A verdict on Planet under Pressure

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

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Planet Under Pressure is over. We’ve heard from eminent sociologist Antony Giddens about the ineffective, virtual world of conferences; we’ve heard from technology policy specialist Nigel Cameron about the scientific bubble that has no purchase on the real world. Did PuP, as we came to call it, have ‘cling’ power?

Did the plane fares, the carbon offset fees, the daily lives left in suspension, the mammoth, expensive, conference apparatus, merit the effort — or could it all have been better directed, as one senior delegate argued , towards actually tackling environmental problems?

Most commonly used words in questions asked during the first three plenaries of the conference
Planet Under Pressure

Some over-used words at the meeting no longer have ‘cling power’ with me. I apologise for this but words like ‘engagement’, ‘governance’, ‘value-change’ and ‘empowerment’ slide off my tired consciousness leaving nothing behind.

But, because of this, one of the delights of this conference was the way in which social scientists offered routes away from these increasingly empty terms. Their presentations helped explain why scientists are modern-day Cassandras – accurately prophesying doom (and, in their case, repeatedly prescribing engagement, governance and empowerment) — but destined never to be heeded.

Values don’t just change to order: scientists have to be a bit more sophisticated than that. This was made compellingly clear by sociologist Kari Marie Norgard. She presented a mind-boggling (to a humble science reporter) analysis of personal, cultural and social attitudes to climate change based on the nested theory of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

She convincingly demonstrated that the climate change message is so damaging to our perceptions of ourselves, on all three levels, that it is no wonder we ignore it.

From Richard Wilkinson there was the insight that some values do alter with the changing level of equality in society. From governance expert Oran Young, we saw that common crises (World War II, the Great Depression) can drive bickering nations into new ways of governing themselves at a global level. This linked with a call from panellist Pamela Collins for a ‘global patriotism’ – a kind of wartime footing that would bring out the collective best in us and see us acting for the global good.

And the insight from several sub-captains of industry (including oil company Shell and UK waste company Viridor) seemed to be: don’t bother with complex, value-changing engagement strategies – slap the right tax on us and we will innovate our way in a new, greener direction.

I wonder if the social scientists picked up similarly illuminating titbits from the natural sciences. Surely this meeting has been a success in fostering links between them (in addition, of course, to Future Earth – the vast, tangible conference outcome).

When I asked a number of senior organisers, before the meeting, how I would know if it had been a success or not, they all told me that its uniqueness (which lay mostly in its interdisciplinarity) meant it was already a success, simply by existing.

More formal negative and positive analyses will emerge over the next months (and see our final news story here). But for me, at least, it did shed light on why scientists’ exhortations fail and what might begin to solve the problem.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

An informal moment with Lidia Brito

Luisa Massarani
Latin America regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

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Last day of the conference… I was in the press room, very tired, thinking on what to write about, when the lovely and smiling Lidia Brito came into the room. Not even showing how tired she should be as co-chair of this conference…

We start talking in Portuguese – a Mozambique Portuguese much near of my Brazilian Portuguese than the one spoken in Portugal… I asked: “So Lidia, what next?”

Basically, the idea is to keep the level of engagement reached for this conference aiming to sensitize the negotiators of Rio+20. Next month, for example, a side event will be hold in New York, during the round for discussing the Rio+20 document.

Lidia Brito

In June, a five-day Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development will be held prior to the Rio+20, organised by the International Council for Science (ICSU), UNESCO, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, the International Social Science Council, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Both meetings aim to join different stakeholders and keep sensitizing the negotiators of Rio+20. But… how much the scientific community is in fact being heard during the negotiations?

According to Lidia, the hopes are high – same feeling expressed by Alice Abreu, ICSU Regional Coordinator for Rio+20 as a chat we had in Brazil a couple of weeks ago.

Both of them believe that the scientific community movements are being able to influence already the negotiations, as – they say – expressed in parts of the draft document.

