IHDP
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
02/2005
ISSN 1727-155X
MODERN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY A Turbulent and Dramatic Scenario | B Y J OHN M C N EILL
FO CUS: ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
C
O N T E N T S
1 Modern Global Environmental
History: A Turbulent and Dramatic Scenario | John McNeill 4 Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) | Rik Leemans and Robert Costanza 6 A Socio-Ecological View on Industrialization in Europe since the 19th Century | Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Fridolin Krausmann 8 Africa’s Environmental History | Jane Carruthers 10 Bialowiez•a Primeval Forest: The Last Remnant of Pristine Woodlands Between Conservation and EcoTourism | Tomasz Samojlik 11 Disaster Coping and Prevention in the Swiss Alps in the Early 19th Century | Agnes Nienhaus ➤ In its time the earth has undergone many dramatic environmental shifts, from ice ages and hot spells to the emergence of new species and massive extinction spasms. Lately another historical moment of rapid environmental change has dawned, an era of environmental shock and awe, on this occasion brought on by the activities of a single species, the rogue primate homo sapiens sapiens. Humankind of course affected earth’s environment from the earliest moments of our career, and in thoroughgoing ways at least since the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. The intensity and scope of human impact upon the earth only grew with the transitions to agriculture that began roughly 11.000 years ago, and grew yet more with the initial harnessing of fossil fuels in the 18th century. But what has occurred in the past three or four human generations is novel in scale and scope, and in some respects, in character. Some forms of modern environmental change are totally new. Until 1930, there were no CFCs anywhere on earth (nor presumably anywhere else either). The earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone remained robust. But by the late 20th century, large quantities of CFCs had escaped to the stratosphere, significantly depleting the ozone shield. Until the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in 1942 there were no nuclear wastes anywhere on earth, but within six decades there were millions of tons of them. But what makes the last century such an era of unusual environmental turbulence is more the scale and scope of venerable human practices such as farming and forest clearance, the use of fire and fuel, fishing and so forth. The following table gives a rough sense of the magnitude of some forms of environmental change over the last century. More data ➤
continued on page 2
12 Becoming Aware of the Seas’ Potential Richness | Interview with Poul Holm 14 From LTER to LTSER: The SocioEconomic Dimension of Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research | Helmut Haberl 16 Can Cities Reduce Global Warming? Urban Development and the Carbon Cycle in Latin America | Summary Report 18 The Challenge of Stabilizing Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations | Pep Canadell and Michael Raupach 20 Increasing IHDP’s Visibility Across the Globe | Debra Meyer-Wefering 21 In Brief 23 Meeting Calendar, Publications
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. : U l a L ö w
Environmental History A DR AMATIC SCENARIO
The introductory article by John McNeill stresses that the emerging superpowers of the East, especially China, may soon be responsible for a major part of global human pressures on ecosystems. Rik Leemans and Robert Costanza describe IHOPE, a new project designed to increase our understanding of past changes in society-nature interactions. IHOPE aims at improving our ability to project plausible future scenarios. In casting a “socio-ecological view” on European industrialization over the last 200 years, Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Fridolin Krausmann offer a biophysical analysis of long-term changes in societynature-interaction in Europe. Jane Carruthers gives a brief overview of African environmental history and analyses the (geo-)political framework, especially that of colonization and decolonization, which has shaped the discourse within the field. The interview with one of the pioneers of marine environmental history, Poul Holm, gives an intriguing insight into his field of research. Agnes Nienhaus demonstrates how changes in the understanding of nature, especially the scientific and mechanistic worldview, have affected strategies of disaster coping in the Swiss Alps. Tomasz Samojlik • introduces the environmental history of Bialowieza National Park, a large and ecologically extremely valuable woodland in Poland and Belarus, and points out how humanities scholarship can inform initiatives for sustainable tourism. V ERENA W INIWARTER , H ELMUT H ABERL , G UEST E DITORS The Guest Editors are lecturing and researching at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, Universities of Vienna and Klagenfurt, Austria; www.iff.ac.at
2 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
freshwater use
9-fold increase
marine fish catch
35
cropland
2
irrigated area
5
pasture area
1.8
forest area
0.8 (i.e. 20% reduction)
CO2 emissions
17
SO2 emissions
13
Lead emissions
8
Cattle population
4
goat population
5
pig population
9
source: McNeill 2000; RIVM
The global environment changes at an ever-increasing pace. Many of the changes are triggered by human activities, and the magnitude of human-induced changes is rising. Understanding of changes in the earth system critically depends on an improved understanding of these ‘socio-economic drivers.’ Environmental history, the theme of this UPDATE, is one of the approaches to fill some of the gaps in our understanding of the past. The study of interactions between human societies and their biophysical surroundings emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the 1970s, as part of the then new environmental movement. It has since then become increasingly professionalized with the development of organizations like the American (1979) and the European (1999) Societies for Environmental History (ASEH and ESEH, respectively). As the subject requires an understanding of both natural and social systems, environmental history is an interdisciplinary field. This UPDATE gives an overview of relevant issues in the light of the field’s interdisciplinarity.
of the same sort may be found at the website maintained by the Dutch Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezonheid en milieu (RIVM) at: http://arch.rivm.nl/env/int/hyde.
Table 1: Scale of Environmental Change, c. 1890s-1990s (co-efficient of increase) It is well to remember that environmental turbulence is neither all good nor all bad, and indeed almost all of it is good for some people or some species, and bad for others. Just why the last few human generations have been so environmentally turbulent is not self-evident. Many interacting, coevolving variables are involved. Probably the most important among them is the energy system that grew up around fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Cheap and abundant energy in the form of fossil fuels helped to create the smoky, sulfurous atmospheres of industrial cities such as Pittsburgh or Glasgow (much improved since 1960 one should note). Cheap energy also made possible the modern mining industry, capable of crunching through thousands of tons of rock to get a few grams of gold, and the modern timber industry, which over the past 40 years has done much to clear the forests of the world’s tropical latitudes. Cheap and abundant energy is of course only part of the story. The 4-fold expansion of human numbers (from 1900 to 2000) and the 14-fold expansion of the world’s urban population are also important driving forces helping to explain modern environmental history. So, of course, are matters not easily reduced to numbers, such as the nature of modern technologies and the systems in which they are embedded, the emergence of (now) prevailing ideologies of mass consumption and economic growth, the pressures on state behavior generated by the international political system and so forth (see McNeill 2000: 267-356). Population
4
Urban proportion
3
Urban population
13
World economy
14
Industrial output
40
Energy use
13
Coal Production
7
Table 2: Some Driving Forces Behind Environmental Change (co-efficients of increase, 1890s-1990s)
Source: McNeill 2000 and RIVM
EDITORIAL
Environmental History A DR AMATIC SCENARIO
For most of the period from, say, 1870 to 1970 the industrial heartlands of the world, mainly in Japan, Europe, and North America, were undergoing the most dramatic environmental turbulence. They suffered the most acute air pollution problems, the most severe chemical pollution (as opposed to bacteriological pollution) of their waterways, and witnessed many quick shifts in land use. They also helped to generate environmental transformation elsewhere in the world, through their hunger for energy and resources, their capital investment in transport and other infrastructure-often undertaken in colonial contexts-and the export of their ideas and ideologies. The reasons behind this were simple enough: the most rapid industrialization, the most rapid economic growth, and the greatest concentrations of political power were to be found in these lands. In the last 30 or 40 years, however, things have changed. East and Southeast Asia emerged as the zone of the greatest turbulence, and lately have begun to generate environmental pressures elsewhere in the world. In some ways this is a return to patterns of the more distant past. The emergence and centralization of the Chinese state, from the Bronze Age onward, proved highly disruptive for peoples and environments of East Asia, organizing a long trend of deforestation and agricultural expansion (Elvin 2004; ReardonAnderson 2000). Despite the prevalence of religious ideologies often held to be reverent of the natural environment – Buddhism, Taoism – traditional China was neither an environmental Eden nor a Shangri-la. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ecological impact of the Chinese economy made itself felt throughout adjacent lands and out into the islands of the Pacific, which for example, supplied Chinese consumers with fragrant sandalwood and delicious sea slugs (McNeill 1994). From the end of the 19th century, Japan’s rapidly industrializing economy – and its imperial expansion between 1895 and 1945 – meant that its ecological impact extended to Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, Micronesia, and parts of Southeast Asia. China, meanwhile, underwent imperial collapse and political chaos (c. 1910-49), followed by a political consolidation under Mao Zedong which brought its own unique environmental consequences (Shapiro 2001). Mao’s China took infrastructure development as a sacred duty, building dams, roads, and railroads with great gusto. For a few years, during the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-61) the government ordered peasant communes to make steel in backyard furnaces, a tremendously inefficient process that led to widespread loss of vegetation (used as fuel) and masses of nearly useless steel. Perhaps 10% of China’s extant forests went into the furnaces. Beijing alone acquired 2,000 smelters with their attendant air pollution. Mao’s geopolitical and other ambitions translated into environmental disruptions across China, few of which can be regarded as beneficial from the human point of view. Since the end of the Mao era in 1976, China has taken part – lately the leading part – in a general surge of economic growth and industrialization in East and Southeast Asia. Between 1980 and 2000 China managed to raise per capita incomes about 10fold. Never in the annals of human history has so much economic growth been achieved so fast, and by so many. Meanwhile, South Korea, which in 1960 was poorer on a per capita basis than Ghana, in one generation became one of the world’s richer countries and most efficient industrial producer in many areas of
heavy industry such as steel and shipbuilding. Japan rebounded from the destruction and privation of the war years (1937-45) to emerge again as East Asia’s leading industrial power, hungry for fuel, timber, and other raw materials from adjacent lands. By the 1980s, Taiwan, and to some extent Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand had also managed to transmogrify themselves into Asian tigers in the world economy. The astonishing rapidity of economic growth in this part of the world inevitably brought environmental repercussions. East Asian cities soon became among the most polluted in the world, particularly those of north China, which burn quantities of high-sulfur bituminous coal. Fresh water shortages came to bedevil much of North China, as did more frequent dust storms, a result of putting millions of hectares of grasslands under the plow (Economy 2004; Smil 2004). In many respects, China’s environmental problems by 2005 came to resemble those of the United States as of 1905 – urban air pollution, regional water shortages, rapid soil erosion on former grasslands – except China was growing economically even faster than the U.S. of a century ago, and had more than ten times as many people in roughly the same territory. Paralleling the U.S. and Britain of a century ago, China’s rapid industrial growth has lately come to mean that China generates environmental turbulence for other parts of the world, as does Japan and, on a smaller scale, South Korea. The tiger economies import massive amounts of grain, oil, timber, mineral ores and other primary products from Southeast Asia, Australia, the Pacific Rim generally, and in the case of oil from the Persian Gulf, providing a fillip to extractive activities in all affected lands (King 1998). The 21st century bids fair to be just as environmentally turbulent as was the 20th, and if it is, the historic resurgence of the East Asian economies will be among the major reasons. R EFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm; http://www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm JOHN MCNEILL is Professor of History at the History Department and Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA; mcneillj@georgetown.edu; http://www.georgetown.edu/sfs ➤ The IHDP UPDATE newsletter features the activities of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and its research community. ISSN 1727-155X UPDATE is published by the IHDP Secretariat Walter-Flex-Strasse 3 53113 Bonn, Germany. EDITOR: Ula Löw, IHDP; loew.ihdp@uni-bonn.de LAYOUT AND PRINT: Köllen Druck+Verlag GmbH, Bonn+Berlin, 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. This newsletter is produced using funds by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF). The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of IHDP or its sponsoring organizations
IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 3
Environmental History IHOPE
INTEGRATED HISTORY AND FUTURE OF PEOPLE ON EARTH (IHOPE) B Y R IK L EEMANS AND R OBERT C OSTANZA INTRODUCTION
➤ Understanding past environmental change is seen as a prerequisite for understanding future change. But most past changes were driven by natural trends and variability, while future changes will be strongly determined by human activities. Over the last century, human activities have already become so pervasive that they affect the whole system Earth in a complex, interactive way. The Earth system now probably operates beyond its normal historic mode (Steffen et al. 2004). Earth System modelers have simulated this complex dynamic behavior by stressing the environmental processes within the Earth system. They now also start to recognize the importance of human activities in their models (e.g. Rotmans and de Vries 1997, Alcamo et al. 1998, Boumans et al. 2002), but few comprehensive datasets have been available to initialize and validate these models. Some research groups (Ramankutty and Foley 1998, Klein Goldewijk 2000) have filled part of this void by creating global historical databases of land-cover change. Their approaches filled gaps in incomplete statistical datasets by applying interpolations and modelbased extrapolations. These datasets have, for example, improved simulations of the contemporary carbon cycle but did not generate enhanced understanding of historic human environment interactions. Social scientists, in contrast, have traditionally portrayed the history of the Earth in terms of the rise and fall of great civilizations, wars, and specific human achievements. They essentially ignored environmental contexts that often triggered and mediated these events. Based on the last decade of research, we are now beginning to understand the complex ways in which humans have affected and have been affected by environmental change (e.g. Diamond 1999, Redman 1999). We now have the capability to better integrate human history with a fairly detailed environmental history of the Earth over the last 10,000 years. The global change research programs have stimulated these attempts to integrate human dynamics and environmental change to improve management of the earth system (e.g. Schellnhuber et al. 2004). Their core projects reflect this integration in various degrees. The need for a broader, more systematic project arose at the IGBP Congress in Banff, Canada, in June 2003. Representatives of all the major global projects in both the biophysical and social sciences initiated the “Integrated History and future Of People on Earth (IHOPE) project and defined its scope and objectives. Here we will summarize the objectives of IHOPE and present one of its first activities. THE OBJECTIVE OF IHOPE
An integrated historical understanding of the Earth is necessary for both scientists and policy makers, since the issues that both must address are neither isolated nor singular by 4 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
nature. More specifically, such an integrated approach would constitute an extensive interdisciplinary basis for studying various aspects of the Earth system upon which future research efforts will be defined and directed. Such a basis does not exist now. The resulting knowledge would form the core upon which, for example, integrated models of human-environment systems could be developed and tested. In turn, the resultant subset of models that exhibit skill in replicating the integrated history of humans on earth could then be used to make projections into the future with much higher confidence. The specific goals of the IHOPE project are: 1. Map the integrated history of the human-environment system over the last 10,000 years, with higher temporal and spatial resolution in the last 1000 and the last 100 years. 2. Understand the dynamics of human history by testing human-environment system models against this history. For example, how well do various models explain the historical patterns of human settlement and population? 3. Project with much more confidence and skill options for the future, based on models and understanding that has been tested against the integrated history and with participation from the full range of stakeholders. THE FIRST ACTIVITY: THE DAHLEM CONFERENCE ON IHOPE
The first milestone activity of IHOPE is happening in June. A group of forty experts from a broad range of disciplines convenes at a conference in Dahlem, Berlin to discuss issues related to land-use systems, human settlement patterns, atmospheric chemistry and composition, climate, material and water cycles, ecosystem distribution, species extinctions, technological changes, patterns of disease, patterns of language and institutions, wars and alliances, and the host of other variables necessary to describe and understand the integrated history of people on Earth over the last 10,000 years. This conference focuses on integrating formal scientific knowledge with traditional knowledge, data and models, and will cover processes that span multiple spatial scales, from the local to the global. More specific objectives are: • To evaluate the current level, scope, resolution, and quality of historical data available in both the biophysical and social sciences and the potential for their integration. • To evaluate the current state-of-the-art of human-environment system studies and develop creative ideas for the next generation of these studies. • To investigate the possibilities for using human-environment system models to project plausible future scenarios for people on Earth. • To develop strategies for achieving the long-term goals of the IHOPE project. The conference involves in-depth discussions in a series of focus groups, which meet in a highly systematic way to achieve
Environmental History IHOPE
optimal interactions among and between members of all groups. These focus groups need to address the full range of empirical, semantic, and academic culture aspects of IHOPE without getting bogged down in endless arguments. The first three focus groups will address issues surrounding the collection, access, integration, interpretation, quality assessment, and analysis of information at three temporal scales and resolutions (with different degrees of quality and coverage) about all aspects of human-environment systems. The fundamental question for these three groups is: What do we know about the history of human-environment systems at multiple time and space scales? The first group ‘Millennial Time Scale’ would try to comprehend the agricultural transition, formation of nation states, major religions, language groups, etc. The second group ‘Centennial Time Scale’ would try to understand events like the industrial revolution and the rise of consumerism and the middle class, while the third group ‘Decadal Time Scale’ would pick up the Depression, WWs I and II, and the “1950 discontinuity” (when there seems to have been a significant change in the rates of many important social processes in the developed world, see Crutzen and Steffen 2003). Group 4 ‘Future Scenarios of Human-Environment systems’ focuses on the modeling and scenario tools that are available to explore future trends end events. The fundamental question for this focus group is: How can we best use humanenvironment systems history and models to generate plausible future scenarios that can integrate various policy, decisionmaking, and stakeholder communities? Besides their own internal complexities, human-environment systems are intimately linked in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. This poses multiple challenges, and it will be necessary to integrate the different perspectives, theories, tools, and knowledge of multiple disciplines across the spectrum from social to biological to chemical to physical sciences in order to understand the integrated history of the Earth (Costanza and Jørgensen 2002, Turchin 2004). A key purpose of IHOPE is to construct integrated models to generate scenarios of the future under different assumptions about key driving forces, including alternative assumptions about institutions, technology, living standards, and policies (van Notten et al. 2003). Future scenarios are inherently about the sensitivity of models to changes in underlying assumptions and parameter values and the confidence we have in model projections based on their ability to reproduce historical behavior. Deciding which scenarios to run and interpreting the results are activities that require significant input from a very broad range of stakeholders. The fourth focus group will also discuss alternative methods to achieve stakeholder input and outreach with communities such as policy makers, nongovernmental organizations and business. LATER PHASES OF IHOPE
The Dahlem conference will provide insight into the already available innovative approaches and projects. This will form the basis for the scientific expansion of IHOPE. We recognize that a productive approach to integration needs to be pluralistic but evaluative, which is impossible to achieve without the use of models. We view “models” in the broadest sense:
conceptual to mathematical; adopting a narrative, agent, or system perspective; at the landscape, regional or global scale. There is no one “right” way to represent complex reality in models, but we can judge and evaluate the relative quality of different representations for different purposes. Significant efforts in the IHOPE project need thus to be devoted to testing and evaluating model performance relative to data and other criteria, and understanding and communicating uncertainty. Since the models represent a complex reality, the conceptual or mathematical representation remains poor and the data is of highly variable quality and coverage, this is not a trivial task. This is illustrated by the insufficient degree of human and natural system integration into currently available models. Additionally, the degree of calibration and testing of the models against real world data is generally low. In both areas, IHOPE may be able to contribute significantly. We do not wish to simply proliferate new models, but rather to develop a deeper understanding of the many ways in which models relate to data and better ways to judge the performance of models in order to winnow out the best performers for further development. The Dahlem participants, for example, have extensive experience in model assessment through inter-comparison of models with other models and with data. Finally, it will be necessary to continuously incorporate the perspectives of non-disciplinary experts. These stakeholders include policy makers who must formulate and justify frameworks for future development, resource managers who must interpret and implement those frameworks, and ultimately the communities who will either suffer or benefit from these policies and decisions. The core approach of IHOPE will always be an attempt to integrate and synthesize perspectives across all relevant disciplines and stakeholders. R EFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm R IK L EEMANS is Professor of Environmental Sciences and Chair of the Environmental Systems Analysis Group at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, The Netherlands; Rik-Leemans@wur.nl; www.dow.wur.nl/UK/cwk/org/esastart.htm R OBERT C OSTANZA is Professor of Ecological Economics at the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA; rcostanz@zoo.uvm.edu; www.uvm.edu/giee
Global Change in Mountain Regions Open Science Conference 2 – 6 October Perth, Scotland, UK For information visit: www.mountain.conf.uhi.ac.uk/
IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 5
Environmental History REGIME SHIFTS
A SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL VIEW ON INDUSTRIALIZATION IN EUROPE SINCE THE 19 TH CENTURY B Y M ARINA F ISCHER-KOWALSKI AND F RIDOLIN K RAUSMANN ➤ Why look at socio-ecological systems in history? We feel that it is indispensible for understanding long-term sustainability options of present-day societies. Therefore, complementary to case-studies on recent transitions, we have analysed historical and present transitions, using the conceptual scheme outlined below. Figure 1 gives a graphical representation of our concept for analysing the coupling of social and ecological systems, contemporary or historical. Socio-ecological systems can be defined, according to Figure 1, as comprising a “natural” or “biophysical” sphere of causation governed by natural laws, and a “cultural” or “symbolic” sphere of causation reproduced by symbolic communication. These two spheres overlap, constituting what is here termed “biophysical structures of society.” These biophysical structures must be sustained by a continuous exchange of energy and materials with environmental systems (socio-economic metabolism), depending on technologies that are rooted in the knowledge (culture) of the social system. In order to maintain this metabolism, social systems intervene into natural systems in order to transform them and keep them in a desired state that is usually far from natural equilibrium. This is what we call colonization; the most obvious example of this being agriculture. Both socio-economic metabolism and colonization constitute specific interdependencies between social and natural systems, and mould them in a co-evolutionary manner.
Figure 1: The structural coupling of social and ecological systems (after Haberl et al. 2004) From such a perspective, industrialization appears as a process which fundamentally alters the size and structure of socio-economic metabolism as well as its relation to land-use and agriculture. In a number of empirical case studies we have investigated the socio-ecological dimensions of this historical transition in Central Europe (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2004; Krausmann and Haberl 2002; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2006). Our socio-ecological view focuses on the transformation of the socio-economic energy system which represents the biophysical core of industrialization since the late 18th century. Under the conditions of the agrarian regime into the nineteenth century, the socio-economic energy system was closely linked to land6 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
use: Biomass accounted for more than 95% of societies’ annual demand of primary energy, including wood for the provision of space and process heat, and food as well as feed to provide human and animal power. Water, wind and coal were quantitatively unimportant, at least on a larger level of scale. The strong reliance on biomass created a tight coupling of energy provision and land-use. Around 1830 in Austria, for example, 85% of all land was directly used for energy provision: 15% was used to feed draught animals, 30% was necessary to provide space and process heating and more than 40% was required to feed the human population. The area-based, and hence decentral, character of the energy system had major implications on socio-economic development. Area and labour productivity strictly limited energy availability and thus socio-economic growth. Population density could not exceed values of 30-50 people per km2 (Table 1). Spatial differentiation was restricted by the high energy costs of overland transport, which allowed for transportation of bulk products only over short distances. Agriculture represented the core element of the pre-industrial energy system. It was essential that agriculture produced a surplus of energy which fed the non-agricultural labour force and fuelled non-agricultural production. The main bottleneck of pre-industrial agriculture was the lack of external inputs and its strong reliance on natural processes, locally available plant nutrients, and animate power. A local mix of cropland, grassland and woodland to provide for the local requirement of firewood, animal power and food for humans was typical. In Central Europe, livestock was the integrating element of the locally optimized production systems: Farm animals and their manure allowed for active nutrient management, they provided the necessary power for farm work and transportation, and supplied food and raw materials. By and large, livestock was not competing for food with humans but allowed to utilize land not suitable for cropping as it was fed biomass not digestible by humans. Agricultural production systems were low input – low output systems. Exports of agricultural produce had to be small compared to internal turnover of biomass to minimize losses. This system allowed for low, but rather stable yields. Growth, however, posed a major sustainability threat under the agrarian regime. In order to feed a growing population, by the beginning of the 19th century, woodlands were pushed back to the poorest soils and virtually every plot of land and all available land and biomass was used. The diffusion of the utilization of coal in combination with iron production, steam engine and the railroad system initiated the transformation of the energy system. In the UK, the amount of coal burnt in households, industry and engines equalled a subterranean forest (Sieferle 2001) which exceeded the domestically available land area as early as in the 1850s, and Central European countries followed suit. The coal phase of industrialization only partially brought the emancipation of the energy system from land-use: Agrarian modernization of the 19th century, by and large, remained within the conditions of the solar
Environmental History Pop. Density [cap/km2]
Energy use [GJ/cap.a]
Energy use [GJ/ha.a]
Material use [t/cap.a]
Material use [t/ha.a]
Agrarian regime
30–50
60–80
20–40
5
3
Industrial regime
100–300
150–350
200–600
15–25
20–50
Table 1: The agrarian and the industrial socio-ecological regime energy regime. New crops, more livestock and better nutrient management allowed for a doubling of yields during the 19th century. Regardless, growth of agricultural output hardly kept up with population growth. By the beginning of the 20th century, the potential for further optimization of the land-use system and increasing output was largely exhausted. Only large scale biomass imports facilitated the enormous growth of the forerunners of European industrialization. In the UK, the land area corresponding to the imported agricultural products equalled its own territory around 1900. The implementation of the oil and gas driven technology complex (electricity, internal combustion engine) after the 2nd World War accomplished the transformation of the energy system and gave rise to rapid growth of per-capita energy and material consumption. This phase completely altered the socio-ecological significance of agriculture and land-use. The fossil fuel based industrialization of agriculture boosted agricultural labour productivity and yields through mechanization, use of new plant varieties and a host of agrochemicals. The industrialization of agriculture resulted in the dissolution of locally optimized land-use systems. Livestock lost its integrating role and was reduced to the production of animal protein. Agriculture became a throughput system relying on large external inputs of fuels, feed and agrochemicals, and exporting most of the agricultural produce. Local optimization was replaced by large scale specialization of land-use. The best soils were used with increasing intensity, whereas marginal land was taken out of production and reforested. Spatial differentiation resulted in transfers of large quantities of biomass and nutrient transfers across long distances. As a result, the environmental impact of agriculture and food production shifted from a local to larger, sometimes even the global scale. The fossil-fuel powered industrialization of agriculture multiplied area and labour productivity and total output far beyond the limits of the agrarian regime. The cost of this growth was a dramatic reduction of the energy efficiency of agriculture. Within only two decades agriculture developed from an energy source into an energy consuming activity. From a socio-ecological perspective industrialization appears as a bi-fold decoupling process which, in several steps, resulted in the emancipation of energy provision from land-use, and of industrial production from both human and animal power. This means that socio-economic material and energy flows become increasingly decoupled from ecosystem processes and thus from the size of “natural” flows which tightly limited physical growth under agrarian conditions. This allowed socio-economic flows to be increased by several orders of magnitude. The fossil fuel powered industrial system supports population densities of several 100 persons per km2 and boosts total material and energy throughput considerably. While energy and material use per capita increased about three-fold since the early 19th century, the full dimensions of the decoupling of energy provision and land-
use are revealed when relating energy to the available land (Table 1): Energy use per unit area in Europe increased from less than 30 GJ/ha in fully developed agrarian regimes to several hundred GJ/ha in current industrial systems. This is far beyond the limits imposed by the solar powered agrarian regime, and represents a fundamentally new level of human domination of the Earths ecosystems (Vitousek et al. 1997). What can sustainability science, or industrial ecology, learn from looking at historical socio-ecological systems and regimes? In the most general way, it profits from an extension of the time horizon, and from an increase in number of comparative cases across various scales, as a basis for scenario development. If scenarios and projections are to reach several decades ahead, they need to be based upon at least equally long footing in the past. More specifically, biophysical processes in nature as well as in society are more robust, sluggish and predictable (because subject to strong coupling) than cultural and economic phenomena, and therefore less sensitive to varying assumptions. The better a socio-economic process can be rooted in some biophysical base, the smaller the range of alternative options to be considered. Even more specifically, the historical analysis contributes to discrimination in longstanding controversies of environmental and sustainability policies. For example: Is decoupling of energetic and material flows from (monetary) economic growth possible, and does it actually take place? As could be seen from the historical example above (more cases also in Weisz et al. 2001), the typical energy and material use per capita in industrial societies is three to five times larger than the agrarian society’s use a hundred years before; in the same period, (monetary) real income per capita has multiplied by a factor of 15 or more (Maddison 2001). So inevitably, decoupling must have taken place. On the other hand, we should be aware that a per-capita reduction in energy or materials use, as propagated for example by Weizsäcker et al. (1997) by “factor 4”, would get us to the level we had 150 years ago – which, even by crediting magical powers to efficiency gains, appears a very ambitious goal, indeed. R EFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm M ARINA F ISCHER KOWALSKI is Professor of Social Ecology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research and Training (IFF), University of Vienna, Austria; marina.fischer-kowalski@uni-klu.ac.at; www.iff.ac.at/socec/basics/basics_leitung_en.php FRIDOLIN KRAUSMANN is Research Fellow at the Department of Social Ecology, IFF, University of Vienna, Austria; fridolin.krausmann@uni-klu-ac-at; www.iff.ac.at/socec/staff/krausmann_en.php IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 7
Source: Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2006
REGIME SHIFTS
Environmental History THE AFRICAN PAST
AFRICA’S ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY B Y JANE C ARRUTHERS ➤ Over the last twenty years a rich literature dealing with a variety of environmental issues – biodiversity conservation, eco-justice, colonial agricultural policy and science, and landscape heritage among them – has developed about the African past. A number of factors is responsible for this. First, Africa (particularly southern Africa) enjoys a strong tradition of social history that began in the 1970s when a younger generation of radical socialist scholars challenged older conservative historiographies. Employing a Marxist paradigm of class relations to explain African dispossession, capitalist industrialization, the disruption of indigenous lifestyles and African resistance to oppression, the environmental themes that were implicit in much of this activist historiography have emerged as seminal concerns in more recent years.1 A second factor was the growth of environmentalism as an international political movement. In the South African situation of that time, this translated into robust debates around environmental justice within the socialist order that was expected to follow the end of apartheid. Using slogans like ‘apartheid divides, ecology unites’ and ‘the greening of our country is basic to its healing’, environmentalism rode a wave of euphoria.2 Third, in addition to responding to societal concerns around eco-politics, environmental history was invigorated by appropriating new sources. The environment itself was reconceptualized and examined anew as a site of power. Fourth, African environmental history emerged in order to contest the point of view emanating from the United States that environmentalism was modern North America’s achievement alone. A number of Africanists were adamant that environmentalism was a consequence of past imperial and colonial eras and that investigating these periods was more ‘interesting and innovative’, ‘more integrated, outward-looking and comparative ... in uncovering the processes and discourses of colonial expansion and cultural encounter’ than the ‘ultra-nationalist’ North American perspective.3 William Beinart, one of Africa’s leading practitioners, believes that African environmental history has made its contribution by refiguring colonialism in environmental terms. A close analysis of colonial environmental responsibility and African agency, he argues, influences our understanding of power relations and environmental transformation in Africa.4 Many historians regard environmental history as an aspect of African history rather than a stand-alone enterprise on a specific topic or one that is necessarily aligned with the concerns of environmental historians in the rest of the world. African environmental history has been described as a ‘rather large can of worms’ and the subject generally as ‘one of the least understood [with] more inherent theoretical ambiguities and methodological dilemmas than any other area of history’.5 In addition, Africa is a uniquely diverse continent and the task of interpreting common themes seems daunting. Coverage is very uneven. Researching in many parts of Africa is hard and expensive work, fraught with cultural and language barriers and a paucity both of oral and documentary sources. Another difficulty relates to the contestation around intellectu8 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
al and disciplinary boundaries, particularly anthropology-history and archaeology-history. For some regions, inspiring work by gifted individuals (such as Terence Ranger with respect to Zimbabwe6) has played a large part in engaging other enthusiastic scholars and creating a vibrant historiography, but other areas have not found the champions they deserved. It has not gone unnoticed that very little African environmental history is written by indigenous Africans and a great deal by ‘outsiders’7 and ‘foreigners’ who may not have sufficient African insights.8 Capacity-building and academic encouragement for black African historians is a real challenge.9 Because of Africa’s colonial history of subjugation, it is not surprising that there has been an emphasis on the history of environmental injustice and eco-racism. Other important themes relate to those that have practical relevance to economic development, including agriculture, eco-tourism and the extraction and export of natural resources. Reconceptualizing the colonial experience – so fundamental to many parts of Africa – is proving a fruitful avenue of investigation, generating nuances and uncovering agencies. The cultural history of colonial and imperial science is another high-growth area. While these are important contributions, there are substantial gaps in African environmental history and there are subjects as well as places that have received very little attention. Generally speaking, the historiography lacks work on disease, urban and bioregional studies, cultural and visual constructs of African space and place, explorations of ‘deep time’ and aspects of public history. There is also an overall absence of active collaboration between historians and other disciplines which is counter-productive. Any historical field is influenced by the concerns of its time and the rise of environmentalism has already been mentioned as a catalyst to rethinking history within an environmental paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s. But ‘Africa’ itself is, at the beginning of the 21st century, being reconceptualized from within. While history has always been shifting and contested terrain, current debates about who ‘owns’ history and heritage and who has the ‘right’ to speak for cultural diversity are more heated than they have been in the past. This affects Africa directly and South Africa in particular. During the years of apartheid from 1948 to 1994, South Africa had an uneasy relationship with the rest of Africa, one that, generally speaking, denied or minimized African connections and celebrated links with the ‘civilized’ West. Since 1994 the new South African government, which received great support from the rest of Africa when it was an outlawed liberation movement, has realigned itself with Africa and moved away from Europe and the United States. The discourse is often overtly antiWest and promotes ‘African solutions for African problems’. A recent newspaper article puts it thus: ‘ ... part of the liberation of South Africa is to transform it from a European outpost in Africa into an African country with a predominantly African cultural character ...’10 As far as the cultural construction of the environment is concerned, this is fundamentally encapsulated in the Parliamentary Millennium Project, a permanent exhibition of
Environmental History THE AFRICAN PAST
hosting of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in antique maps owned by the South African Parliament in Cape Johannesburg in 2002 and of the Fifth World Parks Congress in Town. This display, together with its educational outreach proDurban in September 2003.17 Natural resources exist in disregramme, is explicitly constructed to minimize the European perspective on and contribution to Africa and to emphasize pregard of national boundaries and, depending on how they are colonial African map-making and Chinese cartographical utilized, they have the power both to fracture or to unify comknowledge about Africa well in advance of its ‘discovery’ by munities. Because of this, as well as reflecting a greater AfricanEurope.11 The significance of the cultural pride that is generated ist perspective, transnational themes are emerging as significant in African environmental history.18 More recently there can be appreciated through the ‘African Renaissance’, a panAfrican intellectual movement that encourages Africans to has been critical literature that moves the discussion away from reconnect with each other and with an honourable precolonial social and conservation policy and considers issues of identity heritage.12 Because academic environmental history is taking a and cross-cultural African concerns, particularly the paradox of a nationalism that uses ‘nature’ to further the aims of local leading role in reclaiming African agency and possession, it is and international capital paradoxical that so much of and the aspirations of a the current non-historical global elite.19 literature about Africa’s environmental issues conThe present is a time of tinues to reflect an inaccushifting ideas around enrate and pessimistic percepvironmental conservation tion of African inaction, that cry out for historical inertia and helplessness. analysis and interdiscipliThe colonial experience nary consideration.20 Conwas, without doubt, the servation managers use most defining historical history – stories about the experience of the contipast – simplistically in nent, at least south of the order to bolster policy and Sahara, but it was too entrenched positions21 but diverse to be encapsulated also, one suspects, because A BaTswana hartebeest hunt. Contemporary painting by within a single postcolonial they are somewhat afraid Charles Bell, from W.F. Lye, ed., Andrew Smith’s Journal of theory. As Sachs argues, of historical analysis, ignohis Expedition into the Interior of South Africa, 1834–1836 much of the postcolonial rant of historical context, (Cape Town: Balkema, 1975) perspective locks history – wary of professional histoincluding environmental history – into a stereotype of an rians and unsure of how best to combine the humanities and unchanging bi-fissured exploitative relationship between monoconservation science. lithic groups of colonizer and colonized, recognizing neither Environmental historians have been active in analysing change over time nor specific historical context.13 In most parts ideas around colonial agricultural science and have played a modest role in bringing together the sciences and humaniof Africa, both colonized and colonizers were highly diversified ties. Whether African environments were ‘degrading’ and and the imposition of an over-arching ‘settler mentality’ was ‘declining’ as so often stated, is a case in point, and historians uneven, specific, and always challenged strongly by continuous have begun to unpack what these have meant in specific African resistance. Beinart refers to a ‘struggle to free historiograplaces at specific times.22 African historians have also started phy and social studies from narratives of dependence, victimhood and romanticism’ and this is the theoretical, even activist, to consider issues relating to the invasion of alien species of role that environmental history encourages.14 In this regard the plants and their effect on cultural constructs of nature.23 The research of Melissa Leach, James Fairhead, James McCann and relationship betwen humans and wildlife has loomed large in other environmental historians has gone a long way to changing African environmental history from the start. Imperial (parboth historical and current thinking about African responses to ticularly British) attitudes to wildlife and game protection the environment.15 Very little, however, is still known about what has been a significant strand in African environmental history. The rise of national parks and game reserves has been disindigenous or authentic regional natural resource strategies sected and an extensive literature has developed.24 might have been, nor how they might be revived or integrated into modern conservation biology and management. There are The environmental history of Africa is diverse, informa‘explicit claims about who best understands African environtive and becoming richly layered. It provides a highly proments, and who should have the right to control them – whether fessional, scholarly and innovative interpretation of the scientists, national governments or local people. EnvironmentalAfrican past. ists sometimes emphasize ... responsibility to future generations for the well-being of the planet ... Africanists by contrast, someR EFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website times see access to resources as the critical issue for communities at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm ... All such approaches imply both historical investigation and historical judgment.’16 J ANE C ARRUTHERS is Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, University of South Africa; carruej@unisa.ac.za; That Africans are taking control of many of the theoretical www.unisa.ac.za debates around conservation thinking is evident from Africa’s IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 9
Environmental History FOREST MANAGEMENT
•
BIALOWIE ZA PRIMEVAL FOREST The Last Remnant of Pristine Woodlands Between Conservation and Eco-Tourism B Y TOMASZ S AMOJLIK
Photo by R. Kowalczyk
• Primeval Forest (BPF) which covers about 1500 ➤ Bialowieza The environmental history study currently carried out in 2 km is not the largest woodland in Poland and Belarus, but it is BPF aims at reconstructing the main ways of forest use in the past and determining their impact on the ecosystem. Such undoubtedly the most recognized one. The fragments of results can be translated into concrete actions, both in the fields primeval forest that survived many wars, political changes and • a special place for of conservation as well as eco-tourism. First, the reconstruction management regimes, make Bia lowieza of the extent, durability, type, and role of human impact on the everyone interested in natural processes as undisturbed by forest through time is highly relevant to present protection humans, as it is possible in European lowlands. A central part of needs. It can give conservationists the forest, straddling the Polnew historical arguments for ish-Belarussian border, is strengthening and adjusting the strictly protected; on the Polish • National Park protection rules and regimes. The side, Bialowieza historical context has already been covers over 100 km2, and on used by ecologists in the camthe Belarussian side, the strict • paign for enlarging the Bialowieza reserve covers about 160 km2. It was granted a status of World National Park (created in 1921 Heritage Site and UNESCO’s and expanded in 1996), and Man and Biosphere Reserve. establishing a small natureHowever, the larger part of the archaeological reserve in 1979. forest on both sides is currently Also, by showing how sustainable exploited for timber, though use was functioning in the past, with varying intensity. environmental history may European bison, the largest European land animal, roaming in Annually, 130,000 tourists change the way of thinking about • Primeval Forest, Poland Bia lowieza visit BPF to see European forest usage nowadays. Hopefully, bison, hike in primeval woods, do bird-watching, and perform the decision-makers will be guided towards sustainable multiother ecologically-oriented activities. Tourism is a serious purpose use of various resources rather than simply timber source of income for the local community, but further increase exploitation. of visitors has its limits. Pristine forest is a fragile ecosystem. The reconstruction of the past could also be a magnet for Thus, already now, the access to the reserve is strictly regulated. visitors. Ancient barrow and stone graves surrounded by the old With its nearly 200-year tradition, the scientific research in trees, places with well-recognized history of settlement, and forBPF has predominantly focused on pristine nature, as biologists est ranges connected with royal hunts appeal to imagination. • as an tended to perceive the great primeval forest of Bialowieza Some of the existing tourist trails already refer to the history of BPF, but usually in a rather general and banal way. This could be ecological model and reference point for other temperate improved by communicating the research results. Yet another ecosystems in Europe (eg. Falinski ´ 1986). Human footprints in possibility is the reconstruction of traditional crafts (such as BPF, nicely featured in popular books (eg. Schama 1995), have forest beekeeping, traditional use of mushrooms, medicinal only recently become subject of scientific endeavours. Studies in plants, forest fruits, wood types) in the form of an outdoor environmental history of BPF may answer the question how the museum or seasonal workshops. Forest located in the heart of Europe survived in such a good Last but not least, environmental history may help forest condition, and what traces of past human activities are still visimanagers to preserve or restore some old, relic forms of anthroble in the ecosystem. As evidenced by scarce archaeological, pogenic landscape within BPF, such as wooded meadows, and palynological, and written sources available, in historical times glades with single ancient oaks, which are often reservoirs of a BPF was slightly but steadily influenced by humans, with patchunique biodiversity of plants and invertebrates. Conclusively it es of deforested land constituting 5-15% of the contemporary • Primeval Forest, can be said that, in the case of the Bialowieza Forest area. Ancient and early medieval settlers inhabited small th glades inside the forest, and as of the 14 century BPF became a environmental history appears to have a good potential of linking conservation needs to sustainable eco-tourism developstrictly protected royal game preserve of Polish kings, Lithuanment. ian dukes, and (in the 19th century) Russian czars. The research conducted so far suggests that the centuries-long administrative protection, combined with traditional sustainable use of nonREFERENCES at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm timber resources, has led to preservation of the forest itself and also allowed for the survival of its most fascinating animal, the TOMASZ SAMOJLIK is Research Fellow at the Mammal Research European bison (Samojlik and Jedrzejewska 2004). It was only Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences; in the 20th century, that economic-scale timber exploitation samojlik@bison.zbs.bialowiza.pl; www.zbs.bialowieza.pl/bioter began to threaten the natural character of BPF.
10 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
Environmental History DISASTER PREVENTION
DISASTER COPING AND PREVENTION IN THE SWISS ALPS IN THE EARLY 19 TH CENTURY ➤ Between 1834 and 1843, the rocks above the village of Felsberg in Grisons, eastern Switzerland, started to move. Under a lot of public attention experts surveyed the opening cleavages. In 1843 they forecasted an enormous rockslide, but after two minor rockslides without much damage in 1843 and 1844, the geological situation stabilized. Nevertheless a governmental commission proposed to resettle all villagers into a new model village. In an international campaign philanthropic societies raised funds for this resettlement programme. But as the forecasted disaster never eventuated, the resettlement met increasing communal resistance. In the end, Felsberg consisted of two separate villages whose inhabitants were quarrelling about the distribution of public infrastructure for decades. The case of Felsberg is one of several case studies analysed in the course of a dissertation undertaken within a wider historical disaster research framework at the University of Berne. The research specifically examines concepts of coping with natural disasters (avalanches, floods and rockslides) in Grisons during the first half of the 19th century. In this period Grisons, the largest alpine canton in Switzerland, underwent fundamental changes regarding its political structure and culture. How these changes are reflected in natural hazard management shall be shown in this paper. Far into the 19th century, religious practices formed one of the main aspects of natural hazard management – such as praying and the ringing of the church bells during times of danger or the cult of patron saints in processions, pilgrimages and vows to ensure the saints’ help in the future and remember their help in the past. Christian theological interpretations of God’s punishment often mixed with popular beliefs in devils and witches. Until the 19th century, technical preventive measures – such as special construction methods for buildings to reduce avalanche damage, avalanche forests and basic hydraulic structures – were limited to the individual community level. With the enlightenment era, coping strategies to deal with natural disasters changed fundamentally. A new, mechanistic and scientific understanding of nature resulted in more research on the dynamics of environmental processes. Disastrous events were increasingly linked to natural processes on a regional instead of a local level. Religious interpretations and practices were gradually replaced by scientific explanations and technical solutions. Based on a scientifically oriented cause-and-effect study, discussions emerged on how to improve the preventive protection infrastructure. Flooding danger in the valley areas was tackled by means of new hydraulic engineering approaches which aimed simultaneously at reducing damages and winning new land for cultivation. As the deforestation of the mountains – due to the surging wood export during the industrialization period – was considered as a major cause of floods, efforts emerged to halt deforestation by means of forestry laws and better supervision of the various economic uses of the forests’ resources. The process of scientification was not only just a consequence of the progressing scientific knowledge. In accordance with the current historical debate, scientification can be regarded as the
result of a general change in the way how society identified social and natural phenomena as «problematic», and how it thought to solve these problems. This redefinition has to be regarded as a social process and cannot be separated from the actors putting it forward – actors who also pursue their own interests. A central subject of research is therefore the identification of various social groups, their interests and respective approaches in developing natural hazard management strategies. As a result of these changes, scientifically or technically trained experts became the ones who increasingly influenced the natural environment. This is most evident in the example of river regulations. These rules often changed the borders between communities. In addition, newly acquired land property had to be attributed to owners and to its intended use. The new role that the engineers took up also created tension: Many of their disaster management solutions were not only contrary to traditional knowledge, but also to economic interests and local political structures. Thus it is scarcely surprising that the experts’ commitment to scientific progress and technical feasibility sometimes met social limitations, as the above-discussed example of Felsberg shows. Reform-oriented philanthropists and their enlightened societies played a central role in establishing these experts, as well as in introducing rational approaches towards managing natural hazards. They initiated first discussions and private projects of hydraulic engineering and helped to fund relief measures through relief campaigns for the victims of natural disasters. They increasingly subordinated these measures to rational procedures such as collecting statistical data about the losses, applying mathematical formulas to distribution and public reporting. Above all, these societies introduced the use of donations for prevention. Stressing the need for the improvement of traditional structures these campaigns achieved some successes in modernizing infrastructure. It can be argued therefore, that the philanthropists used their power in the distribution of resources to impose their own approaches on an agrarian society that did not necessarily share their views. As the technical approaches proved their value and the state increased its financial power, Government finally took over originally private initiatives, introduced subsidies for preventive infrastructure and issued a new legislation on the use of natural resources. The new measures of modern disaster management resulted in fundamental changes in the alpine landscape which are still shaping the face of the region today. The previously avoided valley plains became a central area for living, agriculture, industry and infrastructure. While these changes initially were due to an increased security level, they nevertheless led to an expanding exposure to the impacts of natural hazards. REFERENCES at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm AGNES N IENHAUS is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Economic, Social and Environmental History at the University of Berne, Switzerland; agnes.nienhaus@tiscali.ch; www.wsu.hist.unibe.ch IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 11
Interview
MARITIME HISTORY
BECOMING AWARE OF THE SEAS’ POTENTIAL RICHNESS ➤ Poul Holm is Professor of Maritime History at the University of Southern Denmark, President of the European Society for Environmental History, and Chairman of the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. He is also International Chair of the History of Marine Animal Populations Project (HMAP). Q: Can you outline the focus of your work and the research agenda of the HMAP? My main focus is on the environmental history of the world’s oceans. The questions I address in my work mainly relate to what has been the impact of humans on life in the world’s oceans. I am also utilizing historical documentations and historical archives to help build longer time series and effectively shift the baseline of our thinking about biodiversity and long-term changes in marine life. It is an interaction between environmental history and marine science. So, the research agenda of HMAP basically encompasses the two dimensions of long-term historical change in the natural habitat, and the impact of humans on the seas. Q: Who is working in HMAP? HMAP is currently bringing together marine scientists, fisheries historians and ecologists. This kind of research community has not really been in existence a few years ago, so it is very innovative, and a developing environment – many researchers are coming into the field and many seminal papers have been published in the last four to five years. Q: Can you give us some interesting examples of the project’s research? One of the real eye-openers and a stimulus to HMAP was Jeremy Jackson’s studies of the green turtle in the Caribbean, published in 1997. It can be called the first marine-historical ecological paper. He used British colonial archives to document the enormous impact of human fisheries in the Caribbean in the 17th century, which effectively led to a regime shift in the Caribbean. This shift was caused by a strong preference for turtle in Europe. They were exported in hundreds of thousands. Based on colonial customs records, Jackson back-casted the effects on the marine turtle population and calculated the carrying capacity of the Caribbean. What came out was a dramatic decline in the turtle population. With this finding, he was also able to explain the changes in the benthic ecosystems. The turtles – the ‘lawn-mowers’ of the Caribbean – were herbivorous animals, feeding on the plants and sea grasses on the sea bottom. With their disappearance, the sea bottom turned into a benthic environment which was dominated by sea urchins and which changes the whole set-up of the ecosystem and the food-web. With this dramatic change, which was already caused in the 17th and 18th century, we have irrevocably lost the pristine ecosystem of the Caribbean. 12 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
Q: What lesson can be learnt from this intervention? Perhaps the most salient lesson we can learn from these historical studies is that pristine nature is not a useful concept to us when we think about the world’s oceans. By and large, people think that the impacts of humans have only really come into existence in the last thirty to fifty years, and Poul Holm that there are no major extinctions yet. That is not true. We are seeing large-scale commercial extinctions, and we are seeing regime shifts that have been caused not only by recent activities but actually have been taking place over the last four to five hundred years. The effect of early human contact with marine populations is much more dramatic than we have realized previously. We have another very good example from Australia. Neil Klaer did a study for the Australian Fisheries Administration, the CSIRO, where he used business archives of Australian trawling companies of the early 20th century. The findings show that the first two decades of the 20th century which saw the introduction of modern-type steam trawlers in SoutheastAustralia caused a fundamental change of the ecosystem of, for example, Botany Bay off Sydney. With the publication of that report the CSIRO has actually stated that, in the future, historical references need to be taken into account when conservation targets are determined. This is a major breakthrough for environmental history – managers pick up the message and actually say themselves that, if we push back the reference points, we realize that we have lost very much in the sea. So much has changed already that we are challenged in our views on what a sustainable fishery is. Present fisheries may be sustainable only at a very basic level, and at a very deprived level for the ecosystem. The food-webs may have been much more elaborate previously. Q: So the findings are even worse than what we have thought before? The historical exercise is indeed quite depressing. When we shift our baseline and realize that we should look beyond the past generation of marine biological research and begin investigating historical records it becomes blatantly clear how much we have lost. Sometimes, however, we get reassured that things change and stocks rebuild. There is a lot more resilience than we have thought. We can document very few actual extinctions of marine species of commercial fisheries, and of related species. We do see a lot of ‘commercial extinctions’, meaning that the stocks are no longer economically viable but the stocks could be rebuilt. So, we are becoming much more aware of the potential richness of the seas. You can take this as the
Interview
MARITIME HISTORY
Q: What are the research challenges in assessing biodiversity?
optimistic message – the productivity and resilience of the oceans is much bigger than we have thought. Q: What kind of policy results are you aiming at? What we want to do is interact with fisheries managers, and also with nature conservation agencies as regards biodiversity. I think the historical approach will feed into our thinking of marine protected areas, as this approach provides essential information for conservation. Environmental history should also feed into our thinking about climate change. We are also documenting a lot of long-term interactions between climate change and marine populations. For example, we now have a wonderful documentation of 500 years of herring fisheries in the North Sea where we were able to establish catch-per-unit-effort series over a very long time span. We are working with climatologists to read the climate signal from these changes and we should be able to address some of the big puzzles of environmental history with regard to climate as a main driver. One of the big puzzles of climate and marine life is the socalled ‘Bohuslan phenomenon’ which is the fact that in a century-long perspective you see the occurrence of enormous schools of herring off the Swedish coast of Bohuslan. They are there for two, three decades and suddenly disappear again. That is a phenomenon which we observe in many natural systems. The challenge is to get an understanding of what is driving these enormous outbursts of one species. Historical analysis is opening new ways to analyse the climate as a likely main driver of this phenomenon. Q: Is active policy collaboration already happening? Personally, I am in close collaboration with the Danish Institute for Fisheries Research. Another clear signal that this is an emerging field is that they have co-funded a new research professorship in historical marine ecology. It is spreading across the globe that managers need to gain a longer perspective. I already mentioned the report of the Australian Fisheries Administration, CSIRO. Also, this year in early March, the journal ‘Frontiers in Ecology’ had a lead article by Andrew Rosenberg on the calculation of the Gulf of Maine’s historical biomass of cod stock in the 1850s based on a huge collaborative research project. They were able to show that the historical stocks in the 1850s were ten to fifteen times larger than the conservation targets that are set today for the Gulf of Maine. So, not just the actual biomass that is present but even the perceived potential carrying capacity for the Gulf of Maine is now being challenged with this historical information. This type of research and awareness building is happening in a lot of places mainly within the History of Marine Animal Populations Project. It is an international community that has grown in the course of the last five years only. We began in 2000 and we will have our first World Conference in October this year, called ‘Oceans Past’*. This will be an exciting next move where we will see a lot of this work on marine history coming forward and, hopefully, getting across to managers and also to the wider public.
The challenge in assessing biodiversity is that, of course, most of the historical data is generated from commercial catch statistics which will not necessarily tell us a lot about biodiversity. We are trying to develop a broader collaboration which also looks at habitat changes because that will have enormous informational potential for understanding biodiversity changes. If we even could begin to understand how we have changed sea bottoms, for example, or the way that we have changed our coastal defences. That is a major driver for biodiversity change. We also need to develop the collaboration with archaeologists because their kitchen-midden sites will tell us a lot about the actual marine species that were taken out of the seas. Kitchen-midden sites are shell banks piled on the shorelines since prehistorical times by humans who dumped the shells of oysters, shellfish or crayfish. These sites have built up well into the 19th century and they have real potential for research! In HMAP, we are now building a large project where we undertake a comparative study of these kitchen-middens. We find that these are excellent documentations of very long-term changes in marine biodiversity – all kind of creatures have been dumped there and they are often well-preserved. Q: Can you share with us some of your insights on interdisciplinary studies, particularly of biodiversity? One thing to really take to heart in an interdisciplinary collaboration is the mutual respect of the disciplines. There needs to be an intellectual benefit to both disciplines – both to marine scientists and to historians. Also, we need to identify as many disciplines that can provide an insight as possible. Do not restrict yourself to just two or three disciplines – this is multi-disciplinary work. You need very hard science, i.e., you can learn a lot from isotope analysis, but you need to spread out to, at least, history, archaeology, anthropology, to make it a multi-disciplinary team work. No one discipline can be said to be privileged in its ability to inform us on long-term changes in biodiversity. So, one important thing is to be inclusive. At the same time we need to raise tough questions. We need to ask: ‘what do we know, what don’t we know and what could we know?’ And this ‘what could we know’ is extremely interesting because it can be a driver to get us out of the research agenda that is often contained within one discipline (and will not talk to other disciplines). So we need to really come from the outside and ask a pertinent question and say, let us put our brains together and address the overarching question. It is not about forgetting your disciplinary origin but to bring in your skills while at the same time standing outside the restrictive research agenda of your own discipline which may be fully understandable from a historical point of view but which often will not allow us to have interdisciplinary collaboration. *
The Conference ‘Oceans Past: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Marine Animal Population’ will take place in Kolding, Denmark, from 24 to 27 October 2005; www. Marbef.org
I NTERVIEW BY U LA L ÖW IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 13
Core Projects LUCC/IT
FROM LTER TO LTSER The Socio-Economic Dimension of Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research ➤ A report on the LUCC/IT workshop at the Institute of Social Ecology, IFF Vienna / Klagenfurt University, February 2005 Long-term ecological research (LTER) today faces the challenge to engage itself in the production of knowledge useful in solving current sustainability problems. This requires the inclusion of socio-economic dimensions, thus transforming LTER into “long-term socio-ecological research” or LTSER. While classical LTER is focused on patterns and processes in ecosystems, LTSER deals with socio-ecological systems, i.e., systems emerging through society- nature interaction. LTSER investigates not only changes in ecosystems, but also societal pressures, their underlying driving forces, impacts on society and the economy, as well as preventive or adaptive measures. The workshop brought together a small group of scientists from the natural and social sciences and aimed at generating new insights on how to conceptualize society-nature interaction in LTSER projects. Among others, it tackled the issues of how to integrate biophysical processes with communicative ones, how to integrate patterns and processes across spatial scales, and how to integrate results from measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys and soft knowledge.
The discussions led to the conclusions that there are at least four central themes to be dealt with in LTSER: (1) Metabolism, i.e. the material and energy flows in ecosystems and the economy; (2) land-use, long-term changes in cultural landscapes, their perception, as well as their impacts on ecosystems (resilience, biodiversity, etc.); (3) communicative processes representing and shaping the way in which humans use natural resources; and (4) the analysis of institutions and decisionmaking processes relevant to society-nature interaction. The latter point is particularly important as LTSER should help to improve decision-making with regard to sustainability. The workshop was organized by the Institute of Social Ecology of Klagenfurt University as a joint activity of IHDP’s core science project Industrial Transformation (IT) and the IHDP/IGBP core project Land-Use/Land-Cover Change (LUCC). In an ongoing post-workshop process the participants are currently busy drafting a paper to be submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal later this year. H ELMUT H ABERL is Assistant Head of the Institute of Social Ecology / IFF Vienna / Klagenfurt University, Austria; helmut.haberl@uni-klu.ac.at; www.iff.ac.at
liphe4 summer school Procedures and Toolkits for Integrated and Participatory Analysis of Sustainability July 17–23, 2005 · www.liphe4.org · info@liphe4.org Scope of the Summer School
Participants
The purpose of the summer school is to provide a reference point on the state of the art in the field of sustainable development studies to young researchers and students.
The summer school invites PhD and Master students, as well as young professionals, interested in problems related to sustainable development and natural resource management. Participants should have proficiency in English, which is the working language of the event. In addition, a basic knowledge of analytical tools used in the field of Ecological Economics is preferred. The total number of participants will not exceed 30 to allow for close interaction between participants and teachers.
2005 Themes (i) Integrated Assessment for sustainability – epistemological and conceptual issues (ii) Social metabolism on multiple scales (iii) Tool and methods for organizing scientific information for decision making (iv) Resources, time, and land – operationalizing biophysical constraints (v) Geographical Information Systems applied to Integrated Analysis of Sustainability (vi) Participatory approaches and Multicriteria Evaluation Methods Please download the detailed schedule of the Liphe4 – CEMACAM Summer School here http://www.liphe4.org/programme.doc
14 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
The modalities of application and selection are available at: http://www.liphe4.org/application.html Send the application form to Jesus Ramos at ramos@liphe4.org not later than June 25, 2005.
SESSIONS ACCEPTED FOR THE 6TH OPEN MEETING OF THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE RESEARCH COMMUNITY, BONN, 9-13 OCTOBER, 2005 Adaptive Management and Resilience Adaptation to Extreme Events: Concepts and Results from South Asia Climate Change / Vulnerability – Conceptual Frameworks Hazards and Vulnerability Local Responses to Environmental Stress and Risks Local Strategies for Adapting Water Resources Management in Semi Arid Environments under Global Change Vulnerability: Social and Legal Dimensions and Early Warning Vulnerability to Climate Change Vulnerability to Climate Change in the Developing World Vulnerability to Climate Variability and Change Coastal Zones, Human Use of Oceans Coastal Vulnerability to Climate Change Integrating Human Dimensions and Coastal Zone Management Marine Risks and Sustainability Environmental History Historical Depth,Temporal Patterns, and Trajectory Global Environmental Change and Human Security Arctic Environmental Change – A Bellwether of Global Changes Droughts, Poverty and Livelihoods: Key Issues from Southern Africa Early Warning of Natural Hazards and Disaster Environment, Development, and Sustainable Peace Environmental Change, Conflict and Vulnerability in Africa Environmental Migrants and Refugees Global Environmental Change, Equity, and Human Security Global Environmental Change, Gender, and Human Security Human Security and Climate Change Transboundary Water Governance: Lessons learned in Southern Africa Globalization and Global Environmental Change Differential Vulnerability of Local Communities to Global Economic and Environmental Changes: Modelling Agent’s Behaviour Lifestyle Dynamics, Consumption Patterns and Global Environmental Change Migration and its Impact on Forest Governance and Management The Role of the Human Dimension in the Global Water System Project Human Dimensions of Carbon and Water Management, Food and Health Controlling GHG Emissions Globalization, Sustainability and Health Green-house Gases, Carbon Cycle Human Dimension in Water Management – Experiences from European Research Human Dimensions of the Carbon Cycle: Networks of Research and Policy Making Institutional Coordination among Stakeholders for Environmental Risk Management in large River Basins Land Use Changes and Social Systems – Linkages to Water Use and Resource Management Water Management Industrial Transformation Analysing and Managing Societal Transitions Analysing the Dynamic of Transitions towards Sustainability – and How to Induce them? Entrepreneurship Policy and Global Change. Industrial Transformation in Comparative Cross-Spatial Perspectives Sustainable Transition of Infrastructures Technological Innovation & Environmental Sustainability Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Ecologies of Scale: Multi-Level Environmental Governance Enhancing Compliance in Environmental Governance Environmental Governance within the Local-Global Interplay: Understanding the Changing Role of the State in a Multilevel Setting Global Institutions:Theoretical Questions Globalization, Institutional Change and Vulnerability Human Dimensions of Natural Disasters Risk Reduction: Comparative Analysis of Institutions and Mitigation Responses to River Floods in Asia Institutional Dimensions of Food Systems Studies across Spatial Scales Institutions in Africa Intermediating Pathways to Sustainability International Environmental Regimes Local, Regional, and International Institutions to Reduce Conflict and Increase Capacity for Restoration, Protection, and Usage of Transboundary Waters National Institutions in Latin America and Asia Non-state Authority and Legitimacy in Global Environmental Governance Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development Resilience and Vulnerability in Environmental and Resource Regimes Land-Use/ Land-Cover Change Agriculture and Land Use Beefing up the World: Spatial Dynamics of Global Livestock Systems Beyond the Primary Transition: Land Use and Land Cover Change in Agricultural Areas Biodiversity Conservation Contextualizing the Pixel: Comparing Continuous and Discrete Methods for Regional Studies of Human Dimensions on Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC) Research Drought Preparedness in the Context of Global Desertification Effects of Postsocialist Transformations on Land Use and Agrarian Institutions
Global and Regional Forest Cover Monitoring Household Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Concepts and Methods Human Dimensions of Landscape Changes in the Amazon Human Dimensions of Local LUCC in Asia Impact of Land Use Change on Soil Resources Land Use/ Cover Change and Ecological Security Assessment in Asia – The 5th International Colloquium on Land Use/ Cover Change and Environmental Issues in Asia LUCC Methods: Spatial Analysis, Remote Sensing, Landscape Change LUCC: Case Studies, Forests LUCC: Case Studies, Forests,Agro-pastoral Systems LUCC: Models, Decision-making, Scenarios Modeling Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts of Land Use Modeling Land Use Dynamics:The Challenge to Relate Process and Pattern Multi-scale Scenario Development: Linking Narratives Stories and LUCC Models Rates and Patterns of Global Land Cover Change The Forest Transition Understanding Biodiversity World Market, Farmers and States
