Vulnerability

Peter Hessler’s Sichuan Postcard: After the Earthquake

3 Comments

earthquake

Yang Weihua/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

Peter Hessler, author of the excellent book Oracle Bones and a former English teacher in Sichuan province in China, writes in the New Yorker about the response to the recent Chinese Earthquake Sichuan Postcard: After the Earthquake:

This week, it’s unlikely that there will be much good news coming from China. But the rescue crews will, one hopes, make progress, and there may be reason for some Sichuan-style optimism. First, it seems that the Chinese government has been relatively open about news coverage, and it doesn’t seem to be restricting e-mails and phone calls. Second, the scale of destruction could easily have been worse. The epicenter was near the city of Dujiangyan, which in May of 2001 started construction on a massive hydroelectric dam on the Min River. Big dams are common in China, and Dujiangyan was one of the nation’s “Ten Key Projects” aimed at producing electricity and better water supplies.

By 2003, there were signs that the government was quietly expanding the project, and silt had begun to accumulate at a second location on the river. Dujiangyan is home to a local irrigation system that has functioned for more than two thousand years and has been declared a World Heritage site; it would have been effectively destroyed by the new dam. The city’s World Heritage Office opposed the project, contacting journalists from Chinese publications. The press was allowed to report with relative openness, in part because it portrayed the dam as destructive of cultural heritage. But one of the local entities that openly opposed the dam was the Dujiangyan Seismological Bureau.

In August of 2003, dam construction was forced to stop. In the history of the People’s Republic, this represented the first time that an engineering project on such a scale had been cancelled because of public pressure. (For a full account, see “Unbuilt Dams,” by Andrew C. Mertha and William R. Lowry, published in the October, 2006, issue of Comparative Politics.) Today, with Dujiangyan in ruins and the government struggling to respond, there’s some small consolation in the fact that at least there wasn’t another major dam on the site. And maybe later, after the emergency has passed, officials will remember the importance of the press and the seismological experts in stopping the dam. Sichuan’s greatest resource has always been its people, and sometimes the government just needs to listen to them.

Hessler also wrote about China’s Instant Cities in last year’s National Geographic, and on What’s Next on development in China in the May 2008 issue.

General

Using Disasters for Systemic Change

1 Comment

The adaptive cycle concept propose that crisis is followed by a period of reorganization that looks for new forms of organization.  Often these periods rely of plans developed prior to crisis, and are helped by links to areas unaffected by crisis and legacies of past systems that preserve resources during a crisis, for more see Panarchy on RA website or on WorldChanging (Gunderson and Holling eds 2002).

On WorldChanging Matthew Waxman writes about Using Disasters for Systemic Change:

What if we could plan to use the future’s inevitable disasters as opportunities for change and innovation?The planning policy would focus on finding sustainable solutions to broken or destroyed systems. Disaster in this way is used to jump-start changes in infrastructure and thus alter daily habits, patterns, and preferences on everything from energy consumption to transportation, housing and health, economic development, community and civic facilities, open space, food, and lifestyle.

Changes would be contingent on disasters occurring, so this type of planning policy wouldn’t necessitate immediate results without the destructive context – as would planning codes, LEED guidelines or simply better design practices – but it would produce readily-available plans and design-response focused on long-term, large-scale changes to infrastructural systems beyond the scope of a single, smaller-scale project. In the long-view I believe this would speed up the eventual implementation of large-scale change.

Design

Robotic Jellyfish

Leave a comment

I’m not sure if their an art project or practical tool but these autonomous biomorphic Robot Jellyfish are interesting. From National Geographic:

Robot Jellyfish

Propelled by flexible, electrically driven tentacles, robotic jellyfish swim at the Hannover Fair.

Using a type of “swarm intelligence,” the Festo company’s so-called AquaJellies set their own courses and can come together or avoid each other as needed. The robots “talk” via light pulses underwater and via radio at the surface.

On Technium Kevin Kelly writes:

One one level, these autonomous robotic jelly fish illuminated the mechanism by which real jellyfish swim. … The parallels in their motions — clearly visible in the video — feel so organic that we immediately assign them life-like adjectives.

