All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Adaptation, Ecological Economics, Ideas, Scenarios

Forty years of Limits to Growth

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The first presentation of the influential environmentalist book Limits to Growth was on March 1 in 1972 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, four decades ago.

The study was both hugely influential and hugely controversial, and the authors were quite strongly attacked, often for analytical flaws that their study never said or did.  However, after two followup books, and renewed discussions of peak oil (etc) & planetary boundaries, there has been an increased appreciation of Limits to Growth.

After 40 years it seems that:

  1. Limits to Growth was a pretty good first stab at a global model (look at the number of models based on it)
  2. That the scenarios in Limits to Growth were fairly reasonable  (see here and here, here)
  3. That humanity has avoided some really bad trajectories, but could have done a lot better
  4. And that today, global civilization is pushing up against all sort of boundaries and we require more and more innovation to keep going and
  5. We probably need to have a major societal transformation to create a good Anthropocene.

For more on this, see Australian corporate environmentalist Paul Gilding‘s book Great Disruption, just is based on a similar assessment of the world – and he just gave a TED talk based on the book.

Various Limits related events have been timed for this 40th anniversary.

First, the Smithsonian is hosting Perspectives on Limits to Growth – which will feature two of the original members of the team that wrote Limits.  They describe the seminar:

The Club of Rome and the Smithsonian Institution’s Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet are hosting a symposium on March 1, 2012 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launching of Limits to Growth, the first report to the Club of Rome published in 1972. This book was one of the earliest scholarly works to recognize that the world was fast approaching its sustainable limits. Forty years later, the planet continues to face many of the same economic, social, and environmental challenges as when the book was first published.

The morning session will start at 9:00 a.m. and will focus on the lessons of Limits to Growth. The afternoon session will begin at 1:45 p.m. and will address the difficult challenges of preserving biodiversity, adjusting to a changing climate, and solving the societal issues now facing the planet. The symposium will end with a thought-provoking panel discussion among the speakers on future steps for building a sustainable planet.

The meeting will be live-streamed and video archived on the internet at Perspectives on Limits to Growth.

Second, coinciding with the with anniversary is the release an interesting report Life beyond Growth 2012.  Alan AtKisson, author of Believing Cassandra and colleague of many limits authors, wrote the report for the Japanese Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society.

Life Beyond Growth is the product of a year of research and reflection, during which the world experienced tumultuous changes, ranging from the Arab Spring to the Great East Japan Earthquake to the “Occupy” movement to the near-meltdown of the Eurozone.

Despite all the economic and political turmoil, a revolution in economic thought continued to gain steam. From “Green Economy” to “Gross National Happiness” to the more radical notion of “De-growth,” governments around the world have continued to explore new ways to frame, and measure, the idea of national progress. Most recently, the United Nations has formally joined the dialogue, with its own high-level panel calling for “new ways to measure progress” in advance of the Rio+20 global summit.

And third, one that was not planned to coincide with the anniversary, but is importantly connected Victor Galaz and many other have a new paper Planetary boundaries’ — exploring the challenges for global environmental governance, which is not freely available, in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2012.01.006).  The article (from the abstract):

… provides an overview of the global governance challenges that follow from this notion of multiple, interacting and possibly non-linear ‘planetary boundaries’. Here we discuss four interrelated global environmental governance challenges, as well as some possible ways to address them. The four identified challenges are related to, first, the interplay between Earth system science and global policies, and the implications of differences in risk perceptions in defining these boundaries; second, the capacity of international institutions to deal with individual ‘planetary boundaries’, as well as interactions between them; third, the role of international organizations in dealing with ‘planetary boundaries’ interactions; and fourth, the role of global governance in framing social–ecological innovations.

Visualization

Declining child mortality – fast and slow

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From the Economist:

THE frequent death of children before their fifth birthday is both a disaster for their parents and one of the most reliable indicators of country-wide poverty. …  One of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals requires that by 2015, developing countries should reduce their under-five mortality rate to one-third of where it stood in 1990. Just 17 countries had met that target in 2010; notable among them were Brazil, Egypt and Turkey. While China, with 13% of the world’s 636m children under five, is on course to meet the goal by 2015, it will be among only an additional 23 countries to do so, leaving 101 countries set to miss the target.

Design, Networks, Scenarios

Development with Fossil or Solar Energy?

