Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [229]-235. Also issued in print.

Climate change and the continuing changes that accompany it require society and its broader institutions to evolve continuously. Today’s continual atmospheric damage requires a commitment to ecological considerations that show consistent and meaningful carbon reductions. The success of global carbon mitigation depends entirely on the capabilities of individual governing bodies agreeing and delivering upon their climate ambitions. However, delivering impactful progress on emissions is a considerable challenge. Although there has been significant research as to what climate mitigation goals should encompass, the policy path and resulting incremental changes needed to achieve them require additional scholarly attention. This thesis analyses the role of institutions as they adapt to support societies addressing climate change. Adopting a historical institutional approach provides a pathway for understanding the coordination of information, individuals, institutional adjustments, and their role in the carbon policy process. By focusing on the impact of ecological modernisation ideas, this work addresses the ambiguity that lies between contradicting approaches to climate governance and instead, analyses the incremental changes needed to support societies as they address climate change. Systemically gathering policy tools from 1992-2012, this research empirically examines the nature, ambition, and achievements of mitigation policy in the EU and US as they transition to a low-carbon future.

This thesis examines representations of environmental activism in contemporary literature. In general terms, this thesis understands activism to be a mode of politics that seeks to transform society, counter to forces of oppression and crisis. Precisely as a transformative or counter-hegemonic mode of politics, the actions, public perceptions, and representations (literary or otherwise) of activism and social movements mark out an extreme – though rarely understood – horizon of political agency and possibility. The thesis uses and adapts Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious to explore, via literary representation, the prospects, constraints, and capacities which exist in contemporary forms of environmental activism. It begins by considering novelistic representations of climate change that display a tension between ‘fast-violent’ and gradual or historically-embedded forms of environmental change. The thesis then moves on to consider novelistic fiction that displays evidence of the intertwining of environmental crises and neoliberal governmentalities. A later chapter turns to a more specific site of resistance – food production – examining novelistic fiction that not only thematises the emergence of particular forms of resistance, but also aesthetically and formally registers agroecological theory and practice. The final chapter moves away from fictive writing and investigates the ways in which literary non-fiction presents a new kind of critical problem regarding the accuracy of its representations of activism; namely, the tensions which emerge between realist and speculative registers. To date, there has been a relative lack of attention paid to representations of activism in environmental literary and cultural criticism. A critical study of the cultural representation of environmental social movements will, I argue, yield valuable insights into how environmental problems are articulated and the forms of activism in use today, along with the contradictions, tensions – and even unintended harmonies – between environmentalism and mainstream political and economic trends.

