All posts by Garry Peterson

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

Ranking University Sustainability

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A new report provides a College Sustainability Report Card that ranks 100 “leading universities” in North America on their campus environment and how they invest their endowments.

Schools are graded (from “A” to “F”) in seven categories. Four of the categories are on campus operations (administration, green building, food and recycling, and climate change and energy policies) and three endowment related categories (endowment transparency, shareholder engagement, and investment priorities). The report shows that while many universities are improving their operations, most schools do not have clear policies on how they invest their money.

McGill, Univ. of Toronto, and UBC were the only Canadian universites ranked. On campus policies UBC was by far the best (achieving all A’s on the on campus part of its evaluation), and was one of the top universities in North America. In Canada, UT was 2nd (receiving an A in administration and B’s in the other 3 categories. McGill was 3rd (last) with B’s in administration and food and recycling, and C’s in climate & energy and green building.

None of the Canadian universities do well in their endowment policies. However, McGill does better under these criteria (with no failing grades), while UT failed in endowment transparency and UBC failed in both in shareholder engagement and endowment transparency. Combining both these scores, UT and UBC tie, and McGill comes last – with overall grades of B-, B-, and C+.

Compared to all North American schools evaluated, UBC placed at the top, and UT and McGill in the lower middle.

Hopefully future issues of the Macleans Canadian university rankings will include evaluations of all Canadian universitiy sustainability practices and polices.

The full 120-page Report Card can be downloaded as can invidual school report cards.

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Vulnerability

Disaster Data

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The World Resources Institute’s EarthTrends weblog points to some data on trends in natural and manmade disasters.

Although natural and manmade disasters occur in all countries regardless of income or size, not all governments have the resources necessary for prevention and emergency response. For those regions already battling widespread poverty, disease, and malnutrition, disasters are a significant constraint on social and economic development. Understanding the trends that describe disasters through time and space is very important, particularly in light of climate change, which threatens to alter both the distribution and severity of disasters worldwide.

EarthTrends links to an interesting/scary figure on Trends in disaters below from UNEP.

trends in disasters

With growing population and infrastructures the world’s exposure to natural hazards is inevitably increasing. This is particularly true as the strongest population growth is located in coastal areas (with greater exposure to floods, cyclones and tidal waves). To make matters worse any land remaining available for urban growth is generally risk-prone, for instance flood plains or steep slopes subject to landslides. The statistics in the graph opposite reveal an exponential increase in disasters. This raises several questions. Is the increase due to a significant improvement in access to information? What part does population growth and infrastructure development play? Finally, is climate change behind the increasing frequency of natural hazards?


Gaming

BBC Climate change game

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The BBC has created an online flash game – climate challenge – in which the player is president of the “European Nations”. The player has to try to reduce green house gas emissions while maintaining the economy, energy, agriculture and water availability – while being re-elected. The game which also supports the warzone cheats,  is meant to illustrate what options are trade-offs are available to politicians, as well as the need to have policies at different aspects of society. However, some of the game mechanics and feedbacks are unclear (particularly how the economic part of the game works). Nevertheless the game is fun to try.

bbc climate change game

The game makers explain their rationale for making the game. They write:

The producers’ primary goal was to make a fun, challenging game. At times it was necessary to strike a compromise between strict scientific accuracy and playability. For this reason, Climate Challenge should not be taken as a serious climate change prediction.Apart from the primary goal of creating a fun game, Climate Challenge’s producers aimed to:

  • give an understanding of some of the causes of climate change, particularly those related to carbon dioxide emissions.
  • give players an awareness of some of the policy options available to governments.
  • give a sense of the challenges facing international climate change negotiators.

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General

Open Access to Science Under Attack

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A January 26, 2007 Scientific American article Open Access to Science Under Attack:

The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central–a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding–and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the “pit bull” of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature.The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, head of Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm that specializes in “high stakes communications and marketplace defense,” to address some of its members this past summer and potentially craft a media strategy. …

Specifically, according to Dezenhall’s suggestions in a memo, the publishers should “develop simple messages (e.g., Public access equals government censorship; Scientific journals preserve the quality/pedigree of science; government seeking to nationalize science and be a publisher) for use by Coalition members.” In addition, Dezenhall suggests “bypassing mass ‘consumer’ audiences in favor of reaching a more elite group of decision makers,” including journalists and regulators. This tack is necessary, he writes, because: “it’s hard to fight an adversary that manages to be both elusive and in possession of a better message: Free information.” Finally, Dezenhall suggests joining forces with think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and National Consumers League in an attempt to persuade key players of the potential risks of unfiltered access. “Paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles,” he adds.

