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The academic study of dragonflies and damselflies (odonatology) is well established, but relatively limited attention has been given to odonates in the context of applied ecology and conservation science. We used the Web of Science™ and Odonatological Abstract Service (ISSN 1438-0269) to capture trends in primary literature, characterize study features (habitats, life stages, etc.), identify research themes, and suggest future directions for odonatology in freshwater applied ecology and conservation science. We found no papers in this area prior to 1980, and 411 papers from 1980 through 2013. Nearly 75% of these papers were recent (since 2005) and >40% were very recent (since 2010). We identified several broad and overlapping research themes: 1) model taxa, 2) tools and indicators, 3) odonate-centered work, and 4) methodological issues and improvements (field sampling, data modeling/simulation, conservation/landscape-scale genetics). We found more reliance on field-based observational approaches than experiments and model-driven exercises, although the number of papers using model-driven exercises is rapidly increasing. We found a strong focus on adult stages, odonate assemblages, the Odonata as a whole, and studies of particular species. We identified research priorities in areas such as ecological valuation and management, monitoring and assessment, climate change and landscape planning, concordance with other taxa, effects of urbanization, data modeling/simulation, and rare-species ecology and conservation. To help establish an identity and facilitate communication, we suggest naming this diverse realm "applied odonatology". We think applied odonatology has a good future for a range of topics from conservation genetics and population ecology to assessments of anthropogenic impacts and the conservation of biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of global climate change, the variance of rainfall is projected to increase substantially, affecting every country. In this paper, we examine how exposure to rainfall during the first 1,000 days of life influences women's long-term human capital accumulation in the context of 28 African countries. Exploiting the exogenous deviations of rainfall from the historical norms, we document a positive relationship between rainfall during the first 1,000 days and women's educational attainment. The effects mostly come from rainfall variability in agricultural season. There is also suggestive evidence that larger impacts are detected among women from low-income countries and women living in areas with poor market integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, populism is widely understood to entail an exclusionary conception of "the people" that threatens climate change action. While this threat is real, I argue that populism itself can be understood as a response to perceived exclusion and marginalization, making it possible to conceptualize a more heterogeneous conception of populism's "people." Examining two approaches to climate change action rooted in contrasting conceptions of the people and the elite, I argue that climate justice organizing offers a promising effort to construct a heterogeneous people and offers a powerful critique of the elite representation of climate change action in which "we are all in this together." Yet along with this promise, climate justice organizing must navigate tensions that are inescapable within any populist formation. One neglected thread of populist history and theory offers resources for doing so; in the final section of this paper, I explore its relevance to climate justice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature and dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental and ecological context using the case study of South Asia's Indus Civilization (ca. 3000-1300 BC). Most early complex societies developed in regions where the climatic parameters faced by ancient subsistence farmers were varied but rain falls primarily in one season. In contrast, the Indus Civilization developed in a specific environmental context that spanned a very distinct environmental threshold, where winter and summer rainfall systems overlap. There is now evidence to show that this region was directly subject to climate change during the period when the Indus Civilization was at its height (ca. 2500-1900 BC). The Indus Civilization, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to understand how an ancient society coped with diverse and varied ecologies and change in the fundamental environmental parameters. This paper integrates research carried out as part of the Land, Water and Settlement project in northwest India between 2007 and 2014. Although coming from only one of the regions occupied by Indus populations, these data necessitate the reconsideration of several prevailing views about the Indus Civilization as a whole and invigorate discussion about human-environment interactions and their relationship to processes of cultural transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive review and synthesis of studies that forecast economic impacts of ocean acidification. The changes in seawater chemistry resulting from increased carbon dioxide emissions, known as ocean acidification, will have detrimental impacts to marine ecosystem services. Those services include wild capture fisheries, aquaculture, recreation, shoreline protection, and others. The current literature valuing expected impacts to those services is rather thin and tends to focus on mollusk harvesting and aquaculture. Despite the paucity of studies, we divide all relevant estimates into five additively separable economic sectors to provide an aggregate estimate of economic damage from ocean acidification at the end of this