Climate Insecurity in (Post)Conflict Areas: The Biopolitics of United Nations Vulnerability Assessments

Within the United Nations, the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have all highlighted climate risks as relevant to their work in areas affected by conflict, endorsing human security approaches as valid for mapping the relationships between climate stresses and conflict-related harm. While this policy interest has limited operational presence, I discuss salient assessments of climate vulnerability in (post)conflict areas, arguing that these agencies have applied a natural disaster rather than conflict regulation inflection of humanitarian reason. The former entails a biopolitical paradigm of disaster risk reduction, prescribing technical-managerial measures to build the resilience of vulnerable populations. This framing supports a depoliticised stance reflecting UN norms of neutrality and impartiality. I claim that this position nevertheless disregards its own geopolitical conditions and effects, which dilute the scope for international humanitarian law to assign responsibility for conflict-related harm.     

Exchanging Goods and Damages: The Role of Trade on the Distribution of Climate Change Costs

The impacts of climate change vary significantly across world regions. Whereas tropical and subtropical regions are expected to suffer severely from the effects of climate change, the impacts in northern latitudes should remain relatively moderate. However, regions are not self-sufficient, and the costs of climate change can spread across regions through international trade. I study the international spillover of climate impacts within a regionalised, climate-sensitive, dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the world economy. Using data from a global climate model shows that the world regions face welfare losses between 0.6 and 2.1 % due to climate change. I also show that climate change affects terms of trade and sectoral competitiveness. By means of a decomposition method, the extent of spillover impacts through international trade can be identified. Spillover impacts significantly affect, either positively or negatively, the total costs of climate change for a region. For regions with low exposure to climate change and high adaptive capacities, spillover effects are responsible for a 1/6 of the total cost of climate change.     

Climate Change and Regional Vulnerability to Transnational Security Threats in Southeast Asia

Transnational and non-state threats including international organized crime, terrorism, illicit trafficking (in drugs, wildlife, humans, arms, etc.), piracy, infectious disease, and illegal migration flows are major concerns in Southeast Asia. This paper examines IPCC projections for climate change to the region and discusses possible impacts of these changes upon transnational security. Overall, climate change could increase potential vulnerability to various transnational security threats. Southeast Asian livelihood and social systems will be pressured, while state and civil society capacity will be strained. This will intensify existing vulnerabilities to non-state security threats and raise the overall level of vulnerability and risk to both human and state security. Predicted climate change impacts are also likely to strengthen or help revive sub-state networks that have traditionally responded to environmental change and pressure via violence, crime, smuggling, banditry, trafficking, terrorism, and other such activities. This will contribute to the evolution, expansion, and growth of “new” war fighting groups while raising overall vulnerability to non-state threats from local to global scales.     

Countermeasures of adaptation to climate change： establishment and application for implementation matrix

In the conceptual framework of adaptation policy assessment to climate change, adaptation measures can be categorized as two groups：facilitation and implementation. Facilitation measures refers to activities that enhance adaptive capacity, while implementation refers to activities that actually avoid adverse climate impacts on a system by reducing its exposure or sensitivity to climatic hazards, or by moderating relevant non-climatic factors. This paper aims to establish a matrix of implementation measures of adaptation to climate change, through four different ways how adaptation can influencc the relevant elements of climate change. reducing the exposure, reducing the sensitivity, alleviating the adverse impacts and reducing the negative non-climatic factors, and then further discuss the particular implementation measures of adaptation to climate change, through application studies on the selected sub-systems, intend to organize the disordered implementation measures in existent, and put forward some new measures under the guidance of this matrix, which could enrich and promote the system and content of implementation measures of adaptation.     

Climate change and economic growth: An intertemporal general equilibrium analysis for Egypt

This study advances the state of the art in country-level computable general equilibrium analysis for climate change impact and adaptation analysis by incorporating forward-looking expectations. The analytic framework is used to explore the long-run growth prospects for Egypt in a changing climate. Based on a review of existing estimates of climate change impacts on agricultural productivity, labour productivity and the potential losses due to sea-level rise for the country, the model is used to simulate the effects of climate change on aggregate consumption, investment and income up to 2050. Available cost estimates for adaptation investments are employed to explore adaptation strategies.The simulation analysis suggests that in the absence of policy-led adaptation investments, real GDP towards the middle of the century will be 6.5% lower than in a hypothetical baseline without climate change. A combination of adaptation measures, that include coastal protection investments for vulnerable sections along the low-lying Nile delta, support for changes in crop management practices and investments to raise irrigation efficiency, could reduce the GDP loss in 2050 to around 2.6%.Further work along these lines for developing countries in climate change hotspot regions deserves a high priority on the research agenda in economic modelling.     

