All posts by Garry Peterson

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

A Pakistans flood FAQ

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Kate Larkin writes Pakistan’s floods: is the worst still to come? in Nature News

What is the main cause of the intense rainfall?

It is weather, not climate change, that is to blame, according to meteorologists. An unusual jet stream in the upper atmosphere from the north is intensifying rainfall in an area that is already in the midst of the summer monsoon (see animation showing the growing extent of the flood waters). “What sets this year apart from others is the intensity and localisation of the rainfall,” says Ramesh Kumar, a meteorologist at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India. “Four months of rainfall has fallen in just a couple of days.”

Has human activity exacerbated the flooding?

Yes. The high population growth rate in Pakistan has contributed to a rapid deterioration of the country’s natural environment. This includes extensive deforestation and the building of dams for irrigation and power generation across tributaries of the Indus river. Years of political unrest have also left their mark, and flood waters are transporting land mines, posing an extra danger to the relief mission.

Is the humanitarian crisis larger than the 2004 Asian tsunami, as some media reports have claimed?

Not in terms of the death toll. With 1,600 people reported dead, this remains 100 times less than the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami. However, the scale of the tragedy continues to increase, with around 14 million people in immediate need of emergency aid. Many of Pakistan’s bridges and roads have been destroyed, and severe weather is grounding helicopters, slowing relief efforts.

On 11 August the UN and its partners launched an appeal for aid, and the World Bank has announced a grant of $900 million for relief and reconstruction.

What about disease?

The harsh reality is that waterborne diseases are linked to floods — and with cholera outbreaks reported in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, this flooding event seems to be no exception. The fear is that a lack of sanitation will see the fatal diarrhoeal disease spreading. And stagnant water may pose other threats. “The Pakistan floods and stagnant waters may also cause an increase in malarial cases,” says Sandy Cairncross, public health engineer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Inequality, Vulnerability

How resilient is the Pakistan government to floods?

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Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of many books on the geopolitics of central Asia, writes about the continuing floods in Pakistan in the New York Review of Books.  He argues that the floods have the potential to further weaken the Pakistani state.  In his articleLast Chance for Pakistan he writes:

Though it has received only moderate attention in the western press, the torrential flooding of large swaths of Pakistan since late July may be the most catastrophic natural disaster to strike the country in half a century. But even greater than the human cost of this devastating event are the security challenges it poses. Coming at a time of widespread unrest, growing Taliban extremism, and increasingly shaky civilian government, the floods could lead to the gravest security crisis the country—and the region—has faced. Unless the international community takes immediate action to provide major emergency aid and support, the country risks turning into what until now has remained only a grim, but remote possibility—a failed state with nuclear weapons.

Since the upper reaches of the Indus and other rivers in Northern Pakistan first flooded their banks over three weeks ago, the floods have spread to many other parts of the country, submerging dozens of villages, killing thousands, uprooting some 20 million people, and leaving millions of poor children and infants at terrible risk of exposure to water-borne diseases. But the next few months could be even worse, as the collapse of governance and growing desperation of flooded areas leads to increasing social and ethnic tensions, terrible food shortages, and the threat that large parts of the country, now cut off from Islamabad, will be taken over by the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups.

A key part of the security problem lies in the already precarious situation of the regions most affected. The floods and heavy rain have caused the worst damage in the poorest and least literate areas of the country where extremists and separatist movements thrive: this includes the northern region, near Afghanistan, but also parts of Balochistan and Sindh provinces in the south. By contrast, central Punjab, the country’s richest region, with incomes and literacy about double that of other parts of the country, has been relatively unscathed by the disaster. The longstanding resentment by ethnic groups in the smaller provinces against Punjab is thus likely to increase.

The situation in the north is particularly critical. Now inundated by floodwaters, the poverty stricken North Western Frontier Province—now officially known as Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (KP)—is a haven for both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. Millions of people have lost their homes and taken flight only a few months after many of them had returned following a successful offensive against militants by the Pakistan army.

In the Swat valley, where the army had flushed out extremists only a year ago, every single bridge has been destroyed and roads washed away. Across the province hundreds of miles of electricity pylons and gas lines have been ripped out, power stations flooded, and livestock and standing crops decimated by as much as 50 percent. All this will dramatically loosen what little control the state had managed to sustain over outlying areas—especially those bordering Afghanistan, which could now be quickly captured by local Taliban.

Another major recruitment center for extremists are the rural plains of southern Punjab and northern Sind, which suffer from underdevelopment and widespread poverty. Now, these regions too are drowned in water. Lacking any prospects for meaningful employment or education, more young men from these regions will join the militants, who are already proclaiming that the floods represent God’s wrath against the government.