Methods in Human – Environment Studies Can We Study Global Change without Global Data? Will Collaborate with the Panel on “Open Access to the Global Change Data and Information in Developing Countries” Integrated Modelling Methods in Human-Environment Studies:What Does the World Look Like Beyond Regression? Modeling and Collaborative Planning within a Multi-Agent Framework – Empirical Approaches and Methods New Ontologies: Exploring the Anthropo-Sphere Spatial Theory and Methodologies for Integrated Socio-Economic and Biophysical Analysis and Modelling of Land Use Change: an International Test of Theory and Method and a Comparative Synthesis of Change at Local and Regional Scales Remote Sensing and Early Warning Remote Sensing and GMES as Tools for Environmental and Human Security Uncertainty in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation: Challenges for IPCC AR4 Regional Approaches to Human – Environment Studies Case Studies on Adaptation Environmental Ethics Making Global Change Research Matter in Mountain Regions Perspectives on Adaptation to Climate Change Reframing Sustainability Issues, in Response to Global Governance and Environmental Change in Africa Regional Approaches to Food Systems Studies Social Aspects of Desertification Urban Transformation and Reform for Sustainability Various Case Studies on Climate Change Science – Policy Interface in Global Environmental Change Climate Change Needs Social Change:The Role of Communication Climate Change Policy and Science Interface: Case Studies of Adaptation from the Developing World Climate Change Science and Policy Interface:An Overview of Adaptation Research and Application Climate Change, Energy and Policy Climate Policy Climate Science Policy Assessment and Research Cross-cutting Themes in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Enhancing the Contribution of Research-Based Knowledge to the Pursuit of Sustainability Human Dimensions Research in the IPCC Working Group II Fourth Assessment Report Law and Policy Mainstreaming Climate Change Concerns in Development Policy: Issues and Challenges for Asian Countries Making Population-Environment Research Relevant to Policy Makers Population and Environment Relations Science – Policy and Stakeholders The Challenge of Integrating Tourism into Current and Future Climate Change Policy The Science-Policy Interface – Integrating Climate Information into Decision Making Sustainable Development Consumption and Choices:The Behavioural Side of the Problem Consumption in Developed and Developing Countries Psychological Perspectives on Sustainable Development South North Dialogue on Equity in the Greenhouse The Politics of Sustainable Consumption within an Area of Global Environmental Change Where Do the Poor Live? What Have We Learned in the Past Decade? Urbanization A Two-Way Lane: Cities as Drivers and Targets of Climate Change Globalization, Megacities and Health Urban Environment Urban Environmental Management and Urban Planning Urban Structure and Growth Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Urbanization and LUCC Urbanization in West Africa: Patterns, Processes and Implications for Land Use and Land Cover The Open Meeting website: http://openmeeting.homelinux.org
Core and Joint Projects
URBANIZ ATION/GLOBAL C ARBON PROJECT
CAN CITIES REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING? Urban Development and the Carbon Cycle in Latin America A summary of the research report resulting from two workshops in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile, 2004 ➤ As the growing Latin American population becomes more urban, the importance of the way cities develop and are managed for greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and associated pollution happens to be a central point of intervention for addressing climate change. This report explores the interactions between both local and global socioeconomic and institutional processes and the carbon cycle in the cities of Mexico, Mendoza, Buenos Aires and Santiago. It analyses how specific pathways of urban development interact to influence land and energy use; and how different mixes of forces or underlying factors (e.g. economic and socio-demographic dynamics, liberalization) operate at diverse scales to produce cities’ greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions trajectories. URBAN GROWTH AND ITS SPATIAL CRYSTALLIZATION, URBAN FORM
Mexico, Buenos Aires and Santiago transited during the 1980s from a city-based to a region-based pattern of urban development.1 The city-based model dominated during the import substitution industrialization (ISI) period (19401970). The cities registered high rates of economic growth, enjoyed big captive markets and attracted migrant labor, also expulsed by increasingly hard conditions in rural areas. The cities experienced a contiguous and apparently uncontrolled urban growth outwards. The current, region-based pattern of urban development crystallizes in a polycentric urban expansion of first and second-order urban localities sprawling along major highways and functionally linked to the main city. Its drivers (demographic, economic and institutional dynamics operating at diverse scales) experienced a set of carbon relevant changes during the last two decades in the four cities. Economic activities transited to liberalized and deregulated markets, and open economies, and were affected by the retrenchment of the State as developer. Industry lost its role as leading activity of the local economies, while financing and commerce became the most dynamic sectors. Foreign investment increased its presence within the most dynamic enterprises of the three largest cities. There were changes in enterprises’ localization patterns, related to a process of economic fragmentation. The bulk of foreign investment and most dynamic commercial activities tend to be situated in modern corridors (e.g. Santa Fé-Polanco in Mexico City, or renovated areas such as Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires). One consequence of the retrenchment of the state in its role as developer is that rather than by public planning, urban growth has been driven primarily by market forces. The case of Santiago shows how laws and regulations aimed 1
Mendoza has undergone a slightly different urbanization process characterized by the functional centralization of industrial, administrative and commercial activities; accelerated growth of urban population stimulated by city’s economic dynamics and the crisis of the rural sector.
16 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
at controlling urban sprawl have at times been altered or not fulfilled to satisfy the requirements of speculators and developers. Actions aimed at containing land occupation by the poor did not take into regard that housing has increasingly taken place through informal self-help practices outside legal regulations, as high costs of legal land and low levels of income make these the only way for most dwellers to get access to land. Population growth decreased at diverse rhythms in general but especially within the core areas of the cities. Contrary has been the case in peripheral areas where growth-rates have increased in different ways contributing to urban sprawl (e.g., population growth decreased to 2.1% yearly in the core area of Mexico City, and increased by 2.8% in the suburbanized municipalities). These pathways of urban growth resulted in three carbon relevant consequences. Passengers tend to travel longer distances to move from the locations of residence to their education, employment and recreation facilities. Freight transport tends to move products to longer distances. As the cities increase, their ecological footprint on their satellites and on areas outside their boundaries serving their carbon-related needs (e.g. energy and food) becomes more distinct. SCALE MATTERS
GHG emissions trajectories and their drivers change in space and through time. As of the mix of activities emitting carbon, transportation is the main releaser at city level, not necessarily at national scale. Energy is the main releaser for the three countries, followed by agriculture and livestock in Argentina, transportation (32%) and manufacturing (24%) in Chile, and the forest sector (24%) and transportation (14.6%) in Mexico. Emissions patterns illustrate the economic structure of the countries that are more dominated by services – especially by the informal sector – than by manufacturing. The team found commonalities and differences as to how GHG emissions drivers operate at global, national and local scales to produce cities’ trajectories of carbon emissions. At least two components of the current era of globalization, liberalization and regionalization of markets, exert an influence on the patterns of localization of population, productive activities and public investments, and by this on GHG emissions by cities and regions around them. Driven by markets opportunities opened by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), corporations for instance have relocated their establishments within the central region of Mexico. Subsidiaries are set in the city’s most dynamic corridors; high tech enterprises move to localities in or around the satellites; activities demanding cheap labor move to suburban localities functioning as dormitories. All this contributes to urban sprawl, to longer commuting and freight transportation distances and, by this, to increased GHG emissions.
Core and Joint Projects
URBANIZ ATION/GLOBAL C ARBON PROJECT
One component of the state reform is also present in all the cities and in other Latin American urban areas: reduced state participation in the management of public transportation, which is related to deregulation, decentralization and liberalization. This process became one of the drivers of the shift in mode share from high-capacity modes (Metro and buses) to low capacity modes (e.g. minibuses, private cars). The share of public buses in Mendoza diminished from 50.5% in 1986 to 34.8% in 2000. As in other urban areas, motorization is taking place in the four cities. The total fleet increased 2.3 times in Santiago, 1.5 times in Mexico City, and 0.7 times in Mendoza. Most automobiles are private (85%, 73% and 68.8% respectively), but this is not reflected in their share of daily trips (45%, 19.9% and 25% respectively). Motorization tendencies have diverse carbon implications. As calculated for Mendoza, a passenger using a private car consumes about 4 times more energy than a passenger using a public means of transportation. Motorization is related to the weight of transportation in CO2 emissions, but most of the total fleet is made up of private cars having a smaller share of daily trips. Therefore, rather than private vehicles only serving the requirements of middle to upper sectors, cities need better public transportation systems, and public actions aimed at making public transport more attractive. IPAT OR KAYA IDENTITY
We kept the Kaya identity2 in mind to explore some drivers of GHG emissions. Regarding technology, we found that decreased emissions rates in Argentina relate to more efficient thermal generation of electricity. But these indicators are not enough to understand the complexity of the technological dimension. Two technological constrains for a carbon-relevant restructuring of Mexico City’s economy are low levels of human capital and research, of innovation and technology, and lack of competition of the economy. Enterprises have hence reduced incentives to introduce new technologies. When applying the Kaya approach to the residential sector, it is usually assumed that when population grows and standards of living improve so do the consumption of fossil fuels and GHG emissions. We found that technology, affluence and demography are not enough to understand GHG emissions trajectories in Mexico City. High levels of social segregation relate to a differentiated contribution to both energy consumption and GHG emissions. As an example, private cars are highly concentrated among wealthy sectors of Mexico City (50% from the trips go to and come from 16% and 23% of the city respectively), but only cover 18% of the 29.5 trip segments. Institutional settings are another key driver of GHG emissions trajectories. Instruments like the Plan Canje (governmental subsidy to automobile companies for each old car accepted as payment for a new car) together with a good dollar-peso exchange rate induced Argentineans to buy new
2
cars. The Plan intended to support the automotive industry, but it also contributed to the renovation of the automotive fleet, by this, to reduced levels of pollutants like Nitrogen Oxide. Rather than climate change, air pollution has been the main public concern in all cities. Public concern though is not enough to guarantee effective management. As the Mexico City case shows, GHG related policies, are constrained by the organizational structure and institutional capacity of the city. States and the Federal District have different legal and fiscal systems undermining the city’s capacity to deal with this issue at metropolitan scale. Diverse management agencies have competing and overlapping responsibilities, tend to focus on and react to specific issues, and can not address the array of causes driving them. They lack appropriated harmonization of their programs and responsibilities, as well as financial provisions for them to work together. CAN CITIES REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING?
Cities are key players in the field of GHG emissions. Notwithstanding their role, it is hard for them to reduce their GHG emissions. Key drivers of emissions trajectories operate at national and even global scales. Relevant actors in the carbon arena such as transnational corporations have national and international decision making power. It is hence difficult for local authorities to issue regulations without corporations’ conformity. Cities do not have institutions that are explicitly prepared to deal with GHG emissions. Instead, they focus on (for example) air quality issues. It is therefore necessary to undertake future studies focusing on carbon-related strategies and their interplay with environmental policies more focused on pollution control. One example is the viability of promoting win-win strategies that aim at reducing GHG emissions and improving air quality. The workshop coordinators and editors of the report are: PATRICIA R OMERO L ANKAO, Professor, Research Group on Public Policies and Management and SSC member of the Global Carbon Project, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco, México; prlankao@.correo.xoc.uam.mx E NRIQUE P ULIAFITO , Professor and Research Scientist at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Buenos Aires, Argentina; epuliafito@frm.utn.edu.ar A LEJANDRO L EÓN , Assistant Professor and Chair of the Center for Studies of Arid Lands (CEZA), Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; aleon-a@uchile.cl M ARIANA C ONTE G RAND , Director of the Department of Economics at the Universidad del CEMA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; mcg@cema.edu.ar
According to the Kaya identity, carbon emissions (I) are the product of the level of population (P) combined with affluence (A) (e.g., measured by income per capita) and the level of technology (T) (e.g., measured by emissions per unit of income).
IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 17
Joint Projects
GLOBAL CARBON PROJECT
THE CHALLENGE OF STABILIZING ATMOSPHERIC CO 2 CONCENTRATIONS B Y P EP C ANADELL AND M ICHAEL R AUPACH ➤ The entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol in February this year is a historic development in international environmental negotiations, and a significant step towards Earth sustainability. The protocol limits the emissions to the atmosphere of six greenhouse gases for the 30 ratifying countries from the developed world. There has been much debate as to how much difference the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol will make to atmospheric CO2 concentrations (a[CO2]), and which subse-
From Edmonds J et al. (2004) Scenarios, targets, caps, and costs. In: Filed C and Raupach M (Eds) The Global Carbon Cycle: Integrating Humans, Climate and the Natural World, Pp. 77-102
trial CO2 concentration was 280 ppm, and the current concentration is 378 ppm. Notably, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), which has gained the commitment of over 160 countries to stabilise a[CO2], has been very careful to avoid stating a desirable stabilisation level. A number of normative scenarios covering major possible routes that societies could take in this century, have been developed (IPCC1 SRES2, 2000) based on major storylines leading to alternative future emission pathways. These scenarios required assumptions about population and income growth, the cost and availability of current and future energy production and utilisation, and many other driving elements. The approach is consistent with the fact that there are big uncertainties as to whether our grandchildren – and the governments and institutions they may choose and create, will be highly environmentally conscious, or will become full practitioners of economic globalisation, understanding that the two trends are not necessarily incompatible. The range of carbon emissions covered by the SRES scenarios is very broad, so that for practical purposes, IPCC leaves us without a best guess at the most likely future carbon emission scenario. Carbon emissions for the end of this century in the SRES scenarios, range from 3-35 Pg yr-1 (current carbon emissions from fossil fuel are close to 7 Pg yr-1), leaving an unconstrained set of requirements for the amount of change needed to avoid dangerFigure 1. Global carbon emissions 1990-2100 using the IS92a and ous interference in the climate system, for whatever a 550 ppm stabilisation scenario target we choose for the purpose of evaluating the challenge. Part of the uncertainty lies with the difficulty of quantifying quent emission reduction targets would be required to stabilise the impact of major technological improvements on a[CO2], a[CO2] at a given level. This article will attempt to provide a sense of the tremendous challenge of stabilising a[CO2] at a and understanding the difference we can make by, for instance, collectively moving into automobile-hybrid technology, improvlevel thought to avoid dangerous interference in the climate sysing household energy efficiency by 50%, or generating twotem. thirds of our electricity from renewable energies. None of these Although there is no consensus as to what a[CO2] will avoid major technological changes can be realised any time soon. dangerous climatic interference, it is well understood that this As part of a SCOPE3-GCP synthesis of the carbon cycle (Field depends upon the sensitivity of the major Earth System processes to climate change, and the vulnerability – that is, sensitivity & Raupach, 2004), the value of some earlier work on emission to, and capacity to adapt – of different economic, environmenscenarios was rediscovered – particularly the IS92a IPCC scetal and social sectors. Thus, there is no single a[CO2] we can tarnario. This scenario belongs to the family of „business-as-usual“ scenarios – those which attempt to highlight what could happen get, unless we apply a lowest-common-denominator approach. if we do not take specific actions to address the climate change For example, at the recent International Conference on issue, or in other words, what could happen if we let energy mar„Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change“ (Exeter, UK, February kets evolve as they have in the past without specific policies to 2005), experts argued that human societies would be safeguardcurb CO2 emissions. ed from dangerous interference in the climate system by a stabilisation of a[CO2] equivalent to a global warming of 2°C. This The IS92a scenario does not include any CO2 emission reductranslates to a[CO2] of less than 550 ppm. Although these figtion targets, nor any broad policy proposals to reduce deforestaures are contestable, they serve our present purpose, which is to 1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlight the challenge in stabilising a[CO2] at 550 ppm – or 2 Special Report on Emission Scenarios 3 indeed at any level below 750 ppm. For context, the pre-indusScientific Committee on Problems of the Environment 18 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
Joint Projects
GLOBAL CARBON PROJECT
tion rates. What is less widely known, is that this scenario also assumes business-as-usual in technological development, based on the experience of the last century. Thus, IS92a assumes a decrease in energy intensity by 0.8% annually up until 2025, and a 1.0% decrease annually from 2025-2100. More strikingly, IS92a also assumes that by the end of this century 75% of power energy will be carbon free, and that energy generated from bio-fuels will provide more energy than the combined global production of oil and gas in 1990 (Edmonds et al, 2004). These are massive and difficult to appreciate transformations of the energy system, but are probably not beyond what could happen, judging by the impressive advancements of the last century. Such magnitude of change towards renewable and zeroemission energies, might suggest that the CO2 stabilisation problem would be largely solved by the time we achieve such transformations. But disappointingly, far from it – a[CO2] by the end of this century would be over 700 ppm under IS92a – about three times the pre-industrial level (Figure 1). To appreciate the technological challenge involved in limiting a[CO2] to 700 ppm – which itself may involve unacceptable interference with the climate system, one can project a [CO2] under a „freezing“ of technology at 1990 levels, without efficiency improvements (Figure 1). This scenario provides a reference that illustrates the scale of the advancements already expected to occur. Any attempts to stabilise a [CO2] below 700 ppm will require an even larger effort.
The difference in carbon emissions between a given business-as-usual scenario (for example IS92a with a [CO2] at about 700 ppm) and a chosen stabilisation level (for instance 550 ppm as argued above), is referred to as the „energy gap“. The energy gap between IS92a and a 550 ppm stabilisation level is a staggering 14 Pg C yr-1 (Figure 1). This gap can only be closed by implementing emission reduction policies and clear emission cuts, most likely with costs involved. For a number of SRES scenarios, the carbon emission gaps by 2100 range from 1-25 Pg yr-1 (IPCC 2001). Stabilizing a [CO2] will not only require large absolute cuts of greenhouse emissions during this century, but it will ultimately require reducing emissions to close to zero. REFERENCES to this article are included on the IHDP website at www.ihdp.org/updatehistory05/references.htm JOSEP (PEP) CANADELL is Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Canberra, Australia; pep.canadell@csiro.au; www.gcp.org MICHAEL RAUPACH is Co-Chair of the Global Carbon Project and Science Leader of the Earth Observation Centre, Canberra, Australia; michael.raupach@csiro.au; http://www.cossa.csiro.au
International Organizations and Global Environmental Change 2005 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Berlin, 2 – 3 December 2005 www.fu-berlin.de/ffu/akumwelt/bc2005/index.html
Insecurity and Development: Regional Issues and Policies for an Interdependent World International Conference, 21–24 September 2005, Bonn For accreditation see: www.eadi.org/gc2005
IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 19
National Committees
NET WORKING AND CAPACIT Y BUILDING
INCREASING IHDP’S VISIBILITY ACROSS THE GLOBE ➤ Asia & the Pacific: There was a strong presence of the HDGEC scientists from the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere at the Fifth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Development in Asia and the Pacific (MCED 2005), held 2429 March 2005 in Seoul, Korea, with the theme „Achieving Environmentally Sustainable Economic Growth in Asia and the Pacific“. The UN Conference served as a decisive forum for ministerial-level discussions on achieving sustainable development in Asia & the Pacific region. As a side event to this Ministerial Conference, approximately 100 eminent scientists, including social scientists and policy experts came together to discuss the role of science in global change, environment and development in the „Eminent Scientists Symposium“ with the theme „Global Change, Environment and Development“. Topics ranged from the Earth System and its climate, sustainable development, water resources and sanitation, forestry and biofuels, responses to climate change and disasters, including early warning systems for extreme events, to environmental industry, governance and tools for environmental management. Symposium speakers and participants provided national, regional and global perspectives on these issues. The Eminent Scientists Symposium was jointly organized by the Korea Environment Institute (KEI), the IGBP, UNESCAP, and sponsored by KEI, UNU & Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology Joint Programme (Korea), Ministry of Environment (Korea), Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, Samsung Global Environment Research Centre (Korea), Korean National Committee for IGBP and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. Philippines: A regional conference-workshop, „Enhancing Competitiveness, Reducing Poverty: A Call for Effective Water Governance in Southeast Asia“ was held on March 9-10, 2005 in Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila, Philippines. The conference discussed water governance and poverty issues in rural areas in the Southeast Asian region to identify priority research agenda and policy directions in water governance towards poverty alleviation and food security. It also hoped to pave the way for regional collaboration on water development initiatives. The regional conference was organized by the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) based in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines in partnership with institutions committed to the same cause. The meeting is also intended to expand and strengthen the regional alliance against poverty by addressing the institutional and policy dimensions, research, and mechanisms for funding initiatives on water issues and concerns. More specifically, the conferences geared towards raising the importance of water governance in regional development and poverty alleviation agenda; developing a framework for enabling policies and programs towards equitable and sustained water access; identifying priority water development initiatives, and funding mobilization strategies; and identifying areas for collaboration in the region. The conference featured a keynote paper by the Secretary of the Philippine Department of Agriculture (DA), and five thematic papers on water governance, research 20 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
and development, water use and allocation, funding of water resources development initiatives, and issues and concerns on water-related disasters. A total of 35 researchers, planners, decision-makers, multilateral donors and practitioners in Asia who are involved in water governance in their respective countries attended the conference. Participants also included representatives from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Asian Development Bank, and the Global Water System Project (GWSP). Papers and proceedings of the regional conference will be published as a special issue of the Journal of Agriculture and Development. Prof. Felino P. Lansigan, Chairman of the Philippine IHDP National Committee and member of the GWSP SSC helped in the organization of the conference. (fplansigan@yahoo.com) Taiwan: As part of the Capacity Building Program for the Southeast Asian Regional Committee for START (SARCS), a national workshop, „Advanced Training Workshop on Southeast Asia Regional Carbon and Water Issues“ has been organized as part of Taiwan’s contribution to two of the joint projects of the Earth System Science Partnership. The main objective is to promote the Global Carbon Project and the Global Water System Project-related research programs in SARCS member countries, and to provide advanced training on the carbon measurement, water resources, monitoring and modeling techniques, as well as to develop a GCP and GWSP research collaboration team within SARCS. The Advanced Training Workshop will bring together leading researchers from SARCS member countries representing all global change disciplines. The Workshop will take place 15–28 November 2005 in Chung-Li and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Deadline for applications is 15 July 2005! (Contact Prof. Chen-Tung Arthur Chen at ctchen@mail.nsysu.edu.tw) Austria: As the result of a long heritage of significant competences in various fields of climate and global change research, the University of Graz has started the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change (WegCenter) with the recognition of the potential of putting the diverse climaterelated activities under one umbrella. With its official opening in April 2005, the WegCenter is an interdisciplinary, internationally oriented research center with a focus on climate, environmental and global change monitoring, analysis, research, impacts and policy. The WegCenter addresses natural and anthropogenic climate, environmental and global change, respectively, including impacts of changes, mitigation, and policy issues. The initial research foci of the WegCenter are mainly related to climate change, but the broader area of global change is addressed and will increase in the longer term. The activities of the WegCenter are initially organized into two major programmes, the Climate and Environmental Change Research and Monitoring Programme and the Human Dimensions of Climate and Environmental Change Programme. The later will host the Austrian Human Dimensions Programme (HDP-A). These Programmes are highly complimentary to each other and tight cooperation is foreseen at the multitude of interfaces and overlapping areas between climate
National Committees/In Brief
NET WORKING AND CAPACIT Y BUILDING/NEWS
and environmental monitoring and research on the one hand, and research on climate and global change impacts and policy on the other hand. (http://www.wegcenter.at) Switzerland: The 6th annual Swiss Global Change Day was held in Bern, Switzerland on 7 April 2005, organized by ProClim – Swiss Forum for Climate and Global Change in collaboration with the IHDP and IGBP Swiss National Committees, the Commission for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and the Swiss Biodiversity Forum. The established event provided a platform and brought together 250 global change researchers from Switzerland and experts from abroad to share and discuss leading research issues in a transdisciplinary manner. Invited speakers from each field of global change research presented the state-of-the-art of ongoing research, according to the aims of the ESSP Global Environmental Change Programmes (IHDP, DIVERSITAS, IGBP and WCRP). Topics included global change and human health, the challenges for the North and South; traces of global change in polar ice cores; the fate of arctic sea ice; the ‘Syndrome Approach’ in studying the syndromes of global change; and many others. The Swiss Global Change Day is a continuing success in terms of number
and high caliber participants and discussions. Panel discussions include representatives from inter-governmental institutions, the private sector, policy, and the media to provoke discussions on needs and differing views on presented topics. A highlight of the event for young scientists is the award for best poster in each of the fields of ESSP Programmes. Congratulations to Anke Huss of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern, whose poster „Impact of the 2003 Heatwave on Mortality in Switzerland“ won the IHDP award of SFr. 1000 to participate in a future international conference. All full-length articles to the abstracts above on 2005 regional workshops related to IHDP research are available on the IHDP Website (http://www.ihdp.org) under „National Committees“. Compiled by Debra Meyer Wefering (wefering.ihdp@unibonn.de), Science Project Coordinator and IHDP Liaison for National Committees at the IHDP Secretariat, Bonn, Germany.
IN BRIEF Urbanization ➤➤➤ The IHDP Scientific Committee officially launched its new core project on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change in March this year. Karen Seto (Stanford University, USA) chairs the project. Her research interests include integrated land system science, urbanization, agricultural intensification, and remote sensing. Further Karen Seto members of the Scientific Steering Committee are: Frauke Kraas (University of Cologne, DE), David Simon (University of London, UK), William Solecki (City University New York, USA) and Xiaopei Yan (Zhongshan University, CN). The Scientific Steering Committee will be extended during 2005 and fundraising for an International Project Office will start. Also, the Urbanization Science Plan has been published under the leadership of Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez and can be obtained from the IHDP Secretariat or downloaded from the IHDP website (www.ihdp.org). The science plan has four thematic foci that cover the array of interaction between the urban and the global environment components of the Earth system. The conceptual framework starts with processes within the urban system that contribute to global environmental change. A second focus is on the pathways through which specific global environmental changes affect the urban system. Once these pathways and points of intersections are identified, the framework addresses the resulting interactions and responses within the urban system. Finally, the
framework centres on the consequences of the interactions within the urban system on global environmental change, or feedback processes. These four thematic foci create a comprehensive perspective of the dynamic, diverse, and complex interactions between urban systems and global environmental change processes. The Urbanization project will present itself by ways of sessions and a reception at the 6th Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community, taking place in Bonn, Germany, from 9 to 13 October 2005.
