Category Archives: Ecological Management

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management

An interview with Elinor Ostrom

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Elinor Ostrom will be in Stockholm next week for a seminar at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences among other things (unless the Icelandic ash cloud stops her) [update – it stopped her].  She was also recently interviewed by Fran Korten for Yes! Magazine in Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense:

Photo by Chris Meyer / Indiana University

Fran Korten: When you first learned that you had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, were you surprised?

Elinor Ostrom: Yes. It was quite surprising. I was both happy and relieved.

Fran: Why relieved?

Elinor: Well, relieved in that I was doing a bunch of research through the years that many people thought was very radical and people didn’t like. As a person who does interdisciplinary work, I didn’t fit anywhere. I was relieved that, after all these years of struggle, someone really thought it did add up. That’s very nice.

And it’s very nice for the team that I’ve been a part of here at the Workshop. We have had a different style of organizing. It is an interdisciplinary center—we have graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty working together. I never would have won the Nobel but for being a part of that enterprise.

Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate. And your Workshop at the university is also organized on principles of cooperation.

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question—case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

…

Fran: But what about the “free-rider” problem where some people abide by the rules and some people don’t? Won’t the whole thing fall apart?

Elinor: Well if the people don’t communicate and get some shared norms and rules, that’s right, you’ll have that problem. But if they get together and say, “Hey folks, this is a project that we’re all going to have to contribute to. Now, let’s figure it out,” they can make it work. For example, if it’s a community garden, they might say, “Do we agree every Saturday morning we’re all going to go down to the community garden, and we’re going to take roll and we’re going to put the roll up on a bulletin board?” A lot of communities have figured out subtle ways of making everyone contribute, because if they don’t, those people are noticeable.

Fran: So public shaming and public honoring are one key to managing the commons?

Elinor: Shaming and honoring are very important. We don’t have as much of an understanding of that. There are scholars who understand that, but that’s not been part of our accepted way of thinking about collective action.

Fran: Do you have a favorite example of where people have been able to self-organize to manage property in common?

Elinor: One that I read early on that just unglued me because I wasn’t expecting it was the work of Robert Netting, an anthropologist who had been studying the alpine commons for a very long time. He studied Swiss peasants and then studied in Africa too. He was quite disturbed that people were saying that Africans were primitive because they used common property so frequently and they didn’t know about the benefits of private property. The implication was we’ve got to impose private property rules on them. Netting said, “Are the Swiss peasants stupid? They use common property also.”

Let’s think about this a bit. In the valleys, they use private property, while up in the alpine areas, they use common property. So the same people know about private property and common property, but they choose to use common property for the alpine areas. Why? Well, the alpine areas are what Netting calls “spotty.” The rainfall is high in one section one year, and the snow is great, and it’s rich. But the other parts of the area are dry. Now if you put fences up for private property, then Smith’s got great grass one year he can’t even use it all and Brown doesn’t have any. So, Netting argued, there are places where it makes sense to have an open pasture rather than a closed one. Then he gives you a very good idea of the wide diversity of the particular rules that people have used for managing that common land.

Fran: Why were Netting’s findings so surprising to you?

Elinor: I had grown up thinking that land was something that would always move to private property. I had done my dissertation on groundwater in California, so I was familiar with the management of water as a commons. But when I read Netting, I realized that when there are “spotty” land environments, it really doesn’t make sense to put up fences and have small private plots.

Fran: If you were to have a sit-down session with someone with a big influence on natural resources policy say Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, or Ken Salazar, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, what would be your advice?

Elinor: No panaceas! We tend to want simple formulas. We have two main prescriptions: privatize the resource or make it state property with uniform rules. But sometimes the people who are living on the resource are in the best position to figure out how to manage it as a commons.

…

Fran: Do you have a message for the general public?

Elinor: We need to get people away from the notion that you have to have a fancy car and a huge house. Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn’t know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

Fran: Let’s look ahead 20 years. What would you hope that the world will understand about managing common property systems?

Elinor: What we need is a broader sense of what we call “social ecological systems.” We need to look at the biological side and the social side with one framework rather than 30 different languages. That is big, but I now have some of my colleagues very interested. Some of them are young, and what I find encouraging is that with a bunch of us working together, I can see us moving ahead in the next 20 years or so. Twenty years from now, at 96, I probably won’t be as active.

