Category Archives: General

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Great Green Wall to halt Sahara’s spread?

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National Geographic has a recent article on a bold plan to stop the advancement of the Sahara desert.

China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a “Great Green Wall” may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand. The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said earlier this month at the UN’s Copenhagen climate conference. The trees are meant “to stop the advancement of the desert,” Senegalese president and project leader Abdoulaye Wade told National Geographic News in Copenhagen. In many central and West African countries surrounding the Sahara, climate change has slowed rainfall to a trickle, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Crops have died and soils have eroded—crippling local agriculture. If the trend continues, the UN forecasts that two-thirds of Africa’s farmland may be swallowed by Saharan sands by 2025 (explore an interactive Sahara map). Trees are almost always formidable foes against encroaching deserts, said Patrick Gonzalez of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Forestry. That’s because stands of trees act as natural windbreaks against sandstorms, and their roots improve soil health—especially by preventing erosion.

Having just finished reading Alan Weisman’s 2006 The World Without Us, I am reminded of Chapter 13 where he imagines ‘the world without war’ and writes of another type of ‘great wall’. In this chapter he describes what has happened within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between South Korea and North Korea which has been ‘a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953’. It is now, somewhat ironically, critical habitat for many species including red-crowned cranes. He writes,

As the Korean naturalists watch, cameras and spotting scopes poised, over the bulrushes glides a dazzling white squadron, 11 fliers in perfect formation. And in perfect silence. These are living Korean national icons: red crowned cranes – the largest, and, next to whooping cranes, rarest on Earth. They’re accompanied by four smaller white-naped cranes, also endangered. Just in from China and Siberia, the DMZ is where most of them winter. If it didn’t exist, they probably wouldn’t either.

They touch down lightly, disturbing no buried hair-triggers. Revered in Asia as sacred portents of luck and peace, the red-crowned cranes are blissfully oblivious trespassers who’ve wandered into the incandescent tension of 2 million troops faced off across this accidental wildlife sanctuary in bunkers every few dozen metres, mortars poised.

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Transition Towns – resilience indicators & upcoming conferences

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Rob Hopkins, Founder of the Transition movement, published ‘The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience’ in 2008. Here is an extract from the book under the headline ‘What are resilience indicators’,

Carbon footprinting and the cutting of carbon emissions are clearly a crucial part of preparing for an energy-lean future, but they are not the only way of measuring a community’s progress towards becoming more resilient. In the Transition approach, we see cutting carbon as one of many ‘Resilience Indicators’ that are able to show the increasing degree of resilience in the settlement in question. Others might include:

– the percentage of local trade carried out in local currency

– percentage of food consumed locally that was produced within a given radius

– ratio of car parking space to productive land use

– degree of engagement in practical Transition work by local community

– amount of traffic on local roads

– number of business owned by local people

– proportion of the community employed locally

– percentage of essential goods manufactured within a given radius

– percentage of local building materials used in new housing developments

– percentage of energy consumed in the town that has been generated by local ESCO

– amount of 16 year olds able to grow 10 different varieties of vegetable to a given degree of basic competency

– percentage of medicines prescribed locally that have been produced within a given radius

Interestingly, the book goes on to say that,

This is a new area the Transition Network is currently exploring. Your thoughts on what form other Resilience Indicators might take are very welcome. The core point is that we need more than carbon footprinting, that we could cut settlements’ emissions by half, but they would still be equally vulnerable to peak oil.

There are two upcoming Transition-related conferences in May 2010:

The 2010 Transition Network conference will be held in Forest Row in Sussex on the 29th, 30th and 31st May

The European Transition Conference from Wednesday 19th May 19 to Monday, 24th May 2010 in northern Germany

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Three links: green revolution, scientific commons, and transition towns

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1) Jeremy Cherfas writes on the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog about the history of the green revolution:

The standard litany against the Green Revolution is that it failed to banish hunger because the technologies it ushered in were no use to small peasant farmers. Farmers with access to cash and good land did well, but poorer farmers on marginal land got nothing out of the revolution, and if they did somehow buy into it (subsidies, handouts) they were worse off afterwards. That’s not to deny that the Green Revolution increased yields, especially of wheat and rice. Just to say that it did nothing for most smallholders.A wonderful paper by Jonathan Harwood, in Agricultural History, demonstrates that this wasn’t always so. In the early days of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, starting in the 1940s, the target was “resource-poor farmers who could not afford to purchase new seed annually”. The MAP’s advisors put improving cultivation practices at the top of their list, with better varieties second. And the improved varieties were to come from “introduction, selection or breeding”.

2) Ethan Zuckerman writes about John Wilbanks on Science Commons, and generativity in science:

One way to think of the mission of Science Commons, Wilbanks tells us, is to spark generative effects in the scientific world much as we’ve seen them in the online world. He quotes Jonathan Zittrain’s definition of generativity, from “The Future of the Internet… and How to Stop It“: “Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences”. This raises some provocative questions, when applied to the world of science: “What does spam look like in a patent system? What does griefing look like in the world of biological data?”

