The News You Choose: news media preferences amplify views on climate change

How do choices among information sources reinforce political differences on topics such as climate change? Environmental sociologists have observed large-scale and long-term impacts from news media and think-tank reports, while experimental science-communication studies detect more immediate effects from variations in supplied information. Applying generalized structural equation modeling to recent survey data, previous work is extended to show that political ideology, education and their interaction predict news media information choices in much the same way they predict opinions about climate change itself. Consequently, media information sources serve as intervening variables that can reinforce and, through their own independent effects, amplify existing beliefs about climate change. Results provide empirical support for selective exposure and biased assimilation as mechanisms widening political divisions on climate change in the United States. The findings fit with the reinforcing spirals framework suggesting partisan media strengthens climate change beliefs which then influences subsequent use of media.     

Climate policy support under political consensus: exploring the varying effect of partisanship and party cues

By creating attitudinal rifts among partisan voters, political polarization is expected to negatively affect chances of effectively mitigating climate change. While such expectations generally have found support, less attention has been paid to the opposite claim that political consensus should eliminate the partisan dimension in climate change politics. This study tests this claim by studying how party identification, and party cues specifically, affects public policy attitudes in a context defined by political consensus. Using data from a large online access panel in Sweden, party identification and party cues are shown to matter for policy attitudes even in a consensus context. This effect is not limited to certain issues but is found across a wide range of policies, and the effect of party cues, for a given issue, varies across parties. The implications of this study and areas for future work are discussed.     

Water Management Decision Making in the Face of Multiple Forms of Uncertainty and Risk

In the Wasatch Range Metropolitan Area of Northern Utah, water management decision makers confront multiple forms of uncertainty and risk. Adapting to these uncertainties and risks is critical for maintaining the long‐term sustainability of the region's water supply. This study draws on interview data to assess the major challenges climatic and social changes pose to Utah's water future, as well as potential solutions. The study identifies the water management adaptation decision‐making space shaped by the interacting institutional, social, economic, political, and biophysical processes that enable and constrain sustainable water management. The study finds water managers and other water actors see challenges related to reallocating water, including equitable water transfers and stakeholder cooperation, addressing population growth, and locating additional water supplies, as more problematic than the challenges posed by climate change. Furthermore, there is significant disagreement between water actors over how to best adapt to both climatic and social changes. This study concludes with a discussion of the path dependencies that present challenges to adaptive water management decision making, as well as opportunities for the pursuit of a new water management paradigm based on soft‐path solutions. Such knowledge is useful for understanding the institutional and social adaptations needed for water management to successfully address future uncertainties and risks.     

Impacts of Changes in Precipitation Amount and Distribution on Water Resources Studied Using a Model Rainwater Harvesting System

Water supply reliability is expected to be affected by both precipitation amount and distribution changes under recent and future climate change. We compare historical (1951‐2010) changes in annual‐mean and annual‐maximum daily precipitation in the global set of station observations from Global Historical Climatology Network and climate models from the Inter‐Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI‐MIP), and develop the study to 2011‐2099 for model projections under high radiative forcing scenario (RCP8.5). We develop a simple rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) model and drive it with observational and modeled precipitation. We study the changes in mean and maximum precipitation along with changes in the reliability of the model RWHS as tools to assess the impact of changes in precipitation amount and distribution on reliability of precipitation‐fed water supplies. Results show faster increase in observed maximum precipitation (10.14% per K global warming) than mean precipitation (7.64% per K), and increased reliability of the model RWHS driven by observed precipitation by an average of 0.2% per decade. The ISI‐MIP models show even faster increase in maximum precipitation compared to mean precipitation. However, they imply decreases in mean reliability, for an average 0.15% per decade. Compared to observations, climate models underestimate the increasing trends in mean and maximum precipitation and show the opposite direction of change in reliability of a model water supply system.     

Irrigation Water Allocation Using an Inexact Two‐Stage Quadratic Programming with Fuzzy Input under Climate Change

Agricultural irrigation accounts for nearly 70% of the total water use around the world. Uncertainties and climate change together exacerbate the complexity of optimal allocation of water resources for irrigation. An interval‐fuzzy two‐stage stochastic quadratic programming model is developed for determining the plans for water allocation for irrigation with maximum benefits. The model is shown to be applicable when inputs are expressed as discrete, fuzzy or random. In order to reflect the effect of marginal utility on benefit and cost, the model can also deal with nonlinearities in the objective function. Results from applying the model to a case study in the middle reaches of the Heihe River basin, China, show schemes for water allocation for irrigation of different crops in every month of the crop growth period under various flow levels are effective for achieving high economic benefits. Different climate change scenarios are used to analyze the impact of changing water requirement and water availability on irrigation water allocation. The proposed model can aid the decision maker in formulating desired irrigation water management policies in the wake of uncertainties and changing environment.     

