Category Archives: Ideas

Ideas, Reorganization

Peñalosa @ World Urban Forum

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In Vancouver’s Tyee.ca, Charles Montgomery reports from the World Urban Forum on The Mayor Who Wowed the World Urban Forum – Enrique Peñalosa, fomer mayor of Bogota, Columbia who helped transform Bogota from a city famous for murder and cocaine, to a city famous for its bike paths and bus system.

Enrique Peñalosa presided over the transition of a city that the world–and many residents–had given up on. Bogota had lost itself in slums, chaos, violence, and traffic. During his three-year term, Penalosa brought in initiatives that would seem impossible in most cities, even here in the wealthy north. He built more than a hundred nurseries for children. He built 50 new public schools and increased enrolment by 34 percent. He built a network of libraries. He created a highly-efficient, “bus highway” transit system. He built or reconstructed hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, more than 300 kilometres of bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, and more than 1,200 parks.

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General, Networks, Visualization, Vulnerability

Resilience networks in global environmental change science

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In a new paper, Scholarly networks on resilience, vulnerability and adaptation within the human dimensions of global environmental change, Marco Janssen and others have analyzed the networks of co-authorships and citation among research on resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation in human dimensions of global change research. They analyzed co-authorship and citations among 2286 publications between 1967 and 2005 (3860 unique authors and 10,286 co-authors).

Janssen et al identified the most central scholars, publications, and journals in the knowledge domains of resilience, vulnerability and adaptation.

network of coauthorship

Figure 2 Co-author network of most productive and best connected authors with the strongest co-authorship relations. Circles denote author nodes and are labeled by the authors’ last name and first initials. The larger the node, the more publications. The darker the node, the more the co-authors. Black nodes refer to 50 or more co-authors, while white nodes refer to less than 10 co-authors. Edges represent co-authorship relations. The width of an edge represents the relative number of co-author relationships (Janssen et al 2006).

Janssen et al found that the number of publications in all domains increased rapidly between 1995 and 2005, while co-authorship increased from 1.5 authors to 2.5 authors per paper between the 1970s and early 2000s. Despite this increase in number of publications and co-authorship, the resilience knowledge domain is only weakly connected with the other two domains. However, overall there is an increasing number of cross citations and papers contributing to multiple knowledge domains.

The complete database of papers can be analyzed online, on Marco Janssen’s website. However, because this is the Resilience Science weblog, I’ve an image showing the citation network among the most cited papers on resilience (in human dimensions of global change) is shown below. Size corresponds to the number of citations.

Citations within resilience domain
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Ideas, Reorganization

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – universities as catalysts of innovation

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Michael M’Gonigle is co-author of Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University, has an article in the Toronto Star How universities can help Canada’s troubled cities.  He writes that universities can help cities solve their problems and help build sustainable liveable cities:

The idea of many such cities and regions co-operating directly, as well as globally, is intriguing. To help it happen, I have a strategy, too, one that involves an unlikely ally —one with massive and diverse expertise, potentially boundless youthful energy, a large land base, and lots of power, prestige and wealth

I’m referring, of course, to the university. The “higher education industry” is arguably the most important industry in the world. A recent study of the American industry (with 6,500 accredited colleges and universities) put its economic impact at $1.2 trillion per year. At any time, 20 million Americans either work for, or attend, an “institution of higher education.”

Of Canada’s total R&D, 35 per cent (or $9 billion worth) was done by universities. This investment sustains a million jobs, contributes more to the country’s GDP than pulp and paper, automobiles, or the arts, entertainment and recreation industries combined.

These locally situated colleges are also plugged into countless worldwide networks; they are truly a global intelligence. Indeed, with millions of university graduates staffing the high-tech firms and hospitals and manufacturers that make up today’s knowledge economy, the university is actually the mother of all industries.

Today, universities generate huge traffic problems and massive quantities of greenhouse gases. Yet, some now save millions of dollars by giving every student a free transit pass. Local demand for buses has shot up; the need to drive has dropped. Fifty American universities issue passes to more than 825,000 students and staff.

Now, instead of 50 colleges, imagine 5,000. And, looking beyond just the bus pass, think of all these campuses building only state-of-the-art “green buildings,” revitalizing local farming and food systems, shifting to renewable energy suppliers, and redirecting institutional investments into community enterprises. Where a university adopts a mandate of comprehensive local innovation, its potential is truly Earth-changing.

With this week’s gathering asking how we might create sustainable cities despite the intransigence of national governments and transnational corporations, we have an answer: Look to your own backyard.

Design, Vulnerability

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – Planet of Slums?

