Giorgos Kallis

Giorgos Kallis
SOAS University of London | SOAS

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119
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Publications

Publications (119)
Article
Full-text available
Degrowth is coming of age, and its analysis of what can be called degrowth spatial politics is advancing rapidly. In this article, we attempt to unravel the history of spatial thought in the degrowth literature to reveal its tendencies, tipping points, and blank spots. We argue that the more recent degrowth spatial literature overly focuses on the...
Article
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Degrowth is a sustainability strategy that is attracting increasing scientific interest, but is seen as too radical for politicians to accept, especially when compared with ‘green growth’. Here we use Q methodology to investigate viewpoints of political elites on degrowth and green growth by inquiring the views of 41 elected members of the European...
Article
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To effectively navigate out of the climate crisis, a new interdisciplinary approach is needed to guide and facilitate research that integrates diverse understandings of how transitions evolve in intertwined social–environmental systems. The concept of tipping points, frequently used in the natural sciences and increasingly in the social sciences, c...
Article
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Is there a limit to the amount of fish that can be taken from the sea? This question echoes the concern of the broader environmental movement in asking: are there ‘limits to growth’? If the answer is ‘yes’, then what must be done to remain within sustainable limits? Fifty years after the publication of the landmark report Limits to Growth, new theo...
Article
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The convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, widening of wealth inequality, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the urgent need to mobilize change to secure sustainable futures. Centres of tropical biodiversity are a major focus of conservation efforts, delivered in predominantly site-level interventions often incorporatin...
Technical Report
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The Bioeconomy is both an enabler and an end for the European Green Deal transformation: achieving the EGD transformation entails transforming the very meaning of sustainable bioeconomy. Among the deepest and most effective leverage points to transform a system are the worldviews driving our behaviours: they yield an enormous power to influence the...
Chapter
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The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controve...
Chapter
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The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characterist...
Article
Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective. Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.
Article
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Achieving the Paris Agreement will require massive deployment of low-carbon energy. However, constructing, operating, and maintaining a low-carbon energy system will itself require energy, with much of it derived from fossil fuels. This raises the concern that the transition may consume much of the energy available to society, and be a source of co...
Article
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In thinking about alternatives to growth-based development, we draw attention to Mediterranean islands and the way they animate imaginaries and practices of a simple life. We follow Franco Cassano’s thesis of ‘Southern thought’ – a critique of Western developmentalism, prioritizing instead values of slowness, moderation and conviviality. These valu...
Article
This paper investigates how the prefiguration of an alternative future by social movements produces new space through a processual dynamic. A case study of the Indignados movement in Barcelona shows how mobilizations evolved from symbolizing an alternative future in the square to constructing alternatives in the city in the post-encampment period....
Article
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Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency,...
Article
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It is almost impossible to disagree with a proposal seeking to slow things down to minimize harm to the planet. However, the question is where. The manifesto in The Case for Degrowth acknowledges the challenge of asking distinct populations to lower their economic growth and well-being. They suggest alliances, echoing the commons, and highlight anc...
Article
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The literature on how the ideology of political parties in power correlates with climate policy outcomes is abundant, but there is no similar literature for the individual characteristics of government leaders. This assessment is the first study of its kind, building on a dataset of government leaders of OECD countries for the period 1992–2017. We...
Article
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Increasing evidence—synthesized in this paper—shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far n...
Article
Full-text available
Following Illich’s (1974) notion of convivial tools and the distinction he makes between “self-propelled transit” and “motorized transport” of mobility, we apply the emerging paradigm of degrowth to urban mobility. Based on the degrowth literature and Illich’s work, we derive principles and criteria for the mobility of a degrowth society that inclu...
Article
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The energy sector is at the center of the current economic system, and of literature and activism on degrowth, which questions the sustainability of current models of energy use. Local and small-scale energy systems may have the potential to reduce energy and resource consumption and to advance degrowth-related ideals of energy democracy, self-suff...
Article
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Under what circumstances are interest-bearing loans compatible with an economy without much growth? The question is becoming increasingly important given a tendency towards declining growth in industrialised economies and increasing evidence that continued growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability. Previous theoretical work suggests...
Article
Carbon taxation is a core instrument for climate mitigation. Its implementation, however, faces popular resistance. In this paper we study one of the most emblematic mobilizations triggered by the carbon tax issue, the Yellow Vest movement in France. We use Q-methodology, a mixed-method approach to identify discourses (or viewpoints) held by protes...
Article
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Established climate mitigation scenarios assume continued economic growth in all countries, and reconcile this with the Paris targets by betting on speculative technological change. Post-growth approaches may make it easier to achieve rapid mitigation while improving social outcomes, and should be explored by climate modellers.
Article
Full-text available
The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. We bring a critical social science perspective to this framework through the notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds. We start by highlighting the strength...
Preprint
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Do political leaders affect the climate mitigation of the nation they govern, and if yes, to which leader characteristics voters who care about climate should pay attention to when they vote? There is abundant literature on how ideology of political parties in power affects climate policy outcomes, but there is nothing similar for individual charac...
Article
The IPCC warns that in order to keep global warming under 1.5°, global emissions must be cut to zero by 2050. Policymakers and scholars debate how best to decarbonise the energy system, and what socio-economic changes might be necessary. Here we review the strengths, weaknesses, and synergies of two prominent climate change mitigation narratives: t...
Book
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Buy it for 8 euro here (discout code FAL20): https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509535620 Covid-19 has lain bare the fragility of existing economic systems. Any decline in market activity threatens systemic collapse. But it doesn’t have to be this way. To be more resilient to future crises –pandemic, climatic, financial, or political – w...
Article
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The coronavirus outbreak has come in the aftermath of other concerning and disastrous events, from the rainforest fires in the Amazon to the wildfires of Australia. So far, the political response worldwide has been limited to identifying the villain and the hero who will first invent the life-saving vaccine. However, in a time of crisis, it is beco...
Article
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GDP growth is declining in industrial economies, and there is increasing evidence that growth may be environmentally unsustainable. If growth falls below returns to wealth then inequalities increase, as Thomas Piketty recently showed. This poses a challenge to managing slow and/or negative growth. Here, we examine policies that have been proposed t...
Article
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This article advances the case for caring and commoning as engines for getting through the COVID-19 pandemic and for moving toward more equitable and sustainable futures. Building on two processes of collaborative intellectual work among degrowth activists, it diagnoses relations between growth and crisis; identifies policies to move through and be...
Article
Full-text available
Increasing evidence—synthesized in this paper—shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far n...
Article
Full-text available
The term ‘ décroissance’ (degrowth) signifies a process of political and social transformation that reduces a society's material and energy use while improving the quality of life. Degrowth calls for decolonizing imaginaries and institutions from – in Ursula Le Guin's words – ‘a one-way future consisting only of growth’. Recent scholarship has focu...
Chapter
This chapter presents a case study on labour‐intensive agriculture to explore the importance of local power asymmetries as determinants of multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. Understanding multiscalar, multidimensional vulnerabilities and mechanisms giving way to them beyond the biophysical and livelihood aspects are essential to address ‘mor...
Article
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The publication of the Ecomodernist Manifesto in 2015 marked a high point for post-environmentalism, a set of ideas that reject limits and instead advocate urbanization, industrialization, agricultural intensification, and nuclear power to protect the environment. Where, how, and why did post-environmentalism come about? Might it influence developm...
Book
El decrecimiento se resiste a una de nición simple. Como la libertad o la justicia, el decrecimiento expresa una aspiración que no puede ser encerrada en una frase. El decrecimiento es un marco en el que coinciden diferentes líneas de pensamiento, imaginarios o propuestas para actuar. Esta versatilidad es una de sus principales fortalezas. El decre...
