All publications and documents

This paper explores the potential of climate finance to support developing country efforts to shift away from unsustainable land use patterns in the context of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. The authors pursue two research objectives here. Through a meta-analysis of 40 developing country Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), they provide, first, a comprehensive qualitative…

The increasing complexity of our global society means that sustainable development cannot be addressed from a single perspective or scientific discipline. By using the concept of transitions, we examine current and future tensions between welfare, well-being and the environment, and focus on four major issues that are of global importance: two of our key natural resources, water and biodiversity;…

Drylands—defined here to include arid, semi-arid, and dry subhumid zones are at the core of Africa’s development challenge. Drylands make up about 43 percent of the continent’s land surface, account for about 75 percent of the area used for agriculture, and are home to about 50 percent of the population, including a disproportionate share of the poor. Due to complex interactions…

China has been subject to floods, droughts and heat waves for millennia; these hazards are not new. What is new is how rapidly climate risks are changing for different groups of people and sectors. This is due to the unprecedented rates of socio-economic development, migration, land-use change, pollution and urbanisation, all occurring alongside increasingly more intense and frequent weather…

This landmark book maps the latest theoretical and empirical research in this energetic and growing field. Captured here are the pioneering and lively debates over concerns for the health of the planet and how they might best be addressed. The introduction explores the intellectual trends and evolving parameters in the field of global environmental politics. It makes a case for an…

Despite the lack of robust empirical evidence, a growing number of media reports attempt to link climate change to the ongoing violent conflicts in Syria and other parts of the world, as well as to the migration crisis in Europe. Exploiting bilateral data on asylum seeking applications for 157 countries over the period 2006–2015, we assess the determinants of refugee flows using a…