Scientific evidence,expert entrepreneurship,and ecosystem narratives in the UK Natural Environment White Paper

The Natural Environment White Paper represents the most important conservation policy shift in the United Kingdom (UK) in twenty years. It formalises the ecosystem approach within national policy objectives and emphasises the economic value of ecosystem services. By analysing the use of various evidence sources, the involvement of science entrepreneurs, and the development of policy narratives, our goal was to understand factors that influenced adoption of an ecosystem service framework in the UK. We interviewed 48 policy actors and found that centrally-sponsored synthesis reports with entrepreneurial authors provided the most influential expert-based knowledge in the development of the White Paper. More recently published reports had greater influence, yet the window of opportunity for scientific evidence having policy impact was greater in the problem-setting stages of policy development. The interaction between teams preparing syntheses and expert entrepreneurs helped influence the construction of strategic policy narratives. Those narratives increased the impact of scientific evidence by communicating and framing key policy-salient messages, and brokering between broad ecosystem-based and environmental economics narratives. The combination of ecological and economics evidence was particularly salient in the UK case due to the context of continued biodiversity loss and the acceptability of valuation narratives within central government. Our findings suggest that evidence impact varies at different stages of the policy process, and that this is driven by the interplay of contextual factors like policy timing, personal influence, and the competition between different sets of actors and narratives.     

Legal and regulatory challenges in the implementation of CO2 geological storage: An Alberta and Canadian perspective

Alberta is the province with the largest CO₂ emissions in Canada, with approximately two-thirds of emissions originating from large stationary sources. Due to the fortuitous association of large CO₂ sources with the storage capacity offered by the underlying Alberta basin, it is expected that large-scale CO₂ geological storage in Canada will occur in Alberta first, and both levels of governments are contemplating measures to facilitate implementation. A review of the current provincial and federal legislation and regulations presented in this paper indicates that the existing legal and regulatory regime is reasonably sufficient, with some modifications, to accommodate the active injection phase of CO₂ capture and storage (CCS) operations, and the early takers of this new technology. However, governments in Alberta and Canada, and likely everywhere, need to address several pressing issues dealing mainly with the CCS post-operational phase. These issues, reviewed in this paper from an Alberta and Canadian perspective, fall into several categories: jurisdictional, property (ownership), regulatory and liability. Because Alberta is a landlocked province, matters relating to CO₂ storage under the seabed will not be addressed here except when discussing matters of jurisdiction and CO₂ classification. Possible models for post-injection liability transfer to the state are also presented. Although this review is focused on western Canada conditions, the issues are broad enough to be of interest in other jurisdictions, which may also adopt parts of the legal and regulatory framework that is quite well developed in Alberta.     

Indicators of urban climate resilience: A contextual approach

As urban populations grow and climate exposure increases, more cities are introducing formal planning processes to adapt to climate change. This paper explains the process applied to eight cities in the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) for developing indicators for planning and monitoring local climate resilience. This process relied on transferring a common conceptual framework for climate resilience, together with a locally led iterative and collaborative process that engaged technical and planning authorities and vulnerable groups. The process varied slightly between cities and generated indicators that were chosen for their contextual fit and availability of data. The main benefit of developing resilience indicators in this way was the local capacity that the process built, in terms of understanding resilience, shared understanding of concepts and measurement and establishment of a common platform for future planning and monitoring of climate adaptation interventions at the city level.     

Drinking water quality governance: A comparative case study of Brazil,Ecuador, and Malawi

Human health is greatly affected by inadequate access to sufficient and safe drinking water, especially in low and middle-income countries. Drinking water governance improvements may be one way to better drinking water quality. Over the past decade, many projects and international organizations have been dedicated to water governance; however, water governance in the drinking water sector is understudied and how to improve water governance remains unclear. We analyze drinking water governance challenges in three countries – Brazil, Ecuador, and Malawi – as perceived by government, service providers, and civil society organizations. A mixed methods approach was used: a clustering model was used for country selection and qualitative semi-structured interviews were used with direct observation in data collection. The clustering model integrated political, economic, social and environmental variables that impact water sector performance, to group countries. Brazil, Ecuador and Malawi were selected with the model so as to represent the diversity of the clusters. This comparative case study is important because similar challenges are identified in the drinking water sectors of each country; while, the countries represent diverse socio-economic and political contexts, and the case selection process provides generalizability to our results. We find that access to safe water could be improved if certain water governance challenges were addressed: coordination and data sharing between ministries that deal with drinking water services; monitoring and enforcement of water quality laws; and sufficient technical capacity to improve administrative and technical management of water services at the local level. From an analysis of our field research, we also developed a conceptual framework that identifies policy levers that could be used to influence governance of drinking water quality on national and sub-national levels, and the relationships between these levers.     