century. We perform nonparametric bootstrap simulations to characterize the distribution of estimates within each sector and the aggregation across sectors. We also perform meta-regressions to explore whether estimates provided by these studies are generally consistent with expectations based on ocean chemistry and economic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global cooperation with respect to greenhouse gas emissions mitigation is contingent on finding common ground in addressing the problem of adaptation to climate change impacts. This paper uses a noncooperative game theory model to investigate the relationship between adaptation technology and the formation of emissions-reducing international environmental agreements (IEAs) on climate change, with countries that are heterogeneous with respect to the benefits and costs of both mitigation and adaptation. While differences in climate vulnerability are a deterrent for cooperation, increasing the effectiveness of adaptation in highly vulnerable countries can foster an IEA. Both traditional free riding on climate change mitigation efforts, and free riding on adaptation technology among members of an IEA can be reduced by transfers of adaptation technology within the IEA. A numerical example with parameters estimated from climate change data is used to simulate stable coalitions and demonstrate how the transfer of adaptation technology reduces free riding on an IEA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical foundation for the social cost of carbon (SCC). The model highlights the source of debate over whether countries should use the global or domestic SCC for regulatory impact analysis. I identify conditions under which a country's decision to internalize the global SCC is individually rational. I show that obtaining international consensus on a uniform value to internalize will be more challenging than often appreciated. I introduce the notion of a "preferred SCC" to reflect each country's preference conditional on a true value of the global SCC and a distribution of the domestic SCCs among countries. While all countries have a preferred SCC greater than their domestic SCC, a country's preferred SCC can be greater than or less than the global SCC. How these preferences translate into agreement depends on institutional arrangements for collective decision making, for which I provide empirical evidence based on various decision rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests a novel intervention for increasing consumer recycling by anthropomorphizing product characteristics. Across five studies, including lab and online studies and a field experiment, we find that consumers are more likely to recycle an anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) product. We argue that anthropomorphism elicits affective (empathy) and cognitive reactions (an abstract construal level), making consumers empathize with the humanlike product as well as focus on the desirable end (vs. undesirable, effortful means) of recycling and therefore increases their likelihood of recycling. We provide evidence for the mediating roles of both affective and cognitive psychological mechanisms and further pin down the role of construal level by manipulating focus on the means (vs. end) of recycling. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for sustainable consumption and addressing climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolutionary and ecological aspects of leaf emergence. The author highlights the study published by biologist Martin Lechowicz which seeks to understand t the factors affecting the emergence of leaves in deciduous plants, and notes the influence of climatic changes in the leafing of trees.

What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom), we explore how the children come to articulate environmental knowledge as a process of "figuring out" and the extent to which the children engage with the changing climate as a matter of concern. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the main themes that emerged in each region, before developing a comparative discussion of some key factors that gave shape to how climate change comes to matter in the lives of the children. Three dimensions are explored: the effect of climate change on livelihoods and the proximity of children's experience to those livelihoods, the political salience of the narrative of climate change, and the temporal depth invoked by the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although storing more carbon in forests should be part of an efficient mitigation program, it is unclear how to create effective incentives to make this happen. The literature largely has focused on giving landowners direct incentives to store carbon. This paper explores an alternative mechanism to increase forest carbon sequestration by creating a market for wood bioenergy. By raising the value of wood, the program encourages landowners to convert vast amounts of land to forest, which incidentally increases forest carbon. By providing an indirect subsidy on woody biomass, governments can give even more incentive to reward this carbon sequestration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers two areas of current research related to environmental economics: 1. the use of quasi-experimental or “experimentalist” methods to evaluate the effects of environmental policies; and 2. the implications of the Stern Report on the economic consequences of global climate change. The objective of the paper is to stimulate the discussion and exchange of ideas. The paper examines applications of the experimentalist approach to hedonic property models associated with the regulation of air pollution and the cleanup of hazardous waste at Superfund sites. The discussion of the Stern Report considers