A general equilibrium assessment of climate change–induced loss of agricultural productivity in Nepal

The impact of climate change on agriculture has been one of the most discussed topics in the literature on climate change. Multi-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have frequently been used to examine the impact of climate change on agriculture. However, these studies do not focus on country-specific issues related to the link between climate change and agriculture. This paper aims to address this gap by investigating the economy-wide impacts of climate change on Nepalese agriculture. Nepal makes an interesting case study as it has one of the most vulnerable agricultural economies in South Asia. This paper develops a comparative static multi-household CGE model to trace the direct and indirect impacts of climate change in Nepal. The results suggest that climate change has a significant negative impact on the overall Nepalese economy due to the induced loss of agricultural productivity. The results further reveal that rural households in Nepal, whose livelihoods primarily depend on subsistence farming, will face additional climate change–induced stresses due to already overstrained poverty and a weak social welfare system. The results indicate an urgent need to mainstream adaptation strategies to lessen the negative impacts of any climate change–induced loss of agricultural productivity in Nepal.     

地方政府处在应对气候变化的最前线——澳大利亚《地方政府气候变化适应行动》述评

近年来,气候变化成为与人类社会发展和生存密切相关的全球性热点。澳大利亚受到气候变化的严重影响。然而,长期以来,澳大利亚政府在应对气候变化方面一直落后于整体发达国家。自2006年开始,以《地方政府气候变化适应行动》的出台为标志,澳大利亚政府的态度发生了积极的变化。文章对澳大利亚应对气候变化影响的相关背景和举措以及澳大利亚环境和水资源部出台的《地方政府气候变化适应行动》报告进行了介绍和评述,并结合该报告观点及我国实际情况提出了相应的启示和建议。     

Climate change as a threat to biodiversity: An application of the DPSIR approach

Climate change and its consequences present one of the most important threats to biodiversity and the functions of ecosystems. The stress on biodiversity is far beyond the levels imposed by the natural global climatic changes occurring in the recent evolutionary past. It includes temperature increases, shifts of climate zones, melting of snow and ice, sea level rise, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events. Natural systems are vulnerable to such changes due to their limited adaptive capacity. Based on an analysis using the DPSIR framework, this paper discusses some of the important socio-economic driving forces of climate change, with a focus on energy use and transportation. The paper also analyses observed and potential changes of climate and the pressures they exert on biodiversity, the changes in biodiversity, the resulting impacts on ecosystem functions, and possible policy responses. The latter can be divided into mitigation and adaptation measures. Both strategies are needed, mitigation in order to stabilise the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and adaptation in order to adjust to changes that have already occurred or cannot be avoided. One mitigation option, increased biofuel production, which is also a response to oil depletion, would change land use patterns and increase human appropriation of net primary production of biomass, thereby threatening biodiversity. By considering the first order and second order impacts of climate change on biodiversity when developing policy measures, it will be possible to integrate ecosystem and biodiversity protection into decision-making processes.     

Identification of national priority areas for adaptation to climate change in China

The problem of global warming has been identified as the first in the list of the top ten environmental problems in the world. As climate change will seriously affect the social and natural world that people live in, so it may lay serious repercussions on economic progress, social improvement, and sustainable development. International bodies everywhere and many of the countries＇ governments are responding urgently to this call In recent years, climate change has affected different regions in China in different ways. In its national agenda, the Chinese government should address the problem of climate change and its negative impact on socio-economic development. In this endeavor the nation should introduce policies which will help its people and economy to adapt to these effects and changes. Priority-fields of adaptation to climate change are the sensitive areas or departments which are more vulnerable to the negative influences of climate change. The negative impacts of climate change in some parts of China are considered to be very serious indeed as they affect the whole economy and community. As a result, priority should be given to these more affected regions for the limited state financing. This paper defines adaptation and discusses the basic principles and programs in the identi.fication of national priority areas where adaptation should be exercised. Based on the past studies, four priority areas in China are identified, namely, disaster prevention and mitigation, water resources, agriculture, and ecosystem. An analysis on the identification procedures, and the reasons and tasks involved are given for each.     

