I have a new paper, led by Jess Raff, that analyzes sediment transport and sediment budgets in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, and assesses the implications of sediment flow for sustainability in the face of sea-level rise and the diversion and damming of major rivers.
I am very excited to announce that I have been selected for a Fulbright Scholar Award, which will allow me to spend a large part of the next academic year at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Technologies and Sustainability.
In June, I gave the keynote talk for a webinar and panel discussion at the National Socioenvironmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) about incorporating behavior change into socio-environmental systems models. The video of the event has now been posted to SESYNC’s YouTube channel
A major new paper in the journal One Earth from a collaboration between U.S. and European authors on the importance of incorporating behavioral, cultural, social, and political considerations into integrated assessment models of greenhouse gas emissions pathways, especially in the context of the IPCC process.
Limiting global warming to 2°C or less compared with pre-industrial temperatures will require unprecedented rates of decarbonization globally. The scale and scope of transformational change required across sectors and actors in society raises critical questions of feasibility. Much of the literature on mitigation pathways addresses technological and economic aspects of feasibility, but overlooks the behavioral, cultural, and social factors that affect theoretical and practical mitigation pathways. We present a tripartite framework that “unpacks”" the concept of mitigation pathways by distinguishing three factors that together determine actual mitigation: technical potential, initiative feasibility, and behavioral plasticity. The framework aims to integrate and streamline heterogeneous disciplinary research traditions toward a more comprehensive and transparent approach that will facilitate learning across disciplines and enable mitigation pathways to more fully reflect available knowledge. We offer three suggestions for integrating the tripartite framework into current research on climate change mitigation.
Mike Vandenbergh and I have a new paper out, in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, on our three-part framework for assessing the impacts of private climate governance.
We discussed our three-part framework in previous writing, such as “Accounting for Political Feasibility”, “Beyond Gridlock”, and Beyond Politics. Here, we discuss some practical steps toward applying the framework to assessing the prospects and potential impacts of private climate governance and some of the research needs and priorities for using our framework more broadly.
I have a new paper in the journal Energy Efficiency, co-authored with Alex Maki, Emmett McKinney, Mike Vandenbergh, and Mark Cohen, about employers who offer employee benefits to promote energy efficiency.
On a recent trip to Bangladesh I collaborated with Dr. Bishawjit Mallick (Chair of Environmental Development and Risk Management at Technische Universität Dresden), the environmental activist collective Riverine People, and Professor Md. Monirul Islam at Dhaka University, and representatives of the School of Environmental Science and Management at the Independent University of Bangladesh and the International Centre for Climate Change and Development to organize a workshop on River Navigability and Inland Shipping in Bangladesh with a focus on the economic impact of formal and informal use of inland waterways for passenger and cargo traffic.
Cities face challenges on many fronts as they work to assure their residents of safe and reliable access to water. Changes in both supply and demand are driven by complex interactions among many human and natural factors, such as drought, infrastructure, population growth, and land-use. Climate change adds new complexities and uncertainties as cities plan for the future. In the past, challenges to water security were addressed by Promethean energy- and technology-intensive infrastructure projects, such as long-distance transfers, desalination, and artificial aquifer recharge; but in recent years, attention to soft approaches has grown. Soft approaches to water security focus on improving efficiency in obtaining and consuming water, and as John Fleck documented in his book, Water Is for Fighting Over, a number of cities have made impressive progress toward resilience and sustaniability.
Comparisons of observed trends of energy and carbon intensity in the global economy to trends implied by emissions scenarios used in policy analysis suggested that those scenarios were severely over-optimistic about the rate at which the world would spontaneously decarbonize its economy.
I update these analysis, using global emissions since 2005, and find that observed rates of decarbonization are not far behind those implied by the RCP 4.5 policy scenario. This suggests that the policy challenge may not be as difficult as previous work has reported.