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In 1978 the first meeting of UN Habitat occurred in Vancouver. Thirty years later, Un Habitat’s World Urban Forum runs from June 19th-23rd 2006 in Vancouver. During the time between these meetings the world’s urban population has grown rapidly, in particular in developing countries. Both these trends can be seen in a last of the world’s biggest cities in 1975 and 2005.

Largest cities 1975 Population (Millions) Largest cities 2005 Population (Millions)
Tokyo, Japan 26.6 Tokyo, Japan 35.3
New York-Newark, USA 15.9 Mexico City, Mexico 19
Shanghai, China 11.4 New York-Newark, USA 18.5
Mexico City, Mexico 10.7 Mumbai, India 18.3
Osaka-Kobe, Japan 9.8 Sao Paulo, Brazil 18.3
Sao Paulo, Brazil 9.6 Delhi, India 15.3
Buenos Aires, Argentina 9.1 Calcutta, India 14.3
Los Angeles, USA 8.9 Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.3
Paris, France 8.6 Jakarta, Indonesia 13.2
Beijing, China 8.5 Shanghai, China 12.7

In 1975, 5 of the largest cities were in developing countries, in 2005, 80%. In 1978, about 1/3 of the world’s population lived in cities, today it is 2/3. Indeed most of the world’s net population growth in coming decades is expected to occur in developing world cities.

Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Under-Secretary-General and executive director of UN-HABITAT, reviewing Mike Davis’ book Planet of Slums identifies the vulnerability of slums:

Slum dwellers are more vulnerable than most to hazards such as volcanos, floods, earthquakes, landslides, fires and road traffic accidents. Their health is constantly under threat from inadequate sanitation and low-quality drinking water. As Davis writes: “The most extreme health differentials are no longer between towns and countrysides, but between the urban middle classes and the urban poor.” This conclusion is echoed in the State of the World’s Cities report, which describes how the poor are forced to pay an “urban penalty” that encompasses poor health, early death and vulnerability to both natural and human-made disasters.

UN Habitat has released State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7 (which annoyingly isn’t available on the web). From a BBC article Report reveals global slum crisis

Slum-dwellers who make up a third of the world’s urban population often live no better – if not worse – than rural people, a United Nations report says.

Worst hit is Sub-Saharan Africa where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.

Some states, the report notes, have already taken significant action to improve conditions, notably in Latin America where about 31% of urban people are classified as living in slums (figures for 2005) – down from 35% in 1990.

Of the urban population of South Asia, 57% live in slums though this is down on the 1990 figure of nearly 64%.

…

A slum is defined by UN Habitat as a place of residence lacking one or more of five things: durable housing, sufficient living area, access to improved water, access to sanitation and secure tenure.

Slums have existed in what is now the developed world since the Industrial Revolution and 6% of its current urban population also fall under Habitat’s definition.

However, the growth in slums is unprecedented, Habitat finds, and the nature of the problem has also changed.

…

Dr Tibaijuka told journalists that urbanisation in itself was not the problem as it drove both national output and rural development.

“History has shown that urbanisation cannot be reversed,” she continued.

“People move to the cities not because they will be better off but because they expect to be better off.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has a set of resources – Slum Cities – on the state of urbanization in the developing world, including articles on Bombay, Cairo, and an interview with Mike Davis, along with a good set of internet links. They are also have a variety of special coverage of WUF.

Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Rebuilding New Orleans: Don’t build on quicksand

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Down to Earth points to a Washington Post editorial (June 7th) that writes:

… the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. … As the Corps’ own inquiry found, the agency committed numerous mistakes of design: Its network of pumps, walls and levees was “a system in name only”; it failed to take into account the gradual sinking of the local soil; it closed its ears when people pointed out these problems. The result was a national tragedy.

…the New Orleans disaster has illustrated the folly of building flood defenses for vulnerable low land: Some of the worst-hit areas would not have been developed in the first place if the Corps hadn’t decided to build “protections” for them. Encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to build Category 5 defenses for all of Louisiana, including parts that are sparsely populated for good reason, would not merely cost billions that would be better spent on defending urban areas. It would encourage settlement of more flood-prone land and set the stage for the next tragedy.

On Down to Earth, Daniel Collins comments on how this behaviour falls into the pathology of natural resource management:

The engineering that the Corps offers provides residents and residents-to-be with a false sense of security. There is an implicit belief that since we have re-worked nature as much as we have in the past, or that we have been given dominion over the Earth, that we can continue in the same vein without limit. Modern societies endeavour to isolate themselves from the vagaries of the environment. What that has given us is a higher quality of living, offset by disasters like Katrina. Hurricanes will continue to roll into Louisiana, with or without global warming; New Orleans will continue to sink; and eventually the Mississippi will transfer its discharge into the Atchafalaya.