The truth is that the scientific world is far less generative than the digital space. He proposes three major obstacles to generativity: accessibility, ease of mastery, and tranferability. He points out that, as science has gotten more high tech, it’s far harder to master. The result is hyperspecialization: neuroanatomists don’t talk to neuroinformaticists… “and god help you if you cross species lines.” And so universities are making huge investments to try to encourage collaboration: MIT’s just build a $400 million building – the Cook Center – to force collaboration between cancer researchers… and predictably, researchers are fighting the mandate to move in and work together.

3) Judith D. Schwartz writes about the Transition Town movement in Learning About Transition Via Its Vocabulary in Miller-McCune Online Magazine.

Transition: In Hopkins’ words, “Transition” represents “the process of moving from a state of high fossil-fuel dependency and high vulnerability to a state of low fossil-fuel dependency and resilience.” Transition “is not the goal itself — it’s the journey,” he says. Specifically, it’s seeing this journey as an opportunity to embrace rather than a calamity to approach with dread.

“Transition” is predicated on the assumption that society cannot keep consuming energy and other resources at our current pace and that we’re better off accepting this reality and choosing how to adapt rather than letting ourselves get backed into a crisis. The idea is that the adaptation process can harness creative and even joyful possibilities that until now have laid dormant in our towns and cities. As Hopkins has been known to say, “It’s more like a party than a protest march.”

Resilience: A community’s ability to adapt and respond to changes, as well as to withstand shocks to the system, such as disruptions in food or energy supply chains. Resilience differs from “sustainability” in that the emphasis is on community survival as opposed to maintaining the structures and behavioral patterns that currently exist.

“Resilience is the new sustainability,” says Michael Brownlee, a member of the Transition U.S. board and co-founder of Transition Boulder County, the first Transition Initiative in North America. “It’s been co-opted by almost everybody. Everybody is sustainable these days.”

Marketing aside, Hopkins says the two are intertwined: “Sustainability only works if it has resilience embedded in it.”

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Building Resilience in Ontario – more than metaphor or arcane concept

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A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario’s latest annual report entitled “Building Resilience”. This was a pleasant surprise. Off the top, the Commissioner’s report credits Buzz Holling and the ecological origins of resilience and offers the example of forest fire regimes in Northern Ontario and the systems’ inherent capacity for renewal. Further on the report applies resilience thinking to specific issues including biodiversity conservation and implications of a new MNR (Ministry of Natural Resources) biofibre policy to burn forestry “wastes” for fuel:

“Transforming waste to energy and revenue certainly is attractive from a short-term efficiency standpoint. But there are long-term cycles in play too. An appreciation of resilience dynamics would encourage managers to think hard about the long-term ecosystem functions of these “wastes,” including their role as reserve capital, held in store for the next generation. If nutrient-rich branches, needles and leaves are increasingly harvested rather than left on the forest floor to decompose, what will be the consequences for nutrient cycling? What increased stresses may this place on forest soil fertility, on communities of soil micro-organisms and on future forests?”

Inadvertently, the report also amused with its initial introduction of resilience as an “arcane concept that has lurked in the dank halls of ecological academia for almost four decades”. I’d prefer to think of it as a concept that has been simmering. At any rate, resilience thinking appears to be finding a place in Ontario.

The spring issue of Alternatives journal, Canada’s national environmental magazine, echoes the title “Building Resilience” and offers both a “Hardcore Guide to Resilience” and an interview with Buzz Holling. In addition a piece by Andrew McMurry on “The Rhetoric of Resilience” offers some insight from a linguistic perspective on why perhaps the term itself might be resonating so strongly at this particular point in time:

“Resilience answers nicely to the real and rhetorical exigence. To be sure, resilience is in one sense merely the capacity of systems to absorb stress and maintain or even repair themselves. But resilience is also metaphor that embodies a number of characteristics that Aristotle required of all good figures of speech: it is active, primordial, concise and appropriate.

Resilience implies action, as in “building resilience”. To be resilient suggests an inner toughness: the strength, as its etymology tells us, to “jump back” to a previous state. Sustainability, by contrast, suggests a defensive posture: a desire to stay the same, to resist change, without the attractive ability to push back against change and win out. Resilience also connotes a measure of risk, while sustainability suggests that systems are set: they simply need to be cared for and so carried forward. Resilience acknowledges that risk is a constant, and that systems are always in a struggle against dissipation. If the seas are always calm and the weather mild, you don’t need to be resilient. But in this world, you must be resilient to survive.”

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Naomi Oreskes on Merchants of Doubt

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Historian of science Naomi Oreskes recently gave a talk at Brown University, based on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, about how right wing scientists founded the George Marshall Institute which has become a key hub for successfully spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about climate change, along with other environmental issues, and how myths about science enable these political strategies to work.  Below is a video of her talk.

Below is a related 2007 talk of her’s from the University of California The American Denial of Global Warming, that provides more details on environmental denial.

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African Poverty is Falling

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A new NBER working paper African Poverty is Falling…Much Faster than You Think! from economists Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy argues that African poverty has been rapidly falling across Africa since 1995.  They use methods they use to look at global income distributions to show that recent economic growth has reduced rather than enhanced Africa’s huge levels of inequality.

