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Global warming and consequent climate change have emerged as serious issues and have started featuring on almost all multilateral forums with statements warning the global leadership to get increasingly proactive about addressing the issues. In world politics, countries are viewing climate change as an issue to gain influence in international politics. India is no exception to this rule and has been shaping its role as a rule-shaper and policy advocate and is an active participant in climate change negotiations. This article traces India's role since the talks on climate change began as part of wider environmental concerns. It also enumerates the way global leadership viewed and addressed this pressing issue from time to time. The article provides a brief but critical account of India's policy interventions at global and national levels to appraise India's growing role and relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant proportion of the US population does not believe that climate change is a serious problem and immediate action is necessary. We ask whether individuals' experiences with long-run changes in their local climate can override the power of partisanship that appears to dominate this opinion process. We merge individual-level data on climate change perceptions and the main determinants previously identified by the literature with county-level data on an exogenous measure of local climate change. While we find that local climate change significantly affects perceptions and in the expected direction, partisanship and political ideology maintain the strongest effect. We then field a randomized online experiment to test whether partisanship also drives support for pro-climate policies and the willingness to make environmentally friendly individual choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in production and consumption patterns are urgently needed to address climate change. Although transnational agreements and national policy are necessary for a transition to a fully decarbonized global economy, fluctuating political priorities and lobbying by vested interests have slowed these efforts. Against this backdrop, bottom-up pressure from social movements and shifting social norms may offer a complementary path to a more sustainable economy. Furthermore, norm change may be an important component of decarbonization policies by accelerating or strengthening the impacts of other demand-side measures. Individual actions and policy support are social processes—they are intimately linked to expectations about the actions and beliefs of others. Although prevailing social norms often reinforce the status quo and unsustainable development pathways, social dynamics can also create widespread and rapid shifts in cultural values and practices, including increasing pressure on politicians to enact ambitious policy. We synthesize literature on social-norm influence, measurement, and change from the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. We discuss the opportunities and challenges for the use of social-norm and social-tipping interventions to promote climate action. Social-norm interventions aimed at addressing climate change or other social dilemmas are promising but no panacea. They require in-depth contextual knowledge, ethical consideration, and situation-specific tailoring and testing to understand whether they can be effectively implemented at scale. Our review aims to provide practitioners with insights and tools to reflect on the promises and pitfalls of such interventions in diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment examines how framing power plant emissions in terms of air pollution or climate change, and in terms of health or environmental impacts, influences perceived benefits and costs of policies to reduce emissions and intentions to take political action that supports such policies. A moderated-mediation model reveals that focusing on air pollution, instead of climate change, has a positive significant indirect influence on intended political action through the serial mediators of perceived benefits and costs. Political ideology moderates the association between perceived benefits and political action. No framing effects are observed in the comparison between health and environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments are facing increasingly complex policy challenges, ranging from climate change, demographic pressures, rising inequalities and discontent, to the global health crisis that countries are presently confronting. Successful responses require more integrated approaches to policy making at all levels of government, so that economic, social and environmental actions reinforce each other rather than compete. They also require effective coordination across levels of government to manage shared responsibilities, mutual dependence and common challenges. This commentary highlights the progress in the multi-level governance concept since its first use, and focuses on some current dynamics driving multi-level governance, in particular the trend towards differentiated subnational governance. It then highlights that the way multi-level governance systems are designed has a direct impact on policy outcomes, hence the imperative to strengthen multi-level governance systems. The commentary offers insight into how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is tacking this imperative to best support countries in their development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates for eating locally raised animals claim that their practice is helpful in protecting the environment. However, the opposite is true. As such, their references to "nature" have less to do with a scientific stable ecosystem and, instead, represent a call for a return to a "natural" order of human's supposedly benevolent domain over other animals. Instead of a science-based environmental policy, local meat operates as a type of "postcommodity fetish." It is because of the desire to escape the confines of consumerist culture, to return to romanticized idea of Edenic-purity, which underlies the desire to purchase "locally" produced animal products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) serve as a neoliberal performative act, in which idealized conditions are re-constituted by well-resourced and networked epistemic communities with the objective of bringing a distinctly instrumental and utilitarian