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Tarja Halonen was the 11th President of the Republic of Finland and Finland’s first female head of state from 2000 to 2012. She currently serves as the Co-Chair of the UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, and the Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders. She is also a member of the high-level reflection group, the Alpbach-Laxenburg Group.
“Being poor does not mean that you are stupid; it sometimes demands a lot of intelligence to survive if you are poor. It is very important to take these issues seriously and our primary focus should be the empowerment of people.” – Tarja Halonen at the 2014 Alpbach Forum
IIASA: How have you been involved in the formation of the Sustainable Development Goals? Why is this process important? TH: I have been involved in this process since the development of the Millennium Development Goals, and I consider that it is very important that we continue to work for these principles after the implementation of the millennium goals has ended in 2015.
In spite of all of their weaknesses the Millennium Development Goals were important goals, informing the knowledge and expectations that we have regarding sustainable development and a global climate agreement or commitment. To me, the post-2015 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, are perhaps the most important guarantee for the future of the world.
What is different about the approach of the Alpbach-Laxenburg Group? We have said many times—and many world leaders agreed at Rio+20—that it is time to stop working in silos. We need a multidimensional approach, where academia, politicians, business, civil society, and also NGOs are involved. This is where the Alpbach-Laxenburg Group is so important. I think that this group is an effort to address that need, and I hope that by bringing together the various areas of society we can address the great social injustices in the world. It is not only the business of scientists what happens in the world. It is not just someone else’s problem: everyone needs to be involved in the process.
How do you hope to see the issues of gender inequality reflected in the group? In 2012 I was co-chair of a report entitled “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing” for the UN Secretary General, as part of my role on the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability. While compiling this report we noticed that there are a lot of resources that are overused and which cause problems. However, what is underused is human capital.
There are three categories we should focus on: the poor, youth and women. Of course all of these groups are very important to include. But for women, inequality is a lifelong story that you cannot get rid of.
It is very important to take these issues seriously and implement measures to change the status quo. I have already tried in many ways, and of course the Council of Women World Leaders has already done a lot of work which I am very thankful for. I am also very proud of Michelle Bachelet, current President of Chile, and the first Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women, who has led work on the empowerment of women at all levels. We need to make an effort to strengthen gender and women’s rights as part of the post-2015 goals. There are many similar attempts to raise this issue but I hope this group can make it a stronger voice.
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
By Robbert Biesbroek, Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands
Over the past years, a series of reports by the World Economic Forum have identified “failure to adapt to climate change” as being of highest concern to society. But in practice, what does adaptation to climate change mean? What makes adaptation particularly challenging for those policymakers, consultants, businesses and other practitioners working on adaptation in practice? An often heard answer is, “Because there are barriers to adaptation.”
The storm surge barrier Oosterschelde nearby Neeltje Jans in The Netherlands. With its low elevation and long coastline, the Netherlands is particularly sensitive to sea level rise, and has taken an early start to climate adaptation planning (Photo: Shutterstock)
In a recent study, we identified numerous examples of barriers to adaptation encountered by practitioners across the globe. These barriers to adaptation emerge from all angles and direction; they can be institutional (e.g. “rigid rules and norms”) resources (e.g. “lack of money”, “uncertain knowledge”) social (e.g. “no shared problem understanding”), cognitive (e.g. “ignorance”, “apathy”).
As scholars, we have proven to be very good in making lists of barriers to adaptation, but rather poor in understanding where these barriers come from, what the concept of “barriers” means to practitioners, why barriers are mentioned at all, or how barriers can be dealt with in an meaningful way. In a follow-up study, colleagues and I argued that listing barriers in isolation from their decision-making context is an interesting first step, but has hardly provided insights in the openings needed to adequately deal with them. In fact, they often lead to a linear argumentative logic – “Not enough money? Then we need more money or we need to spend the money we do have more wisely!” Such superficial advice is not particularly useful to practice.
By delving deeper in the questions of why adaptation is challenging, we found that what practitioners mention as barriers are mere simplifications of what really happened. Barriers become metaphors that capture people’s lived experience and evaluation of the process into easy to communicate messages – e.g. “no money.” We can argue about whether this is truly a barrier, because their interpretation stems from a complex and dynamic chain of events that only makes sense to those that were actively involved. By putting labels on these events, they automatically become static, therefore lacking the necessary insights in the dynamics that caused the process to become challenging and provide the necessary openings to intervene. We concluded that using barriers as units of analysis to explain why adaptation is challenging is therefore flawed: the analytical challenge is to go beyond barriers in search of the explanatory causal processes, or so-called causal mechanisms.
An example: In our study, we identified 24 different barriers encountered by practitioners during the design and implementation of an innovative adaptation measure for temporal water storage in the city center of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. By going beyond this list, we uncovered three underlying mechanisms that explain why the first attempt to implement the so-called “water plaza” failed. One mechanisms, we called the risk-innovation mechanism—which is basically a miscommunication about risk that leads to public outcry.
