We explore possibilities for the ecological civilization imaginary of China to become a sustainable development narrative shared by a growing number of GS nations. We first highlight the influence GS countries had on the evolution of the concept of sustainable development. GS nations’ interest in retaining economic development options, including energy and materials needed for industrialization and economic expansion, will increasingly contradict global environmentalist narratives of the latter half of the 20th century. The adaptation of GS nations to previously untested energy and material futures will depend on experimentation and learning from initiatives primarily designed and implemented by GS governments at the national, provincial, and local levels. If China succeeds in demonstrating practical examples of ecological civilization construction, it will stimulate other GS countries to learn and adapt lessons to suit their own needs. Multi-country arrangements that China has created could serve as forums to refine the ecological civilization narrative as a development alternative to the dualist conservation vs development thinking and practice of the latter half of the 20th century.
In this article, we show why the growing significance of ethics entails that the call for ethical evaluations is no longer just a specific issue for the particular discipline of academic ethics but a challenge for all academic researchers. Therefore, complex theoretical approaches must be put into practice, and the relationship between ethics and other scientific fields must be clarified. Hence, this essay shows how these requirements can be fulfilled and how to cope with the complexity of ethical consideration on a practical level. We aim to operationalize responsibility as a method. In order to achieve this, basic criteria of practical ethical reflection are elaborated. As a result, we suggest an extended ethical matrix covering the entire research process using a step-by-step model. Our ethical matrix is designed to help researchers reflect and make judgments on moral and ethical issues, enabling them to find their own solutions to these challenges without providing a formal guideline for moral decision-making.
Good projects and solutions aiming at sustainable development must repair the damage done in past decades by being explicitly designed and monitored to achieve synergetic benefits for the environment and society. We identify environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainability in which enlightened forest management can increase the fulfillment of human and ecological needs and hence the quality of life of present and future generations. Projects aiming at energy production and profits at the cost of biodiversity, nature protection, and human health and well-being are therefore questionable and increasingly socially and politically unacceptable—especially where the viability of alternative options with better social and ecological footprints can be easily demonstrated. This is also true for renewable energy projects. The perspective presented here demonstrates how ostensibly renewable energy projects in natural areas, such as large-scale wind and solar power plants in traditional forests, which are planned, for example, in Germany, may be detrimental to ecological and social sustainability. Forests cut down for such projects are “non-renewable” within reasonable time-scales left to stabilize our climate and ecosystems. Such projects also impair the credibility of the proclaimed role model character and sustainability leadership of Global North countries, which can lead to negative implications for the protection of forests in tropical countries.
This research highlights the governance of landscape and policy coherence to ensure a sustainable supply of ecosystem services through incentives for ecosystem schemes at the municipal level in Nepal. The study was carried out in Dhankuta and Dasarath Chand municipalities representing Nepal’s Koshi and Sudur Paschim provinces. Six aggregate governance indicators adopted by the World Bank Group were assessed through interviews with primary stakeholders of selected landscapes in two municipalities, followed by Key Informant Interviews. The study indicates that implementation of the Incentive for Ecosystem service scheme is feasible, creating multi-stakeholder institutions at the local level. However, there are several governance challenges to ensure its success. In particular, incentives for ecosystem schemes must be part of local government planning, where multisectoral coordination and collaboration are essential. While municipal authorities have constitutional jurisdictions to initiate such schemes, they lack the human resources to understand ecosystem management for a sustainable supply of ecosystem services. Therefore, landscape governance is essential to make incentive schemes successful and ensure transparency and equitable benefits among ecosystem service providers.
This paper explores the transformative potential of religious prophetic communication in advancing an ecological civilization. Drawing upon diverse religious traditions—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism—it argues that religious teachings offer profound insights and ethical frameworks essential for addressing contemporary ecological challenges. A key aspect of ecological civilization is the presence of a pervasive ecological ethos. The paper contends that religious prophetic communication plays a crucial role in cultivating such an ethos by promoting a heightened ecological conscience and consciousness among individuals and communities. Through prophetic communication, faith actors and communicators articulate moral imperatives rooted in religious principles contextualized to the present ecological situation. The paper delineates five components that make up religious prophetic communication: (1) Communicating from the position of faith; (2) Communicating in a contextually relevant manner; (3) Communicating to energize; (4) Communicating to criticize; and (5) Communicating beyond words. Applied to the ecological context, religious prophetic communication aims to affirm, stimulate imagination, clarify misunderstandings, inspire action, and confront unjust realities. By carrying out its prophetic role, religious communicators can help bring about an ecological ethos and promote the realization of ecological civilization.
