Well, the Cancun Conference of the Parties (called COP for short) is upon us, where everyone will sit down and accomplish pretty much nothing on a global climate change agreement. There is real concern circulating in the diplomatic world that this meeting could see the fracturing of the push for a global agreement such that it never happens – at least from this framework. This outcome is problematic in all sorts of ways, not least of which in the chaos it will unleash in the development world, where a huge amount of money was slated to be used for adaptation to climate change under what amounted to a glorified memorandum of understanding coming out of Copenhagen. If the whole process bites the dust, it isn’t very clear what happens to that money or the programs and projects under development to use it.
That said, if it all goes totally bad in Cancun it doesn’t mean that we are beyond creating meaningful paths toward a lower-emissions future that might be manageable. Indeed, one might argue that the death of the global framework might be the only way forward. States like California, and cities like New York, are now starting to implement policies and programs to cut their own emissions without a national mandate. They are creating locally-appropriate policies that maximize environmental benefit while minimizing the local “pain” of the new policies. This is all well and good for these cities, but what I find interesting is that there is some evidence – however loose- that this city-by-city, state-by-state approach might actually be more efficient at achieving our climate goals than a global agreement.
I was part of the Scenarios Working Group for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment – my group was tasked with running four future scenarios for ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) under different future political, economic and social conditions. Once we got our baselines and assumptions for each scenario in place, a team of modelers ran the scenarios for various issues (temperature change, water availability, etc.) and then we attempted to link the model runs to meaningful statements about how ecosystems might fare under each scenario.
This is relevant here because, interestingly, we had a “global orchestration” scenario that, to some extent, looks like what the world was going for with Copenhagen and Cancun. We also had another scenario called “adapting mosaic”, which assumes decentralized control and adaptive management of environmental resources. Neither scenario was a clear winner – each had strengths and weaknesses. An “adapting mosaic” approach is great at managing new and emerging environmental challenges, whether from climate change or other issues. It might also serve as the very legitimate basis of a bottom-up approach to an eventual global accord on climate change. However, this approach risks ignoring global commons like fisheries, which often leads to the loss of that resource through overuse. There is a real risk that inequality will go unaddressed, at least across countries and at the global scale, but at the same time economic growth will not be as robust as under other scenarios. Global orchestration is good at maximizing income. While I dissented from this view*, the group argued that under global orchestration a Kuznets Greening Curve would kick in (as people get wealthier, they pay more attention to the environment – thus, economic growth and consumption can result in better environmental quality), and we would have strong global coordination on everything from trade to environmental issues. However, this approach is much more reactive, and focused on the global scale – thus it is not very good at dealing with local surprises. In my opinion, adapting mosaic looks better, over the long run, than global coordination (especially if you factor in my concerns about the Kuznets Curve assumption).
In short, in the efforts of California and New York we are seeing the emergence of a de facto adapting mosaic as the global orchestration efforts of Cancun and Copenhagen fall by the wayside. This actually might be a good thing.
In uncertainty, there is hope.
*the Kuznets curve rests on a key assumption – that with enough wealth, we can undo the damage we do while building wealth to the point that we start caring about the environment. Kuznets has no answer for extinction (a huge problem at the moment), as that is gone forever. Further, the Chinese are starting to provide an object lesson in how to blow up the Kuznets curve by damaging one’s environment so badly that the costs associated with fixing the problem become overwhelming – and those are the fixable problems. Basically, assuming a Kuznets Greening Curve allowed those framing these scenarios to put an overly-happy face on the global orchestration scenario for political reasons – they wanted to provide support for a global effort on climate change. A more honest reading of the data, in my opinion, would have made adapting mosaic look much better.
Category: Adaptation
No, dammit, no . . .
Lord, there are days . . . look, people, the connection between climate change and any sort of social behavior is complex and difficult to trace. I’ve mentioned before that the connection between climate change and conflict is not at all straightforward. So too the connection between climate change and migration/refugees. But no matter how many times we say this, people still go with the simple connection – climate change = more refugees/more migration. Take, for example, this bit of reporting at CNN.
The devastating effects of climate change and conflicts fought over ever-scarcer resources such as water could cause a surge in migration that experts fear the world is totally unprepared for.
At least one billion people will be forced from their homes between now and 2050 by such forces, the international charity group Christian Aid predicted in a recent report.
Oh, for God’s sake. Look, we’ve been over this before. There will be relatively few new refugees, and all I can offer is a very qualified maybe about more migration. Why do I say this?
