Environmental Science & Policy

In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established that global greenhouse gas emissions trajectories are not on track to limiting warming to less than 2 ° C above pre-industrial averages (IPCC 2022a). Given that broader progress towards ambitious climate change and sustainability goals remains incremental, a whole-of-society approach, including transformative innovation in …

The European Commission defines the Green Transition as the transformation set out in the European Green Deal. Ensuring that this transition is just is both an ethical requirement and a practical condition for maintaining public support and policy effectiveness. This Perspective proposes a multidimensional framework for assessing justice in Green Transition policies, encompassing distributional, …

This article examines Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) as a participatory method that supports Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) by amplifying Indigenous and local voices and exposing structural drivers of vulnerability in climate research and practice. Designed by the author and implemented in collaboration with Indigenous communities in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, CDST draws on ora…

Knowledge brokers have emerged as a key mechanism for facilitating knowledge exchange across institutional and epistemic divides to enable more inclusive, informed, and context-sensitive decision-making. However, despite growing recognition about their value and importance, critical gaps remain related to how knowledge brokers operate that hinders their effectiveness and efficiency in practice. O…

In the past decade, diverse public policies and initiatives have been put in place to fight against food waste. The Milan Urban Food Policy includes circular bioeconomy, by preventing food waste and redistributing food surpluses during the different stages of the food chain to reduce socio-economic inequalities and environmental impacts. Here, based on an in-depth case study, the ‘Neighbourhood H…

In the context of increasing global warming, alternative climate intervention strategies are gaining prominence in policy, scientific, media, and public discourse. This study provides novel insights into public perceptions of these interventions, and the foreseeable changes for the near future, through a global foresight exercise involving 44 focus groups across 22 countries, evenly divided betwe…

In Canada, the discharge of pharmaceutical substances from wastewater treatment plants into freshwater ecosystems is an escalating environmental challenge. This study evaluates Canada’s Chemicals Management Plan (CMP) assessment of pharmaceutical substances (PhAC) by considering expert stakeholder insights, exposing key gaps and exploring transformative strategies for pharmaceutical risk governan…

The benefits of involving stakeholders in natural resource projects are well established and in food-energy-water nexus work specifically, those benefits are increasingly being documented. We conducted a review of food, energy, water systems manuscripts and assessed whether stakeholders were engaged, when they were engaged, which stakeholders were involved, the level of their involvement, whether…

Environmental governance (EG) involves the human dimensions that influence biodiversity and natural resource management. Effective EG relies on collaborative and participatory arrangements that enable stakeholder influence in decision-making. This review presents a collection of Social Network Performance Indicators (SNPI) that quantify collaborative qualities such as relationship building, power…

Traditional modeling approaches for net-zero, sustainable development often prioritize technical and expert-driven inputs, producing outputs that overlook critical institutional and behavioral considerations. Although there has been growing interest in participatory approaches and transdisciplinary research in modeling, most processes currently stop at consultation, missing opportunities for deep…

Colonialism continues to have an enduring impact on hydrological research, practice, and education. This paper examines the colonial legacy in hydrology and highlights the need for decolonisation to achieve justice, inclusivity, and sustainability in water management. Through tracing the development of hydrology research and examining stories from Canada, Indonesia, India, West Asia, and Africa, …

Global water governance has increasingly focused on resilience as a means to manage cross-scale complexity and change. In this paper, rather than proposing a rigid new framework, we integrate the concept of socio-natural resilience into the analysis of hydrosocial territories to interpret the complex governance transformations in China. Using field data from the Great Yangtze River Protection Pro…

Climate services are fast being embraced as key climate adaptation tools, in a drive to base societies’ adaptive decisions on advanced forecasting technologies. Desired futures for climate services are most clearly articulated through the World Meteorological Organisation’s Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS), which describes a normative configuration of actors, practices, knowledges, an…