Special Issue "On the Socioeconomic and Political Outcomes of Global Climate Change"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Rafael Reuveny
School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), Indiana University, East 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
E-Mail:
Interests: international political economy with emphasis on globalization; rise and fall of major powers; political conflict and how it interacts with international trade, democracy, and the environment; sustainable development; Middle East political economy

Dear Colleagues,

The intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) expects that climate change will accelerate in this century, assuming business as usual climate change policy. By now, there have been several attempts to develop a global mitigation plan, but they have failed. It seems mitigation will remain an illusionary target in the short to medium run, if not forever. And so that “dreadful” word, adaptation, which we have all hoped will not take the driver seat, becomes for all practical purposes the only viable option to deal with climate change. It is within this larger picture that I invite the academic, practitioner, and the policy communities to address the question of this special issue.

Given the enormity of the expected effects of climate change on the environment worldwide -- including sea level rising and inundation; arable land degradation; changes in precipitation; changes in the patterns of the seasons; salinazation, drying, and dwindling fresh water resources; and more intense weather-related natural disasters such as windstorms, extreme precipitation, floods, droughts, heat waves, extreme temperatures, infestations, spread of diseases, and wet landslides – we must wonder what could be the sociopolitical outcomes within and across countries worldwide. The issue has received some attention in the literature, but it should be addressed more systematically if we are to learn to live with climate change.

Unlike the natural sciences, where we may conduct controlled experiments, in the macro social sciences the only meaningful laboratory is reality. In addressing the question of this issue, out best bet is to look for hints in the current and historical reality. If certain climate change-induced environmental effects have led to some sociopolitical outcomes, we may expect more of them in the future, as climate change accelerates.

I invite empirical contributions. The idea is to develop research questions that are linked to empirical data and show how they have linked to some or all of the environmental outcomes that are said to be associated with climate change.

The focus should be empirical, though the empirical method could take any desired form, including (but not limited to), detailed case studies, comparative case studies, qualitative analyses of data, statistical analyses of all types, simulations of analytical models calibrated to the real world, interviews of policymakers and stake holders, content analysis of media and other sources in the public domain, and surveys of various relevant stake holders.

Prof. Dr. Rafael Reuveny
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 500 CHF (Swiss Francs). English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

• internal, within country, human displacement
• international, between countries, legal human migration
• international illegal immigration
• immigration policy (e.g., quotas, border control, deportation, amnesty)
• international refugees and asylum seeking
• internal political stability and discontent
• international political stability and discontent
• the scope and content of democracy and/or autocracy
• conflict resolution and peace plans
• the domestic economy
• international economic interdependence
• global distribution of income and other economic aspects of the North-South gap
• the welfare state
• the onset, duration, geographical and temporal distributions, and frequency of civil wars, rebellions, and insurgencies
• the onset, duration, geographical and temporal distributions, and frequency of international wars and military disputes
• the incidence, severity, and geographical and temporal distributions of terrorism
• attitudes toward religion and God, and the role of humanity versus nature in a world subject to climate change
• the role of religion in international and domestic relations
• international alliances, agreements, and other forms of political cooperation
• international polarity and polarization
• global organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary fund, and World Trade Organization
• regional forms of economic and political integration
• international economic and political methods of influence
• ongoing adaptation for climate change across the world in various areas related to the above issues, including national security