First, a refugee, by definition, is someone who is forced to move (a nebulous issue) and then does move across an international border. People who are forced to move but stay in their country after moving are called internally displaced people (IDPs) – this is not merely terminology. Refugees have all sorts of rights that IDPs do not. And most work on climate and migration suggests very short moves, meaning we might see a surge in climate-related IDPs, but probably not climate refugees. Well, that and the fact that international law does not consider climate-related events as legal “forcings” that can result in refugee status. So, most people will not clear a border, and those that do will not be recognized under current law as refugees.
Second, there are a hell of a lot of assumptions here about what causes people to move and why in the context of environmental change. I’ve written on this in refereed journals, and a chunk of the first half of my book addresses this issue indirectly. Simply put, any decision to move incorporates more than an assessment of one’s material situation – it is a complex decision that takes into account a whole range of factors, including social considerations and opportunities elsewhere. These factors are locally-specific, and therefore any wide, general claim about the number of likely refugees is mostly crap – we simply don’t know.
So where did the crappy analysis come from? Oh, right, this crap story was built on a completely crap report that I complained about just recently. Crap begetting crap. Super.
And I'm back . . .
OK, page proofs are done. Index is mostly done . . . well, it is out of my hands, anyway. Jacket copy approved. Happy blurbs from Mickey Glantz and Andrew Rice secured for the jacket. Nice author photo for the jacket taken (by Scott). Yep, pretty much done here . . . which means I can now get back to hassling the internet. Wheeeee!
To celebrate, I bring you a completely unfair piece of insanity. I know I come to this late, but this is so nuts I simply could not let it go. Well, that and this may have a direct impact on my work life in the very near future . . . that’s right, it’s the battle for leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee! And why, you ask, does a fairly esoteric battle for what seems to be a marginal committee (it’s not) rise to my attention? Because one of the candidates, John Shimkus, is arguing that while climate change is real, we don’t have to do anything about it because, and I quote:
“I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God,” Shimkus said. “And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood” (via Politico)
By flood, I presume he means sea-level rise. And by Earth, I can only presume he means his great state of Illinois, which is a hell of a long way from the nearest ocean (though Great Lakes rise could cause serious problems for Chicago). I suspect there are a bunch of people in low-lying parts of Bangladesh and Vietnam, as well as a number of island states like Tuvalu, who are pretty much looking down the barrel of the world being destroyed by flood who might take issue with this particular mashup of climate science and the Bible, regardless of their religious background.
Holy crap.
This is old Bjorn Lomborg read through Genesis (new Bjorn Lomborg has reconsidered the math, and now thinks we should do something, though it is mostly adaptation) . . . and Rep. Shimkus might have some influence over the use of federal aid dollars for climate change work.
Look, it is one thing to debate those parts of the science that are not settled (a relatively small amount), and further to debate what to do about the impacts of what is already happening, and what is very likely to happen . . . but it is entirely another to announce that we don’t have to worry about such impacts at all because, even though climate change is real, God will save us. History is littered with the bodies of people who waited for God to save them. God helps those who help themselves – not those who sit around waiting for miracles . . . but it seems Rep. Shimkus’ reading of the Bible didn’t quite make it to the New Testament.
Page proofs . . .
are killing me. But, the book is here, and I am cleaning it up. I hate page proofs. Deeply. This is the sort of detail work I loathe – combing back through 90,000 words looking for misspellings and erroneous punctuation. It is taking days, because you can only focus that hard for so long. And at the same time, I am cleaning up the index.
Oh, and that is on top of the article that was due back in today – I worked with two of my Ph.D. students, Mary Thompson and Manali Baruah, to produce a paper that examines how REDD+ functions as a form of unacknowledged environmental governance (defining legitimate terms and actors within debates over how to implement terrestrial carbon sequestration projects in forest areas). We’ll see how it does in this round of peer review.
And then there is the talk I am supposed to be giving at UNC – Chapel Hill on Friday. I’ll be discussing how we think about livelihoods in development, how current framings might have carried us as far as they are going to, and what a new framing might look like. Yeah, it is coming together, but not as quickly as I’d hoped.
But, without further ado, the first few hundred words of Delivering Development:
When business people assume they can do climate vulnerability analysis . . .
things often go wrong. Take, for example, the climate change vulnerability index produced by Maplecroft. At first glance, this looks interesting – a scale of risk that can be mapped to visually represent the levels of challenge presented by climate change to any particular place.
