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The impacts of climate change in the Pacific and worldwide have prompted researchers and practitioners to find ways to define, assess and support community resilience. This paper presents a community resilience framework to help meet this challenge. While traditional framings of resilience in scholarship are often based on deficit models that focus on vulnerability and gaps, this framework draws on strengths‐based principles and systems thinking approaches to support a holistic and integrated perspective of community resilience. Pacific community resilience literature underpins the framework, which values and prioritises diverse community insights to support locally defined pathways towards adaptation and resilience building. We offer examples of future application of the framework in a range of contexts such as research, programme design, strategic policy, programme implementation or evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly the environment, and climate risks in particular, are influencing migration and planned resettlement in Vietnam, raising the spectre of increased displacement in a country already confronting serious challenges around sustainable land and water use as well as urbanisation. Planned resettlement has emerged as part of a suite of measures being pursued as part of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies. This paper provides an historical, political, legal and environmental overview of resettlement in Vietnam identifying key challenges for framing resettlement as climate change adaptation. The paper outlines the scale of past resettlement in Vietnam, identifying the drivers and implications for vulnerability. Detailed case studies of resettlement are reviewed. Through this review, the paper reflects on the growing threat of climate change and the likelihood of increased displacement associated with worsening climate risks to identify some critical considerations for planned resettlement in climate change adaptation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the pressing challenges of poverty, climate change and disasters, identifying opportunities for interventions that offer positive outcomes across the trifecta of development, adaptation and disaster risk reduction is critically needed. While the overlaps between these streams can be straightforward in theory, practical opportunities for convergence are often lacking. Drawing on 10 focus groups with women market vendors who are part of the UN Women's Markets for Change programme in Vanuatu, this paper explores how markets as places can be useful entry points for this trifecta. Marketplaces can be important sites for developing capabilities and empowering women. As transient and interactive spaces, marketplaces also have inherent strengths that can be built upon and utilised to heighten intervention reach and foster positive outcomes across the development‐adaptation‐disaster trifecta. This paper encourages further exploration into the capacity of marketplaces to achieve this trifecta of outcomes across various scales and locations, and to find solutions to existing challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper conceptualises the process of voluntary relocation undertaken by rural farmers to informal settlements in coastal cities. These are journeys that occur without formal institutional support, utilising migrants' own agency. Learning from these community‐driven relocations has merit in rethinking climate change adaptation at the regional level. In this paper we present stories of 17 families who have progressively relocated to the fringes of Khulna city in southwestern Bangladesh. We observe three key attributes: first, relocations are slow, neither singular nor immediately completed, but rather take months of careful back and forth journeys of family members between their places of origin and destination. Second, relocations rely on small networks of relatives and acquaintances at the destination. Third, relocations are built on shared responsibilities distributed among a range of actors in places of origin and destination. We conclude that these slow, small and shared relocations are likely to be realised as forms of ongoing adaptation by rural farmers if their aspirational mobilities, social relations and supports are maintained at a regional scale. This kind of migration as adaptation may bring about just outcomes for those displaced without necessarily promoting rigid planning interventions that tend to fix resettlement solutions in place and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS), an Indigenous single women farmer's collective in Odisha, India and Norco Dairy in regional NSW, Australia are cooperatives undertaking collective action to 'survive well', securing agrarian livelihoods in the face of climate change. Striking differences in affluence and poverty separate these place‐based cooperatives while other things connect them: an Earth unsettled by climate change and extractivist/capitalist interventions. Both cooperatives transform place in practice by engaging similar survival strategies and non‐exploitative forms of cooperation. In this paper we seek to articulate the transformative nature of these places and practices in a way that goes beyond easy binaries of local/global, while enabling recognition of different affiliations between lands, related climate crisis and sustainable and shared surviving mechanisms. We develop a 'two‐thirds' perspective building upon Bruno Latour's third attractor, the Terrestrial, together with another third, Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg's idea of the World of the Third (WOT). Their interventions open our thinking to the ecological particularities, uncertainties, and postcapitalist possibilities of surviving well in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic climate change poses huge challenges to humanity. The frequency and magnitude of extreme weather is increasing. As more attention turns to disaster preparedness and recovery, it is worth recognising that many communities have a long history of living with the flux of planetary dynamism. They are experienced in negotiating collective well‐being with one another and with the earth. Other communities have less experience and know‐how and have had to adopt more experimental approaches. In this paper we draw on planetary social thought and critical disaster studies to re‐think disaster recovery. We present stories of communities in the Philippines differently negotiating collective well‐being in the face of climate uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bangladesh experiences some of the most severe impacts of climate change, with impacts already evident in the coastal regions. Recent data shows that around 32% of the coastal communities in Bangladesh are affected by climate‐induced hazards each year. In 2011, 64% among them were displaced locally and 27% were displaced to other locations in Bangladesh. It requires comprehensive and viable polices and planning to meet the challenges of managing a large number of displaced people. In this context, this paper reviews and investigates the effectiveness of current governance frameworks to address migration of affected communities. It argues that migration can be an effective way to cope with environmental shocks. Finally, it discusses policy imperatives for effective protection of people displaced by climate risks with a special reference to adopting a human rights‐based approach in law and policy making for climate‐induced migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a leading threat to sustainable socio‐economic development in Bangladesh. Adverse impacts of climatic disasters including flash floods, recurrent cyclones and erratic rainfall patterns are already causing hardship for both rural and urban people and are expected to accelerate into the future. The aim of this research note is to identify the core contributing economic sectors to climate change in Bangladesh, and to consider effective mitigation strategies. Following the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (2014), in this paper, we argue that comprehensive mitigation measures are required in the energy, transport, buildings, industry and land‐use sectors to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Our findings indicate that it is crucial that government and non‐government mitigation efforts engage with community knowledge practices in order to most effectively reduce GHG emissions and combat the adverse impacts of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a time of increasing land enclosures sparked by large-scale environmental initiatives and agricultural expansion, this paper examines local and global contestations over the value of forest on an Indonesian forest frontier. Engaging with recent debates on carbon forestry, the paper problematises the emerging initiatives of ' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' known as REDD+ in the province of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The paper argues that the general rush to implement REDD+ without intimate knowledge of the political landscape of resource struggle is in danger of generating new enclosures of land that may be easily appropriated by local elites, thus excluding less fortunate sections of local society. The paper shows how divergent interpretations of REDD+ are triggering land disputes, and how powerful actors readily appropriate REDD+ discourses as a tool to support divergent claims of land ownership. Government and villagers, through overlapping and contradictory engagements, negotiate REDD+ initiatives with global environmental actors and private plantation companies. The paper highlights the implications of these local realities for the successes of REDD+. The Kalimantan case highlights some of the dilemmas of carbon mitigation initiatives experienced in frontier regions throughout Southeast Asia, places that have become prime battlefronts of large-scale climate change initiatives and agrarian expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts an analysis of the socioeconomic determinants of Vietnam's cross-provincial variations in natural disaster vulnerability. The purpose is twofold: (i) to capture disaggregated vulnerability variations normally obscured by national statistics, thereby providing more nuanced insights into Vietnam's vulnerability to natural disasters; and (ii) to take advantage of the fact that the overall political system and key institutional structures to a large extent are constant across Vietnam's provinces, which makes the analysis a novel addition to the many disaster studies based on cross-national variations. The paper's analysis indicates that much of Vietnam's cross-provincial variations in natural disaster fatalities and economic costs can be explained by differences in key socioeconomic factors. High provincial rates of inequality, poverty and infant mortality, for instance, appear to drive up natural disaster fatalities. Local adaptation efforts should focus as much on these broader socioeconomic dimensions as they focus on the geophysical susceptibility to natural hazards of individual areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that climate change may cause the loss of atoll countries is now taken for granted in much of climate change science, policy and media coverage. This normalisation of loss means atoll countries now face a future that is apparently finite, which is a grievous situation no other country has to contend with. This paper explains the dilemmas this presents to atoll countries. If there is a risk of forced migration, then strategic planning can minimise its social impacts. Yet, doing so may bring future dangers into the present by undermining efforts to facilitate adaptation to climate change, creating new identities and deterring investments in sustainable resource management. To overcome this dilemma, the paper argues for a more hopeful approach to the future of atoll countries, because for as long as the science of loss remains uncertain, and the limits to adaptation are unknown, forced migration cannot be taken as a matter of fact and could possibly be averted through emission reductions and a vastly improved and significantly more creative approach to adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the experiences of a Samoan female geographer undertaking community‐based field research in her home country, and identifies some lessons for researchers working in similar circumstances. The paper suggests that ethical behaviour in research is 'place‐specific', and there is therefore a need to employ culturally sensitive and 'location‐specific' methodologies when undertaking community‐based research fieldwork. For the lead researcher, growing up in Samoa played a significant role in gaining an understanding of a set of robust and effective procedures to evaluate citizens' resilience to climatic and other environmental challenges. Fluency in everyday and more formal local languages, and awareness of local differences, each with multi‐layered connections to local communities, understanding cultural nuances and practising respect for va tapuia [sacred space or relationships] protocols, together facilitated the process of knowledge acquisition and helped to confirm the validity of the conclusions derived from the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planned resettlement is being widely considered as a response to the impacts of climate change. As many millions of people are expected to be displaced in the coming decades, scholars and policymakers are searching for precedence to inform their research and planning, particularly from experiences of Development‐Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR). Nowhere in the world is DIDR and other closely related forms of planned resettlement more prevalent than in China: an estimated 78 million people have been displaced by development projects over the last six decades. While planned resettlement has consistently been shown to cause impoverishment, the Chinese state views it as the answer to a multitude of social ills including poverty, environmental damage, low levels of domestic consumption, and most recently, climate change, providing impetus to the normalisation of resettlement as adaptation. This paper examines the prospects for just outcomes in resettlement projects by examining distributive justice at multiple scales in existing resettlement practice in China. It finds that due to the interplay between resettlement and questions of procedural justice, prospects for just outcomes are quite limited, and that in order to achieve fair adaptation, alternatives to planned resettlement should be emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the expectation of adverse climate change impacts, some (often majority) Indigenous populations of the Pacific are expressing a preference to remain on Indigenous lands for cultural and spiritual reasons. In some cases, Indigenous people express preparedness to die on traditional territory rather than relocate, representing a new type of agency and resistance to dispossession. This is a prominent politics of place of relevance to emerging debates and decision‐making around retreat and relocation. If climate change is experienced by populations as an existential threat to culture, identity and place‐based connections, voluntary immobility can be an important adaptation strategy that helps to strengthen cultural and spiritual resilience among those facing the prospect of a lost homeland. This paper argues that voluntary immobility decisions need ethically robust and culturally appropriate policies and practices, particularly when a site is deemed by external experts to be no longer fit for human settlement. National governments, civil society groups, international organisations and donors will need to: engage in culturally meaningful dialogue with communities about relocation and immobility; respect, protect and fulfil the rights of 'immobile' people and those on the move; and confirm that in situ adaptation options have been exhausted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Philippines, calls for creating 'global', 'sustainable' and 'resilient' cities are placing urban poor communities in increasingly precarious positions. These communities have long been the targets of urban development and 'modernisation' efforts; more recently the erasure of informal settlements from Philippine cities is being bolstered at the behest of climate change adaptation and disaster risk management (DRM) agendas. In Metro Cebu, flood management has been at the heart of DRM and broader urban development discussions, and is serving as justification for the demolition and displacement of informal settler communities in areas classed as 'danger zones'. Using Kusno's (2010) interpretation of the 'exemplary centre' as a point of departure, this paper interrogates the relationship between DRM, worlding aspirations (Roy and Ong, 2011) and market‐oriented urbanisation in Cebu, and considers the socio‐spatial implications of these intersecting processes for urban poor communities. Through analysing the contradictions inherent in framings of certain bodies and spaces as being 'of risk' or 'at risk' over others, I argue that the epistemologies of modernity, disaster risk and resilience endorsed and propagated by the state are facilitating processes of displacement and dispossession that serve elite commercial interests under the auspices of disaster resilience and pro‐poor