By Reinhard Mechler & Thomas Schinko (IIASA) with Swenja Surminski (LSE)
(updated 17 December 2014)
As participants in the 20th Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention (COP 20) in Lima strived to prepare the grounds for a comprehensive climate agreement expected for COP 21 in Paris, negotiators faced key questions that revolve around responsibility and burden sharing.
These questions are not new and have played a key role in the policy and academic discourse on climate change since the beginning of the UNFCCC process.
On the mitigation of emissions, the debate has circled around burden sharing: How should emission reductions be distributed among countries and what are the distributional consequences? On climate impacts and adaptation, the debate has centered on the question of who should pay for adaption and impacts in the global South, given that the global North has been responsible for the bulk of historic anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and that the global South will be facing the most severe risks from climate change.
The 20th Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention (COP 20) opened in Lima on December 1st with big fanfare. It is considered the key milestone event on the road to a comprehensive global deal on climate change that many hope will be struck in Paris in a year’s time. Photo Credit: UN Climate Change
As a partial response, the Green Climate Fund (CGF) was established at COP 16 in Copenhagen to assist developing economies in addressing climate change adaptation and mitigation. The GCF is currently being capitalized by industrialized and emerging economies with the aim of raising 100 billion USD by 2020. At the UN climate talks in Lima the CGF has achieved – thanks to last-minute pledges by several countries – its short term target of mobilizing at least 10 billion USD for the next four years.
Negotiations covering impacts and adaptation have further proceeded, among others, under the umbrella of the Warsaw Loss and Damage Mechanism (WIM), accepted at COP 19 in Warsaw after strong debate as to its meaning and nature- some suggest this mechanism should be part of adaptation, others want it to focus on residual risks that remain after adaptation efforts have been taken.
As a contribution to the WIM discourse, we recently suggested an approach organized around climate risk management, involving the principle of risk layering. We propose that the WIM can build on this principle to distinguish between risk layers to be managed and residual risk layers ‘beyond adaptation,’ thus involving both equity and efficiency aspects: (i) Equity in terms of financially supporting countries particularly vulnerable to climate change in their efforts to manage risks and deal with the burdens ‘beyond adaptation’; (ii) Efficiency in terms of helping to identify best practice for managing risk through well-designed risk prevention, preparedness and financing measures that address high and low frequency climate-related events.
We argue that the risk layering perspective may contribute to taking the WIM discourse over the apparent red negotiation lines if financial support is coupled with well-targeted risk management efforts – such as coordinated nationally through national platforms for disaster risk reduction,
Notions of risk management have been fundamental for the WIM. In Lima the parties discuss whether to accept a two-year work plan, which was put together with input from policy, science and practice. The work plan would give a strong role to risk management and, among others, would seek advice on “enhanced understanding of how comprehensive risk management can contribute to transformational approaches.”
Inauguration ceremony of COP20 in Lima. Credit: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Peru
Transformational risk management approaches have been promoted by the disaster risk management community over the last few years in seeking a better balance between pre-event risk management and post-event relief and reconstruction (currently 15% of overseas development assistance goes into pre-event efforts vs. 85% into post-event). As a case in point, regional risk pools (mostly covering climate-related risks) have been springing up in the Caribbean, Pacific, and Africa. These efforts are first and foremost focussed on mutually financing risk, but can also be seen as a first step to a comprehensive approach for reducing and financing risks.
For example, the African Risk Capacity (ARC) pool provides quick finance to provide relief after drought events, and has aimed at linking these efforts to improvements in response planning and early warning. Innovatively, the ARC, initially capitalized by donor support and country contributions, currently explores to set up an Extreme Climate Facility for raising funding for any losses that can be related to climate change and may endanger the solvency of the ARC.
The idea is to monitor variability in a composite index of weather indicators over time and understand whether this variability can be attributed to climate change, which would then lead to a pay-out to the fund from this facility. While promising, the link to attribution is a key scientific challenge, and a number of principled and implementation-related questions for this particular facility as well as for the WIM in general remain open. These open questions will need further attention by science, policy, practice and civil society in the coming months in order to help achieve progress on the Loss and Damage Mechanism.
Reference
Reinhard Mechler, Laurens M. Bouwer, Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer, Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler, Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts, Swenja Surminski & Keith Williges. 2014. Managing unnatural disaster risk from climate extremes. Nature Climate Change. March 26, 2014. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n4/full/nclimate2137.html
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
By IIASA YSSP participants 2014: Edoardo Borgomeo, Mikko Dufva, Lukas Figge, Thomas Schinko and Fabian Schipfer
Photo Credit: Dan Suarez
A growing number of young researchers in various fields (for example the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics) are realizing that responding to global challenges creates a need for more radical rethinking of some of the basic underlying assumptions of applied science, something that is not captured in most of the way research is done at the moment. Along that line, we argue that research is often not critical and self-reflexive enough and gets lost in the details without connecting to the bigger questions for the future of humanity.
