School of Geography - Research Publications
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ItemStructural and Psycho-Social Limits to Climate Change Adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef Region(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2016-03-09)Adaptation, as a strategy to respond to climate change, has limits: there are conditions under which adaptation strategies fail to alleviate impacts from climate change. Research has primarily focused on identifying absolute bio-physical limits. This paper contributes empirical insight to an emerging literature on the social limits to adaptation. Such limits arise from the ways in which societies perceive, experience and respond to climate change. Using qualitative data from multi-stakeholder workshops and key-informant interviews with representatives of the fisheries and tourism sectors of the Great Barrier Reef region, we identify psycho-social and structural limits associated with key adaptation strategies, and examine how these are perceived as more or less absolute across levels of organisation. We find that actors experience social limits to adaptation when: i) the effort of pursuing a strategy exceeds the benefits of desired adaptation outcomes; ii) the particular strategy does not address the actual source of vulnerability, and; iii) the benefits derived from adaptation are undermined by external factors. We also find that social limits are not necessarily more absolute at higher levels of organisation: respondents perceived considerable opportunities to address some psycho-social limits at the national-international interface, while they considered some social limits at the local and regional levels to be effectively absolute.
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ItemAn integrated assessment of China's South-North Water Transfer Project(WILEY, 2020)China’s South–NorthWater Transfer Project (SNWTP) is a vast and still expanding network of infrastructure and institutions that moves water from the Yangtze River and its tributaries to cities in North China. This article aims to assess the SNWTP’s impacts by beginning to answer seven questions about the project: How is the management of the SNWTP evolving? What are the problems to be resolved when managing SNWTP water within jurisdictions? What are the status and management of water quality in the SNWTP? What are the consequences of resettlements caused by the SNWTP? How is increased water supply affecting regional development? Is the SNWTP achieving its stated environmental goals? What are the sustainability credentials of the SNWTP? Drawing on primary and secondary data, the article demonstrates oth that the opportunities and burdens characterising the project are highly uneven and that management systems are evolving rapidly in an attempt to enforce strict water quality targets. Furthermore, while the SNWTP may be helping to resolve groundwater overexploitation in Beijing, it is highly energy intensive, raising questions about its sustainability. Our analysis highlights the need to continue to interrogate the socioeconomic, ,environmental, and political implications of such schemes long after they are officially completed.
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ItemGlobal environmental change II: Political economies of vulnerability to climate change(SAGE Publications, 2020-02-26)Though rarely described as such, vulnerability to climate change is fundamentally a matter of political economy. This progress report provides a reading of contemporary research on vulnerability to climate change through a political economic lens. It interprets the research as explaining the interplay between ideas about vulnerability, the institutions that create vulnerability, and those actors with interests in vulnerability. It highlights research that critiques the idea of vulnerability, and that demonstrates the agency of those at risk as they navigate the intersecting, multi-scalar and teleconnected institutions that shape their choices in adapting to climate change. The report also highlights research that is tracking the way powerful institutions and interests that create vulnerability are themselves adapting by appropriating the cause of the vulnerable, depoliticising the causes of vulnerability, and promoting innovations in finance and markets as solutions. In these ways, political and economic institutions are sustaining themselves and capitalising on the opportunities presented by climate change at the expense of those most at risk.
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ItemOn the risks of engineering mobility to reduce vulnerability to climate change: insights from a small island state(Cambridge University Press, 2012)This chapter explains the likely consequences of proposals to resettle large numbers of people away from the Pacific Islands for the people left behind. It does this by describing the effects of large-scale migration away from the small island state of Niue, which is a very good analogue from which lessons for other islands can be drawn. The chapter begins by examining the discourse on large-scale migration as a solution to save the people of the Pacific Islands from the impacts of climate change. The discourse of draining the people from these remote island backwaters of the world persists even though understanding of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands remains extremely limited. In this discourse there is little concern for the needs and rights of migrants, and no consideration of the consequences of such movements for those people who cannot or do not wish to move. It is this latter issue that this chapter examines. There has been large-scale migration from Niue since 1971, to the extent that 80 per cent of the people born in Niue now live in New Zealand. There are six principal effects of this depopulation on those who remain on the island, namely that it leads to: distortions in markets; obsolescent political and administrative institutions; a hyper-concentration of social capital; increased demands on labour; difficulties in defining and maintaining that which is ‘traditional’; and an erosion of Niuean identity. Based on this examination, the chapter argues that migration is likely to be an impact of climate change as much as it is to be an adaptation. Mitigation and adaptation must therefore be the preferred strategies, although there may be scope for carefully managed labour migration as part of a suite of adaptation strategies.
