Small mountain towns, such as those in the Appalachian Region of the United States, face increased risks from flooding and soil erosion intensified by climate change. Despite these risks, there is limited knowledge about how these towns are preparing for climate change. This study conducted a mixed methods content analysis of the environmental planning documents of 100 small and mid-sized localities in the Appalachia region to answer two research questions: (i) Do local plans in small and medium-sized towns promote climate mitigation and adaptation strategies? (ii) Are nature-based solutions (NBSs) being deployed through these local plans to build climate resilience? The study found that small towns were incorporating climate-related actions in their planning documents, mainly through Hazard Mitigation Plans, Comprehensive Plans, and Recreational Plans. However, only a handful of planning documents were explicit about climate change. The towns’ economy and population affected the incorporation of climate-related actions.

Choice experiments provide a methodological framework for exploring public preferences for environmental policies, but they are limited by the assumption of homogeneous decision-rule. To understand public preferences for desertification control under decision-rule heterogeneity, this study develops an integrated latent class and generalized random regret minimization (LC-GRRM) approach to capture the heterogeneous decision-rules among both respondents and attributes. The results suggested that the LC-GRRM model showed better fit and provided a more precise explanation compared to the traditional LC model. Respondents could be divided into “comprehensive preferable”, “hedonism preferable”, and “price-sensitive” categories, revealing diverse viewpoints toward desertification control policies. Groups with different preferences have significant decision-rule heterogeneity in multiple desertification control attributes, and such heterogeneous preferences and decision rules are relevant to their socioeconomic and environmental attitudinal characteristics. This study provides a method framework for understanding public preferences in the context of decision-rule heterogeneity and can help to tailor desertification management strategies.

The Regulation on the Administration of Permitting of Pollutant Discharges (RAPPD), implemented in China in 2021, represents a hybrid environmental regulation that integrates command-and-control and public participation elements. Utilizing the implementation of the RAPPD as a quasi-natural experiment and grounding the analysis in the Porter Hypothesis, this paper investigates the micro-level impacts of strengthening the rule of law in emission permits on corporate green innovation. The findings indicate that, compared to non-heavily polluting enterprises, the RAPPD significantly enhances the green innovation capabilities of heavily polluting enterprises. Mechanism analysis reveals that this policy instrument promotes corporate green innovation by enhancing corporate environmental accountability internally and supporting public engagement in governance externally. Furthermore, the green innovation effects induced by the RAPPD are more pronounced in regions with a positive legal environment. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the green innovation effect driven by the RAPPD is more significant in firms where the CEO lacks green experience, environmental management disclosure is limited, or analyst and media attention is low. Additionally, the study reveals that the green innovation effect stimulated by the RAPPD is primarily a leverage effect, resulting from increased R&D investments, rather than a crowding-out effect on other technological innovations. This paper contributes to the evaluation of emission permit policies and the determinants of corporate green innovation while offering valuable insights for optimizing hybrid environmental regulation policy instruments and advancing green development.

In 2023, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) faced its most severe marine heatwave on record, lasting from June to October. This event necessitated the first-ever mass evacuation of corals as part of the ongoing efforts under the Mission Iconic Reef project, aimed at restoring the coral reefs after decades of decline. This study examines how FKNMS stakeholders, including managers and conservationists, responded to the heatwave. Through interviews with stakeholders, our findings highlight a rapid coordinated effort that mitigated some immediate impacts of the heatwave. Stakeholders described that despite these efforts, the marine heatwave had significant adverse effects, leading to coral and fish mortalities, increased human-wildlife conflicts with sea turtles, and declines in the health of birds and dolphins. This study underscores the critical need for enhanced understanding of, and preparation for, emergency events in marine conservation, particularly as climate change increases their frequency.

In the face of growing environmental challenges, the European Green Deal sets ambitious targets for 2030, including strictly protecting 10% of the EU’s land area and expanding organic farming to 25% of agricultural land. To navigate the potentially competing land use demands of these goals, we develop a spatially explicit partial equilibrium model that analyzes the implementation of these targets both independently and concurrently at the EU and national levels. Results indicate that the 25% organic farming target is the restricting constraint with high marginal costs, leading to less cropland use, higher land prices, and higher farming revenues. Consumers would see an increase in average commodity prices of up to 50%. Policy instruments could counteract these effects to ensure the acceptance and increased demand for organic products and reduce environmental leakage to the rest of the world. Less than 1% of cropland area in the EU is needed to fulfill the strict protection target. Hence, the co-fulfillment of both targets incurs minimal land-use conflicts. Half of the newly strictly protected areas are re-designations of already protected areas. Thus, a comprehensive approach that combines expansion with proper management is crucial to achieving conservation goals. This study highlights the need for a comprehensive approach that balances biodiversity conservation and agricultural sustainability and shows that seemingly contradictory goals can be pursued simultaneously with planning and supporting policies.

