Mar 19, 2015 | IIASA Network, Sustainable Development
By Joost Vervoort, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
“Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture.” Donella Meadows
In the face of increasing human pressures on the planet, in a time that is now described as the Anthropocene, the need to finding pathways toward a sustainable and just global future is critical. In 2015, the world’s nations agree on a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – aiming to subscribe to a global narrative on a desired future of human development in all its dimensions.
Vervoort, center, speaks with Tanzanian policy makers at a workshop organized as part of CCAFS’ PACCA project (Policy Action for Climate Change Adaptation). The scenarios used in this workshop were developed with regional stakeholders and quantified by IIASA’s GLOBIOM model and IFPRI’s IMPACT model. Photo Credit: E. van de Grift
The World in 2050 project aims to support the vision of the SDGs by quantifying it and assessing its feasibility through model simulations covering a range of development and environmental dimensions. The goal is to use top science to show that a better world is possible, and explore what transformations and trade-offs are needed to achieve that future. The world’s top modelling groups on population, energy, food, water, technology and other sectors have been invited to join forces for this project.
At a first meeting at IIASA in Laxenburg from 10 to 12 March 2015, the project organizers brought together world-leading modelling teams as well as representatives of global organizations like the OECD, the IMF, the Global Environment Facility and the World Energy Council. A number of us also had experience with using future scenarios for policy and strategy development.
The meeting had two purposes: to outline a way forward for the project, and to allow modelling teams to update each other on their most recent work. Excellent presentations on many dimensions of global change led many to believe that the combination of these modelling efforts would be able to provide a strong exploration of the feasibility of the SDGs. Recommendations were also made to find ways to integrate highly relevant, but not easily quantifiable, dimensions of human development, such as conflict, governance, cultural and value changes and issues of gender inequality. Other challenges that were highlighted had to do with the fact that the future is fundamentally uncertain, and systems models can have difficulty anticipating the impacts of future drivers that are not part of the current scope of concern. The solution to such challenges can be a reflexive approach to integrating model simulation and qualitative information, such as stories about future pathways, that can try to take such dimensions and uncertainties into account and also make clear what they don’t capture.
The launch workshop for the World in 2050 project involved researchers from a number of key institutions. Credit: Matthias Silveri / IIASA
What I saw as perhaps the key conversation in the meeting, however, is one that characterizes many discussions about how to productively engage with the challenges of the future. Is it better to build one unifying vision, or to develop many different future scenarios from the perspectives of a wide range of actors? In the context of the World in 2050 project, developing a single, quantified vision for the SDGs has the benefit of harnessing the power of the best global change research to create a powerful, deeply examined notion that a better world is possible, supported by the voices of global-level organizations. An alternative approach that we discussed was to engage regional and national decision-makers first and build and quantify a diversity of visions and pathways from the perspectives of these actors. The benefit of this approach is that national and regional decision makers may be more likely to perceive this quantitative visioning as useful, and that there is space for and ownership of diverse notions of a better future based on different sets of values.
The leaders of the World in 2050 project took these considerations into account and proposed a way forward: focus on a single global, quantified vision first, to kick-start dialogues about the feasibility of a transformative future at the global level by providing top-level science. Jeffrey Sachs, as one of the project leaders, argued that the SDGs will already involve many interactive processes that allow for a diversity of ideas and conversations at national and regional levels on how to achieve these goals; and that rather than trying to support all SDG-related work, the World in 2050 project would have the most complementary value if it provided its clear, quantified global vision first. Then, a next phase of the project will be to connect to global regions and to national-level processes and find out how the insights from the project can be used. Many of us in the meeting indicated that we have strong networks at regional and national levels that can support this phase. From the beginning of the global modelling project, Sachs and colleagues already envision a strong need to have regional diversity in the analysis, to make sure its results are relevant at that level.
”Also clear from the discussions was that this vision should not just be aimed at policy makers, but that it should speak powerfully to people in all walks of life. Widespread public support for such a vision could be a strong contributor to political momentum. Several speakers referred to the impact of the 1972 “Limits to Growth” study, which, though controversial, stimulated thinking and action around environmental change and sustainability worldwide. Innovative communication approaches that powerfully engage people with the vision will be crucial – if future visions can be made real in an experiential sense, they have a much stronger chance of changing behavior and decisions.
Collaborations across international networks
The World in 2050 project plans to build on the excellent simulation-based work on transformation pathways toward SDGs done by the Dutch Environment Assessment Agency.
It will be very interesting to see the global vision take shape and to help connect it to regional and national action and strategy. With IIASA colleagues from the GLOBIOM team, the CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security program is helping decision makers in Africa, Asia and Latin America develop better policies using socio-economic and climate scenarios, and from our experience, working with future pathways that are inspiring as well as feasible is very attractive to governments and other actors.
