The standard litany against the Green Revolution is that it failed to banish hunger because the technologies it ushered in were no use to small peasant farmers. Farmers with access to cash and good land did well, but poorer farmers on marginal land got nothing out of the revolution, and if they did somehow buy into it (subsidies, handouts) they were worse off afterwards. That’s not to deny that the Green Revolution increased yields, especially of wheat and rice. Just to say that it did nothing for most smallholders.A wonderful paper by Jonathan Harwood, in Agricultural History, demonstrates that this wasn’t always so. In the early days of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, starting in the 1940s, the target was “resource-poor farmers who could not afford to purchase new seed annually”. The MAP’s advisors put improving cultivation practices at the top of their list, with better varieties second. And the improved varieties were to come from “introduction, selection or breeding”.

2) Ethan Zuckerman writes about John Wilbanks on Science Commons, and generativity in science:

One way to think of the mission of Science Commons, Wilbanks tells us, is to spark generative effects in the scientific world much as we’ve seen them in the online world. He quotes Jonathan Zittrain’s definition of generativity, from “The Future of the Internet… and How to Stop It“: “Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences”. This raises some provocative questions, when applied to the world of science: “What does spam look like in a patent system? What does griefing look like in the world of biological data?”

The truth is that the scientific world is far less generative than the digital space. He proposes three major obstacles to generativity: accessibility, ease of mastery, and tranferability. He points out that, as science has gotten more high tech, it’s far harder to master. The result is hyperspecialization: neuroanatomists don’t talk to neuroinformaticists… “and god help you if you cross species lines.” And so universities are making huge investments to try to encourage collaboration: MIT’s just build a $400 million building – the Cook Center – to force collaboration between cancer researchers… and predictably, researchers are fighting the mandate to move in and work together.

3) Judith D. Schwartz writes about the Transition Town movement in Learning About Transition Via Its Vocabulary in Miller-McCune Online Magazine.

Transition: In Hopkins’ words, “Transition” represents “the process of moving from a state of high fossil-fuel dependency and high vulnerability to a state of low fossil-fuel dependency and resilience.” Transition “is not the goal itself — it’s the journey,” he says. Specifically, it’s seeing this journey as an opportunity to embrace rather than a calamity to approach with dread.

“Transition” is predicated on the assumption that society cannot keep consuming energy and other resources at our current pace and that we’re better off accepting this reality and choosing how to adapt rather than letting ourselves get backed into a crisis. The idea is that the adaptation process can harness creative and even joyful possibilities that until now have laid dormant in our towns and cities. As Hopkins has been known to say, “It’s more like a party than a protest march.”

Resilience: A community’s ability to adapt and respond to changes, as well as to withstand shocks to the system, such as disruptions in food or energy supply chains. Resilience differs from “sustainability” in that the emphasis is on community survival as opposed to maintaining the structures and behavioral patterns that currently exist.

“Resilience is the new sustainability,” says Michael Brownlee, a member of the Transition U.S. board and co-founder of Transition Boulder County, the first Transition Initiative in North America. “It’s been co-opted by almost everybody. Everybody is sustainable these days.”

Marketing aside, Hopkins says the two are intertwined: “Sustainability only works if it has resilience embedded in it.”

Related posts:

1. Gates and Rockefeller Foundations to fund African Green Revolution
2. Transition Towns and Resilience Thinking
3. Great Transition Papers

The International Foundation for Science (IFS) is a non-governmental organisation with the mandate to contribute to the strengthening of capacity in developing countries. IFS awards research grants and provides capacity enhancing supporting services to young scientists, working on research projects relevant to the sustainable use and management of biological and water resources. Since 1972, IFS has provided close to 7,000 research grants in more than 100 countries. For more information, please visit the IFS website: www.ifs.se

Currently IFS has a secretariat of 20 staff located in Stockholm, Sweden, and a regional office in Kampala, Uganda. The secretariat is led by the Director who reports to the Board of Trustees. The Director has overall responsibility for implementing the strategic goals of the organisation, managing the secretariat and overseeing day-to-day operations.

IFS will complete its current Five Year Programme in 2010. An external evaluation of the organisation has been conducted recently. A visioning process shall now be initiated to define the future programme, taking into account the uniqueness of IFS viz. other organisations.