whether we should evaluate the merits of reducing the stringency of current environmental policies in order to increase the efforts devoted to controlling pollutants that contribute to long term climate risks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Climate change and other environmental challenges require the development of new energy technologies with lower emissions. In the near term, R&D investments, either by the government or the private sector, can reduce the costs of these lower-emitting technologies. However, the returns to R&D are uncertain, and there are many potential technologies that may emerge to play an important role in the future energy mix. In this paper, we address the problem of allocating scarce R&D resources across technologies when uncertainties exist. We develop a multistage stochastic dynamic programming version of an integrated assessment model of the climate and economy that represents endogenous technological change through R&D decisions for two substitutable noncarbon backstop technologies. We demonstrate that near-term R&D investment in the higher cost technology is justified and that the optimal R&D investment in the higher cost technology increases with both higher variance and higher skewness in the distribution of returns to R&D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics of fear and began to cast the prospect of nuclear catastrophe in terrifying and apocalyptic terms. I argue that Morgenthau’s resort to existential fear appeals may have seemed like an appropriate strategy in the face of the representational and motivational difficulties of prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation and in response to the forms of organized denial and political inertia that these difficulties enable. His aim was to cultivate the salutary fear required to construct new forms of political order as a bulwark against nuclear catastrophe. I suggest that there are lessons from this engagement with Morgenthau for the contemporary question of the place of fear appeals in the climate change debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are the probable future negative effects of climate change an argument for decreasing the discount rate to promote the interests of future generations? The analysis of the present paper suggests that such stronger intergenerational altruism might undermine future well-being if not complemented by collective climate action. In the standard one-sector model of economic growth normatively attractive outcomes will be implemented if each generation has sufficient altruism for its descendants. This conclusion is radically changed in a two-sector model where one form of capital is more productive than the other but leads to negative atmospheric externalities. In fact, the model shows that, if each dynasty is trying to get ahead in a world threatened by climate change by increasing its intergenerational altruism, then long-term well-being will be seriously undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the outcomes of Green Paradox in static models of open economies to improve environmental quality by addressing issues of global warming and climate changes. Topics discussed include scenario and outcomes of international environmental agreement, issues of mitigating climate change across the globe and use of border tax adjustments to reduce leakage.

The article reflects on the 2020 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) conference which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics include the theme of the conference which focused on reconfiguring the human-Earth relationship amid the human-induced climate change crisis, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses and academic societies, and the difficulties of transitioning to a virtual conference with minimal resources.

Our analytical general equilibrium model solves for effects of a small increase in carbon tax on leakage--the increase in emissions elsewhere. Identical consumers buy two goods using income from endowments that are mobile between sectors. Usually an increase in one sector's tax raises output price, so consumption shifts to the other good, causing positive leakage. Here, we find a new negative effect not recognized in existing literature: the taxed sector substitutes away from carbon into clean inputs, so it may absorb resources, shrink the other sector, and reduce their emissions. This "abatement resource effect" could offset some or all of the positive effect. We show that this effect can substantially affect estimates of leakage and is robust to model extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many theorize that public opinion follows political elite on climate change skepticism, yet evidence of a causal link is lacking. I use a regression discontinuity design to establish the impact of the political party of a governor on constituents' global warming beliefs. I find that, relative to the election of a Democratic governor, the election of a Republican governor significantly decreases the probability of a Republican constituent believing in global warming by approximately 11–15 percentage points; there is no significant impact on Democratic constituents. I also find a negative effect of a Republican governor on belief in human-caused global warming that does not differ by constituent partisan affiliation. These results provide one explanation for the increased political polarization in global warming beliefs despite the scientific consensus. Belief formation often plays an important role in political economy models, so these findings also have implications for implementing climate change policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel way to disentangle inequality aversion over time from inequality aversion between regions in