The issue of land use change is a complex, with many factors being important historically, such as

• population growth (more land required for more people)
• technology (e.g., automobiles made suburban expansion feasible)
• economics (cheaper land and rents in suburbs compared to cities)
• policy (things like 30-yr mortgages, mortgage insurance, and FHA loans had a large impact on urban sprawl because they often made it cheaper to own rather than rent)
• cultural values (the romanticized notion of a detached home in a safe, pollution-free neighborhood with good schools)

In this week’s PLoS One, Robert McDonald and colleagues¹ examined land use change for 274 metro areas (figure 1) in the U.S. to determine tends across cities.

Their results were interesting (excerpts):

• 1.4 million ha of open space was lost, and the amount lost in a given city was correlated with population growth.
• American cities vary by more than an order of magnitude in their MSA-wide per capita land consumption. Generally large cities have small per capita land consumption, with the five smallest in 2000 being New York (459 m²/person), Miami (476 m²/person), Philadelphia (519 m²/person), Los Angeles (535 m²/person), and Washington, DC (536 m²/person). Conversely, many small cities have large per capita land consumption, with the five biggest in 2000 being Grand Forks, ND (5394 m²/person), Bismark, ND (3913 m²/person), Flagstaff, AZ (3381 m²/person), Enid, OK (3249 m²/person), and Cheyenne, WY (3073 m²/person).
• The per capita land consumption (m²/person) of most cities decreased on average over the decade from 1,564 to 1,454 m ²/person, but there was substantial regional variation and some cities even increased.
• Cities with greater conservation funding or more reform-minded zoning tended to decrease in per capita land consumption (scroll to table 1) more than other cities.
• The inequality of land consumption varied geographically, with less inequality on the East Coast compared to the West Coast (scroll to figure 4).

They provide a simplified snapshot of how development changes with history and geography (for a more-thorough yet readable treatment of land use in the U.S., check out Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson):

The process of development plays out differently in cities with different socioeconomic histories. Moreover, cultural differences exist among and within many U.S. cities, leading to varying spatial patterns of development. However, a general historical pattern exists. In many U.S. cities, an urban core existed in the decades or centuries prior to the widespread use of the automobile, and these neighborhoods have high population density and small amounts of developed area per capita. The surrounding suburban and exurban areas, created predominately after WWII, contain residents living at lower population density and consume more land per capita. There are substantial economic links between these two zones, and in contemporary U.S. cities commuting occurs in both directions. Northeast U.S. cities that developed before the automobile typically follow this narrative. Many have a relatively dense urban core, but have adopted zoning policies that ensure contemporary suburban settlements occur at lower density. While they remain dense compared to other U.S. cities, they are getting less dense over time, as proportionally more of the population is in suburban areas. The declining manufacturing cities of the Rust Belt and the Southern Appalachians are an extreme example of this spreading out of population.

Southeastern U.S. cities, excluding Florida, are often newer and have less of a legacy of a dense urban core. They do not appear to be getting markedly denser, and the relatively fast population growth of these cities implies that their total impact on natural habitat in coming decades will be large. In contrast to the Southeast, Western cities appear to be getting denser, including those that do not have a historical legacy of a dense urban core such as Phoenix. These Western cities are often still growing quickly and consuming a great deal of land, but contemporary development is making these cities denser than they were previously. Many of these Western cities have a strong conservation culture, and the degree of conservation funding and reform-minded zoning correlates with how much denser they are getting. However, it should be noted that contemporary development in Western cities is still well below the densities found in the dense urban core of Northeastern U.S. cities, posing problems for designing effective public transit systems.

¹McDonald, R., Forman, R., & Kareiva, P. (2010). Open Space Loss and Land Inequality in United States’ Cities, 1990–2000 PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009509

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…in an op-ed piece in today’s NY Times.

Excerpts (links his):

[T]he scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

….The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

….Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically….Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach.

Updates: There is a wide range of opinion on the IPCC these days:

• Union of Concerned Scientists weighs in on climate warming and the criticism of the IPCC.
• Roger Pielke, Jr. has been writing a lot about the IPCC recently (here, here, here)
• Joe Romm at Climate Progress

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The Guardian is running a story by Juliette Jowit suggesting that the total cost of externalities for the 3,000 largest companies in the world could be as much as $US 2.2 trillion in 2008.  As the story points out, that’s a lot:

• more than the economies of all but 7 nations
• about one third the value of the profits of these companies

Excerpts (links by Jowit):

Later this year, another huge UN study – dubbed the “Stern for nature” after the influential report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern – will attempt to put a price on such global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage.

