All posts by Garry Peterson

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

Bus Rapid Transit vs. Light Rail

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Worldchanging interviews WRI researchers on a recent report they did comparing bus rapid transit (BRT) to light rail.  There is an interesting discussion in the comments on the article WRI on Bus Rapid Transit v. Light Rail:

A team of researchers at the World Resources Institute (WRI) recently produced a report that goes against the grain. WRI analyzed and compared BRT and light rail as two options for Maryland’s Purple Line Project, a 16-mile transit corridor that will connect the D.C. suburbs. In January, the Institute came down in favor of BRT, with a statement announcing that “enhanced buses … would cost less, offer similar services, and fight global warming better than light-rail cars.”

Our main question related not to what’s in the study, but rather, what seems to be left out. It’s a common observation that light rail delivers benefit beyond transit alone, in the form of transit-oriented development that springs up as a result of developers, business owners and homebuyers seeking proximity to the train stations.

The team at WRI was happy to share their take on this and other issues. I interviewed the study’s lead author, Greg Fuhs, and WRI’s senior transport engineer Dario Hidalgo, about BRT/LRT, transit prejudices, and how other cities can apply this analysis to their own planning process.

General

Nigeriatown

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chinaphotoIn a New Yorker article – the promised land – Evan Osnos about African merchants living in China. He also narrates an Audio Slide Show about the economic, social, and religious life of African migrants in Guangzhou.  On his blog he writes:

Prof. Adams Bodomo is a Ghanaian linguist at the University of Hong Kong and one of the first scholars to write in English about the African community in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

… As Bodomo and other scholars see it, immigration, like other byproducts of prosperity, is an unfamiliar issue in China. For most of its history, China was so poor that hardly anyone but missionaries or marauders wanted to stay. China’s posture toward foreigners was erratic; it oscillated between the xenophobia that produced the Great Wall to the zealous overture of the Beijing Olympics. But China is still ambivalent about people settling down permanently, and Bodomo sees that as a the big question about whether these communities survive.

There is also a podcast interview with Osnos.

General

PhD position at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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The research program “Governance of the Baltic Sea – a response to ecological regime shifts” at the Baltic Nest Institute and Stockholm Resilience Center is looking for a Political Science PhD student.

The project runs from 2009-2012, andaims to develop guidelines for adaptive  management of both coastal and marine environments (with special focus on the Baltic Sea). The application deadline is very soon – Feb 14th, 2009.

The project is run by associate Professor Christoph Humborg and Professor Carl Folke.  For more information about the research project and information on the position contact
Associate Professor Christoph Humborg (christoph.humborg @ itm.su.se).

More information on training at postgraduate level in science and application procedure are available on
http://www.statsvet.su.se/Student/ansokan_forskarutb.htm

The project is described below:

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Ideas

Traps of abstraction

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In a recent paper in Science, Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope review recent pyschological research on how people think about abstract situations.  They argue that there is similarity between how people cope with situations separated from their situation in time, space, social distance or uncertainty.  In their paper The Psychology of Transcending the Here and Now (2008 322 (5905): 1201) they write:

Our experiences of the world are limited to the self, here and now, yet people, events, and situations that are beyond our immediate experience populate our mind. We plan for the future, remember the past, think about remote locations, take others’ perspective, and consider alternatives to reality. In each case, we transcend the present to consider psychologically distant objects. An object is psychologically distant from us to the extent that it is remote in time (future or past) or in space; refers to experiences of others (e.g., relatives, acquaintances, or strangers); and unlikely to occur. But how do we transcend the present, evaluate, and make decisions with respect to psychologically distant objects? And how does increasing distance from objects affect the way we respond to these objects?

…

Although evolution, history, and child development have different time scales, we propose that the expanding horizons that all of them entail require and are enabled by the human capacity for abstract mental representation. This hypothesis is based on Construal Level Theory (CLT) of psychological distance (3, 4), which links psychological distance from objects to the mental construal of those objects. In the following, we explain what we mean by mental construal and how it relates to traversing psychological distances. We then describe research findings demonstrating that there is considerable commonality in the way people traverse different dimensions of psychological distance; that similar mental construal processes underlie traversing different distance dimensions; and that these construal processes guide the way people predict, evaluate, and plan psychologically near and distant situations.