the computation of the social cost of carbon. Our approach nests a standard efficiency based estimate and an equity weighted estimate as special cases. We use two integrated assessment models (FUND and RICE) to present quantitative estimates of the social cost of carbon. Our results suggest that inequality considerations lead to higher (lower) social cost of carbon values in high (low) income regions relative to an efficiency based approach, but that the effect is less strong than found in previous studies that used equity weighting. Our central estimate is that the social cost of carbon increases roughly by a factor of two to three, and even more for higher degrees of inequality aversion, when our disentangled equity weighting approach is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a rather personal review of the state of environmental and resource economics, preceded by some comments on the evolution of the field. It moves from the history of the subject to the evolution of the Hotelling Rule and then via oil markets on to climate change, natural capital, ecosystem services, greening national income and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We evaluate the effect of climate adaptation infrastructure investments on property transaction prices, using data on over 400,000 property transactions and 162 infrastructure projects in Miami-Dade County, an area that is highly vulnerable to flooding and sea level rise due to climate change. Exploiting the timing and siting of different adaptation projects in Miami-Dade, we are able to identify significant gains in property values after completion of adaptation infrastructure projects. These gains are concentrated in areas close to the project and for projects that are visually identifiable. Our results suggest an aggregate mean benefit, net of adaptation cost, of about $0.68 million per project and almost $300 million in aggregate net benefits for all projects in our sample. Most projects generated positive net benefits, indicating that the vast majority of adaptation efforts are being placed in areas passing a benefit-cost test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following deglaciation during the final stages of the Pleistocene, vast landscapes became increasingly accessible for human dispersal. With no historical analogs, it remains uncertain how people were adapting to these unknown and often unstable environments and whether dispersals were sustained or characterized by local retreat or extinction events. We here address these uncertainties by using climate niche modeling to investigate the relationship between climate and the archaeological record of such a dispersal event: the Late Upper Paleolithic Hamburgian settlement of northern Europe. Our models consider temperature and precipitation from paleoclimate models with high temporal and spatial resolution. They suggest that rising temperatures instead of precipitation changes drove dispersal events by allowing carriers of the Hamburgian tradition to occupy a specific northward-shifting climate space. Similarly, our models suggest a subsequent constriction and fragmentation of this climate space caused by declining temperatures. This climatic downturn and shifting climate space coincide with the disappearance of the Hamburgian tradition from the archaeological record. We argue that this sudden climatic change altered the social and demographic costs of northward dispersal to become unsustainable, leading to a depopulation of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Headwater streams are critical to the integrity of the stream network, yet they are being rapidly degraded, channelized, or lost through land-cover and land-use change, particularly in urbanizing areas. We refined the definition of a headwater stream, reviewed the headwater stream ecosystem literature using examples from southeastern Australia and globally, and identified 4 critical knowledge gaps that are hampering the management of these unique systems: 1) inadequate high-resolution mapping and, thus, low-accuracy estimates of headwater stream locations and extents within catchments; 2) insufficient characterization of headwater stream typologies across varying geological, topographical, climatic, and anthropogenic conditions; 3) incomplete quantification of headwater stream structure, function, and ecosystem services across varying scales; and 4) limited understanding of the effects of urbanization on headwater streams against a backdrop of climate change. We propose a series of research questions to address these gaps and, finally, hypothesize and discuss the most effective ways to protect headwater streams in urbanizing environments given our current state of understanding. Of particular importance are the need to 1) shift perceptions of these systems as dry, insignificant depressions in the landscape; 2) manage both the headwater stream catchment and the channel; and 3) prioritize protection of the natural flow regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and colleagues, which has been published within the issue. The author views that Jones and colleagues failed to pay attention to environmental variability as a component of cultural and ecological change. He emphasized the need for the application of evolutionary perspective of climate and environment in the interpretation of cultural changes.

The article presents the author's comments on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and his colleagues. The author views that the paper lacks convincing demonstration of how climatic change affected the cultural growth of human population of four different studied region. He views that Jones and colleagues were correct to mention that economic factors depending on local factors influence population dynamic up to some extent.