In order to start a conversation on these topics, we organized a workshop as part of our participation in the 2014 IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP). To prepare for the workshop we interviewed fellow YSSPers and asked each of them to identify one major controversial question for the future of humanity. This process resulted in five Big Questions, a list summarizing the five most controversial themes identified by the YSSP cohort. Our five Big Questions are:
Adapting to changing environments: Who will be affected how badly?
Planetary boundaries and resource constraints: How will we manage to live within planetary boundaries and resource constraints?
(Re-)defining quality of life: Can humanity prosper without economic growth?
Dealing with conflict: What will be the main reasons for conflict in the future and how to overcome them?
The efficiency fetish of science and technology: What are or should be the moral and ethical limitations to optimization?
At the workshop, we asked participants – which included YSSP participants and IIASA researchers from different cultural and scientific backgrounds – to discuss the five Big Questions and how applied systems sciences could evolve to address them. The workshop’s outcome was not a list of answers to the five questions, but a list of guidelines that scientists should consider when doing research that seeks to address these questions.
Workshop participants from left to right: Margaret Garcia, Miho Kamei, Thomas Schinko, Farid Karimi Photo credit: Aleksandra Cofala.
Connect and relate to the bigger picture
We as a scientists know that when doing research, it is easy to get tangled up in the details and miss the bigger picture of why the specific research matters. From the discussions at the workshop we distilled three relevant aspects to avoid not seeing the forest for the trees when doing research. First, the participants considered it essential to reflect about the impact that our own research has on society. Second, and connected to the first aspect, the group of researchers affirmed that it is essential how researchers relate and engage with their audience. Third, the discussants concurred that communicating research results means taking part in broader societal discussions: every scientific question, especially in applied sciences, raises political and ethical challenges and we need to realize that these cannot be separated from our research activities.
Accept that controversy is a fact and that it matters
The second main takeaway message from the workshop is that there is controversy around important issues and that sometimes controversy is a desirable thing. We learned that as applied scientists we need to understand that there are different perceptions about a research topic, based on different (cultural) worldviews, politicized processes and from the framing of the issue. Furthermore these perceptions change over time. This means that researchers have to constantly reassess their own perceptions about the specific research topic. However, we argue that controversy drives research forward and, as climate scientist Mike Hulme puts it, disagreeing is a form of learning.
Be more reflective about normative assumptions and cultural biases underlying research
Another important aspect that was brought up by the workshop participants is that the framing of a research question reflects assumptions made about it, either explicitly or implicitly. We agree that making assumptions is of course needed in science, as it is an inherent part of dealing with real world complexity, incomplete knowledge, and uncertainty. But we argue that at the same time, it is important to be aware of and open about the assumptions made. We would like to reiterate three important questions a researcher should answer for herself when framing a research topic: who, where and when? Who do we assume are the stakeholders most affected by our research? Where do we concentrate our attention on? When, i.e. which time horizon, is our research focused on?
Foster inter- and transdisciplinary research
We are aware that for an individual scientist, it is not an easy task to take all of the three previous points into account. Therefore, to engage with the Big Questions, science needs to approach them from multiple angles and foster inter- and transdisciplinary research between natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and non-scientific stakeholders. We are certain that not being restricted to only one discipline paints a more detailed and comprehensive picture of a specific problem.
We have presented four guidelines that scientists should consider when doing research that seeks to matter, based on the results of the workshop on the five Big Questions. However, it is not our intention to give commandments about how to do science. What we and the other participants of the workshop learned from the discussions is that interdisciplinary thinking and debating about the big picture and being exposed to conflicting viewpoints is not only imperative for doing research that is relevant for the future of humanity, but can also be a thoroughly enjoyable experience. And this is perhaps the key take-home message from the workshop: Have fun with your research and find meaning in it by connecting to other researchers and to the bigger questions for the future of humanity.
Photo Credit: Lukas Figge
Note: This post gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Princeton University Professor Simon Levin—IIASA council chair 2003-2008–has won numerous awards for his interdisciplinary research in environmental sciences, economics, and evolutionary biology. On 10 November, Levin gave a public lecture at IIASA, at which he was named an IIASA Distinguished Visiting Fellow.
