coping with ecological suprise in a human dominated world
R. B. Gordon, M. Bertram, and T. E. Graedel’s paper Metal stocks and sustainability in PNAS (Published online 23/01/06)
Shows that copper use per capita is increasing in the US. Increased efficency in use is outweighed by increased consumption. Globally use is increasing much faster than the discovery of new stocks. Below are figures from the article:
Continue reading ‘Absence of Environmental Kuznets in Copper’
I recently read a good paper by Richard York, Eugene A Rosa & Thomas Dietz 2003 Footprints on the Earth: The environmental consequences of modernity. American Sociological Review 68(2) 279-300.
The paper uses the statistical analysis of several competing models of what shapes human impact on the earth. The test models of ecological modernization (that democratic capitalist development is developing solutions to environmental problems - i.e. the environmental kuznets curve), political economic (the neo-Marxian treadmill of production), and ecological models (Impact=Population X Affluence X Technology). They found that population and economy size are the best predictors - by far - of a country’s ecological footprint. There is no evidence of ecological modernization, and a little support for political economic models, such as urbanization increases ecological footprint.
They note
Basic material conditions, such as population, economic production, urbanization, and geographical factors, all contribute to environmental impacts and explain the vast majority of cross-national variation in impacts. Factors derived from neo-liberal modernization theory, such as political freedom, civil liberties, and state environmentalism have no effect on impacts.
and conclude
The sobering note from this analysis is our failure to detect the ameliorating processes postulated by neoclassical economics and ecological modernization theorists. This suggess we cannot be sanguine about ecological sustainability via emergent institutional change.
…
A key consquence is that because of high levels of consumption in affluent nations, even a slow rate of population growth in these nations is at least as great a threat to the environment as is rapid rate of population growth in less developed nations. After all, the footprint of the typical American is nearly 25 times greater than that of the typical Bangladeshi.
ISI selected Footprints on the Earth as a fast breaking paper in Sociology last year.
A bibliography of their related research is avaiable in the STIRPAT Bibliography.
Helmut Haberl from the Institute of Social Ecology, at Klagenfurt University in Vienna, who does interesting work on human appropriation of ecological production, has a paper The global socioeconomic energetic metabolism as a sustainability problem in a special issue of Energy 31 (2006) 87–99. In the paper, Haberl some interesting figures that estimate total human energy use over the last 1,000,000 years and since the widespread use of fossil fuel.
Haberl writes:
conventional energy balances and statistics only account for energy carriers used in technical energy conversions as, for example, combustion in furnaces, steam engines or internal combustion engines, production and use of electricity or district heat, etc. That is, energy statistics neglect, among others, biomass used as a raw material as well as all sorts of human or animal nutrition. These are very important energy conversions in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, but are still significant even in industrial society.
Global socioeconomic energy metabolism in the last 1 Million years. The increase in socioeconomic energy flows encompasses six orders of magnitude, from 0.001 Exajoule per year (EJ/yr) about 1 million years ago to nearly 1,000 EJ/yr today.
SciDev.net has on article -The right way to rebuild Asia’s coastal barrier - on plans by tsunami impacted countries to restore coastal ecosystems. It discusses how plans need to consider the economic values of the ecosystem services produced by mangroves as well as the need to design ecologically appropriate mangrove governance strategies.
Now, governments in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Thailand all want to restore what nature once provided for free: they plan to spend millions of dollars replanting thousands of hectares of mangrove forest.
Scientists applaud the ‘greening’ agenda but warn that to succeed, replanting strategies must include workforce training and supervision, maintenance of seedlings, and increased public awareness about coastal land use. Some economists add that we need a better understanding of the relationship between these endangered ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.
“Reforestation is unlikely to succeed in the long term because the underlying policies haven’t changed,” says Edward Barbier, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming, United States, who has done extensive research on Thailand’s mangroves. Barbier is not surprised that Thailand suffered such extreme damage; since 1961, more than half its mangroves have been removed.
Replanting is critical to restoring ecosystems, he says, but trees alone cannot create the long-term stability needed for sustainable economic growth.
Mangroves tend to be undervalued in economic calculations, which only include the benefits of developing them (such as woodchips or farmed shrimp). This makes it easy for governments to gamble on ‘developing’ the forests. The tsunami clearly raised the stakes — and strengthened the case for protection that ecologists and economists have been making for years.
Previous posts on the tsunami and coastal resilience are: Coral Reefs & Tsunami, Building resilience to deal with disasters, and After the Tsunami.
Jonathan Patz et al have recently published a review paper on the Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health, in a special feature on regional climate change in the Nov 16th issue of Nature.
The article shows that climate change is already a substantial factor shortening people’s lives. The authors estimate that climate change kills an excess 154 000/yr. This mortality compares with 6 million deaths/yr caused by childhood and maternal malnutrition (the largest proportion of mortality) and with 109 000 deaths/yr from carnciogen exposure (data from Rodgers et al 2004 Distribution of Major Health Risks: Findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study. PLOS Medicine pdf)
Climate change deaths are estimated to occur primarily due to increases in malnutrition (77 000 deaths), diarrhoea (47 000 deaths), and Malaria (27 000 deaths). However, the health impacts of climate change vary greatly across the world. In general the areas, least responsible for changing the climate, are suffering the most deaths from climate change. These deaths are concentrated in poor countries, with about half of these deaths occuring in poor countries in S and SE Asia (specifically Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal), which are home to 1.2 billion people.
The mismatch between the countries most responsible for producing climate change and its impact is shown in the two maps below. The first map shows CO2 emissions/capita in 1998 from WRI data, while the second shows the estimated numbers of deaths per million people that could be attributed to global climate change in the year 2000 (From Patz et al). The mismatch be further exagerated if the cumulative CO2 emissions/capita of nations, a better indicator of national responsibility for climate change, were shown.
|
|
[click on a map to see a larger version]
| The World Resources Institute has just published its 2005 report The Wealth of the Poor: Managing ecosystems to fight poverty its available online as a pdf file.
WRI describes the report in their press release:
|
 |
Continue reading ‘WRI 2005: Environment key to helping poor’
This is the third of three posts on Well-Being vs. Wealth (see 1 & 2)
Partha Dasgupta recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives with a number of well know ecologists and economists (Arrow et al 2004. Are we consuming to much? 18(3) 147-172)
They try to answer the question of whether current consumption is sustainable. They consider sustainability to mean that inter-temporal (sum of the discounted value of future) social welfare must not decrease over time. They interpret this to mean that this depends on investment that increases humanity’s productive capacities - which they term genuine wealth.
This requirement that the productive base be maintained does not necessarily entail maintaining any particular set of resources at any given time. Even if some resources such as stocks of minerals are drawn down along a consumption path, the sustainability criterion could nevertheless be satisfied if other capital assets were accumulated sufficiently to offset the resource decline.
Figure comparing yearly growth in per capita GDP and Genuine Wealth during 1970-2001. Error bars show how estimates of wealth change in response different estimates of the ratio between wealth and GDP. I created the figure based on data in Tables 2 & 3 of Arrow et al 2004.
Continue reading ‘Well-Being vs. Wealth (3) - Inclusive Wealth’
This is the 2nd of three posts on well-being and wealth (see 1 & 3).
While the increase in average human wellbeing over the past century is good, a common worry of ecologists (and ecological economists) is much of this increase is sustainable. The answer to this question depends upon how much these improvements in well-being come from more efficient use of renewable flows versus how much comes from the liquidation of natural capital.
Continue reading ‘Well-Being vs. Wealth (2) - Natural Capital’
Following up on Partha Dasgupta’s book review here is a bit more on inclusive wealth and wellbeing. This is the first of three posts.
GDP vs. Well-being
Earlier this year in World Development Charles Kenny from the World Bank had a paper Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything that Matters is Converging (33(1) 1-19).
In the paper Kenny argues
Summary: Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been converging for some time. The paper turns to a discussion of what might be driving convergence in quality of life even as incomes diverge, and what this might mean for the donor community.
The below graph of trends in the human development index shows the type of pattern Charles Kenny discusses in his paper.
From UNDP 2004. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2004: Cultural liberty in today’s diverse world (page 134).
Continue reading ‘Well-Being vs. Wealth (1) - Quality of Life’
Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist, recently wrote a sympathetic yet critical book review of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive in the London Review of Books. In it Partha Dasgupta critiques the book for its failure to adress tradeoffs and advances the concept of inclusive wealth.
Dasgupta critiques Diamond for not being more explict about tradeoffs among ecosystem services:
