Emerging Issues in Decentralized Resource Governance: Environmental Federalism, Spillovers, and Linked Socio-Ecological Systems

Authors: William Shobe

Federalism as an academic discipline studies how multilevel political jurisdictions interact, both vertically and horizontally. Environmental federalism shifts and expands the focus by concentrating on environmental goods, which are related to ecosystem services. This shift necessarily expands the inquiry to include investigation of how ecosystem services respond to changes in resource management by human governance institutions.

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Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in complex humanitarian crises

Authors: David Leblang, Danielle N. Poole, Daniel J. Escudero, Lawrence O. Gostin, Elizabeth A. Talbot

Over 168 million people across 50 countries are estimated to need humanitarian assistance in 2020. Response to epidemics in complex humanitarian crises— such as the recent cholera epidemic in Yemen and the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo— is a global health challenge of increasing scale. The thousands of Yemeni and Congolese who have died in these years-long epidemics demonstrate the difficulty of combatting even well-known pathogens in humanitarian settings. The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) may represent a still greater threat to those in complex humanitarian crises, which lack the infrastructure, support, and health systems to mount a comprehensive response. 

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Environment

From Zero to Hero?: Why Integrated Assessment Modeling of Negative Emissions Technologies Is Hard and How We Can Do Better

Authors: Jay Fuhrman, Haewon McJeon, Scott C. Doney, William Shobe, Andres F. Clarens

Efforts by the United Nations and others to develop a coordinated global response to climate change rely heavily on an ensemble of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to make projections linking human activities to climate outcomes (IPCC, 2014, 2018). IAMs are coupled models of the global economic and climate systems, first developed to represent fossil fuel emissions from the energy system (Reister and Edmonds, 1977), and later expanded to include land use change and forestry emissions, as well as non-CO2 emissions (Di Vittorio et al., 2014).

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A View from the United States

Authors: Harry Harding

Since early June, Hong Kong has been experiencing one of the most serious political crises in its history, arguably the worst since the Maoist-inspired demonstrations against British colonial rule in 1967. The city has been wracked by near-continuous mass protests, some peaceful, some violent. 

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The Right Way to Capture College “Opportunity”: Popular Measures Can Paint the Wrong Picture of Low-Income Student Enrollment

Authors: Caroline Hoxby, Sarah Turner

Higher education may be one of the most important channels through which people can attain improved life outcomes based on their merit rather than family background. If qualified students from lower-income families are underrepresented in higher education, there is potentially a failure not just in equity but in economic efficiency as well.

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