Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Volume 37, 2012
Volume 37, 2012
- Preface
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Global Climate Forcing by Criteria Air Pollutants
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 1–24More LessAmbient air pollution has significant impacts on global climate change in complex ways, involving both warming and cooling, and causes an estimated one million deaths every year. Modeling studies and observations from a suite of platforms, including those that are space based, have revealed that air pollution is a widespread global phenomenon. The net effect of air pollution is a global cooling that is masking 50% of the committed greenhouse gas (GHG) warming from the Industrial Revolution. Aggressive air pollution abatement and climate stabilization strategies that reduce cooling pollutants may lead to a short-term warming surge that is unsafe for ecosystems and the human population, imposing complex trade-offs in policy making. Conversely, selective reduction of warming air pollutants to mitigate near-term climate change may offer opportunities for synergistic policy development. Reducing and preventing the accumulation of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is the only sustainable way to protect climate safety in the long term. Here, the current understanding of air pollution effects on global climate change is reviewed, including assessment by individual pollutant, precursor emission, economic sector, and policy-relevant scenarios.
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Global Biodiversity Change: The Bad, the Good, and the Unknown
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 25–50More LessGlobal biodiversity change is one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. Here, we review current scientific knowledge on global biodiversity change and identify the main knowledge gaps. We discuss two components of biodiversity change—biodiversity alterations and biodiversity loss—across four dimensions of biodiversity: species extinctions, species abundances, species distributions, and genetic diversity. We briefly review the impacts that modern humans and their ancestors have had on biodiversity and discuss the recent declines and alterations in biodiversity. We analyze the direct pressures on biodiversity change: habitat change, overexploitation, exotic species, pollution, and climate change. We discuss the underlying causes, such as demographic growth and resource use, and review existing scenario projections. We identify successes and impending opportunities in biodiversity policy and management, and highlight gaps in biodiversity monitoring and models. Finally, we discuss how the ecosystem services framework can be used to identify undesirable biodiversity change and allocate conservation efforts.
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Wicked Challenges at Land's End: Managing Coastal Vulnerability Under Climate Change
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 51–78More LessWith continuing influx of large numbers of people into coastal regions, human stresses on coastal ecosystems and resources are growing at the same time that climate variability and change and associated consequences in the marine environment are making coastal areas less secure for human habitation. The article reviews both climatic and nonclimatic drivers of the growing stresses on coastal natural and human systems, painting a picture of the mostly harmful impacts that result and the interactive and systemic challenges coastal managers face in managing these growing risks. Although adaptive responses are beginning to emerge, the adaptation challenge is enormous and requires not just incremental but also transformative changes. At the same time, such “wicked” problems, by definition, defy all-encompassing, definitive, and final solutions; instead, temporary best solutions will have to be sought in the context of an iterative, deliberately learning-oriented risk management framework.
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Geologic Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste: Status, Key Issues, and Trends
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 79–106More LessThe permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste is one of the major technical hurdles that must be addressed if electrical power production by nuclear energy is to remain viable. The main challenge is that the waste must be effectively isolated from interactions with the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. A number of permanent disposal options have been proposed and reviewed by various countries and scientific organizations during the past few decades, and there appears to be a consensus today that mined geologic disposal is the most practical and effective method. Several variations on mined geologic disposal are being intensively studied by waste-producing countries. These investigations address a wide range of scientific questions, such as the behavior of geological and engineered barriers over time and the use of quantitative modeling and/or qualitative observational evidence to demonstrate the safety of disposal. The present review provides an overview of current approaches, scientific issues, and safety assessments related to mined geologic repositories for high-level radioactive waste.
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Power for Development: A Review of Distributed Generation Projects in the Developing World
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 107–136More LessThe paradigm for providing affordable electricity for the world's poor—power for development—has begun to change. Historically, centralized governments built large consolidated power plants and distribution and transmission lines with the ultimate goal of providing electricity to all of their citizens. It has become increasingly common in recent decades, however, for donors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), firms, and communities to collaborate with governments to develop small-scale localized energy systems known as distributed generation (DG) either as complements or alternatives to centralized operations. DG programs have been implemented around the world but with a mixed record of success. Based on an analysis of the existing case study literature, we examine DG program goals and outcomes, identifying major factors that affect these outcomes, including appropriately chosen technology, adequate financing and payment arrangements, ongoing end users' involvement, and supportive national policies. We highlight the importance of institutions for collaborative governance in the pursuit of these factors.
