All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Ecosystem services

Positive and negative externatilities of Bt corn

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Evolution of resistance to Bt pesticides is a negative externality of Bt crops, but a recent paper in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1190242) has found that immediate pest control on non-Bt crops is a large positive externality.  The Bt corn growers also benefit from having non-Bt corn around to slow the evolution of resistance.

The New York Times reports Modified Corn Benefits Nearby Farmers, and Vice Versa:

A long-term study of corn production in the Midwest has found that the widespread use of varieties engineered with a bacterial gene that kills insect pests has had big benefits in adjacent fields of conventional corn — cutting infestations there and boosting farmers’ income by billions of dollars. The paper, “Areawide Suppression of European Corn Borer with Bt Maize Reaps Savings to Non-Bt Maize Growers,” is being published in the Oct. 8 edition of the journal Science.

…

According to the paper, maintaining “refuges” of conventional corn varieties helps prevent the corn borer from developing resistance to the engineered variety, and the yields in such areas — because of a combination of reduced insect damage and lower costs of the non-engineered seed — ensure that such plantings are profitable.

Last year, Andrew Pollack reported in The Times that a growing number of corn farmers were violating federal requirements to maintain 20 percent of fields in conventional corn varieties. The new study says that any shift to wall-to-wall Bt corn is bound to backfire and makes little economic sense, Hutchison said.

A separate analysis of the new research in Science, written by Bruce E. Tabashnik, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, describes another approach to fighting insect resistance, in which farmers — instead of setting aside certain areas as refuges — buy a seed mix blending both engineered and conventional corn varieties. He said this could be the ideal way to maximize corn production in developing countries where small farm plots still predominate.

Reorganization, Vulnerability

Twenty two countries in protracted crisis

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FAO reports that:

Twenty-two countries are … are in what is termed a protracted crisis, FAO said in its “State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010” hunger report, jointly published today with the World Food Programme (WFP).

Chronic hunger and food insecurity are the most common characteristics of a protracted crisis. On average, the proportion of people who are undernourished in countries facing these complex problems is almost three times as high as in other developing countries.

More than 166 million undernourished people live in countries in protracted crises, roughly 20 percent of the world’s undernourished people, or more than a third of the total if large countries like China and India are excluded from the calculation.

… Faced with so many obstacles, it is little wonder that protracted crises can become a self-perpetuating vicious cycle,” said the preface to the SOFI report, signed jointly by FAO Director General Jacques Diouf and World Food Programme Executive Director Josette Sheeran.

…For the first time, FAO and WFP offer a clear definition of a protracted crisis that will help improve aid interventions. Countries considered as being in a protracted crisis are those reporting a food crisis for eight years or more, receive more than 10 percent of foreign assistance as humanitarian relief, and be on the list of Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries.

Ecological Economics, Regime Shifts

Food security and financial markets

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FAO says that Food price volatility a major threat to food security:

Concluding a day-long special meeting in Rome the experts recognized that unexpected price hikes “are a major threat to food security” and recommended further work to address their root causes.

The recommendations, put forward by the Inter-Governmental Groups (IGGs) on Grains and on Rice, came as FAO issued a report showing that international wheat prices have soared 60-80 percent since July while maize spiked about 40 percent.

The meeting said that “Global cereal supply and demand still appears sufficiently in balance”, adding, “unexpected crop failure in some major exporting countries followed by national policy responses and speculative behaviour rather than global market fundamentals have been the main factors behind the recent escalation of world prices and the prevailing high price volatility.”

Among the root causes of volatility, the meeting identified “Growing linkage with outside markets, in particular the impact of ‘financialization’ on futures markets”. Other causes were listed as insufficient information on crop supply and demand, poor market transparency, unexpected changes triggered by national food security situations, panic buying and hoarding.

The Groups therefore recommended exploring “alternative approaches to mitigating food price volatility” and “new mechanisms to enhance transparency and manage the risks associated with new sources of market volatility”.

