Week 11: Moving Towards Global Sustainability Within Biophysical and Social Boundaries - Post 1

Week 11 - Moving Towards Global Sustainability within Biophysical and Social Boundaries - Notes

"You can't solve problems with the same mindset that created them" - Einstein 

Lecture 1 – Existing Structures of Global Governance – Dr. Victor Galaz

-So essentially governance in this setting is a much more messy and complex interaction between state and non-state actors at the global level. And it's not about creating a one static body on decision making in a world government. 

-So more international environmental agreements and more actors, those are two critical trends. One of the biggest debates within my community is what the impacts of these trends are. And one general conclusion from my community is that this sort of increased density of agreements and actors have created fragmentation and segmentation. So essentially you get different layers of decision making that become practically decoupled from each other; you lack coordination, and you lack a system's overview to tackle the sort of challenges we're facing.

-And gridlock is a phenomena where you have an increasing number of global challenges but where nation-states are not able to agree on something tangible to address these stresses. So essentially you get more actors involved in more roles, but each of these actors also have veto power, so essentially they are not able to get to a point where they manage to create effective institutions to address critical challenges.

-One of the things that we find interesting though is that it's not only chaos and anarchy at the international arena with all these messy institutions. Actually what we see are emerging patterns of collaboration, information sharing, experimentation, of attempts to navigate this combination of complexity in the problem, essentially in the Earth system, and complexity in the social institutional system. So we see this pattern of networks emerging.
-At you see increased fragmentation over time, but also complexity in terms of institutions and actors linking to each other in very complex ways. And sometimes these create processes of gridlock, essentially the number of challenges are increasing over time and becoming more severe, but the landscape of actors and institutions is so complex that actors are not able to come to robust agreements on how to deal with those challenges. [Gridlock – Complexity – Fragmentation]

Lecture 2 – New and Emerging Perspectives on Global Governance – Dr. Victor Galaz

-So what are some ways by which we can modify global environmental governance to better cope with the challenges of the future?

1) Deep Institutional Reform: I would call deep institutional reform. And deep institutional reform builds on the idea that if you manage to reform critical pillars of global environmental governance then you would create an architecture that's better able to deal with these challenges.
Example: One would be that you need to reform the United Nations Environmental Program. So you would reform and upgrade the UNEP, as it's called, and give it a bigger mandate, better resources, and better capacities to coordinate the fragmented setting up of international institutions. And the idea would be that if you change the voting rules in these bodies then you would get faster decision making and it would become more ambitious.

2) Network Revolution: Another school of thought or another stream within this community would be to focus less on institutional reform but more to strengthen networks. And that mode of thinking I would call network revolution. So essentially you would say no, it's impossible to move ahead with institutional reform, it's very difficult to get all these countries to agree on something tangible, so let's focus on strengthening partnerships that exist between states, or between public and private actors.
-Let's focus on allowing fewer number of countries to create more ambitious goals, for example within climate policy, and have them create benefits for themselves and then hoping that that club will expand over time. So that's the club approach. And the idea is that these modes of more network polycentric governance are more flexible, they're more apt to changing circumstances, they're better able to cope with complexity, and they can expand over time essentially.

3) Legal Transformation: There's a third stream that I find interesting that focuses more on law. And that stream I would call legal transformation. And the idea there would be that you would create different interpretations of existing law in ways that would push us towards sustainability, essentially redefining international human rights law, for example, or creating some sort of planetary boundaries declaration.

-And one interesting observation within this community is that these sort of norms, for example, to protect the environment, or a norm around stay within planetary boundaries, can evolve nonlinearly, meaning that you will have actors lobbying for that sort of change for a long time but nothing happens, but then suddenly you see a nonlinear change, so suddenly it becomes from something being discussed just amongst a small group of people to something that suddenly becomes a global institutional norm.

