Suchergebnisse

Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents. The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them. Agents thus have loss functions which are bounded above. We work with a bell loss function which has this property. With additive uncertainty the certainty equivalence which holds for a quadratic loss function breaks down with a bell loss function when there are two or more targets. With multiplicative (Brainard) uncertainty policy is more conservative than in the absence of multiplicative uncertainty, but less so with the bell than the quadratic loss function.

AbstractClimate scientists have proposed that many people have not yet felt the results of climate change. This explains, at least in part, why some people are so unmotivated to make changes to mitigate climate change. Yet, a range of studies focused on other types of weather-related anticipated and experienced disasters, such as drought, clearly demonstrate that climate-related phenomena can elicit strong emotional reactions. Using a combination of open-ended interview questions and close-ended survey questions, the authors conducted semistructured interviews in three biophysically vulnerable communities (Mobile, Alabama; Kodiak, Alaska; and Phoenix, Arizona). The relatively high number of respondents who expressed sadness and worry at the possible outcomes of climate change indicates emotional awareness, even among climate change skeptics. The patterns were significantly gendered, with men across the three sites less likely to indicate hope. Results suggest that emotional aspects of climate change might provide an entry point for rallying vulnerable U.S. communities to consider mitigation efforts.

Globally, groundwater overdraft poses significant challenges to agricultural production. As a result, it is likely that new water management policies and governance arrangements will be needed to stop groundwater depletion and maintain agricultural viability. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state water managers and other water actors, this paper provides a study of a recent resource management agreement between surface water and groundwater irrigators in the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer region of Idaho. Using adaptive governance as our descriptive framework, we examine how groundwater governance arrangements emerge and are applied to mitigate the impacts of groundwater overdraft. Our findings suggest that adaptive governance, while not a stated goal of the agreement, may enable flexible and sustainable social and ecological outcomes. Our findings also indicate that this new governance arrangement creates a vacuum in enforcement authority that may prove challenging as the management agreement is implemented. These findings extend our understanding of the conditions necessary for effective adaptive governance of groundwater resources, and highlight the challenge of creating capacity for local resource managers as governance shifts from more bureaucratic to adaptive and decentralised arrangements.

For many Indigenous communities in North America, the grizzly bear is a symbol associated with tribal medicine, spirituality, history, and knowledge. Despite its cultural importance to Indigenous communities and also federal trust responsibilities, Indigenous Peoples are rarely consulted in conservation decision-making concerning grizzly bears, and the emotional outcomes of these decisions are poorly understood. In 2017 grizzly bears were removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Drawing from emotional political ecology and emotional geography, we use the concepts of cultural resources and 'networked space' to investigates how conservation decisions about transboundary cultural resources affect the emotions of Indigenous Peoples inside and outside of policy-targeted areas such as Yellowstone. The bears are non-subsistence resources that also carry cultural meanings for people who live beyond their current range. We find that conservation decisions affecting transboundary cultural resources transcend time and space and can have strong emotional consequences for our research participants who live outside of the policy-targeted area. In connection with the psychological dimension of emotional political ecologies, we also find that our participant's emotional responses to the delisting were animated by the historical traumas imposed by living in a colonial state.

Abstract
This paper explores environmental distress (e.g., feeling blue) in a politically conservative ("red") and predominantly white farming community in the southwestern United States. In such communities across the United States, expressed concern over environmental change—including climate change—tends to be lower. This is understood to have a palliative effect that reduces feelings of ecoanxiety. Using an emotional geographies framework, our study identifies the forms of everyday emotional expressions related to water and environmental change in the context of a vulnerable rural agricultural community in central Arizona. Drawing on long-term participant-observation and stakeholder research, we use data from individual (n = 48) and group (n = 8) interviews with water stakeholders to explore reports of sadness and fear over environmental change using an emotion-focused text analysis. We find that this distress is related to social and material changes related to environmental change rather than to environmental change itself. We discuss implications for research on emotional geographies for understanding reactions to environmental change and uncertainty.