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Adaptation and mitigation measures are important in dealing with climate change impacts on agriculture, forestry and water management. Stakeholders have an important role to play in coping with climate change at the regional scale, so it is important to identify which measures they are aware of and which they have implemented. This paper describes the regional adaptation and mitigation measures taken by stakeholders in northern Germany and the connections between the sectoral measures and the spatial scales involved. The study finds that adaptation measures have either been implemented or chosen at the regional scale; that adaptation plays an important role at the regional scale whilst mitigation measures are almost non-existent; that water-related issues link the land use sectors examined; and that experts clearly view the national level as the appropriate level for policy makers to exert political influence on measures relating to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extremes of wet and dry weather experienced in the UK in recent years have raised many questions and issues about traditional water management and farming practices. Farm infrastructure and traditional machinery have been found to be limited when addressing these issues, which include increases in flooding, diffuse pollution and the inability to access land to carry out basic farming operations. This paper reviews reactions to these issues from those tasked with addressing them in the short and long term. Drawing on theories of learning systems, it considers the nature of some of the learning that has taken place and what kinds of social infrastructure can support such learning. Implications for future learning system design are discussed. Key examples are drawn from two research contexts, one concerned with a new generation of agricultural machines and the other with water management, governance and climate adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discursive construction of water scarcity and its role in the establishment and ongoing legitimacy of Australia's market environmentalist water reforms. It shows that climate was the dominant explanation for scarcity crises in Australia until the reforms commenced in the early 1990s, when it was overtaken by mismanagement. Since 2007 climate change has become increasingly prominent, particularly as a discourse explaining future water crises. Drawing on interviews with policymakers and analysis of water policy, it shows that the discourse of mismanagement has played a significant role in justifying the ongoing application of neoliberal policy mechanisms in Australia. Unlike in most accounts from other countries, in Australia neoliberalization has been facilitated by a discursive denaturalization of water scarcity. Yet, despite the reformers' success in mobilizing scarcity in support of neoliberal agendas, collectivist goals continue to have traction, which is visible both in the failure of the National Drought Policy just before the reforms commenced, and particularly as climate change has become discursively prominent since 2007. This points to the utility of studying the neoliberalization of nature in Australia, confirms the dependence of market environmentalism on real or discursively constructed resource scarcity, and highlights the malleability and incompleteness of neoliberal natures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of papers on city planning published from 2007 to 2008, including "Streets, Sounds and Identity in Inter-war Harlem," by Clare Corbould, "(Re)making the Other, Heterosexualising Everyday Space," by Kath Browne, and "Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds," by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder.