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As cities attempt to ameliorate urban green inequities, a potential challenge has emerged in the form of green gentrification. Although practitioners are central to urban greening and associated gentrification, there has yet to be an exploration of practitioner perspectives on the phenomenon. We fill this gap with an online survey of 51 urban greening practitioners in Metro Vancouver and the Greater Toronto Area. Most respondents defined green gentrification as the displacement of vulnerable residents due to the installation or improvement of green space that attracts wealthy in-movers and increases property values. They were most likely to identify greening as driving green gentrification, with a minority identifying other systemic drivers with greening in a secondary role. Although 39 of 51 participants had some familiarity with green gentrification, most reported low confidence in their understanding of the concept, little evidence of using the concept in their work, and moderate concern that their work is implicated in green gentrification. The gentrification issues most encountered by practitioners were changes to neighbourhood character and uneven investment in public infrastructure, and those working in domains linked to planning, equity, and engagement were most likely to encounter gentrification issues. Practitioners experienced multiple barriers to addressing green gentrification, including limited institutional capacity, limited access to data and relevant information, policy/mandate restriction, and lack of engagement tools. Results indicate that practitioners have a moderate understanding of green gentrification but do not often use the concept in their work, despite their potential to contribute to or exacerbate it. This suggests some resistance to critiques of urban greening practice, a failure of scholarly critiques of urban greening to influence policy change, and the need for stronger research theory and research co-creation involving practitioners and academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze multi-scalar social, economic, and policy dynamics of shark fin production and consumption through Hong Kong, the world's leading shark fin entrepôt, and U.S. Mid-Atlantic artisanal fisheries in New Jersey (NJ), a U.S. state that enacted a shark-fin retail ban in 2021. Trade statistics point to a rise in shark fin circulation to Hong Kong in recent years supplied through global pathways of production. Global discourses of overconsumption and shark finning in Asia have shaped U.S. state environmental policies banning shark fin retail. However, interviews with shark fin retailers and consumers in Hong Kong point not to undifferentiated Asian consumption, but instead indicate gendered, classed, and intergenerational dynamics that undergird consumption and bear on production elsewhere. New Jersey fisheries, once an exporter to Hong Kong, enacted a state-wide shark fin retail ban in response to global defaunation and anxieties related to Asian fishing and consumption practices. Interviews and focus group discussions illustrate how the ban has resulted in a practice artisanal fishers call "reverse shark-finning," i.e., the discarding of fins post-landing. Moreover, local regulations neglect artisanal fishers' knowledge and capability to identify shark species at sea. The findings show how the totalizing ban diminishes economic returns but does not reduce total shark catches in the artisanal sector. To test fishers' knowledge at sea, the study uses a mitochondrial DNA barcoding method on post-landing shark fins (n = 47) to compare genetic identification with fishers' visual species identification. The findings illustrate artisanal fishers' knowledge is sufficient to accurately identify the shark species they catch. These findings are significant for environmental policies, biodiversity conservation, and global-local relations of production and consumption. We argue that more targeted efforts that take socioeconomic dynamics into account are needed to affect consumption, while more holistic policies that examine impacts rather than blanket bans may be more effective on the production and conservation side. Ecologically sustainable and socioeconomically sound shark conservation practices, therefore, require multi-scalar interdisciplinary and dialectical analyses of social, economic, and policy dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although North American settler governments face scrutiny over the ecological, social, and ethical shortcomings of environmental policy, many Indigenous Nations are pursuing a resurgence of environmental self-governance according to ancestral principles and practices. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the reintroduction and prioritized conservation of sea otters by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) actively impedes the harvest of culturally and nutritionally significant shellfish species by Nuu-chah-nulth Nations. Integrating a range of qualitative methods, we argue that structural inequities, divergent normative and material priorities, and ontological differences animate a divide between Nuu-chah-nulth and Canadian state governing bodies in sea otter management. The DFO's unwillingness to accommodate Indigenous knowledge, principles, and priorities in its sea otter management scheme reproduces the unequal power relations of settler colonialism to the detriment of Indigenous food sovereignty and security. We propose to reframe sea otter governance around the Nuu-chah-nulth principles of hišukʔiš c̓awaak (everything is one), ʔiisaak (respect with caring), and ʔuʔaałuk (taking care of). This reorientation is in alignment with the efforts of Indigenous peoples throughout Canada and globally to enact multi-species caretaking through the resurgence of self-governance rooted in ancestral knowledge and wisdom. Ultimately, we argue that a sea otter governance structure centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles, ecological knowledge, and leadership would be well-positioned to lead collaborations and respectful engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful forest conservation in the tropics depends on various biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors. Researchers, environmental practitioners, and local people recognize the need to resolve longstanding systemic weaknesses in environmental governance institutions, to make mainstream environmental policy and action, and to find locally informed and adaptive conservation measures. This also applies to the preservation of cloud-forest fragments of the Taita Hills in southern Kenya, a section of the Afromontane biodiversity hotspot. These forest remnants host many endemic and endangered plant and animal species, and suffer under deforestation and forest degradation. We conducted structured surveys with 300 smallholder farmers living around three forest fragments in the Taita Hills. Our results indicate a lack of knowledge about biodiversity and ecosystem functions among local people. We found an inverse relationship between the level of formal education and practical environmental knowledge, and a bias toward the protection of plant species, because of their provisional ecosystem services, as opposed to the protection of wild animals, because they are mainly associated with human-wildlife conflicts and large-scale tourism. Unresolved human-wildlife conflicts and missing benefit sharing from tourism has created an anti-conservation attitude. Our study underlines that nature conservation is only feasible if the local people benefit from it in the medium and long terms, and if the added value of conservation for high humanlivelihood quality is clearly communicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]