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Re-Orient: world economic production in MA scenarios

Published by Garry Peterson on January 23, 2006 in Big Back Loop, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Scenarios. 0 Comments

Scenario Share of World Econ

Proportion of World Economy projected in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios (Tg - TechnoGarden, go-Global Orchestration, am- Adapting Mosaic, and OS-Order From Strength). Compared to yesterday’s post of Maddison’s data, which is in Purchasing Power Parity, this graph estimates the size of the world economy using 1995 exchange rates, which under estimates the purchasing power of poor countries - particularly the Chinese economy. Consquently, this graph and yesterday’s graph do not match in 2000.

This graph shows Asia passing Western Europe + North America & Oceania in about 75 years, later in the slow economic growth world of Order From Strength. If purchasing power is used then crossing date would be earlier.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports Released

Published by Garry Peterson on January 20, 2006 in Big Back Loop, Ecological Management, Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Scenarios. 0 Comments

ma scenarios coverThe four main reports of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment were released yesterday (Jan 19, 2006). The reports are the detailed scientific assessment (including literature citations) on which the MA synthesis reports are based. These large reports (500-800 page) are the products of the four MA working groups:

  • Current State and Trends
  • Scenarios
  • Policy Responses
  • Multi-Scale Assessments.

These reports are published by Island Press or chapters can be downloaded from the MA web site.
The press coverage of the release of the technical reports has been more balanced than the press coverage of the synthesis volumes. The Christian Science Monitor reports, quoting Steve Carpenter (his post on the scenarios):

When researchers scan the global horizon, overfishing, loss of species habitat, nutrient run-off, climate change, and invasive species look to be the biggest threats to the ability of land, oceans, and water to support human well-being.

Yet “there is significant reason for hope. We have the tools we need” to chart a course that safeguards the planet’s ecological foundation, says Stephen Carpenter, a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “We don’t have to accept the doom-and-gloom trends.”

That’s the general take-home message in an assessment of the state of the globe’s ecosystems and the impact Earth’s ecological condition has on humans.

Continue reading ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports Released’

Terrorism, State Failure, and Reorganization

Published by Garry Peterson on January 17, 2006 in Big Back Loop, Ideas and Scenarios. 0 Comments

Science fiction writer, journalist, and green design professor, Bruce Sterling writes about the shadow of globalization and Global Guerrillas John Robb’s weblog about - “Networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.” His analysis is fairly similar to what the MA scenarios group thought about state breakdown. Sterling writes on a 2005/2006 state of the world web discussion:

There’s a lot of meritorious analysis going on [Global Guerrillas], and it’s very counterintuitive by 20th century standards, and that’s a good thing, because this isn’t the 20th century. It’s not about state-on-state violence any more; it’s about the emergent global order versus failed states. The victory condition for global guerrillas is a failed state. And there are lots of global guerrillas and huge scary patches of failed and failing state right nows. And the Disorder and the Order physically interpenetrate; globalization melts the map; there are physical patches of state-failure even inside the most advanced states.

However, there is a nascent order inside the failure, too. People who live in conditions of failure can see what justice, law, and order look like. They see that on those satellite dishes, they get news about that every day from the many, many people who flee the Disorder and become new global diasporas.

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New New Orleans Pt 2 - Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios

Published by Garry Peterson on September 28, 2005 in Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization and Scenarios. 0 Comments

NewOrleansWkshop.jpg

On Sept 2 I
posted about an article Dreaming a New New Orleans.

In another post on WorldChanging Alan AtKisson follows up in A New New Orleans - Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios

From A New New Orleans - Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios:

Another tool for producing best-possible outcomes is scenario planning: imagining several likely future-history pathways, starting from present conditions. In a short brainstorming session, at an international conference on regional sustainability held in central Hungary, an informal workshop group produced several possible scenarios for what New Orleans could become. Three of these scenarios are named after the Dutch cities they most resemble — appropriate, given the city’s position at the end of a major river, under sea level — and they roughly correspond with some scenarios floated by other US commentators (which I had heard about largely through conversation with a BusinessWeek editor reporting on the story).

Continue reading ‘New New Orleans Pt 2 - Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios’

Art of Climate Change: telling stories to understand the future

Published by Garry Peterson on September 24, 2005 in Scenarios and Tools. 0 Comments

The Guardian on Sept 24th, has an article by Robert Macfarlane The burning question, which argues that writers can play a crucial role in helping us to imagine the impact of climate change, but to date there is a gap of literature on climate change that reduces the ability of people to envision possible futures and consquently make better decisions today.

From the article:

Contemplation of the situation on Banks Island prompts a broader question about the relationship of climate change and language. Where is the literature of climate change? Where is the creative response to what Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, has famously described as “the most severe problem faced by the world”?

