Progress in understanding the social dimensions of desalination and future research directions

IF 8.6 1区 环境科学与生态学 Q1 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Brian F. O’Neill , Joe Williams
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The piece outlines the contributions of key works in the field of the political ecology of desalination over the past decade. We note that the field is diverse in terms of contributions from geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and public policy scholars. The research to date has been concerned with the ways in which the deployment of desalting techniques can reflect and reinforce social processes of inequality, political power and economic flows. In this way, desalination has been opened up for intellectual debate beyond technical considerations of the desalting industry and engineers. A critical perspective that complements the recent discussions of environmental harm caused by the desalination industry has emerged as well across a number of global and transboundary contexts. A number of themes emerged that will continue to be of interest to scholars and that need to be addressed in the years ahead. First, desalination intersects transboundary water governance and geopolitics between different water uses and emerges from complex assemblages of local and global actors, including financial actors, water companies, governments, technologies, and natural forces. Second, critical scholarship on desalination needs to continue to pay attention to the interests in and overarching patterns of, the Green New Deal and Blue Economy, each of which intersect with the worlds of academia and policymaking, and involve issues of climate adaptation and mitigation. Third, questions about equity remain with desalination as it is a solution deeply imbricated in the unequal distribution of resources, and questions about representation in decision-making remain. Fourth, research on finance and infrastructure have been at the core of critical desalting research and should remain so. Fifth, there is a growing heterogeneity in terms of research in types of desalting, from reverse osmosis to inland desalting to nuclear and more. This variety will make for rich research for the years ahead. Our hope is that the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological flexibility of this area of research will remain a strong point continuing its rigor, as well as the already robust collegiality among scholars in this interesting, and still nascent field.

在了解海水淡化的社会层面方面取得的进展和未来的研究方向
这篇文章概述了过去十年来海水淡化政治生态学领域主要著作的贡献。我们注意到,该领域的贡献来自地理学家、社会学家、人类学家和公共政策学者。迄今为止的研究一直关注海水淡化技术的应用如何反映和加强不平等、政治权力和经济流动的社会进程。通过这种方式,海水淡化问题已经超越了海水淡化行业和工程师的技术考虑,进入了知识辩论的视野。在一些全球和跨境背景下,也出现了一种批判性视角,对近期关于海水淡化产业造成的环境危害的讨论进行补充。在未来几年中,学者们将继续关注并需要解决一些主题。首先,海水淡化与不同用水方式之间的跨境水治理和地缘政治相互交织,并产生于地方和全球参与者的复杂组合,包括金融参与者、水务公司、政府、技术和自然力量。其次,有关海水淡化的批判性学术研究需要继续关注绿色新政和蓝色经济的利益和总体模式,这两个领域都与学术界和政策制定领域存在交集,并涉及气候适应和减缓问题。第三,海水淡化仍然存在公平性问题,因为它是一种与资源分配不平等密切相关的解决方案,决策中的代表性问题仍然存在。第四,对资金和基础设施的研究一直是海水淡化关键研究的核心,并应继续如此。第五,海水淡化类型的研究日益多样化,从反渗透到内陆海水淡化再到核能等等。这种多样性将为今后的研究提供丰富的内容。我们希望,这一研究领域在认识论、理论和方法论方面的灵活性将继续成为其严谨性的一个强项,同时,在这一有趣但仍处于起步阶段的领域中,学者们之间已经建立起了牢固的合作关系。
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来源期刊
Global Environmental Change
Global Environmental Change 环境科学-环境科学
CiteScore
18.20
自引率
2.20%
发文量
146
审稿时长
12 months
期刊介绍: Global Environmental Change is a prestigious international journal that publishes articles of high quality, both theoretically and empirically rigorous. The journal aims to contribute to the understanding of global environmental change from the perspectives of human and policy dimensions. Specifically, it considers global environmental change as the result of processes occurring at the local level, but with wide-ranging impacts on various spatial, temporal, and socio-political scales. In terms of content, the journal seeks articles with a strong social science component. This includes research that examines the societal drivers and consequences of environmental change, as well as social and policy processes that aim to address these challenges. While the journal covers a broad range of topics, including biodiversity and ecosystem services, climate, coasts, food systems, land use and land cover, oceans, urban areas, and water resources, it also welcomes contributions that investigate the drivers, consequences, and management of other areas affected by environmental change. Overall, Global Environmental Change encourages research that deepens our understanding of the complex interactions between human activities and the environment, with the goal of informing policy and decision-making.
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