Bøger i Anthem Environment and Sustainability Initiative (AESI) serien

Ambitious measures to reduce carbon emissions are all too rare in reality, impeded by economic and political concerns rather than technological advances. In this timely collection of essays, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton show that the impact of inaction on climate change will be far worse than the cost of ambitious climate policies.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Wildlife Corridors charts some best practices and makes new theoretical contributions about the design and creation of wildlife corridors. The book provides the necessary background for understanding habitat connectivity projects, and makes a theoretical contribution to current knowledge about wildlife corridors.

An in-depth analysis of the climate impacts facing Boston and the city's efforts to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.

This book is not another warning about the end of the world. It is neither a penitential sermon on environmentalism, nor an appeal to frugality and self-restraint. Far from having exhausted the era of technological, social and democratic progress, we are on the brink of a new stage of industrial modernity: a shift from a fossil-based to a postfossil economy, from the ruthless exploitation of nature toward growth in tandem with it. Decoupling economic growth from environmental consumption is an ambitious goal, but also an achievable one. Drawing on the German policy experience of tackling climate change, 'Green Growth, Smart Growth' outlines a positive way forward in this great transformation and it does so in the conviction that the danger industrial civilization poses to our future can be overcome using the means of modernity: science, technology and democracy. It is by no means certain that we will win the race against climate change and dwindling resources. That will require nothing less than a great leap forward-a green industrial revolution.

Local communities are now, more than ever before, experiencing environmental change. These changes draw attention to the discrepancy and conflict between their own views and the views of the initiators of development, such as governments and multilateral organizations. The main thesis of the book unfolds around the idea that under changing environmental conditions, sustainable development can only be achieved when communities can overcome the view conflict and are free to set their own goals.Using a case study of the Trio indigenous peoples in Suriname, the book presents an "e;inside"e; view of a community on the path towards sustainable development when facing climate change. It introduces a new framework, called VIEW, to comprehensively analyze the views of the Trio community when progressing through the different stages of development. The community apparently goes through a process of judging climate change against their own values, followed by creating a meaning about it and ultimately making a decision on how to act.This book will take the reader beyond examining a few examples from the field. It discusses the position of a researcher in community development and presents several tools and indicators to effectively work with communities. The book lays out a set of principles for researchers to engage in ethical, effective and valid research. Only with the right mindset, a researcher can look through the eyes of the community in a respectable manner and implement a truly bottom-up approach in sustainable development.

Urban Crisis, Urban Hope is an urgent, informed, and passionate critique at the crisis that has been allowed to develop in our cities, and a wide-ranging agenda for change to challenge all political and government institutions.

Companies can no longer afford to be 'un'sustainable. While this observation has been widely accepted in the United States and Europe, only recently have Latin American companies and businesses across the developing world started to integrate sustainability principles into their corporate cultures. Recognizing and responding to this emerging trend, 'The Labyrinth of Sustainability' offers a collection of carefully developed and tightly framed case studies generated through the Latin American Corporate Sustainability Analysis project, an initiative convened by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy in conjunction with the EGADE Business School in Mexico and INCAE Business school in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.The introduction by Daniel Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and one of the world's leading corporate sustainability experts, makes a compelling argument for what he calls the "sustainability imperative"--the notion that businesses must work toward sustainability to be successful in today's marketplace. It distills from the 12 case studies that follow five important sustainability strategy lessons for executives and managers on leadership, vision and execution, partnerships, communications and inspiration.The 12 case studies focus on the sustainability strategy and initiatives of a company with business operations in Latin America, drawing out key themes and highlighting both successes and challenges. The aim of 'The Labyrinth of Sustainability' is to present the problems and prospects for corporate sustainability in a Latin American context across a spectrum of companies that ranges from small businesses to multinational enterprises. With its Latin American focus and lessons for business in a range of industry settings, this volume complements previous analyses and case studies of corporate sustainability in different regional contexts.

Rooted in the ideas of complexity science and mutual gains negotiation, this volume shows why traditional systems engineering approaches will not work for complex water problems and what emerging tools and techniques are needed to resolve them. This collection successfully synthesizes insights from theory and practice to advocate for contingent and adaptive management using a water diplomacy framework.