Variability and Trends in Runoff Efficiency in the Conterminous United States

Variability and trends in water‐year runoff efficiency (RE) — computed as the ratio of water‐year runoff (streamflow per unit area) to water‐year precipitation — in the conterminous United States (CONUS) are examined for the 1951 through 2012 period. Changes in RE are analyzed using runoff and precipitation data aggregated to United States Geological Survey 8‐digit hydrologic cataloging units (HUs). Results indicate increases in RE for some regions in the north‐central CONUS and large decreases in RE for the south‐central CONUS. The increases in RE in the north‐central CONUS are explained by trends in climate, whereas the large decreases in RE in the south‐central CONUS likely are related to groundwater withdrawals from the Ogallala aquifer to support irrigated agriculture.     

Aboriginal world views and colonisation: implications for coastal sustainability†

In this paper, we show how the Aboriginal people in the south-west of Australia (the Nyungar) developed systems of knowledge, of caring for country and of family relations that enabled them to survive for tens of thousands of years and continue to have importance today. The impacts of British colonisation on cultural continuity and knowledge in the south-west have been significant and include loss of land, break-up of families and massacre. These practices led to a loss of knowledge of language and culture in some cases. However, Nyungar culture is alive and dynamic, constantly being reclaimed, re-energised and rebuilt through the interaction of contemporary and traditional research praxis. Focusing on Derbal Nara (Cockburn Sound) on the coast in the southern metropolitan area of Perth, we provide case examples of the action-research-learning methodologies used by Whadjuk Nyungar Traditional Owners. We also provide examples of stories about Derbal Nara that are still alive and being recounted up to the present day, including those that account for the recent ice age and the end of the ice age 8000 years BC when sea levels rose, drowning land in the area of Derbal Nara. Finally, we argue that Whadjuk Nyungar experiences and world views based on relationality and reflexivity are central to sustainable coastal management and that in some respects there has already been a convergence of Indigenous and Western coastal management. We present a set of principles that support the development of this “third space” for coastal sustainability.     

Hannah Arendt’s turn to the self and environmental responses to climate change paralysis

Environmentalists have struggled with how to mobilize people to act in the face of widespread and now inevitable consequences of climate change. Significant responses to this challenge, such as incentivizing individual Green choices in the market and avoiding the rhetoric of catastrophe, continue the philosophical and political trends, identified by Hannah Arendt, that contribute to world alienation and the decline of politics. Environmental thinkers are invited to use Arendt’s theories of the turn to the self and political action to think critically about contemporary strategies to address climate change.     

Welfare states and environmental states: a comparative analysis

A framework is presented for thinking about state intervention in developed capitalist economies in two domains: social policy and environmental policy (and, within that, climate-change policy). Five drivers of welfare state development are identified, the ‘five Is’ of Industrialisation: Interests, Institutions, Ideas/Ideologies, and International Influences. Research applying this framework to the postwar development of welfare states in the OECD is summarised, distinguishing two periods: up to 1980, and from 1980 to 2008. How far this framework can contribute to understanding the rise and differential patterns of environmental governance and intervention across advanced capitalist states since 1970 is explored, before briefly comparing and contrasting the determinants of welfare states and environmental states, identifying common drivers in both domains and regime-specific drivers in each. The same framework is then applied to developments since 2008 and into the near future, sketching two potential configurations and speculating on the conditions for closer, more integrated ‘eco-welfare states’.     

Ecological citizenship and democracy: Communitarian versus agonistic perspectives

Grassroots environmental movements have recently started to question the focus on sustainable consumption as a main strategy to tackle climate change. They prefer to address individuals as citizens rather than as consumers, and focus on collective rather than individual change. Two prominent movements in this regard are Transition Towns and Climate Justice Action. While both movements criticise conventional approaches, they put forward entirely different strategies for what has to happen instead. Based on extensive qualitative research, this article analyses how these movements manifest themselves in Flanders (Belgium). The focus is on their different accounts of how and why collective practices have to be built, and the place they attribute to ‘the political’ in this. The analysis reveals the existence of two different forms of ecological citizenship: one communitarian, the other agonistic.