Environmental aesthetics encompasses aesthetic relationships to and in the environment, including an urban aesthetic and an aesthetic of nature—which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries both from the sciences and from the distinction from the scientific in the aesthetic observations of nature. Environmental aesthetics notably comprises philosophical, artistic, and geographical work. Increasingly since the 1990s, the social and environmental crisis, and particularly climate change, is and has been causing shifts within this field of research and reflection. As of the 2020s, the admiration humans can bear toward nature is not without fear of its disappearance caused by their own activities. Ethics is more and more linked to aesthetics as humans are morally affected by this catastrophic environmental degradation. Thus, a certain anxiety quickly reveals itself in the face of planetary transformations. What can the geographer do? Since the 1990s, the discipline has been inviting thought about the environment from the aesthetic experience, challenging or interrogating the perception, understanding, and relationship to the natural surroundings. The geographer has been attempting to apprehend through creative research—such as “psychogeographical” situational walks (dérive, situation of inquiry, influence map), and, more generally, artistic works firmly rooted in the whole landscape question—the ways of redefining local situations and places. The need is to face three major challenges. First, there is the necessity to explore how planetary threats transform the perceptions of the environment. Anxieties reflect the difficulties of politics. Second, an aesthetic of the ordinary should be investigated as an ordinary environmentalism, meaning that which is related to the daily creation of environments. Third, the importance of research creation and ecoplastic forms of art needs to be highlighted (art and environment-making processes).
71-80 of 342 Results
Article
Toward a Holistic Environmental Aesthetic
Nathalie Blanc
Article
Water and Development: A Gender Perspective
Yoshika S. Crider and Isha Ray
The large and multidisciplinary literature on water for domestic use and gender has two primary foci: (1) the negative health and well-being impacts of inadequate access to safe water, and (2) the effects of women’s participation in water allocation and management decisions. These foci are reflected in both the research and policy literatures. Smaller bodies of work exist on water and social power, and on nonmaterial values and meanings of water. The term “gender” refers to the socially constructed roles and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and nonbinary people, but the literature on water and gender to date is mainly concerned with women and girls, on whom inadequate water access places a disproportionate burden.
The water and health literature during the Millennium Development Goals era focused overwhelmingly on the consequences of unsafe drinking water for child health, while paying less attention to the health of the water carriers and managers. Studies on women’s participation in water-related decisions in the household or community were (and to some extent remain) mixed with respect to their effects on equity, access, and empowerment. Both the health and participation strands often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that water work was women’s work. Yet data on access was mainly collected and presented by household or community, with little effort to disaggregate access and use by gender.
In keeping with the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals, the post-2015 literature has gone beyond a focus on infectious diseases to include the psychosocial stresses of coping with unreliable or inadequate water supplies. These stresses are acknowledged to fall disproportionately on women. A relatively small literature exists on the health impacts of carrying heavy loads of water and on the hard choices to be made when safe water is scarce. The negative impacts of inadequate domestic water access on girls’ education opportunities, on the safety of those who walk long distances to collect water, and on family conflicts have also been studied. Access is being defined beyond the household to prioritize safe water availability in schools and in healthcare facilities, both of which serve vulnerable populations. Both are institutional settings with a majority-female workforce. The definition of domestic water post-2015 has also broadened beyond drinking water to include water for cooking, sanitation, and basic hygiene, all of which particularly concern women’s well-being.
Intersectionality with respect to gender, class, ability, and ethnicity has started to inform research, in particular research influenced by feminist political ecology and/or indigenous values of water. Political ecology has drawn attention to structural inequalities and their consequences for water access, a perspective that is upstream of public health’s concerns with health impacts. Research on participation is being augmented with studies of leadership and decision-making, both within communities as well as within the water sector. Critical studies of gender, water, and participation have argued that development agencies can limit modes of participation to those that “fit” their larger goals, e.g., efficiency and cost-recovery in drinking water systems. Studies have also analyzed the gendered burden of paying for safe water, especially as the pressure for cost recovery has grown within urban water policy.
These are significant and growing new directions that acknowledge the breadth and complexities of the gender and water world; they do not simply call for gender-disaggregated data but attempt, albeit imperfectly, to take water research towards the recognition of gender justice as a foundation for water justice for all.