“I think we will make the difference, but we still have a long way to go”, said Lidia.

“We are learning how to work differently, much more collaborative, in an inter and multidisciplinary way and we need to be prepared to answer the new scientific questions that are to be presented”, she believes.

Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development 

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

What could a sustainable development council look like?

Mićo Tatalović
Deputy news editor, SciDev.Net

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The idea of a Sustainable Development Council, a new body within the UN system that would have the power to make decisions on environment and sustainable development globally, started getting some flesh on it.

The Planet Under Pressure conference this week (26–29 March) heard from Norichika Kanie, a researcher from Tokyo Institute of Technology who presented findings from ‘World Cafes’ – focused discussion groups – known as Hakone Vision on Governance for Sustainability in the 21^st Century.

The participants agreed that the current issues and political dynamics were different now to 1945 when the UN was founded, and that governance will require “transformative reforms with clear vision”.

Rio+20 conference offers an opportunity to start this process, they said.

The key conclusions were that aspirations need to be clearly defined; actors need to be broadened for “accountable participation and solutions from people for people”, and the institutional architecture needs re-building.

Any new institutions will need to be properly funded and have authority and capacity to address compliance and implementation of their decisions, but also be accountable, transparent and adaptable to fast-changing global circumstances.

The process also identified the Sustainable Development Council as one of the most noteworthy proposals for restructuring governance.

But the idea needs further research and deliberations that should be set in motion at Rio+20, Kanie said. Its mandate and charter could be similar to that of the WHO, so it can govern over environmental crises, too.

Its membership should include primary states which have a capacity to contribute through various forms of capital (e.g. natural of financial), rotating member-states which are most affected by the issues on the table, and non-state actors. This could help form a more inclusive governance, both in terms of including developing countries and non-state actors, Kanie believes.

Kanie told SciDev.Net that he hoped there will be more involvement from developing countries, especially in Asia, at a follow-up conference in Japan in January 2013: Earth System Governance Tokyo Conference: Complex Architectures, Multiple Agents.

How to make business environmentally ingenious

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

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A plea against bureaucracy when designing ways of getting businesses to be greener was made by Colin Drummond, chief executive of a UK waste company, Viridor, one of the few industry representatives to address the plenary sessions.

“Bureaucracy prevents new ideas coming forward,” he said, and gave a compelling example.

He contrasted the environmental footprint of the UK’s water industry with that of its waste industry.

Tax on landfill in the UK has seen a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.

“But we have achieved it at the cost of a huge increase in carbon dioxide emissions – and is the system robust enough to cope with future droughts?” he asked.

In contrast, with the waste industry there was “no bureaucratic approach” he said. There was just a tax on every tonne of waste that went to landfill.

Making landfill too expensive drove ingenuity, with the result that waste handling in the UK has seen a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions; a five fold increase in recycling; a six fold increase in renewable energy generation … and a profit for shareholders.

The argument that incentives work better than regulation was also put forward by Shell’s Martin Haigh, whose reception on Day One we covered here.

“If there was a global price on carbon that would transform the incentives for Shell,” he said

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Why egalitarian societies have more cyclists

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

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The more unequal a society is, the fewer cyclists it has.

This turned out to be a useful insight which, after it was put to the Tuesday plenaries, was referred to by conference speakers again and again.

It was useful because it helped people to think of ways to move beyond the impossible invocations of many scientists here, repeated endlessly at this meeting, that the only way to save the planet is to “change societal values” and “reduce consumption”.

Low status?

Richard Wilkinson, professor at the University of Nottingham, UK, and expert from the world of inequality research, told us there is a growing wealth of data showing that more unequal societies are, regardless of the overall national wealth, more fraught with health and social problems ranging from obesity to violence.

“Inequality is divisive and corrosive. The data show us that that is truer than we ever expected,” he said.

