Environmental governance science, policy & practice

In a recent interview, Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom talks about the need for efforts at multiple levels and the importance of local action in tackling climate change. Here is a sample of the interview:

Q: You have suggested a polycentric approach as opposed to single policies at a global level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Could you explain how that would work? Do you think a similar approach would work to get all countries and their people to believe in, and adopt, sustainable development?

A: We have modelled the impact of individual actions on climate change incorrectly and need to change the way we think about this problem. When individuals walk a distance rather than driving it, they produce better health for themselves. At the same time that they reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that they are generating. There are benefits for the individual and small benefits for the globe. When a building owner re-does the way the building is insulated and the heating system, these actions can dramatically change the amount of greenhouse gas emissions made. This has an immediate impact on the neighbourhood of the building as well as on the globe.

When cities and counties decide to rehabilitate their energy systems so as to produce less greenhouse gas emissions, they are reducing the amount of pollution in the local region as well as greenhouse gas emissions on the globe. In other words, the key point is that there are multiple externalities involved for many actions related to greenhouse gas emissions. While in the past the literature has underplayed the importance of local effects, we need to recognize – as more and more individuals, families, communities, and states are seeing – that they will gain a benefit, as well as the globe, and that cumulatively a difference can be made at the global level if a number of small units start taking action. We have a much greater possibility of impacting global change problems if we start locally.

Click this link for the full interview.

Australia’s Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has released the document “Accurate Answers to Professor Plimer’s 101 Climate Change Science Questions”, which provides answers to the 101 questions on climate change posed by Professor Ian Plimer, a geology professor and expert mineralogist with no background in climate science, in his latest book, How to get expelled from school: a guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters (2011).

The document reads:

Many of the questions and answers in Professor Plimer’s book are misleading and are based on inaccurate or selective interpretation of the science. The answers and comments provided in this document are intended to provide clear and accurate answers to Professor Plimer’s questions. The answers are based on up-to-date peer reviewed science, and have been reviewed by a number of Australian climate scientists.

The document can be downloaded from the Department’s website:

http://www.climatechange.gov.au/climate-change/understanding-climate-change/response-to-prof-plimer.aspx

Source: Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency

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A new article on international governance arrangements relating to the Coral Triangle has just been published in Marine Policy. Using a network approach, P Fidelman, from the University of the Sunshine Coast, and J Ekstrom, University of California Berkeley, examine whether and how institutional complexity can be conducive to large-scale marine management.  They show that regional marine governance is marked by jurisdiction and functional overlaps, and suggest inter-institutional learning and institutional synergy as processes to cope with complexity and fragmentation. The abstract reads:

The Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI), adopted recently in response to the degradation of coastal and marine environments in the Southeast Asia-Pacific’s Coral Triangle, emphasises the need for using existing international and regional fora to promote implementation. Large-scale marine initiatives, including the CTI, very often must contend with a remarkably complex institutional system. This raises the question of whether and how such complexity can be conducive to marine resources management. To answer this question, this paper aims to better understand the governance context in which the CTI was established (i.e., map governance fragmentation/complexity), and explore how such a context may support the implementation of the CTI goals (i.e., examine normative interplay). To conduct this examination, it uses an objective method that allows users to view and explore institutional arrangements through a network approach. By documenting the system of existing institutions in the Coral Triangle, the study shows that the Coral Triangle governance system is illustrative of those of international environmental governance. It involves multiple policy domains, and features different institutional arrangements and variability in terms of geographical scope and main subject matter. Such a system is complex and fragmented, marked by jurisdiction and functional overlaps. The paper suggests interplay management, such as inter-institutional learning and enhancing institutional synergy, as a promising process to promote inter-institutional coordination.

Source: FIDELMAN, P.; EKSTROM, J. 2012. Mapping Seascapes of International Environmental Arrangements in the Coral Triangle. Marine Policy, 36(5): 993-1004; doi: 10.1016/j.marpol.2012.02.006 or download manuscript version.

Related information

• Trouble in the Triangle
• Multilateral Governance in Large-scale Marine Systems
• Authors’ contact

In this talk, Prof Oran Young extracts enduring insights from his research on environmental governance.

