ABSTRACT
Energy issues worldwide are leading to major concern and fueling a diverse spectrum of social-ecological impacts and potential transitions. Complex geographical and historical forces drive the current energy dilemmas, the profusion of responses, and the urgent searching for sustainable alternatives. Societies around the world face a firestorm of volatile energy markets and financial risk; scrambles for energy-yielding territories and technological innovation; palpable uncertainties in the provisioning of basic economic goods and services; escalating social justice impacts and vulnerabilities; declining supplies of easy-to-get oil; rising impacts of climate change along with mitigation and adaptation imperatives; issues of geopolitical security and international relations related to energy; political and regulatory failures and limitations, and energy-fueled impacts on varied resource systems (water, ecosystems, agriculture) and their management. Importance and influence of these issues is cascading across local and global scales together with many in-between levels. Indeed energy, in general, is increasingly recognized as central— perhaps the resource-based center per se—within global environmental change and prospects of sustainability (Wilbanks 1994; Zimmerer 2010, 2011).
