A nice interactive game on solving dilemmas between different stakeholders can be found at http://www.alwayssunny.com/lab/lindissima/. The game is a simple-minded and optimistic story which is used as an excercise for people to learn the basics about scenario simulation, dynamical adaptive systems, sustainability attributes, multicriteria analysis, among others. In the first act, slash and burn maize farmers are compelled by the government to leave a biodiversity reserve zone and to intensify maize production in a smaller area using urea. The user plays the role of the farmer, explores scenarios and decides if he can sustain his family economy under the government´s proposal.
In act 2, rural families that depend on ecotourism in a clear lake downhill feel their income threatened by water murkiness caused by nitrogen coming into the lake from the maize farmer´s fields. As part of negotiation with uphill farmers, the user (now in the role of the lake-side dweller) needs to know how much N they can accept to run into the lake before it becomes murky. A number of simulations helps the user find out the limits (which of course depend on initial conditions in the bi-stable regime). Time series coupled with parameter-sensitive cup and marble models that run as real time animations allow the user to better understand the cusp catastrophe involved
In act 3 farmers try to comply with such restriction imposed by the interests of the lake side people. The farmer, together with the lakesier and the government, first consider if its possible to do so under a maize moncrop system and later under a maize-leguminous shrub system. A simple agroforestry model is behind the curtains and the user currently has access only to a small set of its parameters.
Each act provides: the story with illustrations, a scenario simulator based on minimalist dynamical models, a number of excercises that must be solved before going further and a graphical tutorial.
Following up on other global mapping posts (population cartogram (distorted) & pop vs. economy cartograms), here is a cartogram from Jerrad Pierce showing countries sized by their ecological footprint and coloured according the their status as a net surplus or debtor nation.
One the website, the map is explained:
This thematic map shows two variables; 1) coloration indicates reserve(green) – deficit(red) of national biocapacity and 2) area indicates absolute consumption of biocapacity.
Consumption = Appropriated National Biocapacity + Imports - Exports
The area of each country has been distorted to represent its consumption i.e.; its ecological footprint. Countries which appear larger than normal are consuming more than their fair share and smaller countries are consuming less.
Notes:
1) Features with missing data are shown in blue, and are scaled as if they were in ecological balance.
2) Fair share of a country is considered to be equal to the global biocapacity per capita, currently 2.1 global ha/person. Note that this does not take into account land dedicated for reserves for biodiversity.
There is also a dynamic web GIS on the site that, although buggy, allows you to play around with a few types of cartograms.
via WWF Living Planet Report
Tim Holland, a graduate student in Geography at McGill, working with Andy Gonzalez and Greg Mikkelson, and I has recently mapped out US household inequality (using the Gini coefficent to measure inequality) at a county level for 1970, 1980, and 1990. The inequality data is from François Nielsen at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
The striking increase in USA inequality between 1970 and 1990 primarily occured in the 1980s. The spatial pattern of inequality is interesting, but perhaps unsurprising. Why inequality decreased in some counties in the central USA is perhaps more interesting.
For comparison, below is a map of international inequality from Wikipedia (note the color scheme is slightly different).
Thomas J. Campanella, the co-editor The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005), a professor of urban design and city planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a visiting lecturer at Nanjing University’s Graduate School of Architecture, wrote about the resilience of cities and New Orleans in Sept 2005 on the urban planning website Planetizen:
Lost cities are in fact a relative historical rarity. True, Atlantis remains unfound, let alone rebuilt. Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried permanently beneath the hot ejecta of Vesuvius in 79AD. Timgad was sacked by both the Vandals and the Berbers and lost to history until archeologists uncovered it in the 1880s. Monte Albán, on the heights above the modern Mexican city of Oaxaca, flourished for 2,000 years before the Spanish crushed it for all time. But these are the exceptions. Much more common in the annals of urban history are cities that have rebounded again and again from even horrific devastation. The Romans leveled Carthage after the Third Punic War, salting it for good measure. But it was the Romans themselves who later resurrected the port city and turned it into an administrative hub for their African possessions; even today Carthage persists as a suburb of Tunis. By about 1800, urban resilience becomes the rule. No major city in the last 200-odd years has been completely destroyed, in spite of humankind’s ever-increasing power to do so. There are only a handful of exceptions; St. Pierre, Martinique — the “Paris of the Antilles” — was annihilated by a volcanic eruption in 1902 and never rebuilt. Only one man survived, and only because he was locked in solitary confinement. But for every St. Pierre, there are a hundred cities that bounced right back from catastrophic destruction.
The subject of urban resilience is one I explored with Lawrence J. Vale in an anthology entitled The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford, 2005). Our comparative study revealed no short answers as to why urban sites in the modern age are rarely abandoned (factors such as embedded infrastructure, private property rights and insurance, even the political symbolism of reconstruction for a nation have all played a role). Our study did yield, however, a number of key points and common themes about both disasters and urban resilience, many of which have gained new relevance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For one, cities vary enormously in their resilience. Just as some people can fend off a traumatic illness while others succumb, not all cities are equally capable of rebounding from a shock to the system.
Continue reading ‘Recovering New Orleans: the Resilient City’
Gavin Schmidt has an interesting post on Art and Climate Change on the Real Climate weblog.
As anecdotal evidence of past climate change goes, some of the most pleasant to contemplate involve paintings of supposedly typical events that involve the weather. Given the flourishing of secular themes in European art from the Renaissance on, most of this art comes from the 16th to 19th centuries. As readers here will know, this coincides (in the public mind at least) with the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ and somewhat inevitably this canon of work has been combed over with a fine tooth comb for evidence of particularly cold conditions.
