Ecological Economics

Greening of Cost-Benefit Analysis

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The use of economic discounting for environmental decision analysis is often criticized. Discounting refers to the method of weighing present versus future benefits. Customarily, discounting has been calculated at a constant exponential rate, analogous to the interest rate on a loan. This can lead to absurd results. For example, living resources that grow more slowly than the discount rate (such as redwoods and whales) should be harvested to extinction, according to cost-benefit analyses using constant exponential discounting. Such outcomes have led some scientists and environmentalists to reject cost-benefit analysis for environmental decisions.

However, recent research shows that constant economic discounting is not supported by data for decisions with long time horizons. Proper approaches to discounting yield much greener decisions . Diverse economic models show that future interest rates are highly uncertain. Therefore environmental cost-benefit analyses must consider outcomes over a plausible range of models for future discount rates. When outcomes are averaged, models with relatively severe discounting (such as the constant exponential model) have negligible impact after a long period of time has elapsed. Instead, models that lightly discount the future have greatest impact on decisions. Thus optimal decisions are far greener than previously thought.

The greening effect is especially notable for decisions that involve environmental tipping points, such as species extinctions, freshwater quality, and climate change. Proper economic discounting leads to conservation-friendly decisions in these cases.

Constant exponential discounting has been a powerful obstacle to adaptive ecosystem management, because it downgrades the present value of future information. However, when discounting is done properly then learning has greater weight in decisions, favoring adaptive ecosystem management.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has shown that properly computed cost-benefit analyses would often lead to conservation (rather than conversion) of ecosystems, even using constant exponential discounting. Proper discounting would favor conservation in an even wider variety of cases.

Design

Tomorrow’s frontier – the wreckage of the unsustainable past

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In Metropolis magazine, Bruce Sterling writes about his time as a Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California.

It doesn’t take visionary genius to spot tomorrow’s frontier. It’s not the virgin sod of the American West because there isn’t any now. Tomorrow’s frontier is the wreckage of the unsustainable past. There is no place for us to start over clean, except through cleaning what no longer works. And that frontier is colossal because so little is working. I’ll put on my visionary hat for one last time and predict: you’ll know it’s working when you see the rust bloom.

link

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management

Wetland Mitigation Banking Shortchanges Urban Areas

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In a study highlighted in the National Wetlands Newsletter, J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman show that wetland mitigation banking redistributes wetlands from urban areas to rural ones, leaving urban residents with less access to important ecological services provided by wetlands, such as water filtration, erosion protection, and flood control.

Ruhl, J.B. and Salzman, James E., “The Effects of Wetland Mitigation Banking on People” (January 2006). FSU College of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 179 Available at SSRN).

Wetland mitigation banking is used to ensure no net loss of wetland area under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Basically, mitigation banking allows developers who damage or destroy wetlands to buy off-site wetlands as compensation. Many studies have examined whether the new wetlands adequately replace wetland values and functions, but few have examined the social impacts of wetland mitigation banking.

Ruhl and Salzman studied 24 wetland mitigation banks in Florida (accounting for 95% of bank activity, and representing over 900 development projects). They show that in 19 of 24 banks, wetlands “migrated” from urban to rural areas.

“The whole point of wetland mitigation banking – what makes its economic incentives work – is that developers get to wipe out wetland patches in the higher priced land markets and bankers get to establish wetlands banks in the less pricey land markets,” Ruhl said. “It’s not surprising then that development projects using wetland mitigation banking often are located in urban areas and the banks they use are located in rural areas.”

The populations of winners and losers in wetland mitigation banking are quite different, as you might expect. The banks (where wetlands are restored) are, on average 10 miles from the projects (where wetlands are damanged). The average income was nearly $12,000 lower in projects compared to banks, and the average minority population was 13% higher projects.

The researchers suggest that further examination of wetlands mitigation banking is needed. ” … wetland mitigation banking has been touted as a “win-win” program, but unless someone keeps score we really can’t know whether it truly fits that billing.” For now, it seems that not actively including the value of ecosystem services means inadequately assessing the true costs and benefits of the program.

Ruhl is the Matthew and Hawkins Professor of Property at the FSU College of Law, and Salzman is a professor at the Duke University School of Law and the Nicholas School of the Environment.

General

Using weblogs in science

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Nature (March 30, 2006) has an profile of the father and son scientists Roger Pielke Jr and Roger Pielke Sr. Each of them run a climate weblog. Pielke Sr focuses on climate science, while Pielke Jr focuses on science policy. Below are their explanations to Nature on how their weblogs help their research.