The current Director will retire in 2010 and IFS is searching for a new Director. The successful candidate will be expected to:

• Implement the recommendations of the external evaluation as decided by the Board of Trustees
• Steer the visioning process leading to the new Medium Term Programme, in close dialogue with IFS stakeholders including partners and donors
• Mobilise resources worldwide to implement the programme

IFS is seeking candidates who:

• Have an advanced university degree in an academic field relevant to the IFS thematic mandate
• Are connected with the international scientific and development community, in particular with institutions in developing countries
• Have several years experience from senior positions in research and development
• Have leadership skills to lead IFS towards the future
• Have experience in fund-raising
• Possess full command of written and spoken English. Knowledge of French is an advantage

The position requires frequent international travel.

The appointment will be for three years with possibility for renewal.

IFS is registered as a Swedish NGO. The secretariat in Stockholm follows Swedish labour laws and regulations as well as salary and tax scales.

Your application should be sent in confidence, labelled “IFS Director 2010″ and reach IFS by 12 April 2010. Your application should include CV, names of three referees and expected level of salary, as well as a short description of why you are interested in the position and what you hope to achieve.

Applications are invited from citizens of any country.

Women are especially encouraged to apply.

Please send your application by email with attachments to NewDirector@ifs.se

More information on IFS programme, organisation and administration as well as terms and conditions for the position will be provided, upon request, by the outgoing Director, Dr. Michael Ståhl (michael.stahl@ifs.se), Tel +46-(0)8 545 818 21 or +46-(0)70 508 18 21.

Please refer also to the IFS website: www.ifs.se

Related posts:

1. Stockholm Resilience Centre is looking for Seven new PhD students
2. PhD position at Stockholm Resilience Centre
3. New academic positions in International Development at Univ. of E. Anglia

He writes Is African poverty falling? on the World Banks’ Africa can end poverty blog:

We must first be clear about what we mean when we say “poverty is falling”. What many people mean is falling numbers of poor. However, PSiM [Pinkovskiy & Sala-i-Martin] refer solely to the poverty rate—the percentage of people who are poor. (There is no mention of this important distinction in their paper.) And it is not falling over their whole period of their analysis, which goes back to 1970. Rather they find that the poverty rate has been falling since the mid-1990s.

Here we agree: aggregate poverty rates have fallen in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the mid-1990s.  Shahoua Chen and I came to exactly the same conclusion in our research, for the World Bank’s global poverty monitoring effort, although our methods differ considerably and (no surprise) I prefer our methods.

However, Chen and I also point out that the decline in the aggregate poverty rate has not been sufficient to reduce the number of poor, given population growth. …

Two points to note here: (i) Chen and I show that the poverty decline in SSA tends to be larger for lower poverty lines (in the region $1-$2.50 a day) and (ii) PSiM’s method attributes the entire difference between GDP and household consumption to the current consumption of households, and they assume that its distribution is the same as in the surveys. These assumptions are very unlikely to hold, and they give an overly optimistic picture.

In effect, PSiM are using a lower poverty line than us.

…  Another important difference is that Chen and I are more cautious about the data limitations. There are not enough good household surveys available yet to be confident that this is a robust new trend of a falling poverty rate for SSA. PSiM are not so restrained, as is plain from their title!

…Hopefully we will see a confirmation of the emerging downward trend for Africa in the years ahead, as more (genuine) data emerge.

via
Chris Blattman

Related posts:

1. African Poverty is Falling
2. Absolute poverty in China: Higher, but going down faster than previously estimated
3. We can create a poverty-free world

1) Chinese farmers are acidifying there soil by over applying fertilizer.  Acidic soils impede crop growth and amplify the leaching of toxins.  Since the early 1980s, pH has declined from 0.2 to 0.8 across China, mostly due to overuse of fertilizer.  This is shown in a new Science paper, Significant Acidification in Major Chinese Croplands (DOI: 10.1126/science.1182570) by JH Guo and others.

Topsoil pH changes from 154 paired data over 35 sites in seven Chinese provinces between the 1980s and the 2000s. The line and square within the box represent the median and mean values of all data; the bottom and top edges of the box represent 25 and 75 percentiles of all data, respectively; and the bottom and top bars represent 5 and 95 percentiles, respectively. (From Guo et al)

Reporting on the paper Mara Hvistendahl writes, “Beginning in the 1970s, Chinese farmers applied ever-increasing amounts of fertilizer with the hope that it would lead to bigger harvests. Instead of high yield, however, they got water and air pollution. Today, agricultural experts estimate that in many parts of China fertilizer use can be slashed by up to 60%.”  In another issue of Science she also reports on current Chinese efforts to reduce fertilizer use.  In the Wall Street Journal, Geeta Annad reports on overfertilization in India “Pritam Singh, who farms 30 acres in Punjab, says the more desperate farmers become, the more urea they use. Overuse is stunting yields.”

2) The Washington Post reports on how in the US large feed lots are causing water quality problems in Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.

… Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

3) Fertilization of ecosystems can have complex ecological consequences. In a paper in PNAS, John Davis and others show that in a Long-term nutrient enrichment decouples predator and prey production DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908497107.

Relationship between primary consumer and predator secondary production for the reference stream (gray circles), the treatment stream (black circles), and previously published data (open circles). The arrows represent the temporal trajectory of the treatment stream starting with the 2 years of pretreatment (P1 and P2) and ending with the fifth year of enrichment (E5). The data labels correspond to the sampling year for the reference and treatment streams. The previously published data include 5 years of production data from the reference stream (C53) and a similar Coweeta stream (C55) that had experimentally reduced terrestrial leaf inputs during 4 of those years (21). It also includes previously published data from an unmanipulated year that compared our current reference (C53) and treatment (C54) streams (22). AFDM is ash-free dry mass.

Their research showed that there were differences in how predators and prey responded to fertilization, but these only emerged over time.  Increases N and P entering a stream increased populations of both predators and prey, however later on prey populations continued to increase but predator populations declined,because fertilzation shifted the streams prey to larger, predator resistant species, which reduced the efficiency with which energy flowed through the food web.

Related posts:

1. World distribution of income
2. Nitrogen transfer from sea to land via commercial fisheries
3. Predators, shifting subsidies, and regime shifts

Below is a related 2007 talk of her’s from the University of California The American Denial of Global Warming, that provides more details on environmental denial.

Related posts:

1. Paul Krugman on Betraying the Planet
2. Uncertainty and climate change
3. A report from Copenhagen

via the Oil Drum

Related posts:

1. Dennis Meadows awarded Japan Prize for work on Limits to Growth
2. Richard Alley explains how CO2 is the climate’s “biggest control knob”
3. The Environmental Limits to Globalization

Figure 5 from "African Poverty is Falling...Much Faster than You Think" NBER 2010

Related posts:

1. How much is African poverty really falling?
2. World distribution of income
3. Modelling a social-ecological poverty trap due to infectious disease

Paskal convincingly argues that short-sighted domestic and foreign policies are already eroding “the West’s position in the global balance of power”. Exhibit A is the Arctic, where the US and EU are pushing for ‘global governance’ of the still-frozen Northwest Passage, a route expected to become a prized shipping channel to Asia and Europe with continued warming.
As melting Arctic sea ice opens a shipping channel through the Northwest Passage, China and Russia could forge economic ties to Canada and win major gains in trade.
Canada currently claims the Northwest Passage as part of its territorial waters, but this assertion is being contested by the US and European Union, which want it recognized as an international strait so that they can have unfettered access for their own commercial interests, such as oil and gas exploration. This standoff, Paskal suggests, could prod Canada to explore a strategic relationship with Russia, which has its own designs on the Arctic. Meanwhile, China is knocking at Canada’s door, eager to purchase a slice of the country’s abundant natural resources. In a ’stateless’ Northwest Passage, Russia and China could end up being the big players, especially if they forge stronger economic ties to Canada. This potential development, Paskal argues, poses a long-term security risk to the EU and US.

To understand why the Northwest Passage looms large in global geopolitics, one need only look to China, which has built up a trading and shipping network through state-controlled companies that now manage such chokepoints as the Panama Canal. As Paskal explains, these chokepoints, where a wide flow of traffic is forced through a narrow alley, “are the sorts of things empires go to war over”. The Strait of Hormuz, which leads to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, is a natural chokepoint. Others, such as the Panama Canal, are man-made. “The melting Arctic sea ice creates new chokepoints of global strategic importance,” asserts Paskal, cautioning those who minimize the Northwest Passage as a Canadian issue, “It is about as much of a Canadian issue as the Suez Canal is simply an Egyptian issue.”

Chinese chess

The melding of realpolitik and international relations with climate change is what makes Global Warring deserving of attention. Paskal spends much of the book walking the reader through the projected impacts of climate change — but in the context of countries manoeuvring for advantage in a world where imminent and drastic environmental change is taken for granted.

At the same time the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that the prospect of a navigable Arctic has lead the Chinese government to fund more polar research.  The Financial Times writes in Exploring the openings created by Arctic melting.

“Because China’s economy is reliant on foreign trade, there are substantial commercial implications if shipping routes are shortened during the summer months each year,” the report said. It added that taking the northern route through an ice-free Arctic could shorten the trip from Shanghai to Hamburg by 6,400km compared with sailing through the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal. In addition, piracy-induced high insurance costs could be avoided.

Related posts:

1. Social Implications of Arctic Melting
2. A transforming Arctic
3. Methane in the Arctic

The paper provides an rich history of how the innovative oceanographer Henry Stommel created his diagrams to emphasize the cross-scale dynamics of the ocean (See figure below), and how his diagram was adapted by biological oceanographers. However, they miss how Stommel diagrrams moved into ecosystem ecology and sustainability science.

Below I present a series of Stommel diagrams.  The first three figures are reproduced in Vance and Doel’s paper, the later three are from sustainability science.

First, Stommel’s original figure, which was designed to show how oceanic processes varied across scales, and that sampling efforts had to be planned with a consideration of these.

Schematic diagram of the spectral distribution of sea level (From Stommel 1963. Varieties of Oceanographic Experience. Science)

The first appearance of the Stommel Diagram in a new discipline was in a 1978 book chapter in John Steele’s influential edited book Spatial Pattern in Plankton Communities (Loren R. Haury, John A. McGowan, and Peter H. Wiebe, Patterns and Processes in the Time-Space Scales of Plankton Distribution, pages 277−327.).  They adopted Stommel’s method to show processes influencing biological productivity.

The marine biology version of 1978, by Haury et al. The graph retains the same form as the Stommel's, but now emphasizes factors in marine biology, with an emphasis on biological productivity, here labeled “biomass variability.

Vance and Doel then show how this figure was simplified and coloured to show sampling scales in a textbook.

The biological version of the Stommel Diagram used in teaching: The first known textbook version, produced in 2005, and one of the first originally done in color. In this version, the authors added relevant scales for the main sources of data (ships, moored stations, and satellites). Source:M. J. Kaiser, et al, 2005. Marine Ecology Processes, Systems and Impacts. Oxford University Press)

Stommel diagrams were adopted by sustainability scientist William Clark to illustrate the cross scale impacts of climate change in William C. Clark 1985 Scales of Climate Impacts. Climatic Change 7(1):5-27.

Scales of climatic phenomena. Characteristic time and length scales for selected events.

This type of approach was used in the influential book Sustainable Development of the Biosphere edited by Clark and RE Munn. It has after this carried on in ecological science, particularly through Buzz Holling’s focus on cross-scale pattern, for example in Cross-scale Morphology, geometry, and dynamics of ecosystems (Ecol. Mon. 62(4): 447-502).  Buzz Holling, Craig Allen and I used this approach to illustrate how biodiversity studies need to more fully consider scale in this figure from Peterson, Allen, and Holling’s Ecological Resilience, Biodiversity, and Scale (Ecosystems 1998 1(1): 6–18), which builds upon Clark’s 1985 figure and a figure from Holling’s 1992 paper.

Time and space scales of the boreal forest and their relationship to some of the processes that structure the forest. These processes include insect outbreaks, fire, atmospheric processes, and the rapid carbon dioxide increase in modern times. Contagious mesoscale disturbance processes provide a linkage between macroscale atmospheric processes and microscale landscape processes. Scales at which deer mouse, beaver, and moose choose food items, occupy a home range, and disperse to locate suitable home ranges vary with their body size.

Modified Stommel diagrams were used throughout the 2002 book Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature, to illustrate the cross-scale dynamics of social ecological systems.   For example, in the chapter Why Systems of People and Nature are not just Social and Ecological Systems co-authors Frances Westley, Steve Carpenter, Buz Brock, Lance Gunderson, and Buzz Holling modified the Stommel diagram by replacing the spatial scale with the log of number people involved in an institution in order to illustrate a possible cross-scale structure of social processes.

