Religious positions on climate change and climate policy in the United States

February 2006, a group of 86 evangelical leaders, under the auspices of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, challenged the Bush administration on global warming. Other religious groups and leaders in the USA, and other countries, have taken positions as well. As the US evangelical community seems to have a considerable influence on the views and policy of (Republican) national leaders, these developments are relevant for assessing US and international climate policy. Using argumentative discourse analysis, this paper analyzes the religious positions on climate change and climate policy in the United States, as evident in their communication in the media, opinion documents, and websites. Religious positions show a wide range of views, images, and discourses that deal with fundamental moral and ethical questions concerning climate change, stewardship and social justice. Our main conclusion is that both proponents and opponents of strict climate policy strongly value these concepts, but that they interpret them in different ways. A robust policy strategy (regarding support in the religious community) should pay careful attention to the effects of both climate change and climate policy on the poor in both developing nations and the USA itself.Keywords: environmental justice, equity, ethics, religion and environment, climate policy, United State

Group decision support

Group decision support. What is it? Group Decision Support involves the use of a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) in a workshop: a network of computers with special software for computersupported meetings. The MNP uses the Policy Lab of Utrecht University for this (see References). GDS is a method of supporting group processes, which can also be used to complement other participation methods (for instance, scenario workshops or face-to-face Delphi)

Resilience Principles as a Tool for Exploring Options for Urban Resilience

The world is becoming increasingly urban and cities face a constant struggle with the complex environmental, social, economic, and political challenges of the 21st century. Many international organizations have argued that cities will need to become more resilient to these challenges. However, it is not particularly clear what that really means. In practice, policies often use the concept of ‘resilience’ as a buzzword. In this regard, resilience principles – that is, defining specific mechanisms that make a city resilient – can help clarify the concept and its applicability. Several case studies provide examples of how such principles can be used as tools to brainstorm on new solutions, how they can be used to evaluate proposed policy options and overarching urban resilience plans, and how they can be compared to stakeholders’ preferences for national policy strategies. When applied in a structured way, resilience principles provide a powerful tool to move urban resilience thinking from a metaphorical talk to meaningful solutions

Example from practice : participation in the evaluation of uncertainty communication and worldviews

Participation in the evaluation of uncertainty communication and worldviews Two eye-catching products of the MNP are the Evironmental Balance and the Sustainabiltiy Outlook. The MNP was faced with a number of questions concerning the methodology and presentation of information in these reports. For the Environmental Balance the issue was the communication of uncertainties and for the Sustainability Outlook the issue was the use and interpretation of a set of four 'worldviews'. To fi nd answers to our questions we held several workshops in the Policy Lab of Utrecht University (projects contracted out to the Copernicus Institute). The policy lab is a meeting room with computers that run Group Decision Support software, which makes possible the structuring and facilitation of workshops. Different groups of participants were invited, such as scientists, students, policymakers, stakeholders from industry and NGOs and opinion leaders. Together with these people we assessed the current practice of uncertainty communication in the Environmental Balance and the use and interpretation of worldviews in the Sustainability Outlook. We gathered ideas on how these practices could be improved

Framing resilience: social uncertainty in designing urban climate resilience

Building urban resilience to climate change and other challenges will be essential for maintaining thriving cities into the future. Resilience has become very popular in both research on and practice of climate adaptation. However, people have different interpretations of what it means: what resilience-building contributes to, what the problems, causes and solutions are, and what trade-offs, side-effects and other normative choices are acceptable. These different ways of ‘framing’ climate resilience are hidden in the positive, but sometimes fairly vague, language used to promote it. Based on the current urban resilience literature, I will describe divergent ways of framing resilient urban climate adaptation and will explore their implications. Two important frames of urban resilience include the ‘system resilience’ frame, which focuses on maintaining urban functions and processes, and the ‘community resilience’ frame, which emphasises urban life, and community capacity & self-sufficiency. Other important (contrasting) frames include ‘static resilience’, dealing with quick return to equilibrium, and ‘dynamic resilience’, dealing with adaptability and co-evolving with trends. The frames used by scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders reflect social uncertainties in climate adaptation, related to values, preferences, and goals. They entail different visions on the urban future, leading to different potential realisations of climate change adaptation. Leaving them implicit can result in a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, potentially leading to adaptation failure. Urban decision-makers and stakeholders will need to investigate and develop a clear vision on what they mean by urban resilience: what are the goals, and who’s or what’s resilience are we talking about? Explicit exploration of the current and potential frames will help to cultivate meaningful discussion on the choices and trade-offs to be made in developing climate-resilient urban futures