In the state of California, dams are aging, underfinanced, and in many cases ill-maintained. The Oroville Dam Spillway Failure in February 2017 demonstrates that even dams with satisfactory condition ratings can be at risk of failing from a combination of climatic, political, economic, and structural factors. It is therefore necessary to look beyond the condition assessment of a dam and instead consider the hazard potential status. California has 833 High Hazard Potential (HHP) dams – which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers defines as dams that would cause significant loss of life, property destruction, or environmental damage in the case of failure or misoperation (2016).

Expanding on previous literature on the sociodemographic determinants of flood-risk in cases of sea-level rise, climate change, high precipitation, and storm events, this project analyzes variables of social vulnerability within HHP dam inundation boundaries. I rely on a series of geostatistical analyses, two-tail independent samples statistical tests, and multiple linear regressions to answer the overarching research question – Who is most vulnerable to dam-induced floods in California?

The data underpinning this research comes from the National Inventory of Dams, statewide dam inundation boundary maps, and the 2012 -2016 American Community Survey. Results from independent samples t-tests show that individuals and households are disproportionately located within hazardous dam flood zones if they are U.S. Citizens, live with a disability, are less educated, are unemployed, are single parents, have lower median household incomes, live at, below, or near the federal poverty line, and identify as either Black and African American, American Indian and Native Alaskan, or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.

Furthermore, people whose highest educational attainment is a high school degree, unemployed individuals, those living with disabilities, Hispanic or Latino individuals, female-headed households, renters, and people who identify as Black and African American, American Indian and Native Alaskan, Asian, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander represent variables of social vulnerability that are statistically significant predictors of living within a hazardous dam flood zone. This project therefore reveals the spatial and social characteristics of vulnerability to dam-induced flood risk in California.

Planners and policymakers can use this information to improve existing disaster management and response plans by incorporating targeted and specific strategies to reduce the flood-risk of highly vulnerable populations. My findings also provide information necessary for planners and policymakers to address and mitigate the existing social and spatial inequalities in dam inundation zones to create a more environmentally just California.

This dissertation examines the socio-spatial impacts of climate-related hazards and extreme weather events and associated responses in the Turtle Region of Trinidad & Tobago. The Turtle Region supports a growing eco-tourism industry centered on excursions to remote pristine beaches, hiking trails, waterfalls, and the annual migration of female Leatherback turtles to lay their eggs on natal beaches. The Turtle Region also experiences rapid rates of coastal erosion and severe weather related events which trigger frequent flooding and landslides during the rainy season and extended drought during the dry season.

The first phase of the study consisted of a qualitative hazard impact assessment which examined the spatial distribution of impacts of extreme events using secondary data, site observations and focus groups with members of community-based organizations. The second phase examined the nature of impact and responses of households in different communities which are exposed to hazards such as coastal erosion and flooding events. This portion of the data collection consisted of a household survey conducted in three Turtle villages. The final phase explored the institutional challenges and opportunities to build resilience to extreme events through interviews with national and local government officials as well as community leaders.

The socio-spatial impact analysis of the Turtle Region revealed three primary hazards – landslides, flooding and coastal erosion - which affect the region collectively however there are distinguishable patterns of exposure and impact mostly affected by the location of the village. A majority of households indicated that their livelihoods were not affected by extreme events. Contacting others and rebuilding were the primary coping strategies employed by households, while migration does not appear to be a prevalent strategy. A large portion of households, although seemingly able to cope, make no adjustments in preparation for future events or shocks indicating perhaps that repeated experiences and familiarity with a particular risk over time translates to a normalization and acceptance of the risk.

Recommendations for developing low cost, high impact community-based adaptation projects which would applicable in other vulnerable coastal communities include public infrastructure improvements and maintenance, land-use set backs and controls, hard and/or soft mitigation structures, community education and awareness programs, developing NGO capacity and expanding mandates and community-based disaster training and response teams.

What is the import of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 (“SGMA”)? It is acknowledgement that groundwater consumption is drastically outpacing aquifer replenishment and that new tools are necessary to resolve this issue. However, there is justifiable concern that the SGMA is ill-equipped to tackle sustainable groundwater management. Additionally, the timing of the SGMA’s adoption raises questions as to the Legislature’s motives, especially when it has remained silent for more than a century with respect to groundwater conservation. While the problem appears to be a tragedy of the groundwater commons (potentially remedied by market-based incentives and/or collective action), it is in fact much more complicated. As this paper argues, the problem is rooted in the interplay between the over-allocation of Constitutionally protected groundwater use rights, the American common law system and its independent regimes for surface water and groundwater resources (despite hydrogeological interconnectedness), the legislative process, severe climate-induced drought, and a significant lag between technological advancement and legal precedent. Only through state powers like eminent domain (by reacquiring and redistributing use rights) can the state prevent unbridled groundwater extraction.

The term ‘energy transition’, typically referring to a transition from a carbon-intensive to a low-carbon economy, has become increasingly prevalent in academic and policy circles over the past few decades. Framing energy transition as a geographic process involving the uneven and at times contradictory reconfiguration of current patterns and scales of social and economic activity, this dissertation highlights the social and political limitations to what is often uncritically cast as a technically and economically feasible transition.

