Publications round-up: shipping emissions, cities and climate; EU environmental policy, design and consumerism

In this round-up:

• Policy and mitigation of CO2 from shipping (Tyndall Centre paper)
• How vulnerable could your city be to climate impacts? (European Environment Agency online resource)
• Environmental Policy in the European Union: Contexts, Actors and Policy Dynamics (new book)
• Architecture & Design versus Consumerism: How design confronts growth (new book)

Read about more recent publications and research in the latest SDRN bulletin…

Policy and mitigation of CO2 from shipping

A new paper (funded by the Tyndall Centre) explores the scope for complementary regional, national and global policy to affect shipping.

The authors note ‘Although shipping is an energy efficient transport mode, its emissions continue to grow. Compounding this, the sector’s complexity, exclusion from emission inventories and slow progress towards a mitigation strategy, limit drivers towards meaningful change.’ There is an illustrative section on the UK, as well as details of the areas that stakeholders believe national governments can affect.

More from ScienceDirect…

How vulnerable could your city be to climate impacts?

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of river floods and extreme temperature events in many parts of Europe.

If heavy rain caused rivers to rise by one metre, which European cities could be most at risk from flooding? Which cities could provide relief during heat waves with large green areas and which city designs could most exacerbate the effect of heat waves? What are the capacities of different European cities to cope with climate change impacts and to adapt to future changes?

The recently published EEA report Urban adaptation to climate change in Europe provides initial answers to these and similar questions. Several maps included in the report are now also made available on the interactive Eye on Earth information service. The interactive maps allow users to explore data from more than 500 cities in Europe and get a quick impression of some of the adaptation challenges in Europe’s cities.

More from EEA…

Environmental Policy in the European Union: Contexts, Actors and Policy Dynamics

This is the new and revised third edition of a textbook edited by Andrew Jordan and Camilla Adelle, providing an up-to-date analysis of the EU’s environmental policies. Comprising five parts, it covers the rapidly changing context in which EU policies are made, the key actors and the most salient dynamics of policy making ranging from decision making through to policy evaluation. Written by leading experts in the field, individual chapters examine how the EU is responding to a multitude of different problems, including its efforts to develop more sustainably.

More from Routledge…

Architecture & Design versus Consumerism: How design confronts growth

This new books takes as its premise that in high income countries like the US or the UK, consumer-driven economic growth constitutes one of the biggest obstacles to real sustainability. The book focuses on the ways that spatial and material designers can confront this constant pressure for growth.

The book opens by tackling the four main challenges of consumerism, such as the accelerating pace of consumerism, and shows how designers are responding. The second half of the book turns to a range of examples that illustrate the five main methods that design activists use to confront the challenges of consumerism—methods such as organizing or mobilization—and a range of tactics, such as design competitions or demonstration buildings, which are deployed across these methods. Closing chapters examine how these methods and tactics have the capacity to build power to bring about change, even despite their low budgets and speculate on how the role of design might be transformed in a “post-growth” society.

The author is offering workshops on the book’s topic and also promoting the idea of readers forming groups to discuss and apply the ideas.

More about the book…