Category Archives: Tools

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

Legacy Futures: how past concepts of the future constrain current thinking

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Futurist Jamais Cascio writes on his site Open the Future about how past thinking about the future constraints current thinking.  I saw this first hand when I was working on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios.

Jamais writes:

… we all have this kind of cognitive “legacy code” in our thinking about the future, not just science fiction writers, and it comes from more than just pop-culture media. We get legacy futures in business from old strategies and plans, legacy futures in politics from old budgets and forecasts, and legacy futures in environmentalism from earlier bits of analysis. Legacy futures are rarely still useful, but have so thoroughly colonized our minds that even new scenarios and futures models may end up making explicit or implicit references to them.

… Just like legacy code makes life difficult for programmers, legacy futures can make life difficult or futures thinkers. Not only do we have to describe a plausibly surreal future that fits with current thinking, we have to figure out how to deal with the leftover visions of the future that still colonize our minds. …

We can see it in both visions of a sustainable future reminiscent of 1970s commune life, and visions of a viable future that don’t include dealing with massive environmental disruption.

All of these were once legitimate scenarios for what tomorrow might hold — not predictions, but challenges to how we think and plan. For a variety of reasons, their legitimacy has faded, but their hold on many of us remains.

This leaves us with two big questions:

  • How do we deal with legacy futures without discouraging people from thinking about the future at all?
  • What scenarios considered legitimate today will be the legacy futures of tomorrow?
Visualization

Visualizing the great acceleration – part ii

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The New Scientist adapted graphs from Will Steffen’s and others 2004 Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure for their feature How our economy is killing the Earth.

The three graphs show

  1. first how various drivers of change have accelerated,
  2. how these human changes have driven change in the Earth system, and finally –
  3. when these graphs are combined the accelerating growth of human civilization’s impact on the planet is clear.

(click on graphs for larger versions)

Visualization

Visualizing the great acceleration

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A visualization of the great acceleration from the Encyclopedia of the Earth article Evolution of the human-environment relationship by Costanza and others.


Figure 1. Selected indicators of environmental and human history.

While this depiction of past events is integrative and suggestive of major patterns and developments in the human-environment interaction, it plots only coincidence, not causation, and must, of course, be supplemented with integrated models and narratives of causation.

In this graph, time is plotted on the vertical axis on a log scale running from 100,000 years before present (BP) until now. Technological events are listed on the right side and cultural/political events are listed on the left.

Biologically modern humans arose at least 100,000 yrs BP and probably more than 200,000 – 250,000 yrs BP, but sedentism (and later agriculture) did not start until after the end of the last ice age and the dramatic warming and stabilization of climate that occurred around 10,000 yrs BP, at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary.

Northern Hemisphere temperature can be reconstructed for this entire period from ice core data, combined with the instrument record from 1850 until the present.

Human population fluctuated globally at around 1 million until the advent of agriculture, after which it began to increase exponentially (with some declines as during the black death in Europe) to a current population of over 6 Billion.

Gross World Product (GWP) followed with some lag as people tapped new energy sources such as wind and eventually fossil fuels.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) closely track population, GWP and energy use for the last 150 years.

The start of the “Great Acceleration” after WWII can be clearly seen in the GWP, population, and water withdrawal plots.

The plot for “SE Asian Monsoons” shows the long-term variability in this important regional precipitation pattern.

Patterns in land use are shown as the fraction of land in forest, cropland, and in the “three largest polities”. This area in large “polities” or sovereign political entities has increased over time, with significant peaks at the height of the Roman, Islamic Caliphate, Mongol, and British empires. Currently the three largest polities are Russia, Canada, and China, together covering about 32% of the land surface. At the peak of the British empire in 1925, the 3 largest were Britain, Russia, and France, together covering about 53% of the land surface before the independence of British and French colonies.

