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UPDATE

N E W S L E T T E R O F T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L H U M A N D I M E N S I O N S P R O G R A M M E O N G LO B A L E N V I R O N M E N TA L C H A N G E

04/2002 FO CUS:

LIVING IN A CHANGING EARTH SYSTEM Caveats and Challenges | BY C OLEEN H. VOGEL

POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT C

O N T E N T S

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Living in a Changing Earth System | C.H. Vogel

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Editorial

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Poverty and Environment Linkages | A. Atiq Rahman

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Degradation Narratives | B. Hartmann

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Scaling the Urban Environmental Challenge | G. McGranahan

10 Masthead 11 City Consultation – A Strategy for Poverty Reduction Interview with A.L. Mabogunje Photo: E. Dyck

12 2003 Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community ➤ One of the recent requests following my acceptance as Chair of the IHDP Scientific Committee (SC) was to write an article for UPDATE. May I first take this opportunity to thank all those who felt that I was a suitable candidate, and let me also express my humble thanks to the prestigious group of scientists who elected me to this position. I trust that we will all be able to continue the good work that has already been successfully undertaken by previous Chairs and members of the IHDP SC.

Coming to the Chair of the IHDP SC at such an interesting time in the evolution of global change science is challenging. The legacy of excellent science that has already been undertaken through various global change science initiatives, and my previous exposure to knowledgeable scientists in this field has been extremely valuable and rewarding. The developments in the global environmental change (GEC) programmes, the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg and several other initiatives provide many opportunities for global change science.

These progressive developments, exposure to such groups and the growing corpus of science also cause much introspection. What is the role of science in the pursuit of environmental sustainability? Has the science been useful? Can we evaluate at this stage whether we have been active about “strengthening international science for the benefit of society” (ICSU, 2002). Could our science be made even more useful? Such questions have become more pertinent for me in my ongoing work on drought and vulnerability in the southern African region. I will briefly attempt to grapple with some of these questions, identify some possible

13 Environmental Change and Vulnerability | J.M. Pulhin 14 Soil Mining in Eastern Uganda | J. Woelcke 15 Core Projects: 15 Land-Use and Land-Cover Change | H. Geist, E. Lepers, W. McConnel, E. Lambin, N. Ramankutty 16 IT SSC Convenes in Bonn | A.J. Wieczorek A New Sponsor for GECHS IPO | M. Brklacich, M. Woodrow 17 Joint Projects: The Global Water System | S. Karlsson 18 In Brief, Meeting Calendar 19 Publications 20 Contact Addresses

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W W W. I H D P. O R G I H D P U p d a t e i s p u b l i s h e d b y t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l H u m a n D i m e n s i o n s P r o g r a m m e o n G l o b a l E n v i r o m e n t a l C h a n g e ( I H D P ) , Wa l t e r - F l e x - S t r. 3 , 5 3 1 1 3 B o n n , G e r m a n y, V. i . S . d. P. : E l i s a b e t h D y c k

poverty & environment A CHANGING EARTH SYSTEM

EDITORIAL This issue of UPDATE reports on the linkages between poverty and environmental change. Articles by researchers and young scientists from the international human dimensions community provide a comprehensive picture of the multifaceted problems faced by humankind such as the urban poor, drought, uncontrolled population growth, unsustainable land management, and vulnerability. They also suggest approaches to facilitate poverty alleviation, e.g. by ‘city consultations’, as outlined in the interview with Prof. Akin Mabogunje.

This is the first issue of UPDATE since I became IHDP Executive Director at the beginning of November. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to the Search Committee and the sponsors of IHDP, the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), who appointed me to this position. As a researcher at the University of Bonn, I observed IHDP develop over recent years, as it became an effective programme for the enhancement of research on global environmental change. It is a great professional and personal challenge for me to contribute to IHDP at this point in time.

The challenges ahead are numerous, but so are the opportunities for strengthening the role of social science research on global environmental change. There are several tasks to which I plan to give priority. One of them is to emphasise the role of social science in environmental research. There is ample historical experience in managing environmental risks, such as droughts, famines or climate change; still it is not given sufficient attention in the current debate.

Another major activity will be to support IHDP’s capacity building efforts that aim at involving more young scientists and researchers from developing countries in our network.

Also, as Coleen Vogel, Chair of the IHDP Scientific Committee, points out in her article, we will continue our excellent co-operation with the major partner programmes on global environmental change (IGBP, WCRP and DIVERSITAS) within the framework of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP).

Another aim is to establish closer collaboration with development policy and environment organisations and to increase IHDP’s visibility and acceptance among German and international donors. Intensifying contacts with international organisations in Bonn, such as the Secretariat for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Secretariat for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), will further the dialogue between policy makers and the human dimensions research community at an international level.

In the months to come, I look forward to contacting and meeting many members of the IHDP network. I trust that we will be able to establish a fruitful and mutually beneficial co-operation. ➤

B ARBARA G ÖBEL IHDP Executive Director

caveats in the application of the science and also suggest some 1 areas where the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) can play a role.

THE UNFOLDING FAMINE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Recent assessments by leading scientists, such as contributions of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, point to various environmental changes that may accompany climate change in Africa: “There is wide consensus that climate change will worsen food security, mainly through increased extremes and temporal/spatial shifts” …“Adverse changes in seasonal river flows, floods and droughts, food security, fisheries, health effects, and loss of biodiversity are among the major vulnerabilities and concerns of Africa, Latin America and Asia where adaptation opportunities are generally low” (IPCC, 2001).

In light of this growing concern efforts are being made to improve the scientific understanding of what drives the earthatmosphere system producing such changes in the region, identify those areas that may be particularly vulnerable to environmental change, both socially and biophysically, and improve adaptation and mitigation to enable groups to better live with environmental changes. The unfolding famine in southern and northern Africa captures some of the scientific and humanitarian dilemmas facing those involved and includes many ESSP dimensions (e.g. El Niño and drought – a WCRP focal research area; the impacts on vegetation, water and food – focal concerns of a number of allied programmes; and the human dimensions – the role of institutions, e.g. in mediating access to food).

DROUGHT – THE REAL EVIL?

Droughts occur frequently in South Africa and the wider region.

They are caused usually by variations in the large-scale atmospheric systems that produce rainfall (e.g. those associated with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon (Unganai, 1992; Mason and Tyson, 2000). Droughts usually result in major impacts in the region, such as downturns in GDP and impacts on the agricultural industry (Benson and Clay, 1998). Droughts cause farm retrenchments and livelihood losses that severely aggravate the plight of many of the rural poor in the region.

Scientists, including those in the social sciences, have tried to identify the underlying factors that may contribute to and heighten drought impacts. Droughts thus have been viewed within the broader context of determining some of the underlying drivers of change that have (Davis, 2001) and may be heightening vulnerability to change (Devereux, 2001). Issues such as globalisation, the role of institutions in mediating access to resources, poor maintenance of infrastructure and lack of political commitment to reduce vulnerabilities to various threats and risks (Benson and Clay, 2000; Devereux, 2001) compound drought situations.

Drought therefore needs to be viewed as both a physical and social phenomenon. Famine and periods of food shortage require not only technical fixes, e.g. better early warning systems and meteorological science, but also substantial political will (Devereux, 2000; de Waal, 2000; Vogel and Smith, 2002).

IMPROVED DROUGHT SCIENCE

There is growing global and national commitment to reduce the risk of living with GEC. Major improvements in ‘drought 1

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ESSP is a partnership of four global change research programmes (IGBP, IHDP, WCRP and DIVERSITAS) for the integrated study of the Earth System, the changes that are occurring to the System, and the implications of these changes for global sustainability.

poverty & environment A CHANGING EARTH SYSTEM

In the recent volume “Challenges of a Changing Earth” (Steffen et al., 2002), a synthesis of earth system science is presented together with several visions for future ESSP science (see page 19 of this UPDATE issue). In the volume caveats and problems are also identified including papers that cover discussions on food. Global agro-ecological assessment, it is argued, will be complex: “Given the complex and interlinked components of the food security challenge in the 21st century, it is clear that solutions that deal with one part – for example, crop productivity, land use, water conservation, or forest protection – will not be sufficient.

The issues are connected and must be dealt with as an interlinked holistic system…” (Shah, 2002).

science’ in understanding the predictability of southern Africa’s seasonal rainfall have also emerged over the past decade (e.g.

Goddard et al., 2001; Landman and Goddard, 2002). Due to such improvements, seasonal rainfall forecasts and seasonal temperature and rainfall outlooks have become possible (Carson, 1998).

More is also currently known about food systems, both in terms of food production and food provision (ICSU, 2002).

Global agro-ecological assessments for the 21st century, undertaken recently by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Fischer et al., 2001) indicate that there is still significant potential for expansion of cultivated land in parts of Africa. As the authors point out, “in many developing countries, provided adequate inputs and improved management are applied, there is scope for increased yields” (Fischer et al., 2001, emphasis added).

The complexity of food systems is further enhanced when socio-political issues are included: the governance of food, access to and tracking of food, and how food enters into the discourse of democracy through different political forms and institutions (Watts, 2001). Such components move debates of famine beyond mere assessments of food production. Some of the underlying concerns and fundamental questions that thus may confront the ESSP include the quest for a ‘sensitive steering system’ (Young, 2002) to guide us through this convoluted terrain, challenges for trying to ‘communicate in accessible languages’ and whether we have the data to even begin modeling some of the complexities in such systems (Joachim and Schellnhuber, 2002).

The collective focus of several GEC initiatives is therefore not only on improving science related to food; increasingly global change scientists have begun to focus on aspects that underpin vulnerability and adaptability to changes in food systems, food production and food provision (e.g. GECAFS).

Photo: FAO/M. Marzot

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

Drawing brackish water from a pool during a drought.

IS ESSP SCIENCE USEFUL?

Despite all this activity, the southern African region is currently in the grips of famine. Assessments show that ca. 14.4 million people will require food aid in six affected countries in SADC, the Southern African Development Community (Morris, 2002). The World Food Programme (WFP) has launched a US$ 507 million appeal to provide relief. The combined impacts of HIV/AIDS, land issues, prices, poor governance and trade policy together with climate variability threaten to heighten risks for those currently lacking food and adequate livelihoods. The WFP website (www.wfp.org) provides current assessments of the ‘crisis’.

