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Unintended Consequences: Climate Change Policy in a Globalizing World

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Unintended Consequences: Climate Change Policy in a Globalizing World”—comes from Volume 3 (2012). In her article, Yda Schreuder explains how the cap-and-trade system introduced by the European Union (EU) in order to comply with carbon emissions reduction targets under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Kyoto Protocol (1997) has in some instances led to the opposite outcome of the one intended. In fact, the ambitious energy and climate change policy adopted by the EU—known as the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)—has led to carbon leakage and in some instances to relocation or a shift in production of energy-intensive manufacturing to parts of the world where carbon reduction commitments are not in effect.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

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Abandoned Mine Lands and Collective Cleanup Efforts

On 5 August 2015, a contractor working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accidentally breached a plug of waste rock at the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado. Unbeknownst to the backhoe operator responsible for the breach, the plug was holding back three million gallons of acid mine drainage laced with numerous toxic metals such as zinc, cadmium, mercury, lead, and arsenic. Within hours, the yellow-tinged toxic waters from the Gold King Mine spread downstream from Cement Creek into the Animas River, eventually making their way into the San Juan River until being diluted by their entry into the Colorado River. En route, the waters heavily impacted the livelihoods of farmers, fly fishing guides, and rafting companies from Durango, Colorado, to the Navajo Nation in northern New Mexico.

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Refugees on Their Own Land: Edolo People, Land, and Earthquakes

All the land customarily used and occupied by the Edolo people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been devastated by the swarm of earthquakes that commenced in late February 2018. Few outsiders, however, would be aware of that disaster. With media coverage of events in PNG soon deflected to “bigger” issues of money and the politics of resource extraction, the physical destruction wrought by the quakes has disappeared from view.