“What we’re talking about is a completely new paradigm,” said Richard Mattison, Trucost’s chief operating officer and leader of the report team. “Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them.”

“It’s going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies’ profit margins,” Mattison told the Guardian. “Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle. We should be seeking ways to fix the system, rather than waiting for the economy to adapt. Continued inefficient use of natural resources will cause significant impacts on [national economies] overall, and a massive problem for governments to fix.”

Another major concern is the risk that companies simply run out of resources they need to operate, said Andrea Moffat, of the US-based investor lobby group Ceres, whose members include more than 80 funds with assets worth more than US$8tn. An example was the estimated loss of 20,000 jobs and $1bn last year for agricultural companies because of water shortages in California, said Moffat.

• Use political tools to set emissions targets (e.g., 80% reduction by 2050);
• Invest heavily in green technology to drive green energy prices lower.  Only then will these technologies take hold. Carbon reductions are an important byproduct but not the main goal.

Of course these are not mutually exclusive, but they might as well be given the way they have played out on the political stage.

With a lot of people down on political solutions to deal with climate change, strong advocates of the latter approach may now gain the upper hand.  Folks like Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been arguing that green energy needs to be produced as quickly and cheaply as possible—forget all of the games with cap and trade or carbon taxes.   Tom Friedman has also argued the need for swift action on energy, while also endorsing political solutions like carbon taxes.

If you look for areas that are gaining or have the potential to gain traction, there seem to be two levers that may work:

• the link between fossil fuel dependency, climate change, economic stability, and national security;
• the fact that China is eating our lunch with respect to clean energy development.

Both of these general concerns have attracted Republican support for green energy and climate change mitigation, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

This may be a signal of potential game changers and the clearest path forward that we’ve seen in awhile.

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Happy New Year, everyone.  Sorry for the lag in posts, but there wasn’t a lot happening in the news or journals over the past week.

A few years ago, I saw a talk by Thomas Schelling (Nobel laureate in economics) who argued that we need to accelerate the economic development of poor countries so that they are able to cope with climate change.  This analysis is interesting, if not fraught with additional challenges, such as development in a carbon-based energy world hastening the very problem to which these nations are attempting to adapt.

In an article¹ in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), Anthony Patt and colleagues argued that the need for assistance by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is dependent on vulnerability, which, in turn, depends on both exposure to climate change and how socioeconomic factors affect the sensitivity of LDCs to climate change.

To assess this hypothesis, they first examined how deaths caused by disasters (floods, droughts, and storms) varied across the level of development in several LDCs.  They used the UN Human Development Index—HDI, a composite metric of income, education, and life expectancy—as a proxy for development.

Here’s what they found…

As you might expect, they found that deaths declined with increased HDI, but interestingly, the relationship had a peak in the middle, suggesting that as the least-developed countries become more developed, they may actually exacerbate vulnerability to climate change at mid levels of HDI before eventually reducing vulnerability at high levels of HDI.

Next, they focused on Mozambique as a case study.  Using the model of deaths vs. HDI they developed for other countries, they projected how Mozambique’s HDI might change over the next 50 years.  To do this, they linked the HDI to different development scenarios outlined by the IPCC’s Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES):

The A2 storyline describes high population and economic growth but low globalization, whereas the B1 storyline describes greater globalization
tied to improvements in environmental quality and sustainability, as well as lower population growth.

Under both scenarios, carbon increases in the atmosphere, but at different rates and to different degrees.  The authors assumed a linear increase in storms/disasters with rising temperatures, indicating that greater warming in the A2 scenario will lead to more disasters and more potential death than the B1 scenario where warming is not as great.

Following the B1 scenario caused the HDI to rise more quickly than the A1 scenario.  Simply put, society on a more-sustainable path (B1) leads to higher social welfare than under a more fossil-fuel intensive path with higher levels of human population (A2).

