Tag: Bristol Festival of Ideas

Complex cities in an uncertain world

Posted on by janet.crompton

The Festival of Ideas have invited partners and participants in the Festival of the Future City to contribute articles on areas of work they are engaged in of relevance to the upcoming events. Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute, blogs below.

Photo by David Iliff. License CC-BY-SA 3.0

Half of the planet lives in cities. By the middle of this century, that number will rise to nearly 75%, nearly 7 billion people. The decisions we make today will dictate whether those future cities are fit for purpose, whether they are just, sustainable, vibrant, resilient and pleasant. But those decisions must navigate an increasingly perilous web of urban complexity and global uncertainty.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr famously said,

‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,’ 

a quote that recognises and subverts the very nature of the scientific endeavour. Scientists aspire to understand something well enough that we can predict what will happen under certain conditions in the future, whether it be a chemical reaction or nuclear fission – or administering a drug or raising interest rates. In fact, prediction is the basis for all decision makers, not just doctors and engineers but mayors, CEOs, teachers and you. Whether it is predicting when you will run out of bread or predicting whether a residential parking scheme will bring about a net positive change to a congested city, we all make decisions based on what we think is about to happen or will happen if we take an action. In a simple world, we barely need to think about these things because the pattern has been reproduced numerous times or the solution will clearly address the challenge.

But we do not live in a simple world. We live in a complex world – an astonishingly complex world in which the landscape is changing faster than our ability to map it.

People are complex: our emotions, motivations, desires and fears make us notoriously (and wonderfully) difficult to understand and predict. Society is complex: our communities, whether they be geographical, historical, ethnic or religious, interact in marvellously messy ways. And most of all, our cities are complex. Beautifully, fantastically, unpredictably, frustratingly and vibrantly complex. Cities represent tens or hundreds or even thousands of years of ad hoc expansion, destruction and redevelopment; the accumulation of technological and infrastructural strata, from ancient paths, to great roads, to modern electrical grids, to smart city digital networks; and vast demographic changes including an aging population, migration, globalisation and a frightening increase in social inequality.

That is just the complexity within a city, but cities are not isolated from the rest of the world. They are nodes within a vast and increasingly complex global supply chain on which we depend for everything from our food and electricity to our culture and entertainment.

And adding yet additional layers of complexity are our global environmental and societal challenges. We are warming the planet and depleting it of vital resources. Those would be challenging enough given the complex interdependencies that now define 21st century society. Unfortunately, global warming could change our planet in ways that are unique in human history and possibly geological history. We have not experienced and our models cannot fully constrain this uncertain world. Forecasts for rainfall patterns, extreme weather events or food production are fraught with uncertainty – and by extension, so are forecasts for political insecurity and financial markets.

How does the complexity intersect and overlap, how do these systems merge, either dampening or enhancing their collective impacts? How will climate change and food insecurity, for example, exacerbate inequality? We do have tools for navigating these complex systems – ranging from cognitive shortcuts in decision making to community histories to sophisticated models. However, those are almost all based on experience, and experience loses value when the ground rules are changed. Our vast experiment with the Earth’s climate and ecosystem – making our world not just complex but complex and uncertain – makes it harder for scientists to predict the future, decision makers to plan and individuals to act with creative and empowering agency.

Of course, complexity need not be bad. Complexity and change can bring about positive challenges, shaking us out of complacency and inspiring creativity. Perhaps even more inspiring, complexity could be harnessed as a tool for connection rather than isolation. Although our interdependence makes us particularly vulnerable to conflict or instability on the far side of the planet, it also makes us all invested in one another’s lives. This also applies to the urban scale as exemplified by Bristol is Open, in which an additional layer of complexity – a publicly shared digital infrastructure managed by a smart city operating system – could generate new platforms for social cohesion. It could be a new set of cross-city linkages, a digital commons, or a shared lab for city-scale experimentation in which all of us are the scientists.

Ensuring how our complex cities thrive in an uncertain world is a rather exciting challenge that will likely require a range of solutions. During the Festival of the Future City we will explore both what it means to be a citizen in a complex city, how we navigate that complexity both on a personal and societal scale, and the new technologies that create both new challenges and new opportunities. In some cases, we should avoid unnecessary uncertainty, such as potentially devastating climate change. In others, we should harness the social and economic opportunities it presents. But in all cases, we ourselves must change. A more complex world requires a more resilient citizen or community, one that is empowered to learn, to improvise and to create.

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This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

Prof Rich Pancost

This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from the Bristol Festival of Ideas blog.

