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Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum - Planet of Slums?

Published by Garry Peterson on June 19, 2006 in Design and Vulnerability. 1 Comment

In 1978 the first meeting of UN Habitat occurred in Vancouver. Thirty years later, Un Habitat’s World Urban Forum runs from June 19th-23rd 2006 in Vancouver. During the time between these meetings the world’s urban population has grown rapidly, in particular in developing countries. Both these trends can be seen in a last of the world’s biggest cities in 1975 and 2005.

Largest cities 1975 Population (Millions) Largest cities 2005 Population (Millions)
Tokyo, Japan 26.6 Tokyo, Japan 35.3
New York-Newark, USA 15.9 Mexico City, Mexico 19
Shanghai, China 11.4 New York-Newark, USA 18.5
Mexico City, Mexico 10.7 Mumbai, India 18.3
Osaka-Kobe, Japan 9.8 Sao Paulo, Brazil 18.3
Sao Paulo, Brazil 9.6 Delhi, India 15.3
Buenos Aires, Argentina 9.1 Calcutta, India 14.3
Los Angeles, USA 8.9 Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.3
Paris, France 8.6 Jakarta, Indonesia 13.2
Beijing, China 8.5 Shanghai, China 12.7

In 1975, 5 of the largest cities were in developing countries, in 2005, 80%. In 1978, about 1/3 of the world’s population lived in cities, today it is 2/3. Indeed most of the world’s net population growth in coming decades is expected to occur in developing world cities.

Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Under-Secretary-General and executive director of UN-HABITAT, reviewing Mike Davis’ book Planet of Slums identifies the vulnerability of slums:

Slum dwellers are more vulnerable than most to hazards such as volcanos, floods, earthquakes, landslides, fires and road traffic accidents. Their health is constantly under threat from inadequate sanitation and low-quality drinking water. As Davis writes: “The most extreme health differentials are no longer between towns and countrysides, but between the urban middle classes and the urban poor.” This conclusion is echoed in the State of the World’s Cities report, which describes how the poor are forced to pay an “urban penalty” that encompasses poor health, early death and vulnerability to both natural and human-made disasters.

UN Habitat has released State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7 (which annoyingly isn’t available on the web). From a BBC article Report reveals global slum crisis

Slum-dwellers who make up a third of the world’s urban population often live no better - if not worse - than rural people, a United Nations report says.

Worst hit is Sub-Saharan Africa where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.

Some states, the report notes, have already taken significant action to improve conditions, notably in Latin America where about 31% of urban people are classified as living in slums (figures for 2005) - down from 35% in 1990.

Of the urban population of South Asia, 57% live in slums though this is down on the 1990 figure of nearly 64%.

…

A slum is defined by UN Habitat as a place of residence lacking one or more of five things: durable housing, sufficient living area, access to improved water, access to sanitation and secure tenure.

Slums have existed in what is now the developed world since the Industrial Revolution and 6% of its current urban population also fall under Habitat’s definition.

However, the growth in slums is unprecedented, Habitat finds, and the nature of the problem has also changed.

…

Dr Tibaijuka told journalists that urbanisation in itself was not the problem as it drove both national output and rural development.

“History has shown that urbanisation cannot be reversed,” she continued.

“People move to the cities not because they will be better off but because they expect to be better off.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has a set of resources - Slum Cities - on the state of urbanization in the developing world, including articles on Bombay, Cairo, and an interview with Mike Davis, along with a good set of internet links. They are also have a variety of special coverage of WUF.

Strengthening the resilience of marine ecosystems

Published by Allyson Quinlan on June 15, 2006 in General. 0 Comments

coral reefEarlier today the creation of the world’s largest Marine Protected Area (MPA) was announced. The newly protected Northwest Hawaiian Islands and surrounding waters and reefs is slightly larger than the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia (139,793 and 128,960 square miles respectively). Today’s announcement, combined with the recent listing of two coral species (Elkhorn and Staghorn) on the U.S. Endangered Species Act, suggests momentum towards strengthening the resilience of marine ecosystems.

