FAO released their new report on global food insecurity earlier this week. The first headline in the report is ‘Despite setbacks, the race against hunger can be won’ which to me clearly illustrates the somewhat contrasting situations when looking through regional developments across the world in relation to successes and failures to reduce hunger and mal-nutrition.

A depressing story is that globally, the number of undernourished people is basically the same today (around 800 million) as they were 10 years ago, when the leaders of 185 countries agreed at the World Food Summit (WFS) to halve the number by 2015. However, the proportion of hungry people is dropping, from 20% in the early 1990’s, to 17% today. According to FAO this suggests that the world is on a path towards meeting the Millennium Development Goal on hunger reduction (halving the proportion of hungry people in developing countries by 2015 as compared to what it was in 1990–92). FAO cautions to dismiss the period as a “lost decade since that could compound existing skepticism and would risk detracting from positive action being.

So what are the good parts of the story? Well, several regions have substantially reduced hunger and undernourishments. The largest progress can be found in Asia & the Pacific as well as in Latin America & the Caribbean (see figure). When looking at commonalities across sucess storeis Margarita Flores, secretary of the committee of food security, FAO says:

When we analyze the successful stories, most of them have at least two common characteristics. One of them is economic growth, and particularly agricultural growth. When you see the rapid growth in cities, especially in Latin America, you see a reduction of poverty in rural areas and increase in poverty in urban areas. That means a migration of poor people to the cities. We need to solve the problem in the rural areas.

However, there are severe setbacks in several regions of the world. As usual it is most countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have some of the major challenges. At the same time the FAO report is trying to be optimistic:

Recent progress in reducing the prevalence of undernourishment is noteworthy. For the first time in several decades, the share of undernourished people in the region’s population saw a significant decline: from 35 percent in 1990–92 to 32 percent in 2001–03, after having reached 36 percent in 1995–97. This is an encouraging development, but the task facing the region remains daunting: the number of undernourished people increased from 169 million to 206 million while reaching the WFS target will require a reduction to 85 million by 2015.

The report list a series of steps that they believe are needed to eradicate hunger in the years ahead:

• focusing programmes and investments on “hotspots” of poverty and undernourishment;
• enhancing the productivity of smallholder agriculture;
• creating the right conditions for private investment, including transparency and good governance;
• making world trade work for the poor, with safety nets put in place for vulnerable groups;
• and a rapid increase in the level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to 0.7 percent of GDP.

The city of Chicago, but the city has recently released a plan to protect its existing important wild (or feral) areas. A US public radio story describes how Chicago is Making room for wildlife in the city.

Jerry Adelmann’s been a fan of green space in the city for decades. He’s the chair of Mayor Richard Daley’s Nature and Wildlife Committee. Two years back, Adelmann suggested making a comprehensive inventory of Chicago’s last remaining scraps of habitat.

“We have some of the rarest ecosystems on the globe – tall grass prairie remnants, oak savanna, some of our wetland communities are extraordinarily rare, rarer than the tropical rainforest, and yet they’re here in our forest preserves and our parks, and in some cases, unprotected.”

The city recently unveiled a new plan to protect these little places in the city. The Nature and Wildlife Plan highlights one hundred sites, adding up to almost 5,000 acres. Most of the sites are already part of city parks or forest lands, but until recently, they didn’t have special protection.

Kathy Dickhut is with Chicago’s planning department. She says before Chicago’s recent zoning reform, these sites the city wanted to protect were zoned as residential or commercial areas. Now they’re zoned as natural areas.

“Buildings aren’t allowed, parking lots aren’t allowed. This area is not going to be zoned for any other active use whereas other parts of the parks we have field houses, zoos, ball fields, but in these areas we’re not going to have structures.”

Dickhut says even though land’s at a premium in the city, the planning department hasn’t run into a lot of opposition with the new habitat plan. She says she just got a lot of blank looks. Local officials were surprised the city wanted these small pockets of land.

And that actually worked in the city’s favor. The city’s been able to acquire new lands for habitat that no one else wanted.

“As a rule we don’t like to take the throwaways for parks and habitat. But in some cases, habitat lands work well where other things won’t work well. If you’ve got a road and a river and a very skinny piece of land that won’t fit anything else, that’s good for habitat, because anywhere where land meets water is good for habitat.”

