Following the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011, the Japanese government began constructing a series of 440 seawalls along the north-eastern coast of Honshu. Cumulatively measuring 394.2km, they are designed to defend coastal communities against tsunami that frequently strike the region. We present a case study of the new seawall in Tarō, Iwate Prefecture, which had previously constructed massive sea defences in the wake of two tsunami in 1896 and 1933, which were subsequently destroyed in 2011. We ask whether the government has properly imagined the next disaster for the era of climate change and, therefore, whether its rationale for Tarō‘s new seawall is sufficient. We argue that the government has implemented an incremental strengthening of Tarō‘s existing tsunami defence infrastructure. Significantly, this does not anticipate global warming driven sea level rise, which is accelerating, and which requires transformational adaptation. This continues a national pattern of disaster preparedness and response established in the early 20th century, which resulted in the failure to imagine the 2011 tsunami. We conclude by recalling the lessons of France's Maginot Line and invoke the philosophy of Tanaka Shōzō, father of Japan's modern environmental movement, who urged Japanese to adjust to the flow (nagare) of nature, rather than defend against it, lest they are undone by the force of its backflow (gyakuryū).

The green and the digital revolutions are intimately linked. Mastery of one technology will likely lead to leadership in the other. Both depend on ample supplies of critical materials, rare earth elements and other vital resources. Unfortunately, many are in short supply and demand for them will explode as those two revolutions unfold. Governments have awakened to vulnerabilities created by their need for these materials and are making efforts, with limited success, to ensure continued access to them. Given the consequences of leadership in both the green and digital arenas, it is not surprising that access to critical raw materials has become a geopolitical battleground.

Issues we are confronted with in the age of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, extinction, and the coronavirus pandemic demand a fundamental rethink of human-nature relationships, but at the same time we are faced with a ‘crisis of imagination’, which is highlighted by the paucity of stories or narratives that enable us to fully engage with these issues. We have a ‘climate crisis’ as well as a ‘crisis of culture’ and both derive from the same source: epistemological limitations in the paradigm of modernity. The most problematic limitation is the fact that our social scientific knowledge has blind spots when it comes to nature and spirituality which makes it almost impossible for us to rethink human-nature relationships in a meaningful way. Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto, however, directly illuminate these blind spots by making nature and spirituality central features in their animation films. This opens up new epistemological and ontological spaces in the hearts and minds of a global audience, making it possible to imagine something new. And that ‘something new’ is ‘postmodern animism’ which emerged from the fusion of a critique of modernity with the intangible cultural heritage of grassroots Japan. Postmodern animism is a philosophy that sees nature as a combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world thus enabling us to engage with climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic in a radically different way. It helps us to conceive a new paradigm that is more suitable for the Anthropocene.

Joining the line of free trade agreements involving civil society in climate change-related commitments, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) installs a public submissions and referral procedure (SRP) under its environmental chapter. China’s application to join the CPTPP and the peripheral role of civil society in its climate decision-making furnish a curious opportunity to contemplate dynamics between the SRP and domestic regimes with historically limited civil society involvement.

The article cites China as an illustrative case to show how a state-centric approach to climate change, lacking civil society engagement, may render mitigation efforts unreliable, unsustainable, and inequitable. It argues that the submissions and referrals procedure (SRP)’s unique procedural features offer potential as a testing ground for building up previously constrained civil society involvement in climate decision-making. It also exposes the design flaws in the SRP that require reform to uphold its identified experimental value, regarding which several proposals are put forward.

The articles compiled here offer examples of how the impacts of anthropogenic climate change in coastal settings are monitored and measured, how the broader public can be involved in these efforts, and how planning for mitigation can come about. The case studies are drawn from the southeastern United States and the British Isles, and they indicate the great potential that cooperating communities of practice can offer for addressing climate-change impacts on cultural heritage.

At coastal archaeological sites, measuring erosion rates and assessing artifact loss are vital to understanding the timescale(s) and spatial magnitude of past and future site loss. We describe a straightforward low-tech methodology for documenting shoreline erosion developed by professionals and volunteers over seven years at Calusa Island Midden (8LL45), one of the few remaining sites with an Archaic component in the Pine Island Sound region of coastal Southwest Florida. We outline the evolution of the methodology since its launch in 2016 and describe issues encountered and solutions implemented. We also describe the use of the data to guide archaeological research and document the impacts of major storms at the site. The response to Hurricane Ian in 2022 is one example of how simply collected data can inform site management. This methodology can be implemented easily at other coastal sites at low cost and in collaboration with communities, volunteers, and heritage site managers.

