Right up there with climate change, biodiversity conservation is one of the most challenging issues at the intersection of nature and culture.  Part of this challenge arises because of genuine differences in how people value other species.

In an interesting forthcoming article in Conservation Biology, Chris Sandbrook and colleagues at Cambridge University argue that these value differences not only show up in society at large, but among conservation professionals, who—like climate scientists—are drawn to the possibility of developing scientific consensuses to inform policy debates:

Conservation biology has been called a crisis science and a mission-driven discipline. Both the mission, and its urgency, seem clear, and there has been a substantial increase in activities intended to address the rapid decline in the variety of life on Earth at all levels of biological organization (structure, composition, and function). Nevertheless, there are tensions within the field about the values that underpin the conservation mission, particularly concerning the nature and singularity of these values and the role of values when conservation professionals try to inform or influence policy.

Recently, the values held by conservation professionals themselves have been debated. Conservation professionals often refer to both instrumental values (the usefulness of nature for humans) and noninstrumental or intrinsic values, and there may be an element of opportunism when they do so. Thus, although some may privately base the positions they hold on intrinsic values, they may espouse use-value arguments in public, adapting arguments to the interests of their audience. Some call for conservation scientists to return to a conservation ethic derived from intrinsic values

…[Others] propose a more pragmatic engagement with material values of nature in their focus on what they see as the “hard socioeconomic realities in real-world conservation problems.” The environmental philosophy of pragmatism, with its acceptance of both intrinsic and instrumental values of nature, is the hallmark of adaptive management

To study values held by conservationists, the research team posed a set of values to scientists and asked them to rank the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the statements (Q methodology).  The responses were then run through a set of statistics (factor analysis) to distill the huge pile of value-by-person data into four overarching factors that summarized the main values held.

Their results suggest that consensus building may not only be difficult, it may be counterproductive…

Excerpts edited by me:

Factor 1…reflected the view that the value of biodiversity does not depend on its current usefulness to humans, potential future values to humans, or its importance to human survival.

• In terms of strategies and actions for conservation, the factor focused on global issues, such as changing human population growth rate and to a lesser extent changing the consumption levels of the wealthy.
• At the local level the factor did not express that conservation has a role in addressing poverty alleviation and considered it important to understand how people and nature interact in particular places, which suggests respondents considered that livelihoods of the poor as well as the rich are linked to biodiversity conservation.
• Because the focus of this factor was human population size and resource consumption, respondents appeared to be influenced by the concept of carrying capacity.

Factor 2…reflected a preservationist viewpoint, that conservation should prevent the human caused extinction of species.

• Nevertheless, the views in this factor emphasized social issues in the practice of conservation, particularly understanding how people and nature interact in places and to a lesser extent ensuring that conservation does no harm to human communities and does not displace long-term residents.
• This emphasis and the fact that science driven approaches to priority setting were rejected, suggests that this factor represents the viewpoint that conservation is mainly a political rather than a scientific endeavor.
• In terms of practical strategies, those that adhered to this factor do not believe conservation should focus on protected areas, involve strict law enforcement, or keep areas free from human influence.
• Rather, adherents to this factor strongly supported changes in consumption by the rich, which are actions far removed from the local level of protected areas. At the same time, the factor does not suggest the sole purpose of conservation is human survival.
• The factor also reflects a deep engagement in pragmatic and economic approaches to conservation action. Thus, the viewpoint expressed by this factor was that conservation planning must be local, can involve trade-based
  strategies, and can use incentives.
• This factor also showed there was an interest in holistic solutions, that conservation should not be confined to key priorities or areas and conservation actions should not be focused only where they are most cost-effective.