Social media can be an effective tool for encouraging prosocial behavior, such as energy conservation, making it a key avenue to address the challenges associated with climate change. We examine how social media can be best leveraged to encourage energy-saving behavior. We theorize that two characteristics of social media messages are of particular importance in the context of nudging prosocial behavior: the recipient's affiliation with the message sender and whether the content of the message contains a social proof appeal. We use a multimethod approach to test the importance of these characteristics, including a large-scale energy efficiency campaign and a controlled experiment. We find that social mediamessages sent by a groupwithwhich the recipient is affiliated are substantiallymore effective, particularly when providing evidence of social proof. We discuss the practical impact on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract What are the links among climate change, epidemics, and socioeconomic inequality? Although the recent pandemic has focused attention on the effects of epidemics on economic outcomes, and a separate literature in climate science and environmental health has linked global environmental change to an increase in infectious disease epidemics, there is relatively little work connecting these two strands of literature. We explore the links among climate change, epidemics, and group-based inequality by first reviewing the scientific literature modeling the effects of global warming on infectious disease epidemics. We highlight the ways in which climate variables (such as temperature, precipitation, and wind speeds) and adaptive human behavior (such as migration) in response to climate events may facilitate the spread of infectious disease. We then examine the effects of climate-induced epidemics on gender inequality using evidence from the African meningitis belt. The results show that epidemics can worsen outcomes for groups in already economically precarious circumstances, thereby widening group-based socioeconomic inequality. Effective policies to combat the negative effects of epidemics must be mindful not to increase existing group-based inequalities and should aim to reduce these inequalities by minimizing damage for members of the most marginalized groups in societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of archaeologists of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) urgently needs decarbonization in the context of a climate crisis disproportionately affecting this region's people and cultural heritage. Academic conferences are both an invaluable forum for research exchange and networking and a carbon-intensive practice presenting barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article summarizes a study by the authors and the ASOR Ad Hoc Climate Impact Committee on the carbon footprint of the American Society of Overseas Research Annual Meeting and potential strategies for making the meeting carbon neutral and accessible while retaining engagement. We find that the best strategies for significantly reducing the about 1266 t CO2e produced by the traditional meeting format are: (1) alternation of in-person and virtual meetings; (2) hybrid in-person and virtual meeting; (3) dual-component in-person/virtual meeting; or (4) distributed meeting with US and MENA hubs. Carefully vetted carbon offsets should be purchased for remaining emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a novel analysis of climate change and policy regarding climate damages to growth under regional cooperation or noncooperation. We introduce a new stylized climate module and compute the regional social cost of carbon (SCC) when climate change impacts the growth rate of regional GDP under cooperation and noncooperation between regions. We find that in the presence of climate damage to economic growth, the regional SCC is high in either a cooperative or a noncooperative world, implying that it is optimal for each region to choose stringent climate policies. Moreover, relative to cooperation, noncooperation reduces the GDP of countries in both high northern latitudes and the tropics, while the loss for developing countries in the tropics is especially significant. The welfare losses to the tropics are larger still in the absence of compensatory transfers from wealthier regions most responsible for climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida panhandle 27 days before the 2018 elections. In the aftermath the governor issued Executive Order 18-283, allowing election officials in eight affected counties to loosen a variety of voting laws and consolidate polling places but providing no emergency funding to maintain the planned number of polling places. We test the efficacy of the order, using a novel research design that separates the weather effects of the hurricane on turnout from the administrative effects of how the election was run. We find little evidence that the hurricane itself (as proxied by historically relative rainfall) reduced turnout but that the executive order likely had large, negative turnout effects thanks to widespread polling place consolidation. Natural disasters need not spell turnout disasters if state and local election officials can avoid reducing the number of polling places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freshwater ecosystems are threatened by climate change and invasive species. Amphibians are important members of freshwater communities and are susceptible to negative effects of climate change and invasion. Furthermore, both climate change and invasion can influence density of amphibian larvae at the microhabitat scale because of larval clustering. To understand the effects of climate change and invasion on Pacific Chorus Frog Pseudacris regilla (Baird and Girard, 1852) larvae, a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment was carried out with a climate treatment (future/historical; simulated as changes in both