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Africa has experienced unprecedented growth across a range of development indices for decades. However, this growth is often at the expense of Africa’s biodiversity and ecosystems, jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of people depending on the goods and services provided by nature, with broader consequences for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Encouragingly, Africa can still take a more sustainable path. Here, we synthesize the key learnings from the African Ecological Futures project. We report results from a participatory scenario planning process around four collectively-owned scenarios and narratives for the evolution of Africa’s ecological resource base over the next 50 years. These scenarios provided a lens to review pressures on the natural environment, through the drivers, pressures, state, impacts, and responses (DPSIR) framework. Based on the outcomes from each of these steps, we discuss opportunities to reorient Africa’s development trajectories towards a sustainable path. These opportunities fall under the broad categories of “effective natural resource governance”, “strategic planning capabilities”, “investment safeguards and frameworks”, and “new partnership models”. Underpinning all these opportunities are “data, management information, and decision support frameworks”. This work can help inform collaborative action by a broad set of actors with an interest in ensuring a sustainable ecological future for Africa.

AbstractThe dynamic economic behavior in most integrated assessment models linking economic growth to climate change involves a differential equation solved by Jacob Bernoulli in 1695. Using the dynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) model and freezing exogenous variables at initial values, this dynamic is shown to produce implausible projections on a 60‐year time frame. If world capital started at US$1, after 60 years the world economy would be indistinguishable from one starting with 10 times the current capitalization. Such behavior points to uncertainty at the level of the fundamental dynamics, and suggests that discussions of discounting, utility, damage functions, and ethics should be conducted within a more general modeling vocabulary. Lotka Volterra dynamics is proposed as an alternative with greater prime facie plausibility. With near universality, economists assume that economic growth will go on forever. Lotka Volterra dynamics alert us to the possibility of collapse. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2013; 9: 2–6. © 2012 SETAC

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is advocated for achieving sustainable transportation through development around transit stations. TOD’s global implementation revealed varied outcomes, with many cities failing to achieve the intended objectives. TOD implementation in the Jakarta Metropolitan area still in its infancy. Through a geospatial information system and a survey of 400 commuters who live inside the 1 km radius of planned TOD, this longitudinal study aimed to examine an eight-year lapse between 2013 and 2020 of changes in two aspects, specifically land-use and spatial distribution as well as commuters’ travel behavior and preferences in TOD implementation and travel changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Key findings are as follows: increased diversity in the residential function around planned TOD areas in the Jakarta capital and a decrease in the suburbs, reflecting the commuters’ improved readiness to reside in planned TOD areas. Furthermore, kinship relations were the commuters’ main reason when selecting house locations, with no capacity to change their workplaces. A significant increase in public facilities at the expense of green open space (GOS) indicates that TOD implementation was conducted by the government with the sole authority to manage GOS, lacking private sector involvement. The cost factor was the most dominant reason for the commuter’s use of public transportation, instead of new transport modes such as MRT and LRT. Moreover, the commuter’s travel behavior in all studied transit stations, whilst it showed evidence of changes in time and frequency, was not greatly influenced by the COVID-19 related restrictions.

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis for the global panel consisting of 29 countries (Bahrain, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Japan, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Korea rep, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, IR Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam are taken as the sample of this study) with energy consumption, economic growth and trade openness as additional determinants of environmental degradation over the period 1994–2014. To make the panel data analysis more homogenous, we also investigate the validity of the PHH for a number of sub‐panels. These sub‐panels are constructed based on the sub‐regions of Asia. In this way, we end up with six Asian panels; namely, Global panel, West Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asian panels. Based on the IPS and ADF chi‐square unit root test and Pedroni cointegration test results, all variables were found to be first difference stationary and cointegrated. On applying FMOLS, the long‐run results suggest the presence of the pollution haven hypothesis only in East Asian panel. In turn, foreign direct investment reduces environmental degradation, thus rejecting the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) in the Southeast Asian panel which is found to be negatively linked to CO2 emissions. Moreover, energy consumption seems to be the main determinant of carbon emissions and GDP growth has a positive impact on it in all panels except West Asia. Lastly, East Asian countries have followed the Kyoto protocol in order to reduce their emissions level.