Rooted in the ideas of complexity science and mutual gains negotiation, this volume shows why traditional systems engineering approaches will not work for complex water problems and what emerging tools and techniques are needed to resolve them. This collection successfully synthesizes insights from theory and practice to advocate for contingent and adaptive management using a water diplomacy framework.

This volume reports on the research completed as part of the multi-year New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP), a partnership between the MIT Science Impact Collaborative, the US Government's National Estuarine Research Reserve System, four New England coastal towns, and the Consensus Building Institute. The first half of the book offers a series of chapters that explain how and why climate adaptation requires collective rather than individual risk management. It argues that most of the responsibility for responding to climate risks-including sea level rise, storm intensification, changing patterns of rainfall, and increasing temperature-must be taken by local and regional stakeholders. While collective action is critical for climate adaptation, many communities are not ready to effectively tackle the adaptation challenge, and need enhanced collaborative capacity to support collective risk management. Using concrete examples, this book offers strategies to increase the readiness of communities to deal effectively with the impacts of climate change. It introduces methods for assessing local climate change risks and describes tools for evaluating the social and political contexts in which collective action can take place. It also shares NECAP research demonstrating that engaging communities in tailored role-play simulations has impacted public understanding of climate risks and local readiness to support collective risk management efforts. The second half of the book presents the products of NECAP, including stakeholder assessments (showing how key stakeholders think about climate risks), risk assessments (including downscaled forecasts from global climate models presented in a way that is accessible to the public), tailored role play simulations (that other communities can use to engage residents in their locality), community case studies (that provide statistical and qualitative evidence of the before-and-after impact of public engagement in serious games), and the results of public opinion polls following interventions in each community after almost 18 months.

Since the Kyoto Protocol's signing in 1997 the United States has been the world's most prominent climate change outlaw. In the United States, air pollution policymaking starts and ends with the states, whose governmental units implement federal programs.But we find ourselves in uncharted waters in the United States when it comes to state-federal relations in climate change: many states have developed climate change and renewable energy policies ahead of the national government, and lacking an overarching climate change law, the US Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to employ a little-used part of the Clean Air Act - which revolves around state plans rather than uniform national standards - to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from large stationary sources like power plants.Taking on these challenges, Thomson proposes a framework for climate change policy in the United States called "e;sophisticated interdependence"e; that will help foster the coalition-building so desperately needed in the US climate change arena. This framework rests on a nine-state analysis of state-level economic and political forces in the United States and on comparative descriptions of climate change and renewable energy programs in Germany and Brazil, both strong federal democracies and key players in the global climate change policy arena.

The Creation of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States is a detailed, critical analysis of the most advanced efforts to create ecosystem services markets in the United States. With the help of in-depth case studies of three well-known attempts to create such markets--in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the Ohio River basin and the Willamette River basin--the book explains why very few of these markets have actually succeeded even after close to two decades of much scholarly enthusiasm, significant federal funding and concerted efforts by NGOs, government agencies and private businesses.Based on interviews, policy analysis and participatory observation, three features of markets for ecosystem services emerge as particularly problematic. First, the logic of displacement or the idea that particular elements of an ecosystem can be separated, quantified and traded across landscapes or watersheds runs counter to political interests, environmental beliefs and people's connections to specific places. The second problem is that of measurement. By highlighting the long and often contentious histories of specific measurement systems used in ecosystem services markets, van Maasakkers shows that these quantification methods embed a range of assumptions and decisions about what counts when conserving or restoring (parts of) ecosystems. The third problem is related to participation in environmental decision-making. Since the requirements to buy offsets stem from federal and sometimes state regulations (based on the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act), the opportunities and requirements for public participation are much more in line with typical policy implementation processes as opposed to voluntary decisions about buying and selling in an ideal typical market. How meaningful participation in this hybrid form of regulatory market is possible is not clear and not something that the proponents of markets have successfully dealt with, if at all.

Urban Crisis, Urban Hope is an urgent, informed, and passionate critique at the crisis that has been allowed to develop in our cities, and a wide-ranging agenda for change to challenge all political and government institutions.