Local level climate justice? Adaptation finance and vulnerability reduction

Climate change creates a double inequality through the inverse distribution of risk and responsibility. Developed states are responsible, but are forecast to confront only moderate adverse effects; least developed states are not culpable and yet experience significant threats to livelihoods, assets and security. Adaptation finance addresses inequity by developed states facilitating/funding behaviour adjustments necessary for exposed communities to lessen climate risk. This article investigates the ground-level effectiveness of adaptation finance in climate vulnerable villages across Malawi, while controlling for disparities in vulnerability. Malawi and selected districts are both climate vulnerable and significant recipients of adaptation finance. This concludes a larger top–down multi-scalar analysis of climate justice, which applies the distribution and effectiveness of adaptation finance as a proxy. The study avails of participatory assessments to compare actions of villages receiving adaptation finance with those engaging in autonomous and informal adaptations. Adaptation finance villages: (a) address more climate related risks; and (b) enhance agency, security and sustainably lessen climate vulnerability. Conversely, informal practice villages attend to a lower proportion of climate risks and often develop short-term strategies with less enduring vulnerability reduction. Vulnerable communities receiving adaptation finance do change behaviours to reduce climate risk and thus secure local level climate justice.     

Racing climate change: Collaboration and conflict in California's global climate change policy arena

Media accounts routinely refer to California's Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32), the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, as “landmark” climate change legislation. On its surface, this label is an accurate reflection of the state's forward-thinking stance across many environmental issues including pesticides, toxic substances, solid waste, and air quality. For all its promise, however, AB 32 can also be considered a low point in the landscape of conflict between state environmental regulators and California's environmental justice movement. While the legislation included several provisions to address the procedural and distributive dimensions of environmental justice, the implementation of AB 32 has been marked by heated conflict. The most intense conflicts over AB 32 revolve around the primacy of market mechanisms such as “cap and trade.” This article examines the drivers and the manifestations of these dynamics of collaboration and conflict between environmental justice advocates and state regulators, and pays particular attention to the scalar and racialized quality of the neoliberal discourse. The contentiousness of climate change politics in California offers scholars and practitioners around the world a cautionary tale of how the best intentions for integrating environmental justice principles into climate change policy do not necessarily translate into implementation and how underlying racialized fractures can upend collaboration between state and social movement actors.     

How to speak for aquifers and people at the same time: Environmental justice and counter-network formation at a hazardous waste site

A common source of conflict at hazardous waste sites in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program is the accuracy of scientific investigations and representations produced to inform cleanup decisions. Liable firms often produce these technical representations themselves, and communities surrounding sites frequently argue that such “voluntary” investigations are compromised by conflicts of interest. In order to challenge the representations of powerful firms, locally situated actors often develop trans-local connections with expertise and equipment concentrated at distant centers of calculation. Although some interpret the spatial politics of such connecting in terms of “jumping scales,” another important spatial dimension of this network construction is differential positioning. In a conflict over groundwater models at the St. Regis Superfund Site in Minnesota, the counter-network that emerged to challenge the owner’s representations of the site positioned some actors as “outsiders” and others as “insiders.” This differential positioning enabled the counter-network to balance the need to demonstrate the reliability and impartiality of its claims with the requirement to maintain its accountability to local public interests. I argue that these requirements result from the prevalent view of the science-policy interface, which assumes a rigid separation between science and politics. Nonetheless, the conflict over groundwater at St. Regis reveals how at the science-policy interface, speaking for things and speaking for people are thoroughly entangled.     

县级国土空间基础信息平台建设

以县级市湖北省枝江市的业务需求为例,分析了国土空间基础信息平台的总体架构和主要功能,从地图服务、数据服务、应用服务以及运维等层面进行了探讨;并以国土空间规划"一张图"实施监督信息系统为例,对基于国土空间基础信息平台的开发工作进行了阐述,对平台的下一步技术探索方向提出了建议.     

Mining conflicts and transformative politics: A comparison of Intag (Ecuador) and Mount Ida (Turkey) environmental struggles

This article argues for an understanding of local socio-environmental struggles as political spaces that present possibilities for the transformation of subjectivities of the social actors participating in them. Relying on Gramsci’s theorization of state and society relations the paper analyzes whether and how these struggles foment challenges to hegemonic understandings and practices of development, environment and democracy. The analysis builds on a comparison between two mining conflicts—one in Ecuador’s Intag region, the other in Turkey’s Mount Ida region. The paper suggests that the two conflicts differ in the ways political subjectivities of the peasants opposing the mining projects were constructed. In Intag, the peasants framed their opposition to the copper mine project as a struggle for their right to have control over their lives and territories. They have participated in the construction of a vision of local development based on the promotion of sustainable economic activities, and of an organized society actively building its future. In Mount Ida, the peasants resisting gold mining have emphasized the distributional inequalities; yet have not linked their concerns to broader rights-based discourses or political and ethical principles. Their opposition has been confined to a particularistic defense of the place. The paper discusses the role of the state in the making of subjects, and the relationships among the resistance actors as crucial factors accounting for these differences.     