The niche for greater collaboration between social and biophysical scientists and meteorologists has been created with the ESSP. My concerns include: Why has such official collaboration taken so long? What will it take to make a workable, meaningful and sustainable connection between policy makers, humanitarian agencies, wider civic society and scientists so that effective action can be taken? For those in the southern African region, actively involved in one ESSP area, the mix of factors, e.g. HIV/AIDS, climate and governance, may override well-intentioned humanitarian assistance. The challenges are great for the ESSP. Other challenges exist and require similar energies. My hope is that we may continue to prompt, critique and encourage excellence in global change science for all concerned. ➤

R EFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/update0402/references.htm ➤

Of concern and deep frustration is that this situation began to gain press at the same time as the WSSD was hosted in Johannesburg (with the theme on poverty and sustainability).

The ‘crisis’ is also unfolding at a time when scientific efforts are being marshaled to revive the debate of ‘theoretical’ issues that underpin what is unfolding in the region, e.g. ‘vulnerability’ science. How can such science be used to play a meaningful role in the region? Do we learn from past science and past lessons?

(Glantz, 2001; 2002). The ironies are clear and resolution of some of them will require much deeper thought and engagement between a host of role players.

In the drive towards a sustainable transition in an ever changing earth system one is left asking the question: why the crises in the southern African region? Famines and drought disasters are not new in these areas and have always been complex phenomena, driven in part by the vagaries of weather, but also by other factors such as governance and a variety of social and economic issues. Also famines usually have been the outcome of complex socio-economic and biophysical systems that have allocated risk differentially to various people.

COLEEN VOGEL is Chair of the IHDP Scientific Committee and Professor at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; 017chv@cosmos.wits.ac.za

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POVERT Y & ENVIRONMENT LINK AGES

POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT LINKAGES An emerging concern needs greater attention and focused action | BY A. ATIQ R AHMAN

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In 2002, as the world leaders gathered in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), the total wealth of the planet was never any greater.

Simultaneously, the numbers of people below poverty line and the extent of environmental degradation facing them were never greater. There are inextricable, multidimensional and complex linkages between increasing poverty and environmental degradation. There is a serious lack of understanding and consensus among the different actors, including policy makers, that the interests of the poor and of environment are mutually compatible. A scientific and better understanding of the poverty-environment nexus could lead to sound and informed strategies, policies and actions for the local, national and global communities to fight both poverty and environmental problems.

FROM RIO TO JOHANNESBURG: INCREASING ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF POVERTY

One of the greatest successes of the UNCED (Rio) process was the acknowledgement of the need for integrating environment, development and social justice. A key group actively highlighting the need to integrate poverty as a central concern was the Global Forum on Environment and Poverty (GFEP).

They asserted that there could be “no sustainable development without eradication of poverty”. Maurice Strong, Secretary General of UNCED, acknowledged that the two most needed areas that UNCED did not address adequately were poverty and demilitarisation.

However, it is not declarations but actions that count. For example, the seven heads of governments of South Asia signed the South Asian Poverty Commission Report (1992), which asserted that poverty from South Asia would be eliminated by 2002. As 2002 arrived, it was clear that the number of poor in South Asia had stabilised, if not increased.

The WSSD Plan of Implementation (2002) and the UN Millennium Declaration have emphasised poverty alleviation as a cross-cutting issue. The stated goal is to “halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s poor whose income is less than $1 a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water”. The unfortunate corollary is that even in its intentions and declarations, the global community has condemned half of the global poor to abject poverty even after 2015.

The political declaration at the WSSD states in Article 7: “Recognizing that humankind is at a cross road, we have united in a common resolve to make a determined effort to respond positively to the need to produce a practical and visible plan that should bring about poverty eradication and human devel4 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

opment”. Sadly no such “practical and visible” plan was in place and the same agencies, which failed to reduce poverty in the last five decades, seem least likely to solve these problems today.

A completely different approach, newly enthused human resources and an analytical framework are needed. Fortunately, a number of national sustainable development institutes have emerged in the last twenty years, many of them are in developing countries. Their combined efforts offer the best hope of addressing this complex agenda.

POVERTY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The WSSD recognised poverty reduction as a central tenet of achieving sustainable development. Indeed, some international financial institutions have declared themselves as “poverty banks”. Is this a genuine shift of priorities in favour of the poor or a new recognition that the previous emphasis on the market and trickle-down economic policies fall far short of achieving global or national objectives of poverty reduction? Reducing poverty essentially entails access to higher amounts of financial resources, to goods and services including access to institutions, participation, decision-making and social justice. Reduction of vulnerability of the poor to illnesses, natural disasters, social exploitation, and repressive policies reduces the pressures of poverty.

The low resource base, small internal markets, low purchasing power of the poor, absence of good governance and effective local government, low level of skilled personnel, low literacy rate, lack of national, political consensus and continuity of major policies, a degrading natural resource base, poor law and order at home, global financial instability and political insecurity – all of these combine to create a vicious cycle of continuation of poverty. This is despite some brave attempts by government and non-government sectors to reduce poverty systematically.

POVERTY: LIVELIHOOD AND NATURAL RESOURCES NEXUS

The poor depend on natural resources to manage their livelihood portfolios. Any degradation and loss of access to natural resources deprives them of their livelihood potential.

Despite all the technological and economic achievements, there are over one billion people who live on less than US$ 1 a day. Another billion live on less than US$ 2 a day. These are the people who are most vulnerable to natural disasters and health hazards. Impacts of climate change, particularly the increase of extreme events will hit the poor the hardest.

KEY LINKAGES BETWEEN POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT

The physical environment provides services to the population. People develop specific social systems, institutions

poverty & environment

POVERT Y & ENVIRONMENT LINK AGES

and technologies to interact with the environment to gain livelihood supports. The absence or denial of these basic environmental services constitutes absolute poverty.

Unequal access to basic necessities and other environmental resources is the foundation of relative poverty. In addition to being excluded from access to basic resources, the poor are also most likely to be subjected to the degrading or polluting impacts of the consumption patterns of others. Where local sustainable patterns of agriculture are diverted to monoculture for the global market, the breaking of traditional fertility cycles is associated with negative changes in social structures and economic relationships. The poor have been systematically supplying their share of resources for environmental and global benefits but are continually ‘dis-benefited’ due to structured societal disempowerment and are thus being forced to move towards more environmentally vulnerable areas.

the Global Forum on Environment and Poverty (GFEP). The Declaration on Environment and Poverty asserted that: ➤

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The rights of all people to have access to food and other basic requirements for a healthy and meaningful life are inalienable.

The poor, both men and women, must be able to make decisions about their own local environments and natural resources.

Although poverty must be addressed at a global scale, there can be no solution without the direct participation of people at the local and national levels.

Efforts must be undertaken to remove the most outstanding obstacles to poverty eradication and environmental conservation.

The rich must pay the full ecological costs of their consumption.

All people, including the poor, must have equal rights to global commons including the atmosphere and the oceans.

GLOBAL PICTURE AND THE SOUTHERN PERSPECTIVES

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About 2.8 billion people live in poverty. According to a recent World Bank report, more than 23% of these people live in extreme poverty, and the number of poor people remained almost constant in the past decade (Poverty Net, 2002). The majority of poor people live in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, in recent decades the poor are migrating increasingly to the cities. Urban poverty has become one of the most pressing development and environment concerns. At the same time, the gap between the poor and rich in terms of both wealth and consumption has increased.

In Johannesburg, the GFEP developed an action plan and research agenda on environment and poverty. The large number of actions identified fall under six broad themes: follow-up of Rio instruments and WSSD; advocacy; institution building; technology and knowledge; research; training and publications.

Many social scientists have argued that poverty in the South was initially created mainly by colonial domination and exploitation. The post-colonial period saw much mismanagement and lack of participation in natural resource management. The industrialised countries made their economic progress in the 18th and 19th centuries at the cost of the resources of today’s underdeveloped countries. Another cause of environmental degradation is the trade imbalance and unequal growth of economies of the North and the South. Bad governance, elitism and poor management by the governments of many emerging and independent countries probably made the largest contribution to continued poverty, natural resources and environmental degradation (Rahman et al, 1998).

Many international agencies, such as UNDP, UNEP, World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, are currently working on integrating environment and poverty issues in the development process. But their capacity to reach the poor is extremely limited. The NGOs, grassroots organisations and national think tanks, particularly in the South, are more likely to be the appropriate agents, if utilised properly.

The Johannesburg meeting also posed challenges for different actors including taking into account human rights and equity issues; dealing with consumption-production systems worldwide; ensuring technology transfer; reversing the flow of financial resources from South to North; taking into account the informal and non-monetised economy; meeting basic resource needs of the poor; reconciling sectoral and integrated approaches; ensuring that investments actually reach the poor; and balancing risk minimisation of the poor with their need for access to markets.

CONCLUSIONS

There is an urgent need to develop a better understanding of poverty-environment linkages, and act on these. It is of utmost importance that the human dimension of the problem be the focus of research, analysis and actions. In a rapidly globalising world, greater poverty will induce greater human insecurity in all countries. The poor must be part of the solution and their contribution must be recognised in the global environmental discourse and the decision-making processes. The discourse, initiated by GFEP in Rio (1992) and continued at the WSSD (2002), offers an approach towards addressing some of the most pressing questions of the new millennium. ➤

GFEPS EFFORTS FROM RIO TO JOHANNESBURG

During the Rio (UNCED) process, civil society pointed to the linkages between poverty and the environment through

A. ATIQ R AHMAN is Executive Director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), Dhaka, Bangladesh; e-mail: atiq.r@bdcom.com; www.bcas.net IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 5

poverty & environment D E G R A D AT I O N N A R R AT I V E S

DEGRADATION NARRATIVES Over-simplifying the link between population, poverty and the environment | BY B ETSY H ARTMANN

➤ Ever since the colonial era, “degradation narratives” have exercised considerable influence on understandings of the relationship between population, poverty and environmental degradation in the Global South. The basic story line common to these narratives is that population pressures and poverty precipitate environmental degradation. More recently, environmental conflict theorists have extended the causal chain to include migration and violent conflict. Vaclav Smil humorously describes the resulting equation: “eroding slopelands = environmental refugees = overcrowded cities = political instability = violence” (1).