Institutional hierarchy of rule sets. In contrast to ecological hierarchies, this one is structured along dimensions of the number of people involved in rule set and approximate turnover time.

Another recent ecological adaptation of the Stommel diagram is found in my 2008 paper, Agricultural modifications of hydrological flows create ecological surprises (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2007.11.011).  There Line Gordon, Elena Bennett and I simplified the spatial axis into a number of broad catagories to plot the time and space scales at which a number of different hydrologically mediated agricultural regime shifts operate.

Estimates of the spatial and temporal scales at which regime shifts operate. Blue indicates agriculture and aquatic systems, white indicates agriculture and soil, and green indicates agriculture and atmosphere regime shifts.

Related posts:

1. The how and why of linking future scenarios across scales
2. The long history of human-environment interactions in China
3. Intensive agriculture’s ecological surprises

On Tor.com, science fiction novelist and critic Jo Walton speculates about why there are not more positive futures?:

When I was writing about The Door Into Summer, I kept finding myself thinking what a cheerful positive future it’s set in. I especially noticed because the future is 1970 and 2000. I also noticed because it isn’t a cliche SF future—no flying cars, no space colonies, no aliens, just people on Earth and progress progressing. Why is nobody writing books like this now? …

Why is this?

I don’t think it’s because we live in terrible depressing times. 1957, when Heinlein wrote The Door Into Summer, wasn’t a particularly cheerful … Anyway, people were writing cheerful optimistic stories about the future in the 1930s, when things could not have been blacker. People always want escapism, after all.

First is the looming shadow of the Singularity, that makes many people feel that there is no future, or rather, the future is unknowable. I’ve written about why I think this concept may be inhibiting SF.Another thing may be the failure of manned spaceflight. Most hopeful future-oriented SF includes space colonization and we’re just not doing it. It is cool sending robots to Mars and Jupiter, but it isn’t the same. The problem is people in space doesn’t really seem to make sense, and that puts us in the position where we want to have a moonbase because… because we want to have a moonbase. …

The third thing I see is anthropogenic climate change—far more than the threat of nuclear annihilation this seems to bring with it a puritan yearning for simpler greener life, self-hatred, and a corresponding distrust of science and especially progress. It isn’t the reality of climate change that’s the problem, it’s the mindset that goes with it. If you suggest to some people that small clean modern nuclear reactors are a good way of generating electricity they recoil in horror. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain and sequels have people dealing with the climate change by planetary engineering, but that’s very unusual, mostly it gets into books as something to cower before.

And then there’s the fact that for the most part we don’t understand our technology any more. I know how a CRT monitor works—LCD, not so much. We have a lot of it, it has certainly progressed, but when we take the back off it’s very mysterious. I think this is part of the appeal of steampunk, looking back to a time when tech was comprehensible as well as made of brass. In a similar but related way, maybe progress is moving too fast for optimistic science fiction. … It’s hard to get ahead of that, except with disaster changing everything. Halting State was out of date practically before it was in paperback.

She asks her readers for examples of books that are:

• Published since 2000
• Set in our future (or anyway the future of when they were written)
• With continuing scientific and technological progress
• That would be nice places to live.

But, on her site people cannot come up with many near future positive stories.

Can any Resilience Science readers suggest novels with positive environmental futures?

Related posts:

1. Art of Climate Change: telling stories to understand the future
2. Legacy Futures: how past concepts of the future constrain current thinking
3. Imagining Future Cites

The article covers many projects including the ongoing Urban Atlas Project, which aims to develop new tools for understanding the social-ecological capacity to provide ecosystem services.

The article writes Urban Resilience:

Urban centers have always been hubs of innovation, creativity, and wealth, but they are also hubs of crime, disease, and environmental pollution. Cities can be models of resource efficiency—the average Manhattanite uses only 29 percent of the energy an average American uses in a year—but they also concentrate the need for huge amounts of power, water, food, and other resources. In the developing world, cities are changing faster than scientists can understand the diverse factors driving those changes, and to complicate matters further, many of those forces operate in contradictory directions and at differing scales.