Divergent neighbors: corporatism and climate policy networks in Finland and Sweden

ABSTRACT

Previous research has suggested that corporatist polities tend to enact more ambitious environmental policies than others. Here it is argued that the macro concept of corporatism can be dissected into three components: inclusiveness, consensualism and strength of tripartite organisations. These components of corporatism can be measured at the meso-level of policy networks. It is proposed that inclusiveness and consensualism are related to ambitious climate policy but exclusive tripartite coalitions can be detrimental for the ambitiousness of climate policy. This argument is backed by evidence from policy network surveys in two similar corporatist countries where climate change policies diverge: Sweden, where policies are ambitious, and Finland, where they are less so. It is found that in Sweden the climate change policy network is more consensual and slightly more inclusive, while in Finland tripartite organisations play a strong role.     

中国循环经济发展规划的进展探讨

当前循环经济的研究工作在中国深入展开,与此相适应的循环经济规划的编制和实施工作紧密进行.文章围绕规划的理论基础、现实意义,以及基本元素构成进行介绍.就开展规划编制工作的现状展开综述,归纳所取得的成绩与存在的缺陷、待解决或完善的内容.从我国实际并行的若干规划出发,初步阐释其与循环经济规划协调的原理.现阶段的循环经济探索主要还是基于环境,其可能的经济属性的严重探究不足.试行循环经济规划之后增加的再生成本等其他相关问题在后一阶段的规划推进中需深入考虑.     

A social assessment of urban parkland: Analyzing park use and meaning to inform management and resilience planning

Globally, municipalities are tackling climate adaptation and resilience planning. Urban green space has crucial biophysical buffering capacities, but also affects social interactions and human well-being. This paper considers the social dimension of urban green space, through an assessment focused on park use, function, and meanings, and compares results to categories of cultural ecosystem services. We develop a mixed-method approach for assessment of uses and social meanings of parkland and pilot this method in 2140 acres of parkland in waterfront neighborhoods surrounding New York City’s Jamaica Bay, an area heavily affected by Hurricane Sandy. This method combines observation of human activities and signs of prior human use with structured interviews of park users. We find that urban parkland is a crucial form of ‘nearby nature’ that provides space for recreation, activities, socialization, and environmental engagement and supports place attachment and social ties. We show that parks, through their use by and interactions with humans, are producing vital cultural ecosystem services that may help to strengthen social resilience. Certain services were more easily detectable than others via our assessment technique, including recreation, social relations, and sense of place. The assessment method was designed to be spatially explicit, scalable, and replicable; natural resource managers engaged in park management and/or resilience planning could apply this method across individual sites, in particular districts—such as vulnerable waterfront areas, and citywide. This study demonstrates a way in which cultural ecosystem services and an understanding of social meaning could be incorporated into park management and resilience planning.     

Social equity in urban resilience planning

ABSTRACT

A growing number of cities are incorporating resilience into their plans and policies to respond to shocks, stresses, and uncertainties. While some scholars advocate for the potential of resilience research and practice, others argue that it promotes an inherently conservative and neoliberal agenda, prevents systemic transformations, and pays insufficient attention to power, politics, and justice. Notably, critics of the urban resilience agenda argue that policies fail to adequately address social equity issues. This study seeks to inform these debates by providing a cross-sectional analysis of how issues of equity are incorporated into urban resilience planning. We develop a tripartite framework of equity that includes distributional, recognitional, and procedural dimensions and use it to analyse the goals, priorities, and strategies of formal resilience plans created by member cities of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme. Our analysis reveals considerable variation in the extent to which cities focus on equity, implying that resilience may be more nuanced than some critics suggest. There are, however, clear areas for improvement. Dominant conceptions of equity are generally tied to a distributional orientation, with less focus on the recognitional and procedural dimensions. We hope our conceptual framework and lessons learned from this study can inform more just resilience planning and provide a foundation for future research on the equity implications of resilience.     

Importance of health assessments for conservation in noncaptive wildlife

Wildlife health assessments help identify populations at risk of starvation, disease, and decline from anthropogenic impacts on natural habitats. We conducted an overview of available health assessment studies in noncaptive vertebrates and devised a framework to strategically integrate health assessments in population monitoring. Using a systematic approach, we performed a thorough assessment of studies examining multiple health parameters of noncaptive vertebrate species from 1982 to 2020 (n = 261 studies). We quantified trends in study design and diagnostic methods across taxa with generalized linear models, bibliometric analyses, and visual representations of study location versus biodiversity hotspots. Only 35% of studies involved international or cross-border collaboration. Countries with both high and threatened biodiversity were greatly underrepresented. Species that were not listed as threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List represented 49% of assessed species, a trend likely associated with the regional focus of most studies. We strongly suggest following wildlife health assessment protocols when planning a study and using statistically adequate sample sizes for studies establishing reference ranges. Across all taxa blood analysis (89%), body composition assessments (81%), physical examination (72%), and fecal analyses (24% of studies) were the most common methods. A conceptual framework to improve design and standardize wildlife health assessments includes guidelines on the experimental design, data acquisition and analysis, and species conservation planning and management implications. Integrating a physiological and ecological understanding of species resilience toward threatening processes will enable informed decision making regarding the conservation of threatened species.     

景观健康及其评价初探

生态系统健康是环保领域新兴的、正崭露头角的科学，将生态系统健康科学应用于景观评价是基于人类管理景观严重受到威胁和趋于退化的现实。在论述景观健康概念及其特征的基础上，探讨对景观健康进行整体评价的方法和指标。