All posts by Garry Peterson

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

Big Back Loop, Ecological Management, Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports Released

January 20, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

ma scenarios cover The four main reports of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment were released yesterday (Jan 19, 2006). The reports are the detailed scientific assessment (including literature citations) on which the MA synthesis reports are based. These large reports (500-800 page) are the products of the four MA working groups:

Current State and Trends
Scenarios
Policy Responses
Multi-Scale Assessments.

These reports are published by Island Press or chapters can be downloaded from the MA web site.
The press coverage of the release of the technical reports has been more balanced than the press coverage of the synthesis volumes. The Christian Science Monitor reports, quoting Steve Carpenter (his post on the scenarios):

When researchers scan the global horizon, overfishing, loss of species habitat, nutrient run-off, climate change, and invasive species look to be the biggest threats to the ability of land, oceans, and water to support human well-being.

Yet “there is significant reason for hope. We have the tools we need” to chart a course that safeguards the planet’s ecological foundation, says Stephen Carpenter, a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “We don’t have to accept the doom-and-gloom trends.”

That’s the general take-home message in an assessment of the state of the globe’s ecosystems and the impact Earth’s ecological condition has on humans.

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Ecological Management, Ideas, Tools

Adaptive environmental assessment and management course readings

January 18, 2006 Garry Peterson 2 Comments

During the winter semester at McGill I teach Adaptive Environmental Management (GEOG 380) to upper level undergraduates from a mixed science/arts background. This is the second year that I have taught this course at McGill. In the course I try to bridge the more technical approaches to adaptive environmental assessment and management described by Buzz Holling et al (1978) and Carl Walters (1986) with more recent efforts by Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke that better integrate social dimensions, such as trust building, bridging knowledge systems, and instititutional fit.

I define four pillar of adaptive management, based upon Berkes, Colding and Folke (2003): building resilience, bridging knowledge systems for learning, practice of experimental management, and navigating context.

Below are the papers and book chapters that I am planning to use in my course this semester.

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Big Back Loop, Ideas, Scenarios

Terrorism, State Failure, and Reorganization

January 17, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Science fiction writer, journalist, and green design professor, Bruce Sterling writes about the shadow of globalization and Global Guerrillas John Robb’s weblog about – “Networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.” His analysis is fairly similar to what the MA scenarios group thought about state breakdown. Sterling writes on a 2005/2006 state of the world web discussion:

There’s a lot of meritorious analysis going on [Global Guerrillas], and it’s very counterintuitive by 20th century standards, and that’s a good thing, because this isn’t the 20th century. It’s not about state-on-state violence any more; it’s about the emergent global order versus failed states. The victory condition for global guerrillas is a failed state. And there are lots of global guerrillas and huge scary patches of failed and failing state right nows. And the Disorder and the Order physically interpenetrate; globalization melts the map; there are physical patches of state-failure even inside the most advanced states.

However, there is a nascent order inside the failure, too. People who live in conditions of failure can see what justice, law, and order look like. They see that on those satellite dishes, they get news about that every day from the many, many people who flee the Disorder and become new global diasporas.

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Ecological Economics, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Asia’s coastal restoration

January 14, 2006 Garry Peterson 2 Comments

SciDev.net has on article –The right way to rebuild Asia’s coastal barrier – on plans by tsunami impacted countries to restore coastal ecosystems. It discusses how plans need to consider the economic values of the ecosystem services produced by mangroves as well as the need to design ecologically appropriate mangrove governance strategies.

Now, governments in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Thailand all want to restore what nature once provided for free: they plan to spend millions of dollars replanting thousands of hectares of mangrove forest.

Scientists applaud the ‘greening’ agenda but warn that to succeed, replanting strategies must include workforce training and supervision, maintenance of seedlings, and increased public awareness about coastal land use. Some economists add that we need a better understanding of the relationship between these endangered ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.

“Reforestation is unlikely to succeed in the long term because the underlying policies haven’t changed,” says Edward Barbier, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming, United States, who has done extensive research on Thailand’s mangroves. Barbier is not surprised that Thailand suffered such extreme damage; since 1961, more than half its mangroves have been removed.

Replanting is critical to restoring ecosystems, he says, but trees alone cannot create the long-term stability needed for sustainable economic growth.

Mangroves tend to be undervalued in economic calculations, which only include the benefits of developing them (such as woodchips or farmed shrimp). This makes it easy for governments to gamble on ‘developing’ the forests. The tsunami clearly raised the stakes — and strengthened the case for protection that ecologists and economists have been making for years.