development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process for establishing a 'village agreement' using the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership ( KFCP) as a case study. REDD+ is designed as a 'performance-based' mechanism and requires a contractual agreement between the parties involved. Since its implementation will affect the life of forest-dependent communities, it is vital that villagers have sufficient ability to negotiate their interests during the agreement process. This paper investigates the degree of 'social learning' essential for developing actors' capacity to negotiate rules and interests with outsiders involved in the agreement process (between KFCP and the seven villages involved) and how this meshes with notions of 'participation'. It found that while 'social learning' occurred as a result of the well-designed participatory process conducted by KFCP, villagers' ability to secure their interests was influenced by a learning experience accumulated from their previous engagement with several development/conservation projects. This finding contributes to literature by emphasising how historical context plays a significant role in the success of present learning and the efficacy or otherwise of a contractual agreement. Therefore historical aspects should be taken into account in site selection and the design of future REDD+ projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudden events of crisis ('focusing events') trigger intense media reporting, which in turn can prompt political decision-makers to respond with an adjustment of existing policies. As such, focusing events can potentially lead to long-term policy change on a certain issue. This article explores the sudden and intense period of air pollution in Beijing in January 2013 as a focusing event. The episode, which international media referred to as 'Airpocalypse', triggered widespread discussion and policy adjustments that can be assumed to have accelerated the control of air pollution in China. The 'Airpocalypse' was not the first event of intense air pollution in Beijing, but the only one which seemingly caused lasting sociopolitical changes. The aim of this article is to explore the underlying situational factors that enabled the 'Airpocalypse' to be more relevant than other events of severe air pollution. This paper argues that a combination of historically high pollution, improved access to information, increasing government willingness to address the issue, and the ability of media to more openly discuss air pollution created a public pressure situation to which the government was prompted to respond in a stronger way than during previous events of heavy air pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of changing rationales and tactics among actors engaged in mobilising private finance for Indonesia's emergent Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ( REDD+) programme. Despite limited flows of private finance so far, private sector actors have been responsible for a great deal of development and innovation in the forest carbon sector in Indonesia, and have thus played - and continue to play - an important part in shaping the country's REDD+ programme. Drawing on extended field research and interviews with key actors engaged with REDD+ in Indonesia, we identify a variety of private investor motivations, strategies and tactics, many of which depart considerably from the common understanding of REDD+ as avoided deforestation funded through carbon offsets. As non-state actors increasingly shape emerging REDD+ projects, they assume important roles as agents of environmental governance - working through a variety of private market and hybrid modes of forest/climate governance. We describe four general modes of engagement, centred around: investment in REDD+ verified emissions reductions; corporate social responsibility; sustainable commodities; and impact investment. The research thus contributes to an improved understanding of the nature of private REDD+ finance in Indonesia, and the implications, potential and limits of private, market-based climate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus ( REDD+) programme seeks to reshape the way we value, govern and interact with forests. Rather than managing forests according to interests in timber, conservation, land or livelihoods, REDD+ encourages forms of forest management that prioritise carbon. While international negotiations are shaping the rules of the programme, how it takes place on the ground will depend on its interpretation and implementation in different places. In this paper, we are interested in how the REDD+ Task Force ( Satgas REDD+), an ad hoc body formed by presidential decree to design and implement REDD+ readiness activities in Indonesia, has attempted to mainstream the programme from 2010 to 2013. We develop a governmentality approach to focus on how the Task Force sought to introduce REDD+ carbon rationalities to forest politics. Based on extended ethnographic research, we identify three strategies: adopting and promoting the carbon discourses circulating among global REDD+ communities; making carbon visible and governable through mapping technologies; and implementing participatory technologies to encourage pro- REDD+ subjectivities. In some ways, the Task Force has been successful in building awareness about forest carbon among forest stakeholders in Indonesia. National civil society organisations, in particular, appear to be supportive of REDD+; however, they emphasise 'co-benefits' framed as ' Beyond Carbon', informed by social and environmental justice. For others, however, forests remain sources of timber and land, and new strategies are required if REDD+ is to have substantial impacts on forest governance in Indonesia. The Task Force's efforts reveal the difficult and contested processes through which global