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Geopolitics should be understood as a broader subject than the usual association ‘nation-states + international relations + military power + geographical conditions’ suggests. Actually, ‘geopolitics’ is nothing but an explicitly political approach to social–spatial analysis, even if we pragmatically reserve the term for situations in which we face state interventions and strategies aiming at socio-spatial control and/or expanding political influence. Similar to the Copenhagen School’s ‘wider agenda’ for security studies, I think it is useful to develop a ‘wider agenda’ for the critique of geopolitics—for instance, one that clearly incorporates some urban problems as relevant subjects. ‘Eco-geopolitics’ refers to the governmentalisation of ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’, using the ‘environmental protection’ and often even the ‘environmental security’ discourse as a tool for socio-spatial control. Within the framework of this governmentalisation, there are increasing connections between local-level expressions of socio-spatial control in the name of ‘environmental protection’ and national and global agents and agendas. More concretely, ‘urban eco-geopolitics’ is above all related to strategies of socio-spatial control apparently designed to prevent people from ‘degrading the environment’, though in fact they have several social and spatial implications. Rio de Janeiro is here nothing but an illustration of a very general phenomenon. Nonetheless, Rio is a ‘privileged laboratory’ due to an almost unique conjunction of factors: (a) a proverbial ‘abundance of nature’ (i.e. a huge national park inside the heart of the metropolis); (b) a similarly proverbial socio-spatial inequality (hundreds offavelascoexist with elite neighbourhoods in the context of a complex segregation pattern that also includes a huge periphery and an extreme socio-spatial stigmatisation); (c) a ‘modernising drive’ that has significantly changed Rio’s urban space several times since the beginning of the 20th century, being recently represented by the direct or indirect effects of the ‘sporting mega-events fever’ that has dominated Rio’s city marketing since the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local climate protection initiatives are receiving increased attention and support. However, most of the current understanding about their content, motivation, and impact is based on qualitative studies, whose findings cannot be generalised, or quantitative studies, which consider superficial measures of policy adoption. There is a lack of information about the type and extent of greenhouse gas (GHG)-reducing actions that 'typical' cities have implemented, whether or not they are explicitly framed as part of a broader climate protection strategy. In an effort to address this gap, this paper examines original data collected from a nation-wide sample of US cities on their implementation of a comprehensive list of GHG-mitigating activities. An assessment of the data reveals considerable variation in the frequency with which the different activities are implemented, particularly when considered across policy instrument type and target population. Further analysis suggests that cities utilise three broad 'types' of climate protection strategies, based on the number and nature of the relevant actions that they have implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]