Tradition or Modernization? The Dilemma of Chinese Indigenous Communities
International Journal of Heritage Studies2023
In the indigenous communities in China’s Guizhou Province, people are struggling to balance tradition with modernisation. As fires have long plagued these villages, post-disaster reconstruction has intensified the tradition/modernity tension and left people with a complex dilemma: should traditional wooden houses be restored, or should one, instead, pursue a safer and modern dwelling in concrete houses? Through the lens of housing reconstruction, this paper aims to address this contradiction between the social benefits of heritage preservation and the indigenous rights for development in the context of disaster risk and modernisation in Guizhou Province. Analysing 134 surveys and 29 interviews collected via ethnographic fieldwork, this study’s findings reveal two core themes. First, the presence of a prevailing preference among indigenous Chinese for modernity, which also challenged the conventional wisdom that everyone endorses heritage preservation.
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Land and deep-sea mining: the challenges of comparing biodiversity impacts
Biodiversity and Conservation2023
The term ‘biodiversity,’ while casually used in practice, is a complicated subject to measure, interpret, contextualize, and compare. Yet the possible advent of deep-sea mining in the mid-2020’s compels us to compare potential impacts of biodiversity loss across ecologically distant realms, a formidable task. Supplying the world’s green infrastructure is expected to lead to shortages of nickel, cobalt and other metals; meanwhile polymetallic nodules sitting atop the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean contain billions of tons of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, enough to solve the supply issues. Implicit in society’s decision of whether to exploit this resource is a tradeoff of harm to biodiversity in the CCZ’s abyssal seafloor and its overlying water column, versus intensification of harm to rainforests and other terrestrial mining habitats.
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Natural resources modulate the nexus between environmental shocks and human mobility
Nature Communications2023
In the context of natural resource degradation, migration can act as means of adaptation both for those leaving and those supported by remittances. Migration can also result from an inability to adapt in-situ, with people forced to move, sometimes to situations of worse or of the same exposure to environmental threats. The deleterious impacts of resource degradation have been proposed in some situations to limit the ability to move. In this contribution, we use remote sensed information coupled with population density data for continental Africa to assess quantitatively the prevalence of migration and immobility in the context of one cause of resource degradation: drought. We find that the effect of drought on mobility is amplified with the frequency at which droughts are experienced and that higher income households appear more resilient to climatic shocks and are less likely to resort to mobility as an adaptation response.
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Carbon-adjusted efficiency and technology gaps in gold mining
Resources Policy2023
Gold mining presents a conundrum for economic development practitioners because of its immense environmental impact and profound importance for livelihoods and government revenues in many developing countries. The metal is highly recyclable due to its lack of reactivity. Most of the gold extracted on earth over the past six thousand years is in accessible forms with investors or jewellery. From a purely ecological perspective, gold mining is thus highly problematic. The metal is relatively rare in its geological concentration, so intense chemical interventions are needed for its extraction. Cyanidation has been the transformative process of extracting gold in large quantities and remains the dominant extraction technology with massive chemical and water needs and immense rock waste generation. Data compiled by Lawson and quoted by Ali et al. (2017) suggests that the metal-to-waste ratio of gold is 0.00033% compared to 0.91% for copper, 2.5% for lead, 19% for aluminium, and up to 40% for iron.
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Transnational agricultural land acquisitions threaten biodiversity in the Global South
Environmental Research Letters2023
Agricultural large-scale land acquisitions have been linked with enhanced deforestation and land use change. Yet the extent to which transnational agricultural large-scale land acquisitions (TALSLAs) contribute to—or merely correlate with—deforestation, and the expected biodiversity impacts of the intended land use changes across ecosystems, remains unclear. We examine 178 georeferenced TALSLA locations in 40 countries to address this gap. While forest cover within TALSLAs decreased by 17% between 2000 and 2018 and became more fragmented, the spatio-temporal patterns of deforestation varied substantially across regions. While deforestation rates within initially forested TALSLAs were 1.5 (Asia) to 2 times (Africa) higher than immediately surrounding areas, we detected no such difference in Europe and Latin America.
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