This dissertation is comprised of three distinct but related studies that examine energy transitions in three contexts: globally; in Indonesia; and in California. In the context of the global energy transition, I find that the rapid increase in private finance in the global renewable energy sector has led to unprecedented growth of renewable energy generation capacity at unprecedented scales and at lower tariffs than previously thought possible. In both Indonesia and California, however, I find that the growing dominance of large-scale renewable energy projects despite the availability of smaller-scale alternatives suggests that private finance, particularly the influence of financial logic in determining project viability, has produced a particular geography of renewable energy generation that severely limits the potential for radical, systemic, and democratic transformation of the global energy system. By theorizing the relationship between forms and sources of renewable energy finance and the physical manifestation of renewable energy infrastructure, this dissertation offers a valuable counter-argument to the prevailing eco-modernist perspective that currently dominates global energy transition discourse, exemplified by the belief that “most of the new investment in renewables must come from the private sector” (IRENA and CPI, 2018, p. 38). I argue that shifting the responsibility for creating ‘bankable’ projects away from host governments toward private investors holds the potential to alter the prevailing logic of the global energy transition, which to date has rather myopically emphasized new and ever-larger renewable energy generation over the broader social and ecological benefits an energy transition may otherwise entail.

The empirical and theoretical contributions contained within this dissertation build on existing knowledge regarding the uneven political-ecological implications of the energy transition, while serving as a guide for policymakers seeking to manage the energy transition in a way that reduces the carbon-intensity of the economy while being attentive to potential contradictions and perverse outcomes that may result from reliance on particular means of achieving energy transition objectives.

In recent years, issues associated with natural rubber production have gained visibility and a number of industry stakeholders across a range of rubber submarkets have started to adopt forms of eco-certification and labeling in response to a growing market for certified rubber products. While encouraging, the disparate nature of rubber certification efforts across an already highly fragmented industry makes it difficult to determine the alignment between claims to address environmental and social concerns and actual performance. This thesis contrasts the environmental and social impacts of natural rubber production with the range of emerging natural rubber certification efforts to assess the alignment between certification needs and certification outcomes. In addition, this thesis seeks to understand the processes that give rise to particular forms of eco-certification that may or may not serve to address actual issues associated with current production practices. By examining the nature and contexts of the relationships between certification stakeholders along the rubber commodity chain, this paper illuminates the ecological and social processes that have given rise to the demand, supply and adoption of natural rubber eco-certification as a particular form of private environmental regulation.

California has been an oil and gas state throughout its history. In the latter half of 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century, hydrocarbon extraction helped define both Californian prosperity and the early promise of the West. Many decades later, the Energy Act of 2005 helped to revitalize domestic oil and gas production by exempting a suite of new “enhanced recovery techniques” for well stimulation, commonly referred to as “fracking”, under major federal environmental regulations. This dissertation research engages the subsoil political ecology of California’s petroleum sector in order to explain how well stimulation regulation evolved in California following the rapid deployment of fracking technology across the country that triggered a decade of “Shale Revolution” beginning in 2006. Well stimulation in California represents a case study of the intensely politicized and contested evolution of extractive regimes and their environmental governance at subnational scales in the wake of disruptive technological change. The embedded single-case design employed in this research targets two units of analysis: regulation and frames. Regulation is analyzed using Governance and Political Economy Analysis to assess the structural, institutional, and stakeholder dynamics of California’s oil and gas sector, while frames are analyzed using Frame Analysis of news media and semi-structured open-ended interviews to examine how discourse coalitions construct narratives with which to advance their agendas. This dissertation research contributes to the academic literatures relating to energy systems and their sociotechnical transitions by situating the case of well stimulation regulation in California within the substantive, theoretical, and philosophical debates surrounding the environmental governance of extraction.

In tropical territories, the factors behind technological change in agro-industries encompass an increasingly diverse set of sectors, social agents, and political ecologies. One question that remains under-explained is how and why tropical agro-industrial systems form relationships to distant regions as part of the production of knowledge. This dissertation contributes to the literature on the geographical organization of innovation in tropical agro-regions by explaining the multi-locational dimension of knowledge production within South American agro-industrial systems. Three levels of analysis use novel evidence from multi-sited fieldwork and datasets to examine knowledgeable agents that base their work in locational “hotspots” of agro-innovation within Brazil and engage in spatial mobility to regions within Latin America. I argue that inter-regional matrices of learning form through mobile agents from Brazil that carve out new relations to places and peoples in varied localized contexts of knowledge production within Latin America. The findings suggest that an inter-regional matrix produces learning from a wider spectrum of knowledge that spills over from locations within Latin America into innovation in home regions within Brazil in the globalizing context of growth in emerging economies and planetary climate change.

The first analytical level explains different relational arrangements of regional systems of social circulation from South America through a comparative history of two tropical territories that varied in their processes of distant learning through the mobility of “local” university-based plant scientists. The second analytical level explains the recent cross-border geography of scientific mobility of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation through an integration of otherwise “peripheral” locations and dimensions of knowledge within Latin America into a framework of knowledge spill-ins. The third analytical level suggests the potential for cross-border learning by large agro-industrial firms from Brazil through more granular branch-level analysis of the location, specialization and organization of Latin American subsidiaries. I argue that this select set of empirical and conceptual tools demonstrate the inter-regional prism of knowledge-based dimensions of agro-industrial organization, environmental conservation and multi-scalar governance in tropical territories during a globalizing era that expresses uncertain geographical shifts in comparison to the “Green Revolution” era of agricultural technology after World War II.