Degradation narratives largely view peasants and pastoralists as destroyers of the environment. This negative stereotype has roots in colonial biases against native agricultural practices. In areas of settler agriculture in eastern and southern Africa, for example, land expropriation policies were predicated on the perceived backwardness of African peasants and the superiority of Western knowledge. In Kenya, European settlers mounted a campaign in the 1920s and 1930s to depict African agriculture as a scourge upon the land. “The African people have never established a symbiotic relationship with the land”, stated a witness before the Kenyan Land Commission. “They are, in the strict scientific sense, parasites on the land, all of them” (2).

The image of a backward and destructive peasantry carried over into post-World War II development thinking, with neo-Malthusian assumptions becoming increasingly prominent. Within large international agencies such as the World Bank, degradation narratives came to serve as a rationale for both rural development and population control interventions. A critique of Bank policy in Africa notes how the Bank tended to ignore the great variety and complexity of African agricultural practices, characterising them mainly as slash and burn and nomadic livestock raising, both of which can become destructive under conditions of high population growth. Meanwhile, the Bank neglected the ecologically damaging impact of the mechanised, chemical-intensive farming it was promoting (3).

Despite important challenges from within the development field, degradation narratives shaped the emerging concept of sustainable development in the 1980s. Liberal sustainable development advocates were more willing to acknowledge the role of social and economic disparities, such as unequal land distribution, in the creation of rural poverty. But as their argument proceeded, these inequalities would often fade from view. The poor made themselves even poorer by having too many children, setting in motion a vicious downward spiral of increasing poverty and environmental degradation. The concept of “environmental 6 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

refugees” was added to the picture, with exaggerated claims that there were 25 million such people whose migration posed a major threat to international stability (4).

In the rethinking of security, which took place with the end of the Cold War, the relationship between environment and conflict received increasing attention in foreign policy circles, especially in the U.S. The work of Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon was the most influential.

Homer-Dixon maintained that scarcities of renewable resources such as cropland, fresh water, and forests, induced in large part by population growth, contribute to migration and violent intrastate conflict in many parts of the developing world. He embraced the degradation narrative: “POPULATION GROWTH AND UNEQUAL ACCESS TO GOOD LAND FORCE HUGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE ONTO MARGINAL LANDS. THERE, THEY CAUSE ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE AND BECOME CHRONICALLY POOR. EVENTUALLY, THEY MAY BE THE SOURCE OF PERSISTENT UPHEAVAL, OR THEY MAY MIGRATE YET AGAIN, HELPING TO STIMULATE ETHNIC CONFLICTS OR URBAN UNREST ELSEWHERE”. (5)

Homer-Dixon as well as others scholars and journalists who shared this view helped elevate degradation narratives into the high politics of national security. During the Clinton administration, policy-makers in the State Department as well as in military and intelligence agencies often depicted the relationship between poverty, population growth and the environment in the Global South with degradation narratives.

Today, there is a growing body of scholarly literature, which offers a more nuanced and complex view of this relationship. However, degradation narratives continue to circulate in population, environment and security circles, and it is important to identify and challenge their basic assumptions.

Following are some key points of consideration.

Over-generalisation: The most obvious point to be made is how degradation narratives ignore the great diversity in both social systems and ecological conditions in the Global South. Context, contingency, agency and specificity are sacrificed to a universalising one-size-fits-all model.

Localisation of blame: In focusing on poor peasants and pastoralists as the destroyers of the environment, degradation narratives do not take into account other social, economic and political forces, which may be strongly implicated. ‘Effective demand’ from elsewhere for a region’s natural resources may drive environmental degradation much more than local poverty or population growth. For example, the crucial role of extractive industries – mining, timber, agribusiness, etc. – does not figure in the story at all. Also

poverty & environment D E G R A D AT I O N N A R R AT I V E S

ignored are the complex interactions between resource appropriation and power structures at the local, regional, national and international levels (6).

Neo-Malthusian causality: The belief that population pressure is automatically associated with both increased poverty and environmental degradation is overly simplistic and deterministic. Whether or not population pressure is beneficial or damaging to the environment depends on a host of intervening institutional and technological factors as well as the nature of the particular environment in question.

Degradation narratives fail to take into account that under some circumstances, population pressure may spur agricultural innovation and intensification. While population growth may decrease the size of landholdings, it can also expand the family labour supply, encouraging more labourintensive cultivation and conservation techniques. Thus, a study in Rwanda found that declining landholdings were associated with more investments in soil conservation and greater managed tree densities per unit of land (7).

Degradation narratives also ignore the possibility that depopulation of an area may lead to environmental decline.

In Brazil many areas, depopulated by poor peasants because of their lack of access to land and agricultural inputs, have gone over to ecologically damaging extensive cattle raising, industrial monoculture and logging. Similarly, in Mexico the exodus of poor peasants to urban areas has led to the loss of valuable micro-habitats and crop genetic diversity previously sustained by their labour (8, 9). Such is the power of neoMalthusian reasoning, however, that in some studies, such as a 1999 UNEP report on Africa, increases in population density are used as a proxy for the location of emerging environmental threats (10).

Degradation narratives also fail to differentiate types of rural poverty and their relationship to environmental change. Agrarian scholars have pointed out how poverty cannot be treated as a single concept and that assets must be broken down into specific categories. When households are ‘investment poor’, lacking the cash and human resources to invest in maintenance or enhancement of the natural resource base, then environmental degradation is more likely to occur. However, there are many different reasons for investment poverty, and analyses need to be time- and sitespecific. Moreover, the precise nature of the environmental change in question must be specified (11).

Migration: Degradation narratives have a similar onedimensional view of migration as distress-generated and generating. However, the causes of migration are extremely complex and context-specific, and there is little evidence to support the view that demographic pressure is at the root of many population movements (12). Moreover, migration from rural areas is often not a linear phenomenon or a rejection of rural livelihoods. Instead, it can be a vital part of sustaining them. A study in Vietnam found that internal migration is frequently circular and seasonal, with migrants returning to the rural areas at harvest time. Their remittances from urban jobs often help fund investments in agricultural intensification, children’s education, etc., enhancing the ecological and social resilience of the household (13).

Photo: V.A. Dyck

Gender: Despite lack of explicit attention to gender issues, certain views of women are implicit in degradation narratives, especially given the central and negative role they ascribe to population growth. Subsumed into the analytic frame of population pressure, women through their fertility become the breeders of environmental destruction, poverty and violence, and In many places women are making the day-to-day decisions about controlling their ferFailure to considagriculture when access to land is still invested in men. tility becomes the er livelihood divermagic bullet solution. Women’s access to land and property sification: Degradation narratives tend to promote a onerights, labour obligations, roles in environmental resource dimensional view of the peasantry as living solely off the management, and relative status in the household and comland, ignoring the reality that many peasant households have munity are not part of the picture, even though gender diversified livelihood strategies. In a village in Bangladesh, dynamics can have an important impact on agriculture and e.g. one family may have different members engaged in agrithe environment. Case studies in Africa note how in many cultural labour, petty trade, rickshaw driving, teaching and places women are making the day-to-day decisions about service in the military. Income derived from non-agriculturagriculture when access to land is still invested in men, a al activities is often invested back in productivity-increasing contradiction which can lead to agricultural stagnation (14). land improvements.

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D E G R A D AT I O N N A R R AT I V E S / U R B A N C H A L L E N G E

cation between northern and southern environmental scholars and advocates. The time is long overdue to move beyond them. ➤

Degradation narratives not only misinform, but also can have potentially negative policy consequences. Some international conservation organizations persist in blaming population growth and poverty disproportionately for environmental degradation (15). This can lead to coercive conservation measures, where local people are forcibly denied access to the resources on which their livelihoods depend, or to population-environment projects where reducing fertility is promoted as the main means of nature protection. Family planning is thus removed from the health and human rights context in which it should belong, with important implications for quality of care and reproductive choice.

REFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/update0402/references.htm ➤

BETSY HARTMANN is Director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, USA. She is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the IHDP Project on Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS); bhartmann@hampshire.edu

Degradation narratives are one of the main obstacles standing in the way of greater understanding and communi-

SCALING THE URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE The urban poor and the displacement of urban environmental burdens | BY G ORDON M C G RANAHAN

➤

most are not those on the top of the international environmental agenda – partly because the risks that fall most heavily on the poor tend to be localised and longstanding, rather than global and newly emerging. Similar tendencies exist at national and city levels. A colleague of mine summarised the situation as follows:

Urban economic growth has been accompanied historically by a shifting of environmental burdens, over space and through time. This has helped to create a situation in which many of the world’s urban poor face multiple burdens. A large proportion lives in unhealthy local environments characterised by a complex of interrelated risks, involving crowding, sanitary hazards, unsafe or insufficient water, indoor air pollution, accumulations of waste and disease bearing pests.

Many live in areas also threatened by ‘modern’ risks that can be brought on by environmentally negligent industrialisation and motorisation. Increasingly, the urban poor also live under the threat of global risks such as climate change. They still tend to be healthier than their counterparts in past centuries, at least in part, because they are far more knowledgeable than past generations about the risks they face locally and how to avoid them. However, they not only face more

“THE ENVIRONMENTAL BURDENS OF POVERTY ARE SUFFERED BY THE POOR AND DEALT WITH BY THE POOR. THE ENVIRONMENTAL BURDENS OF AFFLUENCE ARE SUFFERED BY THE PUBLIC AND DEALT WITH BY THE GOVERNMENT.” (MARIANNE KJÉLLEN, STOCKHOLM

FAO/G. Bizzarri

ENVIRONMENT INSTITUTE)

Poor people living in the streets of Calcutta serious environmental health risks than affluent groups, but the share of their mortality and morbidity that can be ascribed to environmental causes is also higher.

Given the multiple risks they face, one might expect the urban poor to be among the main beneficiaries of the increasing international concern about the environment.