Other interactions with complementary projects can be explored – for instance, the “Bright Spots – Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” project takes an opposite, bottom-up approach to future visioning – collecting local “seed” practices with global, transformative potential and combining them to foster dialogues about a better Anthropocene. A similar process for bottom-up transformation pathways on the future of food in Europe also involves IIASA researchers.
References
Meadows, Donella, J. Randers and D. Meadows. Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972.
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.
Aug 27, 2014 | Energy & Climate, Poverty & Equity
By Narasimha D. Rao, IIASA Energy Program
Many people associate raising living standards in developing countries with increases in greenhouse gas emissions. But would improving access to basic needs—such as water supply and nutrition to poor households in Africa—have the same impact on climate change as increasing affluence—people moving to the suburbs, buying bigger homes, and buying cars?
New research that we published this week shows that in fact, it may take fewer emissions to raise the poor’s basic living standards than it does to grow affluence. If this is the case, then progressive development policies may well support climate mitigation. Our new study suggests that climate research needs to focus on how countries’ emissions growth relates to the services people are provide. This could change how we think about development, and influence how we approach the Paris climate negotiations in 2015 – a milestone many view as the last chance for international cooperation to guide humanity onto a safe path of climate stabilization.
Usripur, India. Photo Credit: Rajashree Khalap
There are many reasons why researchers have stumbled when thinking about poverty eradication and climate change mitigation. First, poverty is itself a debated concept. Much of the development community has moved beyond thinking of poverty just as income. We now include measures of other deprivations for example food, health, and education. But metrics abound, many of which are hard to quantify and aggregate. Second, the climate research community has yet to catch up on this shift when linking growth to human-induced greenhouse gases. Countries’ growth pathways in climate scenarios are still represented solely in terms of GDP, which doesn’t say much about how that wealth is distributed or access to basic living standards. Third, data on the multiple dimensions of poverty are hard to come by, particularly for poor countries where they are needed most.
In our new study, we used available data on well-recognized poverty indicators – adequate nourishment, water supply and sanitation and electricity access – to relate countries’ growth over time to these indicators and to emissions. We found that while countries’ GDP has grown largely in proportion to emissions, access to these basic needs has grown in the majority of developing countries without proportionate emissions increases. Furthermore, in a handful of countries (such as Costa Rica, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and others) over 90% of the population have access to these basic needs with total emissions of less than five tons of CO2 equivalent per capita, which is well below the world average of 6.3 tons per capita.
Hyderabad, India. Photo Credit: Dave Wilson via Flickr
Much more research is needed before we can assess whether other countries can raise living standards with low carbon emissions growth. Indeed, increased energy access is a primary driver of greenhouse gas growth, and the energy needs of basic human development aren’t well understood, although we have begun to characterize economy-wide energy needs besides providing modern energy to homes. Countries with different fuel endowments and climate may require different energy and emissions to achieve the same progress in human development.
Understanding the climate impacts of poverty alleviation can be useful for international climate policy. One can identify opportunities and challenges for basic human development within the limited carbon space available if we are to keep global average temperature rise within 2-3 degrees C. Second, it can offer a way to differentiate mitigation efforts among developing countries by recognizing and quantifying emissions associated with basic needs. The lack of a successful agreement on other efforts-sharing regimes over the last twenty years gives cause to chart new directions.
References
Rao, ND, Riahi K, and Grubler A. 2014. Climate impacts of poverty eradication. Nature Climate Change. 4,749–751 doi:10.1038/nclimate2340
Rao, ND, P. Baer. 2012, Decent living emissions: a conceptual framework. Sustainability 4 (4), 656-681. doi:10.3390/su4040656
Rao, ND. 2013. International and intranational equity in burden-sharing agreements for climate change mitigation. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Diplomacy, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp 129-146. doi:10.1007/s10784-013-9212-7
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.
Mar 12, 2014 | IIASA Network, Science and Policy
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network is an expert on economics, development, and sustainability, and a founding member of IIASA and European Forum Alpbach’s Global Think Tank, which is holding its first meeting in Laxenburg this week.
On Wednesday, 12 March Sachs will give a public lecture on the topic at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
Jeff Sachs speaks at the Alpbach Forum in 2013. Photo Credit: European Forum Alpbach
IIASA: Your work spans a large area of research: from economics, to Earth science, to sustainable development. What is the common thread that ties all this together?
JS: The common thread is the challenge that we face on the planet. We can no longer separate economic, environment, and social challenges because we find that if we try to pursue any one of those alone, we end up jeopardizing the others.
For too long, economists have focused simply on economic growth, and clearly that strategy by now has put Earth and humanity at great peril. There’s no shortcut anymore. We have to be able to combine a vision that includes all the major dimensions of the complicated global reality that we face. Economics, divided societies, environmental crises, and rapidly changing geopolitics. It’s not simple to integrate all of these different areas. Our traditional intellectual disciplines do not accomplish that.
