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This book showcases vital lessons learned from research, field projects and best practice examples with regard to climate change adaptation in countries throughout the Pacific region, a part of the planet that is particularly vulnerable to and affected by climate change.The book's primary goals are to document the wealth of experiences in the region available today, to encourage cross-sector interactions among the various stakeholders in the region, and to help transfer results to other countrie...

This text develops and applies a far-reaching account of the economic value of climate, derived from its amenity value or the benefits which a particular climate provides to the people of that region or country. As climate change moves higher on the economic and political agendas, reliable measures of the benefits and costs of specific climates and changes to them become ever-more critical. Detailed studies of a range of countries including Britain, the US, India and Russia, show that the mobili...

Water sustains life: without it, humans cannot survive for more than a few days. And yet this precious fluid is increasingly politicised as the debates about the world's water supply gain force. The control and ownership of water itself, and of the many organizations which govern its use, are increasingly the focus of international concern. Maggie Black explores the many roles water plays in human life and provides a clear overview on the vital issues of distribution, technology, irrigation, lan...

This book explores the role which policy networks and particularly advocacy coalitions play in EU energy policy, and the factors that account for their policy success. It captures the often neglected interaction between public and private actors in EU energy security policy and between opposing advocacy coalitions. The volume’s case studies examine coalitions working on two issues central to EU energy policy debates over the last decade: fracking for shale gas and developing the Southern Gas Cor...

An exploration of commercially available technologies that can enhance energy security and address climate change and public policy options crucial to their adoption.Tackling climate change and improving energy security are two of the twenty-first century's greatest challenges. In this book, Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool offer detailed assessments of the most advanced commercially available technologies for strengthening global energy security, mitigating the effects of climate change, and...

An argument for a major federal program to stimulate innovation in energy technology and a proposal for a policy approach to implement it.America is addicted to fossil fuels, and the environmental and geopolitical costs are mounting. A public-private program-at an expanded scale-to stimulate innovation in energy policy seems essential. In Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution, Charles Weiss and William Bonvillian make the case for just such a program. Their proposal backs measures to stimu...

Scholars have often claimed that democracies, whatever their virtues, are functionally short-sighted. The evidence is clear: we have been unable to manage many long-term issues including climate change, nuclear waste disposal, natural disaster preparedness, infrastructure maintenance, and budget deficits. If voters and influential actors, such as interest groups and corporations, have dominant short-term interests, it may be difficult for elected politicians to act in the long-term interests of...

Recent catastrophic events, such as the I-35W bridge collapse, New Orleans flooding, the BP oil spill, Port au Prince's destruction by earthquake, Fukushima nuclear plant's devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street investment bank failures, and the housing foreclosure epidemic and the collapse of housing prices, all stem from what author Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design. This is design in which structures and systems have so little redundancy and so much interconnectedness and misguide...

As a result of global dynamics—the increasing interconnection of people and places—innovations in global environmental governance haved altered the role of cities in shaping the future of the planet. This book is a timely study of the importance of these social transformations in our increasingly global and increasingly urban world. Through analysis of transnational municipal networks, such as Metropolis and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Sofie Bouteligier's innovative study examines...

The more we debate about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we continue to burn. How did we get caught up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Malm claims that it all began in Britain with the rise of steam-power. So why did manufacturers turn from traditional fuels, notably water, to steam? Overturning established theories of the transition and offering a radically new view of our warming world, this study shows how steam was adopted as a superior sou...

Legitimacy in International Society addresses collective legitimization of emergent norms at international meetings and its effect on state behaviour. Drawing mainly on constructivist approaches in International Relations and social psychology, Isao Miyaoka discusses the international and domestic sources of legitimacy and the basic conditions under which collective legitimization matters for norm adoption. Three case studies examine Japan's responses to wildlife preservationist norms against hi...

Experts from business, academia, governmental agencies and non-profit think tanks to form a transnational and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the combined challenges of environmental sustainability and energy security in the United States and Germany.

Aspirations, desires, opportunism and exploitation are seldom considered as fundamental elements of donor-driven development as it impacts on the lives of people in poor countries. Yet, alongside structural interventions, emotional or affective engagements are central to processes of social change and the making of selves for those caught up in development’s slipstream. Intimate Economies of Development lays bare the ways that culture, sexuality and health are inevitably and inseparably linked...

A growing number of GHG emissions trading schemes are being implemented at regional or national levels. However, even as the number of different schemes grows, few linkages exist between them. Major cap-and-trade proposals are currently at important stages in their development, especially in the United States, Japan and Australia, some of which explicitly emphasize the aim of linking with other schemes. One of the strategic goals of European climate policy is linking the EU ETS with other compar...

Taking a bottom-up perspective, this book explores local framings of a wide range of issues related to benefit-sharing, a growing concept in global environmental governance. Benefit-sharing in Environmental Governance draws on original case studies from South Africa, Namibia, Greece, Argentina, and Malaysia to shed light on what benefit-sharing looks like from the local viewpoint. These local-level case studies move away from the idea of benefit-sharing as defined by a single international orga...