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

“Transforming waste to energy and revenue certainly is attractive from a short-term efficiency standpoint. But there are long-term cycles in play too. An appreciation of resilience dynamics would encourage managers to think hard about the long-term ecosystem functions of these “wastes,” including their role as reserve capital, held in store for the next generation. If nutrient-rich branches, needles and leaves are increasingly harvested rather than left on the forest floor to decompose, what will be the consequences for nutrient cycling? What increased stresses may this place on forest soil fertility, on communities of soil micro-organisms and on future forests?”

Inadvertently, the report also amused with its initial introduction of resilience as an “arcane concept that has lurked in the dank halls of ecological academia for almost four decades”. I’d prefer to think of it as a concept that has been simmering. At any rate, resilience thinking appears to be finding a place in Ontario.

The spring issue of Alternatives journal, Canada’s national environmental magazine, echoes the title “Building Resilience” and offers both a “Hardcore Guide to Resilience” and an interview with Buzz Holling. In addition a piece by Andrew McMurry on “The Rhetoric of Resilience” offers some insight from a linguistic perspective on why perhaps the term itself might be resonating so strongly at this particular point in time:

“Resilience answers nicely to the real and rhetorical exigence. To be sure, resilience is in one sense merely the capacity of systems to absorb stress and maintain or even repair themselves. But resilience is also metaphor that embodies a number of characteristics that Aristotle required of all good figures of speech: it is active, primordial, concise and appropriate.

Resilience implies action, as in “building resilience”. To be resilient suggests an inner toughness: the strength, as its etymology tells us, to “jump back” to a previous state. Sustainability, by contrast, suggests a defensive posture: a desire to stay the same, to resist change, without the attractive ability to push back against change and win out. Resilience also connotes a measure of risk, while sustainability suggests that systems are set: they simply need to be cared for and so carried forward. Resilience acknowledges that risk is a constant, and that systems are always in a struggle against dissipation. If the seas are always calm and the weather mild, you don’t need to be resilient. But in this world, you must be resilient to survive.”

Related posts:

1. Building resilience to deal with disasters
2. Student-led resilience workshop after Resilience 2008
3. Why green building has spread

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

The proportions of the destruction due to the tsunami that came 30 minutes after the earthquake are beginning to emerge as first journalists (2 days), and later aid workers and military forces are working their way down the southern cost of Chile (3 days) . The area of destruction seems very big, now spanning some 300-500 km. Many, many of the villages and tourist spots along the coast that in many ways define the sense of Chile as a country by the sea, are almost completely destroyed. I have attached a link from the national television of Chile.

A debate is arising criticizing the authorities for responding slowly. In fact, two days after the earthquake journalists were the first to arrive to these devastated villages. There are no proper water sources, food or electricity. Also, there is a debate concerning why there was not a proper warning of the tsunami from the Chilean military navy responsible for this task. People in the destroyed areas, being from a country that has experienced earthquakes and tsunamis before and having been trained in school, immediately ran to the hills, which could explain the low number of dead people; but still mourned every one. However, there are rumors that the Chilean Navy sent a faxed message to the national emergency organization which was not properly interpreted. Thirty minutes after the earthquake, eye witnesses have reported of a set of three tsunami waves, the first being some 4-5 meters in height, others claiming 8 metres, came rolling in, pushing some 2 km in land, moving boats, houses, and washing those humans not in safety with it.

What is interesting here is not resilience in itself. For sure, the Chilean society will reconstruct and start working in some way the weeks, months and years to come. In contrast to Haiti, the state is not destroyed, but fully functioning and with more resources and capacities; and with the crucial capacity to capture and steer international capital and aid organizations. Instead, what is interesting is the trajectory of resilience.

After this type of crisis, old habitats and common-days of so many people are ripped apart, and so many forged relations between both humans, species and machines are lost or loosened, speeding the whole of society – and in fact ecologies – into what ecological theorist like Buzz Holling would refer to as re-organization where different scales of dynamic processes (political, social, ecological) would structure re-organization. Social theorists, for instance Anthony Giddens would perhaps rather highlight how “the normal” has vanished, and how novel structuration processes are in play.

What type of new social relations will be forged, which old ones will be lost and what type of social structure will emerge in the wake of this crisis? Will the social system be less or more inequitable? What chances are there that many of these villages will not return but that people, in face of no jobs or a house to live in in the coming months, will move to Santiago where certainly many already have family and friends? And how will the crisis rearrange the relations between social and ecological systems?