temperature and hydroperiod), indirect exposure to the invasive Brook Stickleback Culaea inconstans (Kirtland, 1840) fish (chemical cues present/absent), and conspecific density (conspecific present/absent). We measured tadpole survival and development rate along with variables related to body shape, including mass, growth, growth rate, body mass index, tail fin depth, tail muscle depth, tail muscle width, and rear limb length. We assessed the effects of 3 common and important stressors (climate, invasive species, and density) alone and in combination with the other stressors to explore their interactions. Climate change, as simulated by our study, had large effects on Pacific Chorus Frog tadpole development and body shape. Brook Stickleback chemical cues had smaller but important effects on body shape and development rate when combined with additional stressors. Competition because of presence of a conspecific tadpole also reduced survival and had large effects on body shape. Pairwise interactions were largely additive or antagonistic. Three-way stressor interactions were most often antagonistic, resulting in less-than-additive effects of the 3 stressors together. However, 3 synergistic 3-way emergent interactions were detected. When all 3 stressors were present, development rate was faster than expected but rear limb length and tail muscle width were smaller than expected. Our results illustrate that climate change and conspecific density have wide-ranging effects on amphibian growth, development, and morphology—effects which may carry over into the terrestrial stage and reduce fitness. Furthermore, our findings reveal complex stressor interactions that were not predictable from single stressor effects or pairwise stressor effects, illustrating the difficulty in predicting multiple stressor interactions in freshwater systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two distinct notions of harm, wakllichishka and oil harm, and two distinct ways of shaping bodies. Following postcolonial and decolonial insights, I develop an approach that deploys two Indigenous concepts— wakllichishka , and not being able to see the diagnosis —as valid tools of analysis. Kichwa people in northern Peruvian Amazonia use both to analyze the condition of being harmed, illness, and the possibility of recovering. While wakllichishka rests on understandings and practices that assume that bodies are transformable and the locus of human and more-than-human sociality and agency, not being able to see the diagnosis reveals how biomedical and toxicological practices enact bodies as indicators of unspecific conditions and environmental degradation, and as incurable. Using Kichwa analytics shows the situatedness of these practices and counteracts a common disposition to undertake a colonizing reduction that defines our own categories as the only ones adequate for analysis of the consequences of extractive capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, non-Indigenous peoples have repeatedly positioned Indigenous peoples as the bearers of redemptive environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to climate change and natural hazards. In southeast Australia, recent widespread interest in Aboriginal peoples' fire management practices has been bolstered by these international trends but more directly driven by a succession of severe bushfire seasons as well as popular accounts suggesting that such practices might "save" the fire-prone nation. This situation is one of both continuity and novelty. While the ways Aboriginal peoples burn landscapes have been previously (re)discovered by bushfire managers and scientists, contemporary Aboriginal "cultural burning" initiatives also represent new contact zones of encounter and recognition, offering paradoxical affordances for individuals and groups able to perform different articulations of Indigeneity. As non-Indigenous people search for Indigenous solutions, in Australia and elsewhere, they raise expectations and fuel emerging tensions, with potentially incendiary results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Torpor is a highly effective response to counter various ecological and physiological bottlenecks in endotherms. In this study, we examined interrelations between thermoregulatory responses and key environmental variables in free-living squirrel gliders (Petaurus norfolcensis) in a habitat with drastic climatic and ecological changes across seasons. To this end, we measured body temperature (T b) and heart rate (f H) simultaneously throughout the year using implanted data loggers. Squirrel gliders in our study experienced fluctuations in ambient temperature (T a) between −4.0°C and 44.1°C and expressed torpor at different times during the year. In contrast to our expectations, torpor seemed to be employed flexibly, on demand, and most frequently in spring rather than during the coldest and/or hottest periods. Torpor bouts lasted, on average, about 5 h, and T b during torpor dropped as low as 17.9°C. The f H during torpor decreased below 50 bpm, which is about one-third of the basal level. The ability to record f H alongside T b enabled us to also report periods of low f H during thermoconforming hyperthermia at T a's above 35°C that likely occurred to conserve energy and water. Our findings double the body size of Australian gliders for which data on torpor are available and advance our ecological understanding of the dynamics of torpor expression in wild mammals and of how animals cope with varying conditions. Moreover, they highlight that the flexibility of physiology and thermoregulatory responses are clearly more complex than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court case West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency relating to the Clean Air Act, and the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change. The court held that EPA may still continue to regulate emissions at existing power plants through emissions reduction technologies.

