Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.     

文化地理学视角下跨国移民饮食适应研究进展与启示

全球化进程下,跨国移民成为不同地域间文化交流、冲突和再协商的主要载体,其在地饮食适应问题尤为凸显。本文回顾了国内外跨国移民饮食适应的研究,发现由营养学等范式主导的早期研究偏重对饮食适应水平的直接观测,较少探究饮食适应的身体属性、地方关系以及文化意涵。文化地理学视角下的跨国移民饮食适应的相关研究进展主要包括以下三个方面：身体尺度下的动态饮食适应过程、地方尺度下跨国饮食景观的生产与重构,以及身体与地方交互尺度下饮食适应与身份认同的复杂关系。本文最后针对当前研究的主要不足提出未来跨国移民饮食适应研究的可能议题。     

移动地理研究的一种理论框架——基于文献分析

移动性是21世纪人文地理的研究热点和重要议题,它体现了空间科学的社会学转向,属于人文地理学的核心概念和中心命题,其中心性突出体现在它与其他传统和新兴的人文地理分支学科的交叉。本文以表格为工具梳理了地理移动性的研究理路,发现移动地理与其他人文地理分支学科共同聚焦的核心是：时间地理、旅游地理、行为地理的“时空行为”问题,政治地理、社会地理的“权力”“平等”“权利”问题,身体地理的“具身实践”“感官体验”问题,情感地理的“地方依恋”“身份认同”问题,想象地理的“地方感”问题,道德地理的“空间道德感”问题。本文识别这些关键问题为移动地理的“核心要素”,搭建移动地理的框架和体系,指出探查这些要素之间相互作用机制和不同时空移动类型的转化机理是未来移动性的研究方向。根据移动的空间尺度和时间强度,构建了包括日常移动、旅游和旅行移动到永久性移动在内的地理学移动性连续轴类型,并探索了移动地理研究的方法论体系。     

The ripple effects of large-scale transport infrastructure investment

We analyze the general equilibrium effects of an asymmetric decrease in transport costs, combining a large-scale spatial dynamic general equilibrium model for 267 European NUTS-2 regions with a detailed transport model at the level of individual road segments. As a case study, we consider the impact of the road infrastructure investments in Central and Eastern Europe of the European Cohesion Policy. Our analysis suggests that the decrease in transportation costs benefits the targeted regions via substantial increases in gross domestic product (GDP) and welfare compared to the baseline, and a small increase in population. The geographic information embedded in the transport model leads to relatively large predicted benefits in peripheral countries such as Greece and Finland, which hardly receive funds, but whose trade links cross Central and Eastern Europe, generating profit from the investments there. The richer, Western European nontargeted regions also enjoy a higher GDP after the investment in the East, but these effects are smaller. Thus, the policy reduces interregional disparities. There are rippled patterns in the predicted policy spillovers. In nontargeted countries, regions trading more intensely with regions where the investment is taking place on average benefit more compared to other regions within the same country, but also compared to neighboring regions across an international border. We uncover that regions importing goods from Central and Eastern Europe enjoy the largest spillovers. These regions become more competitive and expand exports, to the detriment of other regions in the same country.     

Inter- and intraregional inequality in a spatial economy

In this paper, we develop a three-region economic geography model with workers of heterogeneous skills and mobility rates to consider how first-nature, regional differences impact both inter- and intraregional inequality. In our model, the skill premium within a region summarizes both the degree of intraregional inequality between mobile, skilled workers and immobile, unskilled workers and the interregional inequality through differences in the welfare of unskilled workers across regions. Regions with the highest skill premium have the greatest degree of intraregional inequality and provide the lowest level of welfare to unskilled workers, relative to other regions. We find that the skill premium will be higher in regions with a greater supply of unskilled labor, lower supply of housing, or are more remote. An increase in a region's housing supply or centrality will lower intraregional inequality and raise the welfare of the local, unskilled workforce. However, the magnitude of these changes are declining in the initial number of skilled workers in the region. The model is extended to consider imperfectly elastic housing supply. The larger the price elasticity of housing, the larger the range of values, such that more populated regions will host a disproportionate share of skilled workers, have lower levels of intraregional inequality, and provide higher levels of welfare for unskilled workers.     

Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

Regulatory Alchemy: How the Water Cycle Becomes Capital in the California Desert

A proposed project will take water from an aquifer in the California desert to the coast. Lacking final approvals more than 30 years after it started, the project remains a plan despite sizeable opposition. What is its secret? In this paper, I examine the imaginaries of the underground aquifer underneath the lands of Cadiz Inc, the project proponent. While local theories insist the company is at the centre of a Chinatown conspiracy, I argue that the company stays alive through regulatory alchemy, a term that reveals the magic at the heart of scientific and regulatory approval processes. I examine narratives of the aquifer in environmental compliance and financial reporting in order to reveal how regulatory processes become the conditions of profit-making, building on debates in critical legal geography and political ecology.     

Patterns of exchange and the social production of pigs in highland new guinea: Their relevance to questions about the origins and evolution of agriculture

In recent years, cultural anthropologists have made notable progress in understanding the bewildering variety of material exchange transactions found among the aboriginal populations of highland New Guinea. One of the major findings of this work is that competitive exchange behavior may bring in its wake alterations in agronomic practices involving an intensification of production. That intensification is primarily a product of social behavior, rather than an adaptation to climate change or population pressure, is a significant conclusion that should influence the thinking of archaeologists as they investigate past episodes of agronomic change, including the origins of agriculture.