General

Parks and People in Africa

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New Scientist has an interview with Paul van Vlissingen who is the largest private parks operator in Africa. Interesting is his focus on the importance of integrating the people and the park:

No park will survive in the long run unless it is supported by the people living in and around it. They need to know there is something better to do with a zebra than eat it, that they can benefit from protecting it.

Our management philosophy is completely different from anything that has been there before. We say that the villagers in and around our parks should see the park rangers as people who will help them, not as policemen who go round beating up anybody they think is poaching. Our rangers visit the villages and ask if there is anything they can do. There is a lot of physical suffering there: hunger, malaria, AIDS, people being mauled by lions. Our rangers have radio equipment, so they can get doctors or medicine. We offer security, too. In Liuwa, our park in Zambia, there were 60 or 80 murders a year before we went there. In the first year that we were there, that number went down to 26, the next year to two.

Ideas, Reorganization

Response Diversity: Concept is being used

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The 2003 paper Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience in Frontiers in Ecology by Thomas Elmqvist, Carl Folke, Magnus Nyström, Garry Peterson, Jan Bengtsson, Brian Walker and Jon Norberg has been identified by ISI as a Fast breaking paper for August 2005.

The paper introduces the concept of response diversity – the diversity of responses to environmental change among species contributing to the same ecosystem function. Response diversity is particularly important for ecosystem renewal and reorganization following change.

Thomas Elmqvist answers some questions from ISI about the paper on ISI’s site.

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General, Networks, Tools

Building resilience to deal with disasters

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Last week Science had a special issue on Dealing with Disasters with focus on the role of building or conserving resilience. The Tsunami disaster on 26 December 2005 clearly highlighted the vulnerability of coastal communities, and has triggered a global discussion on how to deal with increasingly severe natural and human induced catastrophes. Today humanity increase the risk for extreme events by simultaneously e.g. accelerating climate change, simplifying ecosystems, and concentrating human populations in coastal areas and cities.

In the special issue, Neil Adger and co-authors focus on coastal communities and explore their social-ecological resilience by looking at the diverse mechanisms they have developed for living with, and learning from, change and unexpected shocks. The authors also discuss the complexity of how resilience can be both increased and decreased through the same development. For example, global tourism increases the risk of infectious and vector borne diseases, but enhance resilience through the development of interlinked local communities, improved communications and the growth of national and international NGO network that link societies.

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Ecological Management, General

Global Consequences of Land Use

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Growing world population and increasing wealth are driving demands for more food production. Croplands and pastures occupies today roughly 40% of the land surface and global land cover and is according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) the main modification humanity makes to land cover, and therefore a main driver of ecological change, and biodiversity loss at the global scale.

In a new paper in Science, Jonathan Foley et al. reviews the Global Consequences of Land Use , and discuss consequences of land use on food production, water resources, forests, regional climate and air quality and infectious diseases. They highlight the challenge of managing trade-offs between immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of the biosphere to provide goods and services in the long term.

Current trends in land use allow humans to appropriate an ever-larger fraction of the biosphere’s goods and services while simultaneously diminishing the capacity of global ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and mediate infectious diseases…

…The conclusion is clear: Modern landuse practices, while increasing the short-term supplies of material goods, may undermine many ecosystem services in the long run, even on regional and global scales. Confronting the global environmental challenges of land use will require assessing and managing inherent trade-offs between meeting immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services in the future. Assessments of trade-offs must recognize that land use provides crucial social and economic benefits, even while leading to possible longterm declines in human welfare through altered ecosystem functioning.

…Society faces the challenge of developing strategies that reduce the negative environmental impacts of land use across multiple services and scales while maintaining social and economic benefits.

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General, Reorganization

Why the emu’s survived the human occupation

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In the July 8 edition of Science an interesting study is presented by Miller et al. (2005) and commented by Johnson (2005) on the impact of human activities. Around 45,000 years ago, the human started to occupy Australia, and like similar puzzles in the Americas, the questions is the impact of human activities on the extinction of many large herbivores. Miller et al. (2005) provide “the best evidence to date that human arrival, rather than climate, played the leading role in the extinctions of many large herbivores in Australia. They look especially to the diets of the emu and of the largest flightless but now extinct bird Genyornis.

Genyornis & Emu
Figure compares Genyornis & Emu.

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Ecological Economics, Ideas

Well-Being vs. Wealth (3) – Inclusive Wealth

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This is the third of three posts on Well-Being vs. Wealth (see 1 & 2)

Partha Dasgupta recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives with a number of well know ecologists and economists (Arrow et al 2004. Are we consuming to much? 18(3) 147-172)

They try to answer the question of whether current consumption is sustainable. They consider sustainability to mean that inter-temporal (sum of the discounted value of future) social welfare must not decrease over time. They interpret this to mean that this depends on investment from passive income that increases humanity’s productive capacities – which they term genuine wealth.

This requirement that the productive base be maintained does not necessarily entail maintaining any particular set of resources at any given time. Even if some resources such as stocks of minerals are drawn down along a consumption path, the sustainability criterion could nevertheless be satisfied if other capital assets were accumulated sufficiently to offset the resource decline.

Figure comparing yearly growth in per capita GDP and Genuine Wealth during 1970-2001. Error bars show how estimates of wealth change in response different estimates of the ratio between wealth and GDP. I created the figure based on data in Tables 2 & 3 of Arrow et al 2004.

Arrow Inclusive Wealth Table -> Figure

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Ecological Economics, Ideas

Well-Being vs. Wealth (2) – Natural Capital

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This is the 2nd of three posts on well-being and wealth (see 1 & 3).

While the increase in average human wellbeing over the past century is good, a common worry of ecologists (and ecological economists) is much of this increase is sustainable. The answer to this question depends upon how much these improvements in well-being come from more efficient use of renewable flows versus how much comes from the liquidation of natural capital.

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Ecological Economics, Ideas

Well-Being vs. Wealth (1) – Quality of Life

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Following up on Partha Dasgupta’s book review here is a bit more on inclusive wealth and wellbeing. This is the first of three posts.

GDP vs. Well-being

Earlier this year in World Development Charles Kenny from the World Bank had a paper Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything that Matters is Converging (33(1) 1-19).

In the paper Kenny argues

Summary: Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been converging for some time. The paper turns to a discussion of what might be driving convergence in quality of life even as incomes diverge, and what this might mean for the donor community.

The below graph of trends in the human development index shows the type of pattern Charles Kenny discusses in his paper.

trends in human development index

From UNDP 2004. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2004: Cultural liberty in today’s diverse world (page 134).

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General

Collapse in Ancient America

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The American Scientist and the Scientific American both have an article in their July edition on collapse of ancient societies in America. The Scientific American article is called Simulating Ancient Societies and is written by Tim Kohler, George Gumerman and Bob Reynolds (pp. 76-84). They report on a number of studies using agent-based models to explain the disappearance of a number of Anasazi cites in the South West of the USA. They conclude that it can not just have been a drought that led to the collapse, also cultural factors need to be included to explain the observations. The article in the American Scientist is by Larry Peterson and Gerald Haug (Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization, pp. 322-329). They report on detailed climate recordings from analyzing titanium concentrations in a lake in Venezuela, which is a strong indicator for the weather patterns in the Maya sites, more north in Mexico, Guatamala and Belize. They find a strong correlation between periods of regional collapse and droughts. The spatial pattern of collapse can be affected by the local conditions since people in northern Yucatan had a natural storage of water in caves, which led to a delay of the collapse.

Both cases show that both climate and social factors play an important role to understand collapse of the diverse ancient societies in America.