In Balochistan, the large province in southwestern Pakistan that skirts Afghanistan’s southern border, the floods have deepened an already existing crisis. The country’s poorest region, Balochistan, has long hosted a separatist insurgency as well as Afghan Taliban bases (Quetta, the provincial capital, has been a haven for a number of senior Taliban leaders). Now, flash floods have destroyed infrastructure and what little was working in the region’s below-subsistence economy; the state’s fragile control of the region has become even more tenuous, as Baloch separatists, blaming the government for poor relief efforts, are urging a stepped up struggle for independence. (The last time such major floods hit the country in the late 1960s, the inadequacy of the government’s response led in part to the secession of east Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh.)

Meanwhile, the floods have had little effect on the rampant violence by extremists and other groups that has been occurring across the country. The Pakistani Taliban continue to carry out suicide bombings and have vowed to wipe out the country’s government leaders while in Karachi, inter-ethnic violence between political parties representing the Pashtun, Sindhi and Urdu speaking communities has resulted in some 100 deaths in the past four weeks. Since the flooding began, the Taliban have also been seeking to prevent Pakistani non-governmental organizations from carrying out relief work by threatening their workers, while encouraging militant groups who have set up their own relief camps to expand.

Much now depends on the ability of the government and its foreign allies to bring relief to flood victims. Tens of thousands of Pakistani troops and virtually the army’s entire helicopter fleet are now involved in the effort. But its resources are way overstretched, and for months to come the army is unlikely to be in a position to even hold the areas along the Afghan border that it has recently won back from the militants, let alone initiate any new campaigns against the Taliban.

General

Summer backwards glance on 2009

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Posting has slowed as those of us in the northern hemisphere go on vacation. For those still looking for resilience science, below are links to the five posts from 2009 that have continued to be popular into 2009.

  • An article on the embodied energy of bottled water Drinking bottled water is drinking oil
  • A discussion about critiques of resilience thinking part 1 and part 2
  • A comparison of Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis to Holling’s adaptive cycle.
  • An article about the growing west African drug trade.
    • General

    Summer backwards glance on 2010

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    Posting has slowed as those of us in the northern hemisphere go on vacation.  For those still looking for resilience science.  Below are links to our five most popular posts of 2010.

    1. Science historian Naomi Oreskes speaking about her new book merchants of doubt.
    2. Colony collapse disorder as a loss of resilience
    3. Reflections on disaster sociology and the Haitian earthquake
    4. Table of contents of a special issue on the politics of resilience
    5. A history of stommel diagrams
    Ecosystem services, Visualization

    Aquatic Dead Zones

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        I’ve published several links to global maps of coastal hypoxia. Now, NASA has produced a new map of global hypoxic zones, based on Diaz and Rosenberg’s . Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems. in Science, 321(5891), 926-929.  NASA’s EOS Image of the Day writes on  Aquatic Dead Zones.

        Red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet’s dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, but their size is unknown.

        It’s no coincidence that dead zones occur downriver of places where human population density is high (darkest brown). Some of the fertilizer we apply to crops is washed into streams and rivers. Fertilizer-laden runoff triggers explosive planktonic algae growth in coastal areas. The algae die and rain down into deep waters, where their remains are like fertilizer for microbes. The microbes decompose the organic matter, using up the oxygen. Mass killing of fish and other sea life often results.

        Big Back Loop

        Building civilizational memory

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        Memory is an important part of resilience.  Alexander Rose writes about various ideas of creating a Manual for Civilization from the The Long Now Blog:

        Today we received another email about creating a record of humanity and technology that would help restart civilization. …

        My bet is that the reality of watching your civilization (and population) collapse is likely one of the worst things anyone could experience. I am also not so sure the problem is just knowing how to remake a technology. For instance after the fall of the great Egyptian, Mayan, and Roman empires we had evidence and examples of their engineering achievements all around us. But aqueducts or senate buildings are worthless without a society around them to maintain, contextualize and protect them. …

        In any case I thought I would create this blog post which I will try and keep updated as these proposals and efforts come to me (and hopefully come to fruition). I will also list some of the resources that I usually refer to when I get these inquiries. Please note these resources are extremely biased toward the English language, the United States and Western culture. Also note that one of the first things that comes up when creating any compendium style work is the issue of copyright. It might sound ridiculous that you might worry about copyright in a doomsday manual, but if you want to publish it and get it into peoples hands before the apocalypse, you are going to have to deal with it in some way. Please feel free to use the comments field to make suggestions and pointers and I will integrate them here as well.