The Socio-scientific Construction of Global Climate Crisis

This article adapts and applies a securitisation framework to produce an analytical explanation for the heightened geopolitical status of climate change over the past decade, as demonstrated by the breakthrough Paris Agreement of 2015. Rather than speech acts invoking security, the focus of this analysis is on the socio-scientific discourse of global climate crisis that emerged in the several year period leading to the 2009 COP 15 conference in Copenhagen. Two types of experts—contributory and interactional—are identified as the essential and interdependent actors that engaged in ‘crisification’, a novel crisis-based perspective on political agenda setting, in which climate crisis served as a primary discursive device employed by prominent advocates of urgent action. Contributory experts, that is, authoritative climate scientists and their institutions, together with interactional experts—non-scientist social actors who appropriated and mediated scientific data and knowledge in framing climate change as a global crisis—constituted an extended epistemic community of climate advocates. Through an array of speech acts, this extended community effectively co-constructed a convincing climate crisis discourse that consisted of quantitative data artefacts based on CO₂ concentration and global mean temperature, and qualitative invocations of existential threat to human civilisation, which contributed to the ascent of climate change on the global political agenda. In proposing crisification as a complement to securitisation, the article offers a theoretical innovation that facilitates constructivist analysis of issues framed as crises, including geopolitical problems in certain non-military sectors where crisis is a favoured label for perceived threats to core values.     

Aviation and Climate Change: Practising Green Governmentality across the North-South Divide

This article seeks to re-understand climate change in terms of its constitutive state practices. Existing analyses tend to frame climate change as a security discourse, or as a manner of green governmentality normalising the uneven relations between the Global North and South, but seldom is the practical process realising climate change’s logics delineated. Using aviation as an example, this article traces how climate change, as discourse, contingently takes shape through three episodes in aviation’s environmental evolution: a) an initial period of conceptual experimentation and consolidation (1992–2005); b) a major policy break catalysed by the EU ETS that destabilised previous discursive formations (2005–2012); and c) diplomatic attempts to re-gain international consensus following the EU ETS’s extension to aviation (2012–present). These practices will be charted across numerous spaces, including supra-national forums, national governments, technical bodies, consulting agencies, and political summits. By elucidating this geopolitical praxis across the North-South divide, I demonstrate how climate change cannot simply be reduced to a rationality in green governmentality, but must be understood as an outcome of strategic practices among differently positioned states.     

Climatic impacts across agricultural crop yield distributions: An application of quantile regression on rice crops in Andhra Pradesh,India

Climatic impact on agricultural production is a serious concern, as it is directly linked to food security and poverty. Whereas there are empirical studies that examine this issue with parametric approaches focusing on the “mean” level of variables, few studies have addressed climatic impacts in general settings. Given this paucity, we characterize the impacts on crop yield distributions with a non-parametric approach. We examine the case of rice yield in Andhra Pradesh, India, an important state producing rice as a main crop but reported to be vulnerable to climate change. Employing 34 years of data, we apply quantile regressions to untangle the climatic impacts across the quantiles of rice yield, finding three main results. First, substantial heterogeneity in the impacts of climatic variables can be found across the yield distribution. Second, the direction of the climatic impacts on rice yield highly depends on agro-climatic zones. Third, seasonal climatic impacts on rice yield are significant. More specifically, a monsoon-dependent crop is more sensitive to temperature and precipitation, whereas a winter crop remains largely resilient to changes in the levels of climate variables. These findings clarify the idiosyncratic climatic impacts on agriculture in India, and call for location- and season-specific adaptation policies.     

低碳农业发展核心目标:减缓和适应气候变化

减缓和适应是人类应对气候变化行动中两种相辅相成的措施。中国农业在应对气候变化中,减缓和适应同等重要:一方面,农业在减缓气候变化中具有独特的作用;另一方面,农业适应气候变化比减缓气候变化更为现实的迫切。积极发展低碳现代农业实现减排增汇,中国农业生态系统可以作为一种非常重要的固碳增汇措施,纳入全球CO2减排措施中去。中国低碳农业在减缓和适应气候变化中具有巨大潜力。     

Dust storms and human well-being

Dust storms are extreme weather events that can lead to sharp short-duration reductions in environmental quality. Is the US and elsewhere, dust storms are becoming more frequent due to climate change and altered land-use patterns. However, our present understanding of their impacts to social welfare is limited. To address this gap, I undertake the first nationwide US study of dust storm impacts on subjective well-being using life satisfaction (LS) data from the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) over 2005–2010. I find that LS is lower by 0.008 points on a 4-point scale on days when a dust storm occurred in a respondent’s county-of-residence, as identified by the National Weather Service. The observed LS impact is precisely estimated; occurring only on a dust storm event day and not the days immediately before or after. I calculate that individuals are willing-to-pay $111 to avoid a single dust storm event day, on the basis of the estimated well-being externality. I also show that public dust storm alerts on event days can offset more than 50% of the negative LS effect, suggestive of an important role for public risk communication.     