I think we are primed to find lifelikeness in machines. E.O. Wilson calls it our biophilia — our intense attraction to living things. As we design machines to approach the complexity of organisms and mimic their behavior (as these do), we will be very quick to include them in our love.

Continue reading →

Ecological Economics, Ecosystem services

For climate change – Meat matters more than miles

1 Comment

food miles - percent impactA new paper Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews (Environ. Sci. Technol.,42(10), 3508–3513, DOI: 10.1021/es702969f ) conducted a life cycle analysis of the greenhouse gas outputs of foods in the USA (but they didn’t manage to include the impacts of land cover and soil change).

I expect weightings would probably not change a lot if other environmental impacts, such as declines in other ecosystem services, were considered as well. However, I expect they would change a lot in countries with less intensive agriculture. It would be interesting to see someone do the math for these cases.

Environmental Science and Technology news, reports on a paper in Do food miles matter?:

It’s how food is produced, not how far it is transported, that matters most for global warming, according to new research published in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es702969f). In fact, eating less red meat and dairy can be a more effective way to lower an average U.S. household’s food-related climate footprint than buying local food, says lead author Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University.

Weber and colleague Scott Matthews, also of Carnegie Mellon, conducted a life-cycle assessment of greenhouse gases emitted during all stages of growing and transporting food consumed in the U.S. They found that transportation creates only 11% of the 8.1 metric tons (t) of greenhouse gases (in CO2 equivalents) that an average U.S. household generates annually as a result of food consumption. The agricultural and industrial practices that go into growing and harvesting food are responsible for most (83%) of its greenhouse gas emissions.

For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household’s 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home. By comparison, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon of gasoline for 12,000 miles per year (the U.S. average) produces about 4.4 t of CO2. Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year, Weber says.

A relatively small dietary shift can accomplish about the same greenhouse gas reduction as eating locally, Weber adds. Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year.

Several other recent studies have analyzed particular foods and poked holes in the food mile concept. For example, it can be more energy efficient for a British household to buy tomatoes or lettuce from Spain than from heated greenhouses in the U.K.

The new work expands on those studies by providing a comprehensive look at the U.S. food supply. Weber used an input–output life-cycle assessment, which counts not only the CO2 produced when food is shipped but also all greenhouse gases, including methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), emitted from farm production. This means counting all the way back to the fossil fuels used to manufacture fertilizer and tractors.

“There is more [total] greenhouse gas impact from methane and nitrous oxide than from all the CO2 in the supply chain,” Weber says. In large part, he adds, this is because N2O and CH4 emission in the production of red meat “blows away CO2”. Cows burp CH4, and growing their feed uses large amounts of fertilizers that are converted to N2O by soil bacteria.

Update: Simon Donner on Maribo also discusses this paper.

Ecosystem services, Reorganization

Using local ecological knowledge to rebuild ecological infrastructure

Leave a comment

milpa terraces: http://www.goldmanprize.org/slideshow/user/289/767Jesús León Santos won a 2008 Goldman environmental prize for his work on land renewal by reinventing milpa agriculture. The prize website has a video on his work, and his speech on accepting the award is on youtube with English subtitles).

The improvements in crop yield and other ecosystem services from local investment in soil and ecological infrastructure sound similar to what Pretty et al found in their 2005 paper in in Environmental Science and Technology Resource Conserving Agricultural increases yields in developing countries.

In the May 13, 2008 International Herald Tribune Elisabeth Malkin writes about his work with the NGO he helped found in Using ancient ways to reclaim Mexico’s barren lands:

León and the farmers’ group he helped found, the Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca, or Cedicam, have reached into the past to revive pre-Hispanic practices. To arrest erosion, Cedicam has planted trees, mostly native ocote pines, a million in the past five years, raised in the group’s own nurseries.Working communally, the villagers built stone walls to terrace the hillsides and they dug long ditches along the slopes to halt the wash of rainwater that dragged the soil from the mountains. Trapped in canals, the water seeps down to recharge the water table and restore dried-up springs.

As the land has begun to produce again, León has reintroduced the traditional milpa, a plot where corn, climbing beans and squash grow together. The pre-Hispanic farming practice fixes nutrients in the soil and creates natural barriers to pests and disease.

Along the way, the farmers have modernized the ancient techniques.