Factor 3…reflected a viewpoint that emphasized the diverse values of biodiversity, particularly the right of all species to exist and the role of species
in sustaining ecosystem functions

• The notions that trade in wild species can be a tool for conservation and that conservation action should prioritize cost-effectiveness were strongly rejected.
• Instead, priority was given to conservation of species and ecosystems, and the belief was that they should be conserved through implementation of protected areas. Little attention was given to the context and complexities of the practice of conservation, and there was a sense of disconnection between people and their environment at a variety of spatial scales, as evidenced by the focus on protected areas, little emphasis (relative to the other discourses) on understanding how people and nature interact, and rejection of any connection between conservation and consumption by the rich.
• Overall, this factor emphasized reasons biodiversity should be conserved, but gave little attention to mechanisms for achieving this goal.

Factor 4… reflected a view that biodiversity is useful to people, rejecting notions that biological diversity should be conserved for its beauty and that
all species have a right to exist.

• It emphasized the importance of connections between people and the environment, arguing that conservation success requires substantial changes in both human population growth and consumption by the rich.
• Conservation planning was seen to require detailed place-specific knowledge of human–environment interactions and not less-grounded patterns generated through tools such as GIS.
• The position expressed in this factor on economic tools was cautious: incentives are needed and cost-effectiveness is important, but trade in wild species and products was not considered a useful tool for biodiversity conservation.

There are several things I like about this article:

First is the notion that conservation is as political as it scientific— informed by the social sciences (policy, economics, sociology, psychology) and humanities (ethics, history) and ultimately debated by our local, national, and global societies.  It is not the role of science to drive contested, normative debates, although it’s great at providing information to inform these debates.

Second, now you see part of the reason why issues like conservation can be so contentious. There are myriad ways that people value biodiversity and it’s often difficult to reconcile these opposing philosophical positions.

Third, as I have written about previously on the blog, this is a good example of why nature needs to be situated in the context of culture and vice versa in order for challenging environmental problems to be studied effectively, as the authors allude to here (emphasis added):

[O]ur results provide an empirical challenge to the portrayal of conservation as a monolithic activity, driven by a convergent set of Western values, implicitly denying the possibility of differences in viewpoints about conservation at many spatial and temporal scales. The monolithic conception of conservation is based on an assumption that conservation professionals share a core set of values and goals, regardless of the social and economic contexts in which they are embedded and the experiences that have shaped their conservation interests. In reality, most conservation professionals draw on a range of values, from the intrinsic values of species to the use values of nature to humans. We consider it likely that such diverse views exist across a wide range of individuals and organizations involved in conservation.

…We believe conservation science and practice should not try to create a consensus under which conservation professionals can unite and instead acknowledge the diversity of opinions in the field. By acknowledging different
viewpoints, we believe conservation actors can build more honest and ultimately effective relationships with each other and the wider public.

SANDBROOK, C., SCALES, I., VIRA, B., & ADAMS, W. (2010). Value Plurality among Conservation Professionals Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01592.x

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Photo credit: wildxplorer

In the same issue of Population and Environment as the previous post, another article, by Chenyang Xiao and Dayong Hong— Gender differences in environmental behaviors in China—shows some interesting cultural differences compared to the study of the American public:

China represents the third largest economy and the highest level of
national carbon dioxide emissions when compared to other nations across the globe.
Yet, little social science research has focused on the environmentally oriented
behaviors of Chinese nationals, key to understanding levels of environmental
impact. This study examines, in China, gender differences in environmentally
oriented behaviors, environmental knowledge, and general environmental concern.
Making use of path analyses, we identify a pattern of gender differences similar to
common findings in the West: women demonstrated greater participation in environmental behaviors inside of the home (e.g., recycling), while outside of the home (e.g., environmental organization donations) no gendered patterns were exhibited.  However, Chinese women expressed lower levels of concern than men—a finding opposite of most Western studies. Also distinct from other settings, in China, higher levels of knowledge regarding environmental issues did, indeed, translate into proenvironmental behaviors—thereby not exhibiting the knowledge-behavior gap
demonstrated elsewhere.

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Photo credit: tfpang

Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days.   There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.

I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on.  Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:

• Doctors Without Borders USA
• AmeriCares
• An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.

