Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
706,689
result(s) for
"Environmental change"
Sort by:
Governing the Climate
Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.
eBook
Mourning in the Anthropocene
Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, this book reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.
eBook
Societal transformation in response to global environmental change: A review of emerging concepts
The study of societal transformation in response to environmental change has become established, yet little consensus exists regarding the conceptual basis of transformation. This paper aims to provide structure to the dialog on transformation, and to reflect on the challenges of social research in this area. Concepts of transformation are identified through a literature review, and examined using four analytical criteria. It is found that the term 'transformation' is frequently used merely as a metaphor. When transformation is not used as a metaphor, eight concepts are most frequently employed. They differ with respect to (i) system conceptualization, (ii) notions of social consciousness (deliberate/emergent), and (iii) outcome (prescriptive/descriptive). Problem-based research tends to adopt concepts of deliberate transformation with prescriptive outcome, while concepts of emergent transformation with no prescriptive outcome tend to inform descriptive-analytical research. Dialog around the complementarities of different concepts and their empirical testing are priorities for future research.
Journal Article
Global environmental change II
This progress report considers the need for developing a critical body of research on deliberate transformation as a response to global environmental change. Although there is a rapidly growing literature on adaptation to environmental change, including both incremental and transformational adaptation, this often focuses on accommodating change, rather than contesting it and creating alternatives. Given increasing calls from scientists and activists for transformative actions to avoid dangerous changes in the earth system, and the likelihood that ‘urgent’ solutions will be imposed by various interests, many new and important questions are emerging about individual and collective capacities to deliberately transform systems and structures in a manner that is both ethical and sustainable. This presents a transformative challenge to global change science itself that calls for new approaches to transdisciplinary research.
Journal Article
Sustainable planet : issues and solutions for our environment's future
\"Sustainable Planet is a two-volume resource that provides comprehensive coverage on the world most pressing environmental issues, their impact in countries around the world, and how, or if, they are being addressed\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes
Data from experiments that manipulated grassland biodiversity across Europe and North America show that biodiversity increases an ecosystem’s resistance to, although not resilience after, climate extremes.
Biodiversity loss threatens ecosystem reliability
Tests to establish whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against extreme climate events have produced strongly contrasting results. Forest Isbell
et al
. combine data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity and measured productivity across Europe and North America and find that yes, biodiversity does increase an ecosystem's resistance to climate extremes. Plots with just a few species had their productivity reduced by 50% during climate extremes, whereas this effect was halved with a greater number of species. However, biodiversity had no discernible effect on the ecosystem resilience, with both low and high biodiversity treatments recovering from climate extremes within a year.
It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide
1
. Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that of depauperate communities
2
. However, subsequent experimental tests produced mixed results
3
,
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
,
8
,
9
,
10
,
11
,
12
,
13
. Here we use data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity to test whether biodiversity provides resistance during and resilience after climate events. We show that biodiversity increased ecosystem resistance for a broad range of climate events, including wet or dry, moderate or extreme, and brief or prolonged events. Across all studies and climate events, the productivity of low-diversity communities with one or two species changed by approximately 50% during climate events, whereas that of high-diversity communities with 16–32 species was more resistant, changing by only approximately 25%. By a year after each climate event, ecosystem productivity had often fully recovered, or overshot, normal levels of productivity in both high- and low-diversity communities, leading to no detectable dependence of ecosystem resilience on biodiversity. Our results suggest that biodiversity mainly stabilizes ecosystem productivity, and productivity-dependent ecosystem services, by increasing resistance to climate events. Anthropogenic environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss thus seem likely to decrease ecosystem stability
14
, and restoration of biodiversity to increase it, mainly by changing the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate events.
Journal Article