climate change programmes come to be embedded in national arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks through what processes and for which interests the emerging Vietnamese climate change strategy is being designed, and if, ultimately, it is likely or not to be effective in the face of the looming threat. Through a review of an emerging body of literature and field observations, the paper finds the strategy partial and problematic in several ways. Its technocratic process prevents a pluralist representation of interests, obfuscating and perpetuating sectorial ones, at the expense of a more transparent and democratic resource allocation. The strategy therefore reflects and reinforces existing power relations in both politics and production. It feeds into a business-as-usual complacency, protecting national and international interests vested in unchallenged continuity, even when considering post-carbon technological fixes, which largely serve to expand capital accumulation opportunities. The article concludes that the national climate change strategy provides an illusion of intervention and security, but largely fails to identify and mitigate the underlying causes of climate change, or to lay the ground for a robust mid- and long-term adaptation strategy that can cope with yet unknown levels of climatic and other structural changes.

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the issue of climate change in the Pacific Islands, in terms of its geopolitical implications, and through the lens of mitigation and adaptation policies and strategies. Comparatively little focus has been given to the domestic politics of climate change in the region: How a changing climate is affecting internal political dynamics. This article traces the boundaries of a new research agenda on the impacts of climate change within Pacific states as an animating political dynamic. It considers climate change as a possible source of political change and contestation; as a critical domestic policy issue; and as a driver of political participation and organisation. Climate change is an existential threat to the Pacific Islands, yet it has unique power as a mass mobilising factor in the largely localised and fragmented politics of the region. We conclude with some reflections on the potential of climate change as a key political driver in the region, and fruitful avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disappearing islands and climate refugees have become signifiers of the scale and urgency of uneven impacts of climate change. This paper offers a critical account of how sea level rise debates reverberate around Western mythologies of island laboratories. I argue that representations of low-lying Oceania islands as experimental spaces burden these sites with providing proof of a global climate change crisis. The emergence of Tuvalu as a climate change ‘canary’ has inscribed its islands as a location where developed world anxieties about global climate change are articulated. As Tuvalu islands and Tuvaluan bodies become sites to concretize climate science's statistical abstractions, they can enforce an eco-colonial gaze on Tuvalu and its inhabitants. Expressions of ‘wishful sinking’ create a problematic moral geography in some prominent environmentalist narratives: only after they disappear are the islands useful as an absolute truth of the urgency of climate change, and thus a prompt to save the rest of the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Compacts of Free Association (COFA) are agreements between the United States of America and three Pacific Island countries: the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and Palau, collectively the Freely Associated States (FAS). COFA provides the FAS financial assistance to build their economies and foster financial independence; in exchange, the United States has regional military control. The United States is the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, while the FAS produce few emissions but are vulnerable to climate impacts. I highlight inconsistencies in U.S. policies from within its own paradigm by 'seeing like an empire' to show how contradicting priorities jeopardise American interests in the region. Aid provided by COFA has done little to build infrastructure supporting the FAS's economically independence, and climate change diverts economic resources to funding climate adaptation. The United States is currently battling China to maintain hegemony in the Pacific, making the FAS strategically important for national security. Meanwhile, climate change threatens U.S. military installations in the FAS. It is in the United States' best interests to limit emissions to protect its investments in the FAS, but this requires a policy change to prioritise its commitments in Micronesia over climate change denial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pacific region faces a significant and growing burden of noncommunicable diseases and mental disorders. An emerging issue is the increasing overlap between physical and mental health conditions, which are often the result of interactive effects and lead to more severe consequences. In addition, climate change is amplifying health risks, as it poses both physical and existential threats to Pacific Island communities. The sustainable development agenda provides a holistic opportunity to address these issues; key elements include improving health surveillance and strengthening health systems, within a multisectoral approach, in order to work towards achieving Healthy Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realisation that climate change might necessitate resettlement of people displaced initially raised interest in the experience of development‐forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR). Looking back, in 1980 the first international policy on involuntary