Advancing the Science of Climate Change


Book Description

Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for-and in many cases is already affecting-a broad range of human and natural systems. The compelling case for these conclusions is provided in Advancing the Science of Climate Change, part of a congressionally requested suite of studies known as America's Climate Choices. While noting that there is always more to learn and that the scientific process is never closed, the book shows that hypotheses about climate change are supported by multiple lines of evidence and have stood firm in the face of serious debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations. As decision makers respond to these risks, the nation's scientific enterprise can contribute through research that improves understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change and also is useful to decision makers at the local, regional, national, and international levels. The book identifies decisions being made in 12 sectors, ranging from agriculture to transportation, to identify decisions being made in response to climate change. Advancing the Science of Climate Change calls for a single federal entity or program to coordinate a national, multidisciplinary research effort aimed at improving both understanding and responses to climate change. Seven cross-cutting research themes are identified to support this scientific enterprise. In addition, leaders of federal climate research should redouble efforts to deploy a comprehensive climate observing system, improve climate models and other analytical tools, invest in human capital, and improve linkages between research and decisions by forming partnerships with action-oriented programs.




Shadows of a Sunbelt City


Book Description

Austin, Texas, is often depicted as one of the past half century's great urban successstories--a place that has grown enormously through "creative class" strategies. In Shadows of a Sunbelt City, Eliot Tretter reinterprets this familiar story by exploring the racial and environmental underpinnings of the postindustrial knowledge economy.




Handbook of Cities and the Environment


Book Description

With an ever-growing majority of the world's human population living in city spaces, the relationship between cities and nature will be one of the key environmental issues of the 21st Century. This book brings together a diverse set of authors to explore the various aspects of this relationship both theoretically and empirically. Rather than considering cities as wholly separate from nature, a running theme throughout the book is that cities, and city dwellers, should be characterized as intrinsic in the creation of specifically urban-generated ‘socio-natures’.




Urban Environmental Education Review


Book Description

Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.




Environment and the City


Book Description

For the first time at the beginning of the twenty-first century, urban dwellers outnumber rural residents and this trend is set to continue. Consequently one of the most pressing issues of our time is how to square the social and economic development of cities with their environmental limits and those of the wider environment. The theme of the environment and city is topical at every level, from the politics of global trade to local community networks. Environment and the City looks at the evolution of cities in the developed and the developing world and the implications for resource consumption and environmental impacts. It takes a cross-cutting approach with new thinking on multiple geographies – the configuration of networks, exclusion, consumption, risk and ecological footprint. Urban environmental themes and their related social, economic and political agendas are outlined. In turn the environmental impacts and environmental agendas relating to key sectors of the urban economy are discussed. The global context to such issues is then explored before the practical tools and methods of urban environmental management are investigated. The theme of the sustainable city emerges from this – not so much as a standard menu, but as a learning process between all sections of society. This book, a valuable resource, provides a concise, accessible route map for all students interested in the environmental issues emanating from our urban society. Written to aid student understanding, the easily navigable text features boxed practical examples, discussion points, signposts to reading and websites, and a glossary.




City and Environment


Book Description

An introduction to urban environmental issues around the globe.




The City is an Ecosystem


Book Description

The City is an Ecosystem maps an interdisciplinary, community-engaged response to the great ecological crises of our time—climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality—which pose particular challenges for cities, where more than half the world’s population currently live. Across more than twenty chapters, the three parts of the book cover historical and scientific perspectives on the city as an ecosystem; human rights to the city in relation to urban sustainability; and the city as a sustainability classroom at all educational levels inside and outside formal classroom spaces. It argues that such efforts must be interdisciplinary and widespread to ensure an informed public and educated new generation are equipped to face an uncertain future, particularly relevant in the post-COVID-19 world. Gathering multiple interdisciplinary and community-engaged perspectives on these environmental crises, with contemporary and historical case study discussions, this timely volume cuts across the humanities and social and health sciences, and will be of interest to policymakers, urban ecologists, activists, built environment professionals, educators, and advanced students concerned with the future of our cities.




Environment and the City


Book Description

For the first time at the beginning of the twenty-first century, urban dwellers outnumber rural residents and this trend is set to continue. Consequently one of the most pressing issues of our time is how to square the social and economic development of cities with their environmental limits and those of the wider environment. The theme of the environment and city is topical at every level, from the politics of global trade to local community networks. Environment and the City looks at the evolution of cities in the developed and the developing world and the implications for resource consumption and environmental impacts. It takes a cross-cutting approach with new thinking on multiple geographies – the configuration of networks, exclusion, consumption, risk and ecological footprint. Urban environmental themes and their related social, economic and political agendas are outlined. In turn the environmental impacts and environmental agendas relating to key sectors of the urban economy are discussed. The global context to such issues is then explored before the practical tools and methods of urban environmental management are investigated. The theme of the sustainable city emerges from this – not so much as a standard menu, but as a learning process between all sections of society. This book, a valuable resource, provides a concise, accessible route map for all students interested in the environmental issues emanating from our urban society. Written to aid student understanding, the easily navigable text features boxed practical examples, discussion points, signposts to reading and websites, and a glossary.




Eco-city Planning


Book Description

Eco-city planning is a key element of urban land use planning in perspective and of ongoing debate of environmental urban sustainable development with a spatial and practical dimension. The conceptual basis of ecological planning is that we can no longer afford to be merely human-centred in approach. Instead, the interdependency of human and non-human species has forced us to appreciate the ‘rights’ and ‘intrinsic values’ of non-human species in our pursuit for a sustainable ecosystem. This volume has as approach an emphasis on environmental planning policies whereby, for example, energy saving, anti-pollution measures, use of non-car modes, construction of green buildings, safeguarding of nature and natural habitats in urban areas, and use of more renewable resources are promotional norms. Their aims and leading outcome serve to protect the Earth from adverse effects of global warming and different sources of pollution threatening the quality of life of human societies.




Global Cities


Book Description

How Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China deal with such urban environmental issues as ports, goods movement, air pollution, water quality, transportation, and public space. Over the past four decades, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and key urban regions of China have emerged as global cities—in financial, political, cultural, environmental, and demographic terms. In this book, Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng trace the global emergence of these urban areas and compare their responses to a set of six urban environmental issues. These cities have different patterns of development: Los Angeles has been the quintessential horizontal city, the capital of sprawl; Hong Kong is dense and vertical; China's new megacities in the Pearl River Delta, created by an explosion in industrial development and a vast migration from rural to urban areas, combine the vertical and the horizontal. All three have experienced major environmental changes in a relatively short period of time. Gottlieb and Ng document how each has dealt with challenges posed by ports and the movement of goods, air pollution (Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and urban China are all notorious for their hazardous air quality), water supply (all three places are dependent on massive transfers of water) and water quality, the food system (from seed to table), transportation, and public and private space. Finally they discuss the possibility of change brought about by policy initiatives and social movements.