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ItemTesting the presence of marine protected areas against their ability to reduce pressures on biodiversity(WILEY, 2020-06)Marine protected areas (MPAs) are the preferred tool for preventing marine biodiversity loss, as reflected in international protected area targets. Although the area covered by MPAs is expanding, there is a concern that opposition from resource users is driving them into already low-use locations, whereas high-pressure areas remain unprotected, which has serious implications for biodiversity conservation. We tested the spatial relationships between different human-induced pressures on marine biodiversity and global MPAs. We used global, modeled pressure data and the World Database on Protected Areas to calculate the levels of 15 different human-induced pressures inside and outside the world's MPAs. We fitted binomial generalized linear models to the data to determine whether each pressure had a positive or negative effect on the likelihood of an area being protected and whether this effect changed with different categories of protection. Pelagic and artisanal fishing, shipping, and introductions of invasive species by ships had a negative relationship with protection, and this relationship persisted under even the least restrictive categories of protection (e.g., protected areas classified as category VI under the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a category that permits sustainable use). In contrast, pressures from dispersed, diffusive sources (e.g., pollution and ocean acidification) had positive relationships with protection. Our results showed that MPAs are systematically established in areas where there is low political opposition, limiting the capacity of existing MPAs to manage key drivers of biodiversity loss. We suggest that conservation efforts focus on biodiversity outcomes and effective reduction of pressures rather than prescribing area-based targets, and that alternative approaches to conservation are needed in areas where protection is not feasible.
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ItemBeyond contradiction: The state and the market in contemporary Chinese water governance(Elsevier, 2020-01-01)State/market interactions in water governance have long been interpreted in terms of the contradiction between water as a commons and water as a commodity. Recent challenges to this dichotomisation claim that it cannot provide a useful lens through which to interpret the complexity of water resources and their management. This paper provides evidence from China to show that a dichotomous interpretation of state/market interactions has little power to explain the formulation and evolution of water governance regimes. Through an analysis of China's water policy development over the 1998–2018 period, the paper outlines how state control and marketisation are complementary rather than contradictory, collectively contributing to a governance regime that serves broader political and economic goals as much as water management ones. We argue that better understanding of the roles of state and market in water governance requires moving beyond an ‘either-or’ point of departure, and paying greater attention to the ‘both-and’ hybridisation increasingly observed in water management.
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ItemIs Trust Always a Precondition for Effective Water Resource Management?(Springer Verlag, 2020-02-25)
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ItemThe mental health impacts of climate change: Findings from a Pacific Island atoll nation(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2020-06)BACKGROUND: Climate change is anticipated to have profound effects on mental health, particularly among populations that are simultaneously ecologically and economically vulnerable to its impacts. Various pathways through which climate change can impact mental health have been theorised, but the impacts themselves remain understudied. PURPOSE: In this article we applied psychological methods to examine if climate change is affecting individuals' mental health in the Small Island Developing State of Tuvalu, a Pacific Island nation regarded as exceptionally vulnerable to climate change. We determined the presence of psychological distress and associated impairment attributed to two categories of climate change-related stressors in particular: 1) local environmental impacts caused or exacerbated by climate change, and 2) hearing about global climate change and contemplating its future implications. METHODS: The findings draw on data collected in a mixed-method study involving 100 Tuvaluan participants. Data were collected via face-to-face structured interviews that lasted 45 min on average and were subjected to descriptive, correlational, and between-group analyses. RESULTS: The findings revealed participants' experiences of distress in relation to both types of stressor, and demonstrated that a high proportion of participants are experiencing psychological distress at levels that reportedly cause them impairment in one or more areas of daily life. CONCLUSIONS: The findings lend weight to the claim that climate change represents a risk to mental health and obliges decision-makers to consider these risks when conceptualizing climate-related harms or tallying the costs of inaction.
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ItemBetween adaptive capacity and action: new insights into climate change adaptation at the household scale(Institute of Physics (IoP), 2020-07-02)Research on social vulnerability and adaptation to climate change assumes that increasing amounts of adaptive capacity increase the likelihood of actions to adapt to climate change.Wetest this assumption as it applies at the scale of households, through a study of the relationship between adaptive capacity and household actions to adapt to wildfire risk in Mount Dandenong, Australia. Here we show a weak relationship exists between adaptive capacity and adaptation, such that high adaptive capacity does not clearly result in a correspondingly high level of adaptation. Three factors appear to mediate the relationship between household adaptive capacity and adaptation: their attitude to risk, their experience of risk, and their expectations of authorities. The findings suggest that to understand the adaptation practices of households, greater attention needs to be paid to socio-psychological factors that trigger people to apply their available capacities.
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ItemEveryday practices and technologies of household water consumption: evidence from Shanghai(International Institute for Environment and Development, 2019-04-01)A social practice approach to household consumption examines socially produced patterns of practice, and understands these to be composed of technology, knowledge and meaning. This approach challenges many of the assumptions made about how consumers who are supposedly economically rational behave in large-scale municipal water supply systems. Yet for an emerging body of scholarship that is sensitive to the effects of context, research on social practices is notably short of studies beyond wealthy liberal democracies. In this paper we examine the key practices of daily water consumption for households in Shanghai, China. We identify boiling water, filtering water, and buying water as the three key practices associated with daily water consumption in the home, and explain the way each is the result of combinations of knowledge, meaning and technology. We also consider short-term and longer-term shifts in practices, and explain the influence of the materiality of pollution, information and trust on these changing practices.