Similar to what they found by examining many countries, Mozambique will become more vulnerable to increased deaths as HDI rises over coming decades (by 2030-2040).  However, after 2050, vulnerability declined significantly in the B1 scenario, less so in the A2 scenario.

A few excerpts of their conclusions:

The results suggest that vulnerability may rise faster in the next two decades than in the three decades thereafter. Importantly, the overall need for adaptation measures will continue to rise… However,
assuming that their development paths fall somewhere close to the range bounded by the A2 and B1 scenarios, by the second quarter of the century LDCs will likely engage in a greater share of this adaptation autonomously, thereby reducing both their losses, and their need for financial assistance. This is especially the case if socio-economic conditions change in a manner close to that described in the B1 scenario.

….Looking beyond 2060 and the crossing of temperature thresholds such as 2 °C, it may well be that steadily rising climate impacts—such as sea level rise or the effects of cumulative changes on ecosystems—create problems that go well beyond the ability of any country, rich or poor, to adapt. Until that point, a primary argument for ramping up assistance slowly—namely, that adaptation needs can only increase as climate change continues—is incomplete, because it ignores the role that socio-economic development and the concurrent changes in adaptive capacity will have to play. Although there are important caveats to our results, they provide a first estimate of how vulnerability will unfold over the next 50 years, if one assumes, as do all of the SRES scenarios, that
incomes will continue to rise. They suggest that the urgency of efforts to reduce vulnerability, including the provision of international financial assistance, is high.

One thing the authors acknowledge is that nobody really has a good explanation for the humped relationship of HDI vs. deaths from disasters.  That’s an important part of their results, which suggests that the very poorest nations may experience more suffering in the initial steps of development.  Understanding this would make a great PhD in development economics.

¹Patt, A. et al. (in press) Estimating least-developed countries’ vulnerability to climate-related extreme events over the next 50 years. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Food for thought—today’s latest on what happened at Copenhagen, what it might mean, and where we go from here:

1. SLATE:  The Party’s Over Why Copenhagen was the climate conference to end all climate conferences.

2. NY TIMES:

• Copenhagen, and Beyond
• Off to the Races

3. TREEHUGGER:

• The Copenhagen Accord: A Beginning
• What’s Missing in the Copenhagen Accord?
• Why is Everyone so Pissed at Obama?

4. GRIST:

• Copenhagen: a look back at the most striking narratives
• All over the map: Rounding up editorial reax to Copenhagen
• Letter to Bill McKibben: don’t blame Obama for Copenhagen
• A preliminary assessment of the Copenhagen Accord
• What’s missing in the Copenhagen accord?

5. WSJ: Climate Chaos: Is There a Silver Lining to the Copenhagen Fiasco?

6. PIELKE, JR: Post-Copenhagen: More questions than answers

7. BREAKTHROUGH INSTITUTE: BBC World Service: Who is to Blame at Copenhagen?

8. MONBIOT (GUARDIAN): If you want to know who’s to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate

9. NISBET: Schwarzenegger Says It’s Time to Regionalize the Climate Change Debate

10. MCKIBBEN:

• Copenhagen: Things Fall Apart
• An unwelcome lesson in power politics

11. ROMM (CLIMATE PROGRESS)

• post 1
• post 2

12. MOTHER JONES: Obama’s Copenhagen Deal

13. THE VINE (NEW REPUBLIC):

• Was Copenhagen A Disaster Or Decent First Step?
• Did Obama Really Sidestep The U.N. At Copenhagen?

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In the Online First edition of Climatic Change, Tyler Tarnoczi and Fikret Berkes assess^1,2 the sources and availability of information about climate adaptation to farmers in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

Farmers rely on several information sources for agricultural practices, which will likely be vital in helping food producers learn how to adapt to climate warming:

• social networks/experiential learning
• government
• industry (e.g., seed, machinery)
• producer and conservation organizations
• media

Here’s what they found…

Actions taken to reduce vulnerability to climate change are ultimately determined by the perception of impacts and the cost of the adaptation response, but there has to be information available on possible adaptation responses. Of the five general sources of information described above, there is not one single dominant information source used by Prairie farmers to learn about climate change adaptation. While the most common source of information was social sources and personal experience, industry played a large role; by contrast, government information, direction and coordination for climate change adaptation was lacking.

