Environmental Considerations (Asynchronous Session)
How Can Bangladesh Develop an Approach to Climate Law Pertaining to Adaptation and Equity for Women? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fatema Jahan Sharna
To address the widespread impact of climate change and wide-ranging consequences, nations are developing domestic, subnational, regional, and transnational legal adaptation mechanisms which has become a key area of development for national and international policymakers. Climate change may impact women more than men, particularly in developing nations by exacerbating inequalities through a variety of social, economic, and cultural barriers. Thus, as this paper considers, gender-based approaches have been introduced in regard to adaptation to ensure equitable climate justice for women. Both the Cancun Agreement and Lima Work Programme on Gender define ‘gender’ as the empowerment of women to ensure meaningful participation and contribution to strengthening all climate activities through decision-making to find “gender-just or gender-responsive solutions to climate change”. Bangladesh, the 9th most vulnerable nation in 2019 in the world in regard to the impacts of climate change having women as its half of the population has recognized the importance of gender equity and has focused on women empowerment as one of its goals for Vision 2021. The Constitution of Bangladesh has safeguarded gender-focused environmental rights without any discrimination which is not enforceable in the courts of justice in most cases. Among 19 environmental laws in the country only Bangladesh Environment Preservation Act, 1995 and the Environment Court Act, 2010, are practiced mostly in the courts. However, due to some drawback provisions such as, “national interest” and “good faith” provisions, these laws are not fully enforceable in the courts.
Impact of Land Cover Change in Urban Area on Hydrological Characteristic: A Case Study of Kata Watershed, Phuket, Thailand View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yuppared Sittipong
This paper discusses the land cover changes in urban areas through Kata watershed, Phuket, Thailand. It examines the dynamic process of land cover changes and their hydrological effects by comparing past-to-present impacts from land cover change during the last 30 years by collecting field survey data and analyzing two aerial photographs from two periods — 1987 and 2016 — to create land cover maps. The study aims to quantify the land cover changes and its effect on hydrological characteristic using GIS and WIN-TR 55 to identify and estimation on the watershed hydrological characteristic. The study suggests using integrative knowledge of landscape ecology into landscape architectural design and planning in the current context to mitigate the impacts of surface runoff. The results show that in the past 30 years, the increasing of impermeable surface increase runoff and peak flow. The increasing of the wooded area generated runoff and peak flow less than green open space, and also decrease that chance that discharge would overflow from the stream.
Human Ways of Life and Environmental Sustainability: Congo Basin Case Study View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tongele Tongele
The negative impact of people’s ways of life on environment is undisputed: evidence of land, air, water pollutions, as well as climate change, is an illustration. This paper intends to show that people’s ways of life can become best sustainability means that both improve local living conditions and protect local living environment. The case study considers a rural population of the Congo basin and how their ways of life affect the Congo basin rainforest. National and international moneys and resources allocated to environmental issues are generally used for planting trees in urban areas, recycling, identifying areas of deforestation, conducting research that include satellite imaging and global monitoring, incentivizing green development and industry, etc., mostly ignoring local people’s ways of life that should be supported to become best sustainability means. This paper argues that there must be a paradigm change in the fight against climate change, to focus more on ways of life of local populations. A concept of such paradigm change will be applied to the ways of life of populations in the Congo basin to simulate how these ways of life can become means and tools of protecting the environment and improving the living condition.
Technoregionalism: Decentralizing Relations Among Humans, Ecologies, and Technologies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ry Brennan
Bioregionalism has historically held a central position among regionalist strategies to avert ecological crisis. Tending toward technophobia, many bioregionalisms advocate relationships with biotic communities unmediated by technologies. Meanwhile, insofar as technologically-based regions are theorized, they typically refer to globalized trade zones explicitly antipathetic to bioregions. This constructed conflict between biotic and technologic regions frustrates regionalist efforts to carve out a role for technological transformation in addressing ecological crisis. Given that technologies are always present at local sites of human-ecological interaction, it is unimaginable that progress toward regional ecological resilience can be made without considering technological regions. In this work, I recuperate and develop the concept of the technoregion: a geographic unit defined by common use of a given technological infrastructure. I argue that technoregionalism is a key strategy for addressing ecological crisis precisely because these regions are able to be consciously shaped by humans. Specifically, technoregions can be decentralized and brought into fruitful engagements with human communities and local ecologies. Using insights from four years of ethnographic work studying energy infrastructure and wildfires in California, I take distributed energy resources as a case for considering how technoregional decentralization can enact positive change on four levels of analysis: (1) technological resilience, through decentralizing management of complex systems; (2) human subjective development, through reclaiming popular technological competence; (3) human-ecological relations, through decentralizing technological production to local levels; and (4) possibilities for insurrectional political change, through upsetting artificial, arbitrary, and stipulative politico-regions. These decentralist efforts construct improved relations among humans, ecologies, and technologies.
Iron Age Architectures in Iberian Peninsula: Reflections of Changing Societies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jesus Alberto Arenas Esteban
The paper analyses the social background of the different architectural models and urban layouts that developed during the Iron Age in Central Spain. The information handled comes from recent archaeological excavations which have provided important data about houses’ and settlements’ ground-plans as well as about their chronological contexts and specific ecological environments. These data are used for studying different architectural parameters. They are organized into three frameworks: 1) the “individual dimension”, examining size, internal configuration, and the furnishings of households; 2) the “relational aspects”, studying the relations between the different residence units on several levels (intervisibility, centrality vs. marginality, size, etc.); 3) the “settlement configuration”, taking into account both its internal layout and the changing role that the perimeter walls played in the latter: from a basically symbolic function at the beginning to a practical, defensive, one at the end of the period. The ultimate goal of this study is to unveil the social logic of some built environments and, from there, to explain by means of the architecture the evolution of the Iron Age social models in a specific area of the Iberian Peninsula. The methodology applied in this study is based on strictly archaeological criteria (measurable i.e. contrastable) and, later on, on some interpretative approaches, focussed on the social background of the constructed space, provided by Social Anthropology and Theoretical Architecture.