Greenlash, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Steve Carpenter on Black Swans

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Ecologist Steve Carpenter follows up on Don Ludwig’s comments on Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s book The Black Swan:

Both of Taleb’s books are highly entertaining. But he over-reaches. There are some odd mistakes. For example, he makes much of a supposed kink in the integral of the Student-t distribution, (where tail probability declines linearly with deviation from the mean) but if you compute the integral using R software there is no kink — so Taleb evidently made a mistake.

Based on web sites, Taleb made his fortune using a kind of option trade. He purchases only options to buy securities at a certain price during a specified time window in the future. So if the security is trading above Taleb’s price, he buys it and then immediately sells at the market price, thereby making a profit. He says that his life involves long periods of time watching while nothing happens and his options to buy expire. But once in a great while he makes a killing. This is exactly like predators who specialize on very large prey, or fishing for big game fish, or hunting for rare but big game animals.

His writings have done a lot to publicize the importance of huge rare events. I think this is a good thing. But also he over-reaches. In some recent interviews he seems to be gloating over the current economic collapse. And (according to economist colleagues) some economists see his ideas as rather routine. Yet he is a provocative and entertaining writer; if sales measure impact he has made a difference.

To me, the most novel feature of the current ongoing collapse is the coincidence of huge shocks with apparently different triggers. Who would have thought that an epidemic of bad loans in America, steep ramp of energy prices, and biofuels tightening the link of energy to food prices would coincide, against a backdrop of lower economic firewalls between countries and increasingly intense food limitation of the human population, with almost no scope for growth of the food supply. It’s a wonderland for testing resilience ideas and a global tragedy, all at the same time.

For a recent talk I re-analyzed a bunch of information from the Millennium Assessment, to try to figure out if humanity had any chance at all for making it through the next few decades.

If everyone shifts trophic status to roughly herbivore level, and we educate all the world’s women to secondary level, we have a chance.

The difference between 12 billion and 9 billion people in 2050 is one child per woman. If all the world’s women were educated to secondary level, fertility would drop by about 1.7 children per woman. And we can probably feed 9 billion herbivorous people, if we can maintain the crop diversity of the major grain crops high enough to avoid catastrophic disease outbreaks.

Energy needs for agriculture and climate change could make it pretty hard to achieve the rosy scenario; climate heating, more variable precipitation and sea level rise have bad implications for agriculture. So the rosy scenario itself may be way out on the tail of the distribution. And what will happen to relations among people as the going gets rough? Human conflict can wreck agriculture. What are the chances that no one will use nuclear weapons? Even a few nukes would take out huge areas of arable land for millennia. And, as Will Rogers said about land, they ain’t makin’ any more of it. A Taleb-like fat tail breakdown seems not so implausible.

Ecological Management, Reorganization

Transfomation of the Klamath

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Many rivers are more valuable without their dams.  Years ago it was unthinkable, but now dams are scheduled to be removed on the Klamath River.  Robert Service writes in Science News (Nov 13) Four Dams to Come Down:

A tentative agreement has been reached to begin decommissioning four dams on the Klamath River, an issue that has been a hotbed of controversy in recent years. The news was announced today by top officials with the U.S. Department of Interior, the states of California and Oregon, and the utility company PacifiCorp. If the deal goes through, it’s expected to mark the largest dam-removal project ever undertaken.

The agreement marks a major shift in bitter battles over water that have racked the Klamath Basin in recent years and often placed scientists in the center (see Science, 4 April 2003, p. 36). PacifiCorp had been seeking to relicense its dams, and the Bush Administration has long opposed dam removal. The Klamath, which flows from the central portion of southern Oregon to the coast of northern California, is the third most important river for salmon in the West behind the Columbia and Sacramento rivers. Dams along the river provide cheap renewable energy, as well as vital irrigation water for farmers. A drought in 2001 led federal officials to shut off irrigation water, a move that sparked widespread conflicts among farmers, fishermen, and conservationists. With irrigation restored the following year, low river levels contributed to a disease outbreak that killed at least 33,000 salmon, according to a 2004 report by the California Department of Fish and Game.