Here’s where the cyclists fit in: they tend not to come out in societies where your position is in a steep hierarchy, and thus the symbols of status you project, are important. Cyclists are also less common when you need to defend yourself against the weak. In both cases a flashy four-wheel drive vehicle is a better option for those who can afford it.

That’s why greater inequality  leads to greater consumption, argued Wilkinson, as people aspire to climb the hierarchy, acquire status and protect themselves from those beneath them.

And that, in turn, is why reducing inequality may be the route to reducing consumption.

Wilkinson also said that people (and businesses) in more equal societies are more public-spirited and thus more likely to act according to the greater environmental interest.

The previous day, doctoral student Pamela Collins called for a ‘global patriotism’ – the kind of sentiment that has pulled communities together during times of war – as a route to rising above individual interests to halt Earth’s environmental decline.

So is tackling societal inequality, therefore, the first step?

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Is geoengineering a lot of hot air?

Joel Adriano
South-East Asia & Pacific regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

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Geoengineering was described as a “pretty scary” idea by scientists who have been assessing its ramifications said Ben Kravitz, Carnegie Institute for Science. He has been studying the idea of mimicking the cooling effect of  large volcanic eruptions on climate. This could be done by continually pumping sulphates into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from earth.

Could we mimic this volcano?
Flickr/kahunapulej

He tested two scenarios — releasing suphates at the lowest layer, the troposphere, or the highest,  into space. Both cases carried the risk of serious unintended consequences.

Geoengineering is a highly controversial concept since it involves large-scale deliberate manipulation of the planet to remove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. Some of the techniques, such as solar radiation management, are meant to reduce the warming effects of carbon dioxide.

Kravitz said the first idea, put forward in 1977, was to pump carbon dioxide into the deep ocean.

Colin Axon, of Brunel University in the UK, explained that issues included cost (energy, people and investments), materials, process, water and space (land and distribution).

Margaret Torn, head of the Climate and Carbon Sciences Program at Berkeley National Laboratory, US, who studied carbon carbon dioxide removal by terrestrial ecosystems, found that the disadvantages outweighed the advantages if the landscape was altered, for example by intensively planting trees where there used to be none.

But, she said the study showed that “there can be ways to manage land to increase carbon sequestration”.

“There are lots of grey areas in geoengineering” — and so far she said, very few researchers have actually came up with compelling research.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Just how inclusive is ‘Future Earth’?

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

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Future Earth is a vast plan to draw together the big international global change research programmes, and funders, together, to deliver, as ICSU president Yuan Tseh Lee (interviewed here) says, “action-oriented research that society really needs”.

Anyone uneasy at how pratical, inclusive and nimble this behemoth of a collaboration can be (read our latest story on Future Earth here) was invited to a Town Hall session last night, to quiz Future Earth’s behemoth of a transition team.

One worry was how Future Earth would ensure it didn’t just “recycle basic knowledge and not actually be able to generate action”.

The reply was that, as agencies like UNEP are part of the collaboration, it would be forced to stay “action-oriented”.

But most of the questions probed just how inclusive this project, which aims to include just about everyone in setting its research goals and implementing them, will really be. The most upset member of the audience was a biological scientist who felt Future Earth was being driven by the climate and geosciences communities. Emphatically not, said the panel — we have DIVERSITAS, the biodiversity people, on board for a start.

Also: yes – there would be engineers; yes — humanities (there’s an environmental historian on the team); yes – a goal is to recruit and empower scientists from developing countries; yes – social scientist involvement is absolutely critical.

But it’s proving hard, said a member of the transition team, to persuade the last group to join.

There was really only one question that stumped the team: How will you know if you have succeeded?

The team had no answer to this question of metrics, which could be problematic if soliciting funds from outcome-obsessed funders like the UK’s Department of International Development.

But it felt like Future Earth has won the greater argument – that researchers need, urgently, to find out what the outside world needs from them and then pool their frames of reference to deliver it.
This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Community-based adaptation: can it be a solution?