Article
What Is Public and What Is Private in Water Provision: Insights from 19th-Century Philadelphia, Boston, and New York
Gwynneth C. Malin
Water became the first public utility in the United States. Before public transportation and public regulation of utilities like electricity and gas, North American cities adopted public water, but this transition is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 1830s, both water supply and sewerage were seen as private entities to be managed by private companies and private individuals with nominal assistance from local governments. Water provision was often a blend of public and private efforts, and if residents wanted a well or a sewer built in their neighborhood, they had to help pay for it. Until the mid-19th century, residents of Northeast U.S. cities drew water for domestic uses from local ponds, rivers, and groundwater sources. At this time, procuring water was a daily activity for residents that was linked to economic class.
The 19th century was a key period in the redefinition of water as a public-sector responsibility in the United States. The cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York illustrate this change. City officials made the gradual transition from relying on private water companies to implementing public management of the water supply. As increasing urbanization and growing immigrant populations rendered local and privately managed water sources undersupplied, elected officials began to search for new sources of water located beyond city limits. Philadelphia was the first to transition to public water management in 1801, followed by New York in 1842, and Boston in 1848. While each city’s history is unique, city officials took similar approaches to defining public and private with regard to water provision by gradually eliminating private water companies and by increasing funding for public works. Common themes included water pollution, the need to tap new water supplies further from the city centers, disease prevention, fire protection, and financial corruption, within both private water companies and municipal efforts to supply water. While most cities of the Northeast United States transitioned to municipal operation of water supply during the 19th century, the shift was not without its challenges and complexities. Funding shortages often prevented change, but crises, such as fire, drought, and infectious disease outbreaks, forced the hands of municipal officials. Timelines to public water varied. While Boston and Philadelphia achieved permanent public water in the early 19th century, New York experienced a longer trajectory. In each case, public management of water definitively triumphed over private. By the early 20th century, urban Americans conceptualized public and private differently than they had during the 19th century. Water management was at the center of this profound shift.
Article
Catastrophic Droughts and Their Economic Consequences
Farnaz Pourzand and Ilan Noy
The effect of climate change on hydrology and water resources is possibly one of the most important current environmental challenges, and it will be important for the rest of the 21st century. Climate change is anticipated to intensify the hydrological cycle and to change the temporal and spatial distribution patterns of water resources. It is predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme hydrological events, such as heavy rainfall and floods, but in some locations also droughts. Water-related hazards occur due to complex interactions between atmospheric and hydrological systems. These events can then cause economic disasters, societal disturbances, and environmental impacts, which can pose a major threat to lives and livelihoods if they happen in places that are exposed and vulnerable to them. The economic impacts of extreme hydrological events can be separated into direct damage and indirect losses. Direct damage includes the damages to fixed assets and capital; losses of raw materials, crops, and extractable natural resources; and, most importantly, mortality, morbidity, and population displacement. All can be a direct consequence of the extreme hydrological event. Indirect losses are reductions in economic activity, particularly the production of goods and services—which will be greatly decreased after the disaster and because of it. Possibly the most damaging hydro-meteorological hazard, drought, is also the one that is least understood and the most difficult to quantify—even its onset is often difficult to identify. Drought is recognized as being associated with some of the most high-profile humanitarian disasters of past years, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, particularly those living in semi-arid and arid regions. Drought impacts depend on a set of weather parameters—high temperatures, low humidity, the timing of rain, and the intensity and duration of precipitation, as well as its onset and termination—and they depend on the population and assets and their vulnerabilities. While drought has wide-ranging effects on many economic sectors, the agricultural sector bears much of the impact, as it is very dependent on precipitation and evapotranspiration. Approximately 1.3 billion people rely on agriculture as their main source of income. In developing countries, the agriculture sector absorbs up to 80% of all direct damages from droughts. Droughts may be the biggest threat to food security and rural livelihoods globally, and they can increase local poverty, displace large numbers of people, and hinder the already fragile progress that has been made toward the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As such, understanding droughts’ impacts, identifying ways to prevent or ameliorate them, and preventing further deterioration in the climatic conditions and social vulnerabilities that are their root causes are all of utmost importance.
