Flood-prone areas are more often than not held under private property rights. Hence, the purpose of this research is to highlight how crucial private stakeholders are to the effectiveness of any instrument for flood risk and hence directly impact on the effectiveness of flood management and yet, private property rights are rarely highlighted in such schema. Additionally, the location of flood-prone

This paper firstly proposed an analytical framework for the relationship between ecosystem services value (ESV) and multidimensional poverty-reduction index; then, it conducted a quantitative assessment of ESV including ecosystem disservices in China’s Three Gorges Reservoir region; next, it explored the interactive relationship between ESV and multidimensional poverty-reduction index in an attempt

Adaptation to climate change is increasingly advocated as we approach a 1.5 °C future. Policy-makers emphasise that the required transformation begins with local action. Yet, there is a gap in understanding why local action can remain largely locked-in to maladaptive cycles, with variable on-ground evidence of transformative change. Using ‘the politics of scale,’ we interrogated ‘the local’ using ethnographic

There is growing coordination and cooperation between the water and energy sectors in Jordan. However, a water-energy nexus approach is seen as a useful management tool by the water sector more than it is by the energy sector. Strong political leadership will be required for a far-reaching adoption of the nexus approach. Increasing policy connections between Jordan’s water and energy sectors will lead

Like many other countries, Germany aims to create flood retention areas via polders and dike relocations. As these measures require access to diverse plots, land acquisition is clearly a challenging task for the responsible water authorities. A revision to the national water law in 2017 introduced several new instruments for land acquisition, i.e. pre-emption rights and regulations to ease expropriation

Polycentric governance has gained prominence in the environmental sector because of the potential for multiple, overlapping decision centers to address complex, multiscale socio-ecological challenges. These decision centers may interact with each other through cooperation, conflict and conflict-resolution, competition, co-existence, and may result in transformations such as consolidation/fusion, and

There is growing interest – and need – among researchers and research organizations to contribute societally relevant work as well as to demonstrate the policy impact of their research. Diverse science-policy interfaces (SPIs) aim for scientifically informed policymaking by connecting scientists with policymakers. Effective SPIs need to be grounded in credibility, relevance and legitimacy; at the same

Environmental innovations are key enablers of transition towards greener economies. Despite their importance, empirical studies examining the effect of green technologies on CO2 emissions are still limited. Using an autoregressive distributed-lag model (ARDL), we analyze the impact of environmental innovations, the consumption of renewable energies, GDP per capita, and degree of economic openness on

Current trends in climate change indicate that the impact on the most vulnerable systems will increase. Urban areas, which concentrate population, economic activity and infrastructures, are sometimes at high-risk locations. Yet they are to be considered as vulnerable systems in need of harmonized structures supporting their efforts towards mitigating climate effects and/or adapting their territories

The relationship between specific ecosystem services (ES) and different types of conflicts are explored to aid understanding of the barriers to effective biodiversity conservation management. Drawing from conflict theory, content analysis is undertaken of public documents generated during consultations about Natura 2000 management that were conducted in Poland between 2010−2015. Results show the links

This paper aims to assess causes and the interactions between decision making, stakeholders and individuals, law and public policies to build a more precise overview of the relations, the possible results, and the factors which can interfere with environmental conditions and dynamics in Brazilian Amazônia. To better elucidate the issue, rational choice and deterrence theories were used, and a model

This study examines the statistical relationship between people's movements and difference in air quality between the origin and the destination, using computational social science approach. We put forward an important environmentally driven human movement question: Would people move to places of better air qualities? Utilizing Twitter Streaming API, 39,928,132 randomized geo-coded tweets posted by

The fact that agriculture is associated with negative external effects on ecosystems is of great concern. Most of these agri-environmental externalities are public goods in nature and therefore solving them through conventional market and regulation tools is challenging. Collective action has been identified as an option in dealing with externalities emanating from activities touching on agriculture

China’s grassland policy has changed substantially since the country’s “reform and opening up” about four decades ago, with profound impacts on both herder’s wellbeing and grassland conservation in Inner Mongolia. However, whether the herder-grassland system of Inner Mongolia has become more sustainable has not been quantitatively assessed against established sustainability standards. Thus, this study