During the late Miocene, exchange between the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean changed dramatically, culminating in the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC). Understanding Mediterranean-Atlantic exchange at that time could answer the enigmatic question of how so much salt built up within the Mediterranean, while furthering the development of a framework for future studies attempting to understand how changes may have impacted global thermohaline circulation. Due to their association with specific water masses at different scales, radiogenic Sr, Pb, and Nd isotope records were generated from various archives contained within marine deposits to endeavour to understand better late Miocene Mediterranean-Atlantic exchange. The archives used include foraminiferal calcite (Sr), fish teeth and bone (Nd), dispersed authigenic ferromanganese oxyhydroxides (Nd, Pb), and a ferromanganese crust (Pb). The primary focus is on sediments preserved at one end of the Betic corridor, a gateway that once connected the Mediterranean to the Atlantic through southern Spain, although other locations are investigated. The Betic gateway terminated within several marginal sub-basins before entering the Western Mediterranean; one of these is the Sorbas Basin, a well-studied location whose sediments have been astronomically tuned at high temporal resolution, providing the necessary age control for sub-precessional resolution records. Since the climatic history of the Mediterranean is strongly controlled by precessional changes in regional climate, the aim was to produce records at high (sub-precessional) temporal resolution, to be able to observe clearly any precessional cyclicity driven by regional climate which could be superimposed over longer trends. This goal was achieved for all records except the ferromanganese crust record. The 87Sr/86Sr isotope record (Ch. 3) shows precessional frequency excursions away from the global seawater curve. As precessional frequency oscillations are unexpected for this setting, a numerical box model was used to determine the mechanisms causing the excursions. To enable parameterisation of model variables, regional Sr characteristics, data from general circulation model HadCM3L, and new benthic foraminiferal assemblage data are employed. The model results imply that the Sorbas Basin likely had a positive hydrologic budget in the late Miocene, very different to that of today. Moreover, the model indicates that the mechanism controlling the Sr isotope ratio of Sorbas Basin seawater was not restriction, but a lack of density-driven exchange with the Mediterranean. Beyond improving our understanding of how marginal Mediterranean sub-basins may evolve different isotope signatures, these results have implications for astronomical tuning and stratigraphy in the region, findings which are crucial considering the geological and climatic history of the late Miocene Mediterranean is based entirely on marginal deposits. An improved estimate for the Nd isotope signature of late Miocene Mediterranean Outflow (MO) was determined by comparing Nd isotope signatures preserved in the deeper Alborán Sea at ODP Site 978 with literature data as well as the signature preserved in the Sorbas Basin (Ch. 4; -9.34 to -9.92 ± 0.37 εNd(t)). It was also inferred that it is unlikely that Nd isotopes can be used reliably to track changes in circulation within the shallow settings characteristic of the Mediterranean-Atlantic connections; this is significant in light of a recent publication documenting corridor closure using Nd isotopes. Both conclusions will prove useful for future studies attempting to understand changes in Mediterranean-Atlantic exchange. Excursions to high values, with precessional frequency, are also observed in the radiogenic Pb isotope record for the Sorbas Basin (Ch. 5). Widening the scope to include locations further away from the gateways, records were produced for late Miocene sections on Sicily and Northern Italy, and similar precessional frequency cyclicity was observed in the Pb isotope records for these sites as well. Comparing these records to proxies for Saharan dust and available whole rock data indicates that, while further analysis is necessary to draw strong conclusions, enhanced dust production during insolation minima may be driving the observed signal. These records also have implications for astronomical tuning; peaks in Pb isotope records driven by Saharan dust may be easier to connect directly to the insolation cycle, providing improved astronomical tuning points. Finally, a Pb isotope record derived using in-situ laser ablation performed on ferromanganese crust 3514-6 from the Lion Seamount, located west of Gibraltar within the MO plume, has provided evidence that plume depth shifted during the Pliocene. The record also suggests that Pb isotopes may not be a suitable proxy for changes in late Miocene Mediterranean-Atlantic exchange, since the Pb isotope signatures of regional water masses are too similar. To develop this record, the first published instance of laser ablation derived 230Thexcess measurements are combined with 10Be dating.

The modern wave of environmentalism that swept most of the Western world since the 1960s, has generated considerable academic interest and has been widely documented. However there are apparent gaps in the knowledge, understanding and academic coverage of the phenomenon in the developing world, particularly in Africa. This thesis is an empirical exploration into the nature of environmentalism in Ghana, West Africa dwelling on the phenomena of environmental consciousness and movement activity. It identifies the presence of a small yet viable indigenous environmental movement. The movement is most visible through the partnering and collective networking activities of small, institutionalized local organizations that came together to form coalitions, share resources and work together on broad thematic issues that were of common concern.