Roger Pielke Jr runs Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog

“It started as an experiment for our centre, and now it serves a number of different purposes. It is kind of like an extra hard drive for my brain. I can search for things that I’ve written, something I might want later, sort of like my professional notes in a public format. “I’m surprised at the reach the blog has, which is rewarding for this centre with only eight of us here. We can put an argument on it and it shows up out there in the real world. I get contacted by professionals in the United States or elsewhere that I would have never met otherwise. “Blogs are also out there for the public, and it gives you an entirely different perspective on how well the public is getting your message.”

Roger Pielke Sr runs the weblog Climate Science

“My weblog was completely motivated by my son’s. I was sending all these e-mails out to people about committee reports and he said, ‘Why don’t you just do a weblog?’ “With so many journals out there now, it is hard to keep track. When a peer reviewed paper comes out, I can put up the abstract and a summary of key points on the blog. “Now I’m making my arguments to a broader community to see how well they stand up. I also use it as a professional diary and it has increased my network. “The feedback has been wonderful.”

I have been using this weblog in a similar way to Roger Pielke Jr. I have been posting articles of things that I have been reading in my research or teaching that I think will be interesting to the larger resilience community. I frequently use the weblog to show colleagues and students articles, figures, or ideas that I think are relevant to our work. From the posts on the site you are probably able to guess that I am working on the impacts of inequality in social-ecological systems and connections between agriculture and water.

Ideas, Regime Shifts, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems – E&S special feature

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Ecology & Society has just published a special feature Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: Comparative Studies and Theory Development based upon the comparisons of 15 Resilience Alliance case studies.

The current table of contents of the issue is:

Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Through Comparative Studies and Theory Development: Introduction to the Special Issue
by Brian H. Walker, John M. Anderies, Ann P. Kinzig, and Paul Ryan

A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
by Brian Walker, Lance Gunderson, Ann Kinzig, Carl Folke, Steve Carpenter, and Lisen Schultz

Scale Mismatches in Social-Ecological Systems: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions
by Graeme S. Cumming, David H. M. Cumming, and Charles L. Redman

Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects
by Ann P. Kinzig, Paul Ryan, Michel Etienne, Helen Allyson, Thomas Elmqvist, and Brian H. Walker

Fifteen Weddings and a Funeral: Case Studies and Resilience-based Management
by John M. Anderies, Brian H. Walker, and Ann P. Kinzig

Toward a Network Perspective of the Study of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
by Marco A. Janssen, Örjan Bodin, John M. Anderies, Thomas Elmqvist, Henrik Ernstson, Ryan R. J. McAllister, Per Olsson, and Paul Ryan

Collapse and Reorganization in Social-Ecological Systems: Questions, Some Ideas, and Policy Implications
by Nick Abel, David H. M. Cumming, and John M. Anderies

Governance and the Capacity to Manage Resilience in Regional Social-Ecological Systems
by Louis Lebel, John M. Anderies, Bruce Campbell, Carl Folke, Steve Hatfield-Dodds, Terry P. Hughes, and James Wilson

Water RATs (Resilience, Adaptability, and Transformability) in Lake and Wetland Social-Ecological Systems
by Lance H. Gunderson, Steve R. Carpenter, Carl Folke, Per Olsson, and Garry Peterson

Shooting the Rapids: Navigating Transitions to Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems
by Per Olsson, Lance H. Gunderson, Steve R. Carpenter, Paul Ryan, Louis Lebel, Carl Folke, and C. S. Holling

General, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Survey of Initial Impacts of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

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The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment‘s general synthesis report was released about a year ago. On March 21 2006, the MA released an assessment of the initial impact of the MA. The report is written by Walt Reid, the director of the MA, based upon a survey of (report pdf). The survey found that some organizations and countries have been significantly influenced by the MA while others have not been minimally if at all. In the report’s executive summary Walt Reid assess the impact of the MA on its multiple target audiences:

Continue reading →

Greenlash, Ideas, New Orleans, Tools, Visualization, Vulnerability

Mapping Sea Level Rise

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Sea Level Rise Jonathan Overpeck and others have a paper Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise in Science (24 March 2006) that suggests that sea level rise due to anthropogenic climate change could occur much faster than people have previously expected. Possibly an increase of 5 to 10 m of several centuries. (For news articles see BBC, NYTimes, & Toronto G&M).

To visualize the consquences of sea level rise:

WorldChanging points to Flood Maps. A site that mashes up NASA elevation data with Google Maps, and offers a visualization of the effects of a single meter increase all the way to a 14 meter rise. Some examples are: Vancouver with 6m sea rise, New Orleans, and the Netherlands.

Also, Jonathan Overpeck‘s lab also has a visualization of the consquences of sea level rise for the US and the world.

Richard Kerr writes in a news article in Science, A Worrying Trend of Less Ice, Higher Seas:

The ice sheet problem today very much resembles the ozone problem of the early 1980s, before researchers recognized the Antarctic ozone hole, Oppenheimer and Alley have written. The stakes are high in both cases, and the uncertainties are large. Chemists had shown that chlorine gas would, in theory, destroy ozone, but no ozone destruction had yet been seen in the atmosphere. While the magnitude of the problem remained uncertain, only a few countries restricted the use of chlorofluorocarbons, mainly by banning their use in aerosol sprays.

But then the ozone hole showed up, and scientists soon realized a second, far more powerful loss mechanism was operating in the stratosphere; the solid surfaces of ice cloud particles were accelerating the destruction of ozone by chlorine. Far more drastic measures than banning aerosols would be required to handle the problem.

Now glaciologists have a second mechanism for the loss of ice: accelerated flow of the ice itself, not just its meltwater, to the sea. “In the end, ice dynamics is going to win out” over simple, slower melting, says Bindschadler. Is glacier acceleration the ozone hole of sea level rise? No one knows. No one knows whether the exceptionally strong warmings around the ice will continue apace, whether the ice accelerations of recent years will slow as the ice sheets adjust to the new warmth, or whether more glaciers will fall prey to the warmth. No one knows, yet.

Ecological Management, Tools

Green water efficiency in farming

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Green & Blue water A recent SciDev.net article Improve water efficiency in farming, urges report describes an International Water Management Insitute (IMWI) report – Beyond More Crop per Drop prepared for the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico (March 2006).

The article quotes IWMI director general, Frank Rijsberman, who justifies the need to increase water use efficiency by the statement that it takes “70 times more water to grow the food we eat every day than we need for drinking, cooking, bathing and other domestic needs.”

The report describes how water management usually focuses on runoff, blue water, which is only 40% of rainfall. The other 60% is green water that replenishes soil moisture and evaporates from the soil or is transpired by plants. The report states that three quarters of the world’s poor depend upon rainfed agriculture (90% in sub-Saharan Africa), meaning that improving green water productivity has the potential to improve the well-being of the world’s poor.

The report writes:

Increasing the productivity of green water used in rainfed agriculture has great potential to reduce the area needed for agriculture. Agricultural production of staple crops in Africa, has, over the last 40 years, increased almost exclusively by area expansion, at the cost of large areas of natural ecosystems. To enable sustainable increases in food production in Africa, agricultural intensification is absolutely necessary. Increasing the productivity of green water used in rainfed agriculture – particularly by adding a limited amount of blue water (from rivers or aquifers) through supplemental irrigation has great potential.

Rainwater harvesting in Sri LankaThe report recommends using rainwater harvesting, supplemental and micro irrigation, and using land and water conservation to increasee infiltration and reduce runoff, to increase green water efficiency. It suggests that using these known techniques could double crop yields.

The IMWI report provides examples of water management in stories from two areas the Awash Basin – Ethiopia and the Krishna Basin – India.

See also, my previous post on agricultural modification of green water flows.

Greenlash, Ideas, Regime Shifts, Visualization

Mapping anoxic zones – pt 2

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Global International Waters Assessment is a systematic assessment of the environmental conditions and problems in large transboundary waters, comprising marine, coastal and freshwater areas, and surface waters as well as ground waters. Involving over 1,500 expert it has assessed 66 of the world’s major river basins and recently published a synthesis report. These publications are freely available online. The synthesis report‘s section on pollution provides a map of eutrophication impact.

Fig 14 GIWA

As mentioned in a earlier post on mapping dead zones, eutrophication can produce large coastal hypoxic zones. The GIWA regional assessments reported that dead zones:

… have become increasingly common in the world’s lakes, estuaries and coastal zones, with serious impacts on local fisheries, biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Extensive dead zones have been observed for many years in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The GIWA assessment has compiled information on dead zones in the Southern Hemisphere, including several lagoons in the Brazil Current region, coastal locations in the Humboldt Current region, and in the Yangtze River estuary located in the East China Sea region.