However, look more closely and it becomes clear that the product isn’t really useful at all. Anybody who takes 42 variables and aggregates them into a single category (vulnerability) has created something sort of useless. OK, so the vulnerability is high. But vulnerability to what? Flood, drought, crop failure due to temperature, coastal fisheries collapse? All of these things are problems related to climate change, but they are not present in all places at all times, and they all have different impacts on people (and Maplecroft should probably note that they have different impacts on investments) that require different interventions. So the index does not tell you anything diagnostic about this vulnerability. It is, at best, a first step to thinking about vulnerability and how to address it.
On top of overselling the product and its value, their underlying data is problematic – if you download the map you can see the size of the grid they used for the data – it is huge. This suggests that they have used global circulation models (GCMs) for their climate projection variables. The use of global scale data in local cases is highly problematic – downscaling these models to regional or even local levels has proven very difficult because the factors that most influence the global climate are not necessarily the most important factors at regional or local scales. For example, local deforestation can have a huge impact on local precipitation patterns over time without having a very large impact on global circulation as a whole – so the downscaled model (focused on global circulation) will not capture the importance of this local factor in determining local climate outcomes. Just looking at Ghana on their free map (you can download a copy from the page above), I can tell you that they have missed a really distressing trend toward the loss of the minor rainy season in the forest (Southern) areas of Ghana . . . which is going to have a massive impact on both cocoa production (national economic impact) and rain-fed agriculture. If they got this wrong, I am guessing they have missed a hell of a lot of other things.
This is what happens when the business community starts jonesing for climate change, but won’t go to the scientific community to get solid advice on how to get the information they need. Look at Maplecroft’s core team – only one of the six has really engaged with climate change or global environmental change more broadly in any meaningful way – and he is trained in Business Studies, not climatology, biogeography, ecology, anthropology, political ecology or any other number of fields that produce the people who develop basic knowledge on climate change, environmental change and their related human impacts. In short, they really don’t know what they are talking about, but they have made a nice looking product that might mislead people into thinking that they do.
What drives my concern here is not some sort of academic/governmental territoriality. When people approach the issue of climate change and its human impacts without a serious consideration of the science behind these broad issues, there is the potential for very serious problems. You should see the REDD+-related business proposals circulating out there . . . I’ve seen crazy stuff, like people wanting to plant genetically-modified super-fast-growing eucalypts in the swamps around the Amazon to enhance carbon uptake in otherwise not-so-forested areas, without the slightest consideration for the ecological impact of such a species (which would, according to my biogeography colleagues, surely go invasive immediately). Without meaning to, people might end up doing a hell of a lot more damage than good if they just run off willy-nilly.
There are a lot of us out here who would love to work with you – we want to help, and we’ve already made a lot of these mistakes. Let us save you time, and save the folks suffering these vulnerabilities a lot of unnecessary pain.
Great new (to me) resource
For those interested in things environment and development, the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center here in DC (actually in the Ronald Reagan Building along with USAID and EPA) runs a very cool, interesting blog The New Security Beat. It’s going in the blogroll to the right – check it out . . .
Shuffling the deck chairs?
I recently had an e-mail exchange with Rick Piltz over at Climate Science Watch (I link to them regularly, and if you are not familiar with the site, you should check it out – it is an activist site that does very good work) about the whole Cucinelli circus. At the end of that exchange, Rick mentioned that with the upcoming IPCC plenary the question of Patchauri’s leadership was once again on the table. This got me thinking . . . and I shorthanded an answer to him that I think I can expand on here.
For those not neck-deep in the world of climate change, Rajendra Pachauri is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the authoritative scientific body working on the issue of climate change – it is empowered to review the existing literature and evidence (it does not do its own research) and present what amounts to a summary of our best understanding of what is happening to the global climate and why it is happening. (full disclosure: I have been appointed to the IPCC for this round as a review editor – basically, I will manage the peer-review process for one of the chapters).
