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Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2019

Environmental Law

Adaptation

SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

New Realities Require New Priorities: Rethinking Sustainable Development Goals In The Anthropocene, Robin Kundis Craig Jun 2019

New Realities Require New Priorities: Rethinking Sustainable Development Goals In The Anthropocene, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations 17 sustainable development goals are nominally unprioritized. However, numerically and rhetorically, the list effectively makes development goals more important than the environmental goals. This de facto prioritization, however, is deeply flawed in two respects. First, as early sustainable development theorists acknowledged, the environment is the boundary of, not co-equal to, development, constraining potential progress both economically and socially. The Anthropocene’s rapidly accelerating deterioration of the global ecological and physical processes that make human development possible will ultimately constrain development options and potential. Second, human priorities will also change dramatically as adaptation to climate change — the most …


Warming Oceans, Coastal Diseases, And Climate Change Public Health Adaptation, Robin Kundis Craig Jan 2019

Warming Oceans, Coastal Diseases, And Climate Change Public Health Adaptation, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Climate change is changing the world’s ocean in three important ways. First, the ocean is warming. Second, sea levels are rising. Finally, ice is melting. All of these changes have important implications for human disease risk, ranging from a fairly prosaic increase in harmful algal blooms to the science-fictionish re-release of deadly microbes from long ago.

In the United States, coastal adaptation efforts to date have been sluggish. Many uncertainties attend climate change’s effects on the ocean, particularly with regard to sea-level rise and ice melting. In addition, the time scales involved are generally long, outside of the planning ken …