Simon Levin speaks at the fifth IIASA/OeAW Public Lecture in Laxenburg on 10 November. Credit: IIASA/Matthias Silveri
IIASA: Your research explores issues such as environmental degradation, human inequality, and climate change. Why are global problems such as these so difficult to address? Simon Levin: To a large extent, many of these are problems not well addressed in market-based systems. The problem is that for public goods and common-pool resources, the incentives for individual actions are misaligned with the interests of society. Equity gaps and discounting of the future add to these problems, and make it difficult to achieve consensus, especially at global levels for which the feedback loops associated with individual and local actions are weak.
What kinds of approaches are needed to understand such complex, global environmental and social problems? Certainly we need systems approaches to deal with the linkages and scaling problems within these complex adaptive systems. We need interdisciplinarity, and we need more study of how to achieve cooperation at national and international levels. These are all problems central to the agenda of IIASA.
What new insights has your research brought to these problems? I have long been impressed with the power of using what we learn in one set of systems to address analogous problems in others, and have benefited greatly from what I have learned from colleagues in other disciplines. I feel that I have been able to get a great deal of mileage out of translating and adapting those lessons to environmental problems, and feel that my ecological and evolutionary perspective in particular, and what I have learned from how evolution has dealt with challenges, has allowed me to bring useful perspectives to the management of coupled biological and socioeconomic systems.
How can models of complex environmental systems inform our understanding of human systems such as the economy? We learn from such systems what makes them robust, and what makes them vulnerable to collapse; the importance of diversity, redundancy, and modularity to the ability of systems to adapt in variable environments; the importance of flexible and adaptive governance.
“We learn from [environmental] systems what makes them robust, and what makes them vulnerable to collapse” Credit: PhotonQ via Flickr
What can studies of cooperation in nature tell us about cooperation in human societies? Cooperation in nature is strongest in small groups; and as those groups become larger, agreements, social norms and institutions become increasingly important. Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom led in adapting those principles to the management of small societies, and I agree with her on the importance of polycentricity—building up from smaller agreements—in addressing global environmental problems.
How can we apply such findings to find practical solutions for the problems we face? We need research, but we also need partners outside of science. Increasingly, business leaders have looked to biological systems for models as to how they can deal with challenges; we now similarly need to partner with government leaders if we are to address the grand challenges in achieving a sustainable future.
How old are you? This is the most basic demographic question about an individual, and an easy one to answer. What is the population of the world or your country? Well, many who read the news roughly know the number, about seven billion for the world and more than a billion in China and India. But when asked more detailed questions about demography, “What percentage of people are younger than you in the world or your country?” or “What’s the remaining life expectancy for you in your country and the world?” the eyes start rolling. Such questions are important because they lead to better knowledge and awareness about the population, especially the question of life expectancy.
(Photo: UN Photo/Sebastiao Barbosa)
This is why I, with my colleagues Wolfgang Fengler (World Bank), Benedikt Gross (data visualization designer), and many others, have developed a website where people can find out their respective place in the world population or the country population: population.io. The website was launched last Saturday at the TEDxVienna.
How long will we live? Most of us in the general public do not know the answer. But demographers and actuaries can actually project the expected date of death for populations, based on factors such as place of residence, age, and sex. Demographers use data on deaths occurring during a period and the population structure to estimate death rates. These death rates are then included in the life table calculations that show, among other details, expected number of years of remaining life given one’s place of residence, age, and sex.
On population.io, you can find your own expected death date, based on population projections and details such as where you were born, where you live, and your sex. Of course, this date is just an average with a distribution. If the remaining life expectancy for a 40-year-old is 30 more years, that does not mean that all today’s 40-year-olds will die in 2044: roughly half will die earlier and half later. But we hope that exploring this tool will give people some insight into the world and their country’s population and their place within it.
How do we know how long you will live? To answer this question, we use population projections. To make good population projections, demographers need information about the demographic structure, including current age and sex structure and assumptions about the future scenarios of mortality, fertility, and migration. A “cohort component” method is then applied to calculate the future population size and structure and to obtain number of births, deaths, and migration. This method projects each cohort born in the same one- or five-year period forward in time, to replace the older cohort occupying the age. In the process some die or migrate out (population decreases) and some migrate in (population increases), while women in reproductive age groups might give birth to children, who will then enter the population as a new cohort. All of these numbers and assumptions are needed for many purposes within and outside the discipline of population studies including for a proper answer to our question, “How long will I live?”