relationality between humans and nature into existence. We illustrate the performative agency of hegemonic epistemic communities advocating (P)ES imaginaries to differentiate between the cultural construction of an ideal reality, which can and always will fail, and an external reality of actually produced effects. In doing so, we explore human agency to disobey performative acts to craft embodied and life-affirming relationships with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We proposed and tested a conceptual model of how cultural cognition worldviews, climate change risk perception, and psychological barriers are related to reported energy conservation behavior frequency. Egalitarian and communitarian worldviews were correlated with heightened climate change risk perception, and egalitarian worldviews were correlated with weaker perceived barriers to reported energy conservation behavior. Heightened climate change risk perception was, in turn, associated with fewer perceived barriers to engagement in energy conservation behavior and more reported energy conservation behaviors. The relation between cultural worldviews and perceived barriers was partly mediated by climate change risk perception. Individuals with distinct worldviews perceived psychological barriers differently, and some barrier components were more strongly related to energy conservation behavior than others. Overall, climate change risk perception was the strongest predictor of perceived barriers and of energy conservation behavior frequency. Future efforts should focus on reducing the psychological barriers to energy conservation behavior identified in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the adoption of the Warsaw International Mechanism in 2013, the international community recognised that anthropogenic climate change will result in a range of adverse effects despite policies of mitigation and adaptation. Addressing these climatic 'losses and damages' is now a key dimension of international climate change negotiations. This article presents a normative framework for thinking about loss and damage designed to inform, and give meaning to, these negotiations. It argues that policies addressing loss and damage, particularly those targeting developing countries, should respect norms of compensatory justice which aim to make victims of unwarranted climatic disruptions 'whole again'. The article develops a typology of different kinds of climate change disruption and uses it to (1) explain the differences between 'losses' and 'damages', (2) assign priorities among compensatory measures seeking to address loss and damage and (3) explore a range of equitable responses to loss and damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. At the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees, climate activists and researchers began to look for alternative measures. Climate engineering (CE) - the deliberate manipulation of the planetary environment to decelerate climate change - emerges as a possibly effective, albeit risky and conflictual, option.Aim. This article aims both at simulating a plausible international scenario of negotiation over solar climate engineering deployment, and at utilizing the rules of Model United Nations (MUN) for collaborative learning in a university class. Furthermore, the article intends to provide a framework for simulations about CE that could easily be reproduced.Method. MUN is an established and well-tested foundation for a simulation with students, including preparation leading up to the simulation and feedback rounds afterwards. We repeated the simulation three times, recorded the sessions as well as the debriefings, and gathered interesting insight by comparing the results.Result. For our CE simulations, we discovered: 1. Divergent interests (e.g. global north vs global south). 2. Power struggle (e.g. role of the veto powers). 3. Scientific and political ignorance (e.g. decision-making under uncertainty). 4. Risk politics (e.g. trade-offs between climate change risks vs. CE risks).Conclusion. MUN qualifies well for simulating a CE crisis. However, known lacks in MUN settings (like underrepresentation of non-state actors) must be discussed during the debriefing. These simulations illustrate possible future conflicts over CE without being prescriptive in any way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small island developing states (SIDS) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. However, although SIDS have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce different outcomes in different states, indicating variation in vulnerability. The objective of this article is to explore the sources of this variation. With the point of departure in theories about how political institutions affect adaptive capacities, this article sets out to investigate whether government effectiveness has an impact on the vulnerability of SIDS. While claims over the importance of institutions are common in the literature, there is a lack of empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study’s time-series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government data set. The results show that government effectiveness has strong and significant effects on the number of people killed and affected by natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of community-based Transition Town initiatives in countries like the UK, USA and Canada is popularly perceived to represent a broad, socially inclusive and grounded approach to tackling environmental problems in place-based communities. In focusing on resilience as a core theme, so-called re-localisation initiatives attempt to adopt consensus based approaches to decision making and to highlight the need for an ‘inner transition’ of the self that encourages closer connections between individuals and nature. In this way, Transition has been framed as a new form of social and environmental movement that is re-casting community and political relations for a low carbon and post ‘Peak oil’ future. Yet despite these emergent philosophies of Transition and the considerable scholarship being generated on the role and success of such initiatives, there is an urgent need to situate and analyse Transition within broader understandings of environmental activism. Using data from a two year research project on ‘Values in Transition’, this paper argues that the praxis and spatial complexity of Transition can be understood more deeply