León has encouraged farmers to use natural compost as fertilizer, introduced crop rotation and improved on traditional seed selection.

León plows with oxen by choice. A tractor would pack down the soil too firmly.

In the eight villages in the region where Cedicam has worked, yields have risen about three or fourfold, to about 1 to 1.5 metric tons per hectare, León said. Unlike the monocultures of mechanized farming, these practices help preserve genetic diversity.

León’s work is a local response to the dislocation created by open markets in the countryside.

“The people here are saying that we have to find a way to produce our food and meet our basic needs and that we can do it in a way that is sustainable,” said Phil Dahl-Bredine, a Catholic lay missionary and onetime farmer who has worked with Cedicam for seven years and written a book about the region.

The key to determining the project’s success, and that of similar projects in these highlands, will be if it can produce enough to sustain families during the bad years, said James Reynolds, a specialist in desertification at Duke University who visited Cedicam in April. The land of the Mixteca region is so degraded that “the overall potential is not that high,” he said.

Over the past two decades, the Mexican government has steadily dismantled most support for poor farmers, arguing that they are inefficient. About two-thirds of all Mexican corn farmers, some two million people, are small-scale producers, farming less than 5 hectares, or 12 acres, but they harvest less than a quarter of the country’s production.

After winning the award Jesús León Santos was interviewed by TierraAmérica:

TIERRAMÉRICA: — What does it mean to you and your organization to win the Goldman Prize?

JESÚS LEÓN SANTOS: — It has been the most important thing that has happened to me in a long time. This unites us with people who are conserving the environment and makes us stronger. The 150,000 dollars will go to a fund in my organization to continue developing our work. Imagine that! It represents the budget of an entire year. We manage some 100,000 dollars that come from European organizations.

TA: — To come up with and develop projects like yours in a poor area, with degraded land and high rates of emigration is an uphill battle. How did you begin?

JLS: — I became involved in this because when I was a boy I saw that we faced many difficulties. My parents sent me to look for firewood and I had to walk hours and hours because it was very scarce. The trees had disappeared. We thought that the Mixteca had to be green again, like it was in the past, and those were really only words because we didn’t know what to do. Then there came clarity, and 25 years later we see that we have achieved what we never imagined possible.

TA: — What are the most evident changes?

JLS: — Many people who come to the parcels say that it’s a paradise, and then I say that it is a paradise that has been created little by little. Today we enjoy the wood and the birds that for years we didn’t hear singing because there were no trees. The soil is beginning to change. When one walks through the trees, the sound made by our feet on the leaves was something we had never heard before.

TA: — What role did the pre-Hispanic techniques for cultivation and land conservation play in these achievements?

JLS: — In addition to planting trees and creating ditches to retain rainwater, we pushed the recovery of traditional farming systems, the “milpa”, which consists of planting maize, gourds, beans and others on the same parcel, using our seeds from our own harvests, without buying anything. This means the soils don’t deteriorate and it improves fertility.

Unlike monoculture, these systems not only provide a balanced diet, they conserve soil fertility. In the 1970s and 1980s, when they began using fertilizers and improved seeds here, this knowledge of our peoples was pushed out. But we have recovered it.

TA: — The genetically modified seed companies are asking Mexico to allow its maize varieties to be planted here because they say they are much more productive. What do you think?

JLS: — The GM seeds can be monsters in comparison to what nature has done. We can’t be playing with what is natural, and those companies are truly creating monsters that attack life, not just the native seeds but also ourselves. What I’d tell the seed companies is that they carry out campaigns that are not ethical, because they lie and they bribe governments.

TA: — But each year there are more and more GM crops in the world and their promoters argue that this technology has come to stay.

JLS: — To everyone who thinks that our ancient systems are a matter of romantic ideals we say that we are on the right path. What they are proposing is a disaster. When those modified seeds can’t be controlled, they can cause a global catastrophe.