When hurricane Jeanne swept across the Caribbean, flooding rains killed over 3,000 people in the small nation of Haiti. Only 18 people died in the Dominican Republic on the same island.  Haiti has one of the highest population densities in the Caribbean. Its 8.7 million inhabitants live on less than half the land occupied by 9.4 million Dominicans, so population density is roughly two times greater.  Puerto Rico’s population density is as high as Haiti’s, but only seven people died in the storm.

Why, if Haiti’s population size is similar to the Dominican Republic’s and population density is the same as Puerto Rico’s, did Haiti suffer such a devastating loss of life?  Some argue that the loss of forests, with their capacity to prevent soil erosion, was a main reason why so many people were killed: heavy rains let loose massive mudslides on deforested hillsides.¹

Deforestation of Haiti’s landscape for agriculture and the manufacture of charcoal have left only 3% of the land surface forested.² Charcoal, produced by cutting trees and slow burning them in mud pits, meets about 85% of energy needs as cooking fuel.³ We see a ravaged countryside today and are tempted to blame this on Haiti’s high population density.  What is not as apparent, however, is how environmental degradation stems from a legacy of colonial resource extraction, slavery, corrupt governments, foreign intervention, and choices about energy, agriculture, and industry.

The mudslides and mortality did not occur in surrounding countries, which have less poverty and deforestation.  In fact, forest area is actually increasing in countries like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic where economic growth is rapid. Puerto Rico’s forest cover, for example, has risen from less than 10% to more than 40% in the last 60 years.¹ These forests are recovering on abandoned farmland with the transition from agriculture to industry.

It is therefore too simplistic to blame Haiti’s high population density and consumption of forest resources for the current state of the environment.  Human population growth drives environmental change but is seldom the sole factor behind environmental problems.  Instead, we need to figure out how population changes go hand-in-hand with social, economic, and technological changes so that we can explain environmental impacts.  Understanding and solving environmental challenges often requires simultaneous attention to demographic, economic, political, technological, and cultural values.

Haiti’s indigenous inhabitants practiced subsistence-based agriculture of corn, yams and cassava until their Columbus-era enslavement and genocide. Later, French colonists planted sugar cane in the well-suited warm, wet climate, and developed large, labor-intensive plantations. Throughout the 1700s, France imported thousands of African slaves to Haiti each year such that there were half a million working in 1789. During the colonial period, Haiti’s population was seven times larger than the Dominican Republic’s, which carried forward in time. Haiti exported tens of thousands of tons of sugar and most of the lumber from its forests back to France. The heavy exploitation of land for timber and sugar took a toll on the environment because of widespread land clearing, but it made Haiti one of the most profitable colonies in the Caribbean.

After Haitian independence in the early 19^th century, the nascent government was unable to support its own people in developing cash crops for export. To re-establish trade and diplomatic relations with France, Haiti’s government was forced to pay reparations for land and slaves lost during the revolution.  As much as 80% of Haiti’s budget went to pay these reparations, driving Haiti into significant debt from which it has not yet fully recovered.⁴

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with the lowest combination of lifespan, education, and standard of living of any country outside Africa.⁵ Demographic, social, and economic changes happening elsewhere in the Caribbean are not happening as rapidly in Haiti. The abject poverty in which 80% of the population exists deteriorates the country’s environmental and political conditions and constrains economic development.  People are forced to choose between life in urban slums and life as poor, small-scale, subsistence farmers.  More than a million Haitians have emigrated to the United States and elsewhere since 1950.

In recent decades, many Haitian farmers have abandoned agriculture in search of greater profits from supplying charcoal to large urban and rural populations. With the collapse of agricultural and industrial exports, an unemployment rate of 33%, and sliding deeper into poverty, Haitians are forced to destroy remaining forests for charcoal fuel production. Consumption of natural resources just to stay alive is contributing to degraded environmental conditions.

