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Communities worldwide are critically re-examining their seasonal cultures and calendars. As cultural frameworks, seasons have long patterned community life and provided repertoires for living by annual rhythms. In a chaotic world, the seasons - winter, the monsoon and so on - can feel like stable cultural landmarks for reckoning time and orienting our communities. Seasons are rooted in our pasts and reproduced in our present. They act as schemes for synchronising community activities and professional practices, and as symbol systems for interpreting what happens in the world. But on closer inspection, seasons can be unstable and unreliable. Their meanings can change over time. Seasonal cultu...
Although many local authorities underline the important role of citizens in climate adaptation, many experience difficulties with organizing citizen participation in a way that is meaningful to both citizens and policymakers. Climate change is for many simply not a top priority. Besides, the future is often rather abstract to people, citizens in particular. We argue that practical tools are needed to help citizens structure the process of thinking about and designing the future of their living environment under the impacts of climate change. The toolbox Towards a climate-resilient future together offers practical foresight methods and tools for organizing citizen participation in the process...
After official policy advice to governments is publicly released, governments are often accused of ignoring or rejecting their experts. Commonly represented as politicisation, this depiction is superficial. Digging deeper, is there something about the official advice itself that makes it easy to ignore? Instead of lamenting a demise of expertise, Christiane Gerblinger asks: does the expert advice of policy officials feature characteristics that invite its government audience to overlook or misread it? To answer this question, Gerblinger critically examines official policy advice and finds the language of the rebuffed: government experts reluctant to disclose what they know so as to accommodate political circumstances. She argues that this language evades stable meaning and diminishes the democratic right of citizens to scrutinise the work of government.
This significant book addresses the most important legal issues that cities face when attempting to adapt to the changing climate. This includes how to become more resilient against the impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, increases in the intensity and frequency of storms, floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures.
There are two questions often asked of risk communication: what has been learned from past work, and what is needed to push the field forward? Drawing on the experience of leading risk researchers and practitioners, Effective Risk Communication focuses on answering these questions. The book draws together new examples of research and practice from contexts as diverse as energy generation, human health, nuclear waste, climate change, food choice, and social media. This book treats risk communication as much more than the interchange of risk information between experts and non-experts; rather, it aims to emphasise the diversity in viewpoints and practices. In each specially commissioned chapte...
Climate change highlights the challenges for long-term policy making in the face of persistent and irreducible levels of uncertainties. It calls for the development of flexible approaches, innovative governance and other elements that contribute to effective and adaptive decision-making. Exploring these new approaches is also a challenge for those involved in climate research and development of adaptation policy. The book provides a dozen real-life examples of adaptation decision making in the form of case studies: · Water supply management in Portugal, England and Wales and Hungary · Flooding, including flood risk in Ireland, coastal flooding and erosion in Southwest France, and flood management in Australia’s Hutt River region · Transport and utilities, including the Austrian Federal railway system, public transit in Dresden, and Québec hydro-electric power · Report examining communication of large numbers of climate scenarios in Dutch climate adaptation workshops.
This comprehensive book looks at COVID-19, along with other recent infectious disease outbreaks, with the broad aim of providing constructive lessons and critical reflections from across a wide range of perspectives and disciplinary interests within the risk analysis field. The chapters in this edited volume probe the roles of risk communication, risk perception, and risk science in helping to manage the ever-growing pandemic that was declared a public health emergency of international concern in the beginning of 2020. A few chapters in the book also include relevant content discussing past disease outbreaks, such as Zika, Ebola and MERS-CoV. This book distils past and present knowledge, appraises current responses, introduces new ideas and data, and offers key recommendations, which will help illuminate different aspects of the global health crisis. It also explores how different constructive insights offered from a ‘risk perspective’ might inform decisions on how best to proceed in response as the pandemic continues. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Risk Research.
In this volume, on the basis of three consultations which took place in Seoul and Geneva (2016, 2017, 2018), theologians from Yonsei University's College of Theology in Seoul, South Korea, and from the Theological Faculty at the University of Geneva reflect together on three of the main challenges facing Christian theology today. First, questions related to religious pluralism and multiple religious belonging are addressed. Second, the `promise' of an enhanced human being through technology and other means is discussed. Third, the reality of the threat humanity represents to our ecosystem is considered. Each of these themes is examined from a Korean as well as from a Western European perspective, for Christian theology, in our day, can no longer afford to remain limited to its own geographical context. Christophe Chalamet is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). Hyun-Shik Jun is Professor of Systematic Theology at Yonsei University's College of Theology in Seoul, Korea.
This volume defines, illustrates, and challenges the field on environmental political theory. Through a broad range of approaches, it shows how scholars have used concepts, methods, and arguments from political theory and closely related disciplines to address contemporary environmental problems.