The article presents a review of emerging literature on the economics of extreme heat. Topics discussed include biology of temperature stress, challenges with estimating the welfare impact of climate change, and how temperature stress affects health. Also discussed is how temperature stress affects production, labor supply decisions and output levels or growth rates.

Youth in sub-Saharan Africa are extremely vulnerable to the negative consequences of climate change and environmental degradation. The interest in education for sustainable development (ESD) to support African youth in learning about and adapting to climate change is growing in response. This study examines the messages about human-earth relationships, environmental change, and responsibilities for mitigation that are presented in official grade 8 Ghana and Malawi textbooks. Utilizing a political ecology framework, it shows that the curricula normalize an anthropocentric earth view that disappears global power dynamic, neglects widespread commodification of scarce resources, fails to question the developmentalist dream of endless growth, and translates local ecological contexts into universal commodities. We discuss the need to develop educational theories and practices that account for the complexity and deep contextuality of human-earth relationship if we hope to help students around the world envision alternative ways more likely to ensure species survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have long faced pressure to address the climate crisis by increasing taxes on fossil fuels. It is unclear how they have responded. Fossil fuel taxes and subsidies are hard to measure and often hidden in complex policy instruments. We collect and analyze an original high-frequency measure of gasoline taxes and subsidies, covering 157 countries. Our analysis yields three findings: despite rising alarm about climate change, from 2003 to 2015 there was little change in net fuel taxes and subsidies at a global level; these taxes and subsidies appear to be driven by the same fiscal conditions that determine other types of taxes; and reforms are overwhelmingly associated with idiosyncratic country-level conditions. These patterns suggest that fossil fuel taxes are determined by a country's revenue needs, not its political institutions or environmental commitments. They also have significant implications for debates over policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Little Ice Age of the early modern centuries, close to a third of the globe's population perished. Because this period serves as the most recent example of the global impacts of climate change, historians and others interested in developing conceptual and methodological tools for understanding contemporary climate change regularly look to the historiography of the Little Ice Age for direction and inspiration. This article adds to this toolkit by arguing for the place of gender and sexuality in analyses of climate change, something environmental historians have seldom done. It does so through the discussion of a seemingly fantastical account of a young woman who gave birth to an elephant in the Ottoman Empire in the 1640s. Focusing on the experience of one woman, her rape by an elephant from India, the sad fate of her child, and her community's social and economic hardships shows how individuals both experienced and interpreted the environmental calamities of the Little Ice Age as a species crisis. Her story furthermore analogizes the political fortunes of the Ottoman Empire in a moment of weakness. By connecting the literatures of environmental and natural history, women's history and histories of sexuality, empire and science, this article centers the roles of women as prime agents of population, history, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences in real-world pollution markets suggest that firms make persistent errors in forecasting allowance and credit prices that inform their investment decisions. The residual uncertainty characterizing allowance and credit trading means that pollution markets may fail to deliver cost-effective abatement. This contrasts with price-based policies under which firms make investments that equate marginal abatement cost to an emission tax. We incorporate the additional cost of forecast errors under quantity-based programs into a standard Weitzman-style prices versus quantities framework. We distinguish between individual firms' uncertainty over competitors' private information and systemic uncertainty over future cost shocks. We show that a welfare-maximizing regulator would favor price instruments in response to the prospect of firm-specific forecast errors under quantity instruments, ceteris paribus, and the relative benefit of price instruments increases with forecast error variance. We discuss the role of policy design, such as incorporating price collars, in mitigating cost inefficiencies from price forecast errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy with uncertainty is often posed as a