Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Volume 33, 2008

Climate models simulate the atmosphere, given atmospheric composition and energy from the sun, and include explicit modeling of, and exchanges with, the underlying oceans, sea ice, and land. The models are based on physical principles governing momentum, thermodynamics, cloud microphysics, radiative transfer, and turbulence. Climate models are evolving into Earth-system models, which also include chemical and biological processes and afford the prospect of links to studies of human dimensions of climate change. Although the fundamental principles on which climate models are based are robust, computational limits preclude their numerical solution on scales that include many processes important in the climate system. Despite this limitation, which is often dealt with by parameterization, many aspects of past and present climate have been successfully simulated using climate models, and climate models are used extensively to predict future climate change resulting from human activity.

China's annual energy-related carbon emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006, years ahead of published international and Chinese forecasts. Why were forecasts so greatly in error and what drove the rapid growth of China's energy-related carbon emssions after 2001? The divergence between actual and forecasted carbon emissions underscores the rapid changes that have taken place in China's energy system since 2001. In order to build a more robust understanding of China's energy-related carbon emissions, this article reviews the role of economic restructuring, urbanization, coal dependence, international trade, and central government policies in driving emissions growth.

Restoration ecology provides the conceptual and practical frameworks to guide management interventions aimed at repairing environmental damage. Restoration activities range from local to regional and from volunteer efforts to large-scale multiagency activities. Interventions vary from a “do nothing” approach to a variety of abiotic and biotic interventions aimed at speeding up or altering the course of ecosystem recovery. Revised understanding of ecosystem dynamics, the place of humans in historic ecosystems, and changed environmental settings owing to rapid environmental change all impact on decisions concerning which interventions are appropriate. Key issues relating to ecosystem restoration in a rapidly changing world include understanding how potentially synergistic global change drivers interact to alter the dynamics and restoration of ecosystems and how novel ecosystems without a historic analogue should be managed.

Passenger transportation has evolved toward greater reliance on light-duty vehicles. The result, especially in the United States but increasingly elsewhere, is a car-centric transportation monoculture. Conventional cars provide a high level of personal freedom and convenience but are expensive, inefficient, and damaging to the global environment. This article reviews the literature and critically examines the debate about two fundamental challenges: (a) transforming vehicles to dramatically reduce oil use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and (b) transforming the larger transportation system to expand personal mobility options and reduce their environmental and spatial footprints. The technologies and tools are at hand to achieve both. It will take a concerted effort from industry, government, and consumers to facilitate these transportation transformations.

This chapter provides an interdisciplinary review of the drought literature. Droughts are widely perceived as hydroclimatic hazards. In reality droughts are socioenvironmental phenomena, produced by admixtures of climatic, hydrological, environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural forces. The complexity and context specificity of drought confound severity and impact assessments. Interdisciplinary analyses of drought events and collective assessments with the participation of scientists, policy makers, stakeholders, and the public provide promising new ways of producing information for understanding and managing droughts. Global warming is likely to exacerbate droughts in many semiarid, snow-fed, and coastal basins. Research on historical and paleoclimates warns about the prospect of decadal or centennial megadroughts. Enhancing adaptive capacity becomes essential in the face of such uncertain future extremes. But policies remain locked in supply-side food and water technologies. Policies for the support of impoverished, vulnerable groups, investments in water conservation and appropriate, low-scale technologies can reduce drought vulnerability but face political-economic barriers.

The global population without complete sanitation services is enormous; it includes those without access to basic, household-level sanitation (2.6 billion) as well as those without adequate collection, treatment, and disposal or reuse of their waste. The main goals of a complete sanitation system are to protect human health and the environment and to recover valuable resources from waste (e.g., water, nutrients, energy). The needs of households and the larger community vary dramatically among the unserved population, as do the financial and institutional resources available to provide sanitation services. Thus, a wide range of technologies is needed that can be adapted to each particular situation. In this chapter, existing sanitation technologies are reviewed, from simple latrines to advanced wastewater treatment, with specific attention to characteristics that affect long-term performance. In addition, the context in which sanitation projects are implemented is discussed, including user preferences and demand, costs and financing, and institutional capacity.

Fisheries targeting small-to-medium pelagic, so-called forage fish, impact on human food security and marine ecosystems. Because their operations are shrouded by the myth that forage fish are unsuitable for human consumption, the role of these fisheries in intensive food production is not well understood or appreciated. Thus, although they account for over 30% of global landings of marine fish annually, our knowledge of how these levels of removal impact on marine ecosystems is limited. Nevertheless, there is considerable scope for policy makers to change the current management of these fisheries and to enhance their contribution to food security and economic development. Industry and consumers also have an important role in finding the balance between these fisheries contributing to human food security and poverty alleviation on the one hand, and sustaining intensive animal food production systems, especially aquaculture, on the other.