Advances in sensor technology enable environmental monitoring programmes to record and store measurements at high-temporal resolution over long time periods. These large volumes of high-frequency data promote an increasingly comprehensive picture of many environmental processes that would not have been accessible in the past with monthly, fortnightly or even daily sampling. However, benefiting from these increasing amounts of high-frequency data presents various challenges in terms of data processing and statistical modeling using standard methods and software tools. These challenges are attributed to the large volumes of data, the persistent and long memory serial correlation in the data, the signal to noise ratio, and the complex and time-varying dynamics and inter-relationships between the different drivers of the process at different timescales. This thesis aims at using and developing a variety of statistical methods in both the time and frequency domains to effectively explore and analyze high-frequency time series data as well as to reduce their dimensionality, with specific application to a 3 year hydrological time series. Firstly, the thesis investigates the statistical challenges of exploring, modeling and analyzing these large volumes of high-frequency time series. Thereafter, it uses and develops more advanced statistical techniques to: (i) better visualize and identify the different modes of variability and common patterns in such data, and (ii) provide a more adequate dimension reduction representation to the data, which takes into account the persistent serial dependence structure and non-stationarity in the series. Throughout the thesis, a 15-minute resolution time series of excess partial pressure of carbon dioxide (EpCO2) obtained for a small catchment in the River Dee in Scotland has been used as an illustrative data set. Understanding the bio-geochemical and hydrological drivers of EpCO 2 is very important to the assessment of the global carbon budget. Specifically, Chapters 1 and 2 present a range of advanced statistical approaches in both the time and frequency domains, including wavelet analysis and additive models, to visualize and explore temporal variations and relationships between variables for the River Dee data across the different timescales to investigate the statistical challenges posed by such data. In Chapter 3, a functional data analysis approach is employed to identify the common daily patterns of EpCO2 by means of functional principal component analysis and functional cluster analysis. The techniques used in this chapter assume independent functional data. However, in numerous applications, functional observations are serially correlated over time, e.g. where each curve represents a segment of the whole time interval. In this situation, ignoring the temporal dependence may result in an inappropriate dimension reduction of the data and inefficient inference procedures. Subsequently, the dynamic functional principal components, recently developed by Hor mann et al. (2014), are considered in Chapter 4 to account for the temporal correlation using a frequency domain approach. A specific contribution of this thesis is the extension of the methodology of dynamic functional principal components to temporally dependent functional data estimated using any type of basis functions, not only orthogonal basis functions. Based on the scores of the proposed general version of dynamic functional principal components, a novel clustering approach is proposed and used to cluster the daily curves of EpCO2 taking into account the dependence structure in the data. The dynamic functional principal components depend in their construction on the assumption of second-order stationarity, which is not a realistic assumption in most environmental applications. Therefore, in Chapter 5, a second specific contribution of this thesis is the development of a time-varying dynamic functional principal components which allows the components to vary smoothly over time. The performance of these smooth dynamic functional principal components is evaluated empirically using the EpCO2 data and using a simulation study. The simulation study compares the performance of smooth and original dynamic functional principal components under both stationary and non-stationary conditions. The smooth dynamic functional principal components have shown considerable improvement in representing non-stationary dependent functional data in smaller dimensions. Using a bootstrap inference procedure, the smooth dynamic functional principal components have been subsequently employed to investigate whether or not the spectral density and covariance structure of the functional time series under study change over time. To account for the possible changes in the covariance structure, a clustering approach based on the proposed smooth dynamic functional principal components is suggested and the results of application are discussed. Finally, Chapter 6 provides a summary of the work presented within this thesis, discusses the limitations and implications and proposes areas for future research.

Food sovereignty is an alternative agricultural and rural development paradigm advocated by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina. This investigation analyses food sovereignty through a historical cross-scale analysis focusing on the livelihoods of peasants in the sertão in North-Eastern Brazil. The overall aim is to assess the implementation and local effects of a policy, which is based on three food sovereignty principles, and determine in what ways and to what extent it promotes food sovereignty in practice. The three food sovereignty principles considered were support of peasants and small-scale family farmers, prioritisation and support of local food systems and commerce and promotion of agroecology. The policy analysed is the Brazilian government’s Food Acquisition Programme (FAP), as implemented in Mirandiba, Pernambuco by the NGO Conviver from 2005-2008. The analysis involved an assessment of the production and earnings by 359 participating families from 18 poor rural communities, as well as detailed case studies of the livelihood strategies of 14 families from two communities. A number of policy debates are explored, including rural poverty, food security and sustainable agricultural and rural development, to which this research provides three main contributions. Firstly, a new framework to explain the process of marginalisation of peasants through the influence of five mediating factors. Secondly, this framework helps deconstruct misconceptions about peasants and thereby provides support to La Via Campesina’s defence of ‘peasants’ and their livelihoods. Finally, as the first known indepth study of the implementation of the FAP on a local level, this investigation contributes to fill a gap in the research and literature on the operation and local impacts of both the FAP and governmental food procurement programmes more generally. This thesis argues food sovereignty can be achieved locally even within a context of general globalisation, through policies such as governmental food procurement programmes. The investigation concludes that food sovereignty is being pursued in areas of Brazil through the FAP and other progressive policies and movements, which are enabling peasants to improve their well-being, food security, self-esteem and to forge an adequate livelihood. The FAP is also contributing to the development of local food commerce systems and the promotion of agroecology both in Mirandiba and Brazil