Article
Multi-Objective Robust Planning Tools
Jazmin Zatarain Salazar, Andrea Castelletti, and Matteo Giuliani
Shared water resource systems spark a number of conflicts related to their multi sectorial, regional, and intergenerational use. They are also vulnerable to a myriad of uncertainties stemming from changes in the hydrology, population demands, and climate change. Planning and management under these conditions are extremely challenging. Fortunately, our capability to approach these problems has evolved dramatically over the last few decades. Increased computational power enables the testing of multiple hypotheses and expedites the results across a range of planning alternatives. Advances in flexible multi-objective optimization tools facilitate the analyses of many competing interests. Further, major shifts in the way uncertainties are treated allow analysts to characterize candidate planning alternatives by their ability to fail or succeed instead of relying on fallible predictions. Embracing the fact that there are indeterminate uncertainties whose probabilistic descriptions are unknown, and acknowledging relationships whose actions and outcomes are not well-characterized in planning problems, have improved our ability to perform diligent analysis. Multi-objective robust planning of water systems emerged in response to the need to support planning and management decisions that are better prepared for unforeseen future conditions and that can be adapted to changes in assumptions. A suite of robustness frameworks has emerged to address planning and management problems in conditions of deep uncertainty. That is, events not readily identified or that we know so little about that their likelihood of occurrence cannot be described. Lingering differences remain within existing frameworks. These differences are manifested in the way in which alternative plans are specified, the views about how the future will unfold, and how the fitness of candidate planning strategies is assessed. Differences in the experimental design can yield diverging conclusions about the robustness and vulnerabilities of a system. Nonetheless, the means to ask a suite of questions and perform a more ambitious analysis is available in the early 21st century. Future challenges will entail untangling different conceptions about uncertainty, defining what aspects of the system are important and to whom, and how these values and assumptions will change over time.
Article
Planning for Resilient and Sustainable Coastal Shorelands and Communities in the Face of Global Climate Change
Richard K. Norton
Coastal shorelands and communities are among the most beautiful, vital, remunerative, popular, inequitable, and hazardous of places to live, work, and play. Because of the varied and intensive uses of them combined with climate-related impacts to them, they increasingly experience threats from coastal hazards, suffer ecological degradation, and engender contentious conflicts. Although some coastal shorelands are publicly owned, many are privately owned. Coastal states and communities confront many challenges as they plan for and manage the use of privately owned coastal shorelands.
Coastal shorelands encompass the near-shore beaches, dunes, wetlands, and other transitional areas within dynamic coastal zones, whether developed or natural. Sustainability suggests the ability of natural and social coastal systems to persist, whereas resilience speaks to the sustainability of those systems when subject to substantial disruptions such as flooding from extreme storms. In addition to promoting sustainable and resilient coastal shorelands in general, advocates also call for redressing the heightened risks and other inequities experienced by historically marginalized communities. Most of the challenges prompting calls for enhanced coastal resilience, sustainability, and equity are not unique to coastal settings, but coastal communities especially need to attend to them given the heightened risks and development pressures they face. Broadly, they include increasingly frequent and fierce storms, floods, drought, fires, and heatwaves. Coastal communities also face unique challenges, including accelerating rates of shoreline recession and increasing near-shore flooding. Further complicating these natural dynamics are complex and poorly adapted property right, public interest, and related legal/administrative institutional arrangements shaping both private and public expectations in coastal settings.
Community planning, if well executed, offers the promise of facilitating and advancing the kinds of nuanced and adaptive resiliency and sustainability goals needed everywhere, especially in coastal settings. Toward that end, researchers and advocates promote a range of planning principles, such as recognizing that coastal economies are nested within and dependent upon coastal ecosystems; promoting culturally aware, place-based, and infrastructure-efficient development policies; adopting no- to low-regrets climate adaptation policies; and encouraging ongoing learning and adaptative management. They similarly promote a variety of planning methods to support those policies, such as land suitability, infrastructure capacity, hazard vulnerability, and social vulnerability analyses, best engaged through scenario-based planning given climate-related uncertainties. Coastal communities experiencing aggressive shoreline recession face difficult choices as well—such as whether to armor receding shores or withdraw—most of which will require acknowledging and working through unavoidable trade-offs. Finally, providing knowledge about natural coastal dynamics and management systems is necessary but not by itself sufficient. Also needed are enhanced local capacity to conduct the analyses required to identify policies and programs that will effectively and equitably advance coastal sustainability and the firm commitment of local residents and officials to adopt those policies—challenges that are daunting but not insurmountable.