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The price of solar power has been rapidly decling over the past several decades (~ 7%/year decline in US$/watt or a cost halving every 10 years ).  This drop , combined with peristently high oil prices is producing some interesting dynamics. New Scientist has an interesting article on the rapid drop in the price of solar power in India.  Where many people and unconnected to the power grid, and for those that are the brittleness of the grid means that many people rely on generators:

Recent figures from market analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF)show that the price of solar panels fell by almost 50 per cent in 2011. They are now just one-quarter of what they were in 2008. That makes them a cost-effective option for many people in developing countries. .. Now [India’s] generators could be on their way out. In India, electricity from solar supplied to the grid has fallen to just 8.78 rupees per kilowatt-hour compared with 17 rupees for diesel. The drop has little to do with improvements in the notoriously poor efficiency of solar panels: industrial panels still only convery 15 to 18 per cent of the energy they receive into electricity. But they are now much cheaper to produce, so inefficiency is no longer a major sticking point. …The one thing stopping households buying a solar panel is the initial cost, says Amit Kumar, director of energy-environment technology development at The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, India. Buying a solar panel is more expensive than buying a diesel generator, but according to Chase’s calculations solar becomes cheaper than diesel after seven years. The panels last 25 years. Even in India, solar electricity remains twice as expensive as electricity from coal, but that may soon change. While the price drop in 2011 was exceptional, analysts agree that solar will keep getting cheaper. Suntech’s in-house analysts predict that, by 2015, solar electricity will be as cheap as grid electricity in half of all countries. When that happens, expect to see solar panels wherever you go.

A similar article about the USA, was recently in the business magazine Fast Company.

Regime Shifts

Learning about Arctic Regime Shifts

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Science magazine has an interesting question and answer interview with Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist from the USA’s Smithsonian Institution, who has a worked with indigenous communities in Alaska and northern Russia. They talk about learning about local ecological knowledge and Arctic regime shifts.

Q: What are some of the biggest differences in how indigenous people and scientists look for change or perceive change in the environment?

I.K.: I wouldn’t put it like “indigenous people” and “scientists.” It’s a difference between someone who lives in the environment daily, and someone who studies it [at a distance]. If you wake up every morning and your day depends upon the weather, if your life depends upon going out and coming back safe, and bringing food and traveling, then you’re naturally much more attentive and in tune to the environment.

The difference between indigenous people and nonindigenous residents is that indigenous people have the advantage of multigenerational knowledge, and traditional knowledge of language, classification, and nomenclature that they learn from parents, grandparents, and other elders. If you’re just a resident scientist, you depend upon what you may watch in the environment on your own.

Q: What’s the relationship between knowledge and language in how it’s transmitted?

I.K.: We’ve always thought that a lot of information is stored and passed via language. We recently tried to document indigenous terminologies for sea ice, as one of the goals of a project during the International Polar Year [2007-2008]. Altogether, we have documented 30 terminologies from different parts of the Arctic. People are using between 60 and more than 100 terms for different types of ice, and their classifications are very different from those used by scientists. Their terminology is always very local, very different from place to place; the richness of the vocabulary is different. It’s not like there’s an “Eskimo terminology” for ice or for snow. There are a dozens of different terminologies.

…

Q: In your talk, you mentioned the Sea Ice Knowledge and Use (SIKU) Project, where you asked indigenous people to record observations of sea ice change. What were some of the most striking observations that came out of this project?

I.K.: [Indigenous] people keep saying that change has happened before, that we are now documenting an already changed environment. I’m increasingly hearing, “Igor, you’re late. That changed between 1999 and 2000, or 2001.” Probably they are pointing to what biologists and oceanographers call “regime shift” [when ecosystems rapidly change from one relatively stable state to another], which means that the regime shift happened before we started [the project]. Whether it was really an abrupt regime shift or a more gradual one, we don’t know, but we will learn.

General

Arctic Resilience Assessment research position at SRC

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Stockholm Resilience Centre is looking for a researcher in Resilience in Arctic Social-Ecological Systems.  Applications are due Jan 23. The job ad states:

In a joint venture with the Stockholm Environmental Institute,  Stockholm Resilience Centre seeks a researcher to be scientific leader in an Arctic Resilience Report (ARR). The ARR has been approved as an Arctic Council project and is a priority for the Swedish chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The goal of the project is to better understand impacts and risks related to integrated processes of change in the Arctic with focus on the risk for rapid shifts in ecosystems services that affect human well-being. The ARR will furthermore explore strategies to build social-ecological resilience among Arctic communities.

The ARR includes activities until 2015. It is based on active engagement with stakeholders both in identifying valuable aspects of social-ecological systems in the Arctic and identifying drivers that affect them. This will be followed by an analysis of potential tipping points that can affect important ecosystems services and human well-being. An integral part of the assessment is also to identify policy and management options that may be needed for strengthening resilience, for adaptation, and for transformational change when this is necessary. The method for the project will build on and extend the approach developed in the Resilience Assessment workbook.

