Category Archives: Tools

General, Networks, Visualization, Vulnerability

Resilience networks in global environmental change science

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

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

network of coauthorship

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

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

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

Citations within resilience domain
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Design, General

Why green building has spread

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The built environment is a major part of humanity’s ecological footprint. The design of buildings, the materials they use, their interaction with their environments, and how they shape human behaviour have substantial impacts on urban ecology. The growth of the human population (7-11 billion by 2050) and the reduction of household size (fewer people per house) combine to suggest that people will need to build a huge number of new buildings (perhaps the same number as those already built) to house humanity in the coming decades. In this context the spread of green building has the potential to have a major impact on humanity’s ecological footprint.

The Harvard Business Review (June 2006) article Building the Green Way explains why green building practices have entered the mainstream. This article is interesting both for its location, and that it speculates on why green building has entered the mainstream. Hopefully, other green design and consumption approaches can learn from the normalizing of green building.

In June 2005, mayors from 50 large cities around the world met at the United Nations World Environment Day conference in San Francisco and signed the Urban Environmental Accords, which set out 21 sustainable-living actions for each city to complete by 2012. As part of the accords, the mayors pledged to mandate green rating standards for all new municipal buildings in their respective cities.

…

Before 2000, companies generally regarded green buildings as interesting experiments but unfeasible projects in the real business world. Since then, several factors have caused a major shift in thinking.

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General, Visualization

Visualizing Global Urbanisation

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Urban Growth RatesThe BBC website has a visualization of the growth of global cities showing the growth of cities of more than 5 million people as part of their coverage of the World Urban Forum.

The coverage includes other interesting articles, such as a multimedia profile of a few of the million people who live in the slum of Dharavi in downtown Bombay, and Finding green in the concrete jungle, a look at how air pollution in cities compares in rural areas.

Fuel use, intimately connected to urban pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, demonstrates exquisitely the problems in trying to compare the ecological footprint of the rural and urban dweller.

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) focused much of its Human Development Report on China.

“Rural residents consume less than 40% of the commercial energy used by their urban counterparts,” it concluded.

Tokyo skyline

Tokyo’s population and economy have grown while air quality decreased.

“However, if biomass [principally wood-burning] is included, the average person in the countryside uses nearly one-third more energy than a city dweller.”

So the rural resident apparently contributes more to global climate change than the urban citizen – but the equation hinges on how the energy is produced.

If “commercial energy” used in cities – principally electricity – is derived from renewable sources or nuclear stations, the urban dweller wins the eco-prize hands down. But if the rural citizen burns nothing but trees and always replaces them, he or she becomes “carbon neutral” and scoops the award.

…

In London and Tokyo, air quality has improved over the last 50 years. In Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, it has gone down, though there are signs of improvement elsewhere in the developing world.

“It has happened in Delhi, for example, where there has been a huge improvement in air quality by substituting liquefied petroleum gas [LPG] for diesel in vehicles,” observes John Harrington.

“Partly it is just that as cities become richer they can clean their act up, but it’s also how vocal the middle classes become, which in India counts in a way it doesn’t yet in China.

The coverage also includes less interesting articles. One disappointingly boring, and strikingly disconnected from the other articles is a collection of perspectives on the urban world in 2050 from urbanization experts. Their views of 2050 seem to more represent cities today, rather than a global view of what cities could become.

Tools

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – Urban Solutions

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Vancouver-WUFPrior to the WUF meeting in Vancouver, UN-HABITAT organized a global internet discussion – Habitat Jam – on urban problems to bring ideas from the public to those preparing for WUF3. According to the organizers, slum dwellers in poor countries were most active in this online forum. Following the discussion organizers collated the ideas to produce a workbook (pdf) and a website. Below are some of the “70 actionable ideas” that emerged from the discussion (and links to more details):

Idea: 4.3 Building Community Resiliency
Community resilience can be built using participatory tools that enable community members to map their own hazards and risks and mobilize critical resources to respond to those risks.

Natural disasters are occurring with increased frequency and their financial, social and environmental impacts are rising exponentially. The increased risk of disaster poses challenges to local authorities and their citizens. Community members are the first respondents in emergencies and it is their capacity to cope with impacts of disasters that often determines the risk to life and property. Simple knowledge of “Dos” and “Don’ts” before and after disasters can help improve community response. Post-disaster rehabilitation by rebuilding and reconstruction is not enough to build resiliency.
Idea: 5.3 Cities as Ecosystems
Local governments are figuring out how to treat the natural and built environment, and the humans that interact with it, as one interconnected “city ecosystem”.