With many marine protected areas being both small and isolated, a move toward creating very large MPA’s is a more effective strategy. Larger areas allow for more widespread dispersal of species, including coral offspring, which provides greater insurance against changing conditions. Even better would be the linking together of MPA’s in a global network. Authors of a paper published this past March in Nature (“Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity”), have called for the worldwide networking of tropical marine parks and protected areas to reduce risks of extinction under climate change.

One of the paper’s authors, Prof. Terry Hughes, is Centre Director of the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based in Townsville, Australia, as well as the project leader for the Resilience Alliance’s Marine Resilience Program. Later this summer, Prof. Hughes, along with other researchers will gather in Maine for a meeting with the theme “Social-ecological traps and transformations in marine fisheries”. More information at: http://www.resalliance.org/1608.php.

Rebuilding New Orleans: Don’t build on quicksand

Published by Garry Peterson on June 8, 2006 in Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization and Vulnerability. 3 Comments

Down to Earth points to a Washington Post editorial (June 7th) that writes:

… the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. … As the Corps’ own inquiry found, the agency committed numerous mistakes of design: Its network of pumps, walls and levees was “a system in name only”; it failed to take into account the gradual sinking of the local soil; it closed its ears when people pointed out these problems. The result was a national tragedy.

…the New Orleans disaster has illustrated the folly of building flood defenses for vulnerable low land: Some of the worst-hit areas would not have been developed in the first place if the Corps hadn’t decided to build “protections” for them. Encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to build Category 5 defenses for all of Louisiana, including parts that are sparsely populated for good reason, would not merely cost billions that would be better spent on defending urban areas. It would encourage settlement of more flood-prone land and set the stage for the next tragedy.

On Down to Earth, Daniel Collins comments on how this behaviour falls into the pathology of natural resource management:

The engineering that the Corps offers provides residents and residents-to-be with a false sense of security. There is an implicit belief that since we have re-worked nature as much as we have in the past, or that we have been given dominion over the Earth, that we can continue in the same vein without limit. Modern societies endeavour to isolate themselves from the vagaries of the environment. What that has given us is a higher quality of living, offset by disasters like Katrina. Hurricanes will continue to roll into Louisiana, with or without global warming; New Orleans will continue to sink; and eventually the Mississippi will transfer its discharge into the Atchafalaya.

Building buffers against nature is a sound strategy, but it should be supplemented by building into society a degree of resilience and flexibility. Part of this is the ability (strength even?) to impose limits on building in unsafe regions. This may constrain liberties, but Katrina constrained the ultimate liberty of at least 1,800 people.

From Science Fiction to Viridian Design: Guardian Interview with Bruce Sterling

Published by Garry Peterson on June 3, 2006 in Design and General. 0 Comments

The science fiction writer turned design theorist, Bruce Sterling is interviewed in the Guardian (June 1/2006) about the future of green design.

TG: In your book Shaping Things, you describe climate change as the result of technology pioneers like Edison and Ford. Yet you say the only solution is to press forward with technology and shift to a new type of society.

BS: Not many science-fiction writers write industrial design manifestoes, but I was commissioned by Peter Lunenfeld of Arts Centre College of Design in California, where I was visionary in residence. Why do you want a sci-fi writer in a design school? You want someone who’ll think outside the box. The book talks about a new tech phenomenon with six or seven terms attached: the Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computation, Everyware, Ambient Findability, Spimes (my term).

My own theory, which has gone into Shaping Things, is the key element is the identity for objects. It’s putting tags on things that allow them to interact with digital networks. That is the key concept around which other things accrue. My goal in this is sustainability. I want us to invent a better way to put our toys away. We are emitting too much junk. Google is good at sorting garbage. We could do something similar if we tagged our garbage, basically, everything we make.