Adaptation pathways have experienced growing popularity as a decision-focussed approach in climate adaptation research and planning. Despite the increasing and broadening use of adaptation pathways reported in the literature, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to review, compare and contrast approaches to adaptation pathways design and their application. In this paper we address this gap through

Fisheries co-management policy and research have been extensively reported in recent decades, with mixed results in process and outcome. Co-management has proliferated worldwide under the assumption that fisher participation in resource regimes enhances authority of decisions, reduces transaction costs, and increases compliance. The concept of legitimacy is central to this assumption, but its use in

Evaluating the impacts of environmental science on policy and practice is inherently challenging. Impacts can take a variety of forms, occur over protracted timeframes and often involve subtle and hard-to-track changes. As a result, diverse impacts are impossible to capture through traditional academic metrics such as publications and citations, and cannot be captured by focusing solely on end results

VIA Water was an innovation programme of Aqua for All and IHE-Delft funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. VIA Water stands for Valorisation and Innovation in Africa in the Water sector. Between 2015 and 2019 the programme supported 62 urban water innovations across eight countries in Africa with a total grant of € 8.3 million. The programme offered grants to pilot new ideas and innovations

Elaborating the benefits humans receive from coastal wetlands using a Cultural Ecosystem Services assessment is an emergent and important field linking human wellbeing to ecosystem function. Translating these benefits into useable concepts for environmental policymakers, and managers is challenging yet important for supporting landscape restoration projects. This study responds to the call for Cultural

The frequency and severity of shocks to food systems is accelerating globally, exemplified by the current COVID-19 outbreak. In low- and middle-income countries, the impacts have exacerbated existing food system vulnerabilities and poverty. Governments and donors must respond quickly, but few tools are available that identify interventions to build food system resilience, or emerging opportunities

Serbia suffered severe flood events in May 2014, which affected 1.6 million people. The Government declared a state of emergency for the territory of the whole country. The total value of the disaster was 1.7 billion Euros. Traditional flood protection measures proved to be insufficient in that extreme flood event, which raised the question of a greater change towards active flood protection measures

Central to integrated flood risk management is the integration of water management with spatial planning. Existing studies often focus on analyzing the policy instruments in the initiation and planning phases of integrated flood risk management. Little is known, however, about the policy instrument mixes that enable implementation of integrated flood risk management. Therefore, in this article we analyze

Adaptation Pathways have emerged as promising approaches for exploring sequences of actions to address challenges in uncertain conditions. This study elaborates on how pathway approaches operate in practice by applying a learning framework that identifies guiding propositions for successful adaptation pathways. The framework is used to analyze a transformative scenario planning case study from rural

Over the course of the twentieth century, nature conservation gradually became both a broadly accepted and highly contentious field of public policy. In particular, national parks (NPs), a major and one of the oldest conservation tools in the European Union, have been contested, and their promoters must justify their existence. We aim to document and analyse how NP managers have sought to make NPs

Transdisciplinary collaborative processes like knowledge co-production have been promoted as valuable mechanisms to address complex environmental management issues. Their value is based on epistemic and participatory ideals involving academic and non-academic knowledge and values being elicited and deliberated upon. While idealised processes of participation have been described, the actual nature of

Much of the literature on the political ramifications of desalination has emphasized its potential to mitigate transboundary water conflicts by increasing the quantity of available water (thereby alleviating scarcity), and also by reducing variability and uncertainty regarding the timing, location, and quality of water supplies. Of less focus has been the potential for the introduction of desalination

Climate change is having a significant influence on global fish production as well as on small-scale fishers’ livelihoods, nutrition, and food security. We compared two climate-sensitive small-scale fisheries (SSFs) – an Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic and the Coastal-Vedda in Sri Lanka – to broaden our understanding of how fisheries-dependent Indigenous communities respond and adapt to climate