through a narrative lens. In mobilising critical scholarship on environmental activism, the paper calls for a ‘Transition Geographies’ that views re-localisation as a dynamic and complex coalescence of competing narratives that sit between traditional forms of environmental activism and directive initiatives for individual behaviour change. As such, the paper highlights the ways in which this new form of environmental activism is shaping praxis across space, and the implications this has for those advocating re-localisation as a strategy for tackling climate change and resource scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change was adopted at the close of the 21st Conference of Party on 12 December 2015. This agreement has been approved after a marathon negotiation in which parties under the aegis of the United Nations have finally agreed on the terms and conditions to implement it by 2020. The prime objective of the Paris Agreement is to ensure member states of the United Nations take appropriate and concrete actions in combating the menace of climate change that poses a challenging threat to humanity. It includes keeping temperature rise below 2°C by this century and limiting the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial levels. India has announced voluntary pledges during the conference which include carbon intensity growth by 33-35 per cent over the 2005 level, to raise the share of non-fossil fuel power to 40 per cent by 2030 and to produce 175 gigawatt (GW) of renewable power by 2022. Hence, the basic objective of this article is to examine India's commitments and its initiatives to combat climate change in line with the Paris framework agreement to be implemented by 2020 and also to highlight the implications and drawbacks which India confronted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a global challenge. Its ramifying effects on both natural and human systems cut across different regions of the world. While Africa as a whole is being confirmed to be more affected by climate change due in part to a relatively low(er) mitigation and adaptive capacity, coupled with a situation where majority of its population depends mainly on natural resources, Southern Africa is singled out as a potentially vulnerable subregion for other additional factors. Representing a milestone in the trajectory of the global climate change process, the 21st session of the Conference of Parties (COP-21) resolved with a consensual climate change deal known as the Paris Agreement. The Agreement, through the instrumentality of a ratchet up mechanism, otherwise described as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), seeks significant cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions effectively from 2020. In essence, it calls for a novel though gradual shift from carbon-emission approach to low emission development strategy. This, no doubt, is indispensable to sustainable development at all levels. Beyond national commitments as obligatory for parties, there is a need for regional cooperative efforts which should bring about shared appropriate policy responses that promote green energy as well as seize opportunities inherent in it for national and deterritorialised gains. Adopting neoliberal and green theories, the institutional framework of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) where South Africa is expected to take a lead is examined in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy codes set efficiency standards for buildings in the majority of U.S. states. Under most energy codes, builders can comply by demonstrating that the projected private expenditures on energy bills for a proposed building are less than a certain threshold. Using theory and evidence, I show that energy codes would be improved if compliance was instead determined by the projected social damages. Relative to current practice, damage-based codes would likely provide stronger incentives for electricity than natural gas conservation, in most states. Implementation of damage-based codes would lead to substantial welfare gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand how the UK government's headline climate change targets are translated into action at the local level in the transport sector drawing on the findings of research in two English regions. In doing so, these headline targets are identified as a symbolic meta-policy that results in little action on the ground and which challenges established conceptions of policy implementation. Both the 'meta' and 'symbolic' aspects of the policy offer part of the explanation for the lack of substantive action on the ground. As a meta-policy, the headline targets across government require the elaboration of other policies at other levels such as targets for government departments and local authorities, but these are largely absent, leaving the meta-policy without teeth. Over time, these headline targets have developed into a symbolic policy, serving political goals but having little practical effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojève's reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel out the other. I unpack the concept of contra diction in three ways: first, by displaying a Hegelian-inspired understanding of contradiction in relation to change, time, and desire; second, by explaining how inherent contradictions can also be read in relation to the excesses that characterize the deployment of methods of calculation in low carbon interventions; and third, by situating these contradictions within the overall dynamics of carbon governance and purposive attempts to bring about a low carbon transition. The paper explores the practical implications of this analysis in a case of low carbon interventions in social housing in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The case study shows that, if contradictions are at the heart of low carbon interventions, contradiction analysis may provide a direction towards broader reconfigurations of social and technological practices and generate a desire to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the need for labor unions to focus on the problem of climate change. Members of organized labor who are opposed to climate protection efforts identify limitations of the policies suggested by environmentalists. According to the authors, a labor plan for climate protection needs to create full employment, increase job security and increase wages while reducing emissions.