In a recent IFPRI discussion paper, Recent Food Prices Movements: A Time Series Analysis, Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles analyze the food price spike of 2008.  They asses multiple proposed explanations (from biofuels, oil prices, weather, trade barriers, and speculative markets) using econometric time series analysis.  They conclude that financial activity in futures markets and proxies for speculation can best explain crisis.  They write:

Results of our rolling windows Granger causality tests show the following:

(1) In the case of rice prices we find weak evidence that for few 30-month intervals between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. dollar depreciation rate has marginally Granger-caused the growth rate of rice price; and also the growth rate of real world money holdings seems to be more important in explaining the growth rate of rice prices after 2004, but this evidence is not really statistically significant.

(2) When we analyze the price of soybeans we find that, starting in mid-2005 (which implies a 30-month period ending December 2007), the growth rate in the world exports of soybeans shows evidence of Granger causing the growth rate of soybean prices.

(3) In the case of corn we find that starting in the second half of 2004 the growth rate of oil prices shows evidence of Granger causing the growth rate of corn prices, but with a negative relationship.

(4) When analyzing our speculation proxies we observe that the ratio of monthly volume to open interest in futures contracts indicates that for the case of wheat and rice, starting in 2005, it has influence in forecasting price movements.

Also we find that for the case of rice, the ratio of noncommercial long positions to total long (reportable) positions has an effect on prices, starting in 2004. When we analyze the same ratio for short positions we find additional evidence for speculation affecting the growth rate of corn and soybean prices. In the case of corn there are signs of causality between March 2004 and September 2006, and during the 30-month span from May 2005 to November 2007. In the case of soybeans we find weak evidence, in particular for the 30-month period ending February 2008.

Interestingly as the rolling samples include 2008 and 2009 data, picking the decrease of grain prices since mid 2008 and the adverse effects of the global financial crisis, the evidence of speculation activity affecting spot prices vanishes in all cases. This supports the view that during the food crisis agricultural grain markets were operating under a different regime in which speculation activity played a role in spot prices formation. The overall evidence points to the following interpretation: before and after the food crisis speculation activity had no effect on spot prices formation while during the crisis it did. This is not to say that before and after the crisis speculation was not present, it was (probably to a less extent) but didn’t granger cause spot prices.

Overall, we conclude from our time series analysis that when taking the four commodities analyzed here there is evidence that financial activity in futures markets and/or speculation in these markets can help explain the behavior of these prices in recent years. Other explanations are only partially supported for the particular case of one agricultural commodity or not supported at all. We do not claim, however, that these other explanations should be disregarded; all that we can say is that in using the variables considered in this study and the particular time series models herein, we do not find such evidence.

Frederick Kaufman wrote a Harper’s magazine in July 2010 The food bubble:
How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it that reports on finance and the food crisis. The Harper’s version is behind a paywall, but Kaufman was interviewed on Democracy Now.

More academic takes on the food crisis and the possible future of food price volatility are in:

C. Gilbert and C. Morgan’s article Food price volatility in Proc Royal Soc (DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0139 ). They conclude:

We have highlighted the extensive evidence demonstrating interconnection of financial and food commodity markets as the result of speculative activity. Nevertheless, this contention remains controversial and, until the mechanisms are better understood, the policy debate will remain confused.

and

C. Gilbert’s How to Understand High Food Prices in Journal of Agricultural Economics (DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-9552.2010.00248.x) whose abstract states:

Agricultural price booms are better explained by common factors than by market-specific factors such as supply shocks. A capital asset pricing model-type model shows why one should expect this and Granger causality analysis establishes the role of demand growth, monetary expansion and exchange rate movements in explaining price movements over the period since 1971. The demand for grains and oilseeds as biofuel feedstocks has been cited as the main cause of the price rise, but there is little direct evidence for this contention. Instead, index-based investment in agricultural futures markets is seen as the major channel through which macroeconomic and monetary factors generated the 2007–2008 food price rises.

