生态社会主义及其双重价值研究

生态社会主义是当代西方一种具有重要影响的左翼社会思潮,它致力于生态原则与社会主义的结合,要求超越资本主义与现存的社会主义模式,主张在对资本主义进行批判和建议的基础上,建立新的绿色社会、生态现代化的社会和全面发展的社会。生态社会主义具有历史的进步性与理论和实践上的局限性双重社会价值,我们应当汲取生态社会主义的积极思想,为中国生态文明建设提供有益借鉴。     

星云湖湖滨带生态恢复措施探讨

阐述了星云湖湖滨带生态恢复的意义,分析了星云湖湖滨带主要环境问题,探讨了星云湖湖滨带生态恢复的措施。     

波流式生态滤床氨氮去除效果及其微生物群落结构分析

利用波流式生态滤床处理受污染的河水,考察了其对氨氮的去除效果和沿程污染物转化情况,并采用扫描电镜、高通量测序手段解析了波流式生态滤床不同时间和位置基质上生物膜的细菌群落组成,分析了波流式生态滤床小试反应器中硝化细菌和反硝化细菌的分布特点,以探讨其去除氨氮的机理.结果表明,反应器稳定运行以后,对氨氮平均去除率为74.83%,基质表面可以观察到大量微生物,不同时期优势细菌有较大不同.反应器前部主要发挥硝化作用,中部发挥反硝化作用,硝化菌的分布呈现上多下少、前多后少的特点,使得氨氮在前端被快速去除;中部以黄杆菌属(Flavobacterium)为代表的反硝化菌丰度较高,促进了反硝化作用的发挥,降低了出水中总氮浓度;不同部位样品中细菌多样性差别不大,微生物种群多样性随着水流方向呈现先增加,到后段减少的趋势.     

Bottom up and top down: analysis of participatory processes for sustainability indicator identification as a pathway to community empowerment and sustainable environmental management

The modern environmental management literature stresses the need for community involvement to identify indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development and environmental management goals. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of participatory processes on sustainability indicator identification and environmental management in three disparate case studies. The first is a process of developing partnerships between First Nations communities, environmental groups, and forestry companies to resolve conflicts over forest management in Western Canada. The second describes a situation in Botswana where local pastoral communities worked with development researchers to reduce desertification. The third case study details an on-going government led process of developing sustainability indicators in Guernsey, UK, that was designed to monitor the environmental, social, and economic impacts of changes in the economy. The comparative assessment between case studies allows us to draw three primary conclusions. (1) The identification and collection of sustainability indicators not only provide valuable databases for making management decisions, but the process of engaging people to select indicators also provides an opportunity for community empowerment that conventional development approaches have failed to provide. (2) Multi-stakeholder processes must formally feed into decision-making forums or they risk being viewed as irrelevant by policy-makers and stakeholders. (3) Since ecological boundaries rarely meet up with political jurisdictions, it is necessary to be flexible when choosing the scale at which monitoring and decision-making occurs. This requires an awareness of major environmental pathways that run through landscapes to understand how seemingly remote areas may be connected in ways that are not immediately apparent.     

Footprints for Sustainability: The Next Steps

The concept of an ecological footprint is based on the understanding that every individual human appropriates a share of the productive and assimilative capacity of the biosphere. An ecological footprint corresponds to this exclusive biologically productive area that a defined population uses for all its resource requirements and wastes, and is expressed in terms of bioproductive space, with world-average productivity. Humanity's footprint or its aggregate ecological demand can only temporarily exceed the productive and assimilative capacity of the biosphere without liquidating and weakening the natural capital on which humanity depends fundamentally. Therefore, accounting tools for quantifying humanity's use of nature are essential for overall assessments of human impact as well as for planning specific steps towards a sustainable future.This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the ecological footprint as an ecological accounting method, points out research needs for improvement of the analysis, and suggests potential new applications. The paper identifies ten new applications of the tool to make it applicable at various geographic scales and for a number of analytical and didactic purposes. Then nine methodological improvements are suggested that could refine the currently applied method, making assessments more sensitive to a larger number of ecological impacts. It concludes that many crucial questions pertinent to building a sustainable society can be addressed by current ecological footprint research. By making the method more complete, this tool could evolve from being largely of pedagogical use to become a strategic tool for policy analysis.     