Fertility remains high in Haiti because of high rates of mortality. Maternal, infant, and child mortality rates are high:  Sixty-eight infants and 52 mothers die for every 1,000 live births each year, and the under-five child mortality rate is 123 children per 1,000.  Haiti also suffers from the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the Western Hemisphere (5.6% of the population). The leading causes of death are diarrhea, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS—diseases that are preventable or treatable in more developed countries.  However, 40% of Haitians have no access to health care.⁶ Haiti’s unstable governance, poverty, and environmental degradation exacerbate this need for large families as a social safety net.⁷ This is why simple approaches of reducing fertility, such as government support for contraception, have largely failed in Haiti.

Thus, Haiti’s changes in population and economic welfare, from its subsistence-based land use pattern, to an exploitative resource-extraction system, to a poor society where wealth, industry, and commercial agriculture have pulled out of the country, are not characteristic of the economic pattern—in which increasing economic development begets increased welfare—experienced by much of the developed world over past centuries.

Haiti is battling not only mudslides and earthquakes, but a colonial legacy that has predisposed its people to one devastating crisis after another.

References and Further Reading:

¹Aide, T.M. and H.R. Grau (2004) Globalization, migration, and Latin American ecosystems. Science 305:1915-1916.

²Kaiser, J. (2004) Wounding Earth’s fragile skin. Science 304:1616-1618.

³Collie, T. (2003) We know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is what keeps us alive. South Florida Sun-Sentinel

⁴Hallward, P. (2004) Option Zero in Haiti. New Left Review 27:23-47

⁵Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse; How Societies Choose to fail or Succeed. Penguin.

⁶Farmer, P. (2004) Political violence and public health in Haiti. New England Journal of Medicine 350:1483-1486.

⁷de Sherbinin, A. (1996)  Human Security and Fertility: The Case of Haiti. Journal of Environment and Development 5(1):28-45.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/kretyen/ / CC BY 2.0

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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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.

Robert Smith and colleagues argue¹ that it’s time to reorganize the approach to conservation in developing nations.

They are critical of academics and NGOs for missing what they think really matters—effective, on-the-ground research and policy development with strong local participation and buy in.

Part of this stems from the focus of academics.  They cite as an example the work of Norman Myers and Conservation International, who published a now-famous map of biodiversity hotspots.

The map was marketed as a tool for identifying where conservation investment would have the biggest impact, but this involved playing down both how little was actually known about species distributions and that accurate global data sets on the costs of implementation were not available.

These limitations did not stop the map doing its main job, which was to raise funds and show broadly where Conservation International should target its efforts. In fact, the initiative has been extremely successful and helped to raise an estimated  US$750 million for conservation within hot spots. But the hype led many academics to treat priority area setting as simply a question of working out what lives where. This led to many studies that took no account of how plans are implemented.

And part of it stems from traditional structures of NGOs, which, in Smith’s words,

[facilitates] the need to create a sense of urgency among donors lead[ing] to short-term funding and ‘quick and dirty’ projects, which rarely gain local long-term support. Second, NGOs tend to advocate their institutional methodology, rather than allowing local agencies to develop approaches that best match their needs. Third, NGO researchers find it easier to produce articles on broad-scale issues for high-impact journals, which helps to build scientific support for new campaigns, than to write papers about research on local issues.

What’s the new approach they advocate?

Their recommended overhaul includes putting local agencies and citizens in charge of the conservation programs.  It’s an idea increasingly advocated by proponents of indigenous and community conserved areas.

Specifically, they recommend developing “social-learning institutions,” which unite local and international interests.  The role of NGOs and academics becomes a partnership or subordinate relationship to the local communities developing and implementing conservation plans.

What would these institutions do?  Smith sees several needs, emphasizing a strong role for social analysis:

• investigating what makes people support or block conservation projects
• the social and economic implications of different methods for prioritizing conservation areas
• the social, economic and biodiversity benefits of different management approaches
• the effectiveness of these conservation projects
• approaches for building support for conservation
• research on the geographical distribution of biodiversity and how this will change with climate change…but only if produced in a way that helps local decision-making.

