The most deadly disasters were:

• the Indian Ocean Tsunami killed 225 000 people
• Cyclone Nargis killed 140 000 people
• the Sichuan earthquake in China killed 90 000 people.
• Pakistan earthquake killed 70 000 people
• European heat wave killed 70 000

The pattern of people affected by disaster is quite different.  Two billion people were impact by disaster.  The most important of these disasters were floods impacted 44%, droughts impacted 30%, and earthquakes impacted only 4% of this total.  Also, since the 1980s the number of impacted people has increased, but the number of people killed by disaters has declined.

Related posts:

1. Using Disasters for Systemic Change
2. Building resilience to deal with disasters
3. Resilience to Earthquakes

According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead. Cheryl Dybas writing for NSF.gov covers a new paper on “Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions” (Nature, 3 Sept 2009, 461: 53-59).

In the paper, Martin Scheffer of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and co-authors found that similar symptoms occur in many systems as they approach a critical state of transition.

“It’s increasingly clear that many complex systems have critical thresholds–’tipping points’–at which these systems shift abruptly from one state to another,” write the scientists in their paper.

Especially relevant, they discovered, is that “catastrophic bifurcations,” a diverging of the ways, propel a system toward a new state once a certain threshold is exceeded.

Like Robert Frost’s well-known poem about two paths diverging in a wood, a system follows a trail for so long, then often comes to a switchpoint at which it will strike out in a completely new direction.

That system may be as tiny as the alveoli in human lungs or as large as global climate.

“These are compelling insights into the transitions in human and natural systems,” says Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Environmental Biology, which supported the research along with NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

“The information comes at a critical time–a time when Earth’s and, our fragility, have been highlighted by global financial collapses, debates over health care reform, and concern about rapid change in climate and ecological systems.”

It all comes down to what scientists call “squealing,” or “variance amplification near critical points,” when a system moves back and forth between two states.

“A system may shift permanently to an altered state if an underlying slow change in conditions persists, moving it to a new situation,” says Carpenter.

Eutrophication in lakes, shifts in climate, and epileptic seizures all are preceded by squealing.

Squealing, for example, announced the impending abrupt end of Earth’s Younger Dryas cold period some 12,000 years ago, the scientists believe. The later part of this episode alternated between a cold mode and a warm mode. The Younger Dryas eventually ended in a sharp shift to the relatively warm and stable conditions of the Holocene epoch.

The increasing climate variability of recent times, state the paper’s authors, may be interpreted as a signal that the near-term future could bring a transition from glacial and interglacial oscillations to a new state–one with permanent Northern Hemisphere glaciation in Earth’s mid-latitudes.

In ecology, stable states separated by critical thresholds of change occur in ecosystems from rangelands to oceans, says Carpenter.

The way in which plants stop growing during a drought is an example. At a certain point, fields become deserts, and no amount of rain will bring vegetation back to life. Before this transition, plant life peters out, disappearing in patches until nothing but dry-as-bones land is left.

Early-warning signals are also found in exploited fish stocks. Harvesting leads to increased fluctuations in fish populations. Fish are eventually driven toward a transition to a cyclic or chaotic state.

Humans aren’t exempt from abrupt transitions. Epileptic seizures and asthma attacks are cases in point. Our lungs can show a pattern of bronchoconstriction that may be the prelude to dangerous respiratory failure, and which resembles the pattern of collapsing land vegetation during a drought.

Epileptic seizures happen when neighboring neural cells all start firing in synchrony. Minutes before a seizure, a certain variance occurs in the electrical signals recorded in an EEG.

Shifts in financial markets also have early warnings. Stock market events are heralded by increased trading volatility. Correlation among returns to stocks in a falling market and patterns in options prices may serve as early-warning indicators.

“In systems in which we can observe transitions repeatedly,” write the scientists, “such as lakes, ranges or fields, and such as human physiology, we may discover where the thresholds are.

