Farewell and Editorial Change Notification

My 20-year service as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environment and Development (JED) will come to an end with this June 2023 issue. It has been an exceptionally rewarding experience to lead JED and to interact with the growing ranks of academics and practitioners from around the world who have dedicated their research and policy analysis to the serious environmental challenges the world is facing. The cutting-edge contributions of our authors have built JED into the top interdisciplinary journal at the intersection of environment and development. Credit also goes to the many expert peer reviewers and Editorial Board members who generously contributed their time to provide constructive feedback on articles and helped us guarantee the highest scholarly standards.

The Journal of Environment & Development was inaugurated at the University of California in San Diego, UCSD, in 1992 by a group of dedicated graduate students under the leadership of the late atmospheric scientist Prof. Gordon J. MacDonald. Its first issue coincided with the June 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio De Janeiro, in which I participated as a young government official representing Switzerland. My wife and I came to UCSD in 1994 and I became involved in JED shortly thereafter, taking on the role of Editor-in-Chief in 2003, after JED had become a SAGE journal.

I have been fortunate to count on continuous support from a succession of excellent graduate students who served as Managing Editors or as members of the internal review board screening the increasing number of submissions, first at the University of California in San Diego and from 2008 onwards at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Most of these graduate students have gone on to exciting careers in the field of environmental and developmental politics: Darren Posey, Aparna Krishnan, Laura Tierney, Lee Yen Anderson, Valerie Kao, Elizabeth Stryjewski, Erik Nielsen, Mary Collins, Hannah Haehn, Jessica Marter-Kenyon, Heather Hodges, Kristina Rohrer, Brett Aho and lastly, Noosha Uddin.

When JED was founded in 1992, few journals dedicated to environmental issues existed and JED filled an important gap, providing an interdisciplinary publication outlet for authors with wide-ranging interests related to environment and development. Publications dedicated to environmental topics have since mushroomed as the various disciplines—particularly in the social sciences—started to wake up to the growing environmental problems. Even in an increasingly crowded and fast changing publication environment, JED has maintained and built out its position as the interdisciplinary go-to outlet for many authors from around the world.

As I write this note, I wish I could say that the world has started to meet the environmental challenges our authors have researched over the two decades that I guided JED. Unfortunately, the climate crisis and the dramatic decline in global biodiversity have only worsened and we are now in a true state of global environmental crisis. I have often asked myself what contribution a journal like JED can really have, and what its future role can be. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, has now published its 6^thglobal assessment with little serious political follow-up to scientists’ increasingly desperate calls to action. It now is very unlikely that the Paris Climate Agreement’s objective of staying below 1.5-degree Celsius warming is still achievable. I consider the state of international climate negotiations in “30 Years of International Climate Negotiations,” a review article included in this issue.

The threat to nature and biodiversity has also only grown by the relentless worldwide conversion of land by extractive industries and intensive agriculture. This is driven by continued population growth, but more importantly a growing global middle class aspiring to Northern levels of consumption. The December 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Framework for Biodiversity marks an important commitment by the world, but the challenges to its implementation are large. JED has published many articles on the intersection of land use management, conservation, local economic development, and the challenges to sustainably manage natural ecosystems.

Scientific research by itself rarely leads to political action directly. It is this link between science, technology, politics, policy, institutions and legal frameworks that JED articles have often explored. By building knowledge piece by piece, at least a possible foundation for action is being built. This is where JED and other dedicated journals become relevant.

But it is not only the knowledge creation that JED and other research publications foster. By providing publication outlets and rigorously reviewing cutting-edge research, they help train researchers, future academics, and practitioners who themselves may go on to become part of the solution to the world’s many challenges. JED has made a particular effort to reach out to young scholars from developing countries. We have published many articles authored by scholars from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in addition to the more dominant American and European scholars. At its best, JED may have contributed to personal and institutional capacity-building in the authors’ home countries and helped strengthen and diversify future responses to the environment-development challenges.

I could not be happier to see Professor Gavin Hilson, Chair of Sustainability in Business, from the Surrey Business School, take JED to the next level. Professor Hilson is a leading global authority on the environmental and social impacts of the small-scale mining sector. He has published over 300 related articles and book chapters, and his expertise is widely recognized internationally. He was Editor-in-Chief of The Extractive Industries and Society (Elsevier Science), and is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Cleaner Production (Elsevier Science), Resources Policy (Elsevier Science), Mineral Economics (Springer), and The International Journal of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Environment (Taylor & Francis).