Article
In this article, I take issue with (eco-)socialists who embrace an ecological critique of growth under capitalism, but remain supportive or agnostic of the prospects for socialist growth. First, I argue that economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist or socialist does not make a difference. Second, I claim that economic...
Chapter
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his Handbook assembles original contributions from influential authors such as Herman Daly, Paul Ekins, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Jeroen van den Bergh, William E. Rees and Tim Jackson who have helped to define our understanding of growth and sustainability. The Handbook also presents new contributions on topics such as degrowth, the debt-based finan...
Chapter
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Degrowth calls for the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective and signifies a desired direction where societies will use less natural resources and organize to live very differently than today. This article traces the origins of degrowth from theorists of the 1970s, to the French activist movement of décroissance in the 2000s, to the...
Article
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En los últimos años han emergido con fuerza alternativas socio-económicas, políticas y ambientales que quieren subvertir los lenguajes y los relatos hegemónicos que nos guían a la crisis permanente. Este es el caso del decrecimiento, un proyecto de transformación político-económica y socio-ecológica que busca "descolonizar" el imaginario social bas...
Article
There is a growing interest in the connection between climate change and migration, but literature so far has mostly focused on climate refugees, permanent migrants, and the implications for destination countries. Seasonal workers, one of the most vulnerable groups in the agricultural sector, have received scant attention. Nonetheless, several gove...
Article
We welcome the attention of Gsottbauer, Logar, and van den Bergh (thereinafter GLV) to our contribution. However, their critique misrepresents what our article was trying to do, so it merits a response. Our article offered a framework for assessing the conditions under which one may, or may not engage with processes that value nature in money terms...
Book
Full-text available
Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism. It is a project advocating the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability. This overview of degrowth offers a comprehensive coverag...
Article
This article analyzes degrowth, a project of radical socioecological transformation calling for decolonizing the social imaginary from capitalism's pursuit of endless growth. Degrowth is an advanced reincarnation of the radical environmentalism of the 1970s and speaks to pertinent debates within geography. This article benefits from Ursula Le Guin'...
Article
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Can working less lead to a healthier economy and better environmental conditions? Which factors should be taken into consideration when forming an answer to this question? In this article Nicholas Ashford and Giorgos Kallis discuss how affluent economies often have shorter work-weeks and why, under the right conditions, more free time can decrease...
Article
Policy agendas increasingly respond to the perceived security threats of climate change, not least via its effects on water. Yet, solid links between climate, water, conflict and security have seldom been substantiated empirically. Drawing from the conceptual framework and empirical results of the EC-funded research project CLICO (‘Climate Change,...
Article
Should we reject money when we value nature? Like most environmentalists, ecological economists are increasingly divided on this question. Synthesizing political ecology with ecological economics, we argue that this way of framing the question is limited. We propose a reformulation of the question into “when and how to value with money?” and “under...
Article
We explore public policy from the perspective of evolutionary analysis. Potential entry points for developing a normative evolutionary policy theory are examined, which involves a critical examination of the related idea of “evolutionary progress”. The meaning of evolutionary policy is next studied from two different, normative and positive angles:...
Article
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Coca plantations are the largest illegal agribusiness in the world, and Colombia is the world’s leading coca producer. Since 1994, the Colombian state, with the aid of the US, has waged a war on drugs based on air fumigation of coca plantations. This article evaluates the social and environmental impacts of this policy. We construct and analyse sta...
Article
The quest for real democracy is one of the components of sustainable degrowth. But the incipient debate on democracy and degrowth suffers from general definitions and limited connections to political philosophy and democracy theory. This article offers a critical review of democracy theory within the degrowth literature, taking as its focal point a...
Article
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This article explores the pros and cons for reducing working hours in Europe. To arrive to an informed judgment we review critically the theoretical and empirical literature, mostly from economics, concerning the relation between working hours on the one hand, and productivity, employment, quality of life, and the environment, on the other. We adop...
Article
Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of water-related hazards on human populations. This has generated security concerns and calls for urgent policy action. However, the simplified narrative that links climate change to security via water and violent conflict is wanting. First, it is not confirmed by empirical evidence....