Powerful political actors in the international system quite frequently adopt unilateral policies whose implications extend beyond their respective borders. Examples include financial market regulation as well as taxation, trade and environmental policies. They do so to avoid lowest common-denominator outcomes in areas where they desire more ambitious international policies, and to motivate or coerce other countries to shoulder a part of the burden associated with problem solving. This article explores whether and how such unilateralism affects public opinion in other countries, arguing that such analysis can point to external constraints on unilateralism and is worthwhile also for normative reasons. Empirically, we examine the effect of a major unilateral European Union (EU) climate policy initiative, which regulates emissions from aircraft, on public opinion in India and the United States, the two largest democracies outside the EU. Based on survey experiments, we study the effects of cost and sovereignty considerations on people’s evaluation of the EU’s new policy. The results show that both types of concern play a significant role and may act as a constraint on unilateral European climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interactive multiplayer simulation games have the potential to provide a more mature and statistically accurate approach to help better understand human behavior in relation to local environments and situated contexts. This could be used as a tool to better inform policy and research around environmental issues such as sustainability, food, and climate change. The Games Learning Society Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is currently working on an ecological simulation game, Trails Forward. In this game, three players, a lumber worker, a conservationist, and a housing developer, all work and compete within an accurate model of the Vilas county landscape. Trails Forward provides a template of how play in a simulated environment can inform our understandings of human behavior given real-world privileges and restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine U.S. public attitudes regarding global climate change, addressing the puzzle of why support for governmental action on this front is tepid relative to what existing theories predict. Introducing the theoretical concept of relative sociotropic time horizons, the authors show that believers in Christian end-times theology are less likely to support policies designed to curb global warming than are other Americans. They then provide robustness checks by analyzing other policy attitudes. In so doing, the authors provide empirical evidence to suggest that citizens possessing shorter “shadows of the future” often resist policies trading short-term costs for hypothetical long-term benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on pedagogical methods in international affairs includes a number of international politics simulations. We present the material for an in-class simulation exercise on international climate negotiations that attempts to help students understand the importance of theory as well as the substantive issues surrounding climate policy. Simulations have been proposed as a means of providing an engaging classroom experience and a more diverse learning experience. The exercises presented here focus on developing student research skills, analyzing data to present a realistic policy position and understanding the process of institutional regime formation. At the end of the simulation, students are asked to relate their own negotiation experiences back to the theoretical material discussed during the semester. An assessment was conducted of student expectations prior to the simulation exercise and compared with post-simulation experiences. Students reported the greatest positive difference between their expected learning outcome and actual experience with the simulation in terms of learning information about specific country assignments, overall enjoyment of the activity, and understanding the material covered in the course. The greatest negative difference between expectations and experience were reported for understanding international negotiations more generally and current international events. The article outlines the full content for an in-class simulation and its’ implementation as well as results from an evaluation of its use. The simulation provides students with a better understanding of the complexity of international negotiations over climate policy while outlining key theoretical concepts in international relations and comparative public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 1970s, social scientists have argued that general pro-environmental attitudes have diffused throughout American society, rendering socio-demographics largely irrelevant in predicting support for such issues. The public reaction to the issue of climate change, however, is an exception to this narrative. While media bias, ideological framing, and business influence are often invoked to explain public apathy, I argue that ignoring class and culture in determining why climate change is so divisive is a potentially significant oversight. Using the cultural theory of Bourdieu, I examine how the conception of and reaction to climate change varies with economic and cultural capital using data from 40 interviews of Boston-area respondents. The results suggest that climate change may indeed be a 'classed' issue - both in how the respondents conceive of it in the first place, and how they speak of social class in the context of it. The results suggest that social scientists should go beyond rational-choice and media framing explanations, to take two prolific examples, in exploring how disagreements