        Projects that are attempts in this direction:

        • The Rosetta Project: A multi-millennial micro-etched disk with a record of thousands of the worlds languages.
        • Westinghouse Time Capsules: Two time capsules (they actually coined the term for this project) by Westinghouse buried at Worlds Fair sites, one in 01939 and the other 01965 to be recovered in 5000 years.  They also did the very smart thing of making a “Book of Record” and an above ground duplicate of the contents on display.
        • The Human Document Project: A German project to create a record of humanity that will last one million years.
        • Crypt of Civilization: A airtight chamber located at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. The crypt consists of preserved artifacts scheduled to be opened in the year 8113 AD.
        • The Voyager Record: The Voyager Golden Record are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, who may find them.
        • Georgia Guidestones: The four granite Guidestones are covered in inscriptions written in 8 major languages that describe the tenets of their imagined Age of Reason.
        • (added) Doomsday Chests by Noah Raford
        • (added) The Forever Book an idea by Kevin Kelly
        General

        Short links: agricultural statistics

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        1) FAO is granting free and open access to its central data repository, FAOSTAT, the world’s largest and most comprehensive statistical database on food, agriculture, and hunger.

        2) FAO statistics on production of crops, fruits, livestock, oil crops, and others can be analyzed in Gapminder.

        3) How many plants feed the world on Agricultural Biodiversity weblog.  They write:

        Instead, they worked with national level Food Balance Sheets from FAO, and looked at the question in four ways to determine just how many species make up 90% of the total intake of food weight, calories, protein and fat in each country.

        The result is “85 species commodities and 28 general commodities contribute 90% of national per capita supplies of food plants.” After a bit of tinkering, they come up with this final statement: “the total number of species commodities is 82. These consist of 103 species. Fifty-six of the species commodities, consisting of 75 species, account for 5% or more of the national supply of a nutritional category in at least one country.”

        4) International Development Statistics is an online database of the volume, origin and types of aid and resource flows to over 150 developing countries. The data are collected from official statistical reports submitted to the OECD by members of its Development Assistance Committee and include figures on official development assistance, other official flows and private funding.

        General

        Reports on 2010 Transition Network Meeting

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        The transition network, which we have repeatedly covered on Resilience Science, had its fourth meeting recently in Devon, UK.  About 300 people from the over 300 official Transition initiatives attended the meeting in Devon.  Where they discussed peak oil, climate change, and financial crisis; but more importantly what they could do about.

        Design guru and founder of sustainable design conference Doors of Perception, John Thackara discusses the meeting in Of apocalypse and forest gardens, on his site Doors of Perception.  One of the categories on his site is transition and resilience.  In his reflections he writes, among other things, about translating transition to France, and local money.

        I was keen to discover if the Transition model was being, or could be, developed in France, where I live. …

        It turned out that a number of early stage groups is active in France, and a francophone group in Montreal has built a comprehensive site

        Exporting the Transition model in a box to France, or any other country, is not an option, we agreed. For one thing, the array of exiting sustainability and permaculture projects in France is extraordinarily rich. There are possibly more more websites, magazines and events about all things ‘developpement durable’ in France than in the UK.

        On the ground, degrees of resilience already exist in parts of France without the existence of Transition initiatives. France has hundreds of thousands of active local associations; these are a form of social glue that Britain lacks.

        The persistence of local food webs is another example. AMAPs (a French version of Community Supported Agriculture) are spreading fast. ‘Monnaie locale’ is being trialled in several places (see above). There is also a fast-growing debate about economic fundamentals in France in the ‘Decroisasance’ (De-Growth) movement.

        So what are the gaps, that Transition-ness might fill?

        What’s missing, we concluded, are three things:First, a perceptual framework, a story, that links together peak oil and energy, climate change, and the prospect of a massive financial discontinuity.

        Second, France would benefit from a more explicit means to connect together and leverage the multitude of stand-alone projects that are already there.

        And third, the Transition model brings with it a degree of inclusivity – of cultures, ages and backgrounds – that is uncommon in socially fragmented France.

        A meeting of Transition France takes place in Trieves on 27 June.

        …

        I got back from the coppice in time to hear Peter North introduce his brand new book Local Money. Open Money is one of those subjects I’ve enthused about enthused about in print. But North has spent 14 years traveling the world – from Curitiba to Russia to Venezuela – to learn first-hand how different approaches actually work (or not).

        North’s book describes in practical ways how people have coped with financial armegeddon in the past. Following economic collapse across the world, communities have often created their own forms of money. Local Money shows how people manage to make it through even when official money disappears.

        There’s a database of local, open or complementary currencies here.

        I pondered whether local money is necessarily hand-made and ultra-local? This being a Transition Towns gathering, I soon met a software designer, Matthew Slater, who is building customisable digital barter money platforms in Drupal. SELs (a European version of Local Economy Trading Scheme) are already being trialled in Belgium (5) France (2) Switzerland (2) and India.