The image that brought this issue to mind was seeing ‘Washington crossing the Delaware’ at the Met the other day and seeing the iceberg-like ice it was imagined (75 years after the event) that the rebels had had to row through in 1776. The first thing I noticed was that the ice is completely wrong for a river (which is just one of the errors associated with this picture apparently). River ice is almost always of the ‘pancake’ variety (as this photo from the Hudson river shows), and doesn’t form ‘growlers’. However, the confusion of artistic license with climatology appears to be a bit of a theme in other oft-cited works as well….
Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, author of Out of Control, and former editor of the Whole Earth Review, an early systems and sustainability magazine writes about collaborative web filtering sites. The sites he mentions are interesting for technology news and entertainment, but are not good at international news, environmental and development news, science news, or many of the other types of news that I find interesting. However, the collaborative filtering approaches behind these approaches are quite interesting. Science sites that attempt to do the same thing include Faculty of 1000, which isn’t free but uses reviews by many academics to identify interesting papers in different fields (previously mentioned on this weblog). Nature had a news article Science in the age of the web (Nov 2005) on the slowness of scientists in adopting such tools. Kevin Kelly reviews a bunch of sites and their approaches:
What’s new? Consensus Web Filters
Like a lot of people, I find that the web is becoming my main source of news. Some of the sites I read are published by individuals, but I find the most informative sites are those published by groups of writers/editors/correspondents, including those put out by Main Street Media (MSM). However for the past three months my main source of “what’s new” has been a new breed of website that collaboratively votes on the best links.
This genre does not have an official name yet, but each of these sites supplies readers with pointers to news items that are ranked by other readers. None of these sites generates news; they only point to it by filtering the links to newsy items. Using different formulas they rank an ever moving list of links on the web. The velocity of their lists varies by site, but some will have a 100% turnover in a few days. I check them daily.
Continue reading ‘Emergent news: a discussion by Kevin Kelly’
Steve Rayner has an editorial in the Feb 2006 issue of Global Environmental Change - What drives environmental policy? about science and public policy. He writes:
Rather than resolving political debate, science often becomes ammunition in partisan squabbling, mobilized selectively by contending sides to bolster their positions. Because science is highly valued as a source of reliable information, disputants look to science to help legitimate their interests. In such cases, the scientific experts on each side of the controversy effectively cancel each other out, and the more powerful political or economic interests prevail, just as they would have without the science. This scenario has played out in almost every environmental controversy of the past 25 years (Sarewitz 2000).
This phenomenon has led to a widespread pathology: the use of bad arguments for good causes.
Continue reading ‘Science, good causes, and bad arguements’
From World Resources Institute’s Watersheds of the World (2003) visualizations of some social-ecological properties of the world’s major watershed:
Cropland Area by Basin
Average Population/km2 (1995)
Water availability per person (1995)
The map shows the 114 major watersheds in the world. The map includes the largest transboundary watersheds and small basins that are representative of a particular geographic area. Omitted regions, shown in white, are primarily smaller coastal drainage basins or regions with no permanent rivers (more info).
Malcolm Gladwell has a good article on disproportionality in the New Yorker Millon Dollar Murray: Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. His article focuses on homelessness and air pollution - on how most of the cost of homelessness and comes from a tiny part of the homeless population - and how most air pollution comes from a tiny part of the car population.
Disproportionality is fairly general in many forms of environmental impact. For example, in the Lake Mendota watershed in Wisconsin, most of the phosphorus pollution comes from only a few of the farms in the watershed. However, ecological disproportionality is complicated by the fact that the vulnerability of different sites to human impact also varies - which compounds the disproportionality.
In a recent paper Disproportionality as a Framework for Linking Social and Biophysical Systems (Society and Natural Resources 2006 19:153-173) Pete Nowak, Sarah Bowen, and Perry Cabot write
Early social science was influenced by the work of Adolphe Quetelet, who promoted the idea that the average in a normal distribution represented the ‘‘essence’’ of a social system whereas variance or outliers were viewed as ‘‘accidents’’ in the study of social processes (Kruger et al. 1990). Charles Darwin, on the other hand, viewed variance, or the outlier, as central to understanding evolutionary biological processes. In this article, we have argued that giving more attention to variance across multiple scales can serve as a conceptual bridge between the social and biophysical sciences. Disproportionality is a concept that can bridge disciplines by focusing on the salient interactions between humans and their environments at different spatial and temporal scales.
Nowak et al use the example of farming practices and phosphorus runoff to explore how disproportionality in social and ecological systems intersects. They use the figure below to illustrate how the impact of a behaviour is shaped by place and timing.
Figure (from Nowak’s paper) The combination of typical conservation behavior, exhbiting a skewed normal or log-normal probability distribution, and typical environmental conditions, also exhbiting a skewed normal or log-normal probability distribution of the probability of environmental risk, combines to produce a situation in which a small proportion of inappropriate social behaviors within a particularly vulnerable setting can have a disproportionately large impact on overall environmental quality of an ecological system.
Continue reading ‘Disproportionality in Social Ecological Systems’
Foreign Policy magazine has brief editorial essay Economist Class by Moisés Naím on the state of current economics.
A survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading departments in the United States believe that “economics is the most scientific of the social sciences.” It turns out, however, that this certitude does not stem from how well they regard their own discipline but rather from their contempt for the other social sciences. Although they were nearly unanimous about the relative superiority of their profession, only 9 percent of the respondents were convinced that economists agree on fundamental issues.
Continue reading ‘Economic Understanding’