They also see a new role for journals and global conservation organizations—cataloging and disseminating approaches used around the world, identifying ones that are successful (and the social-ecological context in which they are successful) as well as the ones that fail (with analysis of why they failed).  These would be immensely useful to local agencies working on the ground.

The conservation-science community should recognize those with the highest academic or media profile can no longer set the research agenda. Moreover, academics need to understand that if they work in isolation from local conservation agencies, those who might usefully apply their research will probably ignore it. If academics really want to change the conservation agenda or achieve results on the ground, they should join or set up social learning institutions as part of a planning process. This will take more time than simply firing off another paper, but it will also lead to more interesting, novel and important research.

¹Smith, R. et al. (2009) Let the locals lead. Nature 462: 280-281.

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Prerequisite posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 3: Personal perceptions, values, and behaviors.

People often disengage from environmental issues because of a sense of disenfranchisement:  “What kind of difference can I make?  Not much, so why bother?  We need big changes and soon.  The power to do this is controlled by politicians, who are influenced (financially and otherwise) by Big Business often intent on blocking change.”

In a series of provocative articles in Energy Policy¹, Gregory Unruh posed two questions to help us unravel forces at the root of this problem:

• If [renewable energy] technologies exist, are cost effective, and help minimize climate-forcing emissions, why aren’t they diffusing more rapidly?
• Furthermore, why aren’t government policies to promote them, about which there is substantial scientific and social consensus, more aggressive or effective?

The answer he suggests is carbon lock in.  What is it? How has it become major inertia to change by reinforcing power structures in society, business, and politics?

Automobile-based transportation is a great example of carbon lock in.  Let’s start at the level of an individual business firm and then scale up to the entire world:

a business –> technology –> society–social norms and institutions –> society–public institutions  –> globalized society

(1) An individual business (e.g., a car manufacturer)

When the automobile was being invented at the dawn of the 20th Century, there were three engine technology options:  electric, gasoline internal combustion, and steam.  A confluence of forces pushed gas engines over the top.  Horse troughs were closed to steam engine use in 1895. The discovery of the U.S.’s first major oil discovery in Texas (the Spindletop gusher in Beaumont, TX) provided light crude oil that could be refined into gasoline (earlier, heavy oils were mainly used as lubricants or refined into kerosene).² This flooded the market with cheap gasoline.  In addition, Henry Ford’s assembly line was gearing up with the gas engine, dramatically reducing vehicle prices and fueling mass appeal.  The rest is history.

So what happens once this new technology became the industry standard? Unruh (2000) suggests several outcomes:

• There is a massive industry shake out and consolidation. At one point in the late 1890′s there were more than 1900 firms making more than 3200 kinds of car.  Now we just know the Big 3.
• There is a shift from product creation to process innovation.
• “Core competencies” are put into place that define competitive advantage.
• Organizational silos of specialization appear, and rules of thumb become standard operating procedure.

Unruh (2000) goes on to identify several problems with this in terms of how it begins to lock us into a particular mode of production that’s hard to change:

• The focus of the business is on existing competencies, not on alternatives that could make their products obsolete.
• Focus is on constant, incremental improvement (how many times do we hear ads for “new and improved”?).
• The business reinvests profits, reinforcing the dominant design competencies.
• When projects are durable, this can lead to lasting or irreversible impacts.  This is why people oppose the new siting of coal-based power plants—they live for 50 or more years.
• All of this creates lock-in, and large firms rarely become sources of innovation.
• The incumbent industries only postpone their eventual obsolescence.

(2) A technology (e.g., transportation system)

In addition to the rise of the gasoline engine-based auto industry, a number of additional industries sprung up to accommodate the growing popularity of personal automobiles.  And with them came the service economy and standards for how things are designed, all of which create further lock in:

These interlinkages are a significant source of resistance to change.  An industry is unlikely to innovate unless it is sure that all of the necessary associated industries are willing and able to accommodate the change.