Article
History of Wildlife Tracking Technologies
Kristoffer Whitney
Technologies for wildlife tracking in a systematic way by scientists and other naturalists have their origins in the mid-19th century. Tagging and banding systems for fish and birds are exemplary of this: Both were used by late-19th- and early 20th-century biologists to gather data on the populations and migrations of a wide variety of species considered commercially useful or scientifically interesting. These tracking systems were deployed by networks of professional and amateur naturalists, working with a number of institutions integral to natural history work at the time: government agencies, birding and hunting groups, zoos, museums, and universities. By the mid- to late 20th century, wildlife tracking had expanded to include a wider array of species for a number of reasons. Technologically, electronic surveillance equipment from early radio telemetry to modern satellite tracking allowed for more animals to be tracked in ever more precise ways. Culturally and politically, the environmental movement and endangered species programs brought more attention to the plight of nongame or non-commercially valuable species. In the process, traditional biological disciplines were reshaped, and new subfields such as movement and acoustic ecology have emerged. And although the plethora of knowledge generated about wildlife in the past century and a half may prove to be a key component in environmental conservation in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, there are a number of ethical issues emerging from the history of wildlife tracking technologies to be addressed as well.
Article
Water Resource Management: Challenges and Opportunities with Game Theory Approaches
Kim Hang Pham Do
Water is essential to life and development in terms of both quantity and quality. Water resources continue to face various pressures brought about by climate change, growing population, and increased economic demand for water. Managing this unique and precious resource has become a global challenge. The conflicts over water issues often arise not only among stakeholders facing limited water resources but also from social and political aspects of the design, operation, and management of water supply projects. A fair and sustainable system of sharing water resources, therefore, is one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century. In the absence of negotiation and lack of clear property rights, water is a source for human conflicts.
Game theory as strategic analysis has provided powerful tools and been applied to many fields, including water resources management. The basic assumptions of game theory emphasize that rational players who pursue well-defined objectives and assume knowledge of others would accordingly form expectations of other decision makers’ behavior. Hence, game theory is used to predict agents’ behaviors toward fulfilling their own interests during the interactive decision-making process with other agents.
Since the 1950s, game theory has become an important tool for analyzing important aspects of water resource management. Yet despite the rapid increase in the application of game theoretical approaches to water resource management, many challenges remain. The challenges of the early 21st century, including resource constraints, financial instability, inequalities within and between countries, and environmental degradation, present opportunities to address and reach resolutions on how water is governed and managed to ensure that everyone has sufficient access to water.
Article
Economics of Renewable Energy: A Comparison of Electricity Production Costs Across Technologies
Govinda R. Timilsina and Kalim U. Shah
The levelized costs of electricity generation for renewable energy technologies differ and fluctuate depending on factors including capital costs, operation and maintenance costs, utilization factors, and economic lives. In addition to these factors, In the case of fossil fuels, prices and heat rate are also responsible for fluctuations. There is a global movement in favor renewable energy. Many countries have announced carbon-free electricity within the next 30–40 years, which implies massive expansion of renewable energy technologies. The newer investment trends in electricity generation technologies indicate the same. Technological breakthroughs and cost reductions of energy storage technologies would further favor renewable energy technologies and would decrease their intermittency hurdles. Developments that expand the scaling effect of renewable energy and the potential improvement in efficiency through continued research and development could bring the cost of renewable energy further down in the future. When the levelized costs of electricity generation are estimated, the declining trends of renewable energy costs are observed and can to a large extent (but not fully) be explained by certain potential drivers. Particularly for wind and solar, these drivers include technological innovation/improvements that have increased efficiency, policy supports such as research and development funding, economy of scale both in the manufacturing of equipment (solar panels, wind turbines) and installation of plants, and monopoly rent dissipation due to increased number of manufacturers and suppliers. Competition among equipment manufacturers and project developers may also contribute to cost decline as could cost reduction through improved product efficiency related to technological improvements and innovations.
Article
Hydroeconomics
Manuel Pulido-Velazquez and Amaury Tilmant
The management of water resources systems involves influencing and improving the interaction among three subsystems: natural (biophysical), economic, and legal-institutional frameworks. In this sense, hydroeconomic models have the advantage of analyzing water management problems through models that explicitly represent these interactions. The combination of economic, engineering, and environmental aspects of management provides better-informed results for decision making in the complex environment in which water management operates.
Hydroeconomic models (HEMs) are spatially distributed management models of a river basin or system in which both water supply and demands are economically and hydrologically characterized. This definition is sometimes relaxed to refer in general to water resources management models that include the economic component. In HEMs, the management and allocation of water is either driven by the economic value of water or economically assessed, which contributes to policy analysis and reveals opportunities for better economic management. The traditional view of water demand as a fixed requirement to be satisfied is modified by a view of demand that adapts to the changes in the scarcity of water. The integration of economics in HEMs allows the identification of the best combination of water supply and demand management options within a consistent framework. As water scarcity increases worldwide, water managers will increasingly turn to tools that reveal solutions to increase efficiency in water use, fostering improved economic development through better-informed policy choices.
