Solar geoengineering: The case for an international non-use agreement

Solar geoengineering is gaining prominence in climate change debates as an issue worth studying; for some it is even a potential future policy option. We argue here against this increasing normalization of solar geoengineering as a speculative part of the climate policy portfolio. We contend, in particular, that solar geoengineering at planetary scale is not governable in a globally inclusive and just manner within the current international political system. We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.Specifically, we advocate for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering and outline the core elements of this proposal

Environmental Peacebuilding: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Opening Words by CSB+SJU President Brian Bruess. Welcome and Introduction by Dr. Jon Armajani, Department of Peace Studies Faculty. Opening Keynote by Dr. Ken Conca, American University: Environmental Peacebuilding: Yesterday, Today. and Tomorrow. Ken Conca is a professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on environment, conflict, and peacebuilding; water politics and governance; and the role of the United Nations in environmental governance. Dr. Conca’s work has been recognized with several major awards, including the Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order, the Al-Moumin Award for thought leadership in environmental peacebuilding, the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book on international environmental affairs, and the Chadwick Alger Prize for best book in the field of International Organization. He was a founding member of the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Advisory Group on Conflict and Peacebuilding. Recent books include An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance and The Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy (both with Oxford University Press). Dr. Conca earned his Ph.D. from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley

Which Risks Get Managed? Addressing Climate Effects in the Context of Evolving Water-Governance Institutions

Warnings about climate change invariably stress water-related effects. Such effects are typically framed as both unpredictable and disruptive, and are thus said to create large new risks to the water sector demanding adaptive responses. This article examines how such responses are mediated by, and also compromised by, two dominant trends in the evolution of water governance institutions: (1) the rise of an “integrated” paradigm of water resources management, which has encouraged the development of more complex and interconnected water institutions, and (2) the rapidly changing political economy of water financing and investment. Each of these trends carries its own strong presumptions about what constitutes water-related risk and how such risk is properly managed. The article uses the specific example of large dam projects to illustrate how these ongoing trends in water governance shape and complicate the prospect of managing climate-water risks

Confronting Consumption

In affluent societies, evidence suggests that public concern and activism about "the consumption problem" is growing in many corners of everyday life-even in the paragon of the consumer society, the United States. These emerging concerns have an environmental dimension, but also embrace issues of community, work, meaning, freedom, and the overall quality of life. Yet the efforts of individuals, groups, and communities to confront consumption find little guidance or sympathy in policy-making, environmental, or academic circles-arenas dominated, perhaps as never before, by a deeply seated economistic reasoning and a politics of the sanctity of growth. Given our dissatisfaction with fragmentary approaches to consumption and its externalities, we highlight the elements of a provisional framework for confronting consumption in a more integrated fashion. We stress in particular the social embeddedness of consumption, the material and power-based linkages along commodity chains of resource use, and the hidden forms of consumption embedded in all stages of economic activity. Copyright (c) 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.