on the importance of climate change persist in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we understand political polarization within the U.S. climate change debate? This article unpacks the different components of the debate to determine the source of the political divide that is so noted in the mainstream media and academic literatures. Through analysis of the content of congressional hearings on the issue of climate change, we are able to explain political polarization of the issue more fully. In particular, our results show that, contrary to representations in the mainstream media, there is increasing consensus over the science of the issue. Discussions of the type of policy instrument and the economic implications of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, however, continue to polarize opinion. This article concludes by exploring how these findings help us understand more recent political events around climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analysis of three cross-sectional polls administered by the Gallup Organization at 10-year intervals—in 1990, 2000, and 2010—demonstrates that partisan identification has become an increasingly important determinant of environmental concern within the American mass public. Polarization on global warming is especially clear, even when compared to a variety of other social, economic, and political problems, but party sorting seems to occur only as citizens acquire information and become familiar with elite cues. The implications of this for the U.S. environmental movement and the strategies it employs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current international climate governance from a risk-political perspective points to a paradoxical moment in world risk society. While the probability of negative climate impacts increases and we can see the emergence of a common risk perception among international decision-makers, nation states in the international climate regime fail to agree on effective preventive measures that could mitigate the harming effects of global warming. While at the discursive level climate change is constructed as one of the major risks in the twenty-first century, the focus in international climate governance remains on voluntary measures and market-based instruments. Drawing on discourse theory, this paradox can be explained as the outcome of a discursive struggle in climate politics. Risk, in this perspective, is a political technology to govern the future that is embedded within broader political rationalities. Until 2007, risk management in climate governance was established as a form of advanced liberal government based on individualisation and self-responsibility. The growing consensus on dangerous climate change ultimately reinforces this advanced liberal risk management by presenting climate change as a ‘naturalised’ de-bounded risk and blurring its socio-economic causes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Agenda theories suggest that problem indicator, focusing event, and information feedback enhance issue attention. However, few studies have systematically tested this. This study, using time series data and vector autoregression (VAR), examines how climate problem indicator, high-profile international event, and climate science feedback influence media and congressional attention to global warming and climate change. The findings confirm that these attention-grabbing factors indeed generally promote issue salience, but these factors may work differently across agenda venues. Attention inertia, interagenda interaction, and partisan advantage on agenda setting are also included and analyzed in the VAR modeling. Implications of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed in conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

In January 2008, the UK Labour government announced that new nuclear power would play a role in the generation of low carbon electricity, and thus in the mitigation of climate change. This reframing of new nuclear power as a means of tackling climate change signalled a dramatic U-turn on Labour’s commitment to decommission all existing UK nuclear power stations by 2025. In the context of the political reframing of new nuclear builds, this article examines how the UK news media contributed to the reframing of nuclear power as low carbon, and the implications this has for public understanding of nuclear power and climate change. Covering the time period from September 2005 to January 2008, a critical discourse analysis of three UK newspapers — the Daily Mirror (tabloid), the Daily Mail (mid-range) and the Independent (broadsheet) — is presented. This period covers the months leading up to the launch of the UK government’s first Energy Review in January 2006, to the publication of the government’s final White Paper on Nuclear Power in January 2008. The analysis found that the official governmental discourse on nuclear power as essential to climate change mitigation and the security of future energy supplies was variously reproduced and contested across the three newspapers. However, while the government’s rebranding of nuclear as less risky than climate change is not explicitly endorsed by any of the newspapers, it certainly provides the discursive context through which policy decisions on new nuclear have been largely accepted by the UK news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Surveying environmental communication research of the past four decades, the article delineates some of the key trends and approaches in research which has sought to address the role played by media and communication processes in the public and political definition, elaboration and contestation of environmental issues and problems. It is argued: (1) that there is a need to reconnect the traditional, but traditionally also relative distinct, three major foci of communication research on media and environmental issues: the production/construction of media messages and public communications; the content/messages of media communication; and the impact of media and public communication on public/political understanding and action with regard to the environment; and (2) that there is a need for media and communications research on environmental issues/controversy to reconnect with traditional sociological concerns about power and inequality in the public sphere, particularly in terms of showing how economic, political and cultural power significantly affects the ability to participate in and influence the nature of public ‘mediated’ communication about the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The state of São Paulo, the most populous state in Brazil with 40 million people, is leading the way in Brazilian environmental policies. This article discusses the implications this has particularly for climate change policies. Located in the southeast part of the country, far from the Amazon rainforest, São Paulo state has adopted policies and actions that are leading to effective improvements in the quality of air and to the partial recovery of the original Atlantic rainforest, and that promote sustainable practices for ethanol production from sugarcane. Compared to the state of São Paulo, Brazil as a whole faces a considerably different situation, with the federal and the state governments having chosen different pathways for addressing the challenges posed by climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstract on planning including a micro-level analysis of the Black voting during the civil rights movement, the influence of land-use planners on flood hazard mitigation and the use on public transport timetable data into health care accessibility modelling.

Emissions trading has created new forms of exchangeable property which become commodities when traded in markets designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigate climate change. This paper analyzes a set of social processes which influence who benefits from reductions in emissions generated by primary production from forest ecosystems. Informed by commodification literature, and property and access theory, we suggest that farmers and rural communities cannot derive full benefits from carbon sequestration because they lack key structural and relational mechanisms, such as capital, knowledge, expertise, technology, and, in some cases, even labour. We illustrate this argument by examining three ongoing carbon-forestry projects in China, Ecuador, and Mexico and we highlight its implications for future forestry mitigation projects and programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short and deliberately provocative paper I reflect on what seems to be a yawning gulf between the potential contribution of the social sciences and the typically restricted models and concepts of social change embedded in contemporary environmental policy in the UK, and in other countries too. As well as making a strong case for going beyond what I refer to as the dominant paradigm of 'ABC'—attitude, behaviour, and choice—I discuss the attractions of this model, the blind spots it creates, and the forms of governance it sustains. This exercise provides some insight into why so much relevant social theory remains so marginalised, and helps identify opportunities for making better use of existing intellectual resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buildings are the dominant driver of daily and seasonal electric load cycles, and account for 40 percent of U.S. final energy use. They account for roughly 10 percent of direct U.S. CO2 emissions and roughly 40 percent once indirect emissions from electricity generation are included. This paper explores possible evolution of this sector over the coming century, its potential role climate action and response to climate policies, and the potential benefits advances in building technologies for addressing climate change. The paper presents a set of scenarios based on a detailed, service-based model of the buildings sector that is embedded within a long-term, global, integrated assessment model, MiniCAM. Eight scenarios are created in total, combining sets of assumptions regarding U.S. building service demand growth, two assumptions regarding the improvements in building energy technologies, two assumptions regarding long-term U.S. climate action --- a no-climate-action assumption and an assumption of market-based policies to reduce U.S. emissions consistent with a 450 ppmv global target. Through these eight scenarios, the paper comments on the implications of continued growth in building service demands, the ability of efficiency measures to reduce emissions, the strong link between decarbonization of electricity generation and building sector emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on various topics which include social life and civic education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the political aspect of neighborhood football clubs in Santiago, Chile and the legacy of urban renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.

In this article, the author discusses aspects regarding the reasons for concern on climate change adaptation. It states that the reasons for concern were updated in the 2009 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which discussed the risks of large-scale discontinuities to ecosystems. He notes that the freshwater availability in coastal areas will suffer from sea level rise. It adds that the measures should be well-addressed in the environmental policies.

