First-best climate policy is a uniform carbon tax which gradually rises over time. Civil servants have complicated climate policy to expand bureaucracies, politicians to create rents. Environmentalists have exaggerated climate change to gain influence, other activists have joined the climate bandwagon. Opponents to climate policy have attacked the weaknesses in climate research. The climate debate is convoluted and polarized as a result, and climate policy complex.

Urban water and energy systems are crucial for sustainably meeting basic service demands in cities. This paper proposes and applies a technology-independent “reference resource-to-service system” framework for concurrent evaluation of urban water and energy system interventions and their ‘nexus’ or ‘interlinkages’. In a concrete application, data that approximate New York City conditions are used to evaluate a limited set of interventions in the residential sector, spanning from low-flow toilet shifts to extensive green roof installations.

Marine plastic pollution has been a growing concern for decades. Single-use plastics (plastic bags and microbeads) are a significant source of this pollution. Although research outlining environmental, social, and economic impacts of marine plastic pollution is growing, few studies have examined policy and legislative tools to reduce plastic pollution, particularly single-use plastics (plastic bags and microbeads). This paper reviews current international market-based strategies and policies to reduce plastic bags and microbeads.

Developing-developed world partnerships potentially present win-win opportunities for addressing climate-active gas emissions at lower cost whilst propelling developing nations on a lower-carbon trajectory, as carbon emissions, capture and storage are geographically independent. Expanded PES (payment for ecosystem service) principles provides a framework for assessing the transparency and efficacy of partnerships, tested on the model developed by The Converging World (TCW).

This article aims to contribute to current discussions about “making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable” (SDG 11) by linking debates that are currently taking place in separate containers: debates on the “global land rush” and the “new urban agenda”. It highlights some important processes that are overlooked in these debates and advances a new, socially inclusive urbanization agenda that addresses emerging urban land grabs.

Equality between economic progress and environmental sustainability is essential for a developing country like India. In the present time, the economy of India is growing rapidly in a vibrant mode and an efficient way, which in turn demands huge uninterrupted energy supplies. The country's energy needs are met mostly by the usage of fossil fuels and nearly 70% of electricity is generated from coal based power plants. In India, nearly 840 million people depend on traditional biomass to satisfy their energy necessities.

Assuming communities in a city may formally express their aspirations for the future sustainability of their city, which technological innovations for changing the city's infrastructure and metabolism might they introduce today, as a first step towards realizing their distant aspirations? What is more, recognizing the diversity of aspirations that may never be reconciled into a consensus, might some innovations and policy interventions be nevertheless more privileged than others, in being non-foreclosing? How might we discover this?

Using newly-released and globally available high-resolution remote sensing data on forest loss, we update the assessment of the cross-country determinants of deforestation in developing countries. We validate most of the major determinants found in the previous literature, generally based on earlier time-periods, except for the role of institutional quality. Agricultural trade, hitherto relatively neglected, is found to be one of the main factors causing deforestation.

Although it is one of the poorest countries in the world, devastated by the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and heavily aid-dependent, Rwanda has achieved most of its Millennium Development targets for health. This article discusses how it managed this, when many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa failed to achieve theirs, and assesses the sustainability of its solutions.

With Sustainable Development Goal 7, the United Nations has declared its ambition to ensure access to modern energy for all by 2030. Aside from broad appeals to differentiated responsibilities and ‘greener’ technologies, however, the goal leaves significant procedural questions unaddressed. This paper argues that the basic orientation of this approach is problematic, undermining possibilities for progress toward energy justice and equitable development.