The IPCC has come under fire quite a bit – in my opinion, mostly because the scientific story of climate change is getting clearer and clearer, and it is not a happy story. However, there have also been screwups – for example, some of you may have heard how a completely unrealistic assessment of glacier melt in the Himalayas somehow got through review into the last IPCC report (this melt is important, as it tells us how much flooding to expect downstream (i.e. northern India and Bangladesh, among other areas) in the near term, and how much the river flows of the region will decrease once the glaciers have largely melted (potentially creating significant food crises in the same areas). I wasn’t completely freaked out by this error – it is large document that is hard to manage, but the review process is very comprehensive. It’s just not realistic to expect a review, compiled by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by hundreds more as well as representatives from the participating governments (including the US), to come together flawlessly in a reasonable timeframe. However, when this popped up, the handling of it was botched – it was more or less the classic error: instead of identifying, acknowledging and fixing the error, at first the IPCC was seen to be stonewalling and trying to defend an undefendable statement. At one point, Pachauri issued a remarkably tone-deaf statement in which he effectively called India’s Environment Minister “arrogant” and dismissed the Indian Government’s report which seemed to contract the IPCC findings. Even if the IPCC report had been correct in its claims, this could have been handled better. However, the IPCC claims were wrong, and the Indian report was closer to the truth . . . which makes this a disaster. The whole event badly damaged the legitimacy of the IPCC in some people’s eyes, and was fodder for those who would deny the role of human beings in climate change. It was a PR disaster, really – the overall science of the report is, in my opinion (and it is an informed opinion) quite solid. If nothing else, note that as the models of climate get more sophisticated, their results are mapping ever closer to observed reality . . . and the models are predicated on widely accepted understandings of the causes of climate change brought forth through exercises like the IPCC assessments. Still, it was bad.
Add this to the fiasco from this summer (in which I’m afraid I was a visible participant), where the IPCC secretariat, in Pachauri’s name, issued guidance to members of the IPCC on how to interact with the press. The letter was astonishingly poorly worded to sound like those of us on the IPCC were not to speak to the press at all, when what was meant was that we were not to represent the entire IPCC report by ourselves to the press (in other words, we can speak to the press and say “in my opinion . . .” and be fine, but we cannot say “The IPCC says/believes/thinks . . .” because we do not speak for everyone on the IPCC). The meaning of the message was completely innocuous, but the initial wording was very unclear, and set off something of a firestorm.
So, does tone-deafness qualify as a reason to throw the chairman under the bus? Well, if you think that the chairman’s job is to be a media spokesperson, maybe it is. But if the chair is to run the larger IPCC process, I don’t think replacing Pachauri changes anything – it’s just finding a scapegoat to make it look like the panel has been reformed or something – which I strongly object to, as I don’t think the IPCC needs reform. The process is sound, the author selection is sound, the data is sound (yes, I know some people have issues with the data, but the vast majority of the scientific community does not – so I am going with them until such time as I see new evidence – though I remain open to new evidence, as our understanding of the climate as a complex system is incomplete, at best). So replacing Pachauri might actually be read as an admission of guilt or problems with previous IPCC reports that I do not think exist – there is no systematic rot here.
Besides, this round of the IPCC has already started – the authors are selected, and the first plenary will meet soon. So changing the chair now will do nothing but create administrative confusion. And the importance of replacing Pachauri rests on the assumption that the chair has a lot of power – and the post does not, in the grand scheme of things. In the end, the IPCC is an intergovernmental process, which means that the diplomatic process in large, key countries like the US greatly constrain and shape what the IPCC can do – probably more than the chair can. You’ll notice an absence of calls for replacement from the diplomatic community, which tells you what they think. More to the point, Pachauri still has his job – if any major country had an issue, he would be out. For an illustration, take a look at what the Bush administration did to Bob Watson, the previous chair of the IPCC. The Administration withdrew support for him (and there is documentary evidence to suggest that they did so because ExxonMobil really wanted him gone) and that was that.
So, in the end I vote to keep Pachauri in place. I think he is sincere in his efforts to get outreach right, both in terms of his own statements and in terms of the dissemination of the IPCC reports. He knows the process. And the governments are, for now, backing him, so all of the demands for removal are going nowhere right now. That said, I fear he may be one more public gaffe away from someone in the diplomatic world getting fed up and demanding a replacement . . . and that would not be good for the IPCC process during this assessment report.
An opportunity in the challenges . . .
Via Grist:
TIANJIN, China — China will on Monday host its first U.N. climate conference as it seeks to showcase its green credentials, but hopes are dim that the event will yield major breakthroughs that environmentalists crave.
Three thousand delegates will converge on the northern port city of Tianjin for the latest round of tortured United Nations negotiations aimed at securing a post-2012 treaty on tackling global warming.
But even the most optimistic forecasts for the six days of talks foresee only incremental progress amid the continuing fallout from last year’s failure in Copenhagen by world leaders to forge a comprehensive deal.
“Our expectations are not very high, in the sense that we have not witnessed a willingness from governments to really move the negotiations forward,” Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio told AFP.