(3) Society–social norms and institutions

Eventually, social norms and institutions are structured around the emerging technology, helping to further reinforce lock in throughout our daily lives:

(4) Society–public institutions

Local and national governments respond to civil society and business.  They have the power to influence policy, including subsidies and pollution regulation, that can either change or reinforce the dominant business paradigm. They are also heavily influenced by lobbyists and corporate donations.

All of this creates the “iron triangle” among politicians, special interests, and bureaucracy.  The military-industrial complex is one example.  Agribusiness is another.  And the fossil-fuel based economy is another.  As Will Rogers once quipped, “We have the best Congress money can buy.”

Unruh calls this overall system of lock in the “Techno-institutional Complex (TIC).

(5) Globalized society

When nations like China and India begin developing, there are a number of political and economic influences that affect developmental trajectories:

As Unruh (2006) suggests, each developing nation is influenced by the TICs of developed nations.  Also, the World bank and International Monetary Fund impose financial restrictions (such as structural adjustments) and encourage traditional ways of developing.

There has been a longstanding discussion about the need for developing countries to leapfrog the developed world by installing, from the beginning, things like smart grids and renewable energy production.  However, as Unruh (2006) points out

• Energy technologies currently available for transfer are in the hands of transnational giants whose core competencies lie in the traditional fossil fuel industry.
• The rapid industrialization model often adopted by countries like China copies transportation and energy industries in the developed world.
• Leapfrogging technology transfer to the developing world at a large enough scale to have a significant impact will require a major financial investment from industrialized countries, which have yet to commit at this level.
• All of these things reinforce a global carbon lock in, even though we know that better technologies exist.

Bottom line:

• Engaging climate warming is not simply a matter of education (problem 1), finding better messaging (problem 2), or convincing people to change their behaviors or values (problem 3).  Even with all of that, change is incredibly difficult because it requires more than shifts in individual lifestyles—in some cases, we’re demanding that the entire TIC change.  There are few historical precedents for doing this.
• Part of this challenge arises because of the complexity and interdependency of our social-political-economic institutions.
• However, some of the challenge also comes from immense amounts of money and power that flow between deeply entrenched politicians and special interests.

Related posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 3: Personal perceptions, values, and behaviors.

¹Unruh References:

• Unruh, G. (2000) Understanding carbon lock-in. Energy Policy 28:817-830.
• Unruh, G. (2002) Escaping carbon lock-in. Energy Policy 30:317-325.
• Unruh, G. (2006) Globalizing carbon lock-in. Energy Policy 34:1185-1197.

²Little, A. (2009) Power Trip. Harper Collins

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vgm8383/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Prerequisite posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication

In earlier posts, we examined climate change engagement as problems of environmental literacy and communication.  There is no doubt we can do better with both of these.  But as we will see, proponents of environmental literacy and communication make a mistake if they believe engagement is simply a matter of getting more information to people.  Science, it is believed, will speak for itself.

Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.

A political scientist recently told me that before the age of 25, people use information to shape their value system and perceptions of the world.  After 25, they start cherry picking information that simply reinforces these beliefs (hence the world of cable news).

Although this is is a rough generalization, it suggests that a person’s values development may have a shelf life.  It also reveals why issues like climate change may not resonate with people cut from certain ideological cloths—no matter how much information they encounter.

The psychology, sociology, and ethics literature has a lot to say about this problem.  For simplicity, I want to pull out four challenges I think are among the most common and important with respect to climate change…

Challenge 1: Problems that are global in nature and distant in the future are not considered urgent

Matt Nisbet’s article¹ that we looked at last time contained another Pew poll that came out earlier this year, asking Americans which issue should be Obama’s top priority:

If you look at how priorities of Americans are changing over the past two years, some pretty obvious trends show up:

• It’s the economy—people are worried about their jobs.
• At the bottom of the table, the percentage of people who think protecting the environment is a top issue has fallen from 57% to 41%.
• Climate warming is dead last, falling from 38% to 30%.