Of course, open access does not mean no peer review. While the NIH is not in the business of peer review, according to Dr. Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, the entirety of PLoS journals are peer-reviewed. “Open access journals are peer-reviewed to the same standards,” notes Mark Patterson, PLoS’s director of publishing. “We wanted to provide an open access alternative to the best journals to allow the very best work to be made publicly available.”

Visualization

Google Gapminder

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Google is now hosting Gapminder development visualization software that allows the interactive visualization and animation of several world development statistics, showing world development trends over roughly the past thirty years (ranges vary among data sources) . Indicators include: CO2 emissions/capita, Child mortality, Fertility, Economic growth, Income/capita, Life expectancy, Military budget, Girl/Boys in School, Population, and Urbanization.

The site has a great interface that easily allows the data to be visualized as either maps or scatterplots, as change the display. On the scatterplots each point can be represented by a bubble that represents the population of the country or other indicators. This site allows a user to easily explore data showing some of the huge changes – in things such as urbanization, life expectancy and population – that have occurred over past decades.

gapminder

Above is an example showing the relationship between per capita income and urbanization – showing the different trajectories of Nigeria, China and India. Many visualizations are possible. Here is a graph that shows the difference in life expectancy and child mortality between North and South Korea – with shading showing fertility, and another graph showing urban population vs. CO2 emissions per capita).

Gaming, Scenarios

Teaching Using A World Simulation Game

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On the anthropology blog Savage Minds, Kansas State University anthropologist Michael Wesch wrote a series of posts in 2006 on an large introduction to cultural anthropology class he teaches using a semester long world simulation game.

The class sounds really great, and based on his students comments in the comments of his post, really transformative for the students. The active learning, constructivist approach sounds similar to the philosophy to what the McGill School of the Environment is based upon and what I try to do in my courses. I’ve done a number of 1 1/2 hour long environmental management simulations in my Adaptive Management course, but never anything as complex as this project. Doing a similar type of world simulation could be a really interesting activity for one of the School of the Environment’s trans-disciplinary introduction courses.

One of the main advantages of the semester long game is that students are asked to synthesize the course material to produce the rules of the game. What could be interesting to examine is how the game turns out differently with different rules. This could be done by running the game a number of different times – or breaking the class into multiple games – so that people could compare and think about the outcomes of different decisions. But of course, this type of approach isn’t always practical.

Below I have combined extensive extracys from Mike Wesch’s series of posts in a way that describes the simulation and the thinking behind it. His posts have even more details, including his reflections and concerns over various choices he makes, as well as a number of interesting comments from other people and former students.

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Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Scenarios for Ecosystem Services a Special Feature in Ecology and Society

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Steve Carpenter, Elena Bennett and I, edited a Special Feature on Scenarios for Ecosystem Services in Ecology and Society. The special feature is a open-access collection of seven papers that provides an overview of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Scenarios.

MAscenarios

The Scenarios Working Group of the MA was a multi-disciplinary team of 95 ecologists, global modellers, economists, and development researchers from 25 countries. The goal of the scenarios group was to asses the possible futures of ecosystem services to improve ecological policy and management today.

To ensure that these scenarios addressed issues that policymakers face, the MA scenarios team interviewed global leaders from civil society, business and government on what they regarded as critical determinants of the world’s future. These people identified factors including: the role of governments in local, national, and global governance; security; the ability to cope with surprise; learning; and technology. However, while leaders identified similar issues as problems and expressed similar goals, they had substantial disagreement on how to address problems and meet goals.

The scenarios were designed to anticipate what ecological problems and opportunities different policies could create. Consequently, the MA scenarios were designed to incorporate more realistic and detailed ecological dynamics than previous global scenario exercises. Although people modify ecosystems, there are also significant feedbacks from ecosystem change to livelihoods, health, economies, and societies that lead to changes in human systems, engendering further ecosystem change. The ability of societies to manage social–ecological feedbacks is an important aspect of their ability to enhance human well-being. Therefore, the MA scenarios included social–ecological feedbacks, however we have only preliminary scientific understanding of the possible behaviour, extent and consequences of these feedbacks.