There is potential for producer organizations to play a role as knowledge brokers, or bridging organizations, facilitating open dialogue between producers at the farm-level and policymakers at the government-level. With appropriate capacity building, these organizations could help facilitate bottom-up flow of producer-level
information, enable self-organization among producers, and provide platforms for information exchange.

Barriers to adaptation are many. Long-term benefits of climate change adaptation may be hidden when producers are faced with significant short-term costs or financial crises. National-level adaptation options are difficult to prioritize even in countries with high levels of economic and technical capacity. Information and capacity are not the only factors; “what is known, understood and disseminated as information” and issues of power and control of knowledge are also important. Sources of information most likely to be useful for farmers are farm organizations, with accountability to farmers, and…not those that have their own profit motives. Programs that involve observable trials, two-way dialogue, and implementation at the producer level would allow for the co-production of knowledge that can lead to learning and adapting to a changing climate.

The authors convey the importance of bottom-up networking and organization among farmers rather than simply relying on top-down approaches—like government support, which they argue has diminished in recent years because of the decline of agricultural extension offices.   This may be bad, however, because large-scale efforts by government may be needed in terms of basic research and sheer scaling power (although see below).   Adaptation is going to require a cohesive integration of top-down and bottom up approaches.

It’s also worth pointing out that the diversity of these information sources means that farmers could get mixed messages in terms of what’s best for adaptation–messages subject to the influences of money and power.  For instance, seed companies may advocate genetically modified crops less susceptible to drought while, at the same time, the government is subsidizing increased irrigation and advocating its use through the extension services.  Conservation organizations might suggest shifts to more sustainable forms of agriculture or to crop types more suitable to new climatic conditions.

These potential differences aren’t necessarily bad in terms of assembling and considering all possible types of responses.  But power and influence could alter the process in ways that constrain future options.  In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry described how agricultural extension offices were a power multiplier in that they advocated many of the technological innovations that played a large role in causing the industrialization of American farms, concentrating wealth and power into the hands of a few, and leading to attendant degradation of cultural and ecological systems.  What institutions advocate in terms of adaptation practices should therefore also be scrutinized in terms of their contribution to long-term sustainability.

¹Tarnoczi, T.J. and F. Berkes (in press) Sources of information for farmers’ adaptation practices in Canada’s Prairie agro-ecosystem. Climatic Change

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.

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Human actions are having large and accelerating effects on the climate, environment and ecosystems of the Earth, thereby degrading many ecosystem services. This unsustainable trajectory demands a dramatic change in human relationships with the environment and life-support system of the planet. Here, we address recent developments in thinking about the sustainable use of ecosystems and resources by society in the context of rapid and frequently abrupt change.

To deal with these challenges, they advocate “ecosystem stewardship,” which has three core principles.  Here are excerpts of these principles (slightly condensed/adapted by me); please check out the paper for details:

(Principle 1) Reduce vulnerability to known stresses

(A) Reduce exposure to hazards and stresses
• Minimize known stresses and avoid or minimize novel hazards and stresses
• Develop new institutions that minimize global-scale stresses
• Manage in the context of projected changes rather than in the historical range of variability

(B) Reduce social–ecological sensitivities and adapt to adverse impacts
• Sustain the capacity of ecosystems to provide multiple ecosystem services
• Sustain and enhance crucial components of well-being, particularly of vulnerable segments of society
• Plan sustainable development to address the tradeoffs among costs and benefits for ecosystems, multiple segments of today’s society and future generations

(Principle 2) Develop stewardship strategies to prepare for, and shape, uncertain change

(A) Maintain a diversity of options
• Subsidize innovations that foster socio-economic novelty and diversity
• Renew the functional diversity of degraded systems
• Prioritize conservation of biodiversity hotspots and pathways that enable species to adjust to rapid environmental change
• Sustain a diversity of cultures, languages and knowledge systems that provide multiple approaches to meeting societal goals.

