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The past two decades have seen an impressive expansion of municipal engagement with climate change. Yet while interest has broadened, actions remain shallow. This is in part because climate policies fit uneasily into existing bureaucratic structures and practices. Effective climate programmes require adaptive and innovative responses that span departmental divisions. This challenges siloised municipal offices that are embedded in their own organisational cultures and technical practices. Understanding those challenges is crucial to understanding urban responses to climate change, but they remain critically understudied. This paper helps to fill that gap by looking at the experiences of two cities, Durban (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA) as they attempt to put in place integrated responses to climate change. To do so, it brings together complementary critical perspectives drawn from the study of bureaucracies and complex institutions in sociology and geography. This hybrid critical framework is used to elaborate on both the organisational barriers that inhibit effective responses to climate change, and approaches that can be used to enable change and innovation.

Biofuel plantations have been hyped as a means to reinvigorate Africa’s rural areas. Yet there is still apprehension about the negative environmental and social impacts of large-scale commercial biofuel production around rising food prices, land grabbing, ecological damage, and disruption of rural livelihoods. Given the extent of Jatropha curcas production in Ghana and Ethiopia and Castor bean (Ricinus communis) in Ethiopia, this paper presents the results of a study that assessed the socio-economic implications of industrial Jatropha plantations on local livelihoods in Ghana, and of industrial Jatropha and Castor plantations on local livelihoods in Ethiopia. This study used primary data collected from 234 households in Ghana and 165 in Ethiopia. The cultivation of Jatropha and Castor has had several important effects on local livelihoods in the study sites, most notably decreases in household landholdings due to the arrival of industrial Jatropha or Castor plantations; and the resulting changes these plantations have caused in household socio-economic status, food security, fallow periods, and fodder availability. We consider how a lack of meaningful consultation between local people, their traditional authorities and the biofuel company managers, along with shortcomings in each country’s broader land acquisition process and poor land use information, may have contributed to these overall negative effects on local livelihoods. We conclude by suggesting several ways that emerging biofuel industries could be improved from the perspective of local people and their livelihoods.

More than40%of US grain is used for energy due to the Renewable Fuel Mandate (RFS). There are no studies of the global distributional consequences of this purely domestic policy. Using micro‐level survey data, we trace the effect of the RFS on world food prices and their impact on household level consumption and wage incomes in India. We first develop a partial equilibrium model to estimate the effect of the RFS on the price of selected food commodities—rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and meat and dairy, which together provide almost70%of Indian food calories. Our model predicts that world prices for these commodities rise by 8–16%due to the RFS. We estimate the price pass‐through to domestic Indian prices and the effect of the price shock on household welfare through consumption and wage incomes. Poor rural households suffer significant welfare losses due to higher prices of consumption goods, which are regressive. However, they benefit from a rise in wage incomes, mainly because most of them are employed in agriculture. Urban households also bear the higher cost of food, but do not see a concomitant rise in wages because only a small fraction of them work in food‐related industries. Welfare losses are greater among urban households. However, more poor people in India live in villages, so rural poverty impacts are larger in magnitude. We estimate that the mandate leads to about 25 million new poor: 21 million in rural and 4 million in the urban population.

The paper contributes to the debate about how to empirically assess sustainability using the capital approach to development. It focuses on OECD countries for which intangible capital makes up a very large proportion of total wealth. After discussing growth rates of GDP per capita, total wealth per capita and its main subcategories over the 1995–2005 period, correlations between different monetary sustainability indices associated with the capital approach are explored. The conceptually preferred index “change in total wealth per capita” that includes intangible capital is only weakly correlated with the other indices. The analysis is extended to also include some prominent non‐monetary composite sustainability indices. This strengthens the earlier findings. The main message of the paper is that if we accept change in total wealth per capita as the preferred measure, commonly used adjusted net savings‐based indices might be quite misleading, at least for OECD countries.

Sustainable fishing includes the socioeconomic status of fishers. We combined empirical quality of life (QOL) and subjective lived experiences methods to explore the social sustainability of artisanal fishers in five fishery collectives along the coast of Jalisco, Mexico, where the average daily income is slightly above the poverty level. The QOL scores were also related to annual catch and incomes within each collective. A QOL index is used in this study that combines importance and achievement ratings scores; the results are indicative of an acceptable QOL for fishermen. The concept of lived experiences, incorporating aspects of life relating to Mind, Body, Work and People was explored through interviews with 12 fishers. The QOL data revealed that family and friends are important indicators related to positive QOL reported by the sample, while economic indicators were not important. Although four of the five collectives perceived that the future looks worse than the present and past, there was limited correlation between catch or income and QOL. However, while the lived experiences exercise in part supported the QOL findings, in that People was the most important dimension for almost all of the fishers interviewed, negative economic gaps related to poor catches and incomes were prevalent in the Mind and Work dimensions. The findings suggest that to understand the socioeconomic component of sustainable fisheries, both of these approaches should be considered, as they can illuminate different aspects of fishers’ lives that need to be considered during the development of fisheries’ management policies.

This study aimed at developing a list of key human health indicators for quantifying the health impacts of climate change in Canada.A literature review was conducted in OVID Medline to identify health morbidity and mortality indicators currently used to quantify climate change impacts. Public health frameworks and other studies of climate change indicators were reviewed to identify criteria with which to evaluate the list of proposed key indicators and a rating scale was developed. Total scores for each indicator were calculated based on the rating scale.A total of 77 health indicators were identified from the literature. After evaluation using the chosen criteria, 8 indicators were identified as the best for use. They include excess daily all-cause mortality due to heat, premature deaths due to air pollution (ozone and particulate matter 2.5), preventable deaths from climate change, disability-adjusted life years lost from climate change, daily all-cause mortality, daily non-accidental mortality, West Nile Disease incidence, and Lyme borreliosis incidence.There is need for further data and research related to health effect quantification in the area of climate change.

The aim of this paper is to assess how policy goals in relation to the promotion of green growth, energy security, pollution control and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions have been aligned in policies that have been implemented in selected countries during the last decades as a basis for discussing how a multi objective policy paradigm can contribute to future climate change mitigation. The paper includes country case studies from Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea and the United States covering renewable energy options, industry, transportation, the residential sector and cross-sectoral policies. These countries and regions together contribute more than two thirds of global GHG emissions. The paper finds that policies that are nationally driven and that have multiple objectives, including climate-change mitigation, have been widely applied for decades in both developing countries and industrialised countries. Many of these policies have a long history, and adjustments have taken place based on experience and cost effectiveness concerns. Various energy and climate-change policy goals have worked together in these countries, and in practice a mix of policies reflecting specific priorities and contexts have been pursued. In this way, climate-change mitigation has been aligned with other policy objectives and integrated into broader policy packages, though in many cases specific attention has not been given to the achievement of large GHG emission reductions. Based on these experiences with policy implementation, the paper highlights a number of key coordination and design issues that are pertinent to the successful joint implementation of several energy and climate-change policy goals.