Unfortunately, the environmental risks that affect them the 8 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

The concept of sustainable development was intended, among other things, to reconcile the poverty and environment agendas. It has been successful in many respects, but has led to misrepresentation of the environmental implications of urban poverty and environmental interests of the urban poor. From the time of the Brundtland Commission’s influential report Our Common Future (1987), proponents of sustainable development have been inclined to treat poverty as “a major cause and effect of global environmental problems”.

This has been very misleading. The urban poor do not contribute significantly to global environmental problems, although they may be associated with local environmental problems that are very widespread. Alternatively, global environmental problems like climate change may lead to more human hardship among the urban poor than among more affluent urban dwellers. This does not imply that placing such issues at the centre of the international environmental agenda is ‘pro-poor’ (the urban poor are also likely to suffer more when there is a stock market crisis, but that does not mean that economic policies designed to protect stock values are pro-poor.) In order to understand the relationship between urban poverty and the environment, it is important to distinguish between different types of environmental problems.

poverty & environment URBAN CHALLENGE

URBAN ECONOMIC STATUS AND THE SCALE OF URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL BURDENS

From Sanitation to Sustainability

Data on urban per capita income City-Regional Global Local and urban environmental burdens (e.g. Sanitation) (e.g. Ambient Air) (e.g. Carbon Emissions) are scarce and often of dubious quality. The evidence that exists does indicate, however, that cities in Increasing more affluent countries tend to creSeverity ate more spatially extensive and temporally delayed environmental burdens. More specifically, the following stylised facts are indicated: ➤ Local environmental burdens, with an immediate impact on human health, tend to be more prevalent in the cities of lowIncreasing Wealth income countries and particularly Poor Settlements Wealthy Settlements their poorest neighbourhoods.

Shifting Environmental Health Burdens These include indoor air pollution from cooking fires, inadequate Global Local access to water and sanitary facilities, and accumulations of solid Delayed Immediate waste in and around people’s homes. ➤ Citywide and regional environThreaten Life Support Systems Threaten Health Directly mental burdens, often combining immediate health and longer-term Fig. 1. A Stylised Urban Environmental Transition ecological impacts, tend to be more Source: G. McGranahan, P. Jacobi, J. Songsore, C. Surjadi, and M. Kjellén, 2001, The prevalent in and around cities in Citizens at Risk: From Urban Sanitation to Sustainable Cities, Earthscan, London middle-income countries. Such problems also tend to be linked to homes, has tended to decline with economic growth. In the city-size, and are particularly severe in and around megacities.

19th century, such hazards were common even in the most They include ambient air pollution, the release of untreated sewage into water bodies, and unsanitary dumpsites. affluent cities. For much of the century they were very poorly understood, despite causing enormous public health ➤ Activities that contribute to global environmental burdens, problems. They nevertheless became the principle target of often threatening the world’s life support systems and future the sanitary and public health movements. By the early 20th generations, tend to be more prevalent in cities in highincome countries. These include the emissions of greenhouse century, universal access to piped water, sewerage systems, gases and the consumption of resource and waste intensive waste collection, and clean fuels became a realistic aspiration products. in most affluent cities. A range of relatively standardised technologies and institutional mechanisms for providing and servicing these facilities have been developed. In today’s The implied relations between economic status and the scale of urban environmental burdens are summarised in the cities, wealthier people can better afford the facilities highly stylised curves of Fig. 1. Such curves only account for required to avoid localised environmental risks, and wealthpart of an existing inter-urban variation, and simply hide ier governments can better afford to ensure that they are intra-urban variation. Classifying urban environmental burmade available and used, if private incentives are insuffidens by their scale is itself problematic. Poor household sancient. itation (an archetypal small-scale problem) can help trigger large scale pandemics. But most important, these curves Nor is it surprising that the resource consumption and reflect predispositions, not causal relations. There is no prewaste generation that drives global environmental burdens determined environmental trajectory that economically are associated with urban affluence. The risks of global developing cities must go through. The lessons contained in resource depletion and waste generation including, e.g. these curves have more to do with urban environmental greenhouse gas emissions, have only recently gained widechallenges that must be overcome than with development spread recognition. The effects are delayed and remain highpaths that can or should be followed. ly uncertain. International mechanisms, needed to ensure that there are suitable incentives for preventive action, It is not surprising that the share of the urban population, remain rudimentary and heavily disputed. Wealthier people can afford to consume more resources and produce more facing serious environmental hazards in and around their IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 9

poverty & environment URBAN CHALLENGE

waste, and wealthy governments still have relatively little incentive to prevent their own citizens from doing so.

The rise and fall of the mid-scale burdens, e.g. ambient concentrations of ambient air pollution, pollution of local water ways, and urban waste disposal problems, is surprising and empirically debatable. The poorest cities are not sufficiently motorised or industrialised to create serious ambient air pollution problems. They do not have the sewers and drains, or solid waste generation and collection systems to create large citywide waste disposal problems. On the other hand, many cities in affluent countries have implemented control measures that, together with a shift away from industry and into services, have led to appreciable improvements in recent decades. This can leave middle-income cities, and particularly large industrialised middle-income cities, with serious midscale problems. This pattern was documented for several forms of urban air pollution in the early 1990s, and was labelled the environmental Kuznets curve.

Affluence has historically been based on activities that create environmental ‘pressures’, but also has brought greater capacity to avoid the adverse consequences. The local priority has been to address the more discernible, immediate and proximate consequences, which tend to affect local residents.

In some cases, local environmental pressures have been reduced by drawing on more distant resources, searching for more distant waste sinks, or simply dispersing the pollution in the air or water. Affluence has helped urban centres address local and immediate burdens, but has brought greater pressures with more distant or delayed consequences. It has thereby come to be associated with more spatially extensive and temporally delayed environmental burdens.

ECOLOGICAL INSIGHTS ON SCALE

In ecology, scale is increasingly recognised as a critical aspect of system dynamics. Two simple, yet important insights arising from ecosystems analysis are: 1) ‘big’ processes are often ‘slow’, while ‘small’ processes are often ‘fast’; and 2) scale is not politically neutral, and the selection of scales may privilege certain actors or groups. Both of these ecological insights are relevant to the stylised curves in Fig. 1. The environmental burdens of urban poverty involve ‘small’, ‘fast’ processes that

threaten the health of the urban poor themselves, while those of urban affluence involve ‘big’, ‘slow’ processes that threaten the life support systems of future generations. Thus, when they focus on large-scale processes, international environmental policy-makers are not simply focusing on a scale appropriate to their international mandate, but are (intentionally or unintentionally) privileging the concerns of the affluent and of future generations over those of the poor. To make matters worse, processes operating at different scales are intimately related. Without at least a rough understanding of these relations, and explicit attention to the ‘small’, ‘fast’ processes, it is difficult to see how the inherently multi-scaled urban environmental challenges can be addressed equitably and efficiently.

ECONOMIC INSIGHTS ON SCALE

From an economic perspective the scales of environmental burdens are also critically important, particularly as they often involve increasingly extensive ‘externalities’ or public ‘bads’. In the urban context, the failure to take account of global environmental impacts is a longstanding problem, historically experienced at sub-global scales. Urban activities often have their most serious environmental consequences outside of the localities where they take place, whether it is a latrine polluting neighbours’ wells, a textile mill polluting the river for downstream users, or the release of CFCs contributing to ozone depletion in the stratosphere. These environmental risks involve unintended consequences of human activity and the complex interplay of physical and socio-economic systems. They often transcend the spatial boundaries of property systems and public administration. They do not simply reflect human preferences at different levels of economic development. Narrow-minded proponents of economic growth may argue that there is no need to address urban environmental burdens directly, since as cities become more affluent, the problems of the past will eventually decline. This not only neglects the changing spatial scale of urban environmental burdens, but is also bad economics. The local environmental externalities that plague the urban poor can be just as significant as the city-level externalities brought on by industrialisation and motorisation, or the global externalities brought on by high material consumption levels. ➤

➤ The IHDP UPDATE newsletter features the activities of the

International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and its research community.

UPDATE is prepared by the IHDP Secretariat Walter-Flex-Strasse 3 53113 Bonn, Germany.

EDITOR: Elisabeth Dyck, IHDP; elisabeth.dyck@chello.at LAYOUT AND PRINT: Köllen Druck+Verlag GmbH, Bonn, Germany UPDATE is published four times per year. Sections of UPDATE may be reproduced with acknowledgement to IHDP. Please send a copy of any reproduced material to the IHDP Secretariat.

The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of IHDP or its sponsoring organisations.

10 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

GORDON MCGRANAHAN is Director of the Human Settlements Programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, UK; gordon.mcgranahan@iied.org; www.iied.org

JEANNE KASPERSON † Jeanne Kasperson died in August 2002. Throughout her career, Professor Kasperson was an active researcher, pursuing scholarly interests on human-environment linkages, and in particular global environmental risk assessment.

Her contributions to the IHDP research agenda, especially in the area of Vulnerability, will be sorely missed.

Our sympathies go to her husband, Roger Kasperson, and her family.

interview

AKIN L. MABOGUNJE

➤

Akin L. Mabogunje is Director of the Development Policy Centre (DPC) in Ibadan, Nigeria. Since 1998, the Centre has been promoting a strategy of poverty reduction through city consultation, a process to build consensus among key stakeholders, including the urban poor. The DPC has implemented this strategy in Ijebu-Ode, a city with about 200,000 inhabitants in the southwest of Nigeria.

Q: Professor Mabogunje, why are city consultations held and who is involved?

A city consultation tries to bring together all stakeholders in a city – those who are affected by priority issues, including the urban poor, and those who have the relevant information, expertise and implementation instruments. You need to involve all stakeholders in a participatory process of decision-making that should lead to reducing poverty. If you concentrate only on one group, e.g. farmers, traders or market gardeners, there will be a gap. The traders have to know what the farmers are doing.

Stakeholders can include, e.g. trade associations, co-operatives, mechanics, welders, market women and artisan groups.

Religious leaders have to be involved in the process, as well as the elite of a city or country. This is particularly useful if you want to build capacity and raise funding. It is important to stress the interdependence between the various stakeholders and give them a vision of what should be achieved.

