Jeanne X. Kasperson

Roger E. Kasperson

Billie Lee Turner

Human-induced environmental changes are found throughout the world, but there are areas that scientists consider to be "critical regions" that are particularly vulnerable to, or suffering from, environmental degradation. This volume examines as case studies nine such critical environmental regions: Amazonia, the Aral Sea basin, the middle mountains of Nepal, Kenya's Ukambani region, the U.S. Southern High Plains, the Mexico Basin, the North Sea, China's Ordos Plateau, and the eastern Sundaland region of South-East Asia.

Comparisons of Threatened Environments

Regions at Risk

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Social Contours of Risk

Ortwin Renn

Halina Szejnwald Brown

Patrick Derr

Allen L. White

The relationship between multinational corporations and developing countries is frequently characterized by different perspectives and unease. Protection of health, environmental concerns, and other considerations pose potential areas of conflict. Brown and her co-authors use three important case studies and data drawn from extensive access to Du Pont Agrichemical, Occidental Chemical, and Xerox to explore how corporations and nations relate and interact to produce decisions on development, equity, and independence. Those decisions, in turn, involve environmental, health, and safety outcomes. This is an unprecedented analysis of the dynamics and interdependence of multinationals and developing countries as they seek, for independent reasons, to cooperate, on facility development.

Societal Values in International Technology Transfer

Corporate Environmentalism in a Global Economy

Despite international initiatives such as the Earth Summit in 1992 and ongoing efforts to implement the Kyoto Protocol, human activities continue to register a destructive toll on the planetary environment. At root, research on global environmental risk seeks new pathways for reversing unsustainable trends, curtailing ongoing destructive activities, and creating a life-sustaining planet. This book takes stock of the distinctive challenges posed by global environmental risks, the capacity of knowledge systems to identify and characterize such risks, and the competence of human society to manage the unprecedented complexity. Particular attention trains on engaging, in ways conducive to enhancing social learning and adaptation, the large uncertainties inherent in these risks. Various chapters enlist different scales of analysis to explore the manifestation and causes of global environmental risks in all the diversity of their regional expression. Throughout, the editors and contributors accord prominence to the vulnerability of people and places to environmental degradation. Understanding vulnerability is a neglected key to assessing the nature of the risks and determining strategies for altering trajectories of threat. Global risk futures, the editors argue, are not intractable, and are still amenable to a risk-analysis enterprise that is democratic in principle, humanistic in concept, and geared to the realities that pertain to the particular societies, locales, and regions that will ultimately bear the risk.

Jeanne X. Kasperson

Books

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