页岩气开发对生态环境影响评价模型

针对页岩气特殊的开发方式及环评难度比常规气大的特点,运用"压力-状态-响应"框架模型,建立了页岩气开发对生态环境影响的评价指标体系。引入曲线投影的方式,并将投影寻踪方法和动态聚类方法相结合,提出了曲线投影寻踪动态聚类的定量评价方法;基于样本各指标的曲线投影和动态聚类方法寻找最佳投影方向,并建立相应的生态环境影响评价优化模型。结合全局最优经验指导和信息素交流,采用改进的蚁群算法对优化模型进行求解。该算法维持蚁群的多样性,且收敛性较好,同时也避免出现局部最优。对四川省威远页岩气区块进行了实例分析,结果表明:2010年、2011年和2014年的环评属于差类(4级),2012年和2013年的环评属于中类(3级),其中植被覆盖率、空气质量优良率、地表水质达标率、废水排放量、公众对环境的满意度、二氧化硫排放量和废水排放量达标率等指标对生态环境评价的影响较大。在页岩气开发初期,由于开发技术落后,再加上环保投资不高,环保意识不强,造成生态环境问题较为严重。随着学习借鉴美国的经验,及页岩气的开发技术进一步提高,加上国家对生态环境保护的重视,威远页岩气区块生态环境恶化得到有效的遏制。但开发时间越长,开采难度越大,将会产生更多更大的生态环境问题。分析结果与威远页岩气开发区域的实际情况相符,为页岩气气田生态环境影响评价奠定了科学基础。投影寻踪动态聚类方法具有无需设定参数、操作简单、客观等优点,是页岩气开发对生态环境影响评价的一种新方法。     

岷江上游生态脆弱性评价

岷江上游流域是我国典型的生态脆弱区之一,由于地质变化频繁、高差显著、气候干旱,加上人为活动影响,生态脆弱性的表现十分明显。通过对其生态环境脆弱性因素及成因机制的分析,构建了由土地生产力、地表起伏度、干燥度指数、土壤侵蚀强度、草场退化荒漠化率、物种消失率等14个指标组成的岷江上游生态脆弱性的评价指标体系;根据本地区生态环境现状、全国和四川省情况及奋斗目标,建立了Ⅰ到Ⅲ级的评价标准体系;利用模糊数学聚类方法对评价指标进行分析计算,得出了岷江上游生态环境为第Ⅲ级,即生态环境非常脆弱的结论。评价结果符合岷江上游地区的生态环境状况。     

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

Regime shift often results in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the provision of ecosystem services and can therefore have significant impacts on human wellbeing. Understanding regime shifts has profound implications for ecosystem recovery and management. China’s coastal ecosystems have experienced substantial deterioration within the past decades, at a scale and speed the world has never seen before. Yet, information about this coastal ecosystem change from a dynamics perspective is quite limited. In this review, I synthesize existing information on coastal ecosystem regime shifts in China and discuss their interactions and cascading effects. The accumulation of regime shifts in China’s coastal ecosystems suggests that the desired system resilience has been profoundly eroded, increasing the potential of abrupt shifts to undesirable states at a larger scale, especially given multiple escalating pressures. Policy and management strategies need to incorporate resilience approaches in order to cope with future challenges and avoid major losses in China’s coastal ecosystem services.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0692-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Reviving wood-pastures for biodiversity and people: A case study from western Estonia

Wood-pastures are associated with high cultural and biodiversity values in Europe. However, due to their relatively low productivity, large areas of wood-pastures have been lost over the last century. In some areas, incentive schemes have been developed to revive wood-pastures. We investigated the effects of one such scheme in western Estonia. We compared the structure of grazed wood-pastures (old and restored) to those of abandoned wood-pastures and ungrazed forest stands to explore the effects of management, and conducted interviews with 24 farmers to investigate their motivations to carry out the management. We found a positive influence of active management on the semi-open structure of wood-pastures. Financial support was vital for management, but personal values related to tradition also played an important role. The interviewees differed widely in their range of motivations, suggesting that other strategies in addition to financial incentives would further improve the management of wood-pastures in the region.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0719-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

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.