The Special Feature begins with an overview paper Carpenter et al (2006) Scenarios for Ecosystem Services: An Overview that explains some of the problems of addressing social-ecological feedbacks and ecosystem services as well as cross-cutting findings that emerged from the scenarios project.

The MA scenarios are described in Cork et al. (2006) Synthesis of the Storylines. This paper also includes a set of illustrations that tries to capture some of the differences among the scenarios for urban and rural locations in the rich and poor regions of the world.

There are no integrated global social-ecological models, therefore the MA analysis cross-checked quantitative and qualitative approaches that were tested against one another. These quantitative and qualitative analyses of the scenarios are found in the remaining five papers, of which the first three are quantitative and final two qualitative.

Nelson et al. (2006) Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecosystem Change: an Overview

Alcamo et al. (2006) Changes in Nature’s Balance Sheet: Model-based Estimates of Future Worldwide Ecosystem Services

van Vuuren et al. (2006) The Future of Vascular Plant Diversity Under Four Global Scenarios.

Rodriguez et al. (2006) Trade-offs across Space, Time, and Ecosystem Services address ecosystem service tradeoffs

Butler and Oluoch-Kosura (2006) Linking Future Ecosystem Services and Future Human Well-being

Big Back Loop, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

Great Transition Papers

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gsg global trajectoriesGlobal Scenario Group developed a pioneering set of global environmental scenarios, which presented six global scenarios. There were three main scenario types, which each had two variants, producing: Conventional Worlds (Policy Reform and Market Forces), Barbarization (Fortress world and Breakdown), and Great Transitions (Eco-communalism and New sustainability paradigm).

These scenarios have some similarities to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) Scenarios. The GSG scenarios – Policy Reform, Fortress World, and Eco-communalism – are similar, but less ecologically oriented than the MA scenarios – Global Orchestration, Order from Strength, and Adaptive Mosaic. The fourth MA scenario TechnoGarden – market oriented ecological efficiency – does not correspond any of the GSG scenarios.

The Great Transition Initiative continues the GSG project by promoting a global transition to a sustainable society via a fundamental enhancement of global democracy and citizenship. It has prepared a set of papers Frontiers of a Great Transition that explore the challenges, opportunities, and strategies that a transition to sustainability requires. The paper are available as freely downloadable PDF files on the Great Transition Initiative website.

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General, Scenarios

William Cronon on Climate Change narratives

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On Direction not Destination, James Millington describes a 2006 William Cronon talk about narratives of climate change:

I made a point of going to see Bill Cronon at the Thursday morning plenary “Narrative of climate change” at the RGS conference. He suggested that narratives of climate change have been used as both prediction AND (secular) prophecy. This idea of a secular prophecy comes from recent intonations of Nature as a secular proxy for God. Prophecies are often told as stories of retribution that will be incurred if God’s laws were broken. If Nature is a proxy for God then Climate Change is portrayed as a retribution for humans breaking the laws of Nature.Cronon suggests that Global Narratives are abstract, virtual, systemic, remote, vast, have a diffuse sense of agency, posses no individual characters (i.e. no heros/villains), and are repetitive (so boring). These characteristics make it difficult to emphasise and justify calls for human action to mitigate against the anthropic influence on the climate. Cronon suggests these types of prophetic narrative are ‘unsustainable’ because they do not offer the possibility of individual or group action to reverse or address global climate problems, and therefore are no use politically or socially.

Coronon went on to discuss the micro-cosms (micro narratives) Elizabeth Kolbert uses in her book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” to illustrate the impacts of global change in a localised manner. She uses individual stories that are picked because they are not expected, they are non-abstract and the antithesis of the unsustainable global narratives. He concluded that we need narratives that offer hope, and not those tied to social and political models based on anarchic thought that do not address the systemic issues driving the change itself. This is the political challenge he suggests – to create narratives that not only make us think “I contributed to this” when we see evidence of glacier retreat, but that offer us hope of finding ways to reduce our future impact upon the environment.