Ecological Management

Mental models and climate change

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On Ecotrust’s People and Place, Howard Silverman articulates how climate change demonstrates how the earth has become a social-ecological systems, in which facts and values are entangled, and the future is full of various flavours of uncertainty.  These concepts lurk beneath many climate change discussions.  While none of these mental models are new, he suggests their reality is clarified by climate change in What We Talk about When We Talk about Climate:

Humans exist within social-ecological systems.The climate story is one of processes and connections. Critical planetary systems – climate, nitrogen, biodiversity – are impaired by human activities (see Rockström et al.). Both the power of human influence on natural systems and the vulnerability of human dependence on natural systems inspire awe – and, for some, doubt.

Uncertainties are central to social-ecological experience.
Impairments of planetary systems are historical experiments that are run but once. In linked social-ecological systems, knowledge is probabilistic. A very high confidence characterizes the analysis of human impact on the climate system, according to the typologies of uncertainty and confidence developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see IPCC – pdf). Uncertainty becomes central (see Post-Normal Science). The more the climate is changed, the less confident we can be about how it might further change (see Easterbrook).

Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values.
The very-high-confidence fact of human impact on the climate system is not prescriptive in and of itself. To derive knowledge, to gain a capacity for effective action, depends on competing and complimentary values and perceptions, including: worldviews of nature as benign, tolerant and/or ephemeral (see cultural theory); aspirations of economic growth and/or human development; senses of personal and/or collective identity (see identity tree); and awareness of agency, i.e. that one has free will, that one can be effective, that risks can be recognized and evaluated.

In another post on cultural theory (the Douglas and Thompson version) Silverman expands on climate and cultural theory:

With positions on climate hardening, references to contradictory worldviews are popping up in the mainstream media (See NYT and NPR), but the story itself is hardly new.  “Underlying much of the energy debate is a tacit, implicit divergence on what the energy problem ‘really’ is,” wrote Amory Lovins in 1977’s Soft Energy Paths. “Public discourse suffers because our society has mechanisms only for resolving conflicting interests, not conflicting views of reality, so we seldom notice that these perceptions differ markedly.”

Here is a cultural theory-based interpretation of climate worldviews:

  • The hierarchist’s story (nature perverse/tolerant): International protocols and national commitments are needed to address the tragedy of the atmospheric commons and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
  • The egalitarian’s story (nature ephemeral): The underlying problem is consumption (resource throughput). Precaution, lifestyle simplicity and grass roots action are the most effective responses.
  • The individualist’s story (nature benign): To address climate change, rely on laissez-faire markets to spur competition and innovation. The benefits of climate change may even balance out the costs.
  • The fatalist’s story (nature capricious): Natural forces are beyond human understanding, much less human influence.

A fifth worldview, called “nature resilient” (Thompson, Ellis & Wildavsky 1990) or “nature evolving” (Holling, Gunderson & Ludwig 2002) is sometimes pictured at the central intersection of the axes, overlapping each of the others – we might say, in the language of psychologist Ken Wilber, transcending and including each of the others.

Ecological Management, Ecosystem services

Over fertilizing the world

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Three faces of global over fertilization from agriculture in China and the USA, and its complex effects on food webs.

1) Chinese farmers are acidifying there soil by over applying fertilizer.  Acidic soils impede crop growth and amplify the leaching of toxins.  Since the early 1980s, pH has declined from 0.2 to 0.8 across China, mostly due to overuse of fertilizer.  This is shown in a new Science paper, Significant Acidification in Major Chinese Croplands (DOI: 10.1126/science.1182570) by JH Guo and others.

Topsoil pH changes from 154 paired data over 35 sites in seven Chinese provinces between the 1980s and the 2000s. The line and square within the box represent the median and mean values of all data; the bottom and top edges of the box represent 25 and 75 percentiles of all data, respectively; and the bottom and top bars represent 5 and 95 percentiles, respectively. (From Guo et al)

Reporting on the paper Mara Hvistendahl writes, “Beginning in the 1970s, Chinese farmers applied ever-increasing amounts of fertilizer with the hope that it would lead to bigger harvests. Instead of high yield, however, they got water and air pollution. Today, agricultural experts estimate that in many parts of China fertilizer use can be slashed by up to 60%.”  In another issue of Science she also reports on current Chinese efforts to reduce fertilizer use.  In the Wall Street Journal, Geeta Annad reports on overfertilization in India “Pritam Singh, who farms 30 acres in Punjab, says the more desperate farmers become, the more urea they use. Overuse is stunting yields.”