General

Faculty position in sustainability at MIT’s Sloan School

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It seems to be job season. John Sterman writes about a faculty position in sustainability at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He writes:

The MIT Sloan School of Management invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in sustainability, to begin July 2011. The successful candidate will play a central role in MIT Sloan’s Sustainability Initiative, teach courses in sustainability, and carry out research in sustainability (see http://mitsloan.mit.edu/sustainabilit).

Sustainability at MIT Sloan is defined broadly to include environmental, economic, political, social and personal issues, and we stress the interdependency and complex dynamics of these dimensions. We encourage applications from individuals engaged in research involving any aspect of sustainability, including the design, implementation, and evaluation of practices and policies promoting sustainability in business and other organizations, in government and international policy, in communities, and in interactions of these organizations. We encourage candidates whose research examines how organizations, markets and communities can become more sustainable, including the dynamics of implementation and diffusion of sustainable practices, organizational learning and adaptation, and the interactions of markets, firms, government, the public and other organizations.

Candidates can have disciplinary training in any area, including the social and behavioral sciences, management sciences, economics and finance, or other field. Applicants whose substantive research interests are interdisciplinary are particularly invited to apply. The successful candidate can be affiliated with any of the faculty groups at MIT Sloan. We especially want to identify qualified female and minority candidates for consideration in this position.

Applicants should possess or be close to the completion of a Ph.D. in a relevant field by the date of appointment. Applicants must submit their 1) up-to-date curriculum vitae, 2) relevant information about teaching as well as research experience and performance, and 3) three letters of recommendation by November 1, 2010. If papers are available, please provide electronic copies.

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Fire and the Anishinaabe

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Andrew Miller and Iain Davidson-Hunt from the University of Manitoba, write about Fire, Agency and Scale in the Creation of Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes in Human Ecology (doi: 10.1007/s10745-010-9325-3).

The authors worked with the Pikangikum First Nation to understand and analyze how fire co-produces a cultural landscape over large spatial areas.

Their paper has two really interesting figures showing alternative perspectives on fire.  The first is a Stommel diagram of the Anishinaabe fire related cultural landscape in Manitoba, and the second an Anishinaabe image of a specific way fire was used in specific places and time in the boreal forest landscape to enhance the supply of desired ecosystem services.

Fig. 4 Spatial and temporal dimensions of knowledge related to fire use and its impacts held by Anishinaabe elders, and the areas of expertise they require

Fig. 5 Pishashkooseewuhseekaag—Spring burning of the marshes. Fires were lit in marshes in the Spring when ice on the lakes was beginning to break up but the ground was still frozen. Burning created luxuriant regrowth of grass, habitat for ducks and muskrats that could also be harvested for insulation.

Ecosystem services

Software development job with Natural Capital Project

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In line with the Natural Capital Project’s commitment to innovation, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the monitoring and progress tracking of their work. Leveraging AI algorithms, the project team can now utilize advanced software development project management tools that analyze vast amounts of data and provide real-time insights on the status of various tasks and milestones. This cutting-edge approach not only ensures efficient coordination among team members but also enables prompt decision-making, allowing the lead software developer to identify potential bottlenecks, allocate resources effectively, and optimize the overall development process. By harnessing the power of AI-driven monitoring, the Natural Capital Project continues to forge new frontiers in ecosystem service decision-making, reinforcing its position as a global leader in sustainable development.

The Natural Capital Project an exciting international collaboration that aims to improve ecosystem service decision making by developing new spatial modelling tools is looking for a lead software developer.

They write:

Are you a software whiz looking for responsibility, independence, and the opportunity to solve our biggest environmental problems? Do you want to work in the vibrant Stanford campus with internal access to the intellectual and entrepreneurial heartbeat of its community?

We are a highly collaborative group of researchers who need expertise to translate our biophysical and economic models into easy, useful tools for policy makers.  We seek a lead software developer to help us make a global impact on major decisions about human well-being, sustainability, and the use of our lands and waters.