Previous posts on the tsunami and coastal resilience are: Coral Reefs & Tsunami, Building resilience to deal with disasters, and After the Tsunami.

Visualization

Has the world become a better place?

January 12, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Gapminder, which I mentioned in March 2005, has a nice visualization that shows changes in family size and child mortality between 1960 and 2003 to address the question – has the world become a better place?

The visualization shows huge changes in child mortality and family size, with some countries in Africa lagging behind. This convergence in well-being is much stronger – as mentioned in this earlier post.
The site also has a new visualization of data from UNDP’s 2005 Human Development report.

Big Back Loop, Design, General, Ideas, Reorganization

Stewart Brand on How Cities Learn

January 11, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

On WorldChanging Chris Coldeway discusses a recent talk by Stewart Brand on how cities learn. In 1994, he wrote the excellent book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built:

The redoubtable Stewart Brand gave a talk at GBN last night on global urbanization, expanding the “City Planet” material he first outlined at a Long Now talk and [WorldChanging] covered in detail. As we stand in 2006 at a point where the world’s population tips from mostly rural to mostly urban, Stewart considers this a good time to ruminate on the nature of cities and the causes and implications of a rapidly urbanizing world.

In typical Brand form, the talk swept from the beginnings of civilization — with a view of one of the oldest continuously occupied areas and discussion of how Jerusalem has been sacked or taken over 36 times — to the future of the world, with a look at the largest megacities of 2015. While the largest cities one hundred years ago were primarily in the US and Europe, these 21st century megacities are profoundly global. With cities such as Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Karachi dominating the list, Stewart noted the similarity to another era of international cities — 1000 AD.

In asking himself how cities “learn” over time in the way that buildings do, Stewart found that while cities do learn, they also teach: they teach civilization how to be civilized. He discussed Levittown as a counterintuitive example, with its lenient do-it-yourself home customization policies actually facilitating the development of community. Squatter cities in the developing world were another example, with the view that squatter cities are what a population getting out of poverty ASAP looks like: self-constructed, and self-organizing, and vibrant.

Stewart sees cities playing out the same patterns of “pace layering” that he sees in civilization overall. Nature changes the slowest, with culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce, and fashion as progressively faster changing “layers.” Cities specialize in acceleration, in the faster cycles of commerce and fashion, but must balance those with the slower layers at the risk of collapse.

I previously mentioned Stewart Brand on cities in Feb and Sept 2005.

Ecological Management, General

Alternative Strategies of Ecosystem Managmenet and Institutional Interplay

January 10, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Henry Regier explaining conflict over management of the Great Lakes, when he recieved a life time achievement award for important and continued contributions to the field of Great Lakes research. (From Post-normal Times):

Two strategies have been used within our Great Lakes Basin’s governance institutions in recent decades to cope with adverse interrelationships between humans and the rest of nature. Important features of each strategy can be traced back to different emphases within Darwinism a century ago. T. H. Huxley emphasized the role of agonistic or combative interactions within natural selection while P. Kropotkin emphasized mutualistic or cooperative interactions. Capitalists invoked Huxley’s Mutual Harm version for legitimation of their practices while communitarians invoked Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid version. Implicitly the more legalistic regulatory strategies that now dominate within governance in our Basin presuppose Mutual Harm dynamics and seek to temper such harm through pre-cast technocratic capabilities. Participatory democratic programs, now sub-dominant, seek to foster Mutual Aid dynamics less formally. Old Rational Management tries to Temper Mutual Harm Technocratically, TMHT. Drama-of-the-Commons Governance tries to Foster Mutual Aid Democratically, FMAD. Currently, the higher the level of governance in which action on some environmental issue is centred, the more likely that TMHT will dominate, and vice versa. This asymmetry creates problems in hybrid cross-level Adaptive Co-Management and vertical inter-agency partnerships.

Ecological Management, General, New Orleans, Vulnerability

New Orleans and the ecology of the Mississippi River

January 9, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Richard Sparks writes about the ecological/geological context in which New Orleans exists, how people have changed them, and what rebuilders should consider. His article is Rethinking, Then Rebuilding New Orleans, in the Winter 2006 Issues in Science and Technology.