In the NYTimes, Felicity Barringer writes:

All the parties had coped with worst-case situations in the past decade. In 2001, irrigators had their water shut off, crippling agricultural production. In the dry year of 2002, the Interior Department ordered water distributed to irrigators and tens of thousands of salmon in the Klamath died; in 2007, low salmon populations in the Klamath led to sharply curtailed commercial fishing.

“After living through moments that would tax the character of most anyone, the good people of the basin came together,” Mr. Kempthorne said.

…

The agreement also sets out a requirement for several years of scientific analysis of how removing the dams would affect water quality and fish habitat. The aim is to ensure that the environmental impact of the release of sediment would not be worse than leaving the dams in place. The oldest dam was installed more than a century ago.

Gaming, Tools

Software for studying the commons

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Marco Janssen at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU have set up a website (commons.asu.edu) to enable the sharing of software (open source) and  protocols for the lab and field experiments they do to study how people govern common resources.

The group hopes to be able to host more games on common resources on this portal. Making software available as open source software enable them to collaborate with those which are interested also to use it for education and research to improve it over time. At the moment the software is not yet plug and play but various groups with more technical expertise start using it which enable them to solve the glitches.

The protocols for the field experiments (see Cardenas et al. in the “papers” are an easy and reliable place to start.  Marco’s  group is implementing the field experiments also as a web-based games so that it can be used more conviently for larger groups, like in the classroom.

Ecological Management

Illegal logging, black globalization, and undercover environmentalists

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Black globalization is an evocative name for how multi-nationals and mafias can blur together by using violence and global trade to avoid regulation, certification, and quality control. In the New Yorker article The Stolen Forests Raffi Khatchadourian writes about the global trade in illegally logged timber, and how an environmental NGO, the environment investigation agency, collects data to document illegal logging and encourage law enforcement.

Chances are good that if an item sold in the United States was recently made in China using oak or ash, the wood was imported from Russia through Suifenhe. Because as much as half of the hardwood from Primorski Krai is harvested in violation of Russian law—either by large companies working with corrupt provincial officials or by gangs of men in remote villages—it is likely that any given piece of wood in the city has been logged illegally. This wide-scale theft empowers mafias, robs the Russian government of revenue, and assists in the destruction of one of the most precious ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. Lawmakers in the province have called for “emergency measures” to stem the flow of illegal wood, and Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources has said that in the region “there has emerged an entire criminal branch connected with the preparation, storage, transportation, and selling of stolen timber.”

…

A fifth of the world’s wood comes from countries that have serious problems enforcing their timber laws, and most of those countries are also experiencing the fastest rates of deforestation. Until a decade ago, many governments were reluctant to acknowledge illegal logging, largely because it was made possible by the corruption of their own officials. As early as the nineteeneighties, the Philippines had lost the vast majority of its primary forests and billions of dollars to illegal loggers. Papua New Guinea, during roughly the same period, experienced such catastrophic forest loss that it commissioned independent auditors to assess why it was happening; they determined that logging companies were “roaming the countryside with the self-assurance of robber barons; bribing politicians and leaders, creating social disharmony and ignoring laws in order to gain access to, rip out, and export the last remnants of the province’s valuable timber.” In 1998, the Brazilian government announced that most of the country’s logging operations were being conducted beyond the ambit of the law.

…

In 2001, experts with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo coined a phrase, “conflict timber,” to describe how logging had become interwoven with the fighting there. The term is apt for a number of other places. In Burma, stolen timber helps support the junta and the rebels. In Cambodia, it helped fund the Khmer Rouge, one of the most brutal rebel factions in history. Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, distributed logging concessions to warlords and a member of the Ukrainian mafia, and the Oriental Timber Company—known in Liberia as Only Taylor Chops—conducted arms deals on his behalf. The violence tied to Taylor’s logging operations reached unprecedented levels, and in 2003 the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions on all Liberian timber. (China, the largest importer of Liberian timber, tried to block the sanctions.) Shortly afterward, Taylor’s regime collapsed. An American official told me that the U.S. intelligence community “absolutely put the fall of Taylor on the timber sanctions.”