These kinds of data are not new.  Quality of environment is generally a latent concern for most people.  But when asked to rank the importance of things like climate change against other issues that are personal (economy, health care) or are easily manipulated for political gain (terrorism, deficits), environmental concerns usually lose.

Update: The new Bureau of Labor Statistics data out today are grim:

Challenge 2: Cultural identity shapes perceptions and responses to environmental issues

Earlier this year, the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication published a report¹ called Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis (Maibach et al. 2009).

There were a number of important outcomes of this study that have wide-ranging implications for climate change, environmentalism, and environmental studies programs.

The first interesting point is that they identified six clusters of Americans falling along a spectrum from alarmed to dismissive about climate change:

There are three larger groups here:

• Those that get climate warming—the alarmed and concerned (54%)—make up a majority of Americans.
• The cautious and disengaged (31%) are on the sidelines, either not sure about climate change or not perceiving it to be a salient issue.
• The doubtful and dismissive (18%) are the climate warming skeptics and deniers.

So what do these groups mean in terms of engagement with and commitment to climate warming?

These statistics are eye-opening:

• A full 82% of Americans have not yet engaged climate warming personally.
• Almost half (49%) have not yet been convinced that warming is happening or they are actively hostile towards it.

Who are these folks relative to what a “typical” American looks like demographically?

These data are also eye-opening.  You can read the demographic breakdowns in the figure, but a number of things stand out:

• This is why climate warming is also an issue of race, gender, class, education, and religion. All of these frames shape personal values regarding climate warming.  It means that we need to do a better job of engaging all of these constituencies.
• People of color are falling out disproportionately in the disengaged group.
• Blue-collar folks are in the cautious group on the sidelines.
• Religion is a correlate with those doubtful or dismissive of climate warming as well as those disengaged.

Challenge 3:  People don’t see personal harm arising from climate change within their lifetimes

The Maibach article also speaks to this challenge.  In the figure below, they ask two questions:

• How much do you think global warming will harm you personally (left panel)?
• How much do you think global warming will harm future generations (right panel)?

As you can see in the left graph, there’s a lot of brown (only a little and not at all) and gray (don’t know).  More people think they will die from cancer, a heart attack, or an auto accident than being harmed by climate warming.

However, when the audience thinks about future generations, they think that there is greater risk of harm.

This distinction may help with the climate change communication challenge in the earlier post.  In fact, if you’ve had a chance to see climate modeler James Hansen talk recently, this is one of his pitches.  He frames the impacts of warming in terms of the harm his grandchildren will experience.

Challenge 4: Some climate-impacting behaviors are easier to change than others

Dramatic reductions in carbon emissions in a short period of time are going to require significant behavioral changes in transportation, diet, and powering our lives.  Unfortunately, we are creatures of habit.  And our lifestyles are locked in based on things like how our homes, cities, and roads were designed decades ago and the kinds of transportation available to us.

As mentioned in an earlier post, a paper out this week by Tom Dietz and colleagues suggested that policy measures like cap and trade could take years to implement.  Why not take a look at how much readily available technologies in U.S. homes could potentially reduce emission in the short term?

How much of a difference could households make? According to Dietz et al., they are

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

So if we could modify behaviors associated with household energy use, we might be able to bring about relatively quick and possibly large reductions.  The outlook is mixed, however, as suggested by this table:

Some main points:

• Home weatherization is behavioral low-hanging fruit.  People are willing to do these things because they both save money and are good for the environment (probably in that order).  The good news is that there are sizable reductions that can be achieved.
• Driving is the tough nut to crack.  People are simply unwilling to change driving behavior or carpool.  The bright spot here is fuel efficiency.  People are willing to drive cars with better gas mileage, so this behavior should continue to be encouraged with tax credits for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Related posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication

¹References:

• Dietz, T. et al. (2009) Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce U.S. carbon emissions. PNAS 106(44):18452-18456.
• Maibach, E. et al. (2009) Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis. Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication
• Nisbet, M. (2009) Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement. Environment 51(2):12-23.

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/ / CC BY 2.0

As I mentioned in the last post, heat waves have the potential to harm or kill a lot of people.  Who are the people most likely to suffer first? The experiences from the Chicago 1995 heat wave offer some insights for urban America.  Eric Klinenberg’s 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is as relevant as ever to the current conversation about climate change.

Some excerpts from a U. Chicago Press interview with Klinenberg.

The heat made the city’s roads buckle. Train rails warped, causing long commuter and freight delays. City workers watered bridges to prevent them from locking when the plates expanded. Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department. Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses. But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.

“It’s hot,” the mayor told the media. “But let’s not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.” Many local journalists shared Daley’s skepticism, and before long the city was mired in a callous debate over whether the so-called heat deaths were—to use the term that recurred at the time—”really real.”

[T]he black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1.

Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths…Chicago’s Latinos tend to live in neighborhoods with high population density, busy commercial life in the streets, and vibrant public spaces. Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain.

The heat wave was a particle accelerator for the city:  It sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Yes, the weather was extreme. But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.

Related Post: Say so long to your furnace and hello to a new air conditioner

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/paraflyer/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

She suggests that the social movements like environmentalism are comprised of many different organizations, each fostering a collective identity that is often incompatible with other organizations in the same movement.  Ordinarily, we think of the overall movement goals as having a binding effect among these subgroups.  Apparently not.  People are forming identities with other individuals cut from the same ideological cloth rather than the identity of the social movement itself.

This may not be surprising given the radically different approaches of groups like Earth First, Sierra Club, the Apollo Alliance, 350.org, and Shellenberger and Nordhaus.  It’s also apparent with all of the lines drawn in the sand regarding

• cap and trade vs. carbon tax and dividend (make carbon expensive)
• either of the above approaches vs. subsidizing and making renewable energy cheap (Shellenberger and Nordhaus)
• strict and immediate reduction (350.org) vs. slower emissions reduction trajectories

The bad news is that this kind of animosity can be paralyzing to the social movement, leading to little being accomplished, especially when polarizing debate turns off the public.

Some excerpts:

• Given that different organizations within a movement cannot and need not share a collective identity, it then becomes possible to conceive of collective identity as something with the potential to lead to hostility between groups that are each competing to have their own views universally accepted.
• Unlike in radical environmentalism and to a lesser extent in reform environmentalism, it is possible to be a conservationist without developing an ideology that involves becoming immersed in movement culture. The cognitive praxis of conservationists is highly biased towards conservation issues, rather than broader environmentalism. In contrast, reform and radical environmentalism have more encompassing movement organization identities, require an attribution of the source of a problem and the choosing of a course of action based on opportunities and constraints, and are more often called upon to defend their beliefs to adversaries and mainstream culture.
• The existence of organizations within a movement that have strong solidarity presents a challenge to the wider movement in terms of communication, mutual understanding and tolerance of alternative strategies. It is an aim for both more and less solidary groups to avoid sectarian animosity as it could reduce the flexibility of the movement, mislead the public over strategies, make campaigns less effective, spread misunderstandings about other organizations and create unnecessary tensions.
• We should therefore challenge the assumption that collective identity
  always has a binding effect on movements. To the contrary, it has the potential to dangerously factionalize movements. A similar conflict dynamic between radical and reformist SMOs has been reported to occur in other social movements The process of creating ‘sectarian solidarity’ via the formation of encompassing collective identities could be a convincing explanation of its cause.

¹Saunders, C. (2008) Double-edged swords? Collective identity and solidarity in the environment movement. The British Journal of Sociology 59(2):227-253.

²Bowdoin people can link to the article here.