Cities are organisms, consuming resources and discharging wastes at ever higher rates as their populations explode.Treating the city as an ecosystem recognizes natural limits. BedZED in the UK, Durban,South Africa and Auroville,India are examples of an approach that treats a city as a part of, rather than apart from, the natural world.

The ‘city as ecosystem’ research was started by UNEP, codified in the Melbourne Principles and the Cities As Sustainable Ecosystems (CASE) approach. CASE is the multidisciplinary study of urban and economic systems and their linkages with natural systems. It focuses on multiple spatial and temporal scales; emphasizes the systems approach; and takes account of techniques such as the ecological footprint, human ecosystem framework, urban metabolism and ecosystem services focus.

Idea: 1.4 Urban Agriculture – A Poverty Reduction Strategy
In poor communities and informal settlements, city councils can promote urban agriculture as a means to fight malnutrition and hunger, enhance the environment and create jobs.

Although growing food in cities is an ancient practice,itskey role in reducing poverty is gaining recognition today. In Kampala, Uganda, the city council, NGOs, research groups,national and international agencies joined forces in a unique collaborative process to legitimize and safeguard growing food and keeping livestock in the city. Kampala’s set of supportive bylaws governing urban agriculture is a model for other cities grappling with this contentious issue. Now the Ugandan government is adopting a national urban agriculture policy.

Idea: 1.11 Ecological Sanitation: Public Toilets in Slums
Sanitation for people living in slums is a criticalproblem. Ecosan toilets, a system using source separation, not only provides sanitation services at low cost to poor inhabitants, it also recovers waste for reuse in agriculture.

The concept behind ecological sanitation (ecosan) is that sanitation problems could be solved more sustainably and efficiently if the resources contained in excretaand wastewater were recovered and used rather than discharged into water bodies and the surrounding environment. The sanitary systems that are used today are based on modern misconception that human excreta are simply wastes with no useful purpose and must be disposed of. Ideally, ecological sanitation systems enable a complete recovery of nutrients in household wastewater and their reuse in agriculture. In this way, they help preserve soil fertility and safeguard long-term food security, whilst minimizing the consumption and pollution of water resources.

Idea: 6.5 Attractive, Affordable Transit
The TransMilenio Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) System in Bogotá, Colombia provides equitable, clean and efficient transportation and has transformed the city from a place designed for cars to one designed for people.

In Bogotá, people happily choose to take the bus knowing their trip will be cheaper, faster, safer and cleaner than taking the same trip by car. The TransMilenio bus rapid transit system is a low-cost network of high efficiency buses that makes public transport the choice of the people. Cutting car use reduces energy consumption and air pollution,and makes cities more livable.

Scenarios, Tools

Reporting Futures

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Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging, has an good post on his weblog Open the Future on what journalists need to know to report on studies of the future.

1. Nobody can predict the future. This should go without saying, but too often, reports about trends or emerging science and technology tell us what will happen instead of what could happen. In fact, most futurists and foresight consultants will avoid making any predictive claims, and you should take them at their word; any futurist who tells you that something is inevitable probably has something to sell.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. The corollary to #1, be on the lookout for people who saw early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an “overnight success” worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and “bolt from the blue” changes have been on someone’s foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that “nobody expected,” look for the people who actually did expect it — chances are, they’ll be able to tell you quite a bit about why and how it took place.

3. Even when it’s fast, change feels slow. It’s tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel “shocked” or “overwhelmed.” In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren’t thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

4. Most trends die out. Just because something is popular or ubiquitous today doesn’t mean it will be so in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There’s every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon — and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

5. The future is usually the present, only moreso. Conversely, don’t expect changes to happen quickly and universally. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work — even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

6. There are always options. We may not like the choices we have, but the future is not written in stone. Don’t let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking about what might prevent it from happening.

7. Dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years. A favorite pundit cliche is the “dinosaurs vs. mammals” comparison, where dinosaurs are big, lumbering and doomed, while mammals are small, clever and poised for success. In reality, dinosaurs ruled the world for much, much longer than have mammals, and even managed to survive a planetary disaster by evolving into birds. When a futurist uses the dinosaurs/mammals cliche, that’s your sign to investigate why the “dinosaur” company/ organization/ institution may have far greater resources and flexibility than you’re being led to believe.

