Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Volume 47, 2022

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.

Adaptation (i.e., actions that reduce the harms caused by climate change) is widely recognized as one of two pillars of climate action, along with mitigation (i.e., actions that reduce the concentrations of greenhouse gases which cause climate change). Action to date in both pillars is widely recognized as insufficient. This article argues that a major source of this deficiency of adaptation is ambiguity in the concept of adaptation, which hinders planning and implementation of action. The review traces the origins and consequences of this ambiguity and examines three major conceptual obstacles: the unclear relationship between adaptation and mitigation, the tendency to define adaptation by listing distinct types that are not directly comparable and hence difficult to measure, and a persistent separation of short-term and long-term perspectives that limits the ability to build from current action to transformation. The article identifies recent efforts that have addressed these obstacles, although new areas of concern have emerged, particularly maladaptation and Loss and Damage.

Environmentalist, Indigenous, and agrarian and food justice movements that mobilize across and beyond national borders are demanding recognition and participation in debates and policies that shape planetary futures. We review recent social movements that challenge agendas set by corporations, elites, states, conservative movements, and some international governance institutions. We pay particular attention to novel concepts that emerged from or were popularized by these movements, such as environmental justice, climate debt, Indigenous-led conservation, food sovereignty, agroecology, extractivism, and Vivir Bien (“Living Well”). Such concepts and agendas increasingly enter international governance spaces, influence global policy debates, build innovative institutions, and converge across class, geographic, and sectoral lines. Although they face daunting obstacles—particularly the free-market zealotry that dominates international policymaking and the agribusiness, mining, energy, and other corporate-philanthropic lobbies—the visions proffered by these movements offer new possibilities for creating a world that prioritizes the intrinsic value of nature and all its beings.

Corporations are perceived as increasingly powerful and critically important to ensuring that irreversible climatological or ecological tipping points on Earth are not crossed. Environmental impacts of corporate activities include pollution of soils, freshwater and the ocean, depletion of ecosystems and species, unsustainable use of resources, changes to air quality, and alteration of the global climate. Negative social impacts include unacceptable working conditions, erosion of traditional practices, and increased inequalities. Multiple formal and informal mechanisms have been developed, and innovative examples of corporate biosphere stewardship have resulted in progress. However, the biosphere crisis underscores that such efforts have been insufficient and that transformative change is urgently needed. We provide suggestions for aligning corporate activities with the biosphere and argue that such corporate biosphere stewardship requires more ambitious approaches taken by corporations, combined with new and formalized public governance approaches by governments.

Community monitoring can track environmental phenomena, resource use, and natural resource management processes of concern to community members. It can also contribute to planning and decision-making and empower community members in resource management. While community monitoring that addresses the environmental crisis is growing, it also gathers data on other global challenges: climate change, social welfare, and health. Some environmental community monitoring programs are challenged by limited collective action and community participation, insufficient state responsiveness to data and proposals, and lack of sustainability over time. Additionally, community members monitoring the environment are increasingly harassed and sometimes killed. Community monitoring is more effective with improved data collection, improved data management and sharing, andstronger efforts to meet community information needs, enable conflict resolution, and strengthen self-determination. Other promising areas for development are further incorporating governance issues, embracing integrated approaches at the community level, and establishing stronger links to national and global frameworks.

This review engages with literature on authoritarian populism, focusing specifically on its relationship to the environment. We analyze hybrid combinations of authoritarianism and populism to explore three themes from the literature: environmental governance, social and political representations of nature, and resistance. In the environmental governance section, we analyze how governments have increasingly resorted to populist politics to expand extractivism; certain commodities with national security implications have become key commodities to be protected; and borders, frontiers, and zones of inclusion/exclusion have become flash points. In the social and political representations of nature section, we analyze settler colonialism and sacrifice zones as organizing principles for relations with the environment. In our final section on resistance, we review literature highlighting pushback to authoritarian populism from peasant, indigenous, and worker movements. Variants of populism and authoritarianism are likely to persist amid increasing competition over resources as components of responses to environmental and climate crisis.

When deep recessions hit, some governments spend to rescue and recover their economies. Key economic objectives of such countercyclical spending include protecting and creating jobs while reinvigorating economic growth—but governments can also use this spending to achieve long-term social and environmental goals. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, claims have been made that green recovery investments can meet both economic and environmental objectives. Here, we investigate the evidence behind these claims. We create a bespoke supervised machine learning algorithm to identify a comprehensive literature set. We analyze this literature using both structured qualitative assessment and machine learning models. We find evidence that green investments can indeed create more jobs and deliver higher fiscal multipliers than non-green investments. For policymakers, we suggest strong prioritization of green spending in recovery. For researchers, we highlight many research gaps and unalignment of research patterns with spending patterns.