Figure 5 from "African Poverty is Falling...Much Faster than You Think" NBER 2010

General, Networks

Sociologist studying climate change policy

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The failure at COP15 in Copenhagen in December highlights that the greatest challenge to climate change lies in politics and policy processes. This calls for social scientific studies that can study such multi-level and cross-national policy processes.

I have reported before on this blog about a bunch of sociologist in the COMPON study, which is a good example of how social science can engage in bringing understanding on cross-scale linkages. The study was recently commented upon in Nature.

COMPON (Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks) is coordinated by the tireless Jeffrey Broadbent from University of Minnesota, that together with researchers in 15 countries is pulling of this big reserach effort. Among these we have centre reseracher Christofer Edling and Stockholm University sociologist Marcus Carson.

Manifestation at COP15

In an interview with Stockholm University Marcus Carson says that by pairing social network analysis with interviews and document analysis, the COMPON project aims to:

… gather data from organizations such as environmental NGOs, conservative think tanks, human-rights groups, political organizations and so on and get a better understanding of what shapes and motivates their actions.

[These actors, and humans in general] use conceptual models to make sense of the information, but these models include not only what is happening and how, but what kinds of actions should be taken and who to trust for information. Sociological research helps us clarify how these models are constructed and how they are promoted among different groups in society. A better understanding of these factors improves our chances of developing policies that support long-term sustainability.

On their homepage, COMPON writes (and see their blog):

The project […] studying the factors that account for cross-national variation in efforts to mitigate climate change. This variation arises from difference in the interaction process between ways of thinking (discourse) and ways of acting (coalitions) in national cases. The COMPON project currently has teams in over 15 societies (developed, developing, and transitional) and at the international level collecting equivalent empirical data on these processes using content analysis, interview, and inter-organizational network survey.

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Journal rankings of environmental studies and science

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The impact of journals over the short and the long term is often quite different.  ScienceWatch.com presents journal impact factors based on the longer term impact of journals in environmental science and environmental studies.

Below are rankings in environmental science for between 1998 and 2007, which only include journals cited over 10,000 times between 1998-2007.

Rank Journal Papers Citations Citations/
Paper
1 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution & Systematics 131 15,293 116.74
2 Nature 395 41,042 103.9
3 Science 397 34,568 87.07
4 Trends in Ecology and Evolution 727 39,356 54.13
5 Ecological Monographs 309 11,310 36.6
6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 491 17,088 34.8
7 Systematic Biology 416 12,194 29.31
8 Ecology 3,161 80,313 25.41
9 Ecology Letters 1,133 26,327 23.24
10 The American Naturalist 1,618 36,694 22.68
11 Conservation Biology 1,729 36,209 20.94
12 Environmental Health Perspectives 3,374 70,023 20.75
13 Molecular Ecology 3,345 69,275 20.71
14 Ecological Applications 1,711 34,899 20.4
15 Journal of Ecology 1,081 20,969 19.4
16 Global Change Biology 1,508 27,995 18.56
17 Journal of Applied Ecology 1,162 21,032 18.1
18 Oecologia 3,219 56,010 17.4
19 Ecosystems 705 12,199 17.3
20 Environmental Science & Technology 10,006 171,816 17.17

note: The data for the multidisciplinary journals listed – Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA – take into account only those articles that have been classified by Thomson Reuters as ecology and environmental sciences papers.

And, using a slightly different system, journal rankings in Environmental Studies.  Note the contrast in short and longer term rankings.  It is unclear whether these are due to changes in the journal over time, or speed of citation.

Rank 2007 Impact Factor Impact 2003-07 Impact 1981-2007
1 Ann. Rev. Envir. Res.
(4.04)		 Ann. Rev. Envir. Res.
(7.60)		 J. Envir. Econ./Mgmt.
(14.66)
2 Global Envir. Change
(3.92)		 Global Envir. Change
(4.74)		 Environ. & Planning-D
(13.13)
3 Energy Policy
(1.90)		 J. Envir. Econ./Mgmt.
(3.80)		 Environment & Behavior
(11.25)
4 Environ. & Planning-D
(1.81)		 J. Envir. Psychology
(3.49)		 Land Economics
(10.37)
5 Regional Studies
(1.80)		 Int. Region. Sci. Rev.
(3.41)		 J. Leisure Research
(10.20)
6 Harvard Env. Law Rev.
(1.78)		 Landscape Urban Plan.
(3.13)		 J. Envir. Psychology
(9.72)
7 Environ. & Planning-A
(1.73)		 Environ. & Planning-A
(3.01)		 Global Envir. Change
(8.54)
8 Int. Region. Sci. Rev.
(1.72)		 Res. & Energy Economics
(2.80)		 Regional Studies
(8.06)
9 Landscape Urban Plan.
(1.63)		 Land Economics
(2.80)		 J. Regional Science
(7.94)
10 Energy Journal
(1.58)		 Environ. & Planning-D
(2.72)		 Environ. & Planning-A
(7.88)