What will for instance happen to local fishermen resource rights now in the hands of the local “sindicatos” and “las caletas”? What seems to be a strenght in this respect is of course that these sindicatos are organized on a greater scale (nation wide) which should grant some greater possibility for sustained collective action to secure these rights for returning fishermen collectives, as would be argued by social movement theorists like Melucci, Diani, and Tarrow.

I would appreciate anyone with more information on emergent initiatives outside the state and business sectors that are mobilizing for a progressive and equitable reorganization phase, to let me know.

Shift in state powers. One worry – or at least important factor – to understand what could come to structure the “reorganization phase” is a coincidence in the transition of state power (all complexity fans will see “punctuated equilibrium” lights blinking). In a few days Chile is shifting from a 20-year long rule by the left-centre coalition of Michelle Bachelet (since the defeat of dictator Augusto Pinochet), to the right-wing rule of Sebastian Pinera, the latter having promised in elections less interference of the state in societal development. What relevance has the (panarchy-inspired-/-marxist) “shock doctrine” hypothesis of Naomi Klein to do with this shift of political rule at the same time as an external shock? Will Pinera seize the opportunity and blame the earthquake so as to pull back some of the social and state-led reforms like education and large-scale social security systems that were put in place by the centre-left coalition under its rule? What framings of reality will Pinera support and actively strive to construct? Will it be one where business “should” play a leading role in reconstruction? One where deregulation of state health insurance and health care will “need to go” or at least not be expanded? Initial response is that he has decided to remake his whole 4-year plan and focus on the reconstruction of Chile, by some estimated to take between 20-30 years, but it is difficult to interpret what his plan means (or what the time period of 20-30 years means for that matter).

What social movements and sustained collective action processes can put enough pressure so as for the most marginalized of Chilean society to access state resources for the reconstruction of their communities, shools and economic outcomes? Surely the self-organizing capability of local groups will be important to access control of resources (the fishermen caletas are crucial), but if these are not linked across time and space, it will be difficult to sustain pressure and hopes for a better future, as the (new) common-day and normalization starts socializing the lifes of Chileans. As above, if anyone has information of such emergent social movements (including the role of unions, fishing sindicatos, NGO’s and similar), I would be most interested to hear.

I see a parallel here (post-crisis social movements) with how Manuel Castells conceptualized urban social movements – as struggles over public consumption (not production, which was the struggle over the means of production).

Something good coming out… Of course research has demonstrated that these crises “could lead to something better”, but I am very reluctant to frame what is happening in Chile or Haiti, or any region thrown into sudden crisis in those terms. Of course something good could come out; everything is possible right? But to frame this as an opportunity for anything is a slap in the face for all those that have lost family members, their home and community; and a disrespect to the dead. As belonging to a world elite as we academics do, I find it very important to reflect upon how we participate in shaping how things are viewed. If something good comes out, that something “good” will always be contested, and it will always have come out out of some kind of social struggle; i.e. persons forming collectives that can win power to reorganize into more equal – by some rationale – communities and societies. That something good is consequently not something that is just happening, with equal opportunities of turning good or bad, but a contested outcome forged out of social and political struggle. A multitude of actors are now grouping in Chile forging novel relations to carry out intended actions, which nonetheless will produce unintended consequences. To frame this as something good or bad is simplistic and could just come to play in the hands of some.

Like many, I am siding with the masses and the marginalized, and I try to understand the factors that will tend to structure reorganization towards a more unequal society.

As a final remark in relation to Haiti, which did not spur this activity in me. I have family in Chile (whom are all safe) and I feel therefore more emotionally affected, although what is going down in Haiti is in ways similar.

/Henrik

PS. A lot of events are currently structuring the reorganization phase at different scales. From my biased media view, here are some:

1. A Swedish reporter reported that in Curico a local radio-station became the nucleus of self-organization just after the earthquake coordination initial aid work and monitoring the situation. This later lead to that soup-kitchens was established at the radio-station gathering the city in mutual relationships of aid and solidarity.

2. In Concepcion the opposite seemed to have occurred. There bands of people robbed shops of food, TV-sets and refrigerators and were stealing from evacuated houses. This made others to arm themselves to protect property and family, leading to the shooting of several. Things calmed down when the army arrived and enforced a 18 hour curfew (for the first time after Pinoche the army was used for this bringing (in me and probably many Chileans) old haunted memories.

