7.12: Key Terms

Words to Know

• Adaptation: Adjustments in human or ecological systems that reduce vulnerability to actual or expected climate impacts.
• Anthropocene: A widely used term for a proposed era in which human activity has become a major force affecting Earth systems.
• Capitalocene: A critical alternative to the Anthropocene concept that emphasizes capitalism, extraction, accumulation, and unequal economic systems as major drivers of planetary environmental change.
• Circular Economy: An economic approach emphasizing durability, reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling in order to reduce waste and reliance on virgin material extraction.
• Climate Justice: An approach to climate change emphasizing unequal responsibility, vulnerability, power, impacts, and capacity to respond.
• Common but Differentiated Responsibilities: A principle of global environmental governance recognizing that states share environmental responsibilities but differ in historical contribution and capacity.
• Common-Pool Resource: A resource from which it can be difficult to exclude users and where one user's consumption can reduce availability for others.
• Critical Minerals: Minerals considered important for economic, technological, or strategic purposes and potentially vulnerable to supply disruption.
• Degrowth: A body of scholarship questioning whether continued material economic expansion in wealthy societies is compatible with ecological limits and exploring alternative models of prosperity and wellbeing.
• Energy Justice: An approach examining how energy-system benefits, burdens, decision-making power, and historical harms are distributed.
• Energy Poverty: Inadequate or unaffordable access to energy services necessary for basic wellbeing.
• Energy Security: Reliable and affordable access to energy while limiting vulnerability to disruption or supply risk.
• Environmental Justice: A framework examining the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and hazards and the degree to which affected communities participate in decisions.
• Externality: A cost or benefit generated by an activity that is not fully incorporated into the market transaction producing it.
• Feedback Loop: A process through which an initial change creates effects that either reinforce or counteract that change.
• Global Environmental Governance: The network of states, international institutions, communities, companies, civil-society organizations, treaties, and norms through which transboundary environmental issues are governed.
• Great Acceleration: The rapid expansion of human economic activity, consumption, population, resource use, and associated Earth-system changes, particularly after the mid-twentieth century.
• Green Extractivism: The concern that transitions toward low-carbon technologies can reproduce intensive and unequal patterns of resource extraction.
• Greenwashing: Misleading or exaggerated environmental claims used to make a product, organization, or activity appear more sustainable than it is.
• Just Transition: An approach to environmental transition that combines decarbonization with decent work, social protection, participation, fairness, and attention to communities affected by economic change.
• Loss and Damage: Climate-related harms that cannot be fully prevented through mitigation or adaptation.
• Mitigation: Actions intended to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions or enhance processes that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
• Planetary Boundaries: A scientific framework identifying major Earth-system processes and proposed limits associated with maintaining relatively stable conditions for human societies.
• Polycentric Governance: Governance occurring through multiple overlapping and interacting centers of authority rather than a single central institution.
• Resilience: The capacity of a community or system to withstand, adapt to, or recover from disruption.
• Resource Curse: The theory that abundant natural-resource wealth can under some political and institutional conditions contribute to poor governance, conflict, corruption, or economic overdependence rather than broad development.
• Sustainability: The pursuit of human wellbeing in ways that maintain ecological and social systems over time and do not undermine future generations' ability to meet their needs.
• Tragedy of the Commons: A model in which individually rational use of a shared, limited resource can generate collective depletion when effective governance institutions are absent.
• Vulnerability: The degree to which individuals, communities, or systems are susceptible to harm and lack the capacity to anticipate, cope with, or recover from it.
• Adaptation Note for Staff: Key-term list compiled and written for this revised edition.