人文地理学学科体系与发展战略要点

本文属于《中国学科及前沿领域发展战略研究（2021—2035）》地理科学学科规划的系列成果之一,写作组在对人文地理学学科发展进行系统梳理与分析判研的基础上,在本文中侧重介绍未来15年的中国人文地理学学科体系与发展战略要点。人文地理学是研究人类活动地理分布格局形成和演变规律的一门学科。随着人类发展临近和进入后工业化阶段,人类活动的经济社会过程对人文地理分布规律的影响越来越重要,社会科学研究思维和方法已成为探讨和理解变化的人文地理过程和格局的重要途径,人文地理学研究方法论也呈现出自然科学和社会科学综合集成的特色。人文地理学研究的成果产出,揭示了人类活动地理分布格局和演变的科学规律,成为调控和优化国土空间开发保护格局的科学基础,在国土空间规划、区域战略和区域政策制定、空间治理现代化等方面有着广泛的应用,人文地理学的科学研究与决策应用之间具有紧密的关系。根据学科发展现状、趋势及主要产出结果,中国人文地理学可按照5个分支学科群进行学科战略布局,包括综合人文地理学、经济地理学、城市地理学、乡村地理学、社会文化地理学和政治地理学。各分支学科在新时期地理科学学科体系下,具有其优先发展领域与重点方向,相互协调,不断创新。     

What happens after climate change adaptation projects end: A community-based approach to ex-post assessment of adaptation projects

Over the last decade, hundreds of climate change adaptation projects have been funded and implemented. Despite the importance of these first-generation adaptation projects for establishing funders and implementors’ “best practices,” very little is known about how early adaptation projects have endured, to what ends, and for whom. In this article, I propose a community-based methodology for ex-post assessment of climate change adaptation projects. This methodology contributes to recognitional justice by asking the individuals and collectives tasked with sustaining adaptation initiatives to define adaptation success and what criteria for success should be assessed. I apply this subjective assessment approach in 10 communities across Ecuador that participated in an internationally funded adaptation project that concluded in 2015. My analysis draws together participatory mapping, walking interviews with local leaders, participant observation, and surveys with former project participants. The results highlight that even adaptation projects that were deemed highly successful at their closure have uncertain futures. I find that the sustainability mechanisms that were envisioned by project implementors have not functioned, and communities are shouldering the burden of reviving failing adaptation interventions. These findings highlight that the current model of episodic funding for climate change adaptation projects and evaluation processes needs to be revisited to acknowledge the long-term challenges faced by communities. This analysis also calls attention to the importance of ex-post assessment for adaptation projects and the potential of subjective assessment approaches for building more ontological and epistemological pluralism in understandings of successful climate change adaptation.     

Thirty years on: Planetary climate planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this principal supra-national institution remains paramount to the project of planetary climate planning and governance. Reflections on this anniversary should serve to recall the contestations through which this foundational institution was formed, and the delegate dynamics that continue to be reproduced in its wake. The contentious debates and political dynamics that afflicted the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee tasked with crafting the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as dissension in the periphery, remain as relevant today as they were three decades ago. Reprising these dynamics through detailed historical and archival analysis, this article excavates the negotiations of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which met in 5 sessions during 1991–1992. The aim is to identify key fault-lines and conflicts in the lead-up to the finalization of the 1992 Convention, in order to demonstrate whose epistemic and normative commitments came to be reflected in the final outcome and to show how the legacy of this process endures to date. I seek to render visible actors and proposals peripheralized in the formation of planetary climate governance to extrapolate normative boundaries and proffer heterodox lessons from the margins.     

Fairness critically conditions the carbon budget allocation across countries

Countries’ nationally determined contributions to mitigate global warming translate to claims of country specific shares of the remaining carbon budget. The remaining global budget is limited by the aim of staying well below 2 °C, however. Here we show how fairness concerns quantitatively condition the allocation of this global carbon budget across countries. Minimal fairness requirements include securing basic needs, attributing historical responsibility for past emissions, accounting for benefits from past emissions, and not exceeding countries’ societally feasible emission reduction rate. The argument in favor of taking into account these fairness concerns reflects a critique of both simple equality- and sovereignty-principled reduction approaches, the former modelled here as the equal-per-capita distribution from now on, the latter as prolonging the inequality of the status-quo levels of emissions into the transformation period (considered a form of “grandfathering”). We find the option most in line with fairness concerns to be a four-fold qualified version of the equal-per-capita approach that incorporates a limited form of grandfathering.