Q: Who developed this strategy for poverty reduction and what does it involve?

The strategy was developed within one of the UN Centre for Human Settlement’s (Habitat) global programmes, the joint UNCHS-UNDP Urban Management Programme. Its aim is to improve the capacity of cities with environmental and poverty problems. Habitat (www.unhabitat.org) provided a grant to the DPC, and we chose the city of Ijebu-Ode in Nigeria to implement it. The strategy includes accepting that participation is central to poverty reduction; it is not just talking to people, but involving them in the process. First, we establish a “poverty profile” of a city, then we hold a series of mini-consultations and third, we plan and hold the formal city consultation. A successful consultation will be followed by concrete actions.

Q: How did this process work in Ijebu-Ode?

We first conducted a study to establish the poverty profile of the city, i.e. we tried to identify who and where the poor are and what they are doing. This was a three-day process. We put everybody into the picture and divided people in working groups to decide on available resources, how to get more jobs and money, and evaluate the infrastructure of the city, its socioeconomic strength and the government situation. We had four groups with chairs and deputy chairs, one male, one female, and a rapporteur each. The participants could choose to which group they wanted to contribute. We also held a series of mini-

consultations to explain the process, the interdependence between various stakeholders, and why it is important to get everybody together to come and consult.

A city consultation is only the beginning of a process. At the end of the consultation, we held a plenary session with reports by all groups. A committee was set up, including chairs, deputy chairs and rapporteurs, who worked with a team from the DPC to develop an action plan. This plan included recommendations, such as setting up a Development Board for poverty reduction.

To make sure that different stakeholders were represented, there were in total 30 people on the Board, including some members of the elite. Their task was to help raise local funding. They worked with the traditional ruler of the town, the Awujale of Ijebu-Ode, to establish a fundraising campaign. The Awujale also provided an office for the Board in his palace. The Board, of which I am a trustee, chose a chairman, a retired civil servant whose integrity is unquestionable. When the action plan was launched, distinguished sons and daughters of the country, i.e. industrialists and bankers from larger cities came together. The event brought nine million Nira (ca. US$ 100,000); half of it came from the government. This fund is being used now to support community projects. The Board submits a report each year, and its launching has turned into a town festival, because every stakeholder group attends.

Q: What in particular did this action plan include?

The Board decided on the number of programmes, such as identifying industries that we can use to alleviate poverty. We also set up training programmes. The training participants had to pay a small amount, ca. 100 Nira (50-70 US cents), because the Board decided that if you do not pay for something you do not value it. The payment becomes a measure of commitment to show that people were able to improve their productivity.

Even poor people have money, but they may not have it when they need it.

One of the industries we identified was the fruit processing industry, in particular pineapples. Participants were trained how to grow pineapples. Also, a pharmaceutical company needed honey as an ingredient, so people were taught how to keep bees; other training programmes focused on poultry breeding and on training market women in micro-financing. There was also a spillover from each project. For example, the poultry keepers needed cages, and so welders made the cages to keep the chickens; the beekeepers needed special clothes, which the women could sew, and manufacturing beehives provided work for carpenters - all these projects created more jobs.

After the training the participants had to prove that they could manage their own business, and they could borrow from the launching money. A community bank was engaged to be the IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 11

Photo: A. L. Mabogunje

CITY CONSULTATION: A STRATEGY FOR POVERTY REDUCTION

interview

AKIN L. MABOGUNJE

lending institution, and the Board recommended to the bank who should get a loan. The demand on the bank increased tremendously and by now, the launching money has been used up for loans.

Q: What are the long-term benefits of city consultation in efforts to alleviate poverty?

The long-term benefits are not only alleviation of poverty, but also discussions of city problems. This is important for a participatory process in the country. It also relates to accountability, as external auditors audit the accounts. I was at the general meeting last year, and the spirits were fantastic. Now the town has added health to its agenda and is looking into ways to improve the health of its inhabitants.

Q: Is it planned to hold city consultations in other towns as well?

Q: What, in your view, are the main advantages of city consultations?

Poverty means disempowerment, i.e. that people are unable to fend for themselves, and society does not provide an enabling environment for them. City consultation means empowerment – the poor are included in discussions of the town’s development and their own conditions. It is the first time they feel they have a part to play in the process, also about issues of environmental change or health, e.g. waste disposal. It means finding relevant and socially robust solutions within the community.

The poor are mainly concerned with livelihood. City consultation creates a framework to build trust in an internal dialogue.

It helps people discover their own strengths and improve their livelihood. ➤

City consultations have also started in the northern part of Nigeria, in Mena, a town larger than Ijebu-Ode, with about 400,000 inhabitants. Activities started there about a year ago, and by now the action plan is ready. In Tamale and Tema, two cities in Ghana, the consultation process has begun only this year and is at the first step of getting local institutions involved

in developing a poverty profile and identifying stakeholders.

The DPC serves as the “anchor” institution for the Urban Management Programme in Anglophone Africa, which includes Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Liberia and cooperates with other organisations in these countries.

INTERVIEW BY ELISABETH DYCK

2003 OPEN MEETING 2003 OPEN MEETING OF THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE RESEARCH COMMUNITY 16-18 October 2003

Montreal, Canada

TAKING STOCK AND MOVING FORWARD Following a decade of sustained interdisciplinary research on the human dimensions of global change, this is an appropriate time to assess the fruits of our efforts. Are we achieving cumulative, progressive research findings? Are we enhancing the set of methodologies at our disposal? Are we generating useful knowledge for decision-makers? Are we developing effective mechanisms for bridging disciplinary divides?

Plenary speakers at the 5th Open Meeting will address these questions in the context of major areas of human dimensions research.

The organisers also invite submission of focused “stock-taking” panels that take stock of particular areas of human dimensions research such as land-use/land-cover change, integrated assessment, population, environmental security, industrial transformation, institutions, environmental economics, and others. These panels should consist of 3-4 paper presenters, a chair and a discussant.

Abstracts for each paper are required along with an abstract for the panel. Proposals to submit individual research papers are also welcome. These may be on any area within the broad human dimensions research agenda. Poster sessions will be held as well.

Participation of researchers from a broad range of disciplines is expected. Researchers from developing countries and countries with economies in transition, as well as young researchers from all over the world are especially encouraged to submit proposals. Efforts will be made to provide financial support to participants from these categories, if their abstracts are selected for presentation at the meeting. Representatives of other communities, such as NGOs, business and government, are also welcome.

The 5th Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community will be hosted by the McGill School of Environment. It is organised by an international science planning committee, co-chaired by Peter Brown, McGill School of Environment, Canada, and Marc A. Levy, CIESIN, Columbia University, USA. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP).

Updated information about the Open Meeting, as well as registration details and procedures for submitting presentation proposals will be available at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/openmeeting.

Presentation proposals will be accepted at this website beginning January 1, 2003. The deadline for submissions is March 30, 2003.

12 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

young scientist research

ENVIROMENTAL CHANGE & VULNERABILIT Y

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND VULNERABILITY A strategy for the Philippines | BY J UAN M. P ULHIN

➤

The Philippines, a small nation with more than 7,000 islands in Southeast Asia, was one of the first countries to take action on the Agenda 21 process initiated during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992. It formulated its own national Agenda 21 in a highly participatory process.

This document was endorsed by the Cabinet in 1996 and received wide support from various sectors. Despite this, however, the state of the Philippine environment, evidenced by various kinds of environmental problems, has reached an unmanageable level. Among the problems are extensive deforestation, pervasive and health-impairing pollution, indiscriminate discharge of mine tailings and other pollutants into rivers and lakes, destruction of coastal and marine ecosystems, massive pesticide poisonings, degradation and erosion of agricultural land, siltation of rivers and farmland, salt water intrusion into aquifers and loss of biodiversity.

The country’s declining environmental quality manifests itself in the frequent occurrence of environmental disasters, such as destructive floods and landslides during rainy seasons, prolonged drought during dry seasons, and large-scale poisoning and death of fish and other aquatic resources.

These in turn claim human lives and destroy valuable infrastructure and property including poor people’s major sources of livelihood. Even the gains of economic growth are being diminished or negated by the numerous forms of environmental disasters. From 1988 to 1992, the Philippine government had to obtain a total of US$ 731 million worth of forestry sector loans to rehabilitate what can be considered as one of the world’s greatest forest plunders after World War II. Similarly, the costs of restoring water and air are equally high, estimated at a minimum of US$ 680 million and 320 million, respectively. Unless the deteriorating environmental situation can be stopped, its adverse impacts will strongly affect the economy, rendering elusive the pursuit towards sustainable development.

At the policy level, efforts should be made to improve the present approach to policy formulation and implementation. Policy formulation should focus more on the development of an institutionalised mechanism that builds consensus and wide representation among stakeholders, including the poor. Such mechanism or process should also strengthen the link between science and policy, with scientific information as the basis for policy decisions. Monitoring and feedback mechanisms should be instituted to determine compliance and ensure policy relevance at the ground level.

Field implementation of the different community-based resource management initiatives should likewise be improved to be more responsive to the needs and priorities of the poor.

A continuing environmental education at all levels should also be vigorously pursued to increase awareness among the entire population about environmental issues and mobilise them to action. Environmental activities should be incorporated in school/university curricula at all levels and possibly in the programmes of government agencies, NGOs and the private sector. The media should likewise be motivated to educate the pubic about environmental issues.

Finally, support to research and development should be strengthened. One way to do this is to require large foreignassisted environmental programmes and projects to include R&D as one of the components of field implementation.

South-North research collaboration could likewise be tapped to build the capacity of local researchers and provide additional resources. ➤

R EFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/update0402/references.htm ➤

While adverse environmental change has negative repercussions on the entire Philippine population, the most severe impact is on the lives of the poor, who constitute about 70% of the country’s total population (ca. 80 million). Poor people are most vulnerable to environmental disturbance – they have low income, are less able to save and accumulate assets, and are often powerless. They usually fail to build social networks, avail of credit facilities, and access social and other forms of formal assistance. These limitations restrict their capacity to cope with adverse impacts of environmental risks and disasters. This involves a decline in socio-economic well-being, including lost property and lives, physical isolation, population displacement, and cultural disintegration leading to a loss of indigenous knowledge systems and further contributing to environmental degradation.