3. A 24 hour national TV show “Chile auyda Chile” was held to gather money for the reconstruction, following an old tradition in Chilean society to redistribute money through having the rich donating money to the poor administrated through the state. This was en event that gathered the nation, with the flag, the hymn, celebrities, president and soon-to-be president and with interviews of fishers and villages mourning their dead but with the strong belief to continue (“seguimos adelante”), and displaying help-workers, fire fighters and the army helping people. Just a few days after the big catastrophe, people – even in the most destroyed areas – had a party, quite amazing; and probably a general spirit-boosting event.

The event managed to gather a lot of money (30.1 billion pesos or $59.2 million), and the day after some of those that had robbed the stores in Concepcion, came voluntarily and returned some of the goods; some even making an excuse to the owner, some in public television.

Related posts:

1. Using Disasters for Systemic Change
2. Sidney Mintz on how Haiti’s history is ignored
3. Peter Hessler’s Sichuan Postcard: After the Earthquake

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

Does resilience thinking have any impact at all on the ground? These two very interesting examples came in via Lorena Franco Vidal at the NGO Fundación Humedales de Colombia. In January of this year, the mentioned NGO decided to initiate a climate vulnerability and resilience assessment of the Fúquene wetland complex in the east of the Colombian Andes (2,600 meters over the sea level).

According to Lorena, this work has been very much inspired by a range of publications on “the problem of fit” – that is when the dynamics of complex social-ecological systems isn’t matched by institutions and governance [e.g. Cummings et al 2006, Galaz et al 2008], as well as the Resilience Alliance workbook for scientists. In addition, the evaluation of biochemichal variables (in bottom and water sediments of the lake) are – inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s work – done by the fishermen community of the wetland. According to Lorena, this group of local stakeholders have been training monitoring for 2 years to be able to follow environmental change in the lake system.

But there is more. During 2008 and 2009, papers on “the problem of fit” as well as David Salt’s and Brian Walker’s book “Resilience Thinking”, inspired a suggested reframing of Colombian biodiversity policy towards an increased emphasis on social-ecological systems, and the need to address multilevel interactions in governance. Results of the suggested modification include, amongst other things: i) a new conceptual framework for biodiversity management, based upon the resilience thinking paradigm applied to socio-ecological systems; ii) a model that accounts for the various stability domains in which natural and social systems appear in the territory; and iii) a revision of the state – pressure – response model, in order to include new drivers of change affecting biodiversity.

The outcomes of this latter “update”, are now being used for systematic country-side consultations, and we look forward to hear more from both these initiatives!

Related posts:

1. Machine Fetishism, Money and Resilience Theory
2. Resilience Surrogates: a special feature in Ecosystems
3. Resilience Q&A

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

Google and renewable energy? Hackers, deforestation and carbon emission rights? This might sound like an odd mix of events, but something is definitely in pipeline. Global environmental change and rapid information technological change have for a long time been viewed as parallel, and decoupled global phenomena. A number of events in the last month indicate that this is likely to change. Just consider the following events:

GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

Internet giant Google recently got an approval in the US, to buy and sell energy. This happens after the company’s explicit ambition to become one of the major players in renewable energy. According to the New York Times: “The company’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl said the company was fully committed to accelerating the development of renewable energy technologies that can prove more cost-effective than coal power, as a means of both curbing carbon emissions and trimming its own giant energy bill”.

In addition, computer hackers seem to have found a new pool of resources to steal from – emissions trading. As reported by Wired recently, hackers have been successful in stealing millions of dollars by launching “a targeted phishing attack against employees of numerous companies in Europe, New Zealand and Japan, which appeared to come from the German Emissions Trading Authority”. A similar attack was assumed in Brazil in December 2008 when hackers managed to get in to the government logging databases. The impacts? Illegal harvest of 1.7 million cubic meters of timber, according to Wired.

One final example is of course the ongoing bashing of the IPCC, and the now infamous e-mail hack of UK climate scientists. An interesting follow up is this op-ed in The Australian, arguing that the Internet is allowing climate change skeptics to gain traction. One of the more thought-provoking quotes from the article states:

The `climate consensus’ may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to camera and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm.

See also John Bruno of climateshifts.org, who asks “Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?”.

Are moving into an era of cyber-environmental politics? I’m pretty sure that we are.

Related posts:

1. Satellites, Google and the Politics of CO2-Monitoring
2. Transition Towns and Resilience Thinking
3. Using the internet to provide early warning of ecological change