Type of Article: Article
Title: Strengthening Sovereignty: Sustainable Security in an Era of Climate Change
Author: Rymn J. Parsons
Affiliation: Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Mid-Atlantic Naval Station, Norfolk, VA, USA; E-Mail: rymn.parsons@navy.mil
Abstract: Using Pakistan and the Arctic as examples, this article examines security challenges arising from climate change-related phenomena and how the paradigm of sustainable security may be applied to address state failure and strategic competition. Pakistan is in crisis, and climate change is an important reason.  Its survival as a state may depend to great extent on whether and how it responds to devastating floods. Arctic ice is melting faster than predicted, producing a modern-day “gold rush” for natural resources.  Conflict may arise out of resource exploitation competition. Environmental state-change has repeatedly overborne the resilience of societies. War is not an inevitable by-product of environmental state-change, but in the 21^st Century, instability creates undesirable conditions leading to insecurity.  Weak and failing states are today’s greatest security challenge. The pace and breadth of environmental state-change in the Arctic is unprecedented in modern times.  A new, open, rich, and accessible maritime environment is coming into being.  Resource competition must be constrained.  Stability must be maintained.  Otherwise, great power competition may become great power confrontation. Pakistan and the Arctic illustrate how climate change can make conditions less and more hospitable to humans.  Both trends are potentially dangerous.  Sustainable – cooperative - security is the answer. Strengthening sovereignty by bolstering weak and failing states, the Pakistan issue, and by pre-empting great power confrontation, the Arctic issue, is a sustainability imperative.

Title: Actor Configuration for Improving Climate Change Governance - A Case of Agenda Setting
Authors: Norichika Kanie ¹, Steinar Andresen ² and Peter M. Haas ³
Affiliations: ¹ Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
² Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway
³ University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Abstract: This paper deals with climate change governance architecture with the focus on configurations of political actor groups and networks in performance of international environmental governance components. The underlying notion of the paper is that effective governance rests on the performance of five governance components, namely, agenda setting, negotiated settlements, compliance and implementation, resilience, and partnerships. We first present a framework of analytical approach to emphasize the importance of political actor configurations in the governance components. In the performance of each component, hypotheses about best and worst practices on the configurations of actor groups involved (i.e. NGOs, epistemic communities, IOs, MNCs, and the states) were drawn based on existing IEG work and insights from IR theory, and on  considerations of the motivations and resources of each actor group. Political assessment of climate change governance from this perspective makes it possible to provide with prescriptions for designing more robust institutional architecture based upon networks of actors that persist over time. Major characteristics of international environmental governance that we consider significant are the followings: (1) Governance occurs through networks of actors; (2) The networks are multilevel/multi-scale: some are hierarchical—going up and down the political scales—and others at the same level of scales (polycentric/multipolar); (3) Networks generate emergent properties; and (4) collective management forms and dynamics cannot be understood reductionistically through studies of individual actors in isolation. Among governance components, this paper focuses particularly on agenda-setting, which is considered to constitute the basis of the current governance problem of climate change. This paper represents a part of concluding part of a book project. From analyzing the process of environmental governance by a comparative study of a series of multilateral environmental agreements and regimes, we attempt to derive policy prescriptions to ongoing problems on climate change governance architecture.

Title: Land Use Adaptation to Climate Change: Economic Damages from Land-Falling Hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf States of the U.S., 1900-2005
Author: Asim Zia
Affiliation: Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, University of Vermont, Burlington VT, USA; E-Mail: Asim.Zia@uvm.edu
Abstract: Global climate change, especially the phenomena of global warming, is expected to increase the intensity of land-falling hurricanes. Societal adaptation is needed to reduce vulnerability from increasingly intense hurricanes. This study quantifies the adaptation effects of potentially policy driven caps on population densities, housing densities and agricultural cover in coastal (and adjacent inland) areas vulnerable to hurricane damages in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal regions of the U.S. Time series regressions, especially autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models, are estimated to forecast the economic impacts of hurricanes of varying intensity, given that various patterns of land use -- population, housing, agriculture -- emerge in the Atlantic and Gulf coastal states of the U.S. The ARMA models use observed time series data from 1900 to 2005 for inflation adjusted hurricane damages and socio-economic and land-use data in the coastal or inland regions where hurricanes caused those damages. The results from this study provide evidence that increases in housing density and agricultural cover cause significant rise in the de-trended inflation-adjusted damages. Population density, surprisingly, shows up as negatively correlated with the de-trended damages. As expected, higher intensity hurricanes significantly increase the economic damages. More importantly, hurricane intensity shows up as a variable with the largest standardized effect on hurricane damages. The evidence from this study implies that a medium to long term land use adaptation in the form of capping housing density and agricultural cover in the coastal states can significantly reduce economic damages from intense hurricanes.