4) Global Citizenship: And then the fourth stream in this focuses more on citizen and participation, global democracy, cosmopolitan democracy. And the idea here, and the assumption here is that we're getting into these processes of gridlock, we're not able to agree at the international level, because people are not being part of decision making. Decision making is happening behind the scenes, in small groups, in small clubs, with limited insights from citizens. And the idea would be here to reform international organizations in a way that allowed for wider participation from citizens, civil societies, and NGOs. And the idea would be that these sort of reforms would open up decision making and create more ambitious environmental decision making at the international level.
*So just to summarize the key message in this very complex issue, I would say the takeaway message is there are multiple approaches to governance. There's no simple, quick fix solution through reformed governmental governance, there are different traditions, there are different streams, they all have different flavors in a sense. But there are also interesting combinations emerging between these different streams. And we also need to take a step back and look at these proposals, and look at the dimensions. What are the distributional implications of these proposals in terms of risks, or resources, or power? And how well do they function, not only to deal with incremental environmental stresses, but also very complex interactions between global environmental problems, some of which might be linear and some of which might be nonlinear and lead to rapid unexpected shifts?

Lecture 3 – A Shifting Development Paradigm – Professor Johan Rockstrom

-The three pillars of social, environmental, and economic development which forms the basis of our modern thinking on sustainable development,
-This three pillar approach has after all become what we could call a Mickey Mouse economy, where economy is occurring and developing at the expense of natural capital, the environment, and human capital; cheap labor and subsidized labor forces enabling hyper-consumption across the world. So let's simply agree it's time to scrap this obsolete model of separating social, environmental and economics.
-We need to set global environmental goals within which we can have economic growth and development. It also addresses, which is shown in the now famous donut model for economic growth, that if

we have a biophysical ceiling defined by planetary boundaries there must be a social floor, a floor of how we distribute the absolute amounts of remaining environmental space in a fair and just way among all citizens on Earth.
-GOAL: It might seem very utopian, but you know we're applying this kind of thinking very often in many, many other areas. In fact the history of how we have developed policies around chemicals is largely applying this kind of absolute planetary boundary thinking. Think of the Montreal Protocol when we in the mid-'80s recognized that emissions of chlorofluorocarbons were destroying our protective ozone layer. We did not take a relative policy of percentage reductions of these, uh, damaging ozone-depleting substances, we forbid them, we put a cap and we operated within a boundary.
-Integration: that as the famous Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom pointed out that one of the most exciting opportunities we have is to invest in stronger polycentric governance systems where we connect local informal institutions and collective action among engaged citizens with formal institutions across different levels of society to work from local to global, and that this actually works. We show it for water management, we show it for agriculture management, that in many parts of the world this actually can function.
-The economy should be able to grow within a planetary boundary safe operating space, what we have a bit jokingly called a planetary soufflé, meaning that the economy should be able to grow within this space.

-so many analysts are showing that yes, a global energy transformation inside a safe operating space is possible. We can envisage a low carbon world economy by mid-century, a food security transformation where we feed the world with sustainable food is possible. Yes, we need to increase food production 50% by mid-century, but through sustainable agricultural innovations a lot of evidence indicates we can feed humanity in a safe operating space.

-Two-thirds of the cities we need by mid-century are not even built yet. Let's build them in a sustainable, resilient way. Biodiversity management is increasingly shown to be both effective, economically beneficial, and builds resilience that's shown by many, many studies, for example, on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity team.

-So it's not as if a transition to a safe operating space is the dark story of doom and gloom, it seems increasingly to be the desirable, more attractive story of innovation, transformation and human prosperity.
-we will need to change lifestyles. It appears that we need to reconnect our own values with the biosphere, we need a much stronger emphasis on well being rather than just consumption, and that it actually is a shift also in our lifestyles. So it is a social, technological, and political journey we are embarking on if we truly want to endorse and kind of take in the latest science of the realities in the Anthropocene.
-It should be used as an encouragement for a new type of development, a new type of economic growth where we can meet the needs of both the poorest in the world and the aspirations of rapidly growing economies across all nations in the world, but do that in a way that both builds sustainability and resilience.

Lecture 4 – Energy- A Promising Pathway – Professor Johan Rockstrom

-For the world to develop within a safe operating space of planetary boundaries one of the grand challenges is a global transition to a renewable world energy system. This is a double challenge because it's not only about biophysically operating within a safe operating space, it's the recognition, shown in this graph, of the tight connection between energy use in the world and economic growth.

-So one simply has to recognize that if we're seriously talking about sustainable development we can not escape the fact that we need not only energy, we will need more energy in the future if we take an ethical responsibility for the wealth of a world of 9 billion people.

*But overall it shows that however you twist and turn the analysis the era of cheap oil is behind us, which may help us also as an incentive to a transition to renewable energy systems.
-And if you look at a key parameter in this regard called energy return on investment, meaning how much value do you get out for each input of investment into your extraction of energy. We have been privileged, in fact enormously privileged, of having a very large return on investments on oil over the oil era, since the early 1930s and '40s with energy returns on investment often exceeding hundred in the early days of the oil bonanza, and today moving down quickly to levels of 30 to 15.
-we're not even sure how to operate a world economy with energy returns on investments going below 10 to 15, so another reason to really explore innovative solutions in the space of renewable energy systems.
*So these are sharp reminders that the planetary boundary analysis showing the necessity to stay within a sustainable global carbon budget is coupled to the recognition also that the polluting, dirty and climate-destroying energy systems we have today are also becoming less attractive because they're becoming more and more expensive, and less and less efficient in delivering to the human endeavor of economic growth.
-Now what's the solution to this? Well, most analysts would agree today that the long-term future is a future world basically or predominantly supplied from solar energy systems. We're not there yet.
-So there's promise that this transition is not only necessary, but in fact possible to achieve at economically competitive rates, but also desirable because they provide clean energy systems with very high benefits for health and also interestingly in a much more democratic way.

Lecture 5 – The Role and Risks of Technology in the Anthropocene – Dr. Victor Galaz

-The GoldenPalace.com Titi Monkey
-One deals of course with biodiversity and how we protect biodiversity. And there's another issue related to politics of course. I mean where are we, is this a good idea should we really pull in private funding in this way? And giving – selling out naming rights in this way? And of course the third topic [is] about technology. Who would have thought 10 years ago that an online casino would have bought the rights to name this particular monkey? Now I think this really brings us to an illustration of the next generation of environmental challenges in the Anthropocene, and new governance challenges facing us.

“This is really happening, it has passed the point of no return” – The New York Times, May 12 2014

-It is currently unclear and debated to what extent the precautionary principle supports or limits experimentation with emerging technologies to address sustainability issues. While some international conventions (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity) stress the principle’s limiting powers, this interpretation has been questioned by legal scholars. They instead argue that the precautionary principle may in fact be used as an argument in favour of technological experimentation to deal with runaway environmental change. In this interpretation, the magnitude of environmental change and the risk of tipping points is considered worthy of precaution.

Lecture 6 – Cities: Challenges and Opportunities- Professor Thomas Elmqvist

-So talking about the challenges of course. Urban areas are expanding; more people live in cities than in rural areas in the world. And we also know that urban areas are expanding actually much faster than the urban population, and this is called urban sprawl. So we're consuming a lot of land.
-And this is particularly worrisome because we're also consuming a lot of prime agricultural land, which would then would have knockout effects on forests and savannahs and biodiversity in other areas. So this is something we need to deal with. But urbanization is diverse. So we have on the one hand megacities we have by now around 30 megacities in the world with a population of more than 10 million. By 2030 we will have maybe fifty. So there is a huge expansion of these really large cities. But there is also another pattern that we need to think of, and that is the most of population growth in the world the next 20 years will happen in small and medium size cities. And there's a lot of land that's going to be consumed when these cities expand and grow.
*So some of the key challenges are looking ahead with organization is that we will need more resources for a growing population, and also that when people move into cities they become more affluent, and they will increase their consumption of red meat, for example. So the dependence on land is going to increase.
Example: And just as an example, London today is requiring an area a 125 times the size of the city. And that's the size of the UK's entire productive land surface. And this dependence on land is going to increase and that's why we need to understand and manage this is a way that we could actually have a sustainable production.
-So the first point I want to make is that local governments need to address this land consumption and land management in a very active way in the future.
-25% of the world's protected area today are within 17 kilometers of a city. In 10 years it will be less than 15 kilometers.
-And Ban Ki-moon writes in the preface of this study that as he viewed it “the principal message is that urban areas must offer better stewardship of the ecosystems on which they rely.”
-Looking ahead until 2030 we could see that all the urban land we expect to have in 2030, 60% has yet to be built. There's an enormous investment ahead of us for the next two decades in all types of infrastructure. And we need to get that investment right to get on a sustainable pathway for the planet. And I would argue that this is the key for a sustainable planet, that we actually get urban development into a greening path.
Example: And just as an example the consequences of these are immense. In Europe we had a huge heat wave in 2003 and it's estimated we had 70,000 excess deaths. So how are we going to deal with urban heat waves? One way of doing it is actually to start planting trees in the city, because there is a very clear effect - cooling effect of trees. If you increase the canopy cover from 10 to 20% you would decrease the ambient temperature with anything between 3 and 8 degrees C, which is substantial.
*Combine the built environment with the living environment
-And another important challenge when we look ahead is that we will have a growth of cities and a growth of population, but the average age, or the age of this growing urban population will be there will be young people. So the majority of people living in the world and in the cities in the future will be below the age of 20. And there is a huge educational challenge here, but also opportunities. If we could find ways of engaging young people in managing, and restoring, and enjoying the living world in the urban a reaI think that's one of the most fundamental keys for a sustainable pathway.
“I think it's absolutely possible. It's just that we have to come together, sit down and say we've got to do it.”

Lecture 7 – Feeding Humanity in an Urban World – Dr. Lisa Deutsch

-More than half of the population today lives in cities. And although we are no longer an agrarian societies we are still utterly dependent on agriculture for our food. And those of us who live in cities I think are disconnected from where our food comes from and how it's made. I think we're actually disconnected from the entire process of agriculture.
-Part of this is because of global trade. Global trade lets us urban citizens consume foods from anywhere on the globe, produced far outside the city borders. And it also enables us to never actually see what's going on in agriculture production.

The Challenge: there's some unique challenges in the nexus of cities and food and sustainability. Urban dwellers do not understand agriculture production. That's the first main challenge. Second is that urban populations are wealthier. We consume more - because I'm an urban person too - and mostly though we consume differently. That 60% of new calories that we need to get, it's not just because there's going be 2 billion more people on the planet, it's because we want to eat things like meat. We eat things we eat fruit, we eat vegetables in city. That's different than the traditional more grains-based diet. The third kind of unique challenge is that there's no longer going be just local production feeding the local population. The vast majority of food production is coming from far outside the city areas. Fourth, we see changing values, cultural values, in the urban areas. With this highly networked kind of place that we live in in cities, this globalized world, has become more westernized. And these type of western diets are very different and they're resource-demanding too. And last, fifth, is that urban cities, urban areas, are engine rooms of people that drive the free market system. So when we change our diets, when we urban dwellers choose different diets, we transfer that into the market system, we're demanding different things. And that's a challenge.
*So this kind of study is useful I think because cities are going to need to manage food security by learning where in the world - what agricultural ecosystems they need to support their consumption.
-And thinking about planetary boundaries, food actually is affecting every single one, it plays a role in all of the nine planetary boundaries.
Example: For example, more than half of the mangrove areas along Thailand's coasts have been deforested to produce jumbo shrimp aquaculture. And that consumption is driven by rich consumers in the United States and Europe.
*There are many different ways, and many different things that we should be doing. I encourage you to find out what's important for you, and think about what you ate for lunch, and where it came from.