Environmental Governance

The 2nd Global Conference on Environmental Governance and Democracy will take place at Yale University, New Haven, USA from 17-19 September 2010 in the margins of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal Summit, 20-22 September, New York. Focusing on the theme of Strengthening Institutions to Address Climate Change and Advance a Green Economy, the event will take stock of [...] Continue Reading…

December is shaping up to be an important month for the debate, and hopefully some decisions and actions too, on global environmental change. From the 7th of December, environmental ministers and officials from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, in an attempt to agree a new climate treaty, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The week before, about [...] Continue Reading…

Just in… Prof Elinor Ostrom has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Ostrom, from University of Indiana, USA, is the first female Laureate in Economic Sciences and will share the prize with Prof Oliver E. Williamson, from the University of California Berkeley, USA.

Ostrom was praised “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” According [...] Continue Reading…

Article by Joshua E. Brown, University of Vermont, USA.

The most obvious fact about ecological economics is that, well, ecology comes before economics.

“For example,” says Joshua Farley, an economist at the University of Vermont, “without healthy ecosystems to regulate climate and rainfall and provide habitat for pollinators, agriculture would collapse.” Which makes it tough to sell cars.

Put another way, “we [...] Continue Reading…

Kofi A. Annan, President of the Global Humanitarian Forum, launched on 1 October a specially re-recorded version of Midnight Oil’s ‘Beds are Burning’ as a global musical petition to demand climate justice at the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December. The song is also set to become the soundtrack of the Climate Justice movement.

Here is the video from [...] Continue Reading…

Research by UK Met Office scientists has revealed that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unchecked, it is likely that global warming will exceed four degrees by the end of the century.

Met Office scientists have found that if current high emissions continue there could be major implications for the world — with higher temperature rises than previously thought.

Dr [...] Continue Reading…

A group of academics has attempted to estimate limits for biophysical processes to avoid catastrophic environmental changes. Jonhan Rockstrom and colleagues proposes the concept of “planetary boundaries”, a framework for quantifying safe thresholds for long-term human development. In a article published in the journal Nature, they suggest boundaries for nine indicators of stress to the Earth system: climate change, [...] Continue Reading…

Let’s Try Something Different

by Victor Galaz

What is adaptiveness and innovation in earth system governance? How do we define it, and why does it matter? The Stockholm Resilience launched a web-log designed exclusively to the Earth System Governance community and conference participants of the 2009 Amsterdam Conference.

http://adaptiveness.wordpress.com/

The blog includes interviews with prominent scholars in the field of earth system [...] Continue Reading…

An updated framework for analysing complex systems has been presented by Prof Elinor Ostrom.

Source: ASUNews

Common framework would aid cumulation of isolated knowledge

The often-used one-size-fits-all approach to policies aimed at achieving sustainable social-ecological systems needs to be updated with a diagnostic tool to help scholars from multiple disciplines better frame the question and think through the variables, asserts social scientist [...] Continue Reading…

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996–2008, for six dimensions of governance:
Voice and Accountability

Political Stability and Absence of Violence

Government Effectiveness

Regulatory Quality

Rule of Law

Control of Corruption

The aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of [...] Continue Reading…