We are a partnership among The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, and Stanford University developing tools to model and map the distribution of biodiversity and the flow of multiple ecosystem services across land- and seascapes. Our core team is based in Seattle, Washington, DC and at Stanford, and we have active partners around the globe.

We seek a talented and experienced software developer with strong leadership and communication skills to lead the development of the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) family of software tools.

Details of the position are here.

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Harvard Sustainability Science Fellowships

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From Harvard’s Sustainability Science Program:

The Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University’s Center for International Development invites applications for resident fellowships in sustainability science for the University’s academic year beginning in September 2011.

The fellowship competition is open to advanced doctoral and post-doctoral students, and to mid-career professionals engaged in research or practice to facilitate the design, implementation, and evaluation of effective interventions that promote sustainable development.

Applicants should describe how their work would contribute to “sustainability science,” the emerging field of use-inspired research seeking understanding of the interactions between human and environmental systems as well as the application of such knowledge to sustainability challenges relating to advancing development of agriculture, habitation, energy and materials, health and water while conserving the earth’s life support systems.

This year we will give some preference to applicants whose work addresses challenges of innovation for sustainable development, with special attention to innovation in the energy, health and agricultural sectors. In addition to general funds available to support this fellowship offering, special funding for the Giorgio Ruffolo Fellowships in Sustainability Science is available to support citizens of Italy or developing countries who are therefore especially encouraged to apply.

The Sustainability Science Program is directed by Professors William Clark and Michael Kremer, and Nancy Dickson. For more information on the fellowships application process see http://www.cid.harvard.edu/sustsci/fellowship. Applications are due December 1, 2010.

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Feedback Analysis Job at PIK

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The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is looking to fill a research position within the Marie Curie Network GREENCYCLES-II, based in Potsdam, Germany:

T5.3 Feedback analysis and evaluation using the CLIMBER model

The Early-Stage Researcher (PhD candidate) will investigate feedbacks between climate and vegetation using the CLIMBER family of intermediate-complexity Earth-system models developed at PIK. Specifically, the established CLIMBER-2 model will be used to evaluate biosphere-climate interactions at global and continental scales. This will be complemented by more detailed investigations of feedbacks resulting from large-scale modifications of the land surface such as due to expanded biofuel production with the CLIMBER-3 model currently under development.

The successful candidate will actively participate in network-wide workshops and training events.

The position is expected to start on 1 January 2011 and run until 31 December 2013. Applications should arrive before 1.10.2010, but will be also accepted until the position is filled.

Interested candidates should send a CV, a half-page statement of interest, copies of your high-school and academic certificates, the names of two referees and a completed Eligibility Form (http://www.greencycles.org/vacancies/) to Dr. Andrey Ganopolski, preferably by e-mail (Andrey.Ganopolski@pik-potsdam.de) or by post (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, PF 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, Germany).

Payment will be according to Marie Curie rules (http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/), including an allowance for transnational travel and mobility.

At the start of their fellowship, researchers may not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in Germany for more than 12 months in the preceding 3 years. German nationals are eligible only if they have been active in research in a non-Associated Third Country for at least three of the last four years

Early-stage researchers (ESRs) must be in the first 4 years (full-time equivalent) of their research careers, including the period of research training, starting at the qualification date.
PIK seeks to increase the number of female scientists and encourages them to apply. Disabled persons with comparable qualifications receive preferential status.

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Feedback Analysis: 3 links

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1) On MetaSD Brian Eno, meet Stafford Beer

Brian Eno reflects on feedback and self-organization in musical composition, influenced by the organization of complex systems in Stafford Beer’s The Brain of the Firm.

2) RealClimate: Introduction to feedbacks.