Can United Nations peace operations improve their effectiveness and strengthen longer-term positive legacies in host nations by shifting to greater use of renewable energy? Since the end of the Cold War and the growth of modern UN peace operations, attention has been focused on the missions’ mandate of supporting political strategies for peace and core objectives such as protecting civilians. Could missions better meet their mandate with improved energy options and reduced emissions, or is there a trade-off with the core objectives? As the missions are nearly fully dependent on diesel generators to power their operations, what is the UN’s responsibility to reduce emissions at a time when addressing climate change is a priority of the UN Secretary-General? Is there an ethical case to make for the UN to support greater use of renewable energy where it operates? And could the UN partner with host nations and others to support a shift in energy use that benefits the communities that host peace operations? This essay argues that missions could reduce their emissions and leverage their energy needs to increase security, strengthen ties to local communities, increase energy access, and support the climate goals of host nations. Drawing on case studies in recent peacekeeping missions and the author’s review of UN commitments across mandates, the Sustainable Development Goals, peacebuilding, and climate goals, this essay will address this area of potential innovation that can help build a positive legacy for UN missions and countries emerging from conflict.

The North American Heritage at Risk (NAHAR) collaborative, which formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed for heritage-at-risk partners to shift from reactive to proactive strategies. The result was the creation of the NAHAR research pipeline to respond to landscapes at risk. The pipeline includes modeling of environmental changes to the landscape; monitoring sites to verify location and assess condition; meeting with the public, descendant community, land managers, and transdisciplinary experts in their field to discuss climate change impacts to their heritage in the next 10 years; methodizing by means of a workflow organizer using data from the modeling, monitoring, and meeting; and when appropriate, mitigating areas identified during the methodizing process. In 2020, the Florida Public Archaeology Network—along with partners in Georgia, South Carolina, Washington, Texas, and Louisiana—began the Science Collaborative People of Guana project at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM NERR) north of St. Augustine, Florida. Using a collaborative science mindset, the project team applied the NAHAR pipeline to gain a better sense of how resources were used in the past and how they currently are being used by communities to ensure responsive resource management and relationship building with visitors, descendants, and other community stakeholders, such as the Gullah/Geechee Nation. This article will provide the building blocks for other collaborative teams to follow the NAHAR pipeline and share lessons learned from the two-year project.

Community Coastal Zone Assessment Surveys (CCZASs) conducted on the Scottish coast aim to characterize and assess the significance, condition, and vulnerability of coastal archaeology and to prioritize assets most at risk. Two key differences from earlier coastal zone assessment survey methods are the use of coastline vulnerability models to target fieldwork and the involvement of the public in the surveys. This article details the methodology used to plan for, carry out, and disseminate results of the surveys, including the following: evaluating and targeting coastlines in a GIS framework to focus new coastal surveys in areas most susceptible to erosion, using SCAPE's coastal archaeology recording mobile application as our survey tool, managing data through SCAPE's Sites at Risk portal, involving local volunteers, and disseminating findings and data flow into regional and national historic environment databases. We discuss results and reflections from surveys of the Highland, Moray, and Aberdeenshire coastlines conducted in 2022 and conclude with general principles applicable beyond Scotland.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from shipping contribute meaningfully to climate change. Despite significant efforts of the International Maritime Organization over recent decades, existing measures are still inadequate for achieving net-zero GHG emissions in the shipping sector and multilateral negotiations hold little promise for improvement. This article considers the polluter pays principle (PPP) as an alternative or additional pathway for tackling marine GHG emissions. The article focuses on the challenges in identifying polluters, which is the key issue that must be addressed before the PPP can be applied. Specifically, the article presents an analytical framework and examines various approaches to identifying marine GHG emissions polluters. Firstly, it identifies the polluter from a general perspective, using three approaches: examining the issue broadly, reviewing international conventions and European Union initiatives that incorporate the PPP, and analyzing selected domestic legislation reflecting the PPP. The article then focuses on maritime shipping, considering specifically two types of contract of affreightment – charterparties and bills of lading – while highlighting key factors in identifying the polluter. In conclusion, the assessment of causal links, along with operational and management decisions regarding the vessel, attribute the status of primary polluter to the shipowner, demise charterer, and time charterer.