“If we have reason to suspect the possibility of a critical transition, early-warning signals may be a significant step forward in judging whether the probability of an event is increasing.”

Co-authors of the paper are William Brock and Steve Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jordi Bascompte and Egbert van Nes of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Scientificas, Sevilla, Spain; Victor Brovkin of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany; Vasilis Dakos of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Potsdam, Germany; Max Rietkerk of Utrecht University in The Netherlands; and George Sugihara of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

The research was funded by the Institute Para Limes and the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies, as well as the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research, the European Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, among others.

Related posts:

1. Responses to Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions paper
2. Using the internet to provide early warning of ecological change
3. Fire, climate change, and the reorganization of Arctic ecosystems

“Speaking as a natural scientist,” he said, “I think 90% of research [on global change] will have to be done by the social scientists.”

…Physicists, he told me at the coffee break, can describe climate threats increasingly vividly and can tell decision-makers that technological solutions are out there. But it’s up to social science, he says, to figure out how we bring about massive economic and social transformation on a tight deadline.

Case in point: feeding solar power from the Sahara where it’s plentiful to Europe where it’s highly in demand, one of Schellnhuber’s favorite ideas. “All the technical problems have been solved,” he says, “but it cannot be done.” We don’t have the legal framework, the transboundary agreements, the international will for this mode of energy delivery.

This is where policy experts, economists, and even anthropologists come in. But, he says, “I don’t think the social science community has grasped the scope of the challenge.” Operating on the basic principle that all groups are different, 95% of social science papers are local case studies, not global-scale work, he says. And indeed, there are an awful lot of case studies among this week’s 800 talks. It remains to be seen whether the picture emerging from the conference will be piecemeal or planet-wide.

Related posts:

1. Postdoctoral research opportunity in Climate Change Adaptation
2. Brian Walker’s Research Areas for Resilience Science
3. Dead Ahead: Similar Early Warning Signals of Change in Climate, Ecosystems, Financial Markets, Human Health

Current climate projections point to an increase in fire-weather risk from warmer and drier conditions.

Two simulations used by Australia’s lead scientific agency, CSIRO, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology point to the number of days with very high and extreme fire danger ratings increasing by some 4-25% by 2020, and 15-70% by 2050.

The agencies’ Climate Change in Australia report cites the example of Canberra which may be looking at an annual average of 26-29 very high or extreme fire danger days by 2020 and 28-38 days by 2050.

…

Left to its own devices, Nature will initiate – usually through lightning strikes – regular “cool fires” which burn out grasses and shrubs but leave trees charred though not destroyed.

Humans, if they want to live in these types of locations, have to learn to manage their surroundings.

Principally, this means not letting the undergrowth build up, to provide the “ladder” that would otherwise allow fires to consume trees, also. In such circumstances, cool fires rapidly become very hot – and very destructive – ones.

It is why authorities in fire-prone districts across the world – not just in Australia – will practise back-burning, or the controlled ignition of undergrowth.

This type of management is not always popular. Residents dislike being smoked out of their homes every time it is done and some people will resent having the pleasant view from the porch turned to a blackened mess.

There is a natural fear also that such burning might get out of hand and result in the kind of damage it is trying to prevent.

But the consequences of attempting to work against Nature, by trying to prevent any fires at all, can be catastrophic.

David Packham, who has studied bushfires and meteorology for many decades, said at the weekend that Australia had ignored the warnings on this for far too long; and that Victoria was paying the price for allowing fuel loads to build up to unprecedented levels.

“The mismanagement of the south-eastern forests of Australia over the last 30 or 40 years by excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had in human occupation,” said the researcher from the Climatology Group at the School of Geography & Environmental Science, at Monash University.

“The state has never been as dangerous as what it is now and this has been quite obvious for some time.”

How vulnerable people are who live in these areas in another important factor in how dangerous these fires are. Not just the number of people, but their landscape management, their lot management, and their house construction – as well as their fire prediction and warning system. What seems clear now is that people were predicting severe fires in Victoria, but that these general warnings didn’t result in specific actions, but when specific fires appeared they moved quicker than the warning systems could respond.

Another BBC article Bushfire dilemma: Flee or fight? asks:

So what lessons will be learned from recent tragic events?

Gary Morgan, the head of Australia’s Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, says that one of the main issues highlighted by the fires is that of increased development of rural areas.

He says: “Many communities need to re-think the notion of who lives in a bushfire zone and who needs to be educated and prepared.”

Related posts:

1. Australian firefighters on fire policy
2. Stephen Pyne on the Australian fires
3. How slow change increased California’s fire risk

Photo from National Geographic

American fire historian Stephen Pyne comments in The Australian on the current Australian fires in Bushfire leader becomes laggard:

Australia knows better. It developed many key concepts of fire ecology and models of bushfire behaviour. It pioneered landscape-scale prescribed burning as a method of bushfire management. It devised the protocol for structure protection in the bush, especially the ingenious stratagem of leaving early or staying, preparing and defending. In recent decades it has beefed up active suppression capabilities and emergency services.

… Yet Australia keeps enduring the same Sisyphean cycle of calamitous conflagrations in the same places. It isn’t translating what it knows into its practices. It seems to be abandoning its historic solutions for the kind of telegenic suppression operations and political theatre that have failed elsewhere. Even when controlled burning is accepted in principle, there always seems a reason not to burn in this place or at this time. So the burning gets outsourced to lightning, accident and arson.

It’s too early to identify the particulars behind the latest catastrophe. But it’s likely that investigation will point to the same culprits, perhaps aggravated by climate change and arson. Both are relevant, but both are potential distractions.

Global warming might magnify outbreaks, but it would mean a change in degree, not in kind; and its effects must in any case be absorbed by the combustible cover.

Arson can put fire in the worst place at the worst time, but its power depends on the capacity to spread and to destroy susceptible buildings.

Yet neither is fundamental. With or without global warming or arson, damaging fires will come, spread as the landscape allows and inflict damage as structures permit. And it is there – with how Australians live on the land – that reform must go.

Australia will have fire, and it will recycle the conditions that can leverage small flames into holocausts. The choice is whether skilled people should backburn or leave fire-starting to lightning, clumsies and crazies.

After the 1939 Black Friday conflagration, a royal commission set into motion the modern era of bushfire management. At the time the official ambition of state-sponsored conservation was to eliminate fire as far as possible, and through fire exclusion alter the character of the landscape so it would become less fire prone. Leonard Stretton asked the nation’s forester why he continued to hold this view when it had never succeeded, when bushfires had inevitably wiped out his every repeated effort. Wryly, Stretton mocked the absurdity of those who sought to make sunburnt Australia into green England.

Black SaturdayII will yield another royal commission. Much has changed in 70 years; Australians are more urban, more sensitive to environmental issues, keener to protect unique ecological assets. Yet perhaps they are substituting another, more modern delusion: striving to remake the burning bush into an unburnt Oz, only to find this vision also repeatedly obliterated by remorseless fire.

Good points, but I think he under-states the change in settlement patterns, as increasing number of people live in ex-urban areas that complicate fire management, and also the risk that climate change produces a disequilibrium between vegetation and climate that can result in much larger than fires one would observe in an equilibrium climate.

Stephen Pyne is also on an ABC radio podcast discussing the environmental history of bushfire in Australia.

Related posts:

1. Stephen Pyne compares California Fires and the Financial Crisis
2. Australian fires
3. Stephen Pyne on California Wildfires

From ABC News

The deadly Australian bushfires appear to have been so deadly because they were unusual.  The fires caught people before they new it was coming, and unlike many fires they were too strong to fight.  What made these fires unusual?  At first look it seems to be a combination of a lack of social memory, fuel accumulation, and climate change – that together reduced community resilience to fire.

From the New Scientist’s Short sharp science blog Time for a new Australian bushfire policy?

Australia has a national fire-preparedness policy, perhaps uniquely, of encouraging people to either “stay and defend or leave early”. But as the tragedy continues to unfurl there will be increasing pressure to reexamine a policy developed for conditions that existed half a century ago.

The rationale behind the policy is that if you have a fire plan in place – that is, you have a water source, a pump that is not dependent on the power supply, you have ember-proofed your house, and so on – it is safer to stay and let the front pass over, than to leave at the last moment. And historically, it is true that most houses lost in bush fires have burnt because of defendable ember-strikes rather than direct contact with the fire, and most deaths have been due last-minute evacuations.

But conditions have changed. Southern Australia’s epic 12-year drought, higher temperatures due to climate change, and less “prescribed” burning to remove the plant life that acts as fuel, all combine to increase the risk of extreme fire. This year already, we’ve had several days in the mid-40s that have burnt leaves off trees, and squeezed the last drops of moisture out of already tinder-dry bush. One survivor described the ground underfoot prior to the fires going through as “like walking on cornflakes”.

Under those conditions, a fire plan may simply not be enough, as Victoria’s premier John Brumby told the Fairfax Radio Network today: “There is no question that there were people there who did everything right, put in place their fire plan and it wouldn’t matter, their house was just incinerated.” Brumby wants the policy rexamined.

People have changed too. Small towns like devastated Marysville – 90 minutes’ drive northeast of Melbourne – as well as the ever-expanding fire-prone city fringes, are as likely to be home to retirees and “treechangers” (city people who move to the country for a life change) as they are to families with generations of bushfire experience.

One of the commonest reasons for people who intend to stay and defend their properties to change their mind and leave at the last moment is that with no direct experience of fire they are not prepared psychologically.

According to Robert Heath, a psychologist at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, they don’t bank on the overwhelming heat, the lack of contact with the outside world, the darkness, or the noise: loud and like a huge blowtorch, apparently. Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that many people who lost their lives are thought to have done so while fleeing in their cars.

For more details see:

• The Melbourne Age videos
• The Australian – “spot-on forecast – why was no one ready?”
• Leader’s rethink survival strategies from Sydney Morning Herald.
• Australian Broadcasting Company’s full coverage of the bushfires.

Thanks to Arijit Guha for pointers.

Related posts:

1. Stephen Pyne on the Australian fires
2. Tim Flannery on Australian bushfires
3. Slow variables that shape bushfire resilience

The symposium aimed to address questions such as:

• How does resilience intersect with development and debates about it?
• What insights does resilience thinking bring to understanding and action concerned with reducing poverty, vulnerability and marginalisation?
• What are some of the frontier challenges, tensions and gaps as resilience thinking engages with perspectives and debates from other angles and disciplines?

Melissa Leach concludes her report by summarizing the final panel of the symposium:

a panel of speakers (Esha Shah, Andrew Scott, Henny Osbahr, Bronwyn Hayward, Joachim Voss, Carl Folke, Melissa Leach, Andy Stirling) offered their reflections on what had been learned, and what challenges and opportunities remain. Summarising across these discussions, a series of central themes emerged.

First, there is great value in a systems approach as a heuristic for understanding interlocked social-ecological-technological processes, and in analysis across multiple scales. Yet we need to move beyond both systems as portrayed in resilience thinking, and the focus on actors in work on vulnerability, to analyse networks and relationships, as well as to attend to the diverse framings, narratives, imaginations and discourses that different actors bring to bear.

Second, debates about resilience need to engage with normative concerns. This means that when we use terms like vulnerability and resilience we need to attach them to a person, form or organisation, rather than discuss them in the abstract. There is also a need to deal with the many trade-offs between people, systems, levels and scales in a normative way: someone’s resilience may be someone else’s vulnerability, or resilience at one scale may compromise that at another – but the key question is what trade-offs do we want or not want to see? Linking resilience with normative debates in this way may provide a valuable platform for critical discussion, helping to fill the current gulf between optimising and justice-based approaches in development, and contributing to the building of a new ethically and morally-driven development discourse.

Third, resilience approaches can be enriched through more disaggregated attention to action and strategies, considering transformations and transitions; endogeneity/exogeneity and depth of transitions; the relationships between functions, flows and structures; the dynamics (shocks/stresses) they address, and the agency (control/response) involved. We need to consider the processes through which actors at different levels decide strategies, and which would be enabling in terms of adaptiveness, learning, flexibility and empowerment.

Fourth, power and politics are crucial – as a growing area of resilience thinking that could valuably be strengthened with insights from other areas of work in politics, governance and democratic philosophy. Power relations are involved in assigning or avoiding responsibility and accountability; the domination of certain framings/narratives over others, asymmetries between pathways, and which are pursued and which are not. While resilience thinking is clear about the need to conserve life support systems, this will often require politically progressive thinking and action to challenge and transform unsustainable structures and framings in radical ways, and to hold powerful actors and networks to account. Depending on the issue and the setting, strategies might involve a spectrum from discursive and deliberative politics, to more antagonistic politics of resistance and struggle; all involve moves away from the managerialism that characterised early resilience approaches, towards conceptualising it in fundamentally political terms.

Finally, reframing and working with resilience involves an array of challenges for language and communication, and linking understanding and action. Resilience approaches involve complex language and concepts, and integration with other disciplinary perspectives can add to this complexity. A series of balances need to be struck, between attention to the nuances of different frameworks, and articulating their differences clearly; between conceptual advance, and remaining grounded in empirical settings; and between understanding complexity, and the clarity needed to inform policy and practice. The latter is crucial: policy decisions are being made as a matter of urgency in areas from climate change and energy to agriculture, water and health. Building resilience and pathways to Sustainability thus requires both reflection and reflexivity, and clear communication in terms that decision-makers can use.

Related posts:

1. Melissa Leach reports from Resilience 2008
2. PhD position at Stockholm Resilience Centre
3. Special Issue Online: The Politics of Resilience

The links between trade, food prices and poverty reduction are more subtle. Different types of reform have diverse effects on prices. When countries cut their tariffs on farm goods, their consumers pay lower prices. In contrast, when farm subsidies are slashed, world food prices rise. The lavishness of farm subsidies means that the net effect of fully freeing trade would be to raise prices, by an average of 5.5% for primary farm products and 1.3% for processed goods, according to the World Bank.

These effects are still much smaller than recent food-price spikes, but would they, on balance, help or hurt the poor? In crude terms, food-exporting countries gain in the short term whereas net importers lose. Farmers are better off; those who buy their food fare worse. Although most of the world’s poor live in rural areas, they are not, by and large, net food sellers. A forthcoming study* of nine poor countries by M. Ataman Aksoy and Aylin Isik-Dikmelik, two economists at the World Bank, shows that even in very rural countries, such as Bangladesh and Zambia, only one-fifth of households sell more food than they buy. That suggests the losers may outnumber winners.

But things are not so simple. The authors point out that net food buyers tend to be richer than net sellers, so high food prices, on average, transfer income from richer to poorer households. And prices are not the only route through which poverty is affected. Higher farm income boosts demand for rural labour, increasing wages for landless peasants and others who buy rather than grow their food. Several studies show this income effect can outweigh the initial price effect. Finally, the farm sector itself can grow. Decades of underinvestment in agriculture have left many poor countries reliant on imports: over time that can change.

The World Bank has often argued that the balance of all these factors is likely to be positive. Although freer farm trade—and higher prices—may raise poverty rates in some countries, it will reduce them in more. One much-cited piece of evidence is a study† by Thomas Hertel, Roman Keeney, Maros Ivanic and Alan Winters. This analysis simulated the effect of getting rid of all subsidies and barriers on global prices and trade volumes. It then mapped these results on to detailed household statistics in 15 countries, which between them covered 1 billion people. Fully free trade in farm goods would reduce poverty in 13 countries while raising it in two.

But lately the bank seems to be taking a different line. Robert Zoellick, the bank’s president, claims that the food-price crisis will throw 100m people below the poverty line, undoing seven years of progress. His figure comes from extrapolating the results of a different study** by Mr Ivanic and Will Martin, another World Bank economist. This study analyses the effects of more expensive staple foods on poverty by examining household surveys in nine countries. In seven cases, higher food prices meant more poverty. (Dani Rodrik, a blogging Harvard economist, was one of the first to highlight the tension between these studies.)

In fact, the bank’s results are not as contradictory as they seem. The two studies are based on different sets of countries: only Peru, Zambia and Vietnam appear in both. And the gloomy analysis measures only the effect of pricier staple foods, whereas the other examines freer trade in all farm goods. Such trade brings broader benefits: even if higher prices for staples exacerbate poverty in some countries, at least in the short term, the effect may be outweighed by increased demand for other farm exports, such as processed goods, as rich countries cut tariffs.

These subtleties suggest two conclusions. First, the bank, and others, should beware sweeping generalisations about the impact of food prices on the poor. Second, the nature of trade reform matters. Removing rich-country subsidies on staple goods, the focus of much debate in the Doha round, may be less useful in the fight against poverty than cutting tariffs would be. The food-price crisis has not hurt the case for freer farm trade. But it has shown how important it is to get it right.

These papers only assess trade rather than agricultural practices. I would add that the ecological fit of agriculture to the place in which it is practiced will also have substantial impacts on the potential for a regions ability to escape from poverty. Increases in agricultural production that damages other ecosystem services that are important for local people’s livelihood, such a fisheries, fuelwood, flood regulation, or water quality, can do more damage than good.

Related posts:

1. Absolute poverty in China: Higher, but going down faster than previously estimated
2. Food prices rising due increases in meat consumption and biofuels
3. Agro-colonialism and/or Agricultural development?

… The main challenge in bolstering resilience to such geophysical shocks, Ms. Wang, Mr. Tucker and many other experts said, is not the structural engineering. There is no mystery to adding and securing iron rods in concrete, securing floors to beams, boosting the resilience of columns, monitoring the size of gravel mixed with cement.

It is not cost, either. In California, Dr. Tucker notes, the premium for building earthquake resistance into new schools is less than 4 percent. The payoff, beyond saved lives, is significantly lower repair costs after a temblor — 10 to 100 times less than in unimproved buildings. (In poorer countries, the differential in cost could be substantially higher, other experts note, but the payoff, they say, is priceless.)

Rich or poor, the big challenge lies in overcoming social and political hurdles that still give priority to pressing daily problems over foreseeable disasters that may not occur for decades, scores of years, or longer. In some developing countries there is a tendency to ascribe earthquakes and their consequences to fate, but Dr. Tucker and other experts say that lets the authorities off the hook.

“I can’t hold a government responsible for protecting its citizens against a meteorite falling out of the sky,” Dr. Tucker said. “But I can and do hold a government in a country with known seismic risk responsible for protecting its children, who are compelled to attend school, from the school collapsing during an earthquake.”

Dr. Tucker has written or co-written a lengthening string of reports pointing to the building risks worldwide as more populations shift to urban areas, often into shoddy, hastily built structures, with children sent to schools in similar, and often worse, condition.

Arthur Lerner-Lam, who maps disaster risks at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, agrees that urbanization in earthquake zones is setting the world up for its first true megadisaster — a million-casualty earthquake that many seismologists say is only a matter of time. The greatest risk, he said, lies in a belt from Italy and Turkey through central Asia and the Himalayas into central China.

In such regions, Dr. Tucker said, the best blueprints and materials are no guarantee of safety without adequate building codes, laws, training, inspections and enforcement.

The biggest challenge of all may simply be redefining security, and building societies that demand that government investments match risks, said Fouad Bendimerad, an engineering and risk-management consultant in California and chairman of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative.

“The typical government spends around 15 percent of its G.D.P. to defend against exterior military threats that may never occur during the lifetime of generation,” Dr. Bendimerad said. “Why do we want to exonerate governments from dedicating a small portion of that 15 percent to protect against the threats of natural hazards that we know will happen?”

Related posts:

1. Resilience Engineering
2. STEPS Centre Reframing Resilience report
3. Catastrophe Bonds: Markets, Learning and Volatility

1. Test, criticize and revise the propositions about resilience made in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems and Ecology and Society special issue – Exploring Resilience In Social-Ecological Systems.
2. Develop models of social-ecological systems that can produce the key aspects of the rich behaviour of the world. In particular these models should be able to produce:
   i) dynamics in which systems cross multiple thresholds,
   ii) produce “backloop” dynamics, and
   iii) incorporate models of adaptive governance that incorporate leadership, trust, ‘shadow’ networks, sleeper links, and poly-centric governance arrangements.
3. Extend resilience theory from local or regional scales to the global to address questions such as:
   i) Do we need new propositions for global resilience issues?
   ii) Over what ranges of scale can we apply existing theory?, and
   iii) How important are scale-dependent processes?
4. Resilience theory needs to better understand the consquences of multiple simultaneous shocks, because transformative change seems to be often triggered by two (or more) simultaneous shocks. For example an environmental shock and an economic (or political) shock occurring at the same time.
   Resilience theory needs to understand what coupled or sequential shocks are likely, and how could we go about assessing resilience to them. An example of this is the current food crisis that developed from the coupling of agriculture, energy, and climate issues.
5. What are the differences between transformational change, adaptability and resilience? Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when conditions make the existing system untenable. In much of the world the need is to transform, not to make the existing system regime more resilient. What are the design principles of transformations?
6. How can we assess the costs and values of resilience? What is the difference between general (broad spectrum resilience to many things) vs. specified resilience (to a few specific things)? How can we conceptualize the danger in ‘optimizing’ for specified resilience? How much should we spend (or forego) to increase resilience?
7. How can the value of different regimes be assessed? The desirablity of a regime usually depends upon the perspective it is viewed from, and different people have different perspectives. Coping with these perspectives is a challenge. But more fundamentally, this requires not just assessing the value of different ecosystem services, but also understanding the identity of a system, and its ability to maintain itself.
8. Non-mathematical approaches to resilience. While mathematics is beautiful to some, it is difficult to communicate and in some situations is insufficient. We need to increase our ability to represent resilience in a variety of forms. This presents a challenge to the humanities and arts community. At Resilience 2008 we saw contributions towards this understanding, but there is much more to develop. Can science and the humanities work together to provide the impetus towards a richer, more resilient world?

Related posts:

1. Should climate change research be 90 percent social science?
2. STEPS Centre Reframing Resilience report
3. Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems – E&S special feature

Yang Weihua/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

Peter Hessler, author of the excellent book Oracle Bones and a former English teacher in Sichuan province in China, writes in the New Yorker about the response to the recent Chinese Earthquake Sichuan Postcard: After the Earthquake:

This week, it’s unlikely that there will be much good news coming from China. But the rescue crews will, one hopes, make progress, and there may be reason for some Sichuan-style optimism. First, it seems that the Chinese government has been relatively open about news coverage, and it doesn’t seem to be restricting e-mails and phone calls. Second, the scale of destruction could easily have been worse. The epicenter was near the city of Dujiangyan, which in May of 2001 started construction on a massive hydroelectric dam on the Min River. Big dams are common in China, and Dujiangyan was one of the nation’s “Ten Key Projects” aimed at producing electricity and better water supplies.

By 2003, there were signs that the government was quietly expanding the project, and silt had begun to accumulate at a second location on the river. Dujiangyan is home to a local irrigation system that has functioned for more than two thousand years and has been declared a World Heritage site; it would have been effectively destroyed by the new dam. The city’s World Heritage Office opposed the project, contacting journalists from Chinese publications. The press was allowed to report with relative openness, in part because it portrayed the dam as destructive of cultural heritage. But one of the local entities that openly opposed the dam was the Dujiangyan Seismological Bureau.

In August of 2003, dam construction was forced to stop. In the history of the People’s Republic, this represented the first time that an engineering project on such a scale had been cancelled because of public pressure. (For a full account, see “Unbuilt Dams,” by Andrew C. Mertha and William R. Lowry, published in the October, 2006, issue of Comparative Politics.) Today, with Dujiangyan in ruins and the government struggling to respond, there’s some small consolation in the fact that at least there wasn’t another major dam on the site. And maybe later, after the emergency has passed, officials will remember the importance of the press and the seismological experts in stopping the dam. Sichuan’s greatest resource has always been its people, and sometimes the government just needs to listen to them.

Hessler also wrote about China’s Instant Cities in last year’s National Geographic, and on What’s Next on development in China in the May 2008 issue.

Related posts:

1. African ReOrientation II
2. Transfomation of the Klamath
3. Ten most popular posts on Resilience Science from 2008

I was a trader and risk manager for almost 20 years (before experiencing battle fatigue). There is no way my and my colleagues’ accumulated knowledge of market risks can be passed on to the next generation. Business schools block the transmission of our practical know-how and empirical tricks and the knowledge dies with us. We learn from crisis to crisis that MPT [modern portfolio theory] has the empirical and scientific validity of astrology (without the aesthetics), yet the lessons are ignored in what is taught to 150,000 business school students worldwide.

Academic economists are no more self-serving than other professions. You should blame those in the real world who give them the means to be taken seriously: those awarding that “Nobel” prize.

In 1990 William Sharpe and Harry Markowitz won the prize three years after the stock market crash of 1987, an event that, if anything, completely demolished the laureates’ ideas on portfolio construction. Further, the crash of 1987 was no exception: the great mathematical scientist Benoît Mandelbrot showed in the 1960s that these wild variations play a cumulative role in markets – they are “unexpected” only by the fools of economic theories.

Then, in 1997, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their option pricing formula. I (and many traders) find the prize offensive: many, such as the mathematician and trader Ed Thorp, used a more realistic approach to the formula years before. What Mr Merton and Mr Scholes did was to make it compatible with financial economic theory, by “re-deriving” it assuming “dynamic hedging”, a method of continuous adjustment of portfolios by buying and selling securities in response to price variations.

Dynamic hedging assumes no jumps – it fails miserably in all markets and did so catastrophically in 1987 (failures textbooks do not like to mention).

Later, Robert Engle received the prize for “Arch”, a complicated method of prediction of volatility that does not predict better than simple rules – it was “successful” academically, even though it underperformed simple volatility forecasts that my colleagues and I used to make a living.

The environment in financial economics is reminiscent of medieval medicine, which refused to incorporate the observations and experiences of the plebeian barbers and surgeons. Medicine used to kill more patients than it saved – just as financial economics endangers the system by creating, not reducing, risk. But how did financial economics take on the appearance of a science? Not by experiments (perhaps the only true scientist who got the prize was Daniel Kahneman, who happens to be a psychologist, not an econ­omist). It did so by drowning us in mathematics with abstract “theorems”. Prof Merton’s book Continuous Time Finance contains 339 mentions of the word “theorem” (or equivalent). An average physics book of the same length has 25 such mentions. Yet while economic models, it has been shown, work hardly better than random guesses or the intuition of cab drivers, physics can predict a wide range of phe­nomena with a tenth decimal precision.

via 3quarks daily.

For more see Taleb’s home page – Fooled by Randomness.

Related posts:

1. Financial resilience – Taleb and Mandelbrot reflect on crisis
2. Ken Arrow – Financial turmoil is a challenge to economic theory
3. James K. Galbraith economics and the financial crisis