Global Land Project ➤➤➤ The second new IHDP core science project, the Global Land Project (GLP), was also officially launched in March 2005 by the Scientific Committees of both IHDP and its global change partner, IGBP. GLP will act as a successor to the IHDP/IGBP core project LUCC (Land-Use and LandCover Change) which will come to its end this year, as well as the IGBP core project GCTE which closed in 2003. The GLP Science Plan will soon be put to print and will be available on the IHDP website. The next step is to set up a governance structure with a Scientific Steering Committee and an International Project Office. The GLP Science Plan develops a new integrated paradigm focused on two main conceptual aspects of the coupled socio-ecological system. First, is a focus on land-use decision making and secondly, on ecosystem services. Main themes are 1. the causes and nature of land system change (globalization & population, management decisions and practices, atmospheric, biogeochemical and biophysical dimensions, as well as combined human and biophysical impacts); 2.the consequences of land system change (changes in ecosystem IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 21
In Brief NEWS
structure, human well-being, human adjustment to changes in ecosystem service provision, feedbacks from changes in ecosystems to the coupled Earth system); and 3. integrating analysis and modelling for land sustainability (dynamics of land-systems, vulnerability and resilience of land systems, land sustainability and policies/institutions). As is the case with the Urbanization project, the Global Land Project will be presented at the 6th Open Meeting in October in Bonn, Germany.
GECHS ➤➤➤ Karen O’Brien (University of Oslo, Norway) will be the new Chair of the IHDP core science project Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS). She is a geographer working on issues related to global environmental change, vulnerability and human security. Her research has focused on deforestation and climate Karen O’Brien change in southern Mexico, climate variability and the use of seasonal forecasts in southern Africa, as well as climate change impacts and vulnerability in the context of economic globalization. She has been a member of the GECHS Scientific Steering Committee since 2001, and is a lead author on the adaptation chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Karen’s publications include two books: Sacrificing the Forest: Environmental and Social Struggles in Chiapas (Westview, 1998) and Coping with Climate Variability: User Responses to Seasonal Forecasts in Southern Africa (Ashgate 2003, edited with Coleen Vogel). Also, five new members nominated by the GECHS Scientific Steering Committee were approved by the IHDP Scientific Committee in March 2005: Jon Barnett (University of Melbourne, AUS), Indra de Soysa (University of Trondheim, N), Patricia Kameri-Mbote (University of Nairobi, Kenya), Lyla Mehta (University of Sussex, UK), and Joni Seager (York University, CAN). The GECHS International Project Office is moving from Ottawa, Canada to Oslo, Norway in July 2005. The GECHS IPO will be hosted by the Geography Department at the University of Oslo. We are thanking Mike Brklacich, former GECHS Chair and Maureen Woodrow, GECHS Executive Officer, for their commitment to the project over the course of the past six years.
Other IHDP Publications ➤➤➤ Besides the Urbanization Science Plan, also the revised Science Plan of the IHDP core science projects IDGEC (Institutional Dimensions and Global Environmental Change) and New LOICZ (Land-Oceans Interactions in the Coastal Zone) have been published. The scientific framework of the original LOICZ Science Plan was further devel22 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
oped to integrate human dimensions. The revised IDGEC Science Plan includes a new section on three flagship activities and a current version of the IDGEC publications list. The IHDP Secretariat has also compiled a bibliography in order to highlight the contributions of IHDP to global change research, and produced a workshop report of the 2002 IHDW workshop, Urbanization and the Transition to Sustainability. Further, flyers of the following projects have been printed: GECHS, IDGEC and LOICZ. A general flyer describing IHDP has also been produced. All publications are (or will soon be) accessible online on the IHDP website. They can also be ordered from the IHDP Secretariat.
More Short Cuts ➤➤➤ The International Group of Funding Agencies for Global Change Research (IGFA) and the International Council for Science (ICSU) organized a workshop from 17 to 19 May 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden, called „The Interface between Global Change and Development-Oriented Research“. The workshop brought together researchers in global change, researchers engaged in development, as well as funding agencies that fund global change research, or development activities respectively. The meeting was felt to be of high importance and seen as a good start for these different communities to work together and to make a better case to major donors. Further steps include discussions between funding agencies and research groups on both sides (GEC as well as development). Both communities have to take advantage of intersections between global environmental change research and development research and highlight them at important meetings. ➤➤➤ The United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Security (EHS) held a scientific colloquium on „Reflections on Common Concerns and Scientific Challenges in the Field of Risk and Vulnerability“ in Bonn, Germany, on 5 April 2005. The colloquium included presentations on: vulnerability from economic prospective, the perception of flood risk, the meaning of risk and vulnerability in applied peace and conflict research, and the vulnerability of the global water system. IHDP Executive Director Barbara Göbel presented the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) core project. ➤➤➤ IHDP will hold a workshop called „Global environmental change: how do we link science to policy and practice?“ on 7 September at the International Forum on the Social SciencePolicy Nexus, 5 to 9 September 2005 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For more information on the conference, go to www.unesco.org/shs/ifsp. ➤➤➤ ICSU, The International Council for Science, has established an ad-hoc scoping group for a programme on natural and human-induced environmental hazards. A hazard programme should build on the basis of the disciplinary expertise of the ICSU unions, in particular the geo-unions and the hazards theme of the Year of the Planet Earth, as well as the relevant subject areas of the Global Environmental Change programmes, with additional components such as population health and critical infrastructure. IHDP Chair Coleen Vogel has been appointed by ICSU as a member of the scoping group.
Calendar/Publications NEW BOOKS
NEW BOOK ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN THE EU: ACTORS, INSTITUTIONS AND PROCESSES (2ND EDITION)
ardous waste and widespread impacts such as climate change. Earthscan 2005, 376 pages, Paperback £24.95, ISBN 1844070735; Hardback 2 volume set £120.00, ISBN 1844070727
Edited by Andrew Jordan This second and fully revised edition brings together some of the most influential work on the theory and practice of contemporary EU environmental policy. Comprising five comprehensive parts, it includes in-depth case studies of contemporary policy issues such as climate change, genetically modified organisms and trans-Atlantic relations; and an assessment of how well the EU is responding to new challenges such as enlargement, environmental policy integration and sustainability. One of the main aims of this new edition is to look forward and ask whether the EU is prepared or even able to respond to the ‘new’ governance challenges posed by the perceived need to use ‘new’ policy instruments and other processes to ‘mainstream’ environmental thinking in all EU policy sectors in pursuit of sustainability. Earthscan 2005, 352 pages, Paperback £19.51, ISBN 1-84407-158-8; Hardback £68.00, ISBN 1-84407-157-X
PUBLICS, RISK COMMUNICATION AND THE SOCIAL AMPLIFICATION OF RISK By Jeanne X. Kasperson and Roger E. Kasperson We live in a ‘risk society’ where the identification, distribution and management of risks, from new technology, environmental factors or other sources are crucial to our individual and social existence. The two Volume edition collects the authors’ fundamental work on how risks are communicated among different publics and stakeholders, including local communities, corporations and the larger society. It analyses the problems of lack of transparency and trust and explores how even minor effects can be amplified and distorted through media and social responses, preventing effective management. The final section investigates the difficult ethical issues raised by the unequal distribution of risk depending on factors such as wealth, location and genetic inheritance - with examples from worker and public protection, facility siting conflicts, transporting haz-
MEETING CALENDAR ➤➤➤ 6–7 July – Marseille, France Environment, Knowledge and Democracy
www.vcharite.univ-mrs.fr/shadyc/CIEnv.pdf ➤➤➤ 7–9 July – Amsterdam, The Netherlands People and the Sea III: New Directions in Coastal and Maritime Studies
www.marecentre.nl ➤➤➤ 10–12 August – Beijing, China PAGES 2nd Open Science Meeting Paleoclimate, Environmental Sustainability and Our Future
www.pages2005.org ➤➤➤ 21–27 August – Stockholm, Sweden World Water Week 15th Stockholm Water Symposium on Drainage Basin Management–Hard and Soft Solutions in Regional Development
http://worldwaterweek.org and http://www.siwi.org ➤➤➤ 23–27 August – Amsterdam, The Netherlands Modelling Land Use Change Session at the 45th Congress of the European Regional Science Association
www.feweb.vu.nl/ersa2005 ➤➤➤ 27 August–2 September – Grindelwald, Switzerland From the Holocene to the Anthropocene: Climate of the Last 1000 Years; 4th International NCCR Climate Summer School ➤➤➤ 28 August–2 September – Wageningen, The Nether-
lands Land Science: Concepts, Tools and Uncertainties in Land-Use Studies and Landscape Dynamics
www.dpw.wageningen-ur.nl/PEenRC/education/courses/ pgc-land_science.htm ➤➤➤ 29 August–1 September – Buenos Aires, Argentina Environmental Change and Rational Water Use Commission for Water Sustainability of the International Geographical Union (IGU)
http://water-sustainability.ph.unito.it ➤➤➤ 31 August–2 September – London, UK Flows and Spaces in a Globalized World
www.rgs.org/AC2005/registration.htm ➤➤➤ 11–14 September – Liverpool, UK Complexity and Ecological Economics
www.euroecolecon.org/pdf/EcoEcoCallForPapers_ Liverpool2005.pdf ➤➤➤ 19–23 September – Goettingen, Germany The Stability of Rainforest Margins: Linking Ecological, Economic and Social Constraints of Land Use Conservation
www.storma.de/symp2005 ➤➤➤ 20–21 September – Cambridge, UK 7th Annual BIOECON Conference on the Economic Analysis of Policies for Biodiversity Conservation
www.bioecon.ucl.ac.uk IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005 | 23
Addresses
CONTACT ADDRESSES IHDP SECRETARIAT
JOINT ESSP PROJECTS GECAFS
• IHDP Secretariat:
➤
Barbara Göbel, Executive Director Walter-Flex-Strasse 3 53113 Bonn, Germany Phone: +49-228-739050 Fax: +49-228-739054 ihdp@uni-bonn.de www.ihdp.org
• Global Environmental Change and Food Systems
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 Heike Schröder, Executive Officer IDGEC International Project Office 4526 Bren Hall, Bren School of Env. Science and Management University of California at Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5131, USA schroeder@bren.ucsb.edu IDGEC@bren.ucsb.edu http://fiesta.bren.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 http://130.37.129.100/ivm/research/ ihdp-it/index.html
LOICZ • Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone
➤
c/o Hartwig Kremer and Martin Le Tissier LOICZ International Project Office P. O. Box 59, 1790 AB, Den Burg, Texel, Netherlands loicz@nioz.nl www.loicz.org
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
GWSP • Global Water Systems Project
➤
c/o Eric Craswell, Executive Officer International Project Office GWSP Center for Development Research Walter-Flex-Str. 3 53113 Bonn, Germany Eric.Craswell@uni-bonn.de
IHDP SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE (SC) Chair • Coleen Heather Vogel
➤
Dept. of Geography & Env. Studies University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa vogelc@geoarc.wits.ac.za
Vice Chair • Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez
➤
UC-Mexus, University of California Riverside, CA, USA roberto.sanchez-rodriguez@ucr.edu
• Katrina Brown School of Development Studies University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK k.brown@uea.ac.uk
• Geoffrey Dabelko Environmental Change and Security Project (ECSP) Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., USA dabelkog@wwic.si.edu
• Carl Folke 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
Centre for Research on Natural Resources and the Environment (CNM) CNM, Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden calle@system.ecology.su.se
24 | IHDP NEWSLETTER 2/2005
• Roberto Guimarães United Nations Division for SocialPolicy and Development New York, NY, USA guimaraesr@un.org
• Gernot Klepper Kiel Institute of World Economics Kiel, Germany gklepper@ifw-kiel.de
• Tatiana Kluvankova-Oravska Institute for Forecasting Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava, Slovak Republic tatiana@progeko.savba.sk
• Sander van der Leeuw Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA vanderle@asu.edu
• 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 University Shanghai, P.R. China xzpeng@fudan.edu.cn
• Hebe Vessuri Department of Science Studies, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, Caracas, Venezuela hvessuri@ivic.ve
• Paul L.G. Vlek Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany p.vlek@uni-bonn.de
EX OFFICIO MEMBERS IHDP SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE ➤ ICSU • Gordon McBean
Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada gmcbean@fes.engga.uwo.ca
➤ 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 • Karen O’Brien
Institute for Sociology & Human Geography University of Oslo, Norway info@gechs.org ➤ IDGEC • Oran R. Young
Bren School of Environmental Science and Management University of California at Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA, USA young@bren.ucsb.edu
IT • Frans Berkhout ➤
Director, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Frans.Berkhout@ivm.vu.nl
LOICZ • Liana Talaue McManus
➤
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA lmcmanus@rsmas.miami.edu
LUCC • Eric Lambin ➤
➤
ISSC
• Lourdes Arizpe Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Cuernavaca, Mexico larzipe@correo.crim.unam.mx
Dept. of Geography University of Louvain Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium lambin@geog.ucl.ac.be
➤
DIVERSITAS • Michel Loreau
➤ URBANIZATION • Karen Seto
École Normale Superieure Laboratoire d'Écologie Paris, France loreau@ens.fr
Dept. of Ecological & Environmental Sciences Stanford University, USA kseto@stanford.edu
Printed on 100% recycled paper