Category Archives: Ideas

Ecological Economics, Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

Inequality of Climate Change Impacts

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Jonathan Patz et al have recently published a review paper on the Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health, in a special feature on regional climate change in the Nov 16th issue of Nature.

The article shows that climate change is already a substantial factor shortening people’s lives. The authors estimate that climate change kills an excess 154 000/yr. This mortality compares with 6 million deaths/yr caused by childhood and maternal malnutrition (the largest proportion of mortality) and with 109 000 deaths/yr from carnciogen exposure (data from Rodgers et al 2004 Distribution of Major Health Risks: Findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study. PLOS Medicine pdf)

Climate change deaths are estimated to occur primarily due to increases in malnutrition (77 000 deaths), diarrhoea (47 000 deaths), and Malaria (27 000 deaths). However, the health impacts of climate change vary greatly across the world. In general the areas, least responsible for changing the climate, are suffering the most deaths from climate change. These deaths are concentrated in poor countries, with about half of these deaths occuring in poor countries in S and SE Asia (specifically Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal), which are home to 1.2 billion people.

The mismatch between the countries most responsible for producing climate change and its impact is shown in the two maps below. The first map shows CO2 emissions/capita in 1998 from WRI data, while the second shows the estimated numbers of deaths per million people that could be attributed to global climate change in the year 2000 (From Patz et al). The mismatch be further exagerated if the cumulative CO2 emissions/capita of nations, a better indicator of national responsibility for climate change, were shown.

national level co2 emissions per capita 1998 Drawing from data from the World Health Organization, the map was also created by Patz's team. Map courtesy the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

[click on a map to see a larger version]

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Ideas, Regime Shifts, Tools

Faculty of 1000 & Resilience Science

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Discovering interesting articles within sea of scientific publications can be difficult. BioMedCentral produces – Faculty of 1000 – an internet based research filtering service that highlights and reviews the papers published in the biological sciences, based on the ranking and recommendations of a faculty of well over 1000 selected researchers.

Along with many other ecologists from diverse backgrounds, a number of resilience researchers including Carl Folke, Terry Chapin and Ann Kinzig, participate in the Faculty of 10000, but none of them have recommended papers yet.” Resilience Alliance program director Brian Walker, is also a member and he recently recommended Marty Anderies new paper on how deforestation produced a soil-moisture regime shift in the south-eastern Australia,

Minimal models and agroecological policy at the regional scale: An application to salinity problems in southeastern Australia Regional Environmental Change 2005 5:1-17

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Ecological Management, General, Regime Shifts, Reorganization

The Greening of Sahel: Passive recovery or active adaptation?

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The drought years in the Sahel in the early 1970’s that resulted in a large-scale famine gave rise to scientific and policy discussions about land degradation and desertification. A popular belief was that the limited resource base in the Sahel, with vulnerable soils and highly variable and scarce rainfall could not sustain the growing population. The droughts was seen as a stress to a system which was already struggling with a rapidly decreasing resource base (e.g. deforestation of woodlands for agricultural expansion, shortening of fallow times, and soil nutrient depletion) and bad land management practices leading to increased poverty and out-migration.

Sahel Greening. Overall trends in vegetation greenness throughout the period 1982–2003 based on monthly AVHRR NDVI time series. Percentages express changes in average NDVI between 1982 and 2003. From Hermann et al 2005

New analysis of satellite data, by among others Olsson et al., illustrating a greening trend in the Sahel since 1983 thus comes as a surprise for many people. It has also triggered a scientific discussion of whether this greening is merely a recovery of vegetation due to increasing rainfall, or if this trend at least partially can be explained by widespread changes in land management by farmers in the region. Hutchins et al., in the introduction to a recent special issue of Journal of Arid Environments, suggests that there is increasing evidence that farmers have adapted to the changes during the droughts and made a transition from degrading land use trajectories to more sustainable and productive production systems, suggesting that the recovery in many places actually is an active adaptation by the farmers in the region.

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Regime Shifts

Is the Arctic Already Lost?

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Veg/Climate Feedbacks in Arctic

Is the home of polar bears, seals and Inuit communities already doomed? asks Jon Foley in Tipping Points in the Tundra a recent commentary Science. According to him, several recent sources of evidence show that feedback mechanisms seem to be kicking into high gear as the Arctic warms up. Temperature data illustrate, for example, that from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, the Arctic warmed by 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade, but since then the warming has been nearly 0.3 to 0.4 degrees per decade.

Recent evidence comes from Terry Chapin and his co-workers who have analyzed Arctic data on surface temperature, cloud cover, energy exchange, albedo, and changes in snow cover and vegetation. They concluded that the recent changes in the length of the snow-free season have triggered a set of interlinked feedbacks that will amplify future rates of summer warming. One of these feedbacks relate to that the snowmelt has advanced by around 2.5 days per decade which has lead to an increase in the amount of energy that is absorbed and transferred to the atmosphere. The resulting regional increase in temperature is estimated to be comparable (per unit area) to the global atmospheric heating that is projected from a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Chapin et al. also analyses the role of vegetation change for triggering positive feedbacks. Tall shrublands have increased rapidly in the surrounding region of the Arctic. Tree lines have also moved further north. Although the estimated contributions these have on warming were found to be small, the authors expect that they will continue to increase disproportionally in the future.

