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: environment
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:
Global food prices again . . . but maybe a solution!
New Scientist has an interview with the authors of a recent report that blames food price shifts on financial market manipulation and speculation. Worth reading – they are quite clear in their argument.
Is this another crisis like the one we had in 2008?
Not quite. Maximo Torero of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC notes that oil, the real driver of food prices and of the 2008 crisis, is relatively cheap, at around $75 a barrel, not over $100 as it was in 2008.
In 2008, both immediate grain prices, and the prices offered for future grain purchases in commodities markets, climbed steadily for months, whereas now they are spiking and dipping more unpredictably, which economists call volatility.
“The market fundamentals – supply and demand – do not warrant the price increases we have seen,” says Torero. Not all harvests have been bad, and after 2008 countries rebuilt grain stocks. “There are enough stocks in the US alone to cover the expected losses in Russia.”
The food riots in Mozambique were not due to world grain prices, he says, but because Mozambique devalued its currency, making imported food more expensive.
So what has been happening this year?
Markets are responding nervously to incomplete information. First there was a series of shocks: Russia’s export ban, lower maize forecasts, then, days later, a US ruling to allow more bioethanol in fuel which seemed likely to further reduce the maize – the main source of bioethanol – available for food. Meanwhile there was no reliable information about grain stocks, which is strategic information that most countries keep secret.
The result was nervous bidding and sporadically surging prices in commodity markets. And that attracted the real problem: investors wielding gargantuan sums of speculative capital and hoping to make a killing. When speculation exacerbated the price crisis of 2008, Joachim von Braun of the University of Bonn, Germany, then head of IFPRI, predicted that it would continue causing problems. “We saw that one coming and it came,” he says. “Food markets have new design flaws, with their inter-linkages to financial markets.”
Volatility also makes it harder to solve the long-term, underlying problem –inadequate food production – by making farmers and banks reluctant to invest in improved agricultural technology as they are unsure of what returns they will get. “Investment in more production alone will not solve the problem,” says von Braun. As long as extreme speculation causes constant price bubbles and crashes, either farmers will not get good enough returns to continue investing in production, or consumers will not be able to afford the food.
“Without action to curb excessive speculation, we will see further increases in these volatilities,” he says.
h/t to Resilience Science
This is very interesting, but what I found intriguing about this article was the researchers’ suggestion for how to address this uncertainty – transparency and information about supplies via remote sensing:
All the major producers already use remote sensing technology to watch each other’s fields. If countries would reveal just once what stocks they hold, says Torero, the satellite images can be used to calculate whether those stocks have risen or fallen, as growing conditions change. “All we need to know is the baseline,” he says. Reliable information about stocks could offset unwarranted jitters about crop failures, such as the ones that are contributing to the current market volatility.
Von Braun goes farther: he says there should be a global technical organisation that keeps track of world grain stocks and production, and which decides, using complex computerised models of world food markets, what range of grain prices are actually warranted by real supply and demand. Then if speculation starts to drive prices up out of this band, countries could intervene on markets, buying and selling just enough to counter speculative pressure. “This doesn’t stop speculation, just extreme speculation,” he says.
He thinks it would take a fund of $20-$30 billion to do the trick. In September the World Bank extended a $2 billion fund to respond to food price crises, but that is aimed at helping the poorest survive price spikes rather than intervening to stop them happening.
You may or not like the idea of a global organization or fund, but the idea of actually monitoring the supplies of the commodities to examine if pricing reflects actual market dynamics (supply/demand controlled for expected future conditions) is fantastic and already possible. The only people who would lose here are those whose only skill set is in exploiting the uncertainty and lack of information in the market for their own profit – especially those willing to exacerbate uncertainty and opacity to generate larger profits.
Shouldn't accounting rules apply to everyone?
Hoorah! The World Bank is officially recognizing that environmental impacts are an example of a colossal market failure, and moving aggressively to get the cost of these impacts built into country’s national accounts. To quote World Bank President Robert Zoellick:
“We know that human well-being depends on ecosystems and biodiversity,” said Mr Zoellick.
“We also know they’re degrading at an alarming rate.
“One of the causes is our failure to properly value ecosystems and all they do for us – and the solution therefore lies in taking full account of our ecosystem services when countries make policies.”
Well, super. We’ll see how this goes over when a bunch of countries see the accounts they use for planning head into the toilet – my guess is massive pushback from countries that can (China, India, pretty much the entire Global North), which means the only countries that will be forced to deal with this revaluation are those in the Global South too small to resist World Bank pressure. Enforcing this change in accounting unevenly will be remarkably unfair, if this is how it plays out. Think I’m a bit alarmist? Continue reading the article, right down at the end:
The draft agreement ministers are considering in the main negotiations here calls for “the values of biodiversity” to be integrated into countries’ development and poverty reduction strategies.
But delegates are still arguing over whether to call for integration into national accounts.
Only developing countries have to create poverty reduction strategies and development strategies. So if these values are used in these strategies, but not in national accounts more widely, we are going to be hitting the poorest countries pretty hard while doing nothing ourselves.
However, there is a larger problem here – the valuing of everything via markets. While this is an interesting effort, neither the science nor the economics are very well worked out, so the value of many ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) is hard to calculate. So, will we end up only dealing with this in ecosystems where the economics and science is further along (forests, for example – and temperate forests, at that)? Or will we risk arbitrary valuations that lead to their own kinds of market failures? The first option runs into the uneven enforcement problem I raised above – not every country has well-understood forests, so only some countries would have to deal with this revaluation. The second is not an improvement on the current situation – indeed, it would give us the false impression we know what we are doing, when we do not.
Watch this space . . .
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.