Responsibility, opportunity, and vision for higher education in urban and regional carbon management

This is a summary of the conversation among scholars attending the special session on "Responsibility, Opportunity, and Vision for Higher Education in Urban and Regional Carbon Management" at the First International Conference on Carbon Management at Urban and Regional Levels: Connecting Development Decisions to Global Issues in Mexico City Sept. 4–8, 2006. It includes The Declaration for Carbon Management Education, agreed upon by the participants. Obstacles to such a vision were discussed along with exemplar models of transdisciplinary curricula and suggestions for scholarship

The Chinese [climate] box : a scalar approach to evaluating ethical obligations in climate strategies for China

Assuming that all nations have the ethical obligation to reduce emissions to their global fair share, this paper investigates how distributive and procedural justice obligations, under the broader rubric of Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change program, play out across various political and ecological scales in China. As China is such a large and necessary player in any global strategies for addressing climate change, it is imperative that the nation receive closer ethical investigation across scales and sectors, and that other nations and multi-national corporations do their fair share in helping China\u27s various regions and sectors reach its obligations in a post-Kyoto regime. To address the challenges to distributive and procedural justice that emerge at global, regional, national, intra-regional, provincial, urban, and small town & village levels, this paper proposes a multi-scalar ethical framework for evaluating China\u27s climate strategies as the nation formalizes its obligations to the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility, (CDR) and to a framework of Contraction and Convergence (C&C). Part of the difficulty in addressing China\u27s mitigation obligations is in the ongoing articulation of the problem as primarily an obligation of national level governance, a structural result of UNFCCC requirements. However, due to China\u27s complexity in both size and population, both CDR and C&C require a more nuanced and complex articulation of ethical and practical problems across political and ecological scales. As such, implementing China\u27s National Climate Change Programme (CNCCP) will require mitigation management targeting not just political, but ecosystem scales as well. In addition, the Central Government will need to allow or provide for a lateral political agency for ecosystem management efforts, so that institutions at similar scales can plan and co-ordinate more readily

Responsibility, Opportunity, And Vision For Higher Education In Urban And Regional Carbon Management

This is a summary of the conversation among scholars attending the special session on Responsibility, Opportunity, and Vision for Higher Education in Urban and Regional Carbon Management at the First International Conference on Carbon Management at Urban and Regional Levels: Connecting Development Decisions to Global Issues in Mexico City Sept. 4-8, 2006. It includes The Declaration for Carbon Management Education, agreed upon by the participants. Obstacles to such a vision were discussed along with exemplar models of transdisciplinary curricula and suggestions for scholarship. © 2006 Canan and Schienke; licensee BioMed Central Ltd