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Greenlash, Regime Shifts, Visualization

Tipping Points in the Earth System – an icon of climate change?

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tipping pts in the earth system

Martin Kemp writes in Nature – Science in culture: Inventing an icon

Any public campaign benefits from having an iconic image — something that captures the essence of the message and engraves it indelibly on our memories. But it is almost impossible to predict which images will actually stick, so creating one on demand is extraordinarily difficult. …

Even so, finding an iconic image was one of the goals of a meeting, Changing the Climate, held in Oxford, UK, on 11 and 12 September. Researchers and practitioners of the visual, literary, musical and performing arts came together to publicize the predicted perils of climate change, and there was much talk about a memorable image that would encapsulate the initiative…

The data must come from the best science available, but the presentation for maximum impact is a matter of invention in art and design. Of the images produced by the scientists, one in particular seemed to have the potential to combine iconicity with complexity. This is the ‘Tipping Points Map’ devised by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and research director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK. This global map, shown here, outlines what Schellnhuber has identified as regions where the balance of particular systems has reached the critical point at which potentially irreversible change is imminent, or actually occurring.
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Ideas, Tools

Principles of Biomimicry for Green Design

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Jeremy Faludi’s article Biomimicry For Green Design (A How-To) on WorldChanging reviews principles designers can adopt from Nature to produce green products.

It’s easy to talk about how exciting biomimicry is, and how we’ll see more of it in the future, but it’s another thing to actually design and built things that are biomimetic. Most designers, engineers, architects, and other people who build things just don’t know that much about biology and the natural world; and even when they do, there’s often a gap of capability in available materials, manufacturing methods, and economic systems. Some of these obstacles are out of the designer’s hands, and you just have to move on to things that are more feasible. (But don’t forget your ideas; maybe ten years from now the technology will be there.) Even with existing technology, however, an enormous realm of possibilities is feasible, it just requires the right approach. Here is my attempt to describe the biomimetic approach, with a comprehensive list of principles. It combines lessons from Janine Benyus, Kevin Kelly, Steven Vogel, D’Arcy Thompson, Buckminster Fuller, Julian Vincent, and my own limited experience. I also mention at the end where biomimicry will not help you, a subject often glossed over, as well as further resources (books and schools).

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Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization

New Orleans & Disaster Sociology

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new orleans residents on roof waving at helicopter

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article by David Glennn on Sociology and Hurricane Katrina Disaster Sociologists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hurricanes, but Will Policy Makers Listen?

The article discusses what disaster sociology has to say about the disaster in New Orleans. The article makes a number of good points about panic, command and control, and managing uncertainty.

The article starts up with a discussion of the panic myth:

One of the central tenets of disaster sociology is that most communities can, to a large degree, spontaneously heal themselves. People affected by disaster obviously often need resources from the outside world — food, water, shelter. But that does not mean that disaster victims also need outside direction and coordination, most scholars in the field say.

A prime example of spontaneous cooperation was the extraordinarily successful evacuation of Lower Manhattan during the September 11 attacks. James M. Kendra, an assistant professor of emergency administration and planning at the University of North Texas, estimates that nearly half a million people fled Manhattan on boats — and he emphasizes that the waterborne evacuation was a self-organized volunteer process that could probably never have been planned on a government official’s clipboard.

“Various kinds of private companies, dinner-cruise boats, people with their own personal watercraft, the Coast Guard, the harbor pilots — in very short order, they managed to organize this evacuation,” Mr. Kendra said.

The evacuation in New Orleans, of course, was not so smooth. Disaster sociologists say that they are eager to determine how much chaos and looting actually occurred there, and how much was conjured through rumor and news-media exaggeration.

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Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Scenarios

New New Orleans Pt 2 – Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios

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NewOrleansWkshop.jpg

On Sept 2 I posted about an article Dreaming a New New Orleans.

In another post on WorldChanging Alan AtKisson follows up in A New New Orleans – Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios

From A New New Orleans – Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios:

Another tool for producing best-possible outcomes is scenario planning: imagining several likely future-history pathways, starting from present conditions. In a short brainstorming session, at an international conference on regional sustainability held in central Hungary, an informal workshop group produced several possible scenarios for what New Orleans could become. Three of these scenarios are named after the Dutch cities they most resemble — appropriate, given the city’s position at the end of a major river, under sea level — and they roughly correspond with some scenarios floated by other US commentators (which I had heard about largely through conversation with a BusinessWeek editor reporting on the story).

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Ideas, Vulnerability

Environmental Justice and Social Vulnerability

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In a short article in Slate, Eric Klinenberg, an associate professor of sociology at New York University, who wrote a good book about social vulnerability to climate change – Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.

In the Sept 2, 2005 article – When Chicago Baked: Unheeded lessons from another great urban catastrophe – Klinenberg compares the situation and social vulnerability in New Orleans to the Chicago Heat Wave.

From the article:

Sept. 11 was an epochal event in American culture, so it’s no surprise that it’s everyone’s favorite comparison to the destruction of New Orleans. But the more instructive analogy is another great urban catastrophe in recent American history: The 1995 Chicago heat wave, when a blend of extreme weather, political mismanagement, and abandonment of vulnerable city residents resulted in the loss of water, widespread power outages, thousands of hospitalizations, and 739 deaths in a devastating week.
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