Books in the Anthem Environmental Studies series

In the aftermath of considerable seismic unrest caused by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, this volume focuses on exposing the coastal vulnerability of the region. Despite a plethora of enquiries into natural disasters in different parts of the globe, there is now a more conspicuous concern than ever for the South East Asian region. This global concern has become all the more prevalent since the Hyogo Declaration in January 2005 and the recent Asian Summit in Indonesia. The purpose of this treatise is to bring the characteristics of the disastrous events of the region to the fore, seeking to present not only the continuing fatalities and fragilities of the area, but also the possibilities for coping with natural disasters. The book’s layout is specifically shaped by the nature of the damage and threat caused by these disasters, particularly concerning the communities at risk and their responses. This book will appeal to those involved in both global and local organizations as administrators, facilitators, stakeholders and activists, as well as Governmental / Non Governmental agencies, societies including organizations such as ESCAP, UNDP, WMO, UNESCO, UNCRD.

The archipelago of the Philippines is well endowed in nonferrous mineral resources such as copper, gold, lead, silver, nickel, and zinc. In recent years, the government of the Philippines, acting under the influence of the dominant and seemingly ubiquitous neoliberal development paradigm, has liberalized its mining laws to encourage the extraction of minerals by foreign corporations in order to accelerate the development of the economy. The Philippines is also a nation highly prone to a variety of natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, and El Nioinduced droughts.Nonferrous metals mining is an activity with a substantial potential for environmental degradation, and these various natural hazards have a high potential to adversely interact with minings potential for environmental degradation. Earthquakes can destabilize tailings storage facilities, typhoons can flood tailings ponds, and mine-pit dewatering can enhance the competition for groundwater resources during droughts. This study show how natural hazards can amplify the environmental harm prevalent in mining and pose a substantial threat to the livelihoods of archipelagos poor, who are dependent upon subsistence agriculture and subsistence aquaculture.

Climate change and the intertwined extinction crisis lend themselves to political economy. Joseph Henry Vogel has constructed an argument for bringing the carbon-rich but economically poor countries through the bottleneck of a cowboy economy and into the 'cap and trade' Annex I countries of the Kyoto Protocol. Ecuador serves as the example. The Economics of the Yasun Initiative is a counterpoint to The Economics of Climate Change by Sir Nicholas Stern on many levels. At the most basic level, Vogel argues that Stern is wrong for his failure to recognize the nature of climate change as thermodynamic, thereby missing the point of Northern appropriation of the atmospheric sink. The switch to thermodynamics brings into focus the legitimacy of a 'carbon debt that starts to tick with the first report of the IPCC in 1990. Through the lens of economic theory, the understandable intransigence of poor countries to assume the 'cap' in 'cap and trade' is a distortion to the economic system. But by that same economics, one distortion can justify another. That other distortion is the payment Ecuador seeks for not drilling in the Yasun Biosphere. Heeding the call of Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey that economics needs more humor, Vogel has written a scathing critique of economics-as-usual which also entertains.

This book responds to the some of the twenty-first centurys most assuming problems of our times: global warming, sub-national terrorism, natural resource depletion, and economic, environmental and financial crises. It finds short- and long-term solutions to these global woes by looking to the city as the fulcrum for introducing sustainability around the world. Beginning with an outline of a robust strategy of sustainable citiesor sustainable city-regionsthat has emerged out of over two-and-a-half decades of theoretical and practical work, the authors show why these portentous problems can best be addressed at the local-regional scale. In the process, this book cuts through the received wisdom and popular misunderstandings about sustainability and peels away the conceptual fog and ideological confusion about the meaning of sustainability.Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in North America, Europe and Asia, the authors examine both strong and weak examples of sustainable city approaches that validate their distinctive urban sustainability strategy. They discover keen insights and important lessons in these case studies for sustainability practice across the globe, whether in small towns in the US and Canada, large cities in Europe or tiny Chinese villages in Asia. Their concluding chapter argues that only the road less travelled holds real promise of creating sustainable city-regions around the world guided by the toolkit of ecological and technological conviviality.