This chapter on standard setting began by exploring the differences between legal and economic notions of standards and what standard setting means in both research disciplines. We then further clarified the legal concept for environmental law, wherein we set out three forms of standards to be set: (i) target standards, such as or ambient quality standards; (ii) emission standards, and (iii) production or specification standards. We then discussed optimal standard setting and we reviewed cultural relativity, that different cultural communities might place various environmental goals in different priorities. Standard setting is clearly at the heart of environmental law -- to set environmental goals, predicated on community preferences, to better achieve desired levels of environmental welfare or services. But the task of standard setting is both as complex as the set of environmental challenges facing a community as it is complicated by the particular goals desired in diverse communities. Standard setting is then also a question of ‘environmental federalism; the guidelines for setting standards for local injuries and global injuries might differ substantially.

This chapter covered financial tools beyond conventional insurance, to cover self-insurance, risk-sharing agreements, forms of deposits, and various types of compensation funds. The common element is that the capital either remains solely with the actor or remains closer to the actor, so they are less costly on capital budgets. Self-insurance meant to book a financial reserve to cover certain future risks. In the late 1970s, the term began to include the concept of ‘captives,’ wherein a company owns its own insurance agency and write its own policies. Risk-sharing agreements are contractual agreements between similarly placed firms to agree to pay-up in capital, based on a pre-agreed ratio, to cover any of the co-parties’ capital needs to cover emergencies and damages. Various forms of deposits and guarantees involve a third party holding the capital of the risky first party until a certain event or time period has been successfully reached; however, this type of structure can create substantial moral hazards. Compensation funds can be created in two basic manners, the first is to have the actor pay while undertaking the risky activity in some form, while the second is to have public funds cover the cost of the funds.

The Law and Economics literature details how information can be generated from legal rules drawn from both private and public spheres; designing legal rules to become more effective in creating useful information to improve both private and public decision making. We examined the market-based tool known as marketable emission permits or as tradable permits. The ability to sell permits does provide incentives if holders of permits can find greener solutions at prices attractive enough to sell off their permits. Pigou advocated for placing taxes on activities that led to negative externalities; that by carefully adding tax costs to the activity so that the marginal costs could become accurate, fully reflective of the externalities. Coase’s analysis of transaction costs complicates the question of against whom should the taxes be levied. Taxing activities that could give rise to environmental injuries must carefully understand the relative elasticities of demand to ensure that the tax will actually fall on the correct party and thus create the correct incentives. In conclusion, we found that market-based instruments worked best alongside more traditional forms of public regulation, that market-based instruments are not robustly implemented as a stand-alone alternative to traditional forms of public regulation.

And to price an aspect of environmental services need not mean a direct 'price to acquire rights to injure' perspective, but rather can reflect the damages imposed on the community from the event of the injury, of the opportunity costs of the events around the environmental injury. Further, there can be a calculation of the costs necessary to completely avoid the events enabling the injury; at what cost can the commercial activity be undertaken in a manner that enables an environment to remain clear of injury. The Baumol-Oates approach, to determine a set of environmental quality standards to facilitate the imposition of marginal cost correcting unit taxes, enables a functional start at implementing a Pigouvian tax system. But no environmental system is simple, the approach will necessarily be limited to an incomplete set of externalities. Under most forms of cost-benefit analysis, the use of marginal costs for environmental losses requires an understanding of the marginal benefits of the activity that caused those injuries, if they are to be aligned for optimal community welfare. However, those costs and benefits may accrue to many diverse stakeholders, present and future, and it may be quite difficult to complete the set of information required to fully implement marginal analysis.

Chapter 2 – Sense-making analysis – discusses the study’s theoretical and methodological foundations from the perspective of dialogical communication theory and the literature on sense-making resources. The chapter discusses the roles of narratives, framing, categorization and metaphors in sense-making. The book’s different empirical materials are described: peer reviewed research literature, policy documents, international media texts and focus group interviews.

Categories of food wars. Mass starvation caused by conflict, by government act. Starvation as a driver of revolutions and wars. Weaponisation of food in world wars.

Food, land and water as triggers for future wars. Resource scarcity: decline in availability of water and soil for food production and risk of conflict. Food demand rising while resource base shrinks. Climate change as a threat multiplier. Warning of future global food crises. Emerging global food-war cycle.

Prehistoric origins of food conflict. Role of food in the growth and collapse of empires. Food wars in recent centuries.

Chapter 4 – Global arenas of transformation – analyses how the transformation concept has been used to describe or advocate change towards sustainable development in international contexts. The chapter presents the development of the research field and provides an overview of how sustainability transformations have been approached in the news media in different parts of the world. Media texts also present a range of transformation goals that are of two types: those intended to prevent the risks of environmental degradation and human insecurity, and those that propose ideas on how to attain various sustainable futures. Finally, the chapter explores how sustainability transformations have been conceptualized in international politics, with particular focus on the variations in policy discourse in low–, middle–, and high-income countries, in Agenda 2030 and the Voluntary National Reviews of the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement.

Chapter 3 – How societies change – presents some key examples of how historians, anthropologists, economists, and other academics have tried to come to grips with the agents and drivers of previous societal transformations. We cite examples of how the great Western transformation between 1500 and 1900 has been framed in different ways. Furthermore, we present two analogies of transformations: the abolition of slavery, and the replacement of horse transport in cities with automobile transport. This constitutes the basis for a typology of societal transformations based on the system levels and tempo of transformations.