2) The Washington Post reports on how in the US large feed lots are causing water quality problems in Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.

… Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

3) Fertilization of ecosystems can have complex ecological consequences. In a paper in PNAS, John Davis and others show that in a Long-term nutrient enrichment decouples predator and prey production DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908497107.

Relationship between primary consumer and predator secondary production for the reference stream (gray circles), the treatment stream (black circles), and previously published data (open circles). The arrows represent the temporal trajectory of the treatment stream starting with the 2 years of pretreatment (P1 and P2) and ending with the fifth year of enrichment (E5). The data labels correspond to the sampling year for the reference and treatment streams. The previously published data include 5 years of production data from the reference stream (C53) and a similar Coweeta stream (C55) that had experimentally reduced terrestrial leaf inputs during 4 of those years (21). It also includes previously published data from an unmanipulated year that compared our current reference (C53) and treatment (C54) streams (22). AFDM is ash-free dry mass.

Their research showed that there were differences in how predators and prey responded to fertilization, but these only emerged over time.  Increases N and P entering a stream increased populations of both predators and prey, however later on prey populations continued to increase but predator populations declined,because fertilzation shifted the streams prey to larger, predator resistant species, which reduced the efficiency with which energy flowed through the food web.

Ecological Management

Resilience Theory in Colombia

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http://twitter.com/vgalaz

Does resilience thinking have any impact at all on the ground? These two very interesting examples came in via Lorena Franco Vidal at the NGO Fundación Humedales de Colombia. In January of this year, the mentioned NGO decided to initiate a climate vulnerability and resilience assessment of the Fúquene wetland complex in the east of the Colombian Andes (2,600 meters over the sea level).

According to Lorena, this work has been very much inspired by a range of publications on “the problem of fit” – that is when the dynamics of complex social-ecological systems isn’t matched by institutions and governance [e.g. Cummings et al 2006, Galaz et al 2008], as well as the Resilience Alliance workbook for scientists. In addition, the evaluation of biochemichal variables (in bottom and water sediments of the lake) are – inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s work – done by the fishermen community of the wetland. According to Lorena, this group of local stakeholders have been training monitoring for 2 years to be able to follow environmental change in the lake system.

But there is more. During 2008 and 2009, papers on “the problem of fit” as well as David Salt’s and Brian Walker’s book “Resilience Thinking”, inspired a suggested reframing of Colombian biodiversity policy towards an increased emphasis on social-ecological systems, and the need to address multilevel interactions in governance. Results of the suggested modification include, amongst other things: i) a new conceptual framework for biodiversity management, based upon the resilience thinking paradigm applied to socio-ecological systems; ii) a model that accounts for the various stability domains in which natural and social systems appear in the territory; and iii) a revision of the state – pressure – response model, in order to include new drivers of change affecting biodiversity.

The outcomes of this latter “update”, are now being used for systematic country-side consultations, and we look forward to hear more from both these initiatives!

Ecological Management

Shaping Australia’s Resilience

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Australia 21 organized conference Shaping Australia’s Resilience: Policy development for uncertain futures (18-19 February 2010) at Australian National University in Canberra.  They quote my colleagues Steve Cork, who recently editted a book for Australia 21 – Brighter prospects: Enhancing the resilience of Australia).  Australia’s ABC news covered the start of the conference in Experts call for ‘resilience thinking’:

[Steve Cork says] the typical society relies on centralised networks that are vulnerable to threats.

“It’s all dependent on one or a few people or agencies. If they collapse then the whole system collapses,” says Cork.

Resilient cities

Professor Peter Newman of the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute in Fremantle says most cities are not built for resilience.

“At the moment our resource consumption is all based on infrastructure that is highly centralised,” says Newman, who will address the Canberra conference.

“You have big power plants that pump electricity across hundreds of kilometres, and you have big water supply schemes and big pipes in and big pipes out.”

Newman says recent events showed how vulnerable this made the Western Australian capital of Perth, which suffered an economic blow after the natural gas pipeline that supplies it was cut by an explosion.

“The city had no gas virtually for six months,” says Newman, who has recently co-authored a book detailing seven principles of sustainable cities.

“Industry basically had to close down for that period.”

Newman says a more resilient city would consist of smaller interconnected components, which were largely self-sufficient, collecting renewable energy and re-using it locally.

“If you cut the gas supply to the city, as occurred in Perth, the city can go on because it has all these other components.”

Newman says “distributed” energy and better public transport would help decrease dependence on fossil fuels, reduce energy waste, and improve the liveability of cities.

Natural resource management

Cork points to how resilience thinking is being applied to natural resource management.

He says the Federal Government is now providing most of the funding for conservation and better land management.

“So whether the Federal Government gets its policy right or wrong will determine the whole outcome. That’s not a resilient situation,” says Cork.

He says people at the local level need to be given more authority to detect change and make decisions, because they have a better idea of what is going on in the field.

“You don’t send an army into the field and wait for generals to make all the decisions. You give people in the field the authority to make decisions,” says Cork.

Cork says studies of personal resilience show the ability to recover from a serious illness, for example, is linked to a sense of personal control.

“And yet our health system is all about taking that control away from you.”

Ecological Management, Reorganization

Ecological Imperialism during the Cold War

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During the Cold War there was a a faint reprise of the Columbian Exchange.  Science Now reports on a study by François Chiron and others in Biological Conservation (doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2009.10.021) in Cold War Split Birds, Too in ScienceNOW:

The Cold War divided the people of Europe for nearly half a century, and it turns out humans weren’t the only ones stuck behind the Iron Curtain. Trade blockades led to vastly different numbers and types of invasive birds in Western and Eastern Europe, new research reveals. The findings, say experts, highlight the dramatic impact human activity can have on the success of alien species.

… Western Europe saw the introduction of 96 species of birds during the Cold War, while Eastern Europe only saw 24. The relative freedom of movement and high levels of global trade in the West account for the difference, says co-author Susan Shirley, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. “Trade is an important factor in the movement and establishment of alien species across the world.”

The way the Cold War carved up the globe also impacted the type of birds that were introduced. There was a rise in North American bird species, such as the ruddy duck, intentionally introduced to Western Europe many times between 1945 and 1989, but not much of a rise in the East. At the same time, people from former French and British colonies immigrated to Western Europe, toting along 23 African bird species. “They brought their caged pet birds with them–if not physically, then they brought the demand,” Shirley says.

While connections between Western Europe, the Americas, and Africa boomed, trade across the Iron Curtain withered: Exports from Western Europe to the East represented less than 5% of Western European’s total trade volume. The few invasive species that established themselves in Eastern Europe during the Cold War tended to come from other parts of Eastern Europe, or from Asia.

Since the Cold War ended in 1991, the pace of bird introduction events has picked up. Looking at records from 1989 to 2000, the study’s authors found more than 600 instances of alien species released into the wild in Eastern and Western Europe, versus almost 900 for the roughly 40 years of the Cold War. Trade and movement across the former Iron Curtain and rising prosperity in Eastern Europe has made the problem of invasive species worse, they say. “It’s speeding up exponentially, not just for birds but for many other groups, like plants, mammals, insects and fish,” says team leader Francois Chiron, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when this research was conducted.

Ecological Management

Roving bandits, piracy, and fishing

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Piracy has been in the news a lot over the past few years.  Less noticed is the impact of’ roving bandit fishing fleets from the rich world that outfish local fisherman.  The associated press reports on a perverse consquence of Somalian piracy Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish

A report on pirates this year by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore said the value of illegal catches from Somalia’s maritime jurisdiction is estimated at between $90 million and $300 million a year, and that foreign fishing vessels hail from all around the world.

The report’s author, Clive Schofield, a research fellow with the Australian Centre for Ocean Resources and Security at the University of Wollongong, called it ironic that nations contributing warships to anti-piracy efforts are in some cases directly linked to the foreign fishing vessels “stealing Somalia’s offshore resources.”

“This situation has led some pirates to justify their actions on basis of illegal foreign fishing activities — styling themselves ‘coastguards’ and characterizing ransom demands as ‘fines,'” the report said. “Without condoning acts of violence at sea, it is clear that the Somalis who hijack shipping off their coast are in fact not the only ‘pirates’ operating in these waters,” it said.

Piracy has not had a huge effect on Kenya’s overall fishing industry, which is not very well developed on the coast, according to the permanent secretary for Kenya’s Ministry of Fisheries Development, Micheni Japhet Ntiba. Kenya has brought in between 5,000 and 7,000 metric tons of fish off its Indian Ocean coast each of the last several years, he said, less than a tenth of Kenya’s yearly catch from Lake Victoria, on Kenya’s western edge.

Piracy “is a negative thing for Kenya fisherman. It’s a negative thing for the Kenyan economy. It’s a negative thing for the western Indian Ocean economy,” Ntiba said. “What I think is important for us is to invest in security so the government and the private sector can invest in the deep sea ocean resources.”

Still, Kenya’s sports fisherman say the pirates appear to have had a hugely positive effect on their industry. Angus Paul, whose family owns the Kingfisher sports fishing company, said that over the past season clients on his catch-and-release sports fishing outings averaged 12 or 13 sail fish a day. That compares with two or three in previous years.

Somali pirates, Paul said, are a group of terrorists, “but as long as they can keep the big commercial boats out, not fishing the waters, then it benefits a lot of other smaller people.”

Ecological Management

Reflections on COP15

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Reporting on the climate meetings in Copenhagen picks out many different meanings from the chaos and limited success of the meeting.  Below are some reports from Canada, the UK, and the USA.

Comments linking to any other good reports on the conference outcome would be fantastic, especially if they are from other countries and raise other points.

Jeffrey Simpson, the Toronto Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist, writes:

Ideally, the leaders who participated in the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen would have agreed to long-term emissions reductions, backed by short-term reduction targets. Apparently, however, even a 50-per-cent overall reduction target for 2050 was too stringent for too many countries and therefore Copenhagen ended without either long-term targets or short-term yardsticks.

Measurable yardsticks would have required hard decisions by many countries whose publics are not ready for strong action such as the United States; by democratic governments such as Canada that do not wish to lead; and by developing countries such as China and India unwilling to acknowledge that although the developed world has created most of the emissions to date, the fast-developing countries will be responsible for a growing share of emissions in the next half-century.

Instead, what seems to have been agreed upon was a process whereby countries will list their targets voluntarily. A long negotiation will follow to try to make these binding and included in an international treaty. The result was better than a complete collapse of the talks, but it left much of the detailed work for long negotiations ahead.

Copenhagen, therefore, was a predictable disappointment. The gaps coming into the talks between and among countries’ positions were too large; the domestic political stakes in some cases were too high; the economic fears too great; the temptation to finger-point too irresistible. …

Finding common ground among them was always going to be supremely difficult, and it remains so in the months, perhaps years, ahead as countries struggle to do better than they managed at Copenhagen, where they avoided the worst but did not achieve the best.

The negotiations did underscore the emergence of the world’s new power structure, since the critical negotiations involved the United States, China, India and Brazil, with the European Union off to one side, and Canada off the stage completely.

It took a major effort by President Barack Obama to save the negotiations; it will take an even larger one for him to persuade his Congress and the U.S. public to do something serious about climate change. But a Canadian could only admire his moral passion for the issue and his determination to lead, in contrast to the Canadian government’s approach that, appropriately enough, earned the country “Fossil of the Year” award by environmental groups at the conference.

In the New York Times, Andrew Revkin and John Broder report:

Many participants also said that the chaos and contentiousness of the talks may signal the end of reliance on a process that for almost two decades had been viewed as the best approach to tackling global warming: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a series of 15 conventions following a 1992 climate summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro.

The process has become unworkable, many said, because it has proved virtually impossible to forge consensus among the disparate blocs of countries fighting over environmental guilt, future costs and who should referee the results.

“The climate treaty process isn’t going to die, but the real work of coordinating international efforts to reduce emissions will primarily occur elsewhere,” said Michael Levi, who has been tracking the diplomatic effort for the Council on Foreign Relations.

That elsewhere will likely be a much smaller group of nations, roughly 30 countries responsible for 90 percent of global warming emissions. It was these nations that Mr. Obama rallied in a series of dramatic encounters on Friday to finally ink a deal that starts a flow of financing for poor countries to adapt to climate change and sets up a system for major economies to monitor and report their greenhouse gas emissions.

This smaller group of nations will meet periodically to tackle a narrower agenda of issues, like technology sharing or the merging of carbon trading markets, without the chaos and posturing of the United Nations process. A version of this already exists in the 17-nation Major Economies Forum, which has been a model of decorum and progress compared with what the world saw unfold at the climate talks.

The deal worked out in Copenhagen is a political agreement forged by major emitters to curb greenhouse gases, to help developing nations build clean-energy economies and to send money flowing to cushion the effects of climate change on vulnerable states. But even if countries live up to their commitments on emissions, a stark gap remains — measured in tens of billions of tons of projected flows of carbon dioxide — between nations’ combined pledges and what would be required to reliably avert the risks of disruptive changes in rainfall and drought, ecosystems and polar ice cover from global warming, scientists say.

An editorial from the UK’s Financial Times states:

One wonders how a conference to conclude two years of detailed negotiations, building on more than a decade of previous talks, could have collapsed into such a shambles. It is as though no preparatory work had been done. Consensus on the most basic issues was lacking. Were countries there to negotiate binding limits on emissions or not? Nobody seemed to know.

From the start, the disarray was total. In this, at least, the attention to detail was impressive. The organisers invited more people to the event than could be accommodated, and were puzzled when they arrived. Delegates queued in the freezing cold for hours, a scene that summed it all up. The organisers had planned a celebration of a grand new global pact – but the party was a disaster and they forgot to bring the agreement.

Governments need to understand, even if they cannot say so, that Copenhagen was worse than useless. If you draw the world’s attention to an event of this kind, you have to deliver, otherwise the political impetus is lost. To declare what everybody knows to be a failure a success is feeble, and makes matters worse. Loss of momentum is now the danger. In future, governments must observe the golden rule of international co-operation: agree first, arrange celebrations and photo opportunities later.

Fiona Harvey, Ed Crooks and Andrew Ward write in the Financial Times:

Developed countries insist that the accord, while imperfect, is nevertheless a significant step. As published, the section intended to show commitments to curb emissions by big economies is blank, but by February it is supposed to have been filled in. If leading economies repeat the offers made in public, the agreement will not be far from the political declaration the UN was looking for.

The real problem with the accord, however, is that it has not been formally accepted by the Copenhagen conference, which means it can easily be sidelined, an impression reinforced by China’s words. That leaves the UN with a further six months of tough and possibly hopeless negotiations to win acceptance, to be followed by the nearly impossible task of turning any such acceptance into a treaty. It also leaves the world without a global framework to tackle climate change.

It is these conclusions, after two weeks of unprecedented scenes, that have led some to question whether the UN, with processes vulnerable to delays, grandstanding and blackmail by special interests, is the forum in which to reach a treaty. There is talk from developed country officials of pressing ahead with a much smaller group of the leading economies, such as the Group of 20, responsible for the majority of global emissions – a “coalition of the willing” for the climate.

Yvo de Boer, the most senior UN climate official, made a strong defence of the UN as he prepared to leave the meeting, saying all countries must be included in making any deal. If it was restricted to the G20, he said, “you wouldn’t have round the table the countries who are in the front line of dealing with [the effects of] climate change but have minuscule economies.

“That’s part of the reason why people went to the trouble of creating the UN: that people wanted to address problems equitably.”

In Time magazine Bryan Walsh writes about lessons of COP15:

Green schism: The Environmental Defense Fund — a U.S. green group that often works with business — praised the Copenhagen Accord as an “important step,” and other mainstream environmental groups had a similarly measured response. But the new group 350.org — which demands extremely sharp and immediate carbon reductions — denounced the deal and protests outside the venue began almost immediately….

It’s going to get harder, and that’s a good thing: In the weeks preceding the summit, world leaders had downgraded expectations for a binding agreement, aiming instead for a broad political agreement while kicking tough decisions such as emission targets down the road. Logically, that should have made the talks at Copenhagen easier. Obviously that’s not what happened, as the summit’s final 48 hours were passed on the brink of collapse. But if Copenhagen was tough, Mexico City will be a lot more so, because there, countries will be tasked with filling in details sketched in the Copenhagen Accord.

Yet the very struggle to reach agreement at Copenhagen, and the tougher talks to come, demonstrate that climate diplomacy has finally come of age. The negotiations at Copenhagen were so contentious because of the very real impact the proposals on the table will have, not only on the environment, but also on national economies. China and the U.S. played hardball — and sent heads of government to do the talking — precisely because they had something to lose. The onset of a kind of climate realpolitik, which eschews hot air for real action, signals is a sign that global climate talks have moved beyond symbolic rhetoric.

Ecological Management, Visualization

What COP15 means for the planet?

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Climate Interactive used their climate policy model, C-Roads, to analyze the Copenhagen Accord and national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis assumes that nations follow their commitments. Their analysis shows:

The Accord adopted in Copenhagen (accessed 19 December 2009) calls for deep cuts in global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. Simulations of the C-ROADS model show that doing so requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2020 and then fall 50% below 1990 levels by 2050 (a cut of approximately 60% below current emissions).

However, simulations of the C-ROADS model show a large gap between the targets in the final Copenhagen agreement and the commitments offered by individual nations. Using the C=ROADS model, the researchers estimate that current confirmed proposals (that is, submissions to the UNFCCC or official government positions) would raise expected global mean temperature by 3.9 Celsuis by 2100. Including conditional proposals, legislation under debate and unofficial government statements would lower expected warming to an increase of approximately 2.9 C over preindustrial levels.

The graph and table below show simulation results from the C-Roads model for four scenarios: business as usual (calibrated to the IPCC A1FI scenario), current confirmed commitments, potential commitments, and the low emissions path required to achieve an expected warming of 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels.

ci_emmit

ci_table1

Seth Borenstein of Associated Press interviewed John Sterman and Andrew Jones from Climate Interactive as well as Cynthia Rosenzweig and Yvo de Boer:

Going above 450 parts per million “will change everything,” said NASA climate impacts researcher Cynthia Rosenzweig.

“It’s not just one or two things,” Rosenzweig said. “There will be changes in water, food, ecosystems, health, and those changes also interact with each other.”

At that point, among other things, millions of people would be subject to regular coastal flooding, droughts would cause food shortages, coral reefs would dramatically die off affecting the ocean food chain, and about 20 percent of the world’s known species would be significantly endangered, according to Rosenzweig and other climate scientists.

Systems dynamics experts John Sterman of MIT and Andrew Jones of the Sustainability Institute in Vermont compare our carbon problem to a bathtub. Each year we pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, much of it remains there. It lasts for about a century, although about half of the carbon dioxide produced is removed each year by forests and oceans.

Sterman and Jones figure the world can afford to churn out another 920 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide between now and 2050. Holding emissions to that level offers a better than even chance at keeping the world under 450 parts per million and avoiding a crucial temperature rise.

But that will be a challenge. Forty years of pumping emissions at the level we have now would exceed the safe level by more than 50 percent. And that doesn’t even account for future levels of greenhouse gases from booming economies like those in China and India.

Ideally, the world should produce 80 percent less in greenhouse gases than we do now, Jones said.

Technically, the delay of at least one year in implementing strict emissions limits — thanks to the nonbinding deal in Copenhagen — may not hurt. But it’s a momentum issue and a compounding interest issue, said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program. It’s like debt on a credit card: Every time a person puts off paying the balance, it grows bigger and harder to resolve.

Every year of delay means the chance of achieving a stable and healthy climate “is getting smaller and smaller,” said Yvo de Boer, head of U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which ran the Copenhagen negotiations. …

Yet de Boer is optimistic.

“I think science will drive it,” de Boer said. “I think business will drive it. I think society will drive it.”

Ecological Management

Reconnecting floodplains to rivers to reduce systemic flood risk

2 Comments

In policy forum Sustainable Floodplains Through Large-Scale Reconnection to Rivers (Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1178256) by Jeffrey Opperman and others argue that managing flood plains to permit flooding can be a better choice than trying to prevent flooding.  Such a strategy switches from trying to prevent disturbances to managing disturbances.  They write that:

Flooding is the most damaging natural disaster worldwide, and the flood-vulnerable population is expected to grow in coming decades (1). Flood risks will likely increase because of both climate change (1) and shifting land uses, such as filling of wetlands and expansion of impervious surfaces, that lead to more rapid precipitation runoff into rivers. …

Flood-control infrastructure (e.g., levees) prevents high flows from entering floodplains, thus diminishing both natural floodstorage capacity and the processes that sustain healthy riverside forests and wetlands. As a result, floodplains are among the planet’s most threatened ecosystems, even though functioning floodplains—those connected to rivers—are among the most valuable ecosystems for supporting biodiversity and providing goods and services to society (6, 7). We propose that a large-scale shift in land use and policy is urgently needed to achieve economically and environmentally sustainable floodplain management. The area of floodplains allowed to perform the natural function of storing and conveying floodwaters must be expanded by strategically removing levees or setting them back from the river.

Floodplain reconnection will accomplish three primary objectives: flood-risk reduction, an increase in floodplain goods and services, and resiliency to potential climate-change impacts. Efforts should focus on strategic reconnection of large areas of floodplain currently used for agriculture, as large-scale reconnection of densely populated floodplains would be considerably more expensive. The changes we propose will confront considerable socioeconomic and political challenges, but we believe these can be overcome by promoting floodplain land uses that are consistent with private ownership and a vibrant agricultural economy. Although our specific recommendations are for the United States, this vision is applicable worldwide. Similar calls for change have been made in several countries [e.g., (8)].

Reduced Risk, Enhanced Benefit

Large-scale floodplain reconnection will reduce flood risk in two ways. First, land use within reconnected floodplains will move toward activities compatible with periodic inundation. Flood-tolerant land uses (described below) will be much less vulnerable to flood damages and therefore less likely to require disaster relief payments. Second, reconnection increases the area available to store and convey floodwaters and can reduce flood risk for nearby areas. In most of the United States, this benefit occurs haphazardly through levee failure. For example, during 2008 floods in the U.S. Midwest, a town was spared because a nearby levee protecting croplands failed, allowing floodwaters to inundate fields and alleviating pressure on the town’s levees (9). But strategic reconnection of floodplains, designed and implemented to maximize public-safety benefits, holds great promise for reducing local and regional flood risk (8). For example, a study of the Illinois River found that reconnection of 8000 hectares (ha) of floodplain would improve protection for 26,000 ha of farmland by halving the probability of inundation from major floods (10).

Large-scale reconnection of floodplains may also increase flexibility and resilience of water-management infrastructure. Globally, thousands of large, multipurpose dams provide (or are being built to provide) flood control and water supply and/or hydropower. The need for partially empty reservoirs (to store floodwaters) must be balanced with the benefits from full reservoirs (water supply, hydropower, recreation, and environmental flows to maintain healthy ecosystems). Climate-change models suggest that many regions of the world will experience increased frequency of both floods and droughts, exacerbating the challenge of balancing these multiple objectives (1). Large-scale floodplain reconnection provides floodwater storage and conveyance, reducing the need for upstream reservoirs to remain partially empty and thus increasing the benefits they could provide when full. Increased resiliency of water management systems through floodplain reconnection is a promising example of ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change.

…
The author’s propose that there approach is demonstrated by the Yolo Bypass in California.

Demonstrating Success: The Yolo Bypass
Flooded Yolo Bypass

Flooded Yolo Bypass

Although to date rarely implemented, this vision of large-scale floodplain reconnection is not unprecedented. California’s Yolo Bypass conveys 80% of Sacramento River floodwaters during large events, routing water away from the city of Sacramento (see figure, page 1487 ) (18). The bypass was created in the 1930s by reconnecting a 24,000-ha floodplain when it became apparent that a “levees only” approach would not sufficiently reduce flood damages (19). By conveying large volumes of floodwaters, the bypass increases the flexibility of California’s water management infrastructure. During a March 1986 flood, the bypass conveyed ~12.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of water, more than three times the total flood-control storage volume in all Sacramento basin reservoirs (3.5 bcm). This occurred during a period when the flood-control system was operating near maximum capacity (20). Without the bypass floodplain, California would need to build massive additional flood-control infrastructure or allocate more of its already strained water-supply storage capacity to flood control.

Two-thirds of the bypass is privately owned, productive agriculture. During inundation, the bypass provides habitat for birds and native fish (18). The bypass provides additional ecosystem services, such as open space for a rapidly growing region, recreation (including revenue-producing duck-hunting clubs), and groundwater recharge (of great value as a water bank during droughts) (14).