Troubled waters

Posted on by janet.crompton

Water seems like the simplest of molecules, but its complexities have enabled all life on Earth. Its high specific heat capacity allowed early aquatic life to survive extreme temperature fluctuations, its ability to dissolve a wide range of compounds means it is used as a solvent for cellular compounds, and its powerful cohesive properties allow tree sap and blood to move upwards, against the flow of gravity.

ITV science correspondent Alok Jha discussed the incredible properties of water this week as part of a Cabot Institute and Festival of Ideas talk at The Watershed, Bristol.  This was part of a promotional tour for his new book, The Water Book. He amazed the audience with where our oceans came from (ice-covered rocks pelting the Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment), the strange properties of ice (a bizarre solid that floats on its liquid), and the possibility of water and life on other planets.

It was really the universal importance of water that struck me though. As Alok discussed, water is absolutely essential not just for life, but also to enable every aspect of our lives. Its unique properties make it a critical component of almost everything we make and do. In addition to household uses like showers and toilets, the UK uses a lot of water in manufacturing, agriculture and mining, amongst other things. One report suggested that the average person’s life requires 3400 litres of water a day in the UK, with a total global requirement of four trillion litres a year.

Water is scarce

Around 2.7 billion people are affected by water scarcity worldwide. Rivers are drying up or becoming too polluted to use, climate change is altering patterns of weather around the world and mismanagement of precious sources of fresh water has led to the prediction that by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages.

You only have to read the news to see the warning signs.Agriculture is a huge business in California, using 80% of the freshwater to raise livestock and grow two thirds of the USA’s fruits and nuts. California’s climate makes it ideal for growing a range of crops, assuming they can be irrigated. A recent NY Times article revealed that it takes 15.3 gallons of water to produce just 16 almonds, 1.4 gallons of water for two olives, and a whopping 42.5 gallons of water to grow three mandarin oranges. As Alok commented, the state is literally shipping its freshwater to the rest of the world as food. California is currently in its fourth year of drought, and strict laws banning water wasting have been put into place.

Last week, Californian farmers in the deltas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers volunteered to use 25% less water, in a bid to avoid even harsher restrictions being imposed by the state government. These reductions came after uproar from Californian citizens, for whom water wastage was already illegal.

Water conflict

 

Image credit: Katie Tegtmeyer. Image used under:CC BY 2.0

In Brazil, São Paulo has been suffering through the worst drought in more than 80 years. The water supply has been restricted to just six hours per day, but millions of citizens have also had several days without running water. Tensions are beginning to rise, with protests, looting and outbreaks of violence in the city of Itu. The Guardian reported one resident as saying: “We spent four days without water, and we saw what it was like. We saw people behave like animals in our building, so imagine 20 million people”.

Imagine billions.

Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi has declared water is now more important for his people than oil. Egypt has vowed to stop Ethiopia’s construction of a dam on the Nile at “any cost”. Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam look poised to suffer from China’s continued damming of the Mekong River. Water is predicted to be used as leverage, or as the target of terrorist attacks in the future. Paul Reig, Word Resources Institute, stated,

“Water is likely to cause the most conflict in areas where new demands for energy and food production will compete with the water required for basic domestic needs of a rapidly growing population”.

What can we do about this? It’s a problem almost as complex as the molecule itself, and I certainly don’t have the knowledge or expertise required to answer. Alok suggested that the value of water could be added into the final price of our products and services, to make people aware of how much they are consuming and to think twice before wasting it.

Whatever happens, we’re going to need massive global action on a range of issues. We need to use less water to grow our food and manufacture the items we use daily, we need to prevent shared resources being selfishly used, and we need better management systems in place to prevent further pollution or loss of freshwater. Only then will we be better prepared to face uncertainties of the future and ensure everyone has enough to drink.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.
Sarah Jose

 

Bristol 2015 Student Day: Young peoples ideas for the future

Posted on by janet.crompton

The Bristol Student Day for the Bristol Festival of Ideas was all about the future. Cabot Institute director Rich Pancost opened the day with the remark: ‘This is your planet, it is no longer my generation’s’. What he says is true; young people are soon to inherit positions as policy makers, CEOs and decision makers. Student’s visions for the future may soon become a reality, so what are their visions?

Bristol 2015: Student Day at At-Bristol. Organised by Bristol Festival of Ideas

The student day was orchestrated to produce a dialogue for the University of Bristol and UWE student’s opinions on some of the planet’s greatest problems. The thoughts generated will become part of Bristol’s message to the world in at the COP21, a global sustainable innovation forum in Paris later this year.

The discussions ranged from local cycling routes to global overpopulation. The breadth of topics covered meant discussions oscillated between worldwide concerns and university-based issues.  Regardless of scale, the prevailing desire was for increased suitability for the future generations.