Building buffers against nature is a sound strategy, but it should be supplemented by building into society a degree of resilience and flexibility. Part of this is the ability (strength even?) to impose limits on building in unsafe regions. This may constrain liberties, but Katrina constrained the ultimate liberty of at least 1,800 people.

Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour

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The world’s oceans are warming, rising, and acidifing due to human action. The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) on May 31 2006 released a new report on climate change and the world’s oceans, The Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour, that synthesizes current knowledge on climate change and oceans. They state that climate change in combination with over-fishing is threatening already depleted fish stocks. Sea-level rise is exposing coastal regions to mounting flood and hurricane risks. They argue that to keep the impacts on human wellbeing within manageable limits it is necessary to both increase coastal and ocean resilience and reduce the amount of future global warming and ocean acidification. The WBGU recommends that societies act to:

Limit acidification and temperature rise
Adaptation measures can only succeed if sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean acidification are limited to tolerable levels. The only way to do this is through aggressive climate protection policies. WBGU has already recommended previously that the rise in global mean temperature be limited to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Ocean conservation is a further reason for imposing this limit. Furthermore, in order to restrain acidification it is essential to reduce not only emissions of the overall basket of greenhouse gases, but also to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions in particular are sufficiently abated. It follows in WBGU’s view that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will need to be approximately halved by 2050 from 1990 levels.

Strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems
To strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems to elevated seawater temperatures and acidification, it is essential to manage marine resources sustainably. In particular, over-fishing must be stopped. In addition, WBGU recommends designating at least 20–30 per cent of the global marine area as conservation zones. The international community has already adopted goals in this regard, for instance at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. These must now be implemented, and the regulatory gap for the high seas closed by adopting an appropriate international agreement.

Develop new strategies for coastal protection
About every fifth person lives within 30 kilometres of the sea. Many of these people are put at immediate risk by sea-level rise and hurricanes. Coastal protection is thus becoming a key challenge for society, not least in financial terms. National and international strategies for mitigation and adaptation need to be further developed and harmonized. This includes plans for a managed retreat from endangered areas. In developing countries, financing needs to be secured by means of both existing and innovative financing instruments such as micro-insurance.

Give legal certainty to refugees from sea-level rise
At present, international law neither establishes a commitment to receive people who are forced to leave coastal areas or islands because of climate change, nor is the cost question resolved. Over the long term, a quota system is conceivable, under which states would have to adopt responsibility for refugees in line with their greenhouse gas emissions. This will require formal international agreements and the establishment of dedicated funds for international compensation payments.

Use carbon dioxide storage only as a transitional solution
To mitigate emissions, carbon dioxide can be captured in energy-generating facilities and then stored in geological formations on land or under the sea floor. Direct injection into the deep sea is a further option under debate, but this lacks permanence and harbours a risk of ecological damage in the deep sea. WBGU therefore recommends prohibiting the injection of carbon dioxide into seawater in general. In contrast, storing carbon dioxide in geological formations under the sea floor can present a transitional solution for climate protection, complementing more sustainable approaches such as enhancing energy efficiency and expanding renewable energies. Permits should only be granted, however, if such storage is environmentally sound and is secure for at least 10,000 years.

Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Vulnerability

Ecology and Development: the MA & MDGs

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Strategy for Sust Dev - Sachs & Reid Science 2006 The economist Jeffrey Sachs, the director the development oriented Millennium Project, and the ecologist Walt Reid, former director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have written a joint policy forum in Science (May 19, 2006) Investments Toward Sustainable Development. They note that both projects have broad agreement about the need to integrate ecology and poverty alleviation.  They recommend that the world invest in ecological infrastructure in poor countries and establish a periodic assessment of the benefits that people obtains from ecosystems. They write:

The United Nations (U.N.) Millennium Project and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment highlighted the centrality of environmental management for poverty reduction and general well-being. Each report emphasized the unsustainability of our current trajectory. Millions of people die each year because of their poverty and extreme vulnerability to droughts, crop failure, lack of safe drinking water, and other environmentally related ills. The desperation of the poor and heedlessness of the rich also exact a toll on future well-being in terms of habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change.

