By Daniel Mazmanian, Hilda Blanco
Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd
2014
Against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of urbanization, 21st century cities across the globe share concerns for the challenges they face. This Companion provides a framework for understanding the city as a critical building block for a more sustainable future within broader subnational, national and continental contexts, and ultimately, within a global systems context. It discusses the sustainable strategies being devised, as well as the methods and tools for achieving them. Examples of social, economic, political and environmental sustainable policy strategies are presented and the extent to which they actually increase sustainability is analyzed.
By Diego Puga, Jorge De la Roca
Review of Economic Studies
2014
Individual earnings are higher in bigger cities. We consider three reasons: spatial sorting of initially more productive workers, static advantages from workers’ current location, and learning by working in bigger cities. Using rich administrative data for Spain, we find that workers in bigger cities do not have higher initial unobserved ability as reflected in fixed-effects. Instead, they obtain an immediate static premium and accumulate more valuable experience. The additional value of experience in bigger cities persists after leaving and is stronger for those with higher initial ability. This explains both the higher mean and greater dispersion of earnings in bigger cities.
By Antonio M. Bento, Richard Klotz
Environmental Science & Technology
2014
Lifecycle analysis (LCA) metrics of greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly being used to select technologies supported by climate policy. However, LCAs typically evaluate the emissions associated with a technology or product, not the impacts of policies. Here, we show that policies supporting the same technology can lead to dramatically different emissions impacts per unit of technology added, due to multimarket responses to the policy. Using a policy-based consequential LCA, we find that the lifecycle emissions impacts of four US biofuel policies range from a reduction of 16.1 gCO2e to an increase of 24.0 gCO2e per MJ corn ethanol added by the policy. The differences between these results and representative technology-based LCA measures, which do not account for the policy instrument driving the expansion in the technology, illustrate the need for policy-based LCA measures when informing policy decision making.
By Cristian Huse, Claudio Lucinda
The Economic Journal
2014
We quantify the effects of the Swedish Green Car Rebate (GCR), a programme to reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions in the automobile industry. We find the GCR increases the market shares of ‘green cars’ and its cost to be $109/ton CO22 saved, thus five times the price of an emission permit. Since the main green cars in Sweden are flexible‐fuel vehicles (FFVs), which can switch between petrol (gasoline) and ethanol, we also account for fuel choice, which increases the cost of the programme. Finally, we show that consumers would have purchased FFVs regardless of the rebate provided by the GCR.
By Douglas Houston, Marlon Boarnet, Gavin Ferguson, Steven Spears
Directing growth towards compact rail corridors has become a key strategy for redirecting auto-oriented regions towards denser, mixed-use communities that support sustainable travel. Few have examined how travel of near-rail residents varies within corridors or whether corridor land use–travel interactions diverge from regional averages. The Los Angeles region has made substantial investments in transit-oriented development, and our survey analysis indicates that although rail corridor residents drove less and rode public transit more than the county average, households in an older subway corridor with more near-transit development had about 11 fewer daily miles driven and higher transit ridership than households along a newer light rail line, a difference likely associated with development patterns and the composition and preferences of residents. Rail transit corridors are not created equally, and transit providers and community planners should consider the social and development context of corridors in efforts to improve transit access and maximise development.
By Joon Ahn, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Fan Bai, Lin Zhang
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
2014
Disseminating shared information to many vehicles could
incur significant access fees if it relies only on unicast cellular communications. We consider the problem of efficient content dissemination over a vehicular network, in which vehicles are equipped with two kinds of radios: a high-cost low-bandwidth, long-range cellular radio, and a free high-bandwidth short-range radio. We formulate and solve an optimization problem to maximize content dissemination from the infrastructure to vehicles within a predetermined deadline while minimizing the cost associated with communicating over the cellular connection. We examine numerically the tradeoffs between cost, delay and system utility in the optimum regime. We find that, in the optimum regime,
(a) system utility is more sensitive to the cost budget when the allowed
delay for the dissemination is not large, (b) the system requires relatively
smaller cost budget as more vehicles participate and more delay is
allowed, (c) when the cost is very important, it is better not to spread
the content if it needs small delay. We also develop a polynomial-time
algorithm to obtain the optimal discrete solution needed in practice.
Finally, we verify our analysis using real GPS traces of 632 taxis in
Beijing, China.
By Daniel Mazmanian, John Jurewitz, Hal Nelson
Developing an approach to governing adaptation to climate change is severely hampered by the dictatorship of the present when the needs of future generations are inadequately represented in current policy making. We posit this problem as a function of the attributes of adaptation policy making, including deep uncertainty and nonstationarity, where past observations are not reliable predictors of future outcomes. Our research links organizational decision-making attributes with adaptation decision making and identifies cases in which adaptation actions cause spillovers, free riding, and distributional impacts. We develop a governing framework for adaptation that we believe will enable policy, planning, and major long-term development decisions to be made appropriately at all levels of government in the face of the deep uncertainty and nonstationarity caused by climate change. Our framework requires that approval of projects with an expected life span of 30 years or more in the built environment include minimum building standards that integrate forecasted climate change impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) intermediate scenario. The intermediate IPCC scenario must be downscaled to include local or regional temperature, water availability, sea level rise, susceptibility to forest fires, and human habitation impacts to minimize climate-change risks to the built environment. The minimum standard is systematically updated every six years to facilitate learning by formal and informal organizations. As a minimum standard, the governance framework allows jurisdictions to take stronger actions to increase their climate resilience and thus maintain system flexibility.
By Doug Lombardi, Gale M.Sinatra, E. Michael Nussbaum
Learning and Instruction, 27
2013
Plausibility is a central but under-examined topic in conceptual change research. Climate change is an important socio-scientific topic; however, many view human-induced climate change as implausible. When learning about climate change, students need to make plausibility judgments but they may not be sufficiently critical or reflective. The purpose of this study was to examine how students’ plausibility judgments and knowledge about human-induced climate change transform during instruction promoting critical evaluation. The results revealed that treatment group participants who engaged in critical evaluation experienced a significant shift in their plausibility judgments toward the scientifically accepted model of human-induced climate change. This shift was accompanied by significant conceptual change postinstruction that was maintained after a six-month delay. A comparison group who experienced a climate change activity that is part of their normal curriculum did not experience statistically significant changes.