Cultural absences are always more difficult to document than cultural outpourings. But the deficiency of a creative response to climate change is increasingly visible. It becomes unignorable if we contrast it with the abundance of literature produced in response to the other great eschatological crisis of the past half-century - the nuclear threat.

Continue reading ‘Art of Climate Change: telling stories to understand the future’

Stewart Brand - How Cities Learn

Published by Garry Peterson on September 24, 2005 in Design, Ideas, Reorganization and Scenarios. 0 Comments

Stewart Brand, who’s excellent book How Buildings Learn, and was mentioned here earlier, recently gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation as part of their seminar series.

The talk is now available on their website as a (large) mp3 file.

Abrupt Climate Change Fiction

Published by Garry Peterson on September 17, 2005 in General and Scenarios. 5 Comments

Cover Fifty Degrees Below

American ecological science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson recently talked to the Guardian about his new, near-future climate change novel 50 degrees below, which presents a scenario of future climate change, its impacts and humanity’s response.

From the Guardian:

Set in an America of the almost-now, Fifty Degrees Below (and the first volume of the trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain) tells the story of the efforts of a loosely-connected group of scientists, campaigners and politicians to provoke a national response to the crisis of global warming. Unfortunately for them, as environmental aide Charlie Quibbler observes, it’s “easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit”. It is not until the combination of two colliding storm systems and an unprecedented tidal surge causes Washington’s Potomac river to bursts its banks and overwhelm the country’s capital at the climax of book one that the world sits up and takes notice. But, by this point, the polar ice caps have already begun to melt in earnest, shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and creating environmental conditions that could usher in a new ice age. The last ice age, 11,000 years ago, took just three years to start.

Continue reading ‘Abrupt Climate Change Fiction’

Dreaming a New New Orleans

Published by Garry Peterson on September 2, 2005 in Design, Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization and Scenarios. 5 Comments

NO_old.jpg

On the Sustainability weblog WorldChanging, Alan AtKisson writes about rebuilding New Orleans -Dreaming A New New Orleans, Version 1.

He sees the possibility of a future New Orleans that combines elements of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Scenarios TechnoGarden and Global Orchestration, by using technological innovation to ‘green’ the city, ecological engineering to produce a safe livable city , and poverty alleviation to produce a fair and open city. He envisons how these things can combine to noursh a vibrant distinctive creative city.

AtKisson writes based upon his experience with a regional vitalization process in New Orleans:

What follows are very preliminary thoughts on principles for eventually creating a “New New Orleans,” one that is more environmentally secure, more economically successful, and more socially healthy and equitable, while retaining the culture that made it world famous. As the news reports continue to create a picture of the city’s horrible descent into hell, such an exercise feels a bit foolhardy; but there is so much dreaming to be done, to restore this great and wondrous city, that the dreaming must begin now.
…
Beginning in 2001, my firm was engaged by a consortium of regional leaders in New Orleans to help them design and launch an ambitious regional initiative, called Top 10 by 2010. … this extraordinary group worked together for a year and a half to craft a new foundation for regional progress. It was just in the process of re-forming and assessing progress so far when Katrina struck.

Continue reading ‘Dreaming a New New Orleans’

MA Desertification Synthesis

Published by Garry Peterson on June 27, 2005 in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios and Tools. 1 Comment

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (see earlier posts Biodiversity Synthesis and 1 and 2.) has released Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Desertification Synthesis which is freely downloadable from the internet (as a 3 Mb pdf).

My summary of the report is drylands cover about 40% of Earth’s land surface. These areas contain about 2 billion people (~1/3 of world), but only 8% of the world’s supply of water.

Compared to people living in other ecological regions, people living in drylands have the lowest levels of human well-being, including the lowest per capita GDP and the highest Infant Mortality Rate.

Between 1/10th and 1/5th of drylands are degraded – their croplands, pastures and woodlands have been ecologically simplified reducing their economic productivity. The primary causes are over-cultivation, over-grazing, deforestation, and poor irrigation practices

There is substantial variation in rainfall in drylands. Climate change is expected to worsen this variation. People in these regions are already vulnerability of climate variation, climate change and population growth are expected to further decrease the ability of people to maintain their well-being in the face of social and environmental change. However, there are many possible institutional, economic, and ecological responses the people, businesses, and governments can adopt to reduce this vulnerability. In particular, approaches that integrate land and water management are needed.

Continue reading ‘MA Desertification Synthesis’

Nature uses fiction to communicate global risks of Avian flu

Published by Line Gordon on May 26, 2005 in Big Back Loop, General and Scenarios. 0 Comments

The 1918 flu pandemic killed 50 million people across the globe. This weeks Nature is devoted to the potential of an avian flu pandemic and contains both news and scientific reports on the subject. To highlight and communicate the risks involved story telling is used in the form of a future weblog, written by a made up freelance journalist.

Continue reading ‘Nature uses fiction to communicate global risks of Avian flu’

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