Some students of mine (Mary Thompson and Manali Baruah) and I just got word that an article we wrote, “Seeing REDD+ as a Project of Environmental Governance”, has been accepted for a special edition of Environmental Science and Policy. You know, getting articles accepted never really gets old . . .
While there is no abstract, for those who might be interested, here is the introduction:
1. Introduction
Since 2007, efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation have explicitly recognized the role of conservation, sustainable management, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks, facilitated through the use of equitable financial incentives, as promising approaches for mitigating global climate change (known as REDD+). Questions have been raised concerning the issue of government within this so-called REDD+ framework, focusing on the structures that operationalize policy decisions related to deforestation and climate change. However, the literature has yet to offer a careful consideration of how REDD+ is itself an emerging project of environmental governance – that is, a set of social norms and political assumptions that will steer societies and organizations in a manner that shapes collective decisions about the use and management of forest resources.
In this paper, we argue that REDD+ is more than an impartial container for the various tools and actors concerned with addressing anthropogenic climate change. Instead, even as it takes shape, REDD+ is already functioning as a form of governance, a particular framing of the problem of climate change and its solutions that validates and legitimizes specific tools, actors and solutions while marginalizing others. This framing raises important questions about how we might critically evaluate REDD+ programs and their associated tools and stakeholders in a manner that encourages the most effective and equitable pursuit of its goals. Further, it calls into question the likelihood of achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions via REDD+ programs.
This paper has three parts. First, we examine the current governmental structure of REDD+. While no single agency or organization holds a monopoly on the design or administration of REDD+ programs, we focus on two that have emerged at the forefront in transferring this concept from an idea into reality: the United Nations (via UN-REDD) and the World Bank (through the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, or FCFP). The second section of the paper considers how REDD+ functions, even at this early stage, as a largely unacknowledged project of environmental governance. Here we focus on the objects to be governed, who is governing, and how desired conservation and sequestration outcomes are to be achieved under REDD+. Finally, we illustrate how this framework attempts to align the interests of a wide range of stakeholders in this process to bring about desired environmental outcomes through the example of the formalization of indigenous peoples’ participation in REDD+. We argue that this alignment has thus far been incomplete, suggesting an emerging crisis of governance within REDD+ that will compromise future project and policy goals, along with the well-being of various stakeholders.
Category: Climate Change
Thousands of ways to get this done
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.
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.
Yep, this is about right . . .
Yeah, the level of discourse around climate-related topics is pretty low these days . . . not that it has been elevated for a very long time. Still, the folks at RealClimate hacked a political cartoon and got it right:
Yep.
Letting someone else make the point . . .
Well, it’s about a year ago that the “climategate” email hack broke on the world, with a lot of sound and fury that, in the end, signified nothing. I’ve dealt with this plenty of times, and I am too tired to do it again. But there are great posts all over the place – like Peter Gleick here and Gavin Schmidt here. Folks, its all a pack of little distractions from the big problems in front of us – and arguing that the future is uncertain is not reassuring. Uncertainty is what worries me – predictable change can be managed, but nonlinear, unpredictable change can disrupt society significantly . . .
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.
On the use and misuse of anecdotes . . .
Blog The NonSequitor has a post on the use and misuse of anecdotes in discussions of climate change. It is an interesting, well-reasoned piece that I largely agree with. However, I think the post sort of misses the point of the politics of climate change – to get anything done on this issue requires thinking very carefully about how to communicate findings and ideas with the public. While I agree, in principle, that arguing against climate change or climate change science by picking at an imperfect anecdote (i.e. Al Gore making it seem like 20 meters of sea level rise is impending) does not really address the underlying science, or the soundness of the underlying argument, the assumption that John Casey is making in this post is that science and truth are driving political decision-making. They do not.
The simple difference between politics and science: in science, there are problems and solutions (or at least means of coming to a solution). In politics, there are issues and interests that require debate, consideration and compromise. Science and data are just fodder for that process – they always have been. Scientists fundamentally fail to recognize this when they engage the political process, and tend to become frustrated when what seems self-evident to them ends up debated, and when obvious solutions get watered down or buried. Folks, we are not doing science when we engage in policy – we are doing politics. And that means accepting that people will, in fact, “weak man” your arguments by finding one imperfect anecdote and using it against the whole argument. Yes, it’s intellectually dishonest. It is also reality.
Politics does not deal in truth, it deals in tactics. And that means we have to be tactically aware of what we are doing when we lay out examples and anecdotes. It also means that we have to be aggressive in addressing efforts to “weak man” the evidence for climate change, instead of dismissing such efforts as not requiring attention (see the IPCC’s botched handling of the misrepresented melt rate of the Himalayan Glaciers). It is good to know the fallacious arguments being used against the science – but only if we are willing to address those arguments.
Interesting but flawed . . .
The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication recently put out a report on Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change. The findings are pretty interesting, but at times really problematic. This project has a history of putting out cool products that address the complexity of communication and opinion surrounding climate change, such as their Six Americas project.
This graphic, from that report, shows that dividing the country (or indeed any group of people) into global warming alarmists and global warming sceptics is a gross oversimplification of public feeling and perception. The poles of alarmed and dismissive are less than 25% of the population. Disengaged, doubtful and dismissive are only 34% of the population. Alarmed and concerned are 41%. Note that neither category is a majority (though alarmed and concerned is a plurality). Anthropogenic global climate change is NOT dead in public opinion at all.
Well, how did we get to this spectrum of opinions? The new report suggests that while we spend a lot of time talking politics, the larger issue might be education and outreach. There are some really interesting findings in here – for example:
Majorities of American adults correctly understand that weather often changes from year to year (83%) and that “climate” means the average weather conditions in a region (74%). Majorities, however, incorrectly believe that the climate often changes from year to year or that “weather” means the average climate conditions in a region, suggesting that many people continue to confuse weather and climate.
Yep. And I blame the media, who seem to constantly conflate these two on all ends of the political spectrum. A heavy snowfall does not discredit climate change (or even warming), but a heat wave is not a signal of warming unto itself, either.
A majority of Americans (73%) correctly understands that current conditions are not colder than ever before in Earth’s history, but a majority (55%) incorrectly believes the opposite – that the Earth’s climate is now warmer than it has ever been before (this is false – global temperatures have been warmer than current conditions many times in the past).
Wait, who ever said it was the coldest it has ever been? I get what they are trying to do, but that is just an odd thing to throw in. And the fact a majority thinks we are at our warmest point ever speaks to a deeply distressing lack of understanding of our history – things have been warmer in the past, and we know from the geologic records associated with those times what sorts of sea level rise, etc. we can expect. We are not in terra incognita entirely right now – we have records of sudden changes in the state of the global climate as it warmed beyond where we are today. The past is prelude . . .
There is a lot of this sort of thing in the report. All of it is interesting. But it needs to be read with a careful, critical eye. I am worried about some of the questions in this study – or at least their phrasing and the interpretation of the results. For example:
Thirty-nine percent (39%) say that most scientists think global warming is happening, while 38 percent say there is a lot of disagreement among scientists whether or not global warming is happening
At first, this simply seems to be an illustration of the wide divide in the public on the understanding of the nature of the scientific consensus around climate change. But this question is too broad to really capture what is going on here. Answers probably varied greatly depending on the respondent’s level of knowledge (highly variable, as the report noted) – for example, a well-informed person inclined to think that the human causes of global climate change are overstated could take the real and significant (but very narrow) debates about the exact workings of various greenhouse gases, or how to best model the climate, and argue that this represents significant disagreements about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is happening (which is a serious mischaracterization), while someone who is more environmentally inclined but has less understanding of the field might simply assume there is no debate in the science at all, which is not true. To get to 38% thinking that scientists are debating whether climate change is happening or not suggests that something like this happened on this question. There is more or less no scientific debate, and very minimal public debate, over whether or not the climate is changing – the instrument record is pretty clear. The question is how fast, and by what exact mechanisms. Nearly all skeptics agree that some change is taking place – they just tend to doubt that humans are the cause. If only 7% of the study’s respondents thought that climate change was not happening at all, why would they think that scientists had a greater level of debate?
I really dislike the following questions/data:
Respondents were given the current temperature of the Earth’s surface (approximately 58ºFahrenheit) as a reference point. They were then asked what they thought the average temperature was during the last ice age. The correct answer is between 46º and 51º. The median public response, however, was 32º – the freezing point of water – while many other people responded 0º.
Americans, however, did much better estimating the Earth’s surface temperature 150 years ago (before the Industrial Revolution). The correct answer is approximately 56º to 57º Fahrenheit. The median public response was 54º.
When asked what temperature they thought it would be by the year 2020 if no additional actions are taken to reduce global warming, the median response was 60º, slightly higher than the scientific estimate of 58.4º Fahrenheit.
Realistically, this is a bunch of wild guesses. We Americans are not so good at simply saying “I don’t know”. Hell, I would not have nailed these, and I work in this area. The question requires too much precision to have any reasonable expectation of meaningful data.
Finally, a few moments of oversimplification in the data analysis that bother me – even though I like the idea of the report, and I generally agree with the premise that climate change is anthropogenic:
Majorities of Americans, however, incorrectly believe that the hole in the ozone layer, toxic wastes, aerosol spray cans, volcanic eruptions, the sun, and acid rain contribute to global warming.
Again, the analysis assumes a uniform, low level of understanding of climate change across the sample. However, a well-informed person would know that the sun is, in fact, technically a contributor to climate change – it is a small forcing on our climate, dwarfed by that of greenhouse gases, to be sure, but still a forcing. Had I been asked this question, I would have gotten it “wrong” by their analysis . . . but their analysis is predicated on an incorrect assumption about the drivers of climate change. I could make the same argument for toxic wastes, as depending on what they are and how they are stored, they may well change land cover or decompose and release greenhouse gases, thus impacting climate change. The analysis here is too simplistic.
I’m a bit surprised that this sort of a report would be full of problematically phrased questions and even more problematic interpretations of the data (i.e. predicated on misunderstandings of the science). This is amateur hour stuff that any of my grad students could pick up on and address in their work long before they got to publication . . . too bad, as the effort and some of the information is really interesting. It would have been nice to have a consistently interesting, rigorous report.