An illustration of the proposed water plaza in the Netherlands. (Image: De Urbanisten)
In this case, the government took a technocratic stance in communicating the risks and benefits of the project. Meanwhile the citizens, as mutual bearers of the risks, wanted to negotiate about what levels of risk were acceptable. By taking such stance the government avoided a moral debate about the risk of the innovation (the innovation was “adaptation”), but the result was angry citizens who to rebelled against the project and the municipal government. This analysis provided openings to change communication strategies – an intervention the project team used successfully in next stages of the process.
Insights from this study have broader implications. It explains, for example, why existing guidelines to support practitioners to overcome barriers to adaptation have not worked well: As I explored more deeply in my thesis, these guidelines are simply not tailored to the real reasons why adaptation is challenging. We can continue to make endless lists of barriers, but to advance theoretically and conceptually, and to provide meaningful strategies to intervene in practice, we need to rethink how we use the concept of “barriers to adaptation” and start searching for underlying causal mechanisms.
Robbert Biesbroek completed his PhD in January 2014, supervised by IIASA Director General and CEO Prof. Dr. Pavel Kabat.
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.
References:
(1) Biesbroek, G. R., Klostermann, J. E. M., Termeer, C. J. A. M., & Kabat, P. (2013). On the nature of barriers to climate change adaptation. Regional Environmental Change, 13(5), 1119-1129.
(2) Biesbroek, G. R., Termeer, C. J. A. M., Klostermann, J. E. M., & Kabat, P. (2014). Rethinking barriers to adaptation: mechanism based explanation of impasses in the governance of an innovative adaptation measure. Global Environmental Change 26, (1) 108-118
(3) Biesbroek, G. R. (2014). Challenging barriers in the governance of climate change adaptation. Ph.D. thesis, Wageningen: Wageningen University.
“We have to recognize that international approaches to climate change have basically failed. They are not going anywhere, maybe even backwards,” said economist William Nordhaus at a lecture for IIASA staff and young scientists on 23 June. The reason for this failure, he argued, is that international agreements have so far failed to deal with the problem of free riders.
The Kyoto Protocol, for instance, failed as countries dropped out one by one, as soon as mitigation started to become costly. Many countries never even ratified the agreement. Nordhaus explained, “There were no penalties for dropping out.”
Norhaus first introduced the concept of climate clubs at the IIASA 40th Anniversary Conference in 2012.
As the next round of climate talks approach this winter and next in Paris, many researchers say it is time for a new model for international climate change treaties. One new idea, which Nordhaus first proposed at the IIASA 40th Anniversary Conference in 2012, is the concept of “climate clubs.”
Nordhaus said, “Think of the treaty as a club. It’s a voluntary agreement, where members get certain benefits, for a certain cost.” A climate club would work like a free-trade union, such as the EU. It would encourage participation by penalizing non-participants, allowing members of the “climate club” to charge tariffs on all imports of non-participating nations. In his lecture on Monday, Nordhaus expanded on the concept he introduced in 2012, presenting the results of modeling work to determine the tariff rates and carbon prices that would be needed in such an agreement, and how participation would look.
Nordhaus found that more countries were likely to participate when carbon prices were lower. At a carbon price of 25 or 50 dollars, a majority of world regions would participate in the club, while at higher carbon prices of 75 to 100 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide, the highest participation rate would be only about half of that.
At IIASA on Monday. From left: William Nordhaus, IIASA Deputy Director General Nebojsa Nakicenovic, and IIASA Risk Policy and Vulnerability Program Director Joanne Bayer
The high carbon price, Nordhaus explained, would make the cost of participating much higher than the costs of tariffs for non-participants. However, with a lower carbon price, even low penalty tariffs of 3 to 4% could be enough to encourage participation. The idea of tariffs is simpler than previous suggestions of trade penalties based on the carbon emissions impact of specific goods—which in practice are difficult to define, and, as Nordhaus said, “not a big enough stick to induce participation.”
Like any trade agreement, though, Nordhaus’ climate club also means some win and some lose. When he examines the benefits on a regional level, the US, EU, and India appear to gain the most benefits, while Russia and China gain the least. What would it take to get such an agreement off the ground? Nordhaus said that a few key regions would be enough—for example, the EU, the USA, and China.
Watch Nordhaus’ 2012 Lecture at the IIASA Conference
William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He has a B.A. from Yale University (1963) and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT (1967). More>>
By Anne Goujon, IIASA World Population Program and Vienna Institute of Demography
How will societies develop in the future? And what environmental, economic, and social factors will influence these changes? Can these problems be analyzed in a scientific way? And if so, what tools should we use? On 13 June, I took part in a workshop for a project aimed at answering these questions.
