The Journal of Environment & Development

In this special issue of the Journal of Environment and Development, we present results from the research project Globalisation Informed by Sustainable Development (GLOBIS), 2009–2014, funded by the European Union Framework Programme 7. Starting from and focusing on international policies on agriculture, energy, innovation, migration, and transport at both European Union and global levels, the dual aim of the project was to critically analyze interactions between the three major processes and discourses of globalization, development, and sustainability while also identifying and commenting on synergies and conflicts between them.

Global environmental change is real and everywhere, and so is inequality. Such a warmer, stormier, and divided world will create highly differentiated socioecological impacts and responses to climate change with stronger effects on people, places, and livelihoods that contributed the least. This necessitates mitigation, adaptation, and a solid understanding of their interactions with persistent problems such as poverty because uneven distribution of impacts and responses may reinforce existing inequality and vulnerability. Within a frame of political ecology, sociology, and sustainability science and informed by three transnational discourses—sustainability, development, and globalization—this article suggests a mobilizing narrative to think and act. In this format, the narrative must include direction (toward sustainability), distribution (global inclusiveness), and diversity (multiple approaches, methods, and solutions). It must also support arenas for multiscalar dialogs and practices while aiming to replace deep divisiveness and distorted understandings that prevent the emergence of just and synergetic responses to climate change.

Globalization drives a process of diet convergence among developing and developed countries that challenges the predictions about future patterns of food consumption. To address this issue, the objective of this article is to map the range of the possible future diet changes and to explore their impact on agriculture using the Nexus Land-Use model. This model computes agricultural intensification in the crop and livestock sectors at the global scale, based on an architecture accounting for the different types of food calories. By considering four scenarios built on distinct assumptions regarding diet convergence, this article sheds light on the pivotal role of diet changes as drivers of tensions on agriculture and land use and shows the uncertainty associated with processes of diet convergence for foresight exercises on food and agriculture. Finally, the interactions between food production and the other land-use patterns are explored by testing the sensitivity of our results to assumptions regarding biofuel production, deforestation, potential crop yields, and nutrient-use efficiency.

This article assesses the potential contribution for international shipping and long-haul aviation to contribute to sustainable development (SD). The trade literature shows that newly industrializing countries are benefitting from international trade for export-led growth. However, the least developed countries with limited access to international trade networks do not participate in the new global production networks. The World Trade Organization/General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regimes do not have the development of more sustainable transport systems as a priority. In this sense, international transport remains on the fringes of the environment and development policy fields. Three transition pathways to SD have been developed: (a) information and telecommunications technologies leading to particip.ation of least developed countries in global production networks, (b) changes in social preferences toward a high priority for the environment, leading to an extensive growth in fair-trade networks and sustainable production and consumption, and (c) SD from economic growth in newly industrializing countries, with an increased priority placed on solving environmental problems.

In this article, we analyze the socioeconomic effects of energy sustainability challenges raised by oil depletion and climate change at the European and global levels. We assess macroeconomic impacts at different period markers from 2010 to 2100 and under different visions of the future of globalization. Fragmented capital markets affect the pace and direction of change and induce additional economic losses in the long term. Regionalized good markets have a positive effect in the long term because less intense international trade moderates the effects of fossil fuel constraints. A sustainable energy future will require implementing policies and measures that are able to (a) provide correct incentives for long-term investments by resorting to other signals than current market prices, (b) incorporate sectoral measures that act complementarily to pricing scheme measures for sectors confronted with biased agents’ behaviors or strong inertias, and (c) foster globalization patterns that are consistent with energy sustainability objectives. The challenge consists in articulating the objectives and the instruments of these different policy and measures triggering the transition toward a sustainable future.

This article looks at sustainable development and globalization from the perspective of the eco-innovation literature for the case of biofuels in transport. It assesses the potential for newly industrialized countries (NICs) to develop technology and hence export markets in biofuel equipment. An analysis of innovation indicators suggests those countries that have strong capacities in eco-innovation in general. The analysis considers demand and regulatory factors in addition to technological capabilities in biofuels and complementary sectors. A very large global market in biofuels for transport could develop. The case of biofuels in Brazil shows that demand-oriented innovation policy coordinated with supply-oriented research and development policies can be successful in NICs for developing markets in new technologies for sustainability. Brazil, China, Malaysia, Mexico, and South Africa, as well as Indonesia, Thailand, and possibly India, have the favorable combination of high biofuel production potential and the requisite technological capability to develop internationally competitive second-generation biofuel production technologies.

In spite of the growing attention to climate-induced migration, a coherent understanding of the matter is lacking—as any articulated governance strategy. Although such an impasse relates to the unprecedented socioecological processes involved, we argue that many of the challenges posed by climate-induced migration are not unique in the history of global environmental governance. Proceeding from this, we compare climate migration with the issue of desertification. Drawing upon the concept of environmental myth developed in Political Ecology, we identify common themes such as scientism, vagueness, and ambiguities in the definitions, and a tendency to envision one-fits-all solutions that overlook the multiscalar phenomena involved. We discuss how these traits have contributed to the failure of the desertification regime. Consequently, we propose that climate migration debates should move beyond such deficiencies, to avoid the consolidation of policy responses reproducing the same problems that have characterized the regime on desertification.