Toxic Chemical Governance Failure in the United States: Key Lessons and Paths Forward

Over 40 years of regulations in the United States have failed to protect human and environmental health. We contend that these failures result from the flawed governance over the continued production, use, and disposal of toxic chemicals. To address this failure, we need to identify the broader social, political, and technological processes producing, knowing, and regulating toxic chemicals, collectively referred to as toxic chemical governance. To do so, we create a conceptual framework covering five key domains of governance: knowledge production, policy design, monitoring and enforcement, evaluation, and adjudication. Within each domain, social actors of varying power negotiate what constitutes acceptable risk, creating longer-term path dependencies in how they are addressed (or not). Using existing literature and five case studies, we discuss four paths for improving governance: evolving paradigms of harm, addressing bias in the knowledge base, making governance more equitable, and overcoming path dependency

Examining the Scalar Knowledge Politics of Risk within Coastal Sea Level Rise Adaptation Planning Knowledge Systems

As cities around the world experience rapid sea level rise (SLR), institutions and actors classify and measure SLR “risks” through discourse and specifying practices for adaptation. These risk, discourses, and practices occur at multiple scales that are embedded within one another and draw their significance from cross-scalar connections; from global estimates of ocean density and emission scenarios, local design criteria for flood management, networks of tidal gauges, and individual and collective experiences of loss and change. Thus social actors responding to the complex physical challenges posed by climate change across space and time must deal with an inherent politics of building shared understanding and agreeing on (or not) desirable courses of action. These dynamics produce ‘scalar politics,’ i.e. strategies for defining and managing perceived risks at specific scales, resulting in more or less equitable and effective responses to the uneven consequences of SLR. To highlight the scalar politics of knowledge systems in adaptation planning, we present findings from two case studies of the Pacific Islands and coastal areas of Florida, USA. Drawing on our findings, we propose the concept ‘scalar knowledge politics of risk.’ As knowledge claims flow between global, regional, and local decision-making spaces, we identify five scales at which knowledge systems experience friction: 1) construction of the global climate; 2) regional downscaling of climate impacts; 3) local definition of risks; 4) transformation of on-the-ground social-ecological-technical systems and infrastructures; and, 5) evaluation of interventions. Through our case study investigation of the scalar politics of SLR adaptation, we hope to help illuminate and inform strategies to overcome long-standing barriers to effective and inclusive urban adaptation

Trade-Offs by Whom for Whom? A Response to Calow

We welcome Calow\u27s (2019) critique of our recent manuscript (Chiapella et al. 2019) and the opportunity to elaborate a few key points. Calow\u27s argument that governance must come to terms with trade-offs between health risks and “benefits from industrial and agrichemicals and pharmaceuticals in terms of lifestyle, food supply, and health,” has already been the key logic underpinning the current regime of toxic chemical governance. This framing has resulted in extreme inequities in exposure to chemical risk and in the distribution of their benefits. Focusing on the need for improved CBA, while welcome, does not address our more substantive claim: that toxic chemical governance failure has resulted from..

A framework to integrate innovations in invasion science for proactive management

Invasive alien species (IAS) are a rising threat to biodiversity, national security, and regional economies, with impacts in the hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars annually. Proactive or predictive approaches guided by scientific knowledge are essential to keeping pace with growing impacts of invasions under climate change. Although the rapid development of diverse technologies and approaches has produced tools with the potential to greatly accelerate invasion research and management, innovation has far outpaced implementation and coordination. Technological and methodological syntheses are urgently needed to close the growing implementation gap and facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and synergy among evolving disciplines. A broad review is necessary to demonstrate the utility and relevance of work in diverse fields to generate actionable science for the ongoing invasion crisis. Here, we review such advances in relevant fields including remote sensing, epidemiology, big data analytics, environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling, genomics, and others, and present a generalized framework for distilling existing and emerging data into products for proactive IAS research and management. This integrated workflow provides a pathway for scientists and practitioners in diverse disciplines to contribute to applied invasion biology in a coordinated, synergistic, and scalable manner