resettlement was approved to address perceived weaknesses in state property and expropriation law to safeguard people in the way of development projects. Since then international policy and praxis have brought global attention to developmentally displaced people but have not guaranteed them an effective safeguard. Recently, renewed attention has focussed on state legal and governance frameworks substantively and procedurally. Identifying four key policy objectives that resonate with climate change displacement I analyse their treatment in a data base of DFDR laws and regulations from 40 Asia Pacific states. This analysis finds overall little legal congruence. Innovative new formulations in some Asian state laws address recent public criticisms and research findings, but mostly are yet to demonstrate positive outcomes for displaced people. Pacific states increasingly abandon expropriation law to negotiate lease terms for public infrastructure projects with customary landowners that do not extinguish customary title. Any laws governing climate change relocations must protect rights, livelihoods, well‐being, inclusive decision‐making and community initiatives with procedures whilst not relinquishing climate‐change‐reducing action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces various topics covered in the issue including the gap in regional perspectives, emphasizing the necessity of an overriding transnational, the key questions concern how decisions are made, and the realization of human rights.

Pacific Island countries are particularly vulnerable to future manifestations of climate change due to high coastline‐to‐land‐area ratios, and high dependence of inhabitants on natural ecosystems. While everyone in the Pacific Islands should participate in climate change adaptation activities, it is the young people, given they are the generation likely to not only bear the burden of climate change, but to lead and live effective climate change adaptation activities and strategies specific to their region, the involvement of youth is critical. Pacific Island youths are often marginalised within traditional decision‐making hierarchies, therefore they are typically excluded from participating in meaningful discussions at community and government levels. Discussions were held with 30 adolescents aged 14–18 years in Fiji to explore knowledge and experiences regarding climate change. Participants revealed their dismay at their inability to talk to family – who they consider are not doing enough – about what they consider as appropriate responses to climate change, recommending the help of an authoritative outsider who could speak to their community leaders and family. Discussions also revealed that Fijian youth could not distinguish between changes in the climate and normal weather events, attesting to the importance of climate‐change education and awareness‐raising efforts within the Pacific Islands more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely assumed that the impacts of climate change on atolls will render them uninhabitable. The Carteret Islands, an iconic Pacific atoll, is experiencing physical changes, documented in the media, the outcome of multiple factors, alongside critical economic livelihood problems. Its population has sought to resettle on nearby Bougainville Island, but land has not become available. The search for migration opportunities parallels trends on coral atolls elsewhere where survival strategies have involved regional and international ties, with cultures of migration, focused on more distant international destinations. Carteret Islanders have not been able to mobilise similar relationships. For many atolls and atoll states, migration has increasingly become a livelihood strategy, irrespective of climate change. That is likely to become even more true in the future, but the outcome will be dependent on policies and practices in metropolitan destination states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) started as a global project aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by protecting tropical forests. At the same time, several so-called co-benefits were listed in the original documents, such as biodiversity and other environmental services, poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods, and good governance. I argue that REDD+ quickly became a project in which these co-benefits have emerged to be of central concern and that the rights of affected forest populations today dominate much of the REDD+ discourse. One reason for the redirected focus of REDD+ can be attributed to the activities of international and national environmental and human rights organisations. While this has arguably contributed to a process of democratisation in Indonesia, it has also slowed down the implementation of readiness projects. Taking my example from the UN-REDD initiative in Central Sulawesi, I examine some reasons why it has been difficult to establish the proposed five REDD sites in the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus ( REDD+) in Papua New Guinea ( PNG) is uncertain. Logging companies have been accessing land via a controversial legal framework called Special Agricultural Business Lease, while conservation non-government organisations are struggling to find schemes to stop the deforestation. REDD+ has been the new favoured approach. However, there are as yet only a few pilot projects, several of which are in areas without large-scale logging. Whether REDD+ has a future in PNG is difficult to know. It may come to share the fate of the portable sawmill - a technology previously assumed to promote sustainable community logging, but is now adopted by the commercial logging industry and providing new challenges to conversation efforts. This article argues that to understand the possibility for successfully implementing REDD+, it is necessary to