Understanding why people do what they do is central to advancing equitable and sustainable futures. Yet, theories about human action are fragmented across many social science disciplines, each with its own jargon and implicit assumptions. This fragmentation has hindered theory integration and accessibility of theories relevant to a given challenge. We synthesized human action theories from across the humanities and social sciences. We developed eight underlying assumptions—metatheories—that reveal a fundamental organization of human action theories. We describe each metatheory and the challenges that it best elucidates (illustrated with climate change examples). No single metatheory addresses the full range of factors and problems; only one treats interactions between factors. Our synthesis will help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners gain a multifaceted understanding of human action.

We review the state of knowledge concerning international CO2 emission transfers associated particularly with trade in energy-intensive goods and concerns about carbon leakage arising from climate policies. The historical increase in aggregate emission transfers from developing to developed countries peaked around 2006 and declined since. Studies find no evidence that climate policies lead to carbon leakage, but this is partly due to shielding of key industrial sectors, which is incompatible with deep decarbonization. Alternative or complementary consumption-based approaches areneeded. Private sector initiatives to trace and address carbon emissions throughout supply chains have grown substantially but cannot compensate for inadequate policy. Three main price-based approaches to tackling carbon leakage are potentially compatible with international trade rules: border adjustments on imports, carbon consumption charges, and climate excise contributions combined with emissions trading. We also consider standards and public procurement options to tackle embodied emissions. Finally, we discuss proposals for carbon clubs involving cooperation among a limited set of countries.

Ecological thresholds comprise relatively fast changes in ecological conditions, with respect to time or external drivers, and are an attractive concept in both scientific and policy arenas. However, there is considerable debate concerning the existence, underlying mechanisms, and generalizability of ecological thresholds across a range of ecological subdisciplines. Here, we usethe general concept of scale as a unifying framework with which to systematically navigate the variability within ecological threshold research. We review the literature to show how the observational scale adopted in any one study, defined by its organizational level, spatiotemporal grain and extent, and analytical method, can influence threshold detection and magnitude. We highlight a need for nuance in synthetic studies of thresholds, which could improve our predictive understanding of thresholds. Nuance is also needed when translating threshold concepts into policies, including threshold contingencies and uncertainties.

This article reviews the broad range of contemporary remote sensing technologies that can access the ocean, while emphasizing next-generation ones that might revolutionize the field. Significant challenges remain in studying the largest part of Earth's biosphere. As of 2022, less than 10% of the ocean has been imaged at a comparable resolution to the surface of the moon and Mars, despite comprising more than 90% of the habitable volume of our planet. Within the past five years, phenomena as modest as refractive ocean-wave distortion have finally been addressed, but steep technology maturation and challenges persist in remote sensing life in our oceans, hampering our understanding of rapidly changing ecosystems at a crucial inflection point in our history. We survey the field and share emerging technologies and trends, while motivating the case for a future Sustained Marine Imaging Program for the next decade in remote sensing the ocean biosphere.

This review explains the science behind the drive for global net zero emissions and why this is needed to halt the ongoing rise in global temperatures. We document how the concept of net zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions emerged from an earlier focus on stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Using simple conceptual models of the coupled climate–carbon cycle system, we explain why approximately net zero CO2 emissions and declining net energy imbalance due to other climate drivers are required to halt global warming on multidecadal timescales, introducing important concepts, including the rate of adjustment to constant forcing and the rate of adjustment to zero emissions. The concept of net zero was taken up through the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Structured Expert Dialogue, culminating in Article 4of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Increasing numbers of net zero targets have since been adopted by countries, cities, corporations, and investors. The degree to which any entity can claim to have achieved net zero while continuing to rely on distinct removals to compensate for ongoing emissions is at the heart of current debates over carbon markets and offsetting both inside and outside the UNFCCC. We argue that what matters here is not the precise makeup of a basket of emissions and removals at any given point in time, but the sustainability of a net zero strategy as a whole and its implications for global temperature over multidecadal timescales. Durable, climate-neutral net zero strategies require like-for-like balancing of anthropogenic greenhouse gas sources and sinks in terms of both origin (biogenic versus geological) and gas lifetime.