The goal of the Millennium Project is to develop and to promote practical plans for achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for ending poverty, eradicating hunger, achieving universal primary education, improving health, and restoring a healthy environment. The MA, in turn, examined the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and analyzed options for conserving ecosystems while enhancing their contributions to people. The MA and the Millennium Project reached strikingly parallel conclusions:

  1. Environmental degradation is a major barrier to the achievement of the MDGs. The MA examined 24 ecosystem services (the benefits people obtain from ecosystems) and found that productivity of only 4 had been enhanced over the last 50 years, whereas 15 (including capture fisheries, water purification, natural hazard regulation, and regional climate regulation) had been degraded. More than 70% of the 1.1 billion poor people surviving on less than $1 per day live in rural areas, where they are directly dependent on ecosystem services.
  2. Investing in environmental assets and management are vital to cost-effective and equitable strategies to achieve national goals for relief from poverty, hunger, and disease. For example, investments in improved agricultural practices to reduce water pollution can boost coastal fishing industry. Wetlands protection can meet needs of rural communities while avoiding costs of expensive flood control infrastructure. Yet these investments are often overlooked.
  3. Reaching environmental goals requires progress in eradicating poverty. More coherent and bolder poverty reduction strategies could ease environmental stresses by slowing population growth and enabling the poor to invest long term in their environment.

We recommend the following measures in 2006. First, we call on the rich donor countries to establish a Millennium Ecosystem Fund to give poor countries the wherewithal to incorporate environmental sustainability into national development strategies. The fund would support work that focuses on how poverty reduction can enhance environmental conservation (e.g., by giving farmers alternatives to slash and burn) and how environmental sustainability can support poverty reduction (e.g., watershed management to maintain clean water supplies). It would also support national ecosystem service assessments to help decision-makers factor the economic and health consequences of changes in ecosystem services into their planning choices.

The fund would initially need roughly $200 million over 5 years. It would enable universities and scientists in dozens of the poorest countries to incorporate the science of environmental sustainability into poverty reduction strategies. The programs would generate evidence for countries to use in setting priorities for national development and environmental investments.

Second, the United Nations should establish a cycle of global assessments modeled on the MA and similar to the climate change reports produced at 4- to 5-year intervals by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MA and IPCC cost roughly $20 million, and each mobilized in-kind contributions of that magnitude. A global network of respected ecologists, economists, and social scientists working to bring scientific knowledge to decision-makers and to the public can clarify the state of scientific knowledge, help to mobilize needed research, and defeat the obfuscation led by vested interests.

Ideas

Paradox of the clumps

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Sean Nee and Nick Colegrave comment on the Scheffer and van Ness PNAS paper on the formation and persistence of ecological lumps (see the earlier post by Buzz Holling, and the commentary Discontinuities in ecological data by Craig Allen in PNAS).

Their commentary, Paradox of the clumps (Nature May 25, 2006) suggest that ecological clumpiness of species may change how we think about species. They write:

…Scheffer and van Nes have revisited a well-studied classical model of competing species and discovered something new. Even in the absence of any environmental discontinuities, they find that assemblages of species will self-organize into clumps of species with very similar niches within a clump and a large difference between clumps. So, paradoxically, species both do, and do not, organize themselves into discrete niches.

In the Origin of Species, Darwin asked: “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” This evolutionary question has a closely related ecological counterpart: how similar can species be to one another and still coexist? … With a single, continuous niche axis, how many species can you pack along it? Or, is there a limit to how close the species can be along this axis?

…

Previous analytical results produced single species widely spaced along the niche axis. But Scheffer and van Nes find widely spaced clumps of species occupying very similar niches. Why the difference? Analytical work looks at the long-term equilibria of models, whereas a simulation study allows the system to be observed as it moves towards these equilibria. Scheffer and van Nes take the simulation approach, which starts out with a large number of species along the axis and then evolves the system according to standard equations that govern competition between species. The clumps they observe are transient, and each will ultimately be thinned out to a single species. But ‘ultimately’ can be a very long time indeed: we now know that transient phenomena can be very long-lasting and, hence, important in ecology, and such phenomena can be studied effectively only by simulation. There is also good experimental evidence for long-lasting coexistence between similar species.

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The emergence of clumps of highly similar species resonates with a proposed solution to another possible problem: the coexistence of large numbers of species in environments that do not seem to allow for much niche differentiation. Plankton and tropical forest plants are the usual examples. These organisms have a simple set of requirements: light, carbon dioxide and a few nutrients. How is it possible to carve out thousands of distinct niches from so few requirements? It has been proposed that such high numbers of species can coexist precisely because their niches are so similar that exclusion takes a very long time, perhaps on the same timescale as speciation.