look at the development of the forestry sector in the widest possible terms. This involves analysing the different competing actors, technologies and forms of social organisation that are employed to gain control of species deemed valuable to either conservation or commercial resource exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the province of Central Kalimantan in Indonesia was established as a Climate Change pilot province to reduce emissions from deforestation and through peat land forest rehabilitation. Today, international agencies, carbon traders, local and national governments, non-governmental organisations, and local populations have participated in debates and disputes over the establishment of carbon forests and forest protection areas in Central Kalimantan. One such scheme, promoted by the government of Australia ( Kalimantan Forest and Climate Partnership), intended to establish a REDD+ pilot project within an area that covers about 120 000 hectares in Kuala Kapuas in Central Kalimantan, the field location of this research. This specific dispute offers a case study based on ethnographic research that helps to illustrate how widespread climate change debates and disputes become embedded at local and national levels in Indonesia. The dispute over REDD+ will be discussed within a framework of dispute theories which focus on moments of crisis, wherein participants must present arguments and justify their actions and theories of justice. The article shows that competing and conflicting conceptions of justice that emerge in the dispute may bring to a halt a climate change pilot project in the locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of international donors have in recent years shown great interest in implementing community-based projects related to adaptation to climate change climate- in the Pacific. This interest has seen a flurry of activity in Pacific communities to develop and implement on-ground activities in the hope of enhancing adaptive capacity. This article draws on the results of a questionnaire completed by 31 agencies that have implemented climate-change adaptation projects in various communities throughout the Pacific region. The impetus for this research is to better understand the types of projects that have been implemented, and assess their levels of success in safeguarding communities in the face of climate change. While there has been limited overall progress made across the region to address climate change impacts at the community level, four broad-brush lessons that relate to the process of project development and implementation are drawn from this research. These lessons include the need to: provide locally and culturally appropriate community awareness and education; integrate local environmental knowledge throughout the project cycle; ensure that community ownership is involved in all project stages; and enhance sustainable livelihood resources more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates local expert perceptions of the role of environmental factors, especially in terms of contemporary climate change, in population movements from Bangladesh to India. The aim is to delve into locally held understandings of the phenomenon and to gain a better understanding of these migration processes, which are actively intertwined with local experiences. Both Indian and Bangladeshi experts were interviewed using semi-structured, in-depth interviews in order to explore insights from locally held perceptions and understandings of contextual factors. In total, 10 Bangladeshi and 15 Indian experts were interviewed, covering different disciplines, sectors, regions and job types, together providing a more complete and grounded picture of views of environmentally induced migration in Bangladesh and India. The results show that climate change is perceived by local experts as one of the key factors influencing migration in Bangladesh, both internally and externally. The interviewees, however, placed environmentally induced migration in a broader context of labour and economic migration. In particular, migration for environmental reasons in Bangladesh was evident long before the emergence of climate change as an issue. According to the interviewed experts, this does not preclude increased environmentally induced migration within and from Bangladesh in the future, but its analyses ought to be placed in historical and economical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong continues to struggle over which environmental governance approach is in its best interest while fulfilling its environmental obligations. With regard to climate change, Hong Kong's approach is characterised by a passive form of governance that is highly dependent on China's national policy directions. This is reflected, for example, in Hong Kong having not set its own mitigation targets. Market mechanisms have received little attention in developing a city-wide climate change strategy. A transformative impulse, China's national emissions trading scheme, may provide momentum to a market-based approach. However, the necessary conditions for such a market mechanism to be successfully implemented in China remain relatively undeveloped. This raises question about early participation by Hong Kong. Direct benefits are likely to be limited, due to Hong Kong's economic structure and weak demand for emissions reduction. Besides, there are regulatory barriers to enforcing emissions targets and/or recognising emissions allowances and credits from China. We therefore argue that nationwide emissions trading may, at this time, present more challenges than opportunities for Hong Kong to leverage its efforts on climate change mitigation. An alternative is to promote voluntary emissions trading that will require active involvement and leadership by businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]