Article
Can we choose whether to degrow? Sorman and Giampetro in this Special Issue argue that degrowth can only be forced upon us; it will never be the outcome of voluntary or collective choice. In this commentary, I argue instead that although sooner or later we will have to degrow because of bio-physical limitations, we still have a choice of how to do...
Article
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Analizamos el dramático incendio de Horta de Sant Joan de 2009 en Cataluña, bajo el marco de la ecología política. La historia ambiental local, los cambios de usos del paisaje forestal anterior al incendio y el choque entre los diferentes discursos sociales alrededor de éste revelan diferentes formas sociopolíticas de construir la relación entre la...
Article
Economic degrowth is ecologically desirable, and possibly inevitable; but under what conditions can it become socially sustainable? How can we have full employment and economic stability without growth? What will happen to public spending and to public debt? How would production be organised in a degrowing economy? And under what plausible socio-po...
Article
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The environmental sustainability of economic growth has been subject to much debate for many decades. Recently, two alternatives to the growth paradigm have been put forward: namely, a-growth and degrowth. The first proposes to ignore GDP information and focus instead on sound environmental, social, and economic policies independently of their effe...
Article
Uranium mines are the often forgotten source of nuclear power. This article studies impacts and social movements at a uranium mining frontier looking at the interaction between the global social metabolism, industrial dynamics and local ecologies of resistance. Namibia, the world's fourth largest producer of uranium, stands at the vanguard of the g...
Article
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Urbanisation is increasing and today more than a half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Cities, especially those where urbanisation is un-planned or poorly planned, are increasingly vulnerable to hydro-meteorological hazards such as heat waves and floods. Urban areas tend to degrade the environment, fragmenting and isolating ecosystem...
Article
Insights from social system-environmental system coevolutionary thought experiments are abstract, mind opening, and can only be conveyed by leading readers through the experiment themselves. Undertaking applied coevolutionary analyses requires one to bound processes and fix some of the categories, contrary to the nature of the broad, opening nature...
Article
Full-text available
Coca plantations are the largest illegal agribusiness in the world, and Colombia is the world's leading coca producer. Since 1994, the Colombian state, with the aid of the US, has waged a war on drugs based on air fumigation of coca plantations. This article evaluates the social and environmental impacts of this policy. We construct and analyse sta...
Article
Full-text available
International efforts to provide global public goods often face the challenges of coordinating national contributions and distributing costs equitably in the face of uncertainty, inequality, and free-riding incentives. In an experimental setting, we distribute endowments unequally among a group of people who can reach a fixed target sum through suc...
Article
This article introduces the new journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (EIST). We consider its key terms and offer a survey of relevant theoretical and empirical insights, policy issues and research challenges. Four theoretical approaches to studying sustainability transitions are identified. The treatise ends with a synopsis of...
Article
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This article investigates the history of land and water transformations in Matadepera, a wealthy suburb of metropolitan Barcelona. Analysis is informed by theories of political ecology and methods of environmental history; although very relevant, these have received relatively little attention within ecological economics. Empirical material include...
Chapter
En dépit de l’entreprise de légitimation du développement des plantations de jatropha pour la production de biodiesel en Inde, les résultats enregistrés dans l’État du Tamil Nadu ne plaident pas en faveur de cette option agricole et énergétique. La marginalisation des petits paysans et des cultures vivrières invalide de facto le double argument off...
Article
This article defends the proposal of sustainable degrowth. A starting premise is that resource and CO2 limits render further growth of the economy unsustainable. If degrowth is inevitable, the question is how it can become socially sustainable, i.e. a prosperous and stable, rather than a catastrophic, descent. Pricing mechanisms alone are unlikely...
Article
This articles argues that extraction and emission caps are a promising strategy for a sustainable degrowth transition, but that their design and implementation is far from simple. We draw attention to the institutional structures and processes through which caps are to be set, designed and enforced, and discuss the danger of eco-authoritarian polit...