choice between price and quantity instruments. Adding flexibility to fixed policy instruments can improve outcomes. Roberts and Spence noted the efficiency advantages of matching emissions allowances supply to the marginal damage schedule. We propose an implementable approach to making that match, an approach we call "price-responsive supply," which treats prices and quantities as simultaneously determined in the allowance auction. For competitive environments, price-responsive supply outperforms fixed-price and fixed-quantity instruments. Price-responsive supply can enhance the performance of real-world regulatory environments through an automatic adjustment mechanism that responds instantaneously to new information about abatement costs. We demonstrate the improved performance of price-responsive supply in experiments and simulations. A price-responsive supply schedule, while offering efficiency advantages, also translates the cost-lowering effects of other, coincident policies into accelerated reductions under an emissions cap, thereby helping to resolve the waterbed effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies consistently find important economic effects of year-to-year weather fluctuations. I study the economic effects of long-term and gradual climate change over 250 years in the Little Ice Age (1600–1850), during which people and economies had time to adapt. Results show significant negative economic effects of long-term climate change. Temperature impacted the economy through its effect on agricultural productivity and mortality. To adapt to the Little Ice Age, economies increased trade and changed land use. I discuss the relevance of these results for understanding the impact of today's climate change, especially in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Species distribution models assume that at broad spatial scales, environmental conditions determine species ranges and, as such, source-sink dynamics can be ignored. A rationale behind this assumption is that source-sink dynamics manifest at length scales comparable to species mean dispersal distance, which is much smaller than length scales of species distribution and variation in climate. Using a two-dimensional reaction-diffusion model, we show that species can use sink habitats near the niche limit as stepping-stones to occupy sink habitats much further than the mean dispersal distance, thereby extending the distribution far beyond the environmental niche limit. This mismatch between range and niche limits is mediated by the shape (local curvature) of the niche limit. These curvature effects may be significant for a highly dispersive species with low per capita growth rate sensitivity to changes in the environment. These findings underscore the potential importance of stepping-stone dispersal in determining range limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today’s less developed countries (LDCs) have access to energy technologies that did not exist when today’s richer countries were at similar stages of development. Do LDCs therefore consume less energy per capita than rich countries in the past? And is their economic growth associated with a lower growth in energy consumption? Can they “leapfrog” to a lower-carbon economy? I use data on energy consumption, prices, and gross domestic product for 76 countries to estimate the energy intensity of income growth for both current LDCs and industrialized countries in the past. I find that, despite dramatic improvements in energy efficiency, economic growth in LDCs is not less energy-intensive than past growth in industrialized countries. Energy savings from access to more efficient technologies have been offset by other trends, including a shift toward more energy-intensive consumption bundles and compositional changes in industry such as outsourcing. This can have serious implications for energy consumption projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and associates, which is published within the issue. He criticizes the overstated significance given to environmental flux as a factor responsible for the extinction of the late prehistoric population in western North America. He argues that there is a lack of convincing demonstration in the paper to support the vigorous effect of climatic anomalies on human system.

How shall we judge the element of practicality or urgency for scholars working in the era of the 2030 deadline for action on climate change? This essay surveys the reaction to climate change by scholars who work with data, using the philosopher Stephen Gardiner's conceit of "corrupt institutions" to organize the approaches according to an index of pragmatic orientation. This survey will lead to the identification of some challenges for those seeking to engage the climate deadline with data, especially work making climate data more transparent, text mining to identify aspects of corruption and reform within contemporary institutions, and building infrastructure for citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]