Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Education and training programmes can help overcome barriers to the market
acceptance of energy efficiency.
Changes in occupant behaviour, cultural patterns, consumer choice and use
of technologies can result in considerable reduction in CO
2
emissions related to
energy use in buildings.
'Transport demand management', which includes urban planning (which can
reduce the demand for travel) and provision of information and educational
techniques (which can reduce car usage and lead to a more efficient driving
style).
In industry, management tools that include staff training, reward systems,
regular feedback and documentation of existing practices can help overcome
industrial organizational barriers, reducing energy use and emissions.
(IPCC, 2007: 17)
Climate change policies and the goals of sustainable development have clear
synergies. Societies will need to build adaptive capacities to deal with increased risk
and vulnerabilities - floods, drought, temperature extremes, which will almost certainly
affect crop production, distribution and food security (Adger
et al
., 2003; Gregory
et al
., 2005). Other synergies clearly relate to energy efficiency and economic policy.
Renewable energy can be economically beneficial, improve energy security, reduce
local pollutant emissions, create jobs and improve health. (Re)forestation and bio-
energy plantations can lead to restoration of degraded land, manage water run-off,
retain soil carbon, reduce loss of natural habitats, enhance biodiversity, conserve
soil and water, and benefit rural economies if properly designed and implemented.
There are a whole host of geo-engineering solutions ranging from the bizarre to the
possible, the unproven and socially questionable (Jackson and Salzman, 2010). Climate
change is therefore about what we do, have done, what facts we assume we generate
and most importantly the meaning we attach to these facts and actions. Climate
change will take on different forms in different places and cultural values, predis-
positions and political frames of understanding will generate different pre- and
proscriptions, notions of citizenship and governance, corporate and other forms of
responsibility, perceptions of nature, dialogues and conversation, legal obligations,
and actions that bridge different geographical scales. As Sheila Jasanoff (2010) argues,
the interpretative social sciences have an important role to play here in fashioning
frameworks with which we can think about climate change - the social, the human
and the means by which we shape our future. For Mike Hulme (2009), it is imperative
that we harness our creative, psychological, spiritual and ethical imaginations to
show how culture and science interrelate, and that politics and business are not the
sole considerations that are important to securing the future we want. For Eileen
Crist (2007), however, there are two issues that emerge from the very real and very
serious threats of climate change. The first is the tendency for governments and
others to look primarily to technical proposals as a means of addressing current
changes and the second is that climate change seems to crowd out all the other
ecological predicaments the world needs to address. She writes:
Climate change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today
that it has contributed to downplaying other facets of the ecological crisis: mass
extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued
