Category Archives: Tools

Ecological Management, Ecosystem services

Incorporating Ecosystem Services in International Policy

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Researchers from PBL in the Netherlands and IISD in Canada have a released a new report Prospects for Mainstreaming Ecosystem Goods and Services in International Policies, which can be downloaded from the PBL website PDF 2.1 MB.  The report argues that the incorporation of ecosystem services (which they call ecosystem goods and services)  into international policy could reduce poverty.  Some of their findings:

Integrating Ecosystem Goods and Services (EGS) into various international policy domains conveys significant opportunities to contribute to reducing poverty while improving EGS delivery at the local level. Mainstreaming (integration) EGS can become an important element of natural resource and biodiversity policies.

Although most management decisions affecting ecosystem services are made at a local level, these local decisions are conditioned by national and international policies. International policy domains  – including development assistance, trade, climate, and the policies of international financial institutions – provide clear opportunities to mainstream EGS in ways that can support poverty
reduction.

Positive poverty reduction and EGS outcomes cannot be taken for granted; in many cases trade offs between decreasing poverty and EGS delivery will occur. A major challenge is to ensure that loss of EGS at least results in sustainable improvements in social or economic development of the poor.
Consistent policies across scales and policy domains based on analysis of the local situation are necessary to minimize these trade offs and prevent loose-loose situations.

Visualization, Vulnerability

Flooding in Pakistan from the ground and from space

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An aerial view of floodwater covering the land as far as the eye can see, around Taunsa near Multan, Pakistan, Sunday, Aug. 1, 2010. (AP Photo/Khalid Tanveer)

A boy sits on a bed as his family members salvage belongings from their destroyed house in Pabbi, Pakistan on August 5, 2010. (REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood)

From the Big Picture photoblog from the Boston Globe Severe flooding in Pakistan and  Continuing Pakistani floods.  Also National Geographic.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of the Indus River around the city of Jacobabad. Acquired August 18, 2009

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of the Indus River around the city of Jacobabad. Acquired August 17, 2010

Views from space of Flooding in Pakistan from NASA EOS.

Ecosystem services, General, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Reorganization

The “Ctrl+Alt+Del” of Global Change Sciences

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Twitter|@vgalaz
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This is one of those important things that seldom make the headlines. While climate change science has received considerable public attention, especially since the controversies around the IPCC scientific assessments, another fact is seldom, if ever, acknowledged – that  a number of international global change programmes are reorganizing to better match the increasing need for policy-relevant, integrated sustainability science.

The Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) as an example, has been reorganizing its work the last years, to better integrate the natural and social sciences and acknowledge the non-linear features of global change. This integration is to be developed by a range of ESSP associated research programmes and projects, including (prepare for an alphabet soup….) DIVERSITAS, IGBP, IHDP, WCRP,GCP, GECAFS, GWSP , GECHH, START and MAIRS. This paper lays out the thinking behind the ongoing reorganization.

One important change under the ESSP, and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, is the reorganization of the previous programme Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC, lead by the international institutions legend Oran Young), into a new initiative: the Earth System Governance Project (ESG). The ESG, lead by Frank Biermann in Amsterdam, aims to study the role of multilevel governance, institutions and actor-networks in dealing with global environmental change, and includes several international research centres.

In addition, the International Council for Science (ICSU), in partnership with UNESCO and the United Nations University, is launching a new international initiative based on the insights and framework provided by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS). PECS ambition is to address the following question: ‘how do policies and practices affect resilience of the portfolio of ecosystem services that support human well-being and allow for adaptation to a changing environment?’. PECS will provide scientific knowledge to the newly launched “IPCC-like” Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). An article published in PNAS in 2009, lays out the thinking behind the PECS programme.

So, if you ever get the question “where are the scientists that will help save the world”, the answer is easy: it’s ESSP, PECS, DIVERSITAS, ICSU, IPBES, ESG, IHDP, IGBP, WCRP,GCP, GECAFS, ….

Visualization

Johan Rockström at TED on planetary boundaries

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Johan Rockström, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, talks at TED about strategies people can use to transform our civilization (citing work on Latin American agriculture, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Kristianstad in Sweden, and Elinor Ostrom‘s work) to enable the Earth System to remain within planetary boundaries.

Ethan Zuckerman provides a summary of the talk here.

Ecological Management

Learning Leadership Tony Hayward’s Way

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Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, writes about what can be learned about leadership from the failure of BP CEO Tony Hayward to cope with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in Leadership Tips from Tony Hayward (or Not):

The Case of Tony Hayward and the Gulf Oil Spill will be fodder for business school discussions for years to come, as a how-not-to-do-it guide for leadership when disaster strikes.

Mr. Hayward must have studied management in a parallel universe, where a set of anti-rules for bad leadership are taught. Here’s what I imagine are those anti-rules.

* Deny and minimize problems. Drop any mention of the high-minded principles you announced at the beginning of your term, such as safety and a culture that puts people first. Sweep them under the rug as you play down the significance of the crisis. Or better yet, find someone else to blame — a supplier, a business partner, a lowly employee or two.

* Emphasize your own power and importance. Keep yourself front and center all the time. Rarely bring forward the rest of the team, nor even indicate that it’s a team effort.

* Make the story all about you. Talk about your heavy burdens and the costs to your life. When forced to acknowledge the true victims, pay lip service.

* Never apologize, and don’t even pretend to learn from your mistakes. Brush off public disapproval, and persist in the same mindless behavior that provoked criticism in the first place.

* Hang onto your job even when it’s clear you should go, in order to negotiate the highest severance package, whether you deserve it or not. Don’t even consider a deferred resignation to allow for smooth suggestion. Cling to power, and keep everyone guessing to the very end.

Just reverse these rules, and the outcome could have been different. Good leaders must face facts, prepare for the worst case scenario, draw on the whole team, show constant concern for stakeholders, acknowledge mistakes and not make the same ones twice, and do the honorable thing if getting in the way of company progress. BP, in fact, mobilized thousands of employees and former employees from around the world to work on the Gulf Oil spill; the saga of Mr. Hayward now seems peripheral to the main action.

Visualization

Mapping the worlds rivers

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Bernhard Lehner my geography colleague from Burnside Hall at McGill has recently released HydroSHEDS a new global map of the worlds rivers.  Maps based upon this data were featured in the March issue of National Geographic.

HydroSHEDS is:

a new hydrographic mapping product that provides river and watershed information for regional and global-scale applications in a consistent format. It offers a suite of geo-referenced data sets (vector and raster) at various scales, including river networks, watershed boundaries, drainage directions, and flow accumulations. HydroSHEDS is based on high-resolution elevation data obtained during a Space Shuttle flight for NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).

It can be downloaded from USGS at HydroSHEDS Data.

Ecological Management, Networks, Visualization

Livelihood landscapes – disentangling occupational diversity for natural resource management

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A special contribution from Josh Cinner, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (see previous posts on his work here and here) and Örjan Bodin from the Stockholm Resilience Centre on their recent paper, Livelihood diversification in tropical coastal communities: a network-based approach to analyzing ‘livelihood landscapes’, which appeared in the August 11, 2010 issue of PLoS ONE, and is available free online.  They write:

In many developing countries, an individual household will often engage in a range of economic sectors, such as fishing, farming, and tourism. These diverse ‘livelihood portfolios’ are thought to help to spread risk and make households more resilient to shocks in a particular sector. Whether and how local people engage in multiple occupations has important implications for how people use and manage natural resources and is of particular relevance to people involved in managing natural resources. But for scientists, donors, and policy makers, unraveling the complexity of livelihoods in developing countries has been extremely challenging.

In our recent paper in PLoS ONE, we developed a novel method for exploring complex household livelihood portfolios.  We used a network-based approach to examine how the role of natural resource-based occupations changes along spectra of socioeconomic development and population density in 27 communities across 5 western Indian Ocean countries (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Kenyan livelihood landscape maps at various scales of social organization: a) Shela, Kenya; b) an aggregation of peri-urban sites in Kenya; c) an aggregation of rural sites in Kenya; d) all sites in Kenya.

In Figure 1 the links between occupations are indicated by arrows. The size of a node indicates the relative involvement in that occupational sector (larger node means more people are involved). The direction of the arrows indicates the priority of ranking. Thus an arrow into an occupation indicates that the occupation was ranked lower than the occupation the arrow came from. The thickness of the arrows corresponds to the proportion of households being engaged in the, by themselves, higher ranked occupation that are also engaged in the lower ranked occupation. The proportion of the node that is shaded represents the proportion of people that ranked that occupation as a primary occupation.

We found:

  • an increase in household-level specialization with development for most (but not all) occupational sectors, including fishing and farming, but that at the community-level, economies remained diversified.
  • We also found that households in less developed communities often share a common occupation, whereas that patterns is less pronounced in more developed communities. This may have important implications for how people both perceive and solve conflicts over natural resources.

Finally, our network-based approach to exploring livelihood portfolios can be utilized for many more types of analyses conducted at varying scales, ranging from small villages to states and regions.

Ecological Economics, Tools

IUCN’s Guidebook to the Green Economy

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IUCN has just published a guidebook to the green economy. It can be freely downloaded from their website (pdf 490 kb). Guidebook presents an overview of key ideas and themes surrounding discusisons of the Green Economy. They write:

The guidebook is structured as an annotated compilation of relevant papers, reports, and articles that can be freely accessed on the internet. It is not intended to serve as a complete bibliography of available literature, but more as an overview of the different concepts and ideas that animate ongoing discussions on the topic of the Green Economy.

It includes the concept of resilience but points to the secondary literature (it does provide a link the the RA’s website). The Guidebook writes:

The concept of resilience is becoming increasingly used in both natural and social sciences. It is highly relevant to economics in general and the Green Economy concept in particular. The resilience of an economy is intimately linked to its sustainability. The concept of resilience is most appropriately used for analyzing various systems in an effort to assess its capacity to absorb shocks without resulting in a change of state. From an ecological perspective, emphasis is placed on the role of biodiversity in sustaining ecosystem functions (Hooper, 2005). In an economic perspective, it is particularly useful for analyzing vulnerability and dependence of societies on their natural resources base and the capacity that local economies have for ensuring that they are resilient to disturbances (e.g. climate change; market fluctuations, etc.) (WRI, 2008). The notion of resilience also highlights the importance of anticipating potential thresholds and tipping points for a global economy that is expanding within a finite biosphere is faced with (Rockström et al., 2009).

Ecosystem services, Visualization

Aquatic Dead Zones

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      I’ve published several links to global maps of coastal hypoxia. Now, NASA has produced a new map of global hypoxic zones, based on Diaz and Rosenberg’s . Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems. in Science, 321(5891), 926-929.  NASA’s EOS Image of the Day writes on  Aquatic Dead Zones.

      Red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet’s dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, but their size is unknown.

      It’s no coincidence that dead zones occur downriver of places where human population density is high (darkest brown). Some of the fertilizer we apply to crops is washed into streams and rivers. Fertilizer-laden runoff triggers explosive planktonic algae growth in coastal areas. The algae die and rain down into deep waters, where their remains are like fertilizer for microbes. The microbes decompose the organic matter, using up the oxygen. Mass killing of fish and other sea life often results.