煤炭地质单位人才招聘浅议

招聘工作是企业人力资源管理活动的一个基础性环节,它是企业人力资源获取的高素质人才的主要途径,招聘工作的好坏关系到企事业单位的生存和发展。在日益竞争激烈的社会里,企业的招聘工作一旦失误单位将蒙受巨大的损失。针对煤炭地质单位在招聘环节中存在的一些问题,结合航测遥感局人才招聘工作的实践,对煤炭地质单位如何做好人才招聘工作进行了思考和探讨。     

Ethics and public perception of climate change: Exploring the Christian voices in the US public debate

Climate change raises many questions with strong moral and ethical dimensions that are important to address in climate-policy formation and international negotiations. Particularly in the United States, the public discussion of these dimensions is strongly influenced by religious groups and leaders. Over the past few years, many religious groups have taken positions on climate change, highlighting its ethical dimensions. This paper aims to explore these ethical dimensions in the US public debate in relation to public support for climate policies. It analyzes in particular the Christian voices in the US public debate on climate change by typifying the various discourses. Three narratives emerge from this analysis: ‘conservational stewardship’ (conserving the ‘garden of God’ as it was created), ‘developmental stewardship’ (turning the wilderness into a garden as it should become) and ‘developmental preservation’ (God's creation is good and changing; progress and preservation should be combined). The different narratives address fundamental ethical questions, dealing with stewardship and social justice, and they provide proxies for public perception of climate change in the US. Policy strategies that pay careful attention to the effects of climate change and climate policy on the poor – in developing nations and the US itself – may find support among the US population. Religious framings of climate change resonate with the electorates of both progressive and conservative politicians and could serve as bridging devices for bipartisan climate-policy initiatives.     

Inventing Geography: Writing as a Social Justice Pedagogy

Abstract

A critical geographic pedagogy of writing can help students participate in public life by gaining access to the means of knowledge production. Drawing on pedagogical and composition theory, this article analyzes student papers from an introductory-level geography course to show how geography teachers can create assignments that broaden the scope of student agency and expand access to power. This is one way to promote social justice in the classroom because it fosters habits and skills of critical citizenship and participatory democracy instead of passive, consumption-oriented attitudes. Students are better able to position themselves as active members of a community and as agents in the process of critically reshaping knowledge about the world.     

Territorial cohesion trends in Inner Scandinavia: The role of cross-border cooperation – INTERREG-A 1994–2010

The article examines whether the goal of territorial cohesion can be achieved in the area designated ‘Inner Scandinavia’ through the interventions of the European Union's cross-border cooperation programme, INTERREG-A. The programme supports a polycentric development of the Inner Scandinavian border region, which is one of three Swedish-Norwegian INTERREG-A sub-programmes. Since 1994 substantial progress has been made in the Swedish-Norwegian INTERREG-A programme, which recently ended its third generation (2007–2013), with the overarching goals of strengthening the attractiveness and competitiveness of the border region. Progress can be witnessed in the improved selectivity of the projects, which have become fewer, with more funding and more focus on innovation, and of the involved partners, with increasing participation by universities and research centres. However, despite the maturity of the Nordic cross-border programme, many challenges lie ahead. In general, the Swedish-Norwegian border region continues to lag behind in the Scandinavian socio-economic context, in which the main urban agglomerations (Stockholm, Oslo, and Gothenburg) benefit from competitive territorial advantages such as human capital, knowledge centres, decision-making structures, access to capital, and accessibility.     

The New Star in Perseus

Abstract

Students often ask whether the examples we give as instructors have any relevance to their worlds, to their lives. Too often the answer is no. This paper describes a case that is obviously pertinent to both secondary and university students and their instructors. The legal battle over equality and racial discrimination in the New York City School system presents not simply a rich field for geographical consideration but also a pertinent one. It brings to students and their instructors a complex of economic, legal, and social issues played across a discrete spatial surface. As importantly, it offers a case study exploring the difficulties of both defining and then achieving distributive justice in post-modern environments in a context students and their instructors will recognize as relevant and timely. The discussion that results may be useful in economic, legal, locational, and social geographic instruction.