Ideally, we need to tag an object before it exists. We need to tag the blueprints and then the manufactured object. Then, when it’s junk, we need to read it, know where it goes, have it ripped apart and recycled.

TG: Where does the concept of Spimes come from?

BS: Spimes was one of those spontaneous neologisms I came up with at a conference, a contraction of “space” and “time.” The idea is you no longer look at an object as an artefact, but as a process. A modern bottle of wine in one sense does exactly the same as the clay jug and stopper that the ancient Greeks used. On the other hand, it is now mass produced industrial glass, with a machine-applied label containing a barcode and a host of other information, even an associated web page. These invite you to do more than just drink the wine. These innovations link this product into a wider relationship.

Yet the moment the bottle is empty, we make a subtle semantic reclassification and designate it “trash”. The logistics of manufacture and distribution will already have tracked the bottle from factory, to warehouse, to store. But the relationship is not a closed loop. The moment you buy the wine, it’s your responsibility. The onus is on you to recycle it, or it’ll spend eternity in landfill. We really should be thinking about the trajectory all this stuff follows. We are in trouble as a culture because we don’t have a strong idea of where we are in time, and what we might need to do to deserve a future.

Amazon.com, for instance, allows you to study lots of information about physical products (books) without needing to consider the physical artefact itself. Or bookcrossing.com, a site where you can track physical books from reader to reader. Wheresgeorge.com does the same with dollar bills. Spimes are both the physical object and the metadata related to that object. Then, as with Amazon’s reviews, we can start adding correspondence on the nature of objects, creating a forum to discuss all our stuff and what to do with it.

TG: So how do RFID (radio frequency identification) chips relate to this?

BS: To study spimes we need to be able to track them. RFID chips are the next evolutionary step from bar codes. They allow objects to have an identity that can be easily read. They were invented by the Pentagon’s shipping, tracking and logistics agency, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, inspired by some work at MIT. Unlike the barcode, which needs to be scanned up-close, you can just ping a whole warehouse, or delivery truck or cargo container, and an RFID scanner will simultaneously detect and log everything in there. You also see them in swipe cards. These tags make it extremely easy to assign identities to objects and connect them to databases.

Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour

Published by Garry Peterson on June 2, 2006 in Greenlash, Ideas and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

The world’s oceans are warming, rising, and acidifing due to human action. The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) on May 31 2006 released a new report on climate change and the world’s oceans, The Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour, that synthesizes current knowledge on climate change and oceans. They state that climate change in combination with over-fishing is threatening already depleted fish stocks. Sea-level rise is exposing coastal regions to mounting flood and hurricane risks. They argue that to keep the impacts on human wellbeing within manageable limits it is necessary to both increase coastal and ocean resilience and reduce the amount of future global warming and ocean acidification. The WBGU recommends that societies act to:

Limit acidification and temperature rise
Adaptation measures can only succeed if sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean acidification are limited to tolerable levels. The only way to do this is through aggressive climate protection policies. WBGU has already recommended previously that the rise in global mean temperature be limited to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Ocean conservation is a further reason for imposing this limit. Furthermore, in order to restrain acidification it is essential to reduce not only emissions of the overall basket of greenhouse gases, but also to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions in particular are sufficiently abated. It follows in WBGU’s view that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will need to be approximately halved by 2050 from 1990 levels.

Strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems
To strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems to elevated seawater temperatures and acidification, it is essential to manage marine resources sustainably. In particular, over-fishing must be stopped. In addition, WBGU recommends designating at least 20–30 per cent of the global marine area as conservation zones. The international community has already adopted goals in this regard, for instance at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. These must now be implemented, and the regulatory gap for the high seas closed by adopting an appropriate international agreement.

Develop new strategies for coastal protection
About every fifth person lives within 30 kilometres of the sea. Many of these people are put at immediate risk by sea-level rise and hurricanes. Coastal protection is thus becoming a key challenge for society, not least in financial terms. National and international strategies for mitigation and adaptation need to be further developed and harmonized. This includes plans for a managed retreat from endangered areas. In developing countries, financing needs to be secured by means of both existing and innovative financing instruments such as micro-insurance.