IIASA has been one of the world’s leading champions of this kind of integrated vision. Systems thinking applied to massive human problems, bringing together very diverse areas of natural science, social science, and I would say ethical considerations as well. This kind of holistic approach is central to IIASA’s whole strategy. That’s one of the reasons I’m so proud of my connection to the Institute.
What do you see as the biggest problems facing our planet?
We have become an enormously crowded and interconnected global society overnight, because of the technological reach of our economies and because of the remarkable growth of the world’s population during the last century. With 7.2 billion people on the planet now, we are putting vast parts of the biosphere and human well-being at dire risk. We are only slowly waking up to this reality.
All of history, humans have faced local challenges, but we have never faced such a confluence of massive global challenges at the same time. We don’t yet have the institutions, the insight, or the moral outlook to handle this set of challenges, and yet they are bearing down on us very fast.
In your lecture you’ll argue that it is realistic to think we could solve many of these challenges, for example, ending extreme poverty. What would need to be done to accomplish that goal, and why do you think it can be done?
When one thinks about the challenge of ending poverty you quickly realize that while the challenge is great, we also have unique positive opportunities. With the revolutions in communications technology, communities that until five years ago were isolated, impoverished, and with little prospect of escaping from poverty are now connected to global information, as well as to local markets and health clinics. Schoolchildren can get access to the world of information online. Finance has come to rural areas through mobile banking. All of these are examples of the kinds of breakthroughs that are now possible in addressing what have been extraordinarily tough problems of poverty.
We also see the poverty rate coming down now at an unprecedented speed, even in some of the poorest places on the planet. Major advances have been achieved in East Asia during the past quarter century, and increasingly, Africa too is now finally turning the corner on extreme poverty. I have argued that we could mobilize technologies and use directed investments in public health, education, infrastructure, and agriculture to make a decisive breakthrough within our generation.
In my book, “The End of Poverty,” I said that by 2025 we could end extreme poverty. I am afraid that the date is slipping a little because of the lack of concerted effort, but it’s notable for me and gratifying that the World Bank this past year adopted formally the goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030. And I believe that the United Nations member states will also adopt such a goal next year when they create the new Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs.
There are two huge risks that could absolutely defeat this possibility. One is the still greatly excessive population growth in some of the world’s poorest countries. The second is climate change, which left out of control will devastate large parts of the world including regions where many of the world’s poorest people live, for instance the arid regions of the world.
What about climate change? Do you think it’s really possible, at this point, to limit climate change to the internationally agreed target of 2 degrees?
I believe that we are at the very last chance to reach that goal. We have cliff ahead of us, with a sign that says, “Do not go beyond this point.” This point is the 2 degrees centigrade limit. We know from all the physical evidence and all the economic trends that we’re just within a hair’s width of exhausting the possibility of meeting that goal. And I worry that if we fail to achieve that goal we are going to slide very far and very fast down the mountainside, as it were. The world is negotiating a climate agreement in Paris in December 2015, and I believe that’s the very last chance to achieve the 2 degree centigrade goal.
I am not especially optimistic, but I don’t think that all is lost yet. Much depends on a much greater seriousness in the next year and ten months than we have shown in the last 22 years since the climate treaty was adopted.
Your lecture is entitled “The Age of Sustainable Development” what do you mean by that term? Why is now the time to be thinking about these topics?
I argue that we have entered an era when the concept of sustainable development has become the necessary concept for our time. When I say sustainable development, I mean on the analytical side the integrated vision of economic, social, and environmental dynamics; and on the normative side the shared goals of economic prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. I believe that we have a reasonable chance that this will be formally recognized by the UN member states in 2015, when they formally adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals.
My talk in Vienna is about why the concept of sustainable development is so important, and what it means. It’s not a household phrase, and I think there is a tremendous amount of public education that will be needed to understand what the opportunities are and what the threats that we face in this generation are. My basic point is that every generation faces its distinct challenges and sustainable development is our distinct challenge.
What do you see as the role for researchers and for institutions like IIASA in solving these global challenges?
I believe that these problems are inherently complex because they are about managing interconnected complex systems. There’s nothing simple about the world economy, nothing simple about global social dynamics, and nothing simple about interconnected Earth systems. And yet we have to master the risks that attend to each of those and the interconnections among them. It’s quite obvious in that regard that IIASA has a unique role to play. IIASA has been in the forefront of climate modeling, demographic modeling, and agricultural modeling for many years. I’ve been a huge admirer of the Institute’s work, and I look forward to working more closely with IIASA in the future.
I’ve been tasked by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with helping to organize a global network of problem solving on sustainable development. This initiative is called the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). IIASA will be a very important member and I would say leader of that effort, and IIASA’s Director General, Pavel Kabat, is a member of the leadership council of the SDSN. We have already begun to strategize on this with Pavel Kabat, IIASA Deputy Director General Nebojsa Nakicenovic, and many of IIASA’s world class researchers. There’s a tremendous timely opportunity to work with governments around the world and work with the United Nations to help identify safe pathways ahead.
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