The requirements for public consultation in strategic environmental assessment (SEA) imply explicit engagement with affected and interested individuals and communities. However, efforts to engage the lay public are often limited; when pursued, they are often within plan-making rather than SEA consultation. While the importance and value of public input in SEA are internationally recognised, with emphasis on the need for more dedicated action in this regard, little is known about the outcomes of more concerted efforts. This article describes, examines and reflects on the relevance and impact of encouraging public engagement in SEA that goes above and beyond statutory requirements. The key finding is that despite the openness and determination of the planning and SEA teams to engage the public, dedicated measures elicited only minimal participation, although the resulting comments were meaningful. Increased awareness and participation skills are needed for the public to actively and effectively take part in decision-making.

The agricultural sector is pivotal in promoting sustainable development goals (SDGs), yet its connection to environmental degradation remains a topic of active discussion. While prior research has examined the effects of agricultural development on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by treating agriculture value-added as a variable that changes over time, this study investigates its time-invariant influence on environmental degradation, measured through GHG emissions. The analysis incorporates human capital (HC), pesticide use (PEST), green energy, and economic growth as control variables, drawing on data from 121 countries spanning 1990–2019. Using the generalized method of moments (GMM) and panel quantile regression (PQR), the study uncovers a U-shaped relationship between environmental degradation and agricultural value-added, with distinct patterns emerging between agriculture-dependent and non-dependent nations. The results reveal that higher green energy use mitigates environmental pollution, whereas the impacts of PEST, and HC remain ambiguous. For agriculture-reliant economies, the findings underscore the need for governments to promote green growth and invest in agriculture initiatives that leverage green energy and advanced technologies to support SDGs.

Divergent perspectives on future land-use changes, known as land-use conflicts (LUCs), significantly affect the local environment, human well-being, and sustainable development goals. However, the accurate identification and resolution of LUCs remain challenging. This study proposed a framework for LUC identification by integrating the land characteristics obtained from expert analyses with local stakeholder preferences. It outlined four types of LUCs and ten conflict combinations. The results indicated that 44.64% of the land plots exhibited at least one type of conflict. Among these, 896, 324, 115, 15, and 12 plots encountered suitability, preference-current use, preference-evaluation, and preference-preference conflicts, respectively. These findings validated the feasibility of the proposed framework and methods. Furthermore, different types of conflict combinations require different coordination rules, which indirectly reflect the complexity of conflict resolution. This framework aids the classification and identification of LUCs; offers targeted conflict resolution strategies; and contributes to informed and inclusive land-use and spatial planning.

This paper aims to value habitat provision and aesthetic ecosystem services and to study the compatibility of these seemingly unrelated services in greater depth and more systematically than is often the case. We use landscape visibility metrics and indicators as common inputs for both valuations. To better understand the origin of public preferences for urban landscape and to provide meaningful valuation for landscape planning policy, we integrate visual and ecological indicators in a choice experiment study. Our methodology is applied to the landscape of Côte-d’Or in France. Mixed logit models are employed to incorporate random taste heterogeneity. By placing landscape ecology metrics at the heart of the stated preference framework, this article seeks to bridge the gap between landscape ecology and non-market valuation, with an eye to promoting ecological services rendered by urban landscapes while maximising social welfare.

The growing frequency of climate risks poses substantial challenges to business operations, prompting companies to increasingly acknowledge the importance of managing their climate risk exposure. In this context, digital finance can facilitate businesses’ access to capital, enabling them to better adapt to, and mitigate, climate risks. This article draws on data from Chinese companies spanning 2011–2021 to explore the impact of digital finance on corporate climate risk exposure. The key findings encompass the following: Digital finance plays a favorable role in mitigating climate-related risks for companies. However, its impact primarily revolves around alleviating transition risks, while it does not significantly affect physical risks. The effectiveness of digital finance in mitigating climate risk exposure only holds in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), smaller-scale enterprises, and non-manufacturing companies. Digital finance achieves this risk mitigation by elevating companies’ research and development (R&D) endeavors and facilitating the expansion of green finance.