Category Archives: General

General

Resilience Interviews

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inteviews: Fikret Berkes (left), Ann Kinzing and Will SteffenKaitlyn Rathwell and others from the Stockholm Resilience Centre interviewed twenty international resilience researcher, including Fikret Berkes, Ann Kinzing and Will Steffen, at Resilience 2008 about key social and ecological aspects of resilience. The interviews are now available online at the Resilience Centre’s website – Welcome to the Resilience school.

Susan Owens
Our knowledge of the global environment increases and governing institutions that works with the environment also changes, but do they match?

What is the most important factor for knowledge transfer between science and policy?

Neil Adger
How can we apply social sciences to the resilience concept?

Arild Underdal
What are multilevel governance systems?
Why use multilevel governance systems?

[links updated Feb 17, 2009]

General

Resilience Q&A

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People from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Albaeco interviewed biodiversity, resilience and social-ecological researchers to provide brief answers to a set of Resilience questions. The videos are available on the Centre’s website:

Why is biodiversity important?
Gretchen Daily, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University (USA), answers this topical question.

What is ecological anthropology?
Professor Steve Lansing from the University of Arizona explains the meaning behind ecological anthropology.

What do you think will be the future ‘environmental surprises´?
Will Steffen, professor of the Fenner School of Environment & Society, The Australian National University, answers this question.

What is a regime shift?
Professor Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies explains what is the meaning behind the term ‘Regime shifts’.

What is a complex systems approach?
Professor Steve Lansing from the University of Arizona explains the meaning behind the complex systems approach.

What is the key limiting factor for human development?
Professor Paul Ehrlich from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences, explains the key factors that affect human development.

What is a social-ecological system?
Professor Stephen Carpenter from Zoology Department, University of Winsonsin, explains the meaning behind the term social-ecological system.

General

Absolute poverty in China: Higher, but going down faster than previously estimated

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From the Economist:

In December 2007 the World Bank unveiled the results of the biggest exercise in window shopping in history. Scouts in 146 countries scoured stalls, supermarkets and mail-order catalogues, recording the price of more than 1,000 items, from 500-gram packets of durum spaghetti to low-heeled ladies’ shoes.

This vast enterprise enabled the bank to compare the purchasing power of many countries in 2005. It uncovered some statistical surprises. Prices in China, for example, were much higher than earlier estimates had indicated, which meant the Chinese income in 2005 of 18.4 trillion yuan ($2.2 trillion at then-market exchange rates) could buy less than previously thought. At a stroke, the Chinese economy shrank, in real terms, by 40%.

Since then, many scholars have wondered what this economic demotion means for the bank’s global poverty counts. It famously draws the poverty line at “a dollar a day”, or more precisely $1.08 at 1993 purchasing-power parity (PPP). In other words, a person is poor if they consume less than an American spending $1.08 per day in 1993. By this yardstick 969m people suffered from absolute poverty in 2004, a drop of over 270m since 1990. The world owed this progress largely to China, where poverty fell by almost 250m from 1990 to 2004.

…[using a new poverty line of $1.25/day (2005 US$) Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion ] find that 204m Chinese people were poor in 2005, about 130m more than previously thought.

That is the bad news. The brighter news is that China’s progress against poverty is no less impressive than previously advertised. By Mr Ravallion’s and Ms Chen’s new standard, the number of poor in China fell by almost 407m from 1990 to 2004, compared with the previous estimate of almost 250m.

General

Radio Feature: Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times

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Mark Sommer, host and executive producer of A World of Possibilities, interviewed scientists and researchers from around the world at the Resilience 2008 conference last month in Stockholm, Sweden.

The 55 minute long radio show can be heard online and includes interviews with Buzz Holling, Brian Walker, Carl Folke, Charles Redman, Will Steffan and Frances Westley.

Their combined wisdom provides insight into how societies can become resilient in the face of traumatic change and unprecedented transition.

World of Possibilities is an award-winning, nationally and internationally syndicated radio program, that is part of the Mainstream Media Project. The show’s website includes links to other guest interviews that were recorded at the conference.

General

Using Disasters for Systemic Change

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The adaptive cycle concept propose that crisis is followed by a period of reorganization that looks for new forms of organization.  Often these periods rely of plans developed prior to crisis, and are helped by links to areas unaffected by crisis and legacies of past systems that preserve resources during a crisis, for more see Panarchy on RA website or on WorldChanging (Gunderson and Holling eds 2002).

On WorldChanging Matthew Waxman writes about Using Disasters for Systemic Change:

What if we could plan to use the future’s inevitable disasters as opportunities for change and innovation?The planning policy would focus on finding sustainable solutions to broken or destroyed systems. Disaster in this way is used to jump-start changes in infrastructure and thus alter daily habits, patterns, and preferences on everything from energy consumption to transportation, housing and health, economic development, community and civic facilities, open space, food, and lifestyle.

Changes would be contingent on disasters occurring, so this type of planning policy wouldn’t necessitate immediate results without the destructive context – as would planning codes, LEED guidelines or simply better design practices – but it would produce readily-available plans and design-response focused on long-term, large-scale changes to infrastructural systems beyond the scope of a single, smaller-scale project. In the long-view I believe this would speed up the eventual implementation of large-scale change.

Ecological Management, General, Tools

Wiki launch of the practitioner’s guide to resilience assessment

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resilience assessment logo
Last week at Resilience 2008 in Stockholm, I gave a presentation on the Practitioner’s workbook Assessing and Managing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems. The workbook incorporates key principles underlying resilience thinking and provides a framework for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems and considering options to set the system on a sustainable trajectory. The workbook builds on research by RA members and others and while it offers neither a recipe for effective management nor a panacea for resource problems, it does provide a foundation for integrated resource management that takes into account cross-scale interactions, alternate regimes, change, and uncertainty.