Adaptation, Greenlash, Scenarios

Scenarios and Resilience

1 Comment

People or organizations can focus their effort on a narrow goal, or they can diversify the uses of resources to explore and innovate. It is hard to do both at the same time. This pattern arises in politics as well as in corporations, agencies or academic institutions. When politics of democracies begin to lock into a stationary state, party positions are caricatures, messages are simplistic, campaigns are tightly scripted, media events are rigidly coordinated, and big donors demand loyal candidates. These conditions do not encourage broad, creative, inventive discussions of the most important problems of the day. Such a political environment seems hopelessly incapable of addressing the multiple shocks of the present – the credit crisis, sharply rising prices of energy and food, shortage of arable land, declining capacity of ecosystems to produce the goods that people need, and the complex challenges of climate change, among others. These shocks are unprecedented, so the solutions are novel – the kinds of solutions that cannot emerge from gridlock politics.

Nonetheless, people need answers to complex questions. In a recent global survey, respondents were asked to identify the questions that were most important to them. Questions were then ranked in order of the number of respondents who identified them as important. All of the top-ranking questions were deeply complex. What does sustainability look like? How must humans adapt to survive the changes of this century? What economic structures best support a shift to sustainability? How can we re-invent politics so people feel that they have a voice? What kind of leadership does the world need now?

Complex questions can be addressed by scenarios – sets of stories about the future, derived from collaborative processes and models, designed to integrate diverse perspectives. The scenarios of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment are a recent example.

Scenarios are a way of building resilience – the capacity to maintain useful features of nature and society, while inventing and implementing transformations to new ways of living. In a recent talk at Resilience 2008 I discussed some of the connections between scenarios and resilience. To break out of traps, people need positive stories of what the future could be, and blunt warnings of dangerous paths. Scenarios provide such motivating visions. Moreover, the process of scenario-building itself may create connections that enable transformation. Scenario projects form networks of people in settings that promote playful, inventive thinking at the margin of formal politics. The scenarios, the insights, the people, or the networks themselves are capable of infiltrating wider thinking, and thereby contributing to change when the conditions are right.

What could expand the use of scenarios to build resilience? We need more people trained in relevant skills such as collaboration, rapid prototyping, flexible fast modeling, synthesis, and use of art, music, science and stories together. Courses exist and a sizeable literature is available. Yet the best way to learn scenarios is by doing. Why not try scenario thinking the next time you face a complex problem with long-term consequences?

Ecological Economics

Ecological Economics of the Global Food Trade

1 Comment

From the April 26th New York Times, Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World, discusses the complexities of global food trade. Its great efficiency, the hidden subsidies to transport, and the politics of carbon footprint calculations:

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya. …

Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of mega-markets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe — like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco — has accelerated the trend.

But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.

Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures. …

Some of those companies say that they are working to limit greenhouse gases produced by their businesses but that the question is how to do it. They oppose regulation and new taxes and, partly in an effort to head them off, are advocating consumer education instead.

Tesco, for instance, is introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product’s carbon footprint.

Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products, like flowers grown in the tropics instead of in energy-hungry European greenhouses.

“This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose weight,” a spokesman for Tesco, Trevor Datson, said. …

Some studies have calculated that as little as 3 percent of emissions from the food sector are caused by transportation. But Mr. Watkiss, the Oxford economist, said the percentage was growing rapidly. Moreover, imported foods generate more emissions than generally acknowledged because they require layers of packaging and, in the case of perishable food, refrigeration. …

The problem is measuring the emissions. The fact that food travels farther does not necessarily mean more energy is used. Some studies have shown that shipping fresh apples, onions and lamb from New Zealand might produce lower emissions than producing the goods in Europe, where — for example — storing apples for months would require refrigeration.

But those studies were done in New Zealand, and the food travel debate is inevitably intertwined with economic interests.

Visualization

Slow ecological art

Leave a comment

On Pruned Alexander Trevi describes the sculptor David Nash‘s art created from following the movement of a wooden boulder down a stream. Nash tried to use the river to move the wood to his studio, and when it became stuck he documented the movement of the wooden boulder downstream. The 25-Year Riverine Journey of a Wooden Boulder Carved out of a Felled 200-Year-Old Oak Tree:

“For 25 years,” Nash writes, “I have followed its engagement with the weather, gravity and the seasons. It became a stepping-stone into the drama of physical geography. Spheres imply movement and initially I helped it to move, but after a few years I observed it only intervening when absolutely necessary – when it became wedged under a bridge.”

wooden boudler 2

woodenboudler1

The journey is so extraordinary — made more so perhaps by the fact that it’s so well-documented — that we can’t help but quote the rest of Nash’s accounts:

During the first 24 years it moved down stream nine times remaining static for months and years. Sedentary and heavy it would sit bedded in stones animated by the varying water levels and the seasons. Beyond the bridge its position survived many storms, the force of the water spread over the shallow banks did not have the power to shift it. I did not expect it to move into the Dwyryd river in my lifetime.

