Global Environmental Change is a peer-reviewed international journal publishing high quality, theoretically and empirically rigorous articles, which advance knowledge about the human and policy dimensions of global environmental change.
This page collects all citations from this journal, providing an ‘open’ link to access that research paper where possible. The citation for each paper also lists the content of the FRAW site which references that work, with links directly to the paragraph citing the paper. This listing uses the same format as the FRAW Subject Index – and a complete table of the abbreviations used in the listing can be found on the main index page. Note, paywalled links are shown in red, and ‘open’ links are shown in blue.
Santika et al., Global Environmental Change, vol.93 art.103028, 2025.
Trade agreements and environmental provisions: a counterfactual analysis of environmental impact shifting under global economic inequality
Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have proliferated in recent decades, with increasingly stringent environmental clauses aimed at mitigating trade impacts. However, studies on the environmental effects of RTAs typically focus on a few agreements and indicators, hindering a comprehensive understanding of their effects across various resources. Additionally, the long-term effectiveness of environmental provisions within RTAs remains unclear. To address this gap, we applied a rigorous counterfactual analysis to evaluate changes in multiple resource footprints associated with RTAs and environmental provisions across 195 countries annually from 1990 to 2018. We examined four key resources: primary energy, raw materials, blue water, and land use. Findings revealed that RTAs were linked to the outsourcing of environmental footprints across all resource types while reducing footprint insourcing, a phenomenon known as environmental impact shifting. This effect was particularly evident in wealthier countries, where outsourcing of primary energy, primarily from lower-income nations, rose by 11.6%, raw materials by 13.6%, and land use by 33.5%, compared to similar non-RTA countries. Furthermore, these countries’ insourcing of primary energy was reduced by 48.3% and blue water by 15.4% relative to non-RTA counterparts.
Milward-Hopkins et al., Global Environmental Change, vol.65 art.102168, November 2020.
Providing decent living with minimum energy – A global scenario
It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provide decent material livings to the entire global population. We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume.
Graham M. Turner, Global Environmental Change, vol.18 no.3 pp.397-411, August 2008.
A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality
In 1972, the Club of Rome’s infamous report ‘The Limits to Growth’… presented some challenging scenarios for global sustainability, based on a system dynamics computer model to simulate the interactions of five global economic subsystems, namely: population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources… This paper focuses on a comparison of recently collated historical data for 1970-2000 with scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth. The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favourably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the ‘standard run’ scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.