8. Gadgets are not futurism.Don’t get too enamored of “technology” as the sole driver of change. What’s important is how we use technology to engage in other (social, political, cultural, economic) activities. Don’t be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays — ask why people would want it and what they’d do with it.

9. “Sports scores and stock quotes” was 1990s futurist-ese for “I have no idea;” “social networking and tagging” looks to be the 2000s version. Technology developers, industry analysts and foresight consultants rarely want to tell you that they don’t know how or why a new invention will be used. As a result, they’ll often fall back on claims about utility that are easily understood, familiar to the journalist, and almost certainly wrong.

10. “Technology” is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. This means that, very often, the real utility of a new technology won’t emerge for a few years after it’s introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a “new technology.” Those real uses will often surprise — and sometimes upset — the creators of the technology.

11. The future belongs to the curious. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don’t just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don’t just ask their competitors; their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers, the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

12. “The future is process, not a destination.” — Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story — people won’t reach the “future” and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

When talking with a futurist, then, don’t just ask what could happen. The right question is always “…and what happens then?”

Bruce Sterling follows up in the comments with his revisions:

1. The future belongs to the open-minded. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don’t just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don’t just ask their competitors (((social opponents))); their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers (((academics, regulators))), the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. Be on the lookout for the people who saw (((and published))) early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an “overnight success” worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and “bolt from the blue” changes have been on someone’s foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that “nobody expected,” look for the people who actually did expect it — they didn’t “predict the future,” because that’s impossible, but they will be able to tell you many useful and cogent things about why and how it took place.

3. The future is usually the present, only more so. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work — even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

4. There will always be avant-gardes and backwaters. Important changes can’t happen quickly and universally. Any important social change will create at least some reactionary counterforce.

5. There are always options. We may not like the choices we (((seem to have now, but new situations create new choices.))) The future is not written in stone. Don’t let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking (((what people would do next after utopia arrives.)))

6. “Technology” is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. (((The most important technologies are the huge, old, taken-for-granted technologies already massively integrated into everyday life.))) The real utility of a new technology won’t emerge for a few years after it’s introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a “new technology.” Those real uses will often surprise — and sometimes upset — the creators of the technology.

7. Even when it’s fast, change feels slow. It’s tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel “shocked” or “overwhelmed.” In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren’t thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

8. Gadgets are not futurism. Don’t be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays just because they make such good copy. (((Ask the full set of journalistic questions of a gizmo: who, what, when, where, how, why? Why would people would want such a thing? Which people, which demographic? What do they plan to do with it? What’s the killer application? Where’s the revenue stream? What’s the track record of the people introducing this innovation? Does it do anything genuinely novel?)))

9. Most trends die out. (((No tree grows to the sky.))) Just because some trend is (((sexy))) today doesn’t mean it will stay sexy in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There’s every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon — and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

10. “The future is a process, not a destination.” — Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story — people won’t reach the “future” and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

Design, Vulnerability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Design, General

From Science Fiction to Viridian Design: Guardian Interview with Bruce Sterling

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The science fiction writer turned design theorist, Bruce Sterling is interviewed in the Guardian (June 1/2006) about the future of green design.

TG: In your book Shaping Things, you describe climate change as the result of technology pioneers like Edison and Ford. Yet you say the only solution is to press forward with technology and shift to a new type of society.

BS: Not many science-fiction writers write industrial design manifestoes, but I was commissioned by Peter Lunenfeld of Arts Centre College of Design in California, where I was visionary in residence. Why do you want a sci-fi writer in a design school? You want someone who’ll think outside the box. The book talks about a new tech phenomenon with six or seven terms attached: the Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computation, Everyware, Ambient Findability, Spimes (my term).

My own theory, which has gone into Shaping Things, is the key element is the identity for objects. It’s putting tags on things that allow them to interact with digital networks. That is the key concept around which other things accrue. My goal in this is sustainability. I want us to invent a better way to put our toys away. We are emitting too much junk. Google is good at sorting garbage. We could do something similar if we tagged our garbage, basically, everything we make.

Ideally, we need to tag an object before it exists. We need to tag the blueprints and then the manufactured object. Then, when it’s junk, we need to read it, know where it goes, have it ripped apart and recycled.

TG: Where does the concept of Spimes come from?