The city’s also turning an old parking lot back into sand dunes and elevated train embankments into strips of green space. And though some of this land isn’t exactly prime real estate, the city does get donations with a little more charisma.

In Chicago’s industrial southeast side, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered bald eagles nesting in the area for the first time in a century. The birds were nesting on a 16 acre plot owned by Mittal Steel USA. The city got the company to donate the land.

via Bootstrap Analysis

Recently Resilience Alliance (RA) members and partners were asked “what are the best books that you have read in the past year”?

Their book suggestions have been compiled into a four-page annotated booklist. The list of both fiction and non-fiction books includes many familiar titles as well as less-familiar but very intriguing books that have no doubt resulted in multiple book purchases on everyone’s part. Book themes range widely across: climate change, conservation, human behaviour, history of past civilizations, global change and cultural clashes, to name a few. The list is below the break.

RA Partners & Members Booklist – October 2006

Non-Fiction

Against Extinction by Bill Adams. Earthscan, 2004
It is a rather UK-centric overview of the past 100 years of conservation but is well written and contains a strong message.

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History by John Barry (2004).
Many resilience ideas throughout, although not stated as such. Great story on the role of science in real world management issues. He also wrote Rising Tide, about the 1927 flood and how it changed the south (especially New Orleans), 80 years before hurricane Katrina.

Sacred Ecology by Fikret Berkes

Thin Ice by Mark Bowen
This book details how a different strategy for doing ice core samples struggled with the conservatism of big science, but revealed significant anomalies on global change theory and the likelihood of simple switches for autocatalytic processes. As it happens, those ice cores — taken over 25 years at above 20,000 feet in the tropics — are the only samples likely to be available in our epoch, due to subsequent melting and contamination. Very good reading.

Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal.
The biological roots of conflict resolution, aggression and morality.

Primates and Philosophers by Frans de Waal (Princeton University Press).
Both fun reading and important for those of us struggling to develop a better theory of human behavior to imbed in our studies of complex, social-ecological systems.

The Beginner’s guide to winning the Nobel prize: a life in science by Peter Doherty.
Easy reading, emphasizing the love, passion and driving elements that can make a life in science so rewarding. Unfortunately, he has drawn a line between science and research, where research is what social scientists do, whilst real scientists do ‘reductionist’ type
things.

The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery.

The Upside of Down: Catatastrophe, Creativity and Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon (Island Press 2006).

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta.
In the next fifty years the world’s population is expected to increase by roughly 50%. Almost of this population growth is expected to be in cities in the developing world. Suketu Mehta presents Bombay as a representative of this new type of developing country megalopolis. His beautifully written book tells the stories of gangsters, policemen, politicians, dancers, Bollywood stars, the middle class, and slum dwellers. He tells of the failure of state justice, police assassinations, and the intertwined lives of gangsters and movie stars – as well as Bombay’s connection with Dubai, India and the West. (see also article on Resilience Science weblog: http://resilience.geog.mcgill.ca/blog/index.php/2006/03/18/megacities-3-views/)

Where there’s a will by John Mortimer.
An English lawyer turned author (Rumpole of the Bailey series). This is his advice to his family, a sort of rider to his will, on how to lead and not lead one’s life in 31 short pieces. Number 29 is titled “Avoiding Utopia”.

We are everywhere. The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. VERSO, London, New York. Notes from Nowhere (Eds). 2003.
Authored by an assortment of people from the global anticapitalism movement. Inside descriptions of the functioning of distributed networks and a revolution that might be.

Success through Failure : The Paradox of Design by Henry Petroski.
Historical cases from civil engineering where trial and error led to more successful designs.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
The dilemma of meeting our calorie requirements by a description of four types of meals.

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen.
A good expose of science vs. religion in an era of conservative backlash in Europe, and the efforts of scientists to rise above the socio-political climate in making new and controversial findings.

The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz.
Provides a different approach to scenario building. We’re doing some futures work at WCS, and this book was a helpful guide to setting up our own way of “thinking about what we’re not thinking about, instead of just thinking about what we’re thinking about.” If you get what I mean.