Here’s how the calculations behind population.io work. As an example, I’ll take myself: For a male of my age, 40 years old, on average according to the current global mortality rates, my remaining life expectancy would be about 37 years. This is bit scary for me – that means as an average “global citizen, I would die at age 77. In Nepal, where I am from, my life expectancy would be a little more than one year less. However, since I will most likely live in Austria, my remaining life expectancy increases to 43 years, an increase of 7.4 years due to migration.
On population.io, you can explore–among lots of other population data–how living in a different country would affect your life expectancy. Click to try it yourself!
Now, if I add that I belong to the highest category in terms of education, what will happen to my life expectancy? Though education is not yet included in the population.io, it turns out that that also depends to a large degree on where I live. In Portugal or Italy, a person with a university degree would have lesser advantage compared to those with lower secondary education or below (2.5 and 2.6 years more respectively) than someone living in Estonia (13.8 years more) or the Czech Republic (12.5 years), Hungary and Bulgaria (12.1 years).
What if I am a smoker? Do not exercise? These factors too play an important role in future life expectancy, and we plan to add them soon to the population.io Web site.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
By Johannes Pirker and Aline Mosnier, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Research Program
In the late 2000s, Palm oil became a major target of environmental NGO’s working to save tropical forests. Bleak images of recently cleared forest sites left no doubt about the harmful impact of the commodity which today is omnipresent in our food—palm oil today is used in many everyday products such as chocolate bars, shampoo, and margarine. Campaigning against palm oil is a safe bet for NGO’s; it has become the North Korea among the vegetable oils.
The facts are clear: oil palm cultivation has expanded tremendously in recent years. Indonesia and Malaysia were and continue to be the epicenter of this expansion. In these two countries, new plantations have led to at least 3.7 million hectares of forest loss during the last 20 years, an area bigger than Belgium. This deforestation threatens not only animal and plant species, but expansion of palm oil plantations is increasingly occurring into carbon-rich peat soils, leading to the release of tremendous amounts of climate-warming CO2 into the atmosphere.
Palm oil mill of CDC in the South-West province in Cameroon, taken by Aline Soterroni, a 2010 IIASA YSSP participant and collaborator on the REDD-PAC project. Photo Credit: Aline Soterroni
On the other hand, even environmental NGOs cannot deny that the palm-oil boom has brought major benefits to the economies of producer countries. In Indonesia, the sector is estimated to employ on average 0.4 persons per hectare – at least 3.2 million jobs in a country where about 30 million people live in poverty. Unskilled slave labor? Well, no. Almost half of the plantations in the country are owned and managed by smallholders. In Thailand the share is as high as three quarters of the total plantation area.
Demand for palm oil remains high and there is now evidence that the palm oil boom might spill over to Central and Western Africa, where about 800,000 hectares of plantation concession have been granted to companies in recent years. Latin American countries too see the opportunity to benefit from the boom, such as Brazil, which has recently included oil palm in its reforestation plans, bolstered by a generous subsidy scheme for smallholders. So is the way inevitably paved for the palm oil industry to embark on a new round of forest-destroying plantation expansion?
Land use planning as a way forward In many countries land is available – mainly degraded forests and grassland – to satisfy the future demand for palm oil in a less damaging way. Earmarking the right sites for palm plantations requires a good deal of capacity and knowledge by local authorities about where natural conditions are suitable for oil palm, which environmental and social safeguards need to be considered and at which place – a land use planning process.
The map above shows where palm oil production is possible on the globe when taking into account climate, soil, and topography features.
The first step toward more sustainable oil production is a map indicating where bio-physical conditions are suitable for oil palm cultivation. To that end, we constructed a global bio-physical suitability map, building on climate, soil and topography data at the resolution of 1 km. The map reveals that in fact the Amazon basin – the better part of it is located in Brazil – harbors by far the biggest stretch of suitable land, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Indonesia.
IIASA supports the MOABI platform, a collaborative mapping initiative that aims to increase transparency and accountability on resource issues in DRC. Our oil palm suitability map will help to inform this process by providing insight to the sustainability of the expected expansion of oil palm in DRC in the coming years.
This map shows areas that are potentially suitable for oil palm cultivation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The map was developed from our data, and made interactive and zoomable by our partners the Moabi Project.
Biophysical suitability is not all However, if and where plantations will start to appear will depend on many factors, most of which are economic :
Availability, productivity and costs of land and labor
The institutional set-up and support for the sector
Accessibility to refinery plants and markets is a key determinant for oil palm plantations profitability
In order to address these issues, an economic model such as IIASA’s Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM) model can be deployed to gain insights in the likely development of the sector, help land use planning and explicitly show the trade-off between economic development and biodiversity protection.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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