Search results

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. ‘Exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agricu...

Significant advances have occurred in recent years in Europe and in North America in addressing agri-environmental policies. Land use issues tend to be more pressing in Europe than in the US as a whole because of different spatial exigencies. Because these advances have taken place within individual academic disciplines, there has been something of a loss of synergy and often efforts are duplicated. While important institutional and legal differences still exist between the two continents, the...

This book provides research that shows tropical cyclones are more powerful than in the past with the most dramatic increases occurring over the North Atlantic and with the strongest hurricanes. Although such increases are correlated with warming oceans and are consistent with the thermodynamic theory of hurricane intensity, there remains doubt about the interpretation, integrity, and meaning of these results. Arising from the 5th International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change, this book c...

Taking stock of emerging planet data and analysing policies during the global crisis, Earth Economics provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to basic macroeconomic concepts, methods and principles, and their application to real world data.Written principally for students seeking an introduction to macroeconomics, this book offers a completely new angle to policy, with a focus on the truly global level. Underpinned by empirical orientation of state-of-the-art data, it introduces ear...

The book provides a study of sustainable development in rural China. Because of its huge population and vast land area, this is an important issue not only for China but for the whole world. The research presented is both multi aspect and systematical. It can be likened to a tree where the trunk is the three main aspects: economy, environment and rural society, and the five main branches are agricultural development, industrial pollution, energy security, labor migration and social welfare, and...

Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints f...

What will electricity and heat demand look like in a low-carbon world? Ambitious environmental targets will modify the shape of the electricity sector in the twenty-first century. 'Smart' technologies and demand-side management will be some of the key features of the future of electricity systems in a low-carbon world. Meanwhile, the social and behavioural dimensions will complement and interact with new technologies and policies. Electricity demand in the future will increasingly be tied up wit...

Biodiversity loss is one of the major resource problems facing the world, and the policy options available are restricted by inappropriate economic tools which fail to capture the value of species and their variety. This study describes in non-technical terms how cost-benefit analysis techniques can be applied to species and species loss, and how they provide a measure of the efficiency of conservation measures. Only when conservation can be shown to pass such a basic economic test, the authors...

For the last 30 years, analysis of the inner workings of the firm has been largely absent from economic assessments of environmental policy. Recent work has highlighted the importance of understanding a firm's commercial motivations, decision-making procedures and organizational structure when designing and implementing public environmental policies. Environmental Policy and Corporate Behaviour responds to this need, investigating the many internal challenges faced by firms seeking to implement...

A critical issue in dealing with climate change is deciding who has a right to emit carbon dioxide. Allocation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme provided the first in-depth description and analysis of the process by which rights to emit carbon dioxide were created and distributed in the European Union. This was the world's first large-scale experiment with an emission trading system for carbon dioxide and was likely to be copied by others if there was to be a global regime for limiting gr...

This book focuses on three critical issues pertaining to the broader goal of sustainable development - namely, the degenerative forces of globalization, ecological sustainability requirements, and how best to negotiate the economic transition process.While the applicability of ecological sustainability to sustainable development is obvious, the association between economic transition and sustainable development, and, more particularly, how globalization forces can impact negatively on the sustai...

In this interdisciplinary volume, Heinze and a diverse group of senior scholars explore global ethics through sustainability, justice, and security. They address topics within these categories based on recent world events (BP oil spill, 'War on Terror', UN Climate Conference, for example) with an eye toward reconciling the interests of states and other global power-holders with those of individual human beings and global society as a whole. Using a variety of techniques and approaches, including...

This volume, with contributions from a team of multi-disciplinary team experts, addresses the economic sustainability and clean manufacturing methods to deal with the challenges that water scarcity and water quality are imposing on many countries, particularly on Mediterranean arid areas, that are threatening their economic and social development. Water plays a crucial role in industry, agriculture and daily life. Its use has increased ten-fold between 1900 and 2000. On a global scale, about 70...

The key to good policy analysis is asking the right questions about existing or proposed policies. This book explains how to analyze agricultural and natural-resource policy with particular emphasis on Australia. This text aims to develop a systematic theoretical framework that integrates economic efficiency and public choice analysis. It should enable students to understand the principles that underpin good policy-making, how economists understand and evaluate the policy-making process, and how...

This book discusses the interaction between environment, economy, and society in a major part of the Western Himalaya. It reveals the pervasive influence of ecology on virtually every aspect of human activity in the region, and describes how numerous factors converged to sustain life in the Himalayan countryside.

This book discusses the issues of integration within food and fibre supply chains and the challenges in managing price risk. The problems of integration and price risk are interwoven in agricultural supply chains with production and supply risk as well as hoarding. However, without supply chain integration through commercial trade markets there can be no forward market upon which forward transactions and the management of price risk can be based. Without a forward market that can reduce opportun...

Der menschengemachte Klimawandel, knapper werdende natürliche Ressourcen und eine stetig wachsende Weltbevölkerung sind globale Herausforderungen, die ein Umdenken und Umsteuern der Wirtschaft erfordern, um Ernährung und Wohlstand der Menschen auch in Zukunft zu sichern. Die Bioökonomie bietet dafür vielfältige moderne Lösungsansätze, die nicht auf fossilen Ressourcen, sondern auf der effizienten Nutzung von biologischen Ressourcen, wie Pflanzen, Tieren und Mikroorganismen basieren. Dennoch sind...

Over the last thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the most polluted cities in the world are in China. Yet, millions of people continue moving to its cities seeking opportunities. Blue Skies over Beijing investigates the ways that China's urban development i...

This book focuses on issues that are relevant for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The depth and the extension of the current political crisis in the area have changed the perspectives of conventional Euro-Mediterranean integration policies. The book provides the grounds for new patterns of analysis and addresses policy guidelines which are able to respond to the dramatic challenges that Mediterranean regions are facing. By implementing a multidisciplinary approach, the volume uncovers the...

The volume of relevant research and literature on this topic is growing but originates mainly from economists, sociologists, and political scientists; geographers have been slow to make contributions. One reason may be that geographers have been preoccupied with differentiation within the geography of production whereas this new field directs attention to the geography of consumption and a study of economies. This book aims to focus attention on the complex and inter-related problems--social, ec...

This report provides a comprehensive assessment of progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from a small states perspective. The authors compare the performance of 46 small island developing states (SIDS) with 10 benchmark states, illuminating achievements and highlighting areas in which countries are falling behind. The data, 2000–2010, shows that despite their many commonalities, a ‘big divide’ separates these countries across the range of MDG economic, social and environmental ind...

The essays in Energy, Foresight and Strategy apply rational expectation theory to various energy markets with the intention of discussing issues relevant to analysis and decision making in the whole of the energy field. Originally published in 1985, issues explored include oil exportation, energy prices and embargoes, both focussing on how past regulation has created issues in the market at the time of publication as well as creating models to ascertain the futures of various energy resources. T...