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The Energy Technology Innovation System
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 137–162More LessThis article reviews the concept of an energy technology innovation system (ETIS). The ETIS is a systemic perspective on innovation comprising all aspects of energy transformations (supply and demand); all stages of the technology development cycle; and all the major innovation processes, feedbacks, actors, institutions, and networks. We use it as an analytical framework to describe key features and drivers of energy innovation. A global snapshot of the ETIS is provided using investments as the main indicator. Rationales for government policy in energy innovation are discussed, and policy design guidelines for an effectively functioning ETIS are presented. The proposed guidelines are based on a survey of the literature and empirical case studies; they diverge substantially from polices implied by partial perspectives on innovation. Key research, information, and data needs are also identified.
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Climate and Water: Knowledge of Impacts to Action on Adaptation
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 163–194More LessAs adaptation becomes more tightly integrated into the range of responses to climate change, understanding how knowledge of climate change impacts and vulnerabilities can be effectively used is essential both to direct research and to support action. This article reviews literature along an intellectual transect from knowledge of climate impacts on water systems to the influence of that knowledge on adaptation responses. We discuss scientific evidence for changing hydroclimatic regimes, methods for translating climatic information into results relevant to adaptation, uncertainties in these results, methods for addressing uncertainty via adaptation processes, challenges and opportunities for knowledge development and transfer, and sociopolitical factors that enable or hinder the use of knowledge. Challenges remain in developing and applying methods for identifying and reducing underlying vulnerabilities and reliably connecting technical knowledge of climate impacts with local needs remains an unsolved problem. But new decision-making methods and the potential to learn from analogous water management situations provide hope for near-term progress.
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Climate Change and Food Systems
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 195–222More LessFood systems contribute 19%–29% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, releasing 9,800–16,900 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2008. Agricultural production, including indirect emissions associated with land-cover change, contributes 80%–86% of total food system emissions, with significant regional variation. The impacts of global climate change on food systems are expected to be widespread, complex, geographically and temporally variable, and profoundly influenced by socioeconomic conditions. Historical statistical studies and integrated assessment models provide evidence that climate change will affect agricultural yields and earnings, food prices, reliability of delivery, food quality, and, notably, food safety. Low-income producers and consumers of food will be more vulnerable to climate change owing to their comparatively limited ability to invest in adaptive institutions and technologies under increasing climatic risks. Some synergies among food security, adaptation, and mitigation are feasible. But promising interventions, such as agricultural intensification or reductions in waste, will require careful management to distribute costs and benefits effectively.
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Pest Management in Food Systems: An Economic Perspective
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 223–245More LessPopulation and income growth in the coming half century will lead to a tremendous rise in the demand for food. To meet this projected growth without massive extensification of farmland, agricultural yields must increase significantly. Crop yields depend heavily on the pest pressures farmers face and on the pest control treatments available. Pest control, however, inevitably has a multitude of unintended effects on the environment, public and worker health, and the productivity of neighboring farms. The magnitudes of these effects differ widely across pest control technologies and the situations in which they are used. Optimal pest management balances the quantifiable benefits of yield improvement and risk reduction against these external costs, taking into account nonpecuniary characteristics that impact farmers' decisions and welfare. Such analysis should be the basis of government regulation of pest management.
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Searching for Solutions in Aquaculture: Charting a Sustainable Course
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 247–276More LessAquaculture is currently the fastest growing animal food production sector and will soon supply more than half of the world's seafood for human consumption. Continued growth in aquaculture production is likely to come from intensification of fish, shellfish, and algae production. Intensification is often accompanied by a range of resource and environmental problems. We review several potential solutions to these problems, including novel culture systems, alternative feed strategies, and species choices. We examine the problems addressed; the stage of adoption; and the benefits, costs, and constraints of each solution. Policies that provide incentives for innovation and environmental improvement are also explored. We end the review by identifying easily adoptable solutions and promising technologies worth further investment.