While it is increasingly important to strengthen the existing knowledge base in Africa to adequately respond to the rising risks and impacts of climate change on water resources, a significant research gap remains to identify areas and mechanisms to cope with these societal challenges. The aim of the paper is twofold: i) to provide subject-specific insights by analyzing the current knowledge base in

The artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector in Guyana has, over the last decade, become the main engine for economic growth, the key source of foreign exchange and a vital source of employment across the country. It has therefore served as a vital driver in alleviating poverty and helping the country to make progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relating to poverty and economic

Climate change is threatening the livelihood of tea farmers in Nepal. Simultaneously, the production of tea is becoming an increasingly important economic sector for the country. This study aimed to reveal the adaptation behavior towards climate change among smallholder tea farmers, particularly which demographic, institutional, and information source factors are likely to influence the degree of adaptation

American cities have played an increasingly critical role in advancing US climate change mitigation and adaptation. Subnational government support for these efforts, however, varies across social, political, economic, and biogeophysical contexts. While the influence of politics on US climate mitigation is well established, further research is required to identify barriers to—and discern complex influences

Land resources can accommodate extra floodwaters, thus playing an important role in integrated flood risk management (FRM). However, potential conflicts emerge as the lands that are used as temporal room for floodwaters are also home to human beings, which is common in the flood detention zones (FDZs) in China. To date, little is known about how Chinese policies address the conflicts and how local

Co-production is an increasingly popular framework for knowledge generation, evaluation and decision making. Despite its potential to open up decisions and practices to the input of others, co-production regularly falls short of its transformative ambitions. Through documentary analysis, we investigate the meaning and dynamics of co-production as it stretches beyond the local into global research and

For over three decades, air pollution has been a major environmental challenge in many of the fast-growing cities of the world, including Beijing, China. Given that any long-term exposure to high levels of air pollution has devastating health consequences, accurately monitoring and reporting air pollution information to the public is critical for ensuring public health and safety, while facilitating

Mediterranean islands face significant environmental challenges due to their high population density, reliance on imports, and water scarcity, exacerbated by increasing risks from climate change. Nature-based solutions (NbS) could address these challenges sustainably and with multiple benefits, but their uptake in policy and planning is limited, and stakeholder perspectives are conspicuously lacking

This paper considers the apparent confluence of three policy developments: the Sustainable Development Goals, as the latest international commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment; the growing push to formalize the artisanal and small-scale mining sector; and the call to address environmental concerns of ASM through increased regulation, including formalization. Informed by feminist political

In recent years, governments, donors and policy makers across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have increasingly realised the potential of formalizing and supporting artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – low tech, labour-intensive mineral processing and extracting. A significant body of evidence suggests that ASM has become the most important rural non-farm activity across SSA, and by making it the centrepiece

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) plays a central role in scenario pathways that limit global warming in line with the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Yet deliberate policy efforts to incentivise BECCS—whether through amending existing climate policies or introducing entirely new ones—remain rare. In this paper, we contend that BECCS must be incentivised responsibly, through policy-making

In 2019, a heatwave – an unusual extended period of hot weather – broke the UK’s highest recorded temperature of 38.7 °C set in 2003. Of concern is that for summer 2019, this resulted in 892 excess deaths. With the intensity and frequency of UK heatwaves projected to increase, and summer temperatures predicted to be 5 °C hotter by 2070, urgent action is needed to prepare for, and adapt to, the changes

Recent high-profile analyses of trajectories and prognoses of ecosystem decline around the world have called for a renewed focus on embedding the values of the natural world across all areas of public policy. This paper reports the results of a UK-based deliberative process involving experts from a wide range of policy domains and across societal sectors: government departments, associated agencies

Biodiversity underpins the supply of ecosystem services essential for well-being and economic development, yet biodiversity loss continues at a substantial rate. Linking biodiversity indicators with national economic accounts provides a means of mainstreaming biodiversity into economic planning and monitoring processes. Here we examine the various strategies for biodiversity indicators to be linked

Wellbeing has become important in regional development policy as decision-makers grapple with delivering public goods from industry exploitation of resource commons. We asked how these differently constituted concepts–‘regional development’ and ‘wellbeing’ – are handled in the literature. We identified four findings: i) an increasing focus on holistic sustainable development in regional development;