The use of the language of environmental justice as a frame for collective action on socio-environmental concerns has now evolved and extended far beyond its original formulation in the USA. This article examines two ways in which the use of the environmental justice frame has globalized. The first involves the international emergence of ideas, meanings and framing processes in new settings around the world. The 'horizontal' diffusion of an environmental justice frame is traced, examining processes of transfer, reproduction and contextualization that are taking place within the political and institutional cultures of different countries. The cases of the UK and South Africa are examined in detail. The second involves the 'vertical' extension of the environmental justice frame to encompass concerns that do not end at national borders but that involve relations between countries and global scale issues such as trade agreements, transfers of wastes and climate change. The implications of these two shifts, the tensions that have emerged around them and their relevance to the pursuit of progressive global social policy objectives are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the ways in which the precautionary principle has influenced environmental policy development pertaining to climate change. The author is of the opinion that the precautionary principle has done little to combat climate change. The importance of social construction theory and critical realism to an understanding of the principle is emphasized, as the risks of global climate change have direct social consequences. Emphasis is given to the European Union's (EU) handling of the precautionary principle.

Despite the many calls to reform the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), its conceptual underpinnings are strong and it will most likely survive in the post-2012 climate regime. Some modifications may be considered in the short term to strengthen the effectiveness and transparency of the mechanism without modifying the Marrakech Accords. In the medium term, substantially increased mitigation efforts in developing countries may require a combination of three possible financial mechanisms: the current activity-based CDM albeit improved, a second market mechanism that would seek to improve the long term emission trends of developing countries by promoting broad-based emission reduction programs primarily in the private sector, and a third-- nonmarket--financial mechanism that would provide an incentive for the adoption of policy changes leading to a low carbon path, but where emission reductions would not be used as international offsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of articles about planning including those focusing on settlement house work and social reform, the development of heating and cooking technology in the U.S. in the 19th century and emergence of historic sites as tourist destinations in the U.S. in the late 19th century.

The debate on urban sustainability has now been on the research agenda for a number of years. One element that has, however, been undertheorized and empirically understudied is the crucial importance of networked urban infrastructures for the ecological sustainability of cities. These infrastructures mediate resource flows and vitally shape environmental practices and sociotechnical innovation in cities. It is thus argued that we need adequate conceptual approaches which reflect the complex interdependencies between cities, networked infrastructures, and urban ecologies and which broaden our understanding of the ways we can develop, govern, and renew our infrastructures in cities in a sustainable way. Scrutinizing the relevant debates both in technology studies and in urban studies, the author reveals that none of the theoretical approaches discussed seems entirely suitable for conceptualizing these interdependencies and the requirements for the sustainable redesign of urban infrastructures. The author shows, however, how urban and technology studies might inspire, complement, and benefit each other in conceptualizing the urban political ecology of networked infrastructures. Combining elements of the different analytical approaches, it is argued, could create new opportunities for the empirical study of infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 September 2006 UK über-entrepreneur and Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson pledged approximately £1.6 billion, the equivalent of all the profits from Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains for the next ten years, to fighting climate change. Since then, Branson has restated his commitment to action on global warming, including investment in technologies for sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this paper, I critically examine and engage with Branson's announcements as a specific entrée into a dialog about so-called 'green capitalism'. I am particularly interested in the role of the entrepreneurial subject in environmental policy and environmental action. There are glaring problems associated with green capitalism as a mash-up of environmentalism with capitalism. One of these is the tethering of environmentalism to a political economy whose mantra is growth for growth's sake, or, in Marx's terms, accumulation for accumulation's sake. This has been discussed by some as the problem of capitalism's ecological metabolism or 'metabolic rift'. Yet, while accumulation for accumulation's sake may well be anathema to progressive environmentalism and sustainability, I argue that this is not only an objective, quantitative problem but also one of the qualitative dimensions of produced nature and the cultural politics of environmentalism. Appreciation of this can be gleaned by reexamining Marx's discussion of the role of the bourgeois subject in the relentless drive to reproduce and expand capital accumulation via anarchic, entrepreneurial investment. Green capitalist orthodoxy relies on this source of innovative dynamism, but in the process obscures or overlooks the fact that accumulation for accumulation's sake is by definition guided by the anarchic and amoral search for profitable realization of surplus value. Moreover, in order for green capitalism to succeed, its legitimacy must be secured. I argue that this legitimacy derives in part from specific performances of green capitalism by entrepreneurial elites, also made evident by Branson and his commitments to climate action. All of this raises questions about the political, cultural, and ecological character of green capitalism, issues brought to the fore by Branson's brand of climate activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

