Uncovering blind spots in urban carbon management: the role of consumption-based carbon accounting in Bristol,UK

The rapid urbanisation of the twentieth century, along with the spread of high-consumption urban lifestyles, has led to cities becoming the dominant drivers of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing these impacts is crucial, but production-based frameworks of carbon measurement and mitigation—which encompass only a limited part of cities’ carbon footprints—are much more developed and widely applied than consumption-based approaches that consider the embedded carbon effectively imported into a city. Frequently, therefore, cities are left blind to the importance of their wider consumption-related climate impacts, while at the same time left lacking effective tools to reduce them. To explore the relevance of these issues, we implement methodologies for assessing production- and consumption-based emissions at the city-level and estimate the associated emissions trajectories for Bristol, a major UK city, from 2000 to 2035. We develop mitigation scenarios targeted at reducing the former, considering potential energy, carbon and financial savings in each case. We then compare these mitigation potentials with local government ambitions and Bristol’s consumption-based emissions trajectory. Our results suggest that the city’s consumption-based emissions are three times the production-based emissions, largely due to the impacts of imported food and drink. We find that low-carbon investments of circa £3 billion could reduce production-based emissions by 25% in 2035. However, we also find that this represents <10% of Bristol’s forecast consumption-based emissions for 2035 and is approximately equal to the mitigation achievable by eliminating the city’s current levels of food waste. Such observations suggest that incorporating consumption-based emission statistics into cities’ accounting and decision-making processes could uncover largely unrecognised opportunities for mitigation that are likely to be essential for achieving deep decarbonisation.

     

Policy support for rural economic development based on Holling’s ecological concept of panarchy

Globally, rural regions are searching for innovative growth opportunities to reinvigorate their economies. This paper examines the redevelopment of rural communities through an ecological lens – based on the notion of continuous cycles of adaptive change within complex systems as first identified within Holling’s concept of panarchy. Panarchy suggests that complex systems have more than a single equilibrium point and, instead, have some inherent resiliency based on the notion of multiple stable regimes. As such, panarchy provides a conceptual model that describes the ways in which complex social and ecological systems are organized and structured both spatially and temporally. By drawing parallels between the characteristics of ecological communities and rural economic systems, a novel framework is developed to assist policy-makers reflect on a rural community’s position along its own adaptive change cycle and, then, implement appropriate inventions to improve system resiliency – which in this case is linked with economic resiliency through development and/or growth. Supported by empirical data emerging from both key informant interviews and content analysis of current rural development policy, this work also identifies leverage points where policy intervention may be most advantageous by specifying the timing of policy instruments on the cycle. Specifically, this framework describes four leverage points, three major and one minor, to help push or pull rural regions into an area of higher resilience.     

Pilot study investigating ambient air toxics emissions near a Canadian kraft pulp and paper facility in Pictou County,Nova Scotia

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Air toxics are airborne pollutants known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects, including certain volatile organic compounds...     

Biomass of Speckled Alder on an Air-Polluted Mountain Site and its Response to Fertilization

The article summarizes outcomes of a biomass study conducted in a young speckled alder plantation on a cold mountain site. At this location, the previously existing old forest was clear felled because of damage from air pollution, and present-day surface humus is in need of restoration. The intention of this study was to quantify the biomass and nutrients accumulated by alders and their components and assess whether the initial fertilization resulted in increased biomass production and nutrient accumulation in the biomass. Besides the control, two fertilized treatments were installed. In the surface treatment (SUT), the amendment was applied as a base dressing in small circles around trees. In the planting-hole treatment (PHT), the amendment was incorporated into soil inside the planting holes. Five growth seasons after planting and fertilization, six alders from each treatment were harvested including roots. Their biomass was quantified and analyzed for macroelements. The greatest pool of dry mass (DM) was branches in the control and stem wood in the fertilized treatments. The greatest pools of macroelements were leaves and branches. The most pronounced effects of fertilization were recorded in the DM and consequently in the absolute quantities of nutrients. The DM of an average tree in the control, SUT, and PHT was 85, 226, and 231 g, respectively. The absolute contents of nutrients per tree in the fertilized treatments showed the following increases, as compared with the control: (N) 2.5–2.6 times; (P) 1.6–2.4 times; (K) 1.8–2.1 times; and (Mg) 1.8–2.0 times, respectively. Speckled alder responded positively to fertilization.     

Rapid cultural adaptation can facilitate the evolution of large-scale cooperation

Over the past several decades, we have argued that cultural evolution can facilitate the evolution of large-scale cooperation because it often leads to more rapid adaptation than genetic evolution, and, when multiple stable equilibria exist, rapid adaptation leads to variation among groups. Recently, Lehmann, Feldman, and colleagues have published several papers questioning this argument. They analyze models showing that cultural evolution can actually reduce the range of conditions under which cooperation can evolve and interpret these models as indicating that we were wrong to conclude that culture facilitated the evolution of human cooperation. In the main, their models assume that rates of cultural adaption are not strong enough compared to migration to maintain persistent variation among groups when payoffs create multiple stable equilibria. We show that Lehmann et al. reach different conclusions because they have made different assumptions. We argue that the assumptions that underlie our models are more consistent with the empirical data on large-scale cultural variation in humans than those of Lehmann et al., and thus, our models provide a more plausible account of the cultural evolution of human cooperation in large groups.