Week 2: The Big Picture - Post 1
Week 2 -The Big Picture - Notes
Introduction
Planetary boundaries-
Critical biophysical boundaries that we need to stay within
to avoid unacceptable change with serious potentially disastrous consequences
for societies.
Close to, or beyond 4 planetary boundaries:
Climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, nutrient loading
(pollution), and ocean acidification
The Challenge: We need a global transition to a sustainable
economic development, a sustainable growth and development within the safe
operating space of a stable earth system.
Anthropocene- We, human
beings, have become our own geological epoch—the Anthropocene. Where human
action is now influencing every aspect of the Earth, at a scale akin to the
great forces of nature.
There are now so many of us using so much resources, and
changing so profoundly the living ecosystems on Earth that we're disrupting the
grand cycles of biology, chemistry, and geology. Almost all of planet's
ecosystems bear the marks of our presence. Unsustainable patterns of
production, consumption, and population growth are challenging the resilience
and the stability of the planet to support human activities.
Reasons to
be optimistic-
Knowledge: We are the first generation to know that we've
become a threat to our own existence as a modern civilization. Denial and doubt
are no longer an option.
Human Adaptability: We humans are remarkably adaptable,
innovative, and good at cooperation. Scientific findings, emerging
technologies, innovations, and existing know-how implies unique opportunities for
us to embark on the most challenging and exciting journey ever. A transition to
a world that reconnects our society and well-being to the biosphere, and
generates human prosperity within safe planetary boundaries
Week 1 –
The Big Picture
Lecture 1:
Environmental Change Globalization- In real time, if someone
goes to work emitting carbon dioxide in one part of the world it has, in real
time, effects on livelihoods for other individuals in other parts of the world.
3 Pillars
of Sustainable Development: Social, economic, and ecological development but…
Redefine
Development: providing wealth, development, livelihoods, human prosperity,
within the safe, resilient life support systems on Earth.
Examples today of impacts of global environmental change on
society:
The Arab Spring is an example of how social and environmental
changes interplay at the large regional scale causing sudden, abrupt social
shifts. We have the evidence from Australia that twelve years of drought
actually affects even global food prices, and certainly policy in that part of
the world. And finally when Hurricane Sandy, one and a half years back,
suddenly veers in from the Atlantic right in over Manhattan, putting even the
Wall Street three meters underwater. A kind of a sarcastic reminder that even a
financial system is connected to the environmental system in the world.
The Great Acceleration: over just
the last 100 years, we have moved from being a relatively small world on a
large planet to a situation where we today, with a lot of empirical evidence,
can say that we've now become a large world on a small planet. And that this
shift is actually very recent, it's just over the past fifty years.
Overall: Either we
continue on an unsustainable path, or we transition into a sustainable pathway,
which we'll be defining in the following way: as human development within the
safe operating space of a resilient and stable planet. And we're excited about this
because science has advanced so much that we can now define the safe operating space
by identifying planetary boundaries.
The
Anthropocene is the proposed new geological epoch where humans are the
main driver of earth system processes (global environmental changes) at the
planetary scale. The International Stratigraphic (geological) Commission, part
of the International Union of Geological Sciences is currently reviewing the
evidence and will soon determine whether we are in the Anthropocene based on
the geological evidence. The final decision will likely be made in 2015. *2018-Anthropocene
Confirmed
Lecture 2:
The driving forces that explain why
we've ended up in this new juncture with rising global environmental risks.- And
it arises from what I've called a planetary squeeze, originating from four
different large driving forces, the so-called quadruple squeeze from the world
on planet Earth. This squeeze arises from four different areas.
Population Pressure + Affluence
Climate Pressure/Human Caused Climate Change
Ecosystem Crisis
The United
Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the first global health control of the
world's ecosystems, show very clearly that over the past fifty years we've lost
approximately 60% of the ecosystem functions and services that not only support
human well being directly, but also which regulate the capacity of the Earth
system to buffer, for example, climate change.
Surprise/ Tipping Points
Population/Affluence 
Climate Change
Ecosystem Crisis:
On ecosystems, I'm just taking one example here, which is
showing the risks of deforestation. We're learning more and more for
rainforests, and this is an example from the Amazon rainforest, that if we cut
down large tracts of rainforest, that combined with climate change, means that
we dry out the entire system. And that is very dangerous for rainforests
because the majority of the rain in rainforests is self-generated. You need a
very, very large canopy of trees, which evaporate water, self-generates
rainfall. But when you open up these systems they self-dry and can cross the
tipping point and become savannahs. So this is an example of the risks we take
because this undermines freshwater supply to big cities, it undermines the
ability to produce food, and therefore is an enormous risk with regards to
livelihoods. It also makes us lose one of the large global carbon sinks.
Tipping Points:
Finally the risk of tipping points, which is moving from this
example of a beautiful biodiverse marine coral reef system, supplying
livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people in coastal regions worldwide,
which we know today can abruptly shift over and become dead zones. For example,
triggered by long, long periods of overfishing, eutrophication, sediments from
agriculture, global warming, the system loses resilience slowly but surely,
becomes vulnerable, but then a trigger, such as a linear event means that the
whole system due to bleaching topples over and becomes permanently locked in a
desertified state.
Lecture 3:
The scientific story of the Great Acceleration:
*So this is the drama, that the Great Acceleration is based
not on theory or models, it's based on real world observations of the
exponential rise of pressures on essentially every parameter that matters for
our own human well-being.
*Warning - Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
*We are in fact the first generation to know that we're
undermining the ability of the Earth system to support human development. This
is a profound new insight.
*And this is where the real excitement arises, that
sustainable solutions exist to be able to carry out that transition.
So there's
an enormous amount of evidence to support the conclusion that we are in the
Great Acceleration, and need a great transformation.
So it's a
complex again where we need to understand in an integrated way the social,
ecological, the health, human well-being, and environmental changes we're
posing and subjecting ourselves to in this situation of a Great Acceleration.
*So the first giant that we now need to face is the
recognition that these pressures translate increasingly to risks of abrupt
tipping points that the Earth system may respond by suddenly and irreversibly
undermining the ability, for example, of forests, land areas, and oceans to
deliver to the economy. But the second giant, which is colliding right as we
speak, is something that we often underestimate. The global curves I've showed
so far, the exponential rise of pressures have at large been caused by the rich
minority on planet Earth, the 1.5 billion affluent people that have been
largely part of the Industrial Revolution and its success so far. It is now
we're going to scale with the ability of all citizens on the Earth to have a
right to development, and that adds up to a completely new magnitude of
pressures.
Key Challenges
when discussing development:
The right
for all inhabitants to have an equal access to the ecological, the remaining
ecological space in the world.
So we have this enormous challenge of a rising demand and use
of energy, that we with nine billion people increasingly affluent must increase
energy use, and at the same time we need a transition, to a world which is
largely free for emissions of carbon dioxide by mid-century to be able to stay below
2 degrees Celsius. This is the grand challenge for humanity to be able to do
this transition by bending these exponential curves in the Anthropocene.
We also have exponential curves of solutions, and, for
example, to solve one of the world's absolute largest challenges, the
transition of the world's energy system into a sustainable energy future, we
are also seeing today almost a surprisingly rapid exponential rise of adoption
of renewable energy systems. And in these graphs you see examples of data
showing the installations of solar PV systems and wind power systems just over
the past twenty years. And up until just ten years back the rises were very
slow, and now we're on an exponential rise, which actually shows that for many
economies in the world we're starting to go to scale with renewable energy systems
A simple way to estimate the overall
impact of the Great Acceleration on the global environment is via the IPAT identity,
where the impact is the aggregate of changes in population, affluence (an
indicator for consumption) and technology. The volume of
the box in
Fig. 2 depicts the overall impact
(I) and the
three axes represent
the three drivers (P, A, T). The
enormous increase in the volume of the box from 1950 to 2011 relative to the
1900–1950 period shows the
Great Acceleration. Also
evident is the change in the relative importance of the
factors. From 1900 to 1950 population, consumption and
technology had roughly equal
effects, while from
1950 to the
present increases in consumption and technology have become the dominant
factors driving environmental impact.
-TED Talk- https://www.ted.com/talks/johan_rockstrom_let_the_environment_guide_our_development
Very complete notes.
ReplyDeleteThank you, the learning is very interesting.
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