Work Tasks
You will be the scientific leader of the ARR and work closely with the project leader and other staff at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Stockholm Environment Institute and also with international networks, including the “Resilience Alliance”. Roles and responsibilities of the ARR Scientific Leader include:

  • Provide the scientific leadership in developing and carrying out the resilience assessment in the ARR.
  • Initiate and support different project activities under the ARR, and lead the method development for the resilience assessment.
  • Be the lead person in synthesizing insights and in structuring the interim and final reports of the ARR, and function as one of the lead authors.
  • Together with the ARR Project Leader, establish knowledge partnerships (international research networks, interactions with Arctic Council working groups and core programs, and engagement with key stakeholder groups) required in the assessment work.
  • Work closely with the Project Leader and the rest of the project team on all matters, including raising additional funds.
  • Start establishing an Arctic research group at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, together with the centre leadership.

Qualifications

  • Mid-level to senior academic experience in resilience research and integrated assessments.
  • Experience from research on social-ecological systems and resilience.
  • Research experience from the Arctic region.
  • Experience from policy oriented assessments/studies and participatory research processes.
  • Experience or familiarity with the Arctic Council.

Conditions of Employment
Employment is part-time to full-time (50-100 %), depending on the applicant and to be negotiated individually. Fixed-term contract of one year, subject to renewal up to four years in total. Access immediately. Stockholm University administers individual wages, therefore, please indicate salary requirement.

For more details see the full position announcement.

Ecological Management

No surprise to Buzz Holling: Non-linear response of seabirds to forage fish depletion

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Guest post from Henrik Österblom from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Basic ecology rests firmly on a number of basic assumptions.  Some of these assumptions, specifically how predators interaction with their prey, were developed by a key figure in the history of resilience – Buzz Holling. The Holling type I, II and III functional responses are standard material in many textbooks in ecology (here’s wikipedia on functional response).  The different functional responses reflect the prey consumption ratio as a function of food density.  I learned about these different types of functional response more than a decade before coming across anything related to resilience theory, which is perhaps not surprising as the first papers published by Holling on the topic came out in the late 1950s (Holling 1959).

The different functional responses reflect different ways in which predator consumption of prey varies  with changes in food density. The functional response is also related to the numerical response – the reproduction rate in relation to food abundance. If this is too technical, bear with me.

Different types of functional response.

As shown above, a type I functional response is linear – meaning that more prey means that more prey are consumed – straightforward and simple. A type II response is non-linear – the number of prey consumed/reproduction increases initially but reaches a plateau at a certain prey density, as the predator ability to consume prey is gradually saturated. A type III response is more complex and S shaped, with a slow increase in prey consumed/reproduction, due to difficulty in discovering  prey, followed by an increase and subsequent leveling off, as predators are saturated (for more background see here).

What has all this got to do with seabirds?

Seabirds are some of the most conspicuous components of the marine environment and are also well studied throughout the world. Many places where seabirds are studied also have monitoring programs for their prey. Seabirds prey on small pelagic, fat schooling fish – some of which are very important in the rapidly growing aquaculture and meat production sectors.

Recently, I was part of a large group of scientists who analyzed long-term data collected of seabird breeding success, for a range of seabird species breeding throughout the world, including puffins, murres, gulls and penguins. Several of these data sets had previously indicated a type I, or possibly a type II response in some instances, but the evidence were inconclusive. However – when putting all the data together, an interesting pattern emerged – the data indicated a clear type II response!What was even more interesting was that this response was consistent across ecosystems and species.  All ecosystems and species investigated had a very similar level of the threshold – regardless of latitude or foraging strategy. Although we assumed that there would be some nonlinear response in all ecosystems and species, we did not think the threshold would be so similar in where it was located (i.e., at one third of the maximum observed fish biomass).

The key figure from our paper is below.

Fig. 2 (A) Relationship between normalized annual breeding success of seabirds and normalized prey abundance. Each data point from all the time series was plotted with the predictions of a generalized additive model (GAM) (solid line). The gray area represents the 95% confidence interval of the fitted GAM. The threshold in the nonlinear relationship (black solid vertical line) and its 95% confidence interval (black dashed vertical lines) were detected from a change-point analysis. (B) Change in variance across the range of normalized food abundance ranging from –1.5 to 2 standard deviations in eight classes. Variance below the threshold was 1.8 times higher than above it. (C and D) Similar relationships were present when data were pooled (C) for species within ecosystems and (D) for species pooled among ecosystems using the best-fitting asymptotic model (table S2). The Arctic Tern (not shown) model fit was not significant (table S1). The colors in (A) and (C) represent the data set for each ecosystem and in (D) for each seabird species.

The findings, just published in Science (Cury et al. 2011), show that seabirds are unable to increase their breeding output over a certain prey abundance. However, if the amount of prey falls below a threshold – which we estimated at one third of the observed maximum prey abundance – breeding success drops dramatically. This non-linear response has potentially important implications for management: If forage fish stocks are maintained above the identified threshold – seabird breeding success is likely sustainable. However, if fish stocks are harvested to below this level for extended periods of time, we are likely to observe decreasing breeding success and decreasing seabird populations. The study suggests that the one-third rule of thumb can be used as a precautionary guiding principle for marine management. So, potentially, we can use some basic principles from ecology to arrive at some basic principles for marine resource use.