Bikes parked at the University of
Bristol.  Image credit: Emily Gillingham

On a university level the participants expressed discontent with the institution’s reliance on fossil fuels with many agreeing they would like to see increased investment in sustainable energy for their organisations. Financial returns from green energy may be long term but if any institution can expect longevity it’s a university- why should their energy solutions not reflect that?

Waste reduction was an additional point for local improvement with participants venturing ideas such as a ban on single use coffee cups and increased recycling opportunities on campus. There was no shortage of creative ideas, the main issue was implementation and education; how can young people convince their less green-minded peers that such schemes are essential? Food waste was of additional concern, with unanimous support for schemes such as the Bristol Skipchen. The desire to see projects such as this affiliated with the university was a common vision.

Naturally, food was an issue close to the heart of many students and discussion quickly progressed to agriculture. Organic food was considered a luxury for personal health purposes, but its environmental benefit was surprisingly contentious. Many students believed that large scale, non-organic, industrialised farming is more energy efficient and produces fewer emissions, while others believe smaller organic farms are the future of agriculture.

The boundaries of the discussion were pushed both mentally and geographically as the day progressed.  The younger generation’s global responsibilities were also high priority for discussion. Overpopulation in the developing world is putting strain on resources- how can Bristol students help? Food waste reduction was high on the list of solutions, as well as the universal need for more environmentally attractive power solutions, from the first to third world.

The enthusiasm of the participants to build a better, greener and more sustainable future made the discussion both interesting and beneficial. If there is one thing the day has shown, it’s that young people have the desire for long term solutions. After all, it is the millions of small ideas such as the ones discussed in At-Bristol that will shape the future for us all.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Further reading

Ethics and sustainability in University of Bristol catering

Sustainable waste management at the University of Bristol

Read more about all the sustainability initiatives taking place at the University of Bristol

Animals in the fraternity of universal nature

Posted on by janet.crompton

Have you read any poems about animal rights lately? Or perhaps attended a talk or exhibition on this or another environmental topic? Andrew Kelly, director of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, has aimed to inspire discussion on controversial issues for the past ten years through public lectures and commissioned art, this year focusing on the theme radical environmentalism. On 26 March Kelly himself gave a lecture entitled “Animals in the fraternity of universal nature,” where he argued that poets and other artists have been drivers of cultural discourse on radical environmental issues, and specifically on animal rights, since the time of the romantic poets. He suggests that Bristol’s exciting cultural line up for 2015 can give us inspiration as a city to improve our relationship with nature in an urban environment.

Kelly’s literary lens on the history of animal rights showed how the romantic poets, and in particular Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who the whole lecture series this year is named after) and William Wordsworth, brought a relationship with animals and philosophy of universal rights for all creatures to a mainstream audience in the 18th century. These poets represented changing times – the growth of industry, the French Revolution, and challenges to the slave trade all changed people’s perceptions of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. In addition, the increasing use of animals as pets or companions, demonstrated that animals had personality, could feel pleasure and pain, and show loyalty.

The lecture struck a difficult balance between inspiration and excitement on the one hand and depression and pessimism on the other. I’d like to believe that art really can make political change – but issues the romantic poets raised in the 1700s are still considered radical today. For example, hunting for sport was decried by the romantic poets as cruel, although at the time hunting was seen as a symbol of courage. It was not until 2004 that hunting (only with dogs) was banned in England under the Hunting Act. Today, public support of this ban stands at 76%. However, other forms of hunting, and wildlife culling, are perfectly legal.

One of the primary animal welfare issues that we face today, and that the romantic poets might never have imagined, is the growth of intensive factory farms for meat, dairy, and egg production. We also face the rapid destruction of rainforest and other habitat for wild animals for production of palm oil and livestock feed, and the rampant poaching of highly endangered rhinos for black market traditional medicines. Kelly feels that the decimation of the natural world that we see today would have greatly saddened the romantics. His pessimism about the future came through as he quoted a vision of the future from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, written in 1895:

“I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained … But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct … I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock.”

Is it possible to make cultural and political change quickly enough to stop the rampant environmental destruction and exploitation of animals that feels inevitable? Can art and discussion convert the human connection with nature into political will? As Kelly described, the romantic poets wrote about cruelty to animals with quills plucked from live geese; today, we debate the badger cull while eating hamburgers from factory farms. After 250 years, will art finally be able to bring radical environmentalism into the mainstream and into policy?

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member and PhD student Josephine Walker in the School of Biological Sciences.

My ‘Climate Shock’ from a talk by Gernot Wagner