Sustainability has been the subject of considerable attention from the natural and social sciences and, during the last two decades, the discursive aspects of the way we construct nature and sustainability have opened up new terrain. These debates have been given urgency by the growing awareness of global climate change, and the need to formulate policy responses. On the one hand, the attention to policy has led to the belief, among many environmental economists, that climate change can be characterized as a 'market failure'. From a quite different perspective, some recent work has provided critiques of the way nature is being transformed by capital, and sustainability is viewed in terms of changing materialities and poststructuralist understanding of the role of ideology. The article reviews these positions on the environment and carbon 'dependence' and argues that sociology has a real contribution to make to the analysis of future 'post-carbon' societies, drawing on its roots in critique and the elaboration of alternative, utopian, futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Woking Borough Council in the United Kingdom has long been committed to protecting the environment, a goal explicitly stated as one of the borough's top three priorities. Woking is also known for its pioneering approach in operating an extensive networked electricity and district heating system based on co- and trigeneration, as well as what is understood to be the United Kingdom's first commercially operating 200kWe fuel cell. Its other innovative measures to protect the environment and to reduce pollution include the adoption of energy- and water-saving techniques for council-owned buildings and public places, with revenue savings reinvested back into still additional measures to further improve sustainability. These various initiatives are providing a practical framework for advancing a more equitable, clean, decentralized, and socially cooperative energy system in service to Woking's inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fear-inducing representations of climate change are widely employed in the public domain. However, there is a lack of clarity in the literature about the impacts that fearful messages in climate change communications have on people's senses of engagement with the issue and associated implications for public engagement strategies. Some literature suggests that using fearful representations of climate change may be counterproductive. The authors explore this assertion in the context of two empirical studies that investigated the role of visual, and iconic, representations of climate change for public engagement respectively. Results demonstrate that although such representations have much potential for attracting people's attention to climate change, fear is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement. Nonthreatening imagery and icons that link to individuals' everyday emotions and concerns in the context of this macro-environmental issue tend to be the most engaging. Recommendations for constructively engaging individuals with climate change are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate communication approaches expend significant resources promoting attitudinal change, but research suggests that encouraging attitudinal change alone is unlikely to be effective. The link between an individual's attitudes and subsequent behavior is mediated by other influences, such as social norms and the "free-rider" effect. One way to engender mitigative behaviors would be to introduce regulation that forces green behavior, but government fears a resulting loss of precious political capital. Conversely, communication approaches that advocate individual, voluntary action ignore the social and structural impediments to behavior change. The authors argue that there are two crucial, but distinct, roles that communication could play in engaging the public in low carbon lifestyles: first, to facilitate public acceptance of regulation and second, to stimulate grass-roots action through affective and rational engagement with climate change. The authors also argue that using communication to stimulate demand for regulation may reconcile these "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues concerning computer simulation and gaming. It states that simulation or games as well as internships share a number of features, which both provide experience that can be processed through reflection. Meanwhile, it also notes that knowledge is presented as primordial such as lectures and essays, and action during secondary school and in universities. In connection, the author also relates the computer simulation uses to environment, natural disasters and climate change.

The article presents abstracts on planning-related topics which include an examination of the popularity of dancing in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1930s, an examination of how religious diversity in community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change and an examination of child labor in urban industries in the Dutch Republic.