Environmental Justice and Political Ecology

Speaker Information: 

Tracey Osborne, University of Arizona; Assistant Professor in the School of Geography and Development; Director of the Public Political Ecology Lab

Tracey Osborne is Assistant Professor in the School of Geography and Development and Director of the Public Political Ecology Lab at the University of Arizona. Her research investigates the political ecology of environmental markets, particularly carbon markets, and their implications for the lives and livelihoods of forest communities in the Global South. Specifically, she explores the intersection of carbon markets, development, and agrarian change as they relate to forestry-based carbon initiatives in Mexico. She received her PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

The event is co-sponsored by the Yale Student Environmental Coalition (YSEC).

- See more at: http://climate.yale.edu/event/global-environmental-justice-public-political-ecology-carbon-economy#sthash.D1AWzsYt.dpuf

Great Lakes - Local and International Pollutions

Environmental economics views the real economy in which we all live and work as an open system. This means that in order to function, the economy must extract resources (raw material and fuel) from the environment, process these resources, and dispose of large amounts of dissipated and/or chemically transformed resources back into the environment. The process starts with the extraction of resources, which can be exhaustible (fixed in overall quantity) or renewable ( resource grows through time). The process ends with the disposal of transformed resources which could pollute the environment. Pollution is waste that has been disposed off in the air, in water or on land, and that reduces the value of those resources in alternative uses. Resource depletion and environmental pollution are key factors in determining the natural capital of a nation and achieving sustainable development. 

Resource depletion and pollution reduction can be viewed as an economic problem. Environmental economics uses cost-benefit thinking to deal with environmental problems and issues. Benefits and damage assessments are used to integrate the un-priced but valuable functions of natural environments into cost-benefit analysis of real world projects, and to illustrate the kinds of economic damage done to national economics by resource depletions and pollution. 

In an ideal world all wastes that cannot be recycled would be outlawed. The costs of a pollution free society would be very high. The other extreme is to live in a society where there is no pollution control. The real world is somewhere in between these two extremes, i.e., it is necessary to achieve a balance between the social costs and social benefits of reducing pollution. 

Empirical evidence indicates that after substantial amount of polluting emissions have been reduced, extra waste reduction is much more costly than previous reductions. There is a point beyond which the costs of further reducing pollution by far exceeds the increase in social benefits and what people are willing to pay. The benefits of pollution control are measured by the reduction in damages caused by pollution to human health, and to material, natural and agricultural resources.

Governing Resources at Multiple Scale

Climate change represents a major increase in uncertainty that water managers and policy makers will need to integrate into water resources policy and management. A certain level of uncertainty has always existed in water resources planning, but the speed and intensity of changes in baseline conditions that climate change embodies might require a shift in perspective. This article draws on both the social and physical science results of the EU-FP7 ACQWA project to better understand the challenges and opportunities for adaptation to climate change impacts on the hydrology of the upper Rhone basin in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. It first presents the results of hydro-climatic change projections down scaled to more temporally and spatially-relevant frames of reference for decision makers. Then, it analyses the current policy and legislative framework within which these changes will take place, according to the policy coherence across different water-relevant frameworks as well as the integration and main streaming of climate change. It compares the current policy and legislative frameworks for different aspects of water resources management to the projected impacts of climate change on the hydrology of the upper Rhone basin, in order to examine the appropriateness of the current approach for responding to a changing climatic context .Significant uncertainties pose numerous challenges in the governance context. The study draws on adaptive governance principles, to propose policy actions across different scales of governance to better manage baseline variability as well as more ‘unpredictable’ uncertainty from climate change impacts.