In the spirit of knowledge sharing, and collaboration, a wiki version of the workbook was launched last week. The workbook wiki is aimed at those who have experience applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems and who want to contribute to the on-going development of the resilience assessment guide.

Feedback from those who have used the resilience assessment workbook (first made available last July), identified some of the strengths and weaknesses of the original version as well as a few gaps. The wiki editorial team will begin organizing the development of new content and a bunch of new material that will be linked to the workbook including: thematic versions of the workbook (e.g. urban resilience, coral reef resilience); modules on participatory research, adaptive co-management, assessing ecosystem service tradeoffs, etc.; research methods; translations (Spanish, Russian, Swedish); new examples and case studies.

Discussions among those who have used the workbook highlight the need for many more examples and case studies of completed assessments. People want to know how others are applying the assessment process in different settings, how they are adapting it, what problems have arisen, and how they were dealt with. A large network of people who have completed resilience assessments will be encouraged to contribute their examples and case studies to the wiki. These entries will include authorship and be reviewed by editors.

Ecosystem services, General

Can Payments to Farmers Expand Agricultural Production and the Supply of other Ecosystem Services

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greenhouse gas emissionsAgriculture are argueably is the human activity that has the largest impact on the world, impacting many ecosystem services. However, most farmers have minimal financial incentive to enhance ecosystem services other than crop yield. WRI Earthtrends reviews the evidence that Expanding Agriculture and Protecting Ecosystems: Can Payments to Farmers Accomplish Both?

How can farmers be encouraged to reduce these negative side-effects, while also meeting the growing demand for food and fiber?

Paying Farmers for Ecosystem Services

Farmers constitute the largest group of natural resources managers in the world–agriculture accounts for over 40% of global employment. The concept of paying farmers for the ecosystem services they provide, thereby creating a financial incentive for environmental protection, is an approach generating increasing support worldwide. In fact, the FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture Report 2007 provides an in-depth analysis of this concept, highlighting its great potential as well as existing challenges.

Farmers can generate enhanced environmental services in three main ways:

* Changing methods of production
* Diverting current agricultural land to other uses
* Avoiding future conversion of new land to agriculture

Examples of Payment Systems around the World

The demand for environmental services has been increasing over recent decades, both due to greater awareness of their value and to their increasing scarcity. Consequently, many industrialized countries have already implemented programs providing farmers with payments for environmental services. In the United States, for example, farmers can elect to receive annual rental payments for retiring farmland from crop production for 10 to 15 years, thereby enhancing soil conservation. Similarly, farmers in the United Kingdom can receive compensation payments for adopting less intensive farming practices.

One of the most notable programs in the developing world was established in Costa Rica in 1996. To enhance forest environmental services (i.e. carbon sequestration, watershed protection and biodiversity protection), land and forest owners receive compensation payments for reforestation, sustainable forest management and forest protection. The program is financed via a fossil fuel sales tax and revenues from hydroelectric companies, among other sources. Similarly, China’s “Grain for Green” program pays farmers to plant forests on sloping and degraded lands.

Policy Design Issues and Challenges

Environmental payment schemes have great potential but must overcome several implementation challenges. A successful approach must create a mechanism for measuring and valuing a service, identify how and where to enhance services most cost-effectively, and decide which farmers to compensate and how much to pay them. In some situations, it may make sense to use alternative policy approaches, such as reforms to reduce agricultural market distortions or command-and-control regulations. No matter what strategy is adopted, the FAO emphasizes that poverty implications must be kept in mind. Most of the world’s poor people live in rural areas and are dependent upon agriculture and their natural resource base for survival–any plan to implement payments for environmental services will have both positive and negative impacts for the poor that must be considered.

General

Melissa Leach reports from Resilience 2008

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Melissa Leach, co-author of the well known book Misreading the African Landscape and director of the STEPS centre, provides her perspective on the Resilience 2008 conference, on STEP’s Centre’s Crossings blog.  She writes:

Despite the avowed interdisciplinarity of resilience studies, one such tension is still beteween those who come primarily from an ecological science or a social science perspective. Brian Walker’s introductory talk, and Steve Carpenter’s plenary today, both argued that the tendency for ecologists to ‘black-box’ social processes and social scientists to black-box ecological ones, badly needs to be overcome.But many talks here expose how far this is not happening – yet. Meanwhile, panels that Adrian has been contributing to indicate that technology-focused perspectives and work on socio-technical transitions provide a further view, and integrating this with studies of socio-ecological systems is not straightforward. …

Yesterday afternoon, a panel on development and adaptation involving Emily Boyd and Polly Eriksen from Oxford, along with Emma Tompkins, Henny Osbahr and Hallie Eakin, debated vulnerability-resilience ‘trade-offs’ head-on. The ways in which ‘resilience’ (like ‘development’) can be co-opted as a disempowering discourse were raised. But these more politicised discussions are fairly rare in a conference that for the most part sees systems as ‘out there’ and the problems facing society as shared, even if often difficult to deal with.

In addition to the chance to reflect on these dilemmas and meet up with those sharing them in the coffee breaks around the Aula Magna’s gallery (and last night, over drinks in the designer boutique hotel owened by Abba’s Benny Anderson) high points of these days for me have included a brilliant talk on urban system challenges and social movements; and an excellent panel on globalisation, tipping points and the new social contracts that may be required for governance in this context.

In a packed plenary, Steve Carpenter has just given us a system’s ecologist’s perspective on scenarios and imaginations for global futures. And Eric Lambin is about to fill another hall, I suspect, in a session on land use transitions. Rich stuff indeed. And lots of fuel for our thinking in the STEPS centre, both in our projects and in our own ‘Reframing Resilience’ symposium planned for September this year which will follow up on a number of the debates aired here.