Bothina Osama
Middle East & North Africa regional news editor, SciDev.Net

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Terry Cannon, Institute of Development Studies, UK

“Community-based” is the keyword for any solution you may think of on local level, this is how Terry Cannon, a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK described his view in finding a way to improve the integration of disaster risk management (DRM) with climate adaptation, in the context development.

Cannon pointed out that these three issues are difficult to separate, “if we are putting plans for development we have to work on disaster risk reduction, and this will lead us to climate adaptation”, so the three issues have to intersect in many junctures.

He maintained that the link between DRM and adaptation to climate change has improved in the last five years but the problem is that they are not linked to development, nor are the funds. The agencies operating at the community level especially NGOs, and the donors that support them, still find it difficult to integrate work on adaptation and on disaster risk reduction with development.

Therefore as community-based adaptation and community-based disaster risk management expand rapidly with adaptation funds flow in larger quantities, there is a danger that separate silos will continue with a lack of clarity of where funding will fit.

Cannon raised that community assumed to be valid locus of interventions, but the continued mismatch between people’s priorities and DRM have to stop, and culture and belief systems that are still largely ignored have to be engaged.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Animation engages young people in ocean issues

Luisa Massarani
Latin America regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

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The need to engage the public in the ocean acidification issue — an increasing concern in scientific debates — is evident. But finding ways of attracting the attention of audiences can be tricky, highlighted a session on oceans at Planet Under Pressure 2012.

A project carried out by the European Project on Ocean Acidification and the UK Plymouth Marine Laboratory is an example of good practice.

Students from the Ridgeway School (Plymouth, UK) were commissioned to produce an animation film to explain the issue to young people.

The students talked to scientists and conducted their own research in the school and National Marine Aquarium. They were involved in the whole process of animation, including giving voice to the film’s characters.

The result was “The another CO2 problem”, a creative 8-minute animation film, which was awarded with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Bill Bryson Prize.

There is no doubt how beautiful the film is and how important the experience was for the kids — who probably will not forget what ocean acidification means but also had a lot of fun! It is also an opportunity to raise the curiosity of other young people to the issue.

But a closer look at the film highlights the fact that the language does not make some of the main scientific concepts clear. This is the case, for example, when formulas or phrases are used that are more at home at a conference for scientists such as Planet Under Pressure.

This raises the point that although climate change is abstract and more difficult to understand, ocean acidification can be much more visual and concrete to understand. Another example of video that succeeds in making clear what happens with the oceans was created by the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, in San Diego (United States). Although clearer, it certainly doesn’t have the charm of the Plymouth animation!

Check on Youtube:

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

The Matrix and the virtual world of conferences

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

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It was refreshing to hear a talk from Anthony Giddens, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, in the UK. After the railings of scientists, someone who can throw some light on why their prophecies fall on deaf ears is always welcome.

Green illusion: the parallel world of "The Matrix" mimicks the relationship between the conference and the world outside, suggested UK social scientist Anthony Giddens

Giddens invoked the film, The Matrix, to illustrate what he sees as two parallel and unrelated worlds: there’s the world of international conferences and then there’s real life, which continues, unabated, on its disastrous paths.

“When you look at those negotiations as they unfold,” he said, referring to events such as the climate change negotiations in Durban in November 2011, “to me they exist in a sort of simulated world where success is determined in terms of how far you keep the negotiations going.

“Then there’s the real world where things look very bleak.

For example, he said, “for all the talk of the green economy and green growth, there is not a single green economy in the world”.

Giddens is pinning any remaining hopes he has on other fora — “states, groups of states, regional agreements”.

“I hope that developing countries might play a bigger role as leadership countries.

And he is also hopeful for networks – of cities, of youth, of ‘transition towns’.

These, to adapt a saying of the Beatles star John Lennon, are where life is happening while the conferences are busy making other plans.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.