Current government policies and programmes to reduce the vulnerability of the poor to adverse environmental impacts have only had limited success. A three-pronged strategy is recommended to improve present performance: ➤ develop a more responsive policy and practice of community-based resource and environmental management; ➤ conduct intensive and continuing public environmental education; and ➤ strengthen support for research and development.

J UAN M. P ULHIN is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of the Philippines, Los Baños, Philippines; jpulhin@laguna.net

IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 13

young scientist research SOIL MINING IN UGANDA

SOIL MINING IN EASTERN UGANDA (In)compatibilities between poverty reduction and sustainable land management at the farm household level | BY J OHANNES WOELCKE

Uganda is among the countries with the highest levels of nutrient depletion in sub-Saharan Africa and therefore an interesting location to explore these issues. For this purpose, the research project “Policies for Improved Land Management in Uganda”, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, was initiated in Uganda. Its immediate objective was to assist policy-makers in identifying and assessing policy, institutional and technological strategies for improved land management.

14 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

Better targeted technologies would allow farm households to intensify their agricultural production without increasing nutrient extraction. ties between private and social goals. Although modernisation has a positive effect on farm incomes, it leads to increased soil nutrient depletion, because some nutrients are not adequately replenished by the technologies adopted.

Several policy conclusions can be derived from the bio-economic model. First, the model results strongly encourage the completion of market reforms in Uganda. The process of market liberalisation has removed some major distortions, but has not been sufficient to create a business environment, which enables private trade, nor has it succeeded in linking small farms to high value markets. More public investment in market institutions, e.g. market information systems, and in finance and contract enforcement should be undertaken. Second, the model results emphasise that the provision of credit alone does not necessarily lead to sustainable farming practices. Policy programmes that combine access to new technologies, credit and training/education need to be designed. The Ugandan micro-finance programme Entandikwa seems to be a potential starting point to provide also poor farmers with loans. Third, more agricultural research is needed to search for better targeted technologies that will allow farm households to intensify their agricultural production without increasing nutrient extraction. Several national research institutions are carrying out encouraging field experiments, but more efforts and funding are required to revitalize R&D in Uganda. ➤

Two comprehensive household surveys were carried out in two villages in eastern Uganda. These data were used to develop a bio-economic simulation model that reflects the objectives and constraints of farm households in the region. The model computes the optimal choice of farming activities and quantifies the financial consequences at household level. It also includes a yield estimator and nutrient balances to assess the ecological impacts of these farming practices. The model results reveal the main reason why farm households do not pursue sustainable, intensive agricultural production as an appropriate strategy: it is not profitable under current socio-economic and agro-ecological conditions. Low economic incentives to adopt improved land management practices are due to market imperfections reflected in high transaction and transportation costs and insufficient access to financial loans. Consequently, farmers adopt a strategy of rational soil mining. Even with the introduction of new fertilizer technologies and the provision of credit, non-negative nutrient balances are not feasible for most households. Only drastic changes in input and output prices would induce the farm households to conserve their soil nutrient stocks while simultaneously satisfying their consumption needs. Significant improvements in the socioeconomic environment are essential to successfully promote intensive agricultural production in a sustainable manner. The effectiveness of direct market interventions, such as subsidies, is often limited due to enforcement problems. Moreover, they distort the private costs of resource use. But direct market interventions should not be ignored as a complementary policy measure, considering the substantial price changes needed to adopt new technologies. Implemening measures that aim at reducing transaction and transportation costs will affect the market in the longer run, and fertilizer subsidies may be a suitable option dur-

ing a transition period. As for the policy efforts to modernise agricultural production by increasing the production of high value crops, the simulation experiments indicate incompatibili-

Photo: J. Woelcke

➤ Nutrient depletion is reaching alarming levels in subSaharan Africa. The majority of farmers extract nutrients mainly through harvested crops, without replenishing them through inorganic or organic fertilisers. Policy-makers and researchers have raised concerns that nutrient depletion contributes to declining yields, with serious consequences for food security and household welfare. Consideration of these problems led to important research questions: why do poor farmers mine their soils? Why do they not invest in environmentally sound land management practices that would guarantee higher yields in the future?

JOHANNES WOELCKE was a junior researcher at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Bonn, Germany. In November 2002 he joined the CGIAR-Secretariat at the World Bank. j.woelcke@uni-bonn.de; www.zef.de

core projects LUCC

LAND-USE AND LAND-COVER CHANGE Meta-analyses of the causes and synthesis of the rates of change | BY

H ELMUT G EIST, E RIKA L EPERS , W ILLIAM M C C ONNELL , E RIC L AMBIN , NAVIN R AMANKUTTY

➤ Research discussions within the Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) of the LUCC Project have revealed that over the last few years our understanding of the patterns and drivers of land-use change has been altered in a major way (1). Efforts are now focusing on producing syntheses of knowledge on areas of rapid land-cover change and on integrating rates of change with causal patterns.

grammes. Strong regional trends are evident, e.g. in the nature of changes in property regimes, with the Latin American experience with land reform quite distinct from trends in the privatisation of communal land holdings in Africa. In addition, a diffuse set of equity issues, including economic and gender differentiation, are strong factors explaining which farmers change their production systems.

META-ANALYSES OF THE CAUSES OF LAND-USE CHANGE

GLOBAL SYNTHESIS OF THE AREAS OF RAPID LANDCOVER CHANGE

The quest for new knowledge on the causes of land-use change is met through a network of case studies that represent the variety of human-environment conditions and multiple organisational levels influencing land-use change. A two-fold approach has been taken. First, additional case studies have been

Joint efforts of LUCC, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), and Global Observations of Land Dynamics (GOLD/GOFC) have arrived at a synthesis of the areas affected by rapid land-cover change during the last fifteen to twenty years per various change classes. The exercise, based on existing databases, helps to focus attention on the areas experiencing the most significant land-cover changes (‘hot spots’) and to identify change processes for which poor information and data are available. A synthesis of all previous research on the subject at regional to global scales (e.g. deforestation, intensification, soil degradation, desertification, urban expansion, exceptional fires) is being carried out. The final product is a recent 1km resolution global land-cover base map (GLC2000) on which the areas affected by significant land-cover change are identified by colour codes for different processes of land-cover change. For each change patch, a description of the nature of the change, date, causes, impacts, detection method and references is included. It complements the improvements carried out on longer-term cover analyses (5).

The pace, magnitude and spatial reach of human alterations of the Earth’s land surface are unprecedented. To understand recent changes and generate scenarios on future modifications of the Earth system, the scientific community needs quantitative, spatially explicit data on how land cover has been changed by human use over the last 300 years, and how it will be changed in the next 50-100 years.

OUTLOOK

In its seventh year, the LUCC Project is about to integrate science outcomes on global land-use change (Focus 1) with those on global land-cover dynamics (Focus 2), and develop regional and global models; this will provide the wider science community with quantitative, spatially explicit data for scenario development. The concept of land-use transitions is being developed to support such scenario development. The work of meta-analysing causal synergies and synthesising rates of change is crucial for the next decade of integrated land change research (6, 7). ➤

REFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/update0402/references.htm ➤

developed, as can be seen from the portfolio of an increased number of scientific investigations through endorsed projects and regional networks (see “research” at www.geo.ucl.ac.be/LUCC). In these case studies, linking household–level information to remote sensing data has become an important tool to increase our understanding of land-use dynamics (2). Second, synthesis of knowledge through comparative analysis of cases has been broadened and improved in the form of meta-analyses, i.e. statistical techniques to synthesize results from individual studies. On tropical deforestation, e.g., it has been found that a set of recurrent, underlying driving forces (demographic, technological, economic, political, and cultural factors) is contributing to a limited set of proximate causes (agricultural expansion, infrastructure extension, wood extraction), with clear regional distinctions of the patterns of causal synergy (3). On drylands, it has been found that many more properties of systems dynamics (thresholds, feedback loops) are inherent to desertification, mainly due to the coupled impact of human causes and biophysical factors. Slow dryland change have been quantified and distinguished from fast changes, thus supporting empirically the Dahlem paradigm, stating that ‘desertification‘ is a process of sudden or gradual decline in the slow variables governing collectively the trajectory towards (non)sustainable land use (4). On agricultural change, the importance of widely-theorised causal factors, including population growth and market demand, were confirmed, though the effects of these factors are always modulated by a set of institutional factors, especially property regimes and government and non-governmental pro-

HELMUT GEIST (Executive Officer, geist@geog.ucl.ac.be) and ERIKA LEEPERS (Science Officer, lepers@geog.ucl.ac.be) are with the LUCC International Project Office; E RIC L AMBIN (lambin@geog.ucl.ac.be) is Chair of the LUCC Scientific Steering Committee; all: University of Louvain, Belgium, www.geo.ucl.ac.be/LUCC; WILLIAM MCCONNELL is with the LUCC Focus 1 Office, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA; wjmcconn@indiana.edu; NAVIN RAMANKUTTY is a researcher at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA; nramanku@facstaff.wisc.edu IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 15

core projects IT/GECHS

IT SSC CONVENES IN BONN

A NEW SPONSOR FOR GECHS IPO

| BY A NNA J. W IECZOREK

| BY M IKE B RKLACICH AND M AUREEN WOODROW

➤ The IT Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) met for the third time – this time in Bonn, Germany, at the end of May 2002, following a successful workshop on Industrial Transformation research in Germany. The SSC identified several important tools and activities to assess the success of the IT Project, such as IT publications, endorsed projects and events and web site hits. It also discussed tentative plans for an international conference in 2004 and fellowship awards.

In view of the geographical scope of the endorsed projects, the SSC decided to hold IT workshops in Germany, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, South Asia and the USA, to identify and/or initiate international IT projects and develop a more systematic cooperation between national and international IT research groups worldwide. The German workshop proved that there is already much research being carried out in the area of Industrial Transformation at a national level, which needs to be promoted and linked to international science. At a recent workshop in Twente on “Transitions towards Sustainability through System Innovation”, international researchers discussed the nature and ways transitions are induced. They also tried to determine whether transformations can be managed at all, as many of them occur regardless of whether they are desired or not.

‘Partnerships’ with other programmes and research institutes were considered as a means to strengthen the IT network and improve cooperation with organisations that pursue similar goals. In addition to endorsing projects and workshops, the SSC decided to create a category ‘IHDP-IT partner institutes’. Such partner institutes are programmes and organisations which also promote research on alternative development pathways that pose a significantly smaller burden to the environment; have at least two research areas in common with IT; are internationally oriented and financed; and/or undertake research that addresses questions of the IT Science Plan.

16 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

M IKE B RKLACICH is Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the IHDP Project on Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS); mbrklac@ccs.carleton.ca ➤

➤

ANNA J. WIECZOREK is Executive Officer, International Project Office of the IHDP Project on Industrial Transformation (IT); anna.j.wieczorek@ivm.vu.nl; www.vu.nl./ivm/research/ihdp-it/

Changes in GECHS Staff and SSC Membership: Ann Zurbrigg, the University of Victoria Project Officer, will leave the GECHS team in late 2002 following the SSC meeting in November. The GECHS SSC would like to thank Ann for her tremendous contribution to the Project since its inception in June 1999. In addition, GECHS would like to thank two departing members of the SSC, Dr. Chou Meng Tarr of Cambodia and Dr. Okechukwu Obeanu of Nigeria and also welcome Dr. Karen O’ Brien, a Senior Research Fellow at CICERO in Oslo, Norway, and Dr. Kwasi Nsiah-Gyabaah, Principal of Sunyani Polytechnic in Ghana. Dr. O’Brien’s research focuses on relationships between globalisation and the environmental and social vulnerability to global environmental change. Dr. Nsiah-Gyabaah’s research programme investigates relationships amongst poverty, environmental degradation and sustainable development. ➤

Finally the SSC has advised me to create an IT bibliography for each of the IT research foci and compile the most cited IT scientific publications. An interactive reference manager should be available on our website in spring 2003. The next issue of UPDATE (1/2003) will focus on research on transformations towards sustainability, with highlights from endorsed projects and workshops of IT. More information and updates on the IT Project are available at the IT website: www.vu.nl/ivm/research/ihdp-it/

➤ GECHS is pleased to announce it has forged a partnership with Procter & Gamble (Canada) for an initial twoyear period, which commenced in mid-2002. This partnership, in conjunction with support from Carleton University, provides much needed stability for the IPO. P&G’s support is founded upon its sustainable development initiatives (www.pg.com/canada/), which emphasise that improving human livelihood and security must be based on integrating economic progress with social development and environmental protection. This partnership will enable the GECHS IPO to improve its capacity to foster international research and leadership in the area of global change and human security. P&G sponsorship is used primarily to support a fulltime Executive Officer. Dr. Maureen Woodrow has come to the GECHS Project from the University of Ottawa where she was Coordinator of Research Initiatives for the Institute of the Environment at that University. The P&G sponsorship also includes a graduate scholarship. Paul Steenhof is the inaugural recipient of the P&G-GECHS graduate scholarship. He has commenced PhD studies at Carleton University and his research focuses on energy security issues.

M AUREEN WOODROW is Executive Officer, International Project Office of the IHDP GECHS Project; mwoodrow@ccs.carleton.ca; www.gechs.org

joint projects

G LO B A L WAT E R S YS T E M

THE GLOBAL WATER SYSTEM A progress report on the Joint Water Project | BY S YLVIA K ARLSSON ➤ In Update No. 3/2001, we reported on the efforts of the four global environmental change (GEC) programmes, i.e. IGBP, IHDP, WCRP and DIVERSITAS, to establish a Joint Water Project (JWP). This short article provides a progress report on the Project’s developments and planned scientific focus.

In the autumn of 2001, a scoping team was appointed, including Carlo Jäger (IHDP), Dennis Lettenmaier (WCRP), Christian Léveque (DIVERSITAS), Harry Lins (WCRP), Madiodio Niasse (IHDP), Michel Meybeck (IGBP) and Charlie Vörösmarty (IGBP). The team’s task was to develop a draft plan on the scientific scope, potential activities and products of the JWP. Representatives from the core projects of the four GEC programmes were invited to a meeting in Paris in May 2002 where the suggestions of the scoping team were discussed and further elaborated.

At the heart of the project is the global water system, which plays a central and integrative role in the dynamics of the Earth System (see box). The overarching scientific question to be addressed by the Joint Water Project is:

These issues are clearly complex and call for integrative and interdisciplinary approaches, combining studies of the physical water cycle, the influence of human actions and water-related institutions, as well as biogeochemical and ecological processes.

Three initial framing questions, consistent with the overarching science question, are proposed to provide some sense of the scope of activities that could be pursued by the Join Water Project.

Question 1: What are the relative magnitudes of global-scale changes in the global water system that are attributable to changing human activities such as water use, water management, land use, and to environmental factors such as climate variability and change?

The draft scoping document of the JWP can be downloaded from the Project’s website (www.jointwaterproject.net).

Comments on the document are welcome and should be sent directly to the co-ordinator, Holger Hoff (hhoff@pik-potsdam.de) or to the IHDP liaison to the Project, Sylvia Karlsson (karlsson.ihdp@uni-bonn.de). During 2003 the scoping team will convene several workshops to further develop the scientific framework including plans for implementation. Also, the four GEC programmes will discuss the Project’s progress at their respective Scientific Committee meetings. The goal is to launch the JWP before the end of 2003, with an International Project Office and a Scientific Steering Committee in place.

For more information on the JWP read the article by H. Hoff in the IGBP Newsletter No. 50 (www.igbp.kva.se). ➤

How are humans changing the global water cycle, the associated biogeochemical cycles, and the biological components of the global water system, and what are the social feedbacks arising from these changes?

al modelling capabilities confirm that the effects of human development on the terrestrial water cycle are already truly global in scope. In addressing the questions on the integration of environmental and human dimensions, it is envisaged that the methodology will include comparative regional studies, focusing on two or more heterogeneous regions that can be included in continental and global-scale analyses.

SYLVIA KARLSSON is an International Science Project Co-ordinator at the IHDP Secretariat in Bonn and IHDP liaison to the JWP; karlsson.ihdp@uni-bonn.de; www.ihdp.org THE GLOBAL WATER SYSTEM involves physical, biogeochemical and socio-economic components: ➤ the physical water cycle (which is central to the system); ➤ waterborne substances; ➤ biological species; and ➤ humans with their water-related institutions, as well as the interactions between these components.

Question 2: What are the main mechanisms by which human activities are affecting the global water system?

Question 3: To what extent is the global water system (from the perspective of its living and social components) resilient to global change? How adaptable is the global water system and how capable are water management systems and ecosystems to cope with water issues, in particular when these arise in combination with further challenges like biodiversity loss or economic poverty?

The Project will have a global focus. A number of studies, based on continental and global-scale datasets and evolving globIHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 17

in brief/calendar

Photo: B. Göbl

NEWS/MEETINGS

IN BRIEF

MEETING CALENDAR

➤➤➤

➤➤➤ 23 - 25 January 2003 - Punta Arenas, Chile Symposium on Global Change: Toward a Systemic View Focuses on physical and socio-economic issues in different ecosystems, with an emphasis on scientific research in Latin America; includes topics covered by IGBP and IHDP Contact: scovarru@dim.uchile.cl www.cmm.uchile.cl/scc2003/

IHDP Executive Director Barbara Göbel (Germany) has taken up office as the next IHDP Executive Director on 1 November 2002, succeeding Jill Jäger, who served in this position since 1999.

Dr. Göbel is a social anthropologist, specialised in environmental issues. Before joining IHDP, she was a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Anthropology of the University of Bonn. Earlier employments were with the Universities of Göttingen, Tübingen, and Hohenheim and at the Collège de France (Paris). She was also a Visiting Professor to the Universities of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Jujuy (Argentina) and La Paz (Bolivia).

Barbara Göbel’s main research interests are the cultural, economic and institutional dimensions of global environmental change. She was involved in several interdisciplinary research projects of the German Research Association (DFG), investigating environmental and cultural issue with special focus on arid areas in Latin America. She also cooperated with research programmes in Africa and Asia as well as both with governmental and non-governmental organisations. Barbara Göbel holds a PhD in social anthropology, prehistory and social and economic history from the University of Göttingen (1990). ➤➤➤ MODLUC Advanced Study Course With support from the European Commission, DG XII Environment and Climate Programme, the Advanced Study Course ‘Modelling Land Use Change’ (MODLUC) was held at the LUCC-IPO’s host university in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (27 Oct – 2 Nov 2002). Sixteen teachers trained more than 40 post-graduate students from all over Europe in modelling techniques within the context of global environmental change research. Course materials are available at: http://www.geo.ucl.ac.be/MODLUC. ➤➤➤ Research and Writing Competition The MacArthur Foundation invites proposals relating to Technological Change and Global Security and Sustainability for 2003 and 2004. These grants to individuals and two-person teams are intended to support projects that explore the development of improved understanding of key topics in global security and sustainability, and to broaden and strengthen the community of scholars engaged in work on these issues.

Applicants may request up to US$75,000 for individual projects, and US$100,000 for two-person collaborations.

The deadline for the proposals is February 3, 2003 and February 2, 2004. For further information write to: researchandwriting@macfound.org.