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Municipal Solid Waste and the Environment: A Global Perspective
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 277–309More LessMunicipal solid waste (MSW) reflects the culture that produces it and affects the health of the people and the environment surrounding it. Globally, people are discarding growing quantities of waste, and its composition is more complex than ever before, as plastic and electronic consumer products diffuse. Concurrently, the world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. These trends pose a challenge to cities, which are charged with managing waste in a socially and environmentally acceptable manner. Effective waste management strategies depend on local waste characteristics, which vary with cultural, climatic, and socioeconomic variables, and institutional capacity. Globally, waste governance is becoming regionalized and formalized. In industrialized nations, where citizens produce far more waste than do other citizens, waste tends to be managed formally at a municipal or regional scale. In less-industrialized nations, where citizens produce less waste, which is mostly biogenic, a combination of formal and informal actors manages waste. Many waste management policies, technologies, and behaviors provide a variety of environmental benefits, including climate change mitigation. Key waste management challenges include integrating the informal waste sector in developing cities, reducing consumption in industrialized cities, increasing and standardizing the collection and analysis of solid waste data, and effectively managing increasingly complex waste while protecting people and the environment.
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Social Influence, Consumer Behavior, and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 311–340More LessRealizing a low-carbon energy future requires pervasive changes in consumer behavior. Here, we examine the role of social influence in transitioning toward new low-carbon products and practices. We review and critique five research perspectives of how social interactions affect the spread of new behaviors through social networks: diffusion of functional information across social groups; conformity to others' behaviors; dissemination by organized, resourceful social groups motivated to promote societal goods; translation of consumers' perceptions between social groups; and reflexivity of individuals' continual search for self-development and expression through lifestyle practices, including their social context and consumption. Each perspective observes different social processes and holds different implications for policies and strategies to achieve low-carbon energy transitions. No single perspective seems adequate to characterize social influence. We conclude with a set of priorities to develop an integrative framework to guide strategy and policy.
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Disaster Governance: Social, Political, and Economic Dimensions
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 341–363More LessDisaster governance is an emerging concept in the disaster research literature that is closely related to risk governance and environmental governance. Disaster governance arrangements and challenges are shaped by forces such as globalization, world-system dynamics, social inequality, and sociodemographic trends. Governance regimes are polycentric and multiscale, show variation across the hazards cycle, and tend to lack integration and to be formulated in response to particular large-scale disaster events. Disaster governance is nested within and influenced by overarching societal governance systems. Although governance failures can occur in societies with stable governance systems, as the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina shows, poorly governed societies and weak states are almost certain to exhibit deficiencies in disaster governance. State-civil society relationships, economic organization, and societal transitions have implications for disaster governance. Various measures can be employed to assess disaster governance; more research is needed in this nascent field of study on factors that contribute to effective governance and on other topics, such as the extent to which governance approaches contribute to long-term sustainability.
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Multiactor Governance and the Environment
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 365–387More LessThis review critically assesses a large and growing literature on multiactor environmental governance. The first section provides an historical and conceptual background to the observed increase in such arrangements. The second section describes the diversity of governance arrangements and the related actor constellations to address environmental issues, and the third section offers some explanations for the origins, form, and effectiveness of multiactor governance arrangements. The conclusion reflects on some of the key challenges in advancing and deepening research in this area and suggests some fruitful avenues for future work.
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Payments for Environmental Services: Evolution Toward Efficient and Fair Incentives for Multifunctional Landscapes
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 389–420More LessPayments for environmental services (PES), the non-provisioning part of ecosystem services, target alignment of microeconomic incentives for land users with meso- and macroeconomic societal costs and benefits of their choices across stakeholders and scales. They can interfere with or complement social norms and rights-based approaches at generic (land-use planning) and individual (tenure, use rights) levels; they interact with macroeconomic policies influencing the drivers to which individual agents respond. In many developing country contexts, community scale factors strongly influence land users' decisions, whereas unclear land rights complicate the use of market-based instruments. PES concepts need to adapt. Multiple paradigms have emerged within the broad PES domain. Evidence suggests that forms of “coinvestment in stewardship” (CIS) alongside rights are the preferred entry point. Commodification of environmental services (ES) and ES markets might evolve later on, but require strong government regulation to set and enforce rules of the game. We frame hypotheses for wider testing and “no-regrets” recommendations for practitioners.
