Urban climate change, livelihood vulnerability and narratives of generational responsibility in Jinja, Uganda

There is an urgent need to understand lived experiences of climate change in the context of African cities, where even small climate shocks can have significant implications for the livelihoods of the urban poor. This article examines narratives of climate and livelihood changes within Jinja Municipality, Uganda, emphasizing how Jinja's residents make sense of climate change through their own narrative frames rather than through the lens of global climate change discourses. We demonstrate how the onset of climate change in Jinja is widely attributed to perceived moral and environmental failings on the part of a present generation that is viewed as both more destructive than previous generations and unable to preserve land, trees and other resources for future generations. A focus on local ontologies of climate change highlights how the multiple, intersecting vulnerabilities of contemporary urban life in Jinja serve to obfuscate not only the conditions of possibility of an immediate future, but the longer-term horizons for future generations, as changing weather patterns exacerbate existing challenges people face in adapting to wider socio-economic changes and rising livelihood vulnerability. This form of analysis situates changing climate and environments within the context of everyday urban struggles and emphasizes the need for civic participation in developing climate change strategies that avoid the pitfalls of climate reductionism. The article draws on more than 150 qualitative interviews, generational dialogue groups, and creative methods based on research-led community theatre

Rural–urban inequality and the practice of promoting sustainability in contemporary China

This article focuses on the rural–urban inequality and its impacts on the meanings and practices of sustainability in Chinese context, based on a qualitative analysis of 30 semi-structure interviews with key practitioners. This research understands sustainability to be ‘simultaneously an ideological stance, a point of convergence for political struggles, and a measure of performance for development activities’ (Sneddon in Progr Hum Geogr 24(4):521–549, 2000). The main argument suggests that an appreciation of the need to reduce the rural–urban inequality can add new meanings to the Chinese interpretation and practice of sustainability. In Chinese context, a sustainable future is not about maintaining the current social and environmental status for future generations, but rather, it refers to improving environmental quality and promoting social and environmental justice in the future. That is, creating a better future through transforming the Chinese society from a polluted and rural–urban divided society with low-level suzhi population into a green, civilised and thriving one is the core of its sustainable development. Theoretically, this work indicates that the ways of building links between rural and urban can be multiple and dynamic. And more broadly, this research uses a Chinese case study to indicate that complex spatial relationships and interactions should be taken into considerations in sustainability studies

Caring for the future : climate change and intergenerational responsibility in China and the UK

Debates about intergenerational fairness and resource-use are prominent in diverse international contexts, with a large number of social policy and environmental concerns characterised as having intergenerational dimensions. This includes concerns relating to synchronic equity (how resources are distributed between living generations) and diachronic equity (saving resources for future generations), with climate change being a high-profile example of an issue characterised in this way. In this paper we explore how urban residents perceive their responsibilities towards future generations in two cities based in countries that are major greenhouse gas emitters. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a cross-generational sample of 190 people living in Nanjing, China, and Sheffield, UK, we consider whose future and what aspects of the future people feel responsible for and at what scale. This discussion is situated within an emerging critique of generational discourses that conflate caring for the family and one’s own children with caring for the wider society and for the future. We argue that this has far-reaching implications for how people think about intergenerational responsibility and imagine appropriate courses of action, shaping a particular ‘timescape’ that privileges living generations in close proximity. We find that people in Sheffield tend to be more concerned about social and economic aspects of sustainable development than environmental degradation. People in Nanjing more readily discuss responsibility for environmental stewardship, in the wider political context of state-led and nationalist discourses of collective responsibility, but still appear to struggle with thinking about the future beyond their lifetimes and immediate descendants. We discuss these findings and their implications through the analytical framework of geographies of responsibility, exploring possibilities for a more spatially and temporally extensive scope of care

Corporations, consumerism and culpability: sustainability in the British press

Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policy-making, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Its definitions are contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In spite of its common usage, there is little research about how sustainability is represented and refracted in public discourse in different national contexts. We examine British national press coverage of sustainability and sustainable development in 2015 in a cross-market sample of national newspapers. Our findings show that key international policy events and environmental and social justice frames are peripheral, while neoliberalism and neoliberal environmentalism vis-à-vis the promotion of technocratic solutions, corporate social responsibility and “sustainable” consumerism are the predominant frames through which the British news-media reports sustainability. This holds regardless of newspaper quality and ideological orientation

Reformulation and Decomposition of Integer Programs

We examine ways to reformulate integer and mixed integer programs. Typically, but not exclusively, one reformulates so as to obtain stronger linear programming relaxations, and hence better bounds for use in a branch-and-bound based algorithm. First we cover reformulations based on decomposition, such as Lagrangean relaxation, the Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation and the resulting column generation and branch-and-price algorithms. This is followed by an examination of Benders' type algorithms based on projection. Finally we discuss extended formulations involving additional variables that are based on problem structure. These can often be used to provide strengthened a priori formulations. Reformulations obtained by adding cutting planes in the original variables are not treated here