The study highlights the importance of curiosity driven research and long term monitoring program. These monitoring programs were not primarily intended to inform management of marine resources but were instead set up by individuals with a keen interest in basic seabird ecology The study also underlines the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration for producing fun and exciting syntheses. Most of all, it highlights how rewarding it is to work with seabirds – coolest critters on the planet.  Seabirds occupy some of the most remote and harsh habitats on the planet and are incredibly resilient – until critical thresholds are passed.

References

Cury, P.M., Boyd, I.L., Bonhommeau, S., Anker-Nilssen, T. Crawford, R. J. M., Furness, R.W., Mills, J.A., Murphy, E.J., Österblom, H., Paleczny, M., Piatt, J.F., Roux, J.-P., Shannon, L., Sydeman, W.J., 2011 Global Seabird Response to Forage Fish Depletion —One-Third for the Birds. Science 334 (6063), December 23. (DOI: 10.1126/science.1212928 )

Holling, C. S. 1959. The components of predation as revealed by a study of small-mammal predation of the European pine sawfly. Canadian Entomologist 91: 293-320

General

Three social science and sustainability positions at ASU

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While Stockholm is looking for one professor in the environmental social sciences, ASU is looking for 3 social scientists working on sustainability.  The job ad is below and applications are due in early January:

The School of Sustainability at Arizona State University invites applications for up to three tenure track faculty positions at the assistant or associate professor level

The School of Sustainability at Arizona State University invites applications for up to three faculty positions either at the tenure-track assistant professor level or tenured associate professor level. The appointment is in an innovative interdisciplinary academic program in sustainability (see http://schoolofsustainability.asu.edu). Applicants must be committed to a research and education program in sustainability and will teach both undergraduate and graduate courses, seek external funding on their own initiative or as part of a team, conduct interdisciplinary sustainability research, publish in sustainability journals in their area of specialization, as well as perform appropriate university, professional, and community service.

The School of Sustainability is the first of its kind: a comprehensive degree-granting program with a transdisciplinary focus on finding real-world solutions to environmental, economic, and social challenges. Established in 2007, the School is part of the Global Institute of Sustainability. Our mission is to bring together multiple disciplines and leaders to create and share knowledge, train a new generation of scholars and practitioners, and develop practical solutions to some of the most pressing environmental, economic, and social challenges of sustainability, especially as they relate to urban areas. The School of Sustainability takes a transdisciplinary approach in its curriculum, addressing a broad spectrum of global challenges, including: energy, materials, and technology; water quality and scarcity; international development; ecosystems; social transformations; food and food systems; and policy and governance.

Successful candidates must have an earned doctorate at the time of appointment in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences, and must demonstrate that sustainability is the core organizing principle in their research, scholarship, and teaching. They must also demonstrate: experience working effectively in interdisciplinary teams; a record of excellence in teaching and other educational activities; a strong record of scholarly achievement and publications appropriate to rank; strong communication skills; and evidence of potential to secure research funding appropriate to rank.

Special emphasis will be placed on candidates who demonstrate rigorous qualitative or quantitative methodological expertise relevant to sustainability scholarship (for example, the analysis of complex adaptive systems, assessment techniques, decision and policy analysis, or participatory [action] research); experience with engaging diverse communities in research practice and problem-solving; research interests at the international level (including collaborative work with partners in developing countries) and innovative approaches to education.

To review and apply to this position, please visit www.academicjobsonline.org and search for the position under the Global Institute of Sustainability. The initial application deadline is January 8, 2012. Applications will continue to be accepted and reviewed weekly thereafter until the search is closed. Applicants must submit a cover letter that addresses the criteria described above, current curriculum vita, statement of teaching philosophy, and the names, phone numbers addresses, and e-mail addresses of three references. Only electronic applications will be accepted. A background check is required for employment. Arizona State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. The School of Sustainability actively encourages diversity among its applicants and workforce.

Visualization

2011 precipitation anomalies in USA

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From US’s National Weather Service – big precipitation anomalies in US this past year.  The purple areas are extra wet, while the red areas are extra dry.

Precipitation anomalies in USA for 2011 in mm

update:

“Normal” precipitation is derived from PRISM climate data, created at Oregon State University. The PRISM gridded climate maps are considered the most detailed, highest-quality spatial climate datasets currently available. The 30 year PRISM normal from 1971-2000 is used for precipitation analysis since 2004. Prior to 2004 the 30 year PRISM normal from 1961-1990 is used.” from http://water.weather.gov/precip/about.php