Give legal certainty to refugees from sea-level rise
At present, international law neither establishes a commitment to receive people who are forced to leave coastal areas or islands because of climate change, nor is the cost question resolved. Over the long term, a quota system is conceivable, under which states would have to adopt responsibility for refugees in line with their greenhouse gas emissions. This will require formal international agreements and the establishment of dedicated funds for international compensation payments.

Use carbon dioxide storage only as a transitional solution
To mitigate emissions, carbon dioxide can be captured in energy-generating facilities and then stored in geological formations on land or under the sea floor. Direct injection into the deep sea is a further option under debate, but this lacks permanence and harbours a risk of ecological damage in the deep sea. WBGU therefore recommends prohibiting the injection of carbon dioxide into seawater in general. In contrast, storing carbon dioxide in geological formations under the sea floor can present a transitional solution for climate protection, complementing more sustainable approaches such as enhancing energy efficiency and expanding renewable energies. Permits should only be granted, however, if such storage is environmentally sound and is secure for at least 10,000 years.

Ecology and Development: the MA & MDGs

Published by Garry Peterson on June 1, 2006 in Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Vulnerability. 0 Comments

Strategy for Sust Dev - Sachs & Reid Science 2006 The economist Jeffrey Sachs, the director the development oriented Millennium Project, and the ecologist Walt Reid, former director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have written a joint policy forum in Science (May 19, 2006) Investments Toward Sustainable Development. They note that both projects have broad agreement about the need to integrate ecology and poverty alleviation.  They recommend that the world invest in ecological infrastructure in poor countries and establish a periodic assessment of the benefits that people obtains from ecosystems. They write:

The United Nations (U.N.) Millennium Project and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment highlighted the centrality of environmental management for poverty reduction and general well-being. Each report emphasized the unsustainability of our current trajectory. Millions of people die each year because of their poverty and extreme vulnerability to droughts, crop failure, lack of safe drinking water, and other environmentally related ills. The desperation of the poor and heedlessness of the rich also exact a toll on future well-being in terms of habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change.

The goal of the Millennium Project is to develop and to promote practical plans for achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for ending poverty, eradicating hunger, achieving universal primary education, improving health, and restoring a healthy environment. The MA, in turn, examined the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and analyzed options for conserving ecosystems while enhancing their contributions to people. The MA and the Millennium Project reached strikingly parallel conclusions:

  1. Environmental degradation is a major barrier to the achievement of the MDGs. The MA examined 24 ecosystem services (the benefits people obtain from ecosystems) and found that productivity of only 4 had been enhanced over the last 50 years, whereas 15 (including capture fisheries, water purification, natural hazard regulation, and regional climate regulation) had been degraded. More than 70% of the 1.1 billion poor people surviving on less than $1 per day live in rural areas, where they are directly dependent on ecosystem services.
  2. Investing in environmental assets and management are vital to cost-effective and equitable strategies to achieve national goals for relief from poverty, hunger, and disease. For example, investments in improved agricultural practices to reduce water pollution can boost coastal fishing industry. Wetlands protection can meet needs of rural communities while avoiding costs of expensive flood control infrastructure. Yet these investments are often overlooked.
  3. Reaching environmental goals requires progress in eradicating poverty. More coherent and bolder poverty reduction strategies could ease environmental stresses by slowing population growth and enabling the poor to invest long term in their environment.

We recommend the following measures in 2006. First, we call on the rich donor countries to establish a Millennium Ecosystem Fund to give poor countries the wherewithal to incorporate environmental sustainability into national development strategies. The fund would support work that focuses on how poverty reduction can enhance environmental conservation (e.g., by giving farmers alternatives to slash and burn) and how environmental sustainability can support poverty reduction (e.g., watershed management to maintain clean water supplies). It would also support national ecosystem service assessments to help decision-makers factor the economic and health consequences of changes in ecosystem services into their planning choices.