Feedbacks are components of the climate system that are constrained by the background climate itself; they don’t cause it to depart from its reference norm on their own, but rather may amplify or dampen some other initial push. These original “pushes” are forcings which are typically radiative in nature (such as adding CO2 to the air) and manifest themselves as a climate change when they are large enough or persistent enough to overcome the large heat capacity of the oceans, and thus change the annual mean radiative energy balance of the Earth. In a broad sense, a feedback means that some fraction of the output is fed back into the input, so the radiative perturbation gets an additional nudge (amplifying the forcing, a positive feedback or damping the forcing, a negative feedback). The major examples such as decline in ice extent in a warmer world, thereby reducing the reflected fraction of incident surface radiation are pretty well known at this point.

3) Gerard Roe in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences writes about Feedbacks, Timescales, and Seeing Red (doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.061008.134734) writes:

The history of the recognition of feedbacks is perhaps best described as an emerging awareness. Adam Smith, for instance, had a clear understanding of the feedbacks inherent in the operation of the invisible hand—the set of natural and mutual interactions that govern commerce (Smith 1776). In practical applications, the use of feedback principles to regulate mechanical devices goes back much further. Centrifugal governors, which act to automatically maintain the distance between the bed and runner stones, have been employed in wind- and water mills since the seventeenth century (e.g., Maxwell 1867), and float valves were used by the Greeks and Romans in water clocks. However, the abstract idea of a feedback was first conceived of and formalized by Harold S. Black in 1927. Black was searching for a way to isolate and cancel distortion in telephone relay systems. He describes a sudden flash of inspiration while on his commute into Manhattan on the Lackawanna Ferry. The original copy of the page of the New York Times on which he scribbled down the details of his brain wave a few days later still has pride of place at the Bell Labs museum, where it is regarded with great reverence (Figure 1). Some of the concepts and consequences of feedbacks are counterintuitive, so much so that it took Black more than nine years to get his patent granted—the U.K. patent office would not countenance it until a fully working model was delivered to them. Only after being convinced that seventy negative-feedback amplifiers were already in operational use were they finally persuaded to issue a patent. Black (1977) writes that “[o]ur patent application was treated in the same manner one would a perpetual motion machine.” Since the initial skepticism, the principles of feedback analysis have become widely disseminated in the fields of electrical engineering and control systems. For the latter, in fact, they are the foundational theory.

The notion that internal, mutually interacting processes in nature may act to amplify or damp the response to a forcing goes back at least as far as Croll (1864), who invoked the interaction between temperature, reflectivity, and ice cover in his theory of the ice ages. Arrhenius (1896), in his original estimate of the temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide, takes careful and quantitative account of the water vapor feedback that amplifies the response to the radiative forcing. The explicit mention of feedbacks seems to enter the Earth sciences via the climate literature starting in the mid 1960s (e.g., Manabe & Wetherald 1967, Schneider 1972, Cess 1975), and in the popular imagination through the concept of Gaia (Lovelock & Margulis 1974). At first, it appears mainly as a conceptual description of physical processes relating to climate sensitivity.  Hansen et al. (1984) and Schlesinger (1985) contributed groundbreaking papers, making quantitative comparisons of different feedbacks in a climate model (but see footnote 4). Since then, there has been a thin but steady stream of studies quantifying climate system feedbacks (e.g., Manabe and Wetherald 1988, Schlesinger 1988, Cess et al. 1990, Zhang et al. 1994, Colman et al. 1997, Colman 2003, Soden & Held 2006).

From Roe 2009

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Part-time job on Resilience with Shareable

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Neal Gorenflo writes that Shareable Magazine, a nonprofit online magazine that publishes stories about how to share resources, is  looking for a part-time contract editor for their Ecosystem channel.  They hosted  a Resilience inspired event called Design 4 Resilience in April 2010.  They are looking for someone to:

Write about innovations in managing important physical commons like
fisheries, forests, climate, water and more. Write useful how-tos, guides,
and share news of the commons. Make the commons relevant to a general
audience. Environmental reporting experience appreciated, but not
mandatory.

Key words: social-ecological resilience, the commons,
Elinor Ostrom, The Resilience Alliance, conservation, environment.

LINK: http://shareable.net/channel/ecosystem
Instructions for applying: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/wri/1966914496.html