Showing papers in "Environmental Science & Policy in 2011"

TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce a special issue dedicated to understanding the governance and implementation dimensions of REDD+ at international, national and local levels, and highlight three main pillars for a future research agenda.

TL;DR: In this article, a generalisable analytical framework for exploring planned retreat from the sea behind natural ecological defences is proposed, where the option of planned retreat is disappearing because the State Government promotes population increase; the need to provide places for naturally protective coastal ecosystems to occupy does not seem urgent, so houses are built there; liability laws favour development; and political pressure to build defences grows as the value of built assets increases.

TL;DR: The HYDRATE project as mentioned in this paper aims to improve the scientific basis of flash flood forecasting by advancing and harmonising a European-wide innovative flash flood observation strategy and developing a coherent set of technologies and tools for effective early warning systems.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that REDD+ is more than an impartial container for the various tools and actors concerned with addressing anthropogenic climate change, and they bring the issue of governance under REDD+, to the fore through a focus on the objects to be governed, the tools of governance, and the forms of environmental, economic and social knowledge that are considered legitimate under this framework.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of groundwater in surface ecosystems is not fully understood and the status and baseline of different types of groundwater dependent ecosystems are discussed, with particular emphasis on past evidence of environmental change and potential thresholds and threats in GDEs in various parts of Europe with different land use, climate and geology.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the process of knowledge co-production between experts, bureaucrats and stakeholders in two Dutch water management projects and analyze the methods used for coproduction along with the impact of the resulting knowledge on the decision-making process.

TL;DR: The Socio Bosque program as mentioned in this paper is a national conservation agreement scheme of the government of Ecuador, which consists of the transfer of a direct monetary incentive per hectare of native forest and other native ecosystems to individual landowners and local and indigenous communities who protect these ecosystems, through voluntary conservation agreements that are monitored on a regular basis for compliance.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the modes of climate change adaptation governance systems, by presenting two empirical multi-scale case studies in Finland and Italy, and conclude that the governance of adaptation is mainly taking place through both formal institutions and networks across actors at various scales.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest that progress can be made towards the REDD+ outcomes envisaged by the Copenhagen Accord by supporting implementation of existing national and sub-national forest policies in ways that are consistent with the principles of good forest governance.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors considered the thermodynamic limitations of tropical mangrove forests and proposed a carbon-sequential site selection strategy for PES and REDD+ schemes.

TL;DR: In this article, a global survey of REDD activities was undertaken in 2009 to enable better understanding of the intensity and geographic distribution of these activities, which revealed the importance of biodiversity and good governance, and the relative unimportance of human need and opportunity cost of land.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report on historical analysis of the steel industry in which crude steel production trends are quantified for the period from 1950 to 2006, and the future production of steel for the world is estimated using regression analysis.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the body of literature that makes claims about the socioeconomic and biophysical impacts of pre-REDD+ projects and conclude that drawing specific lessons from pre-Redd+ projects for the design or evaluation of current REDD++ projects is tenuous.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated how their simplistic use has been misleading and found that the limits of the MAC curve concept can lead to biased decision-making, and identified some steps to overcome present shortcomings in the generation of MAC curves.

TL;DR: In this article, a heuristic model of social capacity building for natural hazards is developed by taking into account a wide range of existing expertise from different fields of research, with particular attention paid to social vulnerability and its assessment, as well as to risk communication and risk education.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed primary environmental assessments for biodiversity conservation, the water environment, water level fluctuation zone, and the uplands after the partial filling in the Three Gorges reservoir region.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide an up-to-date review of the literature on locally based natural resource monitoring, looking at the inherent advantages it has over professional monitoring, and highlight the need to develop a community monitoring protocol that maximises the involvement of local people in forest monitoring, while also corresponding to the forest monitoring requirements made by the UN for the prospective REDD+ framework.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the possible future situation of the Rhone River in the Swiss part of its catchment and discuss issues related to current and future water governance in the region, whether waterrelated policies are sufficiently robust today to cope with what may be rapid changes in water availability and water use in coming decades, and to resolve possible rivalries between economic sectors that may be increasingly confronted with problems of water availability at critical times of the year.

TL;DR: In this article, a review of the flood risk management in three case studies in Europe: Flanders (Belgium), Niedersachsen (Germany) and Calabria (Italy) is presented.

TL;DR: The results suggest that many Nairobi residents are exposed on a regular basis to elevated concentrations of fine particle air pollution, with potentially serious long-term implications for health.

TL;DR: An ensemble of regional climate model (RCM) runs from the EU HighNoon project are used to project future air temperatures and precipitation on a 25 km grid for the Ganges basin in northern India, with a view to assessing impact of climate change on water resources and determining what multi-sector adaptation measures and policies might be adopted at different spatial scales as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present some novel research ideas related to resilience to flooding in urban areas, which are under development within the EU FP7 project ‘Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban area’ (CORFU).

TL;DR: The new framework has been demonstrated to provide an effective guide to the organisation of a LAA and provides a new analytical tool to assess the impact of LAAs and the better integration of flood risk management into the planning process are considered.

TL;DR: In this article, the consequences of climate change related impacts on such interplays between climate-change affected sectors are analyzed and how electricity exchanges between countries in Europe are affected and threatened by climate change because of the higher risk of water supply shortages due to more frequent drought and heat-wave incidences.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed the implications for emission reductions, the carbon price, and abatement costs of individual countries' greenhouse gas reduction proposals for the year 2020 and concluded that the largest share of these costs are incurred by Annex I countries.

TL;DR: In this article, the nutrient transfer continuum concept is applied as an example framework in small (6-30 km(2)) catchments, where auditing nutrient sources to established levels of compliance is the first stage and considers nutrient use and soil status.

TL;DR: A regional agri-environment scheme (AES) was proposed in this paper to mitigate the impacts of the decline of traditional farming in the Italian Alps by compensating farmers for keeping lower production of organic fertilizers at the farm scale and maintaining the extensive management of steep meadows at the field scale.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a conceptual framework to account for substantive, contextual, and procedural criteria of knowledge quality, and synthesize the various classes of uncertainty highlighted in the literature.

TL;DR: In this paper, the REDD+ Advance Negotiating Text is described as "groundbreaking" for including references to the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, and the implementation of these rights requires clarity with respect to the type of tenure which grants property rights in forest carbon.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on multiple aspects of groundwater science, policy and sustainable management, and highlight a number of issues that should be considered in an integrated and holistic approach to future management of groundwater and its dependent ecosystems.