The workshop on ‘Carbon Governance in Asia: Bringing Scales and Disciplines’ is calling for applications. The workshop will be jointly organised by the Global Carbon Project, the Earth System Governance Project and the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) in Yokohama, Japan, on 1-3 November 2010. The workshop is supported by the Asia-Pacific Network on Global Change Research. The deadline for application is 8 July 2010.

For more information see:
http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/events/2010-06-07-workshop-carbon-governance-asia

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 200 researchers and practitioners from around the world will gather at the 2009 Amsterdam Conference on Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change to attend to the Earth System governance. Though not associated with, and much smaller than the Copenhagen meeting, the Amsterdam conference is expected to play an important role in the debate about global environmental governance. [Read more →]

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 to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:

Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. [Read more →]

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 need economic production to survive, but we also need healthy ecosystems and the service they provide,” he says. No bees, no food, no trip to the grocery store. [Read more →]

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 science and governance. They will all elaborate different aspects of adaptiveness and innovation in an era of global environmental change. [Read more →]

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

[Read more →]