…

In summary, a range of studies suggests that people rely on high-level construals to a greater extent when predicting, evaluating, and taking action with respect to more distant situations. Ironically, the increasing reliance on high-level construals for more distant situations often leads people to make more confident predictions, more polarized evaluations, and clearer choices. This result is counterintuitive if one believes that distant situations should afford less certainty and thus reduce confidence and decisiveness.

Ecosystem services

Special Ecosystem Services Issue of Frontiers

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coverfeb2009A current special issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment is dedicated to Ecosystem services.  The Ecological Society of America, publisher of Frontiers, also has a podcast on the special feature. From the ESA press release:

“In this Special Issue of Frontiers, we have assembled pioneering examples of the quantification of ecosystem services and nascent steps toward turning that quantification into a framework for better land and water management,” Kareiva and Ruffo write.

The issue’s authors draw on current ecosystem services projects ranging from ranches in the Everglades to North American shorelines to cultural lands in Hawaii.

Novel programs such as the Florida Ranchlands Environmental Services Project (FRES) are designed to encourage the provisioning of ecosystem services from agricultural lands. These initiatives differ from traditional cost-sharing programs by paying landowners directly for the services their lands already provide, instead of giving incentives to adopt additional practices. In the Florida Everglades, agriculture has increased nutrient runoff into the Lake Okeechobee watershed since the 1940s, which has caused harmful algal blooms and ocean dead zones. State agencies are now developing a program to pay ranchers for ecosystem services produced by their lands, like water storage and filtration.

Another study shows that although wave attenuation, or the minimizing of ocean damage to shorelines by wetland habitats, provides quantifiable protection to coastal communities, this service can vary over time. Much like an economic market rises and falls with prosperous and hard times, these services vary over the winter and summer months, when shoreline plants are at different densities. The authors argue that most ecosystem services likely vary in a non-linear fashion, which will prove challenging for ecosystem modelers.

Placing a dollar amount on ecosystem services is not the only way to value them, however. In Hawaii, researchers say, ecosystem services evaluations should take into account cultural values, such as access to spiritual lands and areas available for gathering traditional plants used in ceremonies. The authors use a new software modeling program called InVEST (Integrated Evaluation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs) to help land managers and government workers assess this wide array of services.

The InVEST software has also shown that high levels of biodiversity often go hand-in-hand with the provision of more ecosystem services, suggesting that the preservation of biodiversity will enhance ecosystem services. This correlation is also reflected in the success of ecosystem service projects: The authors report that although conservation initiatives that focus on ecosystem services are still in their infancy, many are as successful as traditional biodiversity preservation approaches, and can often garner as much or more funding from the private sector.

Ideas

Whole Earth Catalog web archive

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coevolutiongaiaThe entire 35-year archive of Whole Earth Catalogs, along with its Supplements, and descendant magazines – CoEvolution Quarterly, and Whole Earth are now available on the web.  The Whole Earth Catalog,was published in 1968 by Stewart Brand, it and its related  magazines embodied a certain type of Californian environmental thinking.  A key concept was systems – which included thinking about people,  and computers, as well as ecosystems, and when I read first read issues of the magazine as a teenager in the 1980s it was my first exposure to systems theory.

The full archive is in a difficult to navigate scanned form, which is difficult to link to or search, however some of the later articles are available as text.  However the archive includes lots of interesting stuff.  For example, Dana Meadows famous article on where to intervene in a system there.  Other interesting bits include articles by ecologists such as HT Odum, Paul Ehrlich, and Buzz Holling as well as an issue focused on scenario planning.

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Ecosystem services

Thinking about ecosystem services

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On Faculty of 1000, Elena Bennett identifies an interesting new paper on ecosystem services – Defining and classifying ecosystem services for decision making by Brendan Fisher, RK Turner, and P Morling in Ecological Economics (2009 68:643-653: doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.09.014).  Elena writes:

Building on the Millennium Assessment and other ecosystem services literature, the authors of this paper develop a new definition of ecosystem services that strives to bring together the economic and ecological understandings of the concept. What I find interesting is how well the authors are able to integrate the ecological and economic literature on ecosystem services, as well as their discussion of the aspects of ecosystem services that make ecosystem service classification schemes difficult.