A summary, based upon foresight, futures, ideation and frontier technology studies of prospective approaches to foster ecosystem sustainability including climate mitigation at the technology and societal levels which are at scale and profitable. Approaches summarized include halophytes/salt plants grown on deserts/wastelands using saline/seawater, to address land, water, food, energy and climate, frontier energetics, nascent climate mitigation concepts, cellular agriculture, materials optimization, the virtual age, efficiency and redesigning the ecosystem for the Anthropocene. Solution/mitigation approaches are targeted at deforestation, desertification, pollution writ large (land, sea, air, space), and extensive urbanization along with soil salination, ocean acidification, mining, and water scarcity.
Industrial development processes, accompanied by extreme growth processes, regards world population, pollution, food production and the exploitation of natural resources have caused severe ecological problems. This has been well known since 1972 through the study ‘The Limits to Growth’, in which humanity and the world society was called upon to make an ecological turn and to change its consumption model and the type of economic development that was not suited to finite natural resources (or a finite planet). However, the relationships between the state of the environment and human health have hardly been considered, although an ecological view of health was already proposed by Hippocrates, and as in the meantime, the technical terms “Environmental Health” and “Environmental Medicine” have become established at universities. It is only in recent times that global terms such as climate medicine, One Health, Eco Health, etc. have become powerful pragmatic and action-oriented initiatives. They can be understood as calls for a worldwide health-related ‘ecologization’ of (health) culture. Regarding these approaches we highlight theoretical and metatheoretical aspects, since in general, any real action is only as good as the analytical quality of the plan that serves as a guide for that action. From this point of view, we find that these approaches exhibit striking weaknesses. These are, among other things: the neglect of epistemological challenges combined with inconsistent conceptualizations of the category environment, the very superficial models of human beings, weaknesses of ecological frameworks in relation to the macro-, meso- and micro-eco-social levels of the targeted topics, and a vague notion of systems methodology. Following on from this, we call for an explicit social-/human-ecological framework (New Viennese School, Australian School) for environmental health issues as it has been established for decades in the field of environmental, sustainability and transformation sciences.
Construction of a Comprehensive International Legal Protection Mechanism for Climate Refugees
Climate refugee has become an unavoidable major right crisis challenge for the international community. However, the corresponding development of positive international law is obviously imperfect. The basic rights of climate refugees cannot be fully guaranteed by international law. They are always facing problems such as unclear legal status lack of protection of basic rights, and imperfect relief mechanism. Those vulnerable groups who lack resources and migration abilities suffer more serious rights violations because they are forced to stay in place. Compared with the risk-management framework and right-protection framework, the comprehensive international legal protection mechanism is the inevitable choice for climate refugees’ rights relief in the post-2012 period. The rights of climate refugees set out in the preamble of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants in 2016, the Global Refugee Compact in 2018, and the Global Compact for Security, Order and Regular Migration formally incorporated the issues of refugees and migrants caused by climate change, laying the foundation for this choice. However, it is a long and difficult way to build a perfect comprehensive international response to climate change. It is not only necessary to realize the integration of human rights law and climate law at the conceptual level, but also to integrate the different perspectives of the two laws and build a set of scientific and reasonable cooperation mechanism.
The occupation of the Amazon is driven by capitalist production, impacting climate change discussions. Despite constitutional protections since 1934, the influx of non-Indigenous settlers, particularly miners, led to significant conflicts. The Yanomami sought international recourse through the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In the context of redemocratization, the 1988 Constitution marked a shift, reinforcing Indigenous rights and environmental protection. Brazil’s role in protecting the rainforest intersects with global climate efforts, including the REDD+ mechanism. The creation of the Amazon Fund in 2008, aligned with REDD+ initiatives, involved international cooperation and local governance, leading to a substantial decline in Amazon deforestation between 2004 and 2012. However, exploitative practices endorsed by the State pose threats to environmental and human rights, notably affecting indigenous communities. Amid Brazil’s democracy crisis, deforestation surged in the Amazon from 2013–2022 and the Yanomami face conflicts fueled by State support for non-Indigenous groups. The Yanomami sought international recourse through the IACHR and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. These issues are intensified by an ideological bias, linked to authoritarian populism rooted in the legacy of the Dictatorship. Recent initiatives aim to enhance environmental and human rights protection. However, political instability poses challenges for the future.