The workshop took place in Nanterre, France. Photo Credit: Bladsurb via Flickr
I participated in a round table where we discussed how to find tools for forward-looking analysis and how to develop and integrate them to analyze societal change. This implies the integration of different models (economic, territorial, environmental), which can be very challenging. It can be difficult to avoid overlaps between models, and also to account for possible feedback effects between different factors. We discussed how to choose between two overlapping outputs such as two different GDP projections produced by environmental and economic models. Shall we try to validate the models historically by checking which model is best able to reconstruct the past? A nice idea, but most researchers agreed it would be too time and data-intensive to be practical. Another alternative, much less rigorous but easier to implement, would be to compare the results of the two models and decide which one is the best among the FLAGSHIP team. But according to which criteria? The last alternative would be to decide upfront which model should provide which outcome. It is almost a philosophical decision to be made as none is right or wrong.
Innovation seems to be at the core of all models for the future of Europe, encapsulating more than Information and Communication Technologies and Research and Development, but also incorporating other components such organizational capital – the share of a firm at management level. At the moment, FLAGSHIP is envisaging two storylines for the future—namely socio-ecological transition and global growth—which are actually not very far from some of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios developed by IIASA and others for the 5th assessment of the IPCC . Another IIASA researcher, Samir K.C. presented these scenarios at the meeting as an invited expert.
In a 2011 Science article, IIASA researchers Wolfgang Lutz and Samir KC showed the importance of population heterogeneity, specifically related to age, sex, and level of education, whenever population is an important driver of change. At the workshop, KC talked about the steps involved in the process of developing global demographic and human capital scenarios for the SSPs, with an emphasis on the importance of dialogue, discussion, and interactive iteration between the demographers and the user community in shaping the quality of the product. He recommended more consultation between the demographers and other experts in the FLAGSHIP project to produce consistent and meaningful demographic narratives. He also argued that existing scenarios such as SSPs should be explored and might be useful with some alterations.
Since the project looks at the next 50 years, rather short-term from a demographic point of view, population will possibly enter the whole model with just one scenario.
Scientists who have worked for many years in the field of climate change sometimes grow cynical about the possibility that the world will address the problem. After over 40 years of research on the subject, there is still no global agreement on climate change, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. This despite growing evidence of the severity of the problem.
“The odds are against us, but they are not zero,” he told an audience of IIASA researchers on 13 May. In a wide-ranging lecture for IIASA staff, Schellnhuber highlighted some of the most recent findings on climate change from PIK researchers, but also shared his thoughts on the potential for the world to take action to mitigate the emissions that are leading to climate warming.
The human race has blossomed on this planet only in the last 11,000 years, a period of very stable climate known as the Holocene. Without this stability, Schellnhuber pointed out, humans would not have been able to develop agriculture, let alone the technological advances of the industrial revolution or the population explosions that followed from these developments. Destabilizing this climate that has led to such success could be dangerous—and evidence suggests that it will be most dangerous to people in developing countries, who did the least to cause the problem.
Some of the more worrisome research to come out of PIK and other climate research centers in recent years focuses on possible tipping points or “non-linearity” in the climate system. For example, changes in the jet stream, related to declining Arctic sea ice cover and warming in the Arctic, are already proving to have major effects on weather, possibly contributing to recent heat waves like the 2010 heat wave in Russia, as well as floods in more southern regions—such extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent, said Schellnhuber, in a world with greater warming.
A new study from PIK researchers shows that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may also be in danger of melt that would raise sea levels. (Image courtesy NASA Goddard)
At the same time, a new study from PIK scientists suggests that the glaciers which serve as the outlet for the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet might melt, effectively unplugging the passages that hold the ice sheet in place. Schellnhuber said, “If global warming removes that plug, there could be an unstoppable flow of ice into the ocean.”
New research from NASA announced this week suggests that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have been so destabilized. Schellnhuber points out that the countries that will experience the greatest impacts of sea level rise—primarily in the tropics—contributed the least to the problem.
A moral issue
Many researchers at both IIASA and PIK work closely with policymakers to help define the costs and benefits of climate action. But Schellnhuber argued that only a social movement will provide the push that policymakers need in order to support strong action. When he talks to heads of government, he said, they listen to what he has to say. But without broad support, they cannot or will not act.
“I think it is a moral issue in the end. People have to decide whether they want to do something,” he said. “The older I get and the more I learn about the challenges, the more I think this is the only way.”
References
Tang, Q, Zhang X, Francis JA. (2014). Extreme summer weather in northern mid-latitudes linked to a vanishing cryosphere. Nature Climate Change 4, 45–50 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2065
Levermann, A., Bamber, J., Drijfhout, S., Ganopolski, A., Haeberli, W., Harris, N.R.P., Huss, M., Krüger, K., Lenton, T., Lindsay, R.W., Notz, D., Wadhams, P., Weber, S. (2012): Potential climatic transitions with profound impact on Europe – Review of the current state of six ‘tipping elements of the climate system’. Climatic Change 110 (2012), 845-878, [DOI 10.1007/s10584-011-0126-5]
Joughin, I, Smith BE, Medley B. (2014) Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Underway for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica. Science. 10.1126/science.1249055
Rignot E, Mouginot J, Morlighem M, Seroussi H, and Scheuchl B. (2014) Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011. Geophysical Research Letters. DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140
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