Loss aversion and social security: a general equilibrium approach

Introducing an intertemporal model of loss aversion, I study the role of social security in determining intergenerational redistribution when consumers have reference-dependent preferences with loss aversion. Using a unified social security model in which different social security plans are specified via different degrees of fundedness, I examine the effect of the transition from a less funded system to a more funded one on savings, consumption, and capital accumulation for an OLG production economy. A general equilibrium analysis shows that the direction of intertemporal equilibrium is dependent on how the total savings responds to the interest rate change, but the effect of the payroll tax on capital accumulation is ambiguous. By deriving closed-form solutions, I find that an increase in fundedness intensity unambiguously increases capital accumulation in steady states, while the tax effects on consumption and savings are not conclusive. Moreover, simulation exercises show that when consumers are prone to over-consume because they care more about the contemporaneous gain utility, the fully funded system may help the individuals smooth out their lifecycle consumption.     

Managing Environmental Risk in Presence of Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia

This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function. We use an empirical strategy that accounts for the heterogeneity in the decision on whether to adapt or not, and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm. We find that past adaptation to climate change (i) reduces current downside risk exposure, and so the risk of crop failure; (ii) would have been more beneficial to the non-adapters if they adapted, in terms of reduction in downside risk exposure; and (iii) is a successful risk management strategy that makes the adapters more resilient to climatic conditions.     

气候变化对湖南省农业水旱灾害的影响研究方法探讨

随着全球气候变化的不断加剧,区域气温、降水、辐射等都发生了重大变化,其对农业发展也具有重要影响,研究气候变化对湖南农业水旱灾害的影响及适应性对策有利于减小灾害性天气及气候系统对湖南省农业的影响,适时找出适合湖南区域特点的应对措施,并进一步完善当前全球气候变化对农作物生长研究的不足。基于英国哈德莱气候中心的区域气候模式PRECIS系统的区域尺度气候情景模拟结果,借助于GIS技术运用EPIC和SWAT模型分别模拟未来不同气候情景下湖南水稻产量和水资源的变化,通过对过去50年气候变化及其对水稻模拟产量的影响研究,可以总结湖南省应对气候变化引发的水旱灾害的策略和方法,并进一步提出未来气候变化情景下的适应性对策,可以为政府和相关决策部门应对未来水旱灾害的适应性对策提供参考依据。     

气候变化对欧洲农业的系统影响及对策

本文基于欧洲气候变化的历史演进与未来情景,系统分析了气候变化对欧洲农业的历史和潜在影响,提供了欧洲农业应对气候变化的适应性措施,及其对中国未来农业发展的启示和建议。     

Post–Privatization Effects of Management and Employee Buy–outs

Management and employee buy–outs have played a significant role in the privatization of state–owned enterprises. Key research and policy issues are raised concerning whether insider ownership promotes or impedes restructuring and adaptation. This paper reviews and synthesizes studies of the effects of privatization management and employee buy–outs in both developed and transition economies. Trends in privatization buy–outs and conceptual issues concerning the expected effects of privatization buy–outs both in terms of performance and survival are discussed. A review of empirical evidence is presented in terms of the impact of buy–outs on employee attitudes, human resource management, strategy and restructuring, financial and economic performance, together with fresh evidence on survival. Privatization buy–outs can lead to significant restructuring but their impact depends on institutional context and policy. Restructuring may be greater where insiders purchase shares rather than acquiring them virtually free through voucher programmes.     

Adaptation processes in the context of climate change: a social and environmental psychology perspective

An informed multidisciplinary understanding of the ways in which people experience, appraise, adapt, and respond to global climate change is a prerequisite to effectively managing the transition to a sustainable economy. In this paper, we argue that climate science has to date failed to fully appreciate the contribution that social and environmental psychology can make to such an understanding. We draw on findings from two large national Australian surveys to demonstrate how this perspective can contribute to knowledge, understanding, and policy formulation. Central to this perspective are processes of psychological adaptation, that is, processes through which individuals orient towards, make sense of, and ultimately come to terms with, the threat and reality of climate change. Such adaptive processes are shown to mediate relationships between environmental experiences and behavior, and hence provide the foundation for environmentally-friendly lifestyles. Rather than assuming that external sanctions and incentives are sufficient to engender sustainable lifestyle changes, a social and environmental psychology approach recognises and explores the complexities of the transactions that occur between individuals’ internal and external environments, emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation and self-determination, and suggests the need for initiatives that promote behaviors that are both environmentally and psychologically significant.