Many definitions and classification systems of ecosystem services exist, and there is surprisingly little agreement across the literature about these definitions and classifications. Furthermore, scientists are sometimes not clear about the definitions of or assumptions about ecosystem services on which they base their studies. The authors of this paper move the community closer to what may be an agreeable definition of ecosystem services. They also provide a very useful discussion of the various aspects of ecosystem services that might be important in classification schemes, such as public-private good aspects, spatial and temporal dynamism, joint production, complexity, and interactions.

Big Back Loop

Terra preta the only way to save our civilization?

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James Lovelock appears to be marginally more positive about our civilization’s capacity to avoid collapse, because of terra preta in a New Scientist interview One last chance to save mankind.  He says:

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it.

Do you think we will survive?

I’m an optimistic pessimist. I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It’s happening again.

I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.

Big Back Loop, Ideas

Dennis Meadows awarded Japan Prize for work on Limits to Growth

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Dennis Meadows has been awarded the Japan Prize for his work on Limits to Growth.  The Prize Committee writes:

[he] served as Research Director for the project on “The Limits to Growth,” for the Club of Rome in 1972. Employing a system simulation model called “World3,” his report demonstrated that if certain limiting factors of the earth’s physical capacity – such as resources, the environment, and land – are not recognized, mankind will soon find itself in a dangerous situation. The conflict between the limited capacity of the earth and the expansion of the population accompanied by economic growth could lead to general societal collapse. The report said that to avert this outcome, it is necessary that the goals of zero population growth and zero expansion in use of materials be attained as soon as possible. The report had an enormous impact on a world that had continued to grow both economically and in population since World War II.

The report sparked a great debate worldwide about the value of the zero growth theory that it proposed. The report was extremely significant in that it sounded a loud alarm about global society’s urgent need for sustainable development, and it engendered broad interest throughout the world. Since its initial publication, Dr. Meadows has continued to study the causes and consequences of physical growth on a finite planet. He co-founded the Balaton Group, a famous environmental research network. He has published many educational games and books about sustainable development that are used around the world.

Together with his wife, the late Dr. Donella Meadows and Dr. J. Randers, he has twice co-authored updates to “ The Limits to Growth”, in 1992 and 2004. In these updates, an improved world model was used to point out that the limiting features of the earth’s physical capacity, about which “ The Limits to Growth” had sounded a warning, have continued to deteriorate, and that the time left for solving the problem is growing short; the authors also urged that mankind not delay in taking the measures necessary to address the situation.

This series of reports, especially the first “The Limits to Growth,” presented the conflict between the earth’s physical limitations and the growth of mankind in clear, logical terms, and marked the beginning of mankind’s efforts to achieve a sustainable society. …

Based on the foundations established in “The Limits to Growth” over the past 30 years Dr. Meadows has consistently proposed, through model analyses, efforts aimed at forming a sustainable society. He has continued to exert a large influence on the entire world. This, it is believed, is highly praiseworthy and deserving of the 2009 Japan Prize, which is intended to honor contributions in the area of “Transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.”

The Prize has posted an interview video on YouTube.

Recently, Graham Turner, from Australia’s CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, published a paper A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years (2008 Global Environmental Change). The abstract states:

…Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th century. This paper focuses on a comparison of recently collated historical data for 1970–2000 with scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth. The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the “standard run” scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century. The data do not compare well with other scenarios involving comprehensive use of technology or stabilizing behaviour and policies. The results indicate the particular importance of understanding and controlling global pollution.

Ideas, Scenarios

Social science and science fiction

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Crooked Timber is hosting an online seminar on the innovative science fiction author Charlie Stross.  Their discussants include economists Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and John Quiggin , as well as a response from Charlie Stross (pt 1 and 2):

… we’ve got Paul Krugman writing on The Merchant Princes, considered as a thought experiment in development economics. Of course, as Paul points out, these books are first, and foremost, great fun. But, unlike others in the ‘between alternate timelines genre’ Stross focuses on the big question: how does an agrarian society respond to a sudden irruption of modern industrial technology?

For example Political Scientist Henry Farrel writes:

Rather than engaging with the futures of the past (as lots of SF today does, it tries to set out the futures of the present, … I think that this is the first genuinely successful SFnal take on the social changes that we’re facing into – not, of course, because it is going to be right – but because it takes some of the core dilemmas of an IT based society, plays with them and extrapolates them in ways that challenge our basic understanding of politics in a networked society.