human–environment explanations. The results of our experiment support the view that communication and cooperation across the diverse human–environment traditions is possible and productive. At the same time, however, we argue that it is the distinctiveness of the claims yielded by these different schools of thought that augment our collective understanding of complex socio-ecological problems. Attempts to integrate these perspectives in one unitary approach would undermine the intellectual wealth necessary to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.     

Social capital and community preparation for urban flooding in China

Social capital can enhance community resilience to environmental change. Productive and trusted relations among social actors and effectual social norms can help local residents share resources, information and risks. The main objective of our study is to understand the ways in which social attributes and risk considerations influence adoption of resilient economic measures by individuals for reducing potential losses due to catastrophic rainstorm and flooding. This article provides evidence from China on how social capital contributes to anticipatory adaptation to environmental change. The inquiry is based on structured interviews with local residents of Tianjin, a flood-prone port city in China, and a standard regression analysis. Findings show that the intention to make preparation increases with the levels of social expectation, social relationship, and institutional trust. Perceived risk and damage experience, however, have no significant impacts. This suggests that building social capacity and trust will be more effective in enhancing community resilience than merely increasing awareness of hazard risks. We call for greater efforts on strengthening the capacity of formal and informal communal institutions. The structural changes required, however, are challenging.