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed by John Vaillant.
A complex story of people and Nature in British Columbia. The Golden Spruce was a unique tree on the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) that was cut down in a misguided environmentalist protest by a bitter ex-logger, who had been driven mad by the contradiction between his love of being in the wild woods and his life spent being a logger, in what he loved, destroying it. The book is a rich story of the economic, cultural, and geographic relationship between people and nature in the coastal rainforest of BC.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.
The anthropologist Jack Weatherford tells the incredible life story of Genghis Khan, who went from being a poor nomad called Temüjin, to founder of the world’s largest empire. An empire that played a key role in stimulating technological and cultural cross-fertilization. The book is well written and an presents an unfamiliar version of world history.

Getting to Maybe by Frances Westley, Michael Patton, and Brenda Zimmerman. (Random House 2006)

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright.
It’s an amazingly succinct and fascinating, easy-to-read account of the development of the world, from the advent of Homo sapiens to where we are today. The significance of resilience in the journey(s) is inescapable.

Fiction

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
Oryx and Crake captures a future social world that has collapsed, and includes issues around cloning, climate change, equity, etc. A good read.

Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard.
A novel set in19th century England. About Timothy Cratchit (Tiny Tim) grown up and
trying to escape his suffocating virtue.

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay (1989 Ballantine Books).
A little old but truly an outstanding story of the human spirit in South Africa just before apartheid collapsed.

We Killed Mangy Dog (& other Mozambique stories) by L. B. Honwana.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
An outstanding book on cultural clashes.

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson.
A novel set in Antarctica in the near future, ~ 2050. Climate warming is melting the ice cap to the point where methane is becoming commercially exploitable and soon other minerals will be extractable. The Antarctic Treaty is in danger of collapse because transnational corporations are preventing ratification by the US. The continent is sparsely populated by scientists, eco-tourists, employees of extractive industries, and true Antarcticans — “ferals” who live there permanently in a novel culture that blends modernity with skills from the Inuit and Saami. Then there is an eco-terrorism incident which ends up getting resolved by an odd coalition of ferals, scientists, a couple of renegade oil employees and a beautiful female mountaineer.

Aside from being an entertaining story for a long plane flight, the novel blends elements of adaptation and green technology innovation to explore fundamental ideas about transformation of society in a changing world. The author evokes the feeling that the people in the story are truly the primitives of an emerging civilization, something completely new and reconfigured for a previously-uninhabitable continent in a rapidly changing world. It is full of little resilience lessons, a novel by someone who understands transformation and plays with the idea through his fiction.

Forty Signs of Rain (2004) & Fifty Degrees Below (2005) by Kim Stanley Robinson.
These are the first 2 books in what is to be the “Science in the Capital” trilogy. (The third book, Sixty Days and Counting, is due in February 2007.) Both of the books are set in DC in the near future and revolve around the same cast of characters, including a bureaucrat at NSF; her husband, an environmental advisor to a senator; and their family; an academic scientist on leave at NSF; and some scientists at a biotech company). Both deal with climate change and potential impacts on DC itself. There is actual science in them (both information and process) and both offer some glimpses into how science works and doesn’t work (in scenes at NSF and at a biotech company), and how science can, and can’t, influence policy (through scenes with the senator and his science advisor). Robinson also likes to play with ideas about resilience — in this case, the resilience of individuals as they respond to changes in their environment brought on by climate change and resilience of the city of DC to catastrophic events related to climate change.

Other recommended reading:

Two non-books, but very interesting reading, are about how societies can game future(s) by pooling predictions — this is how the life insurance industry began. Neat stuff can be found at: http://www.longbets.org/ and http://www.longnow.org/, which is the home of the Long Now Foundation, parent of the Long Bets site. The idea is to engage short cycle thinking about the long term, and to build long-term social responsibility through learning. Some very clever thinking.

Johan Colding, Jakob Lundberg and Carl Folke. 2006. Incorporating Green-area User Groups in Urban Ecosystem Management. Ambio Vol 35 (August, 2006): 237-244. They show that the spatial extent of locally managed green areas is high in the City of Stockholm and how these privately managed areas may function as important buffer areas around lands that are formally set aside for nature conservation.

The Koran

Dr. Oran Young of UCSB and chair of the scientific committee of the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme gave a very interesting talk entitled ‘Resilience, Vulnerability, and Change in Environmental Governance Systems’.

A recording of this talk can be found at http://www.ihdp.org/ .