Responding to climate change, the most vexing environmental challenge of today, encompasses the use of measures enhancing adaptation to its current and future consequences and those aimed at mitigating further warming. This study addresses the latter response category. In particular, it examines the extent to which political partisanship influences states’ energy efficiency policies. For context, energy

Achieving sustainable development while avoiding further environmental degradation is a crucial challenge faced by society today. The African countries in this study have shown considerable growth, but still face various barriers to comply with international environmental agreements. This paper analyses the effect of globalisation and corruption on the environmental performance of 23 African countries

Multiple sustainability initiatives have emerged in response to the environmental impacts of soy production, especially deforestation and climate change. But company commitments to reduce deforestation in their supply chains are not leading to outcomes on the ground. Achieving concerted action by supply chain actors requires consideration of their diverse perspectives. We investigate the mental models

Manoomin, the Ojibwe word for wild rice, grows in shallow lakes and streams and provides physical, spiritual, and cultural sustenance as a sacred food and relative for Indigenous peoples across the Great Lakes region of North America. Unfortunately, Manoomin has been declining due to multiple environmental stressors. In 2018, an interdisciplinary group from the University of Minnesota came together

Societal efforts towards greening the economy are typically accompanied by controversy over whether voluntary initiatives by firms or government regulation are more effective to that end. Recent research argues that public opinion plays an important role in this regard because citizens’ preferences are crucial when democratic policy-makers decide. We investigate whether and how citizens’ general attitudes

Atlantic salmon populations in Maine remain critically low despite extensive hatchery supplementation and habitat improvement efforts. In 2000, the Gulf of Maine Distinct Population Segment was listed as Endangered under the ESA with joint listing authority shared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Because, regulators

An exemplar of nature-based solutions (NBS) is natural flood management (NFM), for which interest is growing worldwide. As with many NBS, implementing NFM requires the participation of support of multiple stakeholders. However, we lack understanding about the views and expectations of the many stakeholders who might be expected to enable or implement it. Understanding such views may offer insights

There is currently no consensual definition of deforestation. Given its importance in several research topics ranging from biodiversity to climate change, conservation, restoration, and emerging diseases as well as in comparative studies, it is necessary to provide an integrated framework towards a harmonized definition of deforestation. Here, we analyze and compare international and national reports

Flooding is a common and costly natural hazard, causing huge amounts of damages and loss of human life across the world. In the United States, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) constitutes the major driver for floodplain management. NFIP, a federal program, incentivizes state and local participation by offering subsidized flood insurance to residents of localities that participate. However

The common pool resource (CPR) theory has made invaluable contributions to the governance of natural resources in the past decades, but few literatures have specifically paid attention to the different property right arrangements of resource system and resource units, and their relationship. In this paper, we take two types of grassland property right system on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) in

Freshwater scarcity has increased in the cities of the global South due to rapid urban agglomeration and changing climate. Alternative water resources such as treated wastewater can play a significant role to reduce the water supply-demand gap. In the recent past, wastewater has been used solely for irrigation and other allied agriculture purposes, with limited focus on reuse for other purposes within

Rapid socio-economic development and urbanization have resulted in serious deterioration in air-quality in many world cities, including Beijing, China. This study attempts to examine the effectiveness of air pollution control regulations implemented in Beijing during 2008–2019 through a data-driven regulatory intervention analysis. Our proposed Bayesian deep learning model utilizes proxy data including

Effective policies that integrate climate change considerations are crucial for successful adaptation to increasing climate risks. While there is an abundant normative literature proposing potential effective ways to adapt, there is a lack of empirical literature on current risk and adaptation policy and its potential effectiveness. Studying existing policies can help to reveal existing constraints

As the volume of ecosystem services modeling and valuation studies grows, decision-makers have access to more information than ever before on how human activities affect the provision and value of ecosystem services. However, few studies aim to understand how value information in different formats is interpreted and used by decision makers. Motivated by a desire to better understand how private, non-profit