In short, cities are the quintessential complex adaptive system. Which makes them, in many ways, the perfect place to explore resilience.

Brian Walker is former program director and chair of the Resilience Alliance, a loose international coalition of natural and social scientists who, in their own words, “collaborate to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems.” In 2005, recognizing the growing impact of urbanization, the Alliance held a series of brainstorming sessions, laying the groundwork for the “Urban Network,” based out of the Stockholm Resilience Center, an interdisciplinary research group that formed at Stockholm University in 2008.

The Urban Network has research sites in 12 cities: Bangalore, New Dehli, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Chicago, New York City, Phoenix, Canberra, Helsinki, Istanbul, and Stockholm. These cities span the globe and differ vastly in terms of culture, history, and economic development. The ultimate goal, according to Thomas Elmqvist, lead researcher of the Network, is to do a comparative analysis of these cities. How are they similar or different with respect to handling development? How do they compare it comes to withstanding shocks and surprises?

“As humans, we should try to understand how to manage systems in order to avoid passing thresholds,” says Elmqvist. But this is especially difficult in urban contexts, which have already been so transformed by humans that they’ve breached most of the thresholds ecologists are familiar with. When great expanses of concrete and steel now exist where trees and streams once did, new tipping points must be defined for places that are, as Elmqvist puts it, “already tipped.”

Case studies are now underway in each of the Network’s 12 participating cities. But in deciding what kind of data to gather, researchers have had to ask themselves: What would a city look like through the lens of resilience?

Metabolism

A city’s lifeblood is a continuous flow of stuff—fuel, consumer products, people, and services that enter it either actively, through human effort, or passively through natural processes like solar radiation, atmospheric currents, and precipitation. Ecologists often talk about these resource flows in terms of inputs and outputs. They’ve developed several budgetary models of accounting for them, including the well-known “ecological footprint.”

The resilience approach, according to ecologist Guy Barnett of the Urban Network’s Canberra research team, focuses less on the resources that cities consume and more on the interdependencies along the chain of supply and demand. Dependence on a single type of fuel as an energy source, for instance, creates a highly vulnerable system—especially if fuel prices are volatile or if the supply is prone to disruption.

Related posts:

1. Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – Urban Solutions
2. Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – Planet of Slums?
3. Weaving ‘Protective stories’ to secure urban green areas

[Steve Cork says] the typical society relies on centralised networks that are vulnerable to threats.

“It’s all dependent on one or a few people or agencies. If they collapse then the whole system collapses,” says Cork.

Resilient cities

Professor Peter Newman of the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute in Fremantle says most cities are not built for resilience.

“At the moment our resource consumption is all based on infrastructure that is highly centralised,” says Newman, who will address the Canberra conference.

“You have big power plants that pump electricity across hundreds of kilometres, and you have big water supply schemes and big pipes in and big pipes out.”

Newman says recent events showed how vulnerable this made the Western Australian capital of Perth, which suffered an economic blow after the natural gas pipeline that supplies it was cut by an explosion.

“The city had no gas virtually for six months,” says Newman, who has recently co-authored a book detailing seven principles of sustainable cities.

“Industry basically had to close down for that period.”

Newman says a more resilient city would consist of smaller interconnected components, which were largely self-sufficient, collecting renewable energy and re-using it locally.

“If you cut the gas supply to the city, as occurred in Perth, the city can go on because it has all these other components.”

Newman says “distributed” energy and better public transport would help decrease dependence on fossil fuels, reduce energy waste, and improve the liveability of cities.

Natural resource management

Cork points to how resilience thinking is being applied to natural resource management.

He says the Federal Government is now providing most of the funding for conservation and better land management.

“So whether the Federal Government gets its policy right or wrong will determine the whole outcome. That’s not a resilient situation,” says Cork.

He says people at the local level need to be given more authority to detect change and make decisions, because they have a better idea of what is going on in the field.

“You don’t send an army into the field and wait for generals to make all the decisions. You give people in the field the authority to make decisions,” says Cork.

Cork says studies of personal resilience show the ability to recover from a serious illness, for example, is linked to a sense of personal control.

“And yet our health system is all about taking that control away from you.”

Related posts:

1. Resilience 2011
2. A regional resilience assessment of the Goulburn-Broken Catchment
3. Slow variables that shape bushfire resilience