Then in November 2002 it was gone. The ‘goneness’ was palpable. The storm propelled the boulder 5 kilometres, stopping on a sandbank in the Dwryd estuary. Now tidal, it became very mobile. The high tides around full moon and the new moon moved it every 12 hours to a new place, each placement unique to the consequence of the tide, wind, rain and depth of water.

In January 2003 it disappeared from the estuary but was found again in a marsh. An incoming tide had taken it up a creek, where it stayed for five weeks. The equinox tide of March 19 2003 was high enough to float it back to the estuary where it continued its movement back and forth 3 or 4 kilometres each move.

The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can, only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is.

Ecological Management, General, Tools

Wiki launch of the practitioner’s guide to resilience assessment

2 Comments

resilience assessment logo
Last week at Resilience 2008 in Stockholm, I gave a presentation on the Practitioner’s workbook Assessing and Managing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems. The workbook incorporates key principles underlying resilience thinking and provides a framework for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems and considering options to set the system on a sustainable trajectory. The workbook builds on research by RA members and others and while it offers neither a recipe for effective management nor a panacea for resource problems, it does provide a foundation for integrated resource management that takes into account cross-scale interactions, alternate regimes, change, and uncertainty.

In the spirit of knowledge sharing, and collaboration, a wiki version of the workbook was launched last week. The workbook wiki is aimed at those who have experience applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems and who want to contribute to the on-going development of the resilience assessment guide.

Feedback from those who have used the resilience assessment workbook (first made available last July), identified some of the strengths and weaknesses of the original version as well as a few gaps. The wiki editorial team will begin organizing the development of new content and a bunch of new material that will be linked to the workbook including: thematic versions of the workbook (e.g. urban resilience, coral reef resilience); modules on participatory research, adaptive co-management, assessing ecosystem service tradeoffs, etc.; research methods; translations (Spanish, Russian, Swedish); new examples and case studies.

Discussions among those who have used the workbook highlight the need for many more examples and case studies of completed assessments. People want to know how others are applying the assessment process in different settings, how they are adapting it, what problems have arisen, and how they were dealt with. A large network of people who have completed resilience assessments will be encouraged to contribute their examples and case studies to the wiki. These entries will include authorship and be reviewed by editors.

Big Back Loop, Ecosystem services, Ideas

Novelty Needed for Sustainable Development – Resilience 2008

Leave a comment

conclusions panel resilience 2008

The Stockholm Resilience Centre has released two press releases on the conclusion of Resilience 2008.

The first Novelty thinking key to sustainable development reports on the concluding panel of the conference in which Elinor Ostrom, Sverker Sörlin, Carole Crumley, Line Gordon and Buzz Holling reflected on the conference, lessons from the past and the answers for the future.

Buzz Holling, considered the father of resilience thinking, called for freedom and flexibility in order to generate multilevel change and novelty thinking. This is needed in a time when several crises are emerging, he said.

– This year a cluster of predicted crises have become aware to the public, such as the rise of food prices due to energy market changes and the collapse of the financial market. We see that small instabilities and risks spread to practically all developed countries in the world. However, globalisation also adds a great positive value because the individual or small groups can have an increasingly global effect, Holling said.

Resilience as an continuance of sustainability thinking
Sverker Sörlin and Carole Crumley both argued that we have moved beyond traditional discussions around sustainability and that resilience thinking is increasingly being embraced as an integrated part of sustainable development thinking.

– Resilience thinking will not replace the sustainability discourse, but we can use resilience to develop sustainability further, Sörlin said. He was followed up by Line Gordon who noted that the key approach with resilience thinking is that although we might have solutions for sustainable development, we will face challenges and we must be prepared for surprises.

Continue reading →