Check the Oh Crap box in the right sidebar. These guys are foot-dragging, and we’re already out of what most people think is the safe range for CO2 concentrations. What do I mean by safe? Well, it comes down to the odds of catastrophic change. The concern is that, as CO2 levels inch upward, we are approaching a situation where nonlinear changes start to happen – that is, where slow, steady changes in the climate “jump” to a new state very, very rapidly (in decades or less). We can cope with slow, steady changes in rainfall in most parts of the world. That is much of what adaptation planning is about these days – adjusting livelihoods and infrastructure for expected changes in the future to minimize the negative impacts.
What worries me, however, is what I don’t know. Global climate and ecology are extraordinarily complex, linked systems that are not completely understood. Changes in some parts of these systems may have no effect at all on the larger picture. Other changes might radiate through these systems, having massive, unintended and largely unpredictable consequences. As we inch the CO2 concentrations ever upward, and we inch global temperatures upward, we create conditions in which the likelihood of this sort of non-linear change increases. The big example of this you might have heard of is the potential shutdown of the Gulf Stream, a shift in ocean circulation triggered by larger changes in oceanic circulation linked to salinity and temperature. If this happens (and it could, though I think it remains unlikely), Europe (for example) would become much, much cooler, radically altering agricultural production and the accessibility of ports from France north much faster than we could keep up with the changes.
This is an extreme example, but there are many other such shifts we worry about . . . and many, many more that we’ve not yet thought of because of the complexity of the systems with which we are engaged. It is possible to plan for adaptation to such events, though – in fact, I would argue that the idea of the discontinuous change is an opportunity for more productive adaptation and development thought than that which is practiced today. All you can do in the face of discontinuous change is make communities and countries as resilient as possible – build as much capacity for change as you can, and then let people address these changes in locally-appropriate manners as they start to happen. In other words, discontinuous change gives us the opportunity to take our hands off the wheel – to stop lying to ourselves that we can plan for everything, or that we even have all of the knowledge we need to make such plans. Instead, it encourages us to think about a more flexible, resilient world in which people are empowered to address the challenges in their lives.
In every challenge, there is an opportunity . . .
Well, this isn't good . . .
Coral bleaching is back, and the New York Times has noticed. Nice of them, given the persistence of this problem over the last few decades. In summary, you care about this because coral is generally seen as one of the canaries in the global coal mine – they are very sensitive to changes in the temperature of the oceans in which they live, and when they get too warm (often only a few degrees above normal temperatures) they lose their color as they go into survival mode – hence the term “bleaching”. Many bleached corals die, and when they do the very rich biodiversity they support dies with them or disperses. Yep, coral bleaching is bad.
That said, Justin Gillis and the people he interviewed for this story are perhaps pushing the coral bleaching = global warming thing in the wrong way. Basically, the argument in the article is that climate change (warming) has pushed average sea temperatures up, and so when we get a warm year, it doesn’t take long for the already warm seas to get too warm for coral:
“It is a lot easier for oceans to heat up above the corals’ thresholds for bleaching when climate change is warming the baseline temperatures,” said C. Mark Eakin, who runs a program called Coral Reef Watch for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If you get an event like El Niño or you just get a hot summer, it’s going to be on top of the warmest temperatures we’ve ever seen.”
Well, yes . . . but you don’t have to have evidence of a warming trend in the seas to get this outcome. Instead, all you need is greater climate variability where there are several years with hot enough temperatures to push things over the edge, even if average temperatures have not really risen all that much. Climate variability is an outcome of climate change – so you can still make the bleaching-to-climate change connection – but you don’t have to assert permanently warmer seas when the evidence for this is pretty uneven globally. This, of course, is not surprising – the distribution of atmospheric warming is pretty uneven globally, thanks to the circulation of the winds and oceans, and differences in the vegetation that cover the land in different parts of the world.
So, to summarize – yes, coral bleaching is a good preliminary indicator of the impacts of ongoing climate change . . . but it does not necessarily mean that we have an established warming trend as much as evidence of disruptions in the normal variability of air and water temperatures created by the redistribution of excess heat energy in our atmosphere. Overselling the warming trend (which is there – see here at Climate Charts and Graphs, but not in a manner that can be downscaled to reliable causality for coral bleaching) doesn’t do us any favors as we try to influence policy on climate change, and how to address it.
And now the book has a cover . . .
I took the photo in 2006 – it is the road through Dominase and Ponkrum, where I work in Ghana, looking to the south toward Ponkrum. What do you think?