As the demand for energy rises, Populus species are increasingly grown as bioenergy crops. Meanwhile, due to global change, predictions indicate that summer droughts will increase in frequency and intensity over Europe. This study was carried out to evaluate the adaptation to drought in Populus, at different levels: genetic, genomics and physiology. Forests trees such as poplar are very important ecologically and economically but the Populus genus is known to be drought sensitive. Consequently, it is essential to understand drought response and tolerance for those trees. Two populations of poplar were used for this study, a mapping population (Family 331) and a natural population of Populus nigra. The F2 mapping population obtained from a cross of Populus deltoides and Populus trichocarpa, showed differences in stomatal conductance and carbon isotope composition in both clones and the F2 progeny. It was also used to discover QTL related to water use efficiency highlighting interesting areas of the genome. Combining QTL discovery and microarray analysis of the two clones in response to drought, a list of candidate genes was defined for water use efficiency. The natural population of Populus nigra consisting of 500 genotypes of wild black poplar showed variation in numerous physiological measurements such as leaf development and carbon isotope discrimination in well-watered conditions depending on their latitude of origin. The drier genotypes (from Spain and South France) had the smallest leaf area which could be linked to an adaptation to drought. Physiological measurements of extreme genotypes in leaf size of this population revealed differences in response to water depending on their latitude of origin. Stomatal conductance rapidly decreased and water use efficiency improved for Spanish genotypes after a slow and moderate drought stress. Direct comparisons between the transcriptome of extreme genotypes from Spain and North Italy in well watered and drought conditions provided an insight into the genomic pathways induced during water deficit. Six candidate genes were selecting for further analysis using real-time PCR: two stomatal development genes (ERECTA and SPEECHLESS), two ABA related genes (ATHVA22A and CCD1), a second messenger (IP3) and a NAC transcription factor (RD26)

Future food security is under threat from both climate change and human population growth. Water scarcity is a major limitation to crop production worldwide and the effects of climate change are likely to exacerbate this. Furthermore, an ever increasing human population is driving our demand for food, fuel and fibre. In combination, climate change and population growth, and their interaction, creates a complex problem with regards to improving plant productivity with which to maintain food security. If crop production can be made more efficient, agricultural intensification can be achieved without the need to expand the world’s cropped area, which is unfeasible. Leafy salad crops are of significant nutritional value and are eaten globally, thus making them an exciting target for improving resource use efficiency in agriculture. This research focuses on water as a resource and takes two complementary approaches. Firstly, to improve the crop genetically so it produces more ‘crop per drop’ without a detrimental impact on yield. Secondly, the aim was to improve irrigation management in a commercial setting in order to use water more efficiently while attaining optimal crop yield and quality. Candidate SNPs within the lettuce genome have been elucidated which control both fresh weight and water use efficiency and these can now be used to inform a marker assisted selection breeding program. This breeding will produce a more water use efficient lettuce crop, which is not compromised in its ability to produce biomass, while also retaining the favoured traits of currently used commercial crops. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated using thermal imagery that water savings of almost 20% can be made in a commercial setting without any impact on crop yield or quality. The water savings which we have provided, if extended commercially, will confer significant savings in terms of water, waste and money.

The behaviour of Tidal Stream Turbines (TST) in the dynamic flow field caused by waves and rotor misalignment to the incoming flow (yaw) is currently poorly understood. The dynamic loading applied to the turbine could drive the structural design of the power capture and support subsystems, device size and its proximity to the water surface and sea bed. In addition, the strongly bi directional nature of the flow encountered at many tidal energy sites may lead to devices omitting yaw drives; accepting the additional dynamic loading associated with rotor misalignment and reduced power production in return for a reduction in capital cost. For such a design strategy it is imperative to quantify potential unsteady rotor loads so that the TST device design accommodates the inflow conditions and avoids an unacceptable increase in maintenance action or, more seriously, suffers sudden structural failure. The experiments presented as part of this work were conducted using a 1:20th scale 3-bladed horizontal axis TST at a large towing tank facility. The turbine had the capability to measure rotor thrust and torque, blade root strain, azimuthal position and speed. The maximum outof- plane bending moment was found to be as much as 9.5 times the in-plane bending moment, within the range of experiments conducted. A maximum loading range of 175% of the median out-of-plane bending moment and 100% of the median in-plane bending moment was observed for a turbine test case with zero yaw, scaled wave height of 2m and intrinsic wave period of 12.8s. A Blade Element Momentum (BEM) numerical model has been developed and modified to account for wave motion and yawed flow effects. This model includes a new dynamic inflow correction which is shown to be in close agreement with the measured experimental loads. The gravitational component was significant to the experimental in-plane blade bending moment and was included in the BEM model. Steady yaw loading on an individual blade was found to be negligible in comparison to wave loading (for the range of experiments conducted), but becomes important for the turbine rotor as a whole, reducing power capture and rotor thrust.