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I have just read this article by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, Australia, where he discusses five plausible hypotheses to explain climate change scepticism: (1) the influence of vested economic interest, (2)  the role played by the mass media, (3) ideological rationalisations, (4) a certain kind of individual who is offended by the conclusions of the climate scientists, and (5) sceptics are telling people what they most wish to hear. All five hypotheses make sense to me; however, number five is the one that very often comes to mind when contemplating the willingness of Western developed societies to take action in the face of climate change on one hand, and the material comfort we became so accustomed to, on the other. Manne explains:

The leaders of the denialist campaign are however not whistling in the dark. The message they are selling is popular. The reason is reasonably straightforward. The majority of people in Western countries live now in a state of material comfort beyond the imaginings of all previous generations. Who amongst us would not prefer to believe that there are indeed no limits to the material comforts we may enjoy? Who would not prefer to believe that this level of material comfort will go on expanding forever? To take the conclusions of the climate scientists seriously is to embrace the need for massive economic change and even for possible economic sacrifice. If the influence of the climate change denialists is growing the most important reason is that they are telling people what they most wish to hear. In his book Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton makes an entirely unnerving suggestion. Perhaps it is the character type that flourishes under the conditions of consumer capitalism that presents the primary obstacle to taking action on climate change. Faced by an apparent choice between the continuation of our lifestyle and the wellbeing of our planet, perhaps it is the continuation of our lifestyle that in the end we will decide to choose.

In helping us to make this choice, the denialists have played an important role. For they have been able to convince many people that to choose this way is not irresponsible or immoral or insane – a choice for which future generations will curse us – but represents, rather, sweet reason and merest common sense. Recently I read an interesting World Bank survey of international public opinion on the question of climate change. What it revealed, broadly speaking, was that the poorer the country, the more likely are its people to believe in the reality of dangerous human-caused climate change. While 31% of Americans and 38% of Japanese thought climate change was a very serious problem, 75% of Kenyans and 85% of Bangladeshis did. Those who do have reason to fear climate change but have little to lose in the curbing of emissions are the people who believe in what the climate scientists are telling them. Those who do not at present fear climate change but recognise they have a lot to lose by tackling it have simply and conveniently ceased to believe what they hear.

The meaning of all this seems clear. Citizens of the consumer society are unwilling to risk the loss of any of their comforts. However they wish to feel good about themselves. The climate change denialists – the lobbyists and propagandists of the fossil fuel corporations; the right-wing commentariat in the blogosphere and the media; the anti-political correctness and anti-collectivist ideologues in the think tanks and the academy; the angry older generation of engineers and geologists – offer them the alibi for doing nothing they so desperately need.

Read Robert Manne article in full on http://bit.ly/uVJXBz

Just received the link to the video on the IAI research on how ocean circulation affects blue carbon, which examines the links between biological carbon sequestration, chemical absorption, physical transport and possible re-release to the atmosphere; and what this implies for carbon management options.

For more information on this topic see the post Is continental shelf production mitigating climate change?

Presentation by Jonathan Foley from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

How will nine billion people be able to eat without undermining the very basis for food production? This was the starting point for a seminar in Stockholm on 7 November.

The seminar, which was organised by the Swedish International Agriculture Network Initiative (SIANI) brought together international leaders with early-career researchers working on global food security.

In this presentation, Jonathan Foley articulated the key challenges to global food security and highlight the latest trends and projections.

Foley recently co-authored together with centre director Johan Rockström and others the article Solutions for a Cultivated Planet which was published in Nature in October 2011.

Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre

By Andrea Brock & Ruben Zondervan

The upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) will focus on two themes: Green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and the institutional framework for sustainable development. These two themes have received ample attention by a wide range of stakeholders over the past months already – and will increasingly do so as the conference draws closer and the preparatory process get more intense.

The global environmental change research community is also joining this process towards Rio+20. The four global environmental change research programmes (IHDP, IGBP, Diversitas and WCRP), as organizers of their joint Planet under Pressure Conference, have commissioned nine policy assessments with the aim to make concrete science-based policy [...] Continue Reading…

The Ocean over the Patagonian continental shelf absorbs about 17 million metric tons of carbon per year, the equivalent to all the carbon content of one hundred thousand hectares of rainforest, studies have revealed.

Just a week before the start of the next round of UN Climate Change negotiations in Durban, South Africa, scientists funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) underscore the importance of understanding the links between biological carbon sequestration, chemical absorption, physical transport and possible re-release to the atmosphere and what this implies for carbon management options.

Although production fluxes in Patagonia and over other [...] Continue Reading…

We are now 7 billion people on the Planet! Is it sustainable? Below is an interview with Paul Ehrlich on this issue.

It took humankind 1800 years to get from a global population of about 200 million to 1 billion. But it only took us 200 years to go from a billion to 7 billion. Most students of population agree that the planet cannot support current rates of population growth for much longer. This week Sea Change Radio begins a two-week series on population. Today we spend the whole show talking with Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the environmental classic, The Population Bomb and one of the foremost scholars on the subject. Dr. Ehrlich talks with host Alex Wise about [...] Continue Reading…