This chapter reviews current thinking about environment-development issues in the transitional zones between distinctly urban and unambiguously rural areas, known variously as rural-urban fringes/transition zones, or peri-urban zones/areas or interfaces (PUI). Such concerns reflect the growing real-world limitations of traditional concepts of a simple rural-urban dichotomy. Moreover, recent archaeological research suggests that these phenomena may have ancient antecedents. Present-day fringes/interfaces have become intimately bound up with notions of (more) sustainable urbanization and urban development, with different issues and agendas manifested in different geohistorical zones of urbanization. Following an overview of planning issues in (post)industrial societies, the chapter addresses the complexities of changing peri-urban production and livelihood systems in the context of rapid urbanization in poorer countries, distinctive peri-urban challenges of appropriate and flexible planning and development, and the future prospects for enhanced sustainability in this most challenging category of development-environment interfaces. Possibilities for mutual learning between geohistorical regions are also raised.

Certification schemes have emerged in recent years to become a significant and innovative venue for standard setting and governance in the environmental realm. This review examines these schemes in the forest sector where, arguably, their development is among the most advanced of the sustainability labeling initiatives. Beginning with the origins, history, and features of schemes, the review synthesizes and assesses what we know about the direct effects and broader consequences of forest certification. Bearing in mind underlying factors affecting producers' decisions to certify, direct effects are examined by describing the uptake of schemes, the improvements to management of audited forests, and the ameliorative potential of certification for landscape-level concerns such as deforestation and forest protection. In assessing broader consequences, we look beyond the instrument itself to detail positive and negative unintended consequences, spillover effects, and longer-term and slow-moving effects that flow from the emergence of the certification innovation.

This chapter reviews the literature on natural resource decentralization with an emphasis on forests in developing countries. This literature can be located at the intersection between discussions of good governance and democracy, development, and poverty alleviation, on the one hand, and common property resources, community-based resource management, and local resource rights, on the other. Policies implemented in the name of decentralization, however, are often not applied in ways compatible with the democratic potential with which decentralization is conceived, and only rarely have they resulted in pro-poor outcomes or challenged underlying structures of inequity. Greater attention to who receives decentralized powers, the role of property rights, the notion of “the local,” and the meeting of expert and local knowledge provides insights into key issues and contradictions. Fundamental differences in conceptions of democracy, participation, and development lie behind these contradictions and shape strategies for the redistribution of access to political power and resources, which is implied by decentralization.

The pursuit of sustainability in particular places and sectors often unravels at the edges. Efforts to tackle environmental problems in one place shift them somewhere else or are overwhelmed by external changes in drivers. Gains in energy efficiency of appliances used in houses are offset by greater total numbers or compensating changes in patterns of use. Analytical perspectives and practical initiatives, which treat production and consumption jointly, are needed to complement experiences and efforts with sector-, place-, product- and consumer-oriented approaches.

There is now a growing body of scholarship exploring a diverse range of initiatives and experiments aimed at enabling sustainable production-consumption systems (PCSs). Different approaches make divergent assumptions about market institutions, government regulation, sociotechnical innovation, and actor partnerships. From this body of work flow useful insights for others who would engage, for example, in redesigning relationships around services rather than products or between third world producers and first world consumers in fair trade initiatives.

This article provides a focused review of the current literature on global environmental governance. In the first part, we differentiate between three usages of the term “global environmental governance,” which we describe as analytical, programmatic, and critical. In the second part, we highlight three key characteristics of global environmental governance that make it different, in our view, from traditional international environmental politics: first, the emergence of new types of agency and of actors in addition to national governments, the traditional core actors in international environmental politics; second, the emergence of new mechanisms and institutions of global environmental governance that go beyond traditional forms of state-led, treaty-based regimes; and third, increasing segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and functional spheres. In the last section, we present an outlook on future study needs in this field.

Land-change science (LCS) and political ecology (PE) have emerged as two complementary but parallel approaches of addressing human-environment dynamics for sustainability. They share common intellectual legacies, are highly interdisciplinary, and provide understanding about changes in the coupled human-environment system. Distinctions in their problem framings and explanatory perspectives, however, have accentuated their differences and masked the symmetry in much of their findings relevant for sustainability themes. Focusing on their shared interests in the human-environment interactions of land use illuminates the differences and similarities relevant to these themes. Divergence is found primarily in regard to their different foci of interests about causes and consequences of land change. Convergence is revealed in the identification of the complexity of the interactions and the importance of context in land-change outcomes and in the general consensus found in such synthesis issues as forest transitions, vulnerability, and coproduction of science and application.