        Community Forge as the platform is called, is community currency trading software build on a social networking platform. This means thousands of software developers can set up similar sites, and many of them could easily modify the software. As a popular open source project, the code is very high quality and continually improving.

        John Thackera also points to the transition network’s founder Rob Hopkins’ reflections on the meeting. Rob Hopkins writes:

        One of my personal highlights was the response to my workshops about ‘Seeing Transition as a Pattern Language’ workshop, which introduced the work I have been doing for the past few months, exploring whether a pattern-based approach might be a more suitable way of explaining and modelling Transition.  You can hear a recording of my first workshop here, as well as see some photos.  It was great to get people’s thoughts, critiques, suggestions and input, which will be worked through over the next few months.  Thank you so much to everyone who came, and who offered their input.

        Another highlight (if that’s the right word) was the talk by Stoneleigh (see left), called ”Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil”, which you can hear in full here.  Stoneleigh is one of two editors of the ‘Automatic Earth’ blog, and her talk was stark, stunning and very much strengthened the case that economics needs to become a third ‘leg’ of Transition alongside peak oil and climate change.  Her talk affected people deeply, and people’s reaction to it went on to become one of the things that defined the rest of the conference.  Her prognosis was that the world is on the cusp of an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression as the debt bubble bursts.  Not much that would have been new to Transitioners, but the way she built her argument was very compelling.  You can read Shaun Chamberlin’s reflections on her talk here, along with some insightful comments from other people.

        And on Transition Culture, reflections from Sophy Banks the conference organizer. She writes about both the planning and the dynamics of running a conference focussed on learning and change:

        It felt important in the design of this year’s event to include the fact that Transition has been going for four years – and that the wider context around us has moved on since we started back in 2006. I wanted there to be a journey in the flow of the three days, so that as well as sharing information and meeting people, having fun and gathering inspiration, there would be an element of deepening together, a sense of building trust and engaging with something challenging.

        This was reflected in a number of new elements.

      • People were invited to form “Home Groups” at the start of the conference – about 6 people who get to know each other at the start, and meet fixed times throughout the three days, as well as meeting informally if they want to at other times.
        We scheduled a longer, 3 hour workshop session to give a chance to go deeper into topics.
        We included a session where the whole conference came together in their “Home Groups” to explore thoughts and feelings of what is really coming in the next one, five and ten years into the future. This was not a “positive visioning” session such as we often do in transition, but a wider ranging naming of what we fear as well as hope for, what could be really dangerous or challenging as well as what might not change at all, and what might transform to something wonderful.

        • …
        In the afternoon we moved to another variation on previous conferences – workshops that lasted three hours, rather than the 1½ that we have had before. Several were specifically included to be places to continue to work with anything that had come up in the large group session, (though I think we could have done more to signpost them clearly).

        These included –

        * Somewhere to express your own, and witness others’ feelings (a Work that Reconnects “Truth Mandala”),
        * To explore more creatively Stories for Transition – using Storytelling as a way of working.
        * Workshops on Diversity, on Community and Conflict, and on Inner Transition – all pieces of building the inner structures that can help a community cope with the fall out of shocks – whether they are economic, physical, or emotional.
        * For those who wanted practical support for the Transition process we included sessions on Holding Good Meetings, the Energy Descent process.
        * And for those wanting to get on with building the business, organisations and systems we will need to create there were sessions on Working with Business, Local Food, Social Entrepreneurship, Local currencies. There were also visits to projects in Totnes and Occombe farm to see some pieces of the resilient future already up and running.

        General

        WWF seeks conservation social scientist

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        Coral reef conservation scientist Helen Fox is seeking a post-doctoral social scientist to work with her and environmental social scientist Arun Agarwal at WWF.  She writes:

        We seek a highly motivated researcher early in his/her career to join our team. The successful applicant will have strong statistical skills, international field experience, and a passion for policy-relevant conservation science. (The official announcement is below and attached.)

        The post-doc will join the science program at WWF here in Washington, DC. S/he will work with me, Helen Fox (WWF-US), Arun Agrawal (U. Michigan), and colleagues around the world to evaluate the ecological and social impacts of marine protected areas (MPAs) and other conservation interventions. This exciting portfolio is part of the emerging WWF Conservation Impact Initiative, which seeks to catalyze rigorous evaluation of conservation interventions and, thus, provide the scientific evidence for more effective conservation policy and practice.

        The application deadline is August 13 for a fall start date. All applications should be submitted via the WWF website: www.worldwildlife.org/who/careers/jobs.html.