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Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 421–448More LessEnhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and ongoing change in social-ecological systems (SES). These principles are (P1) maintain diversity and redundancy, (P2) manage connectivity, (P3) manage slow variables and feedbacks, (P4) foster an understanding of SES as complex adaptive systems (CAS), (P5) encourage learning and experimentation, (P6) broaden participation, and (P7) promote polycentric governance systems. We briefly define each principle, review how and when it enhances the resilience of ES, and conclude with major research gaps. In practice, the principles often co-occur and are highly interdependent. Key future needs are to better understand these interdependencies and to operationalize and apply the principles in different policy and management contexts.
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Environmental Informatics
James E. Frew, and Jeff DozierVol. 37 (2012), pp. 449–472More LessEnvironmental informatics uses large multidimensional, complex datasets to study environmental problems, which can be both discrete and continuous in space or time. These datasets and their requisite metadata can be managed by queryable databases. Geospatial Web application programming interfaces (APIs) provide remote access to dynamic subsets of environmental information. Persistent identifiers make data citable. The storage-computing trade-off is now heavily skewed in favor of moving calculations to the data. Provenance metadata help determine a data object's reliability and trustworthiness.
Rising atmospheric CO2, the Antarctic ozone hole, and Gulf Stream warm-core rings were all discovered by analyzing long-term datasets. Similar work continues on mapping evapotranspiration and snow water equivalent. In these “fourth paradigm” problems, data (especially data collected operationally) drive hypothesis formation. Making data available requires new discovery mechanisms and policies favoring data sharing. Cloud computing and array-friendly databases will help bring processing to the data. Ubiquitous location sensing and geotagging will help turn citizen scientists into environmental information collectors.
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The Public Trust Doctrine: Where Ecology Meets Natural Resources Management
Vol. 37 (2012), pp. 473–496More LessThe public trust doctrine (PTD) is a legal concept with ancient roots, and it is increasingly being examined as a framework for modern conservation. At its core, the PTD is based on the idea that certain natural resources cannot be fairly or effectively managed by private owners. Rather, these resources should be held in trust by government, which must manage their consumptive use and protection on behalf of present and future citizens. Although historically the PTD applied to a limited set of natural resources such as shellfish beds and submerged lands, courts and legal scholars have expanded the definition of trust resources to include wildlife, oceans, and ecosystem services generally. The wide range of interpretations of the PTD is seen as both a weakness (because it leads to uncertainty in property ownership) and a strength (because it can adapt to accommodate emerging science about what it takes to protect ecosystems).
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 48 (2023)
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Volume 47 (2022)
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Volume 46 (2021)
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Volume 45 (2020)
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Volume 44 (2019)
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Volume 43 (2018)
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Volume 42 (2017)
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Volume 41 (2016)
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Volume 40 (2015)
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Volume 39 (2014)
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Volume 38 (2013)
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Volume 37 (2012)
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Volume 36 (2011)
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Volume 35 (2010)
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Volume 34 (2009)
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Volume 33 (2008)
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Volume 32 (2007)
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Volume 31 (2006)
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Volume 30 (2005)
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Volume 29 (2004)
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Volume 28 (2003)
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Volume 27 (2002)
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Volume 26 (2001)
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Volume 25 (2000)
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Volume 24 (1999)
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Volume 23 (1998)
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Volume 22 (1997)
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Volume 21 (1996)
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Volume 20 (1995)
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Volume 19 (1994)
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Volume 18 (1993)
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Volume 17 (1992)
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Volume 16 (1991)
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Volume 15 (1990)
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Volume 14 (1989)
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Volume 13 (1988)
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Volume 12 (1987)
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Volume 11 (1986)
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Volume 10 (1985)
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Volume 9 (1984)
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Volume 8 (1983)
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Volume 7 (1982)
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Volume 6 (1981)
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Volume 5 (1980)
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Volume 4 (1979)
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Volume 3 (1978)
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Volume 2 (1977)
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Volume 1 (1976)
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Volume 0 (1932)