…

We can go further: on what basis did Darwin make his assertion about the discreteness of species? This question is distinct from debates about the definition of species in nature. Blackberries reproduce asexually, and it is impossible to agree on how many ‘species’ there are; but, nonetheless, we all know a ‘blackberry’ when we see one and do not wonder if it is actually a raspberry. Great tits, blue tits and coal tits are all quite distinct when considered as a set, but are surely just more-or-less continuous variants on a tit theme when compared with flamingos. Bacteria that are vastly different genetically are all called Legionella because they clump along the single niche axis that matters to us: they all cause Legionnaire’s disease.

So what is the correct or meaningful frame of reference when thinking about the ecological nature of species? As well as providing stimulating theoretical results, Scheffer and van Nes have revitalized the fundamental question of how we should look at the ecological identity of species.

Greenlash, Ideas, Regime Shifts

Pollution risks Yangtze’s ‘death’

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From BBC news, Pollution risks Yangtze’s ‘death’, briefly describes China’s fears that how large scale eutrophication and pollution is impacting human wellbeing and economic growth prospects along the Yangze.

YangtzeThe Yangtze, China’s longest river, is “cancerous” with pollution, reports in the country’s state media have said.Environmental experts fear pollution from untreated agricultural and industrial waste could turn the Yangtze into a “dead river” within five years.

That would make it unable to sustain marine life or provide drinking water to the booming cities along its banks.

The Yangtze rises in China’s western mountains and passes through some of its most densely populated areas.

The government has promised to clean up the Yangtze, which supplies water to almost 200 cities along its banks.

But experts speaking in China’s state media say that unless action is taken quickly, billions of tonnes of untreated industrial and agricultural waste and sewage are likely to kill what remains of the river’s plant and wildlife species within five years.

China’s rapid economic development means that many of the nation’s waterways are facing similar problems.

Last year the authorities announced that the country’s second-longest river, the Yellow River, was so polluted that it was not safe for drinking.

Correspondents say that 300 million people in China do not have access to safe drinking water.

They say that government efforts to clean up the country’s polluted lakes and waterways are being thwarted by lax enforcement standards.

Ecological Management, Regime Shifts, Vulnerability

Does Rainfall Increase in the Sahel Mask a Degradation Trend?

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There have been heated debates about the dynamics of land degradation and climate change in the Sahel region in West Africa. The region has suffered a number of extreme droughts since the 1960’s causing famine, loss of livestock and reduced vegetation. However, a ‘greening trend’ trend has recently been detected. To a large extent this trend appears to be driven by increased rainfall (although some scientists argue that this alone can not explain the full extent of the greening trend).

Several studies, based on remote sensing, have now analyzed the reduced vegetation during the drought years and compared it to current land cover. Interestingly, they have not detected any land degradation that can be attributed to land management, which is in contrast with earlier studies suggesting that livestock management in the region is reducing productivity and increasing the systems vulnerability to drought.

A recent paper ‘Desertification in the Sahel: a reinterpretation’ by Hein and De Ridder published in Global Change Biology, suggests that the analyses based on remote sensing may be flawed and that land degradation may have been masked by rainfall.

Hein and De Ridder’s reasoning builds on the way that previous studies linked net primary production (NPP) (or actually a vegetation index – NDVI) to rainfall. These previous studies assumed that for a given site with no land degradation a linear relationship exists between NPP and rainfall (i.e. the Rain Use Efficiency (RUE) is constant). When they did not see any change in RUE over time they assumed that there has not been any land degradation.

Hein and De Ridder studied RUE in six field sites and found that in the absence of land degradation the relationship between NPP and rainfall was non-linear (followed a quadratic curve). When they looked at expected RUE values based on their quadratic estimates they found that the RUE from satellite estimates were lower than the expected ones, and thus land degradation may have occurred. They conclude:

If anthropogenic degradation of the Sahel is demonstrated, this would have repercussions for the debate on the causes of climate change in the Sahel. Currently, a weakness in the argumentations … that anthropogenic land cover changes have contributed to the occurrence of the extreme Sahelian droughts of the last decades of the 20th century is a lack of evidence of degradation from remote sensing data. Hence, if new remote sensing analyses confirm anthropogenic degradation, this would support the hypothesis that degradation of the vegetation layer, in particular through sustained high grazing pressures, has contributed to the occurrence of the 20th century droughts in the Sahel. Furthermore, if degradation of the Sahelian vegetation cover is confirmed, this would indicate that Sahelian pastoralists may be more vulnerable for future droughts than currently assumed. Because degradation of the Sahel in the 1980s and 1990s has been masked by an upward trend in annual rainfall, the consequences of a future drought for the local population could be unexpectedly severe.