Article
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Jatropha curcas is promoted internationally for its presumed agronomic viability in marginal lands, economic returns for small farmers, and lack of competition with food crops. However, empirical results from a study in southern India revealed that Jatropha cultivation, even on agricultural lands, is neither profitable, nor pro-poor. We use a polit...
Article
This article reviews the burgeoning emerging literature on sustainable degrowth. This is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term. The paradigmatic propositions of degrowth are that economic growth is...
Article
This paper adopts a coevolutionary perspective to criticize the dominant narratives of water resource development. Such narratives of progress portray a sequence of improving water technologies that overcame environmental constraints, supplying more water to satisfy the demands of growing populations for better living. Water supply appears as the r...
Article
This paper studies the coevolutionary ecological-economic dynamics of agro-environmental change. The case study is Santa Rosa (Brazil) and the modernization of subsistence agriculture followed by the more recent emergence of organic farming. We use coevolution as an integrative framework for explaining how and why economic production changed over t...
Article
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This paper maps a coevolutionary research agenda for ecological economics. At an epistemological level coevolution offers a powerful logic for transcending environmental and social determinisms and developing a cross-disciplinary approach in the study of socio-ecological systems. We identify four consistent stories emerging out of coevolutionary st...
Article
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This article asks three connected questions: First, does the public view private and public utilities differently, and if so, does this affect attitudes to conservation? Second, do public and private utilities differ in their approaches to conservation? Finally, do differences in the approaches of the utilities, if any, relate to differences in pub...
Article
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Both for its technological and institutional innovations and for its history of conflicts, California's water system has been one of the most observed in the world. This article and this Special Issue on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program continue in this tradition. CALFED is likely the most ambitious experiment in collaborative environmental policy and...
Article
We address the future of science and governance for the California Delta, focusing on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, an interagency, multi-stakeholder effort to understand and manage the Delta for multiple purposes. We portray a Delta history as a coevolutionary process between science, governance and ecosystems. Global integrated environmental asse...
Article
This article critically examines the usefulness of scenarios in supporting environment-development planning, drawing from the experience of two differentiated case studies: integrated coastal zone in the Greek island of Rhodes (a country pilot project of the Coastal Area Management Programme implemented under the auspices of UNEP's Mediterranean Ac...
Article
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Purpose – This paper sets out to investigate the potential contribution of the inter‐disciplinary field of ecological economics to the explanation of the current economic crisis. The root of the crisis is the growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. Design/methodology/approach – The authors trace...
Article
Deliberative visioning refers to processes of inclusive, multi-stakeholder deliberation over a desirable future. Methodologies include scenario workshops, future searches and community visioning. This paper looks critically at the assumptions of deliberative visioning benefiting from a case study in Greece. We argue that there are fundamental choic...
Article
This paper introduces a special section devoted to participation and evaluation for sustainable river basin governance. The departing point for this research was the recognition that although there is a relative agreement regarding the need to develop new multi-dimensional, inclusive and plural approaches to water resource management, there is stil...
Article
Aquest estat de la qüestió introdueix tres contribucions recents al tema de la desforestació utilitzant la perspectiva de l’ecologia política. Els casos d’estudi examinats, l’oest dels EUA, Indonèsia i l’Índia, palesen les relacions de poder i les qüestions distribucionals que envolten les pràctiques de gestió forestal en aquests tres contexts geog...
Article
Innovation policy is increasingly informed from the perspective of a national innovation system (NIS), but, despite the fact that research findings emphasize the importance of national differences in the framing conditions for innovation, policy prescriptions tend to be uniform. Justifications for innovation policy by organizations such as the OECD...
Article
This chapter provides an interdisciplinary review of the drought literature. Droughts are widely perceived as hydroclimatic hazards. In reality droughts are socioenvironmental phenomena, produced by admixtures of climatic, hydrological, environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural forces. The complexity and context specificity of drought confound sev...
Article