The Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change: How Do We Make a Quantum Leap to Sustainability?

Robin Leichenko and Karen O'Brien will discuss climate change in the context of globalization and its implications for equity and human security, including the types of responses that can lead to an equitable and sustainable future. Drawing on recent IPCC reports, they argue that "bending the curves" calls for more than technical solutions -- it calls for challenging some key assumptions about social change. The adaptive challenge of climate change may, in fact, call for the transformation of science itself, including the role that the social sciences play in integrated global change research.Ohio State UniversityMershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web Pag

What Does the Future Hold? What Globalization Might Mean for the Rural South

This paper considers the implications of economic globalization for rural communities in the U.S. South. Despite significant gains in average incomes and educational attainment in the South over the past 30 years, the paper finds that the rural South\u27s longstanding reputation as the nation\u27s low-wage, low-skilled region remains largely intact. In particular, manufacturing wages in the rural South have remained stagnant relative to the rest of the United States. Furthermore, as dominant sectors such as textiles and apparel continue to experience price competition and international pressure, there will likely be additional downward pressure on wages in low-skill southern industries, and there may possibly be widespread job losses in the South\u27s rural communities

Winners and losers in the context of global change.

The idea that global change produces winners and losers is widely accepted. Yet there have been few systematic discussions of what is meant by ''winner'' or ''loser,'' and little attention has been given to the theoretical underpinnings behind identification of winners and losers. This is particularly true within global-change literature, where the phrase ''winners and losers'' is widely and rather loosely used. In this article, we explore the concept of winners and losers in the context of two aspects of global change: economic globalization and climate change. We first identify two major underlying theoretical perspectives on winners and losers: one suggests that winners and losers are natural and inevitable; the other suggests that winners and losers are socially and politically generated. We then apply these perspectives to current research on global change and demonstrate that they play a decisive role, influencing opinions on what winning and losing entails, who winners and losers are, and how winners and losers should be addressed

Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation and Human Security: A Commissioned Report for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, in an effort to ‘contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind’. In the wake of the 2007 award, the relationship between climate change and security has surfaced as a key concern among national governments and international institutions

Growth and Change in U.S. Cities and Suburbs

Differential rates of growth and decentralization are processes that characterized U.S. urban areas over the past three decades. This paper examines the determinants of growth in cities and suburbs during the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. The modeling approach adopted in the study allows for simultaneity between population and employment, and between cities and suburbs, while also taking into account a range of other explanatory factors. Results indicate that population and employment growth in cities tend to be jointly determined, but that growth of employment in the suburbs tends to drive growth of suburban population. Results also suggest that suburban and city growth are interrelated, but that the nature of these interrelationships varies over time: suburban growth promoted city growth during the 1970s and 1980s, while city and suburban growth were jointly determined during the 1990s. Other factors that consistently explain variation in city growth include demographics, population density, crime rates, and income inequality. Factors consistently explaining suburban growth include regional location and climate. Copyright 2001 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky.

Critical Surveys Edited by STEPHEN ROPER

Leichenko, R. M. and Solecki, W. D. (2005) Exporting the American dream: the globalization of suburban consumption landscapes, Regional Studies 39 , 241–253. This paper examines how cultural, economic and political aspects of globalization interact with processes of urbanization in less developed country (LDC) cities to create new landscapes of housing consumption. Drawing evidence from the current literature, the paper demonstrates that globalization processes influence the housing preferences and housing consumption decisions of a small yet growing, middle‐income segment of LDC urban residents. These changes lead to patterns of urban resource use akin to those associated with suburbanization and suburban sprawl in more developed countries (MDC), particularly the USA. In effect, these changes amount to the manifest export of the American Dream – the ideal of homeownership of a single‐family house in a suburban area – to LDC cities. A critical element of this process explored in the paper is how this suburban ideal is set down within each city context. This placement is presented as the result of global‐, national‐ and local‐level drivers. The emergence of consumption landscapes raises critical questions about the environmental and social sustainability of globalization, as LDC residents increasingly emulate the highly resource‐consumptive, energy‐intensive and exclusionary lifestyles currently practised by MDC suburbanites.Globalization, Suburbanization, Housing consumption, Environmental degradation, Mondialisation, Développement des banlieues, Consommation de logements, Dégradation écologique, Globalisierung, Vervorstädterung, Wohnverbrauch, Umweltdegradierung, Globalización, Suburbanización, Consumo de vivienda, Degradación ambiental, JEL classifications: O12, O21, R20,

The Dynamics of Rural Vulnerability to Global Change: The Case of southern Africa

agriculture, climatic change, economic globalization, vulnerability,