Environmental cost-benefit analysis, or CBA, refers to the economic appraisal of policies and projects that have the deliberate aim of improving the provision of environmental services or actions that might affect (sometimes adversely) the environment as an indirect consequence. Vital advances have arisen in response to the challenges that environmental problems and environmental policy pose for CBA. In this article, we review a number of these developments. Perhaps most notably this includes continuing progress in techniques to value environmental changes. Growing experience of these methods has resulted in, on the one hand, ever greater sophistication in application and, on the other hand, scrutiny regarding their validity and reliability. Distributional concerns have led to a renewal of interest in how appraisals might throw light on questions about equity as well as efficiency, and there have been substantial new insights for discounting costs and benefits in the far-off future. Uncertainty about what is lost when environmental assets are degraded or depleted has resulted in a number of distinct proposals although precaution is the watchword in each. Just as importantly, there is a need to understand when CBA is used in practice and why environmental decisions are often made in a manner apparently inconsistent with cost-benefit thinking.

Uncertainty about historical evidence of forest clearing is highlighted; nevertheless, its longevity and basic importance for survival make an understanding of the process important. First, archaeological and paleobotanical evidence for clearing during late Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe is examined. A similar examination of the Americas during past millennia emphasizes the myth of a pristine precontact forest. Post-1950s deforestation is beset with similar problems of forest extent and loss, pathways and processes of change, and the rate of change. Recent literature also reflects concerns about past and present motives in clearing and management, emphasizing conflicts between traditional users and modern producers, North/South inequalities of consumption/production, and social confrontation. The cultural meaning of the forest is another current theme, developed through dominant “discourses.” Finally, I argue that humans and the organic world are intimately entwined, and our expectations and ideas of the natural world actually mold the way we use and manipulate it.

The Earth system and society's use of ecological resources are tightly coupled through exchanges of water, energy, and nutrients. Terrestrial vegetation transfers materials between the atmosphere, biosphere, and water bodies in the coupled system. Vegetation is also a primary interface between human society and the Earth system through land-cover conversion, cultivation of favorable species, and transfer of organisms between locations. Remote sensing aids analyses of these interactions and, ultimately, contributes information to decision makers for improved management. Multidecadal records from multispectral sensors have been the mainstay for studying terrestrial vegetation at regional and global scales. Representation of vegetation and carbon dynamics is now routine in Earth system models. Challenges remain to incorporate realistic ecological disturbances and human land-use activities based on remote sensing observations. Hyperspectral, LIDAR, and radar systems contribute new capabilities for observing nitrogen fluxes, vegetation stress, canopy structure, and in some cases individual species.

To appreciate the beauty or the fragility of our environment and our cultural responses to it, we need to understand how artists have portrayed the environment in the past and how they are continuing to portray it in the present. Environmental art is presented in this paper as a new genre to describe works of art that are not only directly representational of the environment (e.g., Constable's Cloud Series or Monet's London Series) but also works of art that are clearly nonrepresentational and performative, such as Long's A Line Made by Walking or Turrell's Skyspaces. The need for an overarching new genre to describe nonrepresentational performative environmental art is more obvious because there has been a host of labels given to this type of art since the late 1960s, such as land art, earthworks, site-specific art, destination art, ecological art, eco-art, and environmental sculpture. The review is also concerned with the potential of environmental art for communicating climate change.

The last half decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of attention among practitioners and scholars to understanding the ability of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to address environmental and social problems. Although significant advances have been made, assessing the forms, types, and impacts on intended objectives is impeded by the conflation of distinct phenomena, which has created misunderstandings about why firms support CSR, and the implications of this support, or lack thereof, for the potential effectiveness of innovative policy options. As a corrective, we offer seven categories that distinguish efforts promoting learning and stakeholder engagement from those requiring direct on-the-ground behavior changes. Better accounting for these differences is critical for promoting a research agenda that focuses on the evolutionary nature of CSR innovations, including whether specific forms are likely to yield marginal or transformative results.

This review examines the literature available on the state of the environment and environmental protection in the Russian Federation. As the largest country on Earth, rich in natural resources and biodiversity, Russia's problems and policies have global consequences. Environmental quality and management are influenced by the legacy of Soviet economic planning and authoritarian governance, as well as by Russia's post-Soviet economic recession and current strategies of economic development. Russia achieved a reduction in some pollutants owing to the collapse of industrial production in the 1990s, but many environmental indicators suggest growing degradation. Russia has signed on to a number of international environmental agreements, but its record on implementation is mixed, and it discourages environmental activism. Scholarship on the Russian environment is a limited, but growing, field, constrained by challenges of data availability, yet it offers great potential for testing scientific and social scientific hypotheses.

More than 10,000 years ago, humans began an experiment on the environmental consequences of resource use. The environmental changes were at first local. By 6000 years ago, the consequences had begun to be manifested at the regional and global scales. At the beginning of the experiment, Asia played a founding role. Populations were centered there, and agriculture and associated land-use change began there. Now Asia, with 60% of the world's population, is rapidly growing in terms of both population and economic development. Over the next few decades, population growth will slow, but economic growth will continue, resulting in large-scale losses of S, C, and N compounds to the atmosphere. A global challenge is to implement growth scenarios that, on one hand, will not limit the ability of the Asian population to attain a higher standard of living, but, on the other hand, will not result in a continued degradation of the environments within Asia as well as downwind and downstream of Asia.