Increases in atmospheric CO2 have led to more CO2 entering the world’s oceans, decreasing the pH in a process called ’ocean acidification’. Low pH has been linked to impacts on macroalgal growth and stress, which can alter palatability to herbivores. Two common and ecologically important macroalgal species from the western Antarctic Peninsula, the unpalatable Desmarestia menziesii and the palatable Palmaria decipiens, were maintained under three pH treatments: ambient (pH 8.1), near future (7.7) and distant future (7.3) for 52 days and 18 days, respectively. Discs of P. decipiens or artificial foods containing extracts of D. menziesii from each treatment were presented to the amphipod Gondogeneia antarctica in feeding choice experiments. Additionally, G. antarctica exposed to the different treatments for 55 days were used in a feeding assay with untreated P. decipiens. For D. menziesii, extracts from the ambient treatment were eaten significantly more by weight than the other treatments. Similarly, P. decipiens discs from the ambient and pH 7.7 treatments were eaten more than those from the pH 7.3 treatment. There was no significant difference in the consumption by treated G. antarctica. These results suggest that ocean acidification may decrease the palatability of these macroalgae to consumers but not alter consumption by G. antarctica.

This article analyzes the application of environmental impact assessment as a tool for climate change mitigation from a global comparative perspective. It firstly confirms that, despite persistent resistance in a few jurisdictions, climate effect assessment is now widely applied on a global scale. Yet the article also shows that this practice has faced recurrent practical and conceptual issues, in particular, concerning the determination of the significance of a project’s climate effect and the assessment of indirect effects. Lastly, this article assesses how states have addressed these issues and identifies good practices. In doing so, the article illustrates the potential of functionalist comparative analysis in advancing our understanding of climate law and suggesting policy-relevant conclusions.

This article explores some ethical implications of nuclear energy from a theological perspective. The key point argued for is that the few texts in the literature that address nuclear energy from a theological perspective do not give adequate weight to the importance of the potential benefits of nuclear energy as part of climate change mitigation strategies. The same also applies to the possible role of nuclear energy in providing compensation for future generations in terms of energy resource durability. The texts thus fail to address matters of importance for intergenerational justice. I examine first an article by Jame Schaefer that discusses Aquinas’ conception of prudence in relation to nuclear energy. I then discuss the relevant sections of the papal encyclical, Laudato Si’ and the Japanese Bishops Conference’s document, Abolition of Nuclear Power. All these texts fail to articulate the potential benefits of nuclear energy pertaining to some perspectives on intergenerational justice, because they do not take sufficient note of advances in nuclear technology that would allay some of the concerns expressed within the texts with which I take issue.

We propose a simple indicator for the climate-related transition risks of bank lending based on transaction-level loan data. The underlying idea is that the higher the greenhouse gas intensity of an economic activity, and thus that of the debtor involved, the higher its transition risk. The relationship is mapped through two min-max-normalised functions, each of which represents a scenario for the future characteristics of the green transition. The concept is versatile and applicable to different dimensions at different levels of aggregation (banking system or individual banks, whole economy or specific sectors). As a practical example, we discuss the proposed indicator using Hungarian data for the period 2012–2020.

Mounting climate-related floods, fires, droughts and storms across the globe raise crucial questions about the role of law in adjudicating rights and obligations. While climate litigation attracts scholarly attention, vulnerable populations often lack the means to use formal laws and courts. We draw on ethnographic interviews conducted in 2022 in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, to study how residents of informal settlements exposed to flooding resist exclusionary climate adaptation laws. The findings show how formal law has exacerbated differential climate vulnerability, and resulted in “seawalls for the rich, relocation (and stalled adaptation) for the poor.” In this context, residents claim land in risk-zones through a local rule system known as “the law of the four poles.” We argue that by challenging the legality of the state, and creating a rival legal order that better represents locally identified interests and entitlements, they are claiming a political voice in climate adaptation. We advance theory in both climate adaptation and sociology of law and discuss how the law can better reflect not only the science behind climate change but also the interest and needs of marginalized communities.