BS: Spimes was one of those spontaneous neologisms I came up with at a conference, a contraction of “space” and “time.” The idea is you no longer look at an object as an artefact, but as a process. A modern bottle of wine in one sense does exactly the same as the clay jug and stopper that the ancient Greeks used. On the other hand, it is now mass produced industrial glass, with a machine-applied label containing a barcode and a host of other information, even an associated web page. These invite you to do more than just drink the wine. These innovations link this product into a wider relationship.

Yet the moment the bottle is empty, we make a subtle semantic reclassification and designate it “trash”. The logistics of manufacture and distribution will already have tracked the bottle from factory, to warehouse, to store. But the relationship is not a closed loop. The moment you buy the wine, it’s your responsibility. The onus is on you to recycle it, or it’ll spend eternity in landfill. We really should be thinking about the trajectory all this stuff follows. We are in trouble as a culture because we don’t have a strong idea of where we are in time, and what we might need to do to deserve a future.

Amazon.com, for instance, allows you to study lots of information about physical products (books) without needing to consider the physical artefact itself. Or bookcrossing.com, a site where you can track physical books from reader to reader. Wheresgeorge.com does the same with dollar bills. Spimes are both the physical object and the metadata related to that object. Then, as with Amazon’s reviews, we can start adding correspondence on the nature of objects, creating a forum to discuss all our stuff and what to do with it.

TG: So how do RFID (radio frequency identification) chips relate to this?

BS: To study spimes we need to be able to track them. RFID chips are the next evolutionary step from bar codes. They allow objects to have an identity that can be easily read. They were invented by the Pentagon’s shipping, tracking and logistics agency, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, inspired by some work at MIT. Unlike the barcode, which needs to be scanned up-close, you can just ping a whole warehouse, or delivery truck or cargo container, and an RFID scanner will simultaneously detect and log everything in there. You also see them in swipe cards. These tags make it extremely easy to assign identities to objects and connect them to databases.

Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Vulnerability

Ecology and Development: the MA & MDGs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecological Management, Regime Shifts, Vulnerability

Does Rainfall Increase in the Sahel Mask a Degradation Trend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design, Tools

Designing Resilient Software?

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Daniel Jackson has written an article, Dependable Software by Design, on how software design tools can be used to improve the resilience of software. In Scientific American he wrote:

An architectural marvel when it opened 11 years ago, the new Denver International Airport’s high-tech jewel was to be its automated baggage handler. It would autonomously route luggage around 26 miles of conveyors for rapid, seamless delivery to planes and passengers. But software problems dogged the system, delaying the airport’s opening by 16 months and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Despite years of tweaking, it never ran reliably. Last summer airport managers finally pulled the plug–reverting to traditional manually loaded baggage carts and tugs with human drivers. The mechanized handler’s designer, BAE Automated Systems, was liquidated, and United Airlines, its principal user, slipped into bankruptcy, in part because of the mess.

…Such massive failures occur because crucial design flaws are discovered too late. Only after programmers began building the code–the instructions a computer uses to execute a program–do they discover the inadequacy of their designs. Sometimes a fatal inconsistency or omission is at fault, but more often the overall design is vague and poorly thought out. As the code grows with the addition of piecemeal fixes, a detailed design structure indeed emerges–but it is a design full of special cases and loopholes, without coherent principles. As in a building, when the software’s foundation is unsound, the resulting structure is unstable.

…Now a new generation of software design tools is emerging. Their analysis engines are similar in principle to tools that engineers increasingly use to check computer hardware designs. A developer models a software design using a high-level (summary) coding notation and then applies a tool that explores billions of possible executions of the system, looking for unusual conditions that would cause it to behave in an unexpected way. This process catches subtle flaws in the design before it is even coded, but more important, it results in a design that is precise, robust and thoroughly exercised. One example of such a tool is Alloy, which my research group and I constructed. Alloy (which is freely available on the Web) has proved useful in applications as varied as avionics software, telephony, cryptographic systems and the design of machines used in cancer therapy.

Daniel Jackson has also recently written a book Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis. The book’s website describes the book:

Daniel Jackson introduces a new approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach–which Jackson calls “lightweight formal methods” or “agile modeling”–takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. The designer can use automated analysis not only to correct errors but also to make models that are more precise and elegant. This approach, Jackson says, can rescue designers from “the tarpit of implementation technologies” and return them to thinking deeply about underlying concepts.

via ThreeQuarksDaily