Urban water management is a growing concern in India's rapidly urbanizing cities. Population growth and climatic variability are exuberating the impact on surface and underground water supply. Understanding the causes and the extent of water vulnerability is required for developing effective strategies for water insecurities. This study attempts to assess the water vulnerability across different wards of a touristic city of Himalaya-Nainital using IPCC approach considering the three dimensions: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Seven indicators, mostly spatial, i.e. edaphic (aspect, elevation) and climatic (land surface temperature) besides some water infrastructural (distance to water distribution) and population, were considered for development of vulnerability index using Analytical Hierarchy Process for assigning weights. These indicators were simple to extract and easy to obtain and mostly available from secondary sources and were capable to account the variability at micro-level. Moreover, the current adaptation mechanisms for water security were also derived through conducting surveys by randomly selecting households across the wards. Staff House and Harinagar wards were the most vulnerable. The survey results that the adaptation mechanism should be managed at individual and organization level. Policy measures such as optimum use of water, grey water recycling, spring rejuvenation, rain water harvesting, and leakage proof infrastructure with intervention of new technologies, may be adopted and implemented for reducing the water vulnerability in the city along with the public participation. The appropriate measures for water vulnerability would further provide support for improving the facilities to the tourists in the city thereby improved economic opportunities to the locals.

Abstract Solid waste generation and treatment become one of the main concerns for the rural area. This article reviews the solid waste composition and various solid waste treatment technologies in the rural areas of India and other countries. The solid waste generated in a rural area containing more than 50% of organic waste and rest inorganic. Waste generation rate is 0.3–0.9 kg/capita/day in various rural areas of different countries. Agriculture waste and animal waste are the major components of the organic fraction. Because of the organic nature of waste, composting is the most feasible technology of treating solid waste in the rural area. The review article also focused on various factors which may affect the process of composting and helpful for selecting composting technology as moisture content, C/N ratio, turning frequency, particle size, aeration rate, and temperature. Optimum values of these parameters are found that the optimum moisture content is (45%–60%), suitable temperature (45–70 °C), turning frequency (7–15 days/turning) and C/N ratio (25–30). This paper also contains various treatment technologies for the organic solid waste which are based on composting and anaerobic digestion.

In recent years, growing water insecurity in the Himalayan region has attracted new scientific research and fresh attention on policy. In this paper, we synthesize field research evidence from a sample of five Himalayan cities—three in Nepal and two in the western Indian Himalayas—on various forms of water insecurity and cities’ responses to such challenges. We gathered evidence from a field research conducted in these cities between 2014 and 2018. We show how different types of Himalayan towns (mainly hilltop, foot hill, river side, touristic, and regional trading hub) are struggling to secure water for their residents and tourists, as well as for the wider urban economy. We found that even though the region receives significant amounts of precipitation in the form of snow and rainfall, it is facing increasing levels of water insecurity. Four of the five towns we studied are struggling to develop well-performing local institutions to manage water supply. Worse still, none of the cities have a robust system of water planning and governance to tackle the water challenges emerging from rapid urbanization and climate change. In the absence of a coordinated water planning agency, a complex mix of government, community, and private systems of water supply has emerged in the Himalayan towns across both Nepal and India. There is clearly a need for strengthening local governance capacity as well as down-scaling climate science to inform water planning at the city level.

I read with interest the commentary article by Bongaarts and Sitruk-Ware.1 I think this commentary is very timely, and I am so glad to see this topic being discussed. However, I wondered whether there could have been more of a focus on the impact of population in developed countries, particularly on the impact of having a child if you are in the most socioeconomically developed subgroup of the population? I would be really interested to hear the commentary authors' views on this. Although …