His article focusses on the natural forces that have shaped the Mississippi and how humans have shaped those forces. One of the most interesting points he raises is how land cover change, and river management have radically changed the sediment load of the Mississippi, shifting the balance between land building and subsidence in the delta. In other words flood protection higher in the river has made lower portions of the river more vulnerable to flooding.

Figure: The sediment loads carried by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico have decreased by half since 1700, so less sediment is available to build up the Delta and counteract subsidence and sea level rise. The greatest decrease occurred after 1950, when large reservoirs constructed trapped most of the sediment entering them. Part of the water and sediment from the Mississippi River below Vicksburg is now diverted through the Corps of Engineers’ Old River Outflow Channel and the Atchafalaya River. Without the controlling works, the Mississippi would have shifted most of its water and sediment from its present course to the Atchafalaya, as part of the natural delta switching process. The widths of the rivers in the diagram are proportional to the estimated (1700) or measured (1980–1990) suspended sediment loads (in millions of metric tons per year).

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General

When are economics models of human behaviour reasonable?

January 8, 2006 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Colin Camerer and Ernst Fehr have a great review paper in When Does ‘Economic Man’ Dominate Social Behavior? (Science 6 January 2006: 47-52), of how social context interacts within individual difference. The article begins by laying out the ‘rational actor’ assumption that has underpins most economic theory, along with the recent challenges to this view. Populations seem to farily consistently contain self-regarding and cooperative individuals individuals. Self-regarding individuals approximate ‘Economic Man’, while cooperative actors reward cooperation and are willing to bear a cost for punishing unfair behaviour.

The rationality assumption consists of two components: first, individuals are assumed to form, on average, correct beliefs about events in their environment and about other people’s behavior; second, given their beliefs, individuals choose those actions that best satisfy their preferences. If individuals exhibit, however, systematically biased beliefs about external events or other people’s behavior or if they systematically deviate from the action that best satisfies their preferences, we speak of bounded rationality. Preferences are considered to be self-regarding if an individual does not care per se for the outcomes and behaviors of other individuals. Self-regarding preferences may, therefore, be considered to be amoral preferences because a self-regarding person neither likes nor dislikes others’ outcomes or behaviors as long as they do not affect his or her economic well-being. In contrast, people with other-regarding preferences value per se the outcomes or behaviors of other persons either positively or negatively. A large body of evidence accumulated over the last three decades shows that many people violate the rationality and preference assumptions that are routinely made in economics. Among other things, people frequently do not form rational beliefs, objectively irrelevant contextual details affect their behavior in systematic ways, they prefer to be treated fairly and resist unfair outcomes, and they do not always choose what seems to be in their best interest.

The interesting part of this review is how the behaviour of ‘cooperative’ and ‘economic’ actors changes based upon the context in which they interact and their perceptions about the composition of population an individual is interacting with. The presence of cooperators can causes ‘economic’ actors to behave cooperatatively, and the presence of ‘economic’ actors can cause cooperative actors to behave in a more self-regarding fashion.

To show how the interactions between strong reciprocators and self-regarding individuals shape bargaining behavior, we consider the ultimatum game, in which a buyer offers a price p to a seller, who can sell an indivisible good. For simplicity, assume that the buyer values the good at 100 and the seller values it at 0. The buyer can make exactly one offer to the seller, which the latter can accept or reject. Trade takes place only if the seller accepts the offer. If the seller is self-regarding, she accepts even a price of 1 because 1 is better than nothing. Thus, a self-regarding buyer will offer p=1 so that the seller earns almost nothing from the trade. Strong reciprocators reject such unfair offers, however, preferring no trade to trading at an unfair price. In fact, a large share of experimental subjects reject low offers in this game, across a wide variety of different cultures, even when facing high monetary stakes. This fact induces many self-regarding buyers to make relatively fair offers that strong reciprocators will accept. Often the average offers are around p=40, and between 50% and 70% of the buyers propose offers between p=40 and p=50. The behavior of both buyers and sellers changes dramatically, however, if we introduce just a little bit of competition on the seller’s side. Assume, for example, that instead of one there are two sellers who both want to sell their good. Again the buyer can make only one offer which, if accepted by one of the sellers, leads to trade. If both sellers reject, no trade takes place; if both sellers accept, one seller is randomly chosen to sell the good at the offered price. Almost all buyers make much lower offers in this situation, and almost all sellers accept much lower offers. In fact, if one introduces five competing sellers into this game, prices and rejection rates converge to very low levels such that the trading seller earns only slightly more than 10% of the available gains from trade.