Public climate-change skepticism,energy preferences and political participation

Many studies have shown a general decline of public concern about climate change or vice versa a rise in public climate-change skepticism, in particular in the U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon countries. There is a vivid debate on whether this is a global phenomenon, on which factors explain the decline, and on the broader societal implications of these trends in the context of the transformation toward a low-carbon society. We add to this literature by presenting the results of a recent general population survey in Germany in which we looked for systematic linkages between public climate-change skepticism on one hand, and energy preferences and political participation on the other. Germany is an interesting testbed as it is currently involved in a large-scale restructuring of its system of energy supply toward renewable energy sources (the “Energiewende”). Our results indicate that climate-change skepticism has not diffused widely in Germany, but that it correlates with less support of renewable energy sources. However, skepticism correlates negatively with political participation, and there is no strong political outlet for public climate-change skepticism in Germany. Alternative potential barriers for the successful implementation of the “Energiewende” are also discussed.     

Déjà vu or something new? The adaptation concept in the climate change literature

This paper reflects on the resurgence and meaning of the adaptation concept in the current climate change literature. We explore the extent to which the early political economic critique of the adaptation concept has influenced how it is used in this literature. That is, has the current conceptualization been enriched by the political economic critique of the 1970s and 1980s and thus represent something new? Or is the concept used in a way today that echoes previous debates; that is, is this a déjà vu experience? To answer this question, we review the early political economic critique of the natural hazards school’s interpretations of vulnerability and adaptation. We then examine the revival of the adaptation concept in the climate change literature and discuss its main interpretations. For the purposes of this paper, the climate change literature encompasses the four IPCC reports and adaptation-focused articles in four scholarly journals: Global Environmental Change, Climatic Change, Climate and Development, and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change. Our content analysis shows the dominance (70%) of “adjustment adaptation” approaches, which view climate impacts as the main source of vulnerability. A much smaller percentage (3%) of articles focus on the social roots of vulnerability and the necessity for political–economic change to achieve “transformative adaptation.” A larger share (27%) locates risk in both society and the biophysical hazard. It promotes “reformist adaptation,” typically through “development,” to reduce vulnerability within the prevailing system. We conclude with a discussion of continuity and change in the conceptualization of adaptation, and point to new research directions.     

A new look at population change and regional development in Aotearoa New Zealand

In New Zealand, population change is interlinked with regional development. Places growing in population attract regional investment, while regional investment—or lack thereof—can change migration patterns. However, to determine the appropriate response to population change for a community, it is important to understand that population change involves much more than “just” migration. Specifically, it involves interactions between the three components of population change: natural change (births minus deaths), net migration (international and internal) and population ageing (changing cohort size). For example, migration can be negative, but growth can be positive due to underlying natural increase or growth in cohort size. Responses need to differ, depending on these drivers. The goal of this article is to provide new insights into these interactions using data for 275 cities, towns and rural centres (hereafter “urban places”) in New Zealand for the period 1976 to 2013. The results show that natural change has been consistently positive for most urban places up to the present, although projections indicate that in the future this component will become negative across much of the country. At the same time, net migration shows considerable spatial variation, not only in terms of volume, but also direction (negative or positive), which differs markedly by age. A net gain of people of retirement age can offset a net loss of young adults to deliver overall growth, and vice‐versa, but the two have very different implications for longer term growth. An analysis of the drivers of net migration using GIS and machine learning techniques provides an indication of the importance of economic conditions (land‐use and access to markets), lifestyle, access to essential services (hospitals and education) and their interaction with age in regional change. The results show that population age is the best predictor of migration. Younger people are moving to cities for tertiary education and work and older people near or in retirement are moving to smaller lifestyle towns but also want to be close to amenities such as hospitals and international airports. The research also shows that natural lifestyle characteristics (landscape and climate), in combination with age are just as important as economic conditions for understanding migration. Regional development, such as infrastructure that helps business (ports and services) is important for the working age population but not necessarily the retirement age group. When regional development, age/life‐cycle stage and lifestyle come together, such as in Queenstown and Tauranga, net migration gain is high.     

Urbanization and class-produced natures: Vegetable gardens in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region

This paper examines urban vegetable gardens in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona (MRB) in the context of a political ecological approach. We argue that these gardens provide an interesting example of how the urbanization process creates particular “socionatures” linked in this case to retired members of the working class who occupy (often as squatters) and transform the interstices left by the expanding city in order to produce food at a small scale. We document how these vegetable gardens are the product of a peculiar form of the recent urban history of the area, and also how they are increasingly under pressure due to the rapid process of sprawl now characterizing the expansion of the built environment in the Barcelona region. Vegetable gardens also highlight the contradictions of public policies in managing urban development, since the general attitude towards their elimination from the urban landscape stands in opposition to many of the sustainability initiatives such as the “greening of cities” promoted by city councils in this area.The empirical analysis was carried out in the municipality of Terrassa, one of the largest cities in the MRB, and also one with a higher number of vegetable gardens. We interviewed 132 plot users and obtained data about the legal status of gardens, their size and appearance, and crops grown, as well as the reasons for pursuing this activity. Our results show that, in general, this is an activity undertaken by people over 60 years old, often retired members of the working class that migrated to Catalonia from other Spanish regions in the 1960s and 1970s, and that use these spaces for a variety of reasons (personal goals, support to their families, and also as a bond to their rural past). Finally, we develop some conclusions regarding vegetable gardens in which we maintain that different social classes may create different natures but that class and power relations appear to legitimize some of these natures over others, for example, private and public gardens having a much larger social and institutional appeal and support than the vegetable gardens of the retired workers.     

Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States

We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States.     

张其昀的地理思想和学术成就

张其昀(1901—1985)是我国近代地理学的创建者之一。他在地理教育以及人文地理学的广泛领域卓有建树。本文阐述他的学术成就,并探讨他的地理思想。     

Estimating the Accuracy of Geographic Variation in Indigenous Population Counts

The ABS 2006 Post-Enumeration Survey was extended to include a sample of localities from the whole of Australia, thereby providing an estimate of census net undercount reflective of the enumeration in remote Indigenous settlements for the first time. The results revealed substantial undercounting of the Indigenous population in certain jurisdictions. At the same time, census counts in many locations were substantially higher than demographic factors could account for. The analytical and policy issues that arise from this revolve around a simple question: what credence can we give to observed spatial patterns of Indigenous population change? This paper seeks to provide an answer by establishing the spatial relationship between population change and net migration at the small area level. This reveals the detailed geography of census undercount and ‘overcount’ with the former common in remote areas and the latter most evident in regional towns and cities. The findings raise important policy issues about the proper interpretation of Indigenous population change data and the nature of estimates used to determine fiscal resourcing for Indigenous policies and programs.     

On-line with the people in line: Internet development and flexible control of the net in Vietnam

Information and communication technologies in general and the internet in particular are often praised as a means for enhancing democracy and providing new spaces for the development of an egalitarian civil society, in which all members of society can participate equally. However, there are various possibilities to monitor, manipulate and control cyberspace, of which the internet is an essential part. This paper examines the efforts of the Vietnamese government and the Vietnamese Communist Party to control cyberspace as well as the physical spaces through which the virtual world is accessed. There are attempts to control the internet in a similar fashion as the traditional print and broadcast media. Any such control is neither absolute nor without effect. Instead control is exercised in a highly flexible manner, allowing for some officially unwanted or illegal activity to occur. At the same time authorities can apply internet regulations, if it serves their political objectives as for example strengthening the Party’s official monopoly on political power. The paper traces the development of the internet as well as the regulatory environment surrounding it and analyses the inconsistent enforcement of regulations. The analysis is framed in the theoretical works of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas.     

Resilience compromised: Producing vulnerability to climate and market among quinoa producers in Southwestern Bolivia

Climate change is already affecting rural communities along the high Andean plateau, but it is just one of many stresses that Andean people experience on a regular basis. This paper examines the experiences of quinoa farmers in Southwestern Bolivia as they faced the overlapping crises of protracted drought and market disruption in 2017. Drawing on political ecologies of resilience, this paper argues that the ability of rural people to cope with this double exposure was already compromised by ecological and social vulnerabilities produced through the development trajectories of the previous two decades. These development strategies generated three overlapping processes: 1) neoliberal entanglements involving specialization in quinoa production, marketization, and individualization of livelihoods in ways that undermined collective action; 2) new relationships of debt that tied households to monetized response paths and undermined flexibility; and 3) the degradation of soils through extensification, overproduction, and industrialization of quinoa production. This paper argues that while climate and market disruptions are not to be dismissed, we must historicize the double exposure to also ask how resilience and vulnerability to such challenges are generated in the first place.     

Population structure and conservation status of the red gorgonian Paramuricea clavata (Risso, 1826) in the Eastern Adriatic Sea

Gorgonians are important structuring species of the Mediterranean hard‐bottom communities that are threatened by disturbances such as increasing seawater temperature, mucilaginous events and destructive fishing, among others. In this study we assessed for the first time the population structure and conservation status of one of the most common gorgonians in the Eastern Adriatic Sea, the red gorgonian Paramuricea clavata. During late spring 2009, nine populations dwelling between 30 and 50 m depth were examined by SCUBA diving along 200 km of the Croatian coastline. The density ranged between 7 and 20 colonies·m^?2. The mean and maximum colony heights were 31.2 ± 22.7 cm (±SD) and 138 cm, respectively. Two main patterns of P. clavata size frequency distributions were observed: the first one with a higher proportion of juveniles (~30%) observed mostly in the northernmost populations, and the second one with a higher proportion of larger colonies (>25% of colonies >40 cm in height). Regarding the disturbance impact level, the proportion of healthy colonies (with <10% of injured surface) was high in almost all of the studied populations (>60%) and the mean extent of injury (i.e. denuded axis or epibiosis) was 9.7 ± 4% (±SD), indicating low impacts. Contrasting population size structures with high recruitment in mature populations provides new insights into the demographic structure of the Mediterranean gorgonian forests dwelling in their upper bathymetric range (<50 m depth). Furthermore, these size structures and the low impact levels suggest a current favorable conservation status of the studied populations in the Eastern Adriatic Sea and provide a baseline for their monitoring in the future.