The fund would initially need roughly $200 million over 5 years. It would enable universities and scientists in dozens of the poorest countries to incorporate the science of environmental sustainability into poverty reduction strategies. The programs would generate evidence for countries to use in setting priorities for national development and environmental investments.

Second, the United Nations should establish a cycle of global assessments modeled on the MA and similar to the climate change reports produced at 4- to 5-year intervals by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MA and IPCC cost roughly $20 million, and each mobilized in-kind contributions of that magnitude. A global network of respected ecologists, economists, and social scientists working to bring scientific knowledge to decision-makers and to the public can clarify the state of scientific knowledge, help to mobilize needed research, and defeat the obfuscation led by vested interests.

Paradox of the clumps

Published by Garry Peterson on June 1, 2006 in Ideas. 0 Comments

Sean Nee and Nick Colegrave comment on the Scheffer and van Ness PNAS paper on the formation and persistence of ecological lumps (see the earlier post by Buzz Holling, and the commentary Discontinuities in ecological data by Craig Allen in PNAS).

Their commentary, Paradox of the clumps (Nature May 25, 2006) suggest that ecological clumpiness of species may change how we think about species. They write:

…Scheffer and van Nes have revisited a well-studied classical model of competing species and discovered something new. Even in the absence of any environmental discontinuities, they find that assemblages of species will self-organize into clumps of species with very similar niches within a clump and a large difference between clumps. So, paradoxically, species both do, and do not, organize themselves into discrete niches.

In the Origin of Species, Darwin asked: “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” This evolutionary question has a closely related ecological counterpart: how similar can species be to one another and still coexist? … With a single, continuous niche axis, how many species can you pack along it? Or, is there a limit to how close the species can be along this axis?

…

Previous analytical results produced single species widely spaced along the niche axis. But Scheffer and van Nes find widely spaced clumps of species occupying very similar niches. Why the difference? Analytical work looks at the long-term equilibria of models, whereas a simulation study allows the system to be observed as it moves towards these equilibria. Scheffer and van Nes take the simulation approach, which starts out with a large number of species along the axis and then evolves the system according to standard equations that govern competition between species. The clumps they observe are transient, and each will ultimately be thinned out to a single species. But ‘ultimately’ can be a very long time indeed: we now know that transient phenomena can be very long-lasting and, hence, important in ecology, and such phenomena can be studied effectively only by simulation. There is also good experimental evidence for long-lasting coexistence between similar species.

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The emergence of clumps of highly similar species resonates with a proposed solution to another possible problem: the coexistence of large numbers of species in environments that do not seem to allow for much niche differentiation. Plankton and tropical forest plants are the usual examples. These organisms have a simple set of requirements: light, carbon dioxide and a few nutrients. How is it possible to carve out thousands of distinct niches from so few requirements? It has been proposed that such high numbers of species can coexist precisely because their niches are so similar that exclusion takes a very long time, perhaps on the same timescale as speciation.

…

We can go further: on what basis did Darwin make his assertion about the discreteness of species? This question is distinct from debates about the definition of species in nature. Blackberries reproduce asexually, and it is impossible to agree on how many ’species’ there are; but, nonetheless, we all know a ‘blackberry’ when we see one and do not wonder if it is actually a raspberry. Great tits, blue tits and coal tits are all quite distinct when considered as a set, but are surely just more-or-less continuous variants on a tit theme when compared with flamingos. Bacteria that are vastly different genetically are all called Legionella because they clump along the single niche axis that matters to us: they all cause Legionnaire’s disease.

So what is the correct or meaningful frame of reference when thinking about the ecological nature of species? As well as providing stimulating theoretical results, Scheffer and van Nes have revitalized the fundamental question of how we should look at the ecological identity of species.

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