Grantmaking guidelines at: http://www.macfound.org/programs/gss/gss_guidelines. htm#research_writing

18 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

➤➤➤

10 - 11 February 2003- New Delhi, India

South Asia Regional Conference on Transitions Towards Sustainable Development Organised by TERI in co-operation with IHDP-IT and START; held at the India Habitat Centre Contact: www.teriin.org/events/docs/ihdp.htm ➤➤➤

13 – 18 February 2003 – Denver, CO, USA

AAAS Annual Meeting – Science as a Way of Life Annual Meeting and Science Innovation Exposition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Contact: www.aaas.org/meetings/ ➤➤➤

16 - 23 March 2003 - Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka, Japan

Third World Water Forum The IGU Commission for Water Sustainability is organising sessions on “Managing Human Impacts on Water Resources and the Water Environment” Contact: www.worldwaterforum.org ➤➤➤

24 - 27 March, 2003 – Gdansk, Poland

European Conference on Coastal Zone Research: an ELOISE Approach Conference on the EU Project Cluster on European LandOcean Interaction Studies (ELOISE); held at the Technical University Gdansk Contact: eloise@nilu.no www.nilu.no/projects/eloise ➤➤➤

31 March - 3 April 2003 - Beijing, China

International Symposium on Climate Change (ISCC) Organised by the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) Contact: www.cma.gov.cn/tongzhi.htm 16-18 April 2003 - Utrecht, The Netherlands International Conference on Framing Land Use Dynamics: Integrating knowledge on spatial dynamics in socioeconomic and environmental systems for spatial planning in western urbanised countries Endorsed by the IGBP/IHDP LUCC Project Contact: http://networks.geog.uu.nl/conference

publications NEW BOOKS

PUBLICATIONS CHALLENGES OF A CHANGING EARTH Proceedings of the Global Change Open Science Conference, Amsterdam,The Netherlands, 10-13 July 2001

Will Steffen, Jill Jäger, David J. Carson, Clare Bradshaw (eds); Springer, 2003; 216 p. 187 illus., 79 in colour. ISBN 3-540-433082; recommended retail price: € 79,95 ➤ This book presents a state-ofthe-science overview of global change and its consequences for human societies. It highlights four areas of critical importance – food, water resources, air quality and the carbon cycle – from both science and policy perspectives, and points the way towards the new scientific approaches needed to study the Earth System in the future. The book also summarises recent advances in understanding in global change science: the climate system, global biogeochemistry, land-ocean interactions and changing land cover and the Earth System. The volume is based on plenary presentations from Challenges of a Changing Earth, a Global Change Open Science Conference, held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, July 2001. The conference was organised by three international global change programmes – IGBP (International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme), IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change) and WCRP (World Climate Research Programme).

PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS

Jefferson Fox, Ronald R. Rindfuss, Stephen J. Walsh and Vinod Mishra (eds.); Kluwer Academic Publishers, December 2002; 344 p., ISBN 1-4020-7322-4; Price: € 85.00/US$ 83.00/£ 54.00 ➤ This new LUCC publication appeals to a wide range of natural, social, and spatial scientists with interests in conducting population and environment research and thereby characterising (a) land-use and land-cover dynamics through remote sensing, (b) demographic and socio-economic variables through household and community surveys, and (c) local site and situation through resource endowments, geographical accessibility, and connections of people to place through GIS. Case studies are used to examine theories and practices useful in linking people and the environment. The authors also describe land-use and land-cover dynamics and the associated social, biophysical, and geographical drivers of change articulated through human-environment interactions. A CD-ROM is included.

Principal investigators or project leaders of LUCC endorsed projects from Africa, Asia and Latin America may contact the LUCC International Project Office for a free copy. (lucc.ipo@geog.ucl.ac. be).

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN ALPINE REGIONS Recognition, Impact, Adaptation and Mitigation

Karl W. Steininger and Hannelore Weck-Hannemann (eds.); Edward Elgar Publishing, Nov. 2002; ISBN 1 84376 193 1 ➤ Mankind

is both responsible for, and affected by, global environmental change. Options for adaptation and mitigation can differ dramatically between regions. This book studies the effects on Alpine regions and other mountainous areas, which are among the most vulnerable, as they are affected early and most significantly by environmental change. The problem becomes even more acute in these regions because options for adaptation are severely limited. The local economy is based on environmentdependent forms of land use such as tourism and agriculture, yet it is exactly these activities, which help accelerate or mitigate environmental change.

MAKING WAVES Integrating Coastal Conservation and Development

Katrina Brown, Emma L.Tompkins and W. Neil Adger; Earthscan Publications, 2002; cloth ISBN 1 85383 915 9; paper ISBN 1 95383 912 4; Online Price £ 16.16 ➤ Coastal zones are critical multi-

ple-use resources, under pressure from constant demands from different sources - conservation, economic growth and social welfare. Making Waves identifies the dilemmas of managing conservation and development in coastal areas. It is packed with important and timely information and tools for the management, conservation and assessment of social implications of coastal resource use. The authors present a variety of methods and techniques that can be used to highlight the trade-offs and promote sustainable decisions among diverse users.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN FUTURES An Ecological Perspective

Jill S. Baron (ed.); Island Press, 2002; 352 p. cloth ISBN 1-55963-953-9 online price: US$ 52.00 paper ISBN 1-55963-954-7 online price: US$ 26.00 ➤ The book presents a comprehensive and wide-ranging exami-

nation of the ecological consequences of past, current and future human activities in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States and Canada. It brings together 32 leading ecologists, geographers, and other scientists and researchers to present an objective assessment of the cumulative effects of human activity on the region’s ecological health and to consider changes wrought by past human use. This combined view of past and present reveals where Rocky Mountain ecosystems are heading, and the authors project what the future holds based upon current economic and social trends and the patterns that emerge from them.

IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002 | 19

addresses

CONTACT ADDRESSES IHDP SECRETARIAT • IHDP Secretariat: Barbara Göbel, Executive Director Walter-Flex-Str. 3 53113 Bonn, Germany Phone: +49-228-739050 Fax: +49-228-739054 ihdp@uni-bonn.de www.ihdp.org

IHDP CORE PROJECTS GECHS • Global Environmental Change and Human Security

➤

c/o Maureen Woodrow Executive Officer GECHS International Project Office Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies, Carleton University 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada gechs@carleton.ca www.gechs.org

IDGEC • Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

➤

c/o Syma Ebbin, Executive Officer IDGEC International Project Office 6214 Fairchild, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA syma.ebbin@dartmouth.edu www.dartmouth.edu/~idgec

IT • Industrial Transformation

➤

c/o Anna J. Wieczorek, Executive Officer IT International Project Office Institute of Environmental Studies De Boelelaan 1087 1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands Anna.J.Wieczorek@ivm.vu.nl www.vu.nl/ivm/research/ihdp-it/

LUCC • Land-Use and Land-Cover Change

➤

c/o Helmut Geist, Executive Officer LUCC International Project Office University of Louvain Place L. Pasteur 3 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium lucc.ipo@geog.ucl.ac.be www.geo.ucl.ac.be/LUCC

Printed on recycled paper

SUBSCRIPTION ➤ For a free subscription to

this newsletter, write to the

JOINT PROJECTS

• Gilberto C. Gallopin

GECAFS • Global Environmental Change and Food Systems

Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean (ECLAC) Santiago, Chile ggallopin@eclac.cl

➤

c/o John Ingram, Executive Officer GECAFS International Project Office, NERC-Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford OX 10 8BB, UK jsii@ceh.ac.uk www.gecafs.org

GCP • Global Carbon Project

➤

c/o Pep Canadell Executive Officer GCP International Project Office, CSIRO Canberra, Australia Pep.Canadell@csiro.au www.globalcarbonproject.org

Water • Water Joint Project

➤

c/o Sylvia Karlsson IHDP Liaison Officer IHDP Secretariat, Bonn, Germany karlsson.ihdp@uni-bonn.de

IHDP SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE (SC) Chair • Coleen Heather Vogel

➤

Dept. of Geography & Env. Studies University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa 017chv@cosmos.wits.ac.za

Vice Chair • M.A. Mohamed Salih

➤

Institute of Social Studies The Hague, The Netherlands salih@iss.nl

Past-Chairs • Eckart Ehlers

➤

Institutes of Geography University of Bonn Bonn, Germany ehlers@joyce.giub.uni-bonn.de

or send an e-mail to: staff.ihdp@uni-bonn.de

Ecole Normale Superieure Laboratoire d'Ecologie Paris, France loreau@ens.fr

• Carlo J. Jaeger Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) Potsdam, Germany carlo.jaeger@pik-potsdam.de

• Tatiana Kluvankova-Oravska Institute for Forecasting Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava, Slovak Republic tatiana@progeko.savba.sk

• Elinor Ostrom Center for the Study of Institutions, Population & Environmental Change Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA ostrom@indiana.edu

• Xizhe Peng Institute of Population Research Fudan Unviersity Shanghai, P.R. China xzpeng@fudan.edu.cn

• P.S. Ramakrishnan Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India psrama2001@yahoo.com

• Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez University of California Santa Cruz, CA, USA rsanchez@weber.ucsd.edu

• Paul L.G. Vlek Center for Development Research (ZEF) Bonn, Germany p.vlek@uni-bonn.de

IGBP • Guy Brasseur

➤

Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology Hamburg, Germany brasseur@dkrz.de

START (alternating) • Sulochana Gadgil ➤

Indian Institute of Science & Oceanic Sciences Bangalore, India sulo@caos.iisc.ernet.in

• Graeme I. Pearman CSIRO Atmospheric Research Aspendale, Australia graeme.pearman@dar.csiro.au

WCRP • Peter Lemke

➤

Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research Bremerhaven, Germany plemke@awi-bremerhaven.de

GECHS • Michael Brklacich

➤

Carleton University Ottawa, Canada mbrklac@ccs.carleton.ca

IDGEC • Oran R. Young

➤

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA oran.r.young@dartmouth.edu

IT • Pier Vellinga

➤

EX-OFFICO MEMBERS IHDP SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Dean, Faculty of Life and Earth Sciences Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The Netherlands vell@geo.vu.nl

ICSU • Gordon McBean

➤

➤

• Arild Underdahl Rector, University of Oslo Oslo, Norway arild.underdal@stv.uio.no

Members • William C. Clark

➤

JFK School of Government Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA william_clark@harvard.edu

IHDP Secretariat at the above address

DIVERSITAS • Michel Loreau

➤

• Carl Folke CNM, Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden calle@system.ecology.su.se

20 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 4/2002

Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada gmcbean@fes.engga.uwo.ca ➤

LUCC • Eric Lambin

Dept. of Geography University of Louvain Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium lambin@geog.ucl.ac.be

ISSC

• Kurt Pawlik Institute for Psychology I University of Hamburg, Germany pe6a017@uni-hamburg.de

SOCIAL SCIENCE LIAISON OFFICER • João M. Morais IGBP Secretariat The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 50 005 10405 Stockholm, Sweden morais@igbp.kva.se