(B) Enhance social learning to facilitate adaptation
• Broaden the problem definition and knowledge co-production by engaging multiple disciplinary perspectives and knowledge systems
• Use scenarios and simulations to explore consequences of alternative policy options
• Develop transparent information systems and mapping tools that contribute to developing trust among decision-makers and stakeholders, and build support for action
• Test understanding through comparative analysis, experimentation and adaptive management
• Exercise extreme caution in experiments that perturb a system larger than the jurisdiction of management

(C) Adapt governance to implement potential solutions
• Provide an environment for leadership and respect to develop
• Foster social networking that builds trust and bridges communication and accountability among existing organizations
• Enable sufficient overlap in responsibility among organizations to allow redundancy in policy implementation

(Principle 3) Transform from traps to potentially more favorable trajectories

(A) Preparing for transformation
• Engage stakeholders to identify dysfunctional states and raise awareness of problems
• Identify thresholds, plausible alternative states, pathways and triggers
• Identify the barriers to change, potential change agents and strategies to overcome barriers

(B) Navigating the transition
• Identify potential crises and use them as opportunities to initiate change
• Maintain flexible strategies and transparency
• Foster institutions that facilitate cross-scale and cross-organizational interactions and stakeholder participation

(C) Building resilience of the new regime
• Create incentives and foster values for stewardship in the new context
• Initiate and mobilize social networks of key individuals for problem solving
• Foster interactions and support of decision makers at other levels

Bottom line:  This paper provides a useful framework for the continuing conversation on sustainability.  Some of the ideas are not new, but it’s a good synthesis, and it makes progress towards the difficult task of integrating natural and social systems. I would like to see a comprehensive list of examples compiled for all of these strategies as a clearinghouse for ideas, including ideas that do (did) not work.

We are going to see a lot more on these ideas over the next decade:

• interdependence of natural and social systems
• reducing vulnerabilities (a key component of adaptation)
• fostering innovation in all sectors of society
• maintain diversity in ecological and social systems as a form of resilience (another key component of adaptation)
• being proactive to shape the trajectory of change

¹Chapin F.S. et al (in press) Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet. Trends in Ecology and Evolution

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.

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Home weatherization and efficiency upgrades can make a big difference in U.S. carbon emissions.  As we saw in a previous post, American households (including personal transportation) are responsible for

• 38% of the overall US carbon emissions
• 8% of global emissions
• more emissions of any single country except China

Unfortunately, there’s a big disconnect between things we can do to to save home energy and the ability for folks to pay for these improvements. New insulation, solar hot water, solar photovoltaics, high-efficiency furnaces: Take your pick….Each can cost $10k or more.

Fortunately, there are a lot of creative ideas coming to the rescue to help people defray these up-front costs:

• Municipalities can issue bonds that homeowners can borrow from to pay the up-front costs of improvements.  The costs of these improvements are then payed back over an extended periods of time through raised property taxes.  Homeowners effectively get a zero-interest loan from their cities.
• Banks can issue higher mortgages that include up-front costs for major energy efficiency improvements.  These added costs are then spread out over the life of the mortgage, resulting in manageable monthly payments for homeowners.
• Or, the federal government can simply reimburse people for part of the costs of improvements.  The so-called “Cash for Caulkers” program reported today by CNN is an example.

These kinds of programs make a lot of sense and have the potential to be game changers, along with helping Americans transition to electric vehicles as soon as possible.

Related post:  Behavioral changes at home can have big impacts on U.S. emissions

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In his blog, Paul Krugman responded with an article, Unhelpful Hansen, in which he takes readers through a basic primer of C taxes and cap and trade, arguing that they are basically the same and that Hansen is wrong for trashing what may end up being the best available approach.

Most of this is the kind of policy play-by-play that dominates daily blog traffic.  However, one of Krugman’s paragraphs caught my eye:

Things like this often happen when economists deal with physical scientists; the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights. Most of the time not much harm is done. But this time is different.

Although this may not be an entirely fair criticism of Hansen (I have no idea what his formal training in economics is), it is interesting to see the implied call for better transdisciplinary understanding.   Social scientists have a responsibility to call out natural scientists for being naive when they wade around in social issues (and vice versa).  Although most of us are trained as disciplinarians, this is why it’s good to stretch ourselves and really understand perspectives and theory from fields with which we are not traditionally affiliated—as any good Environmental Studies program should do.  Most of the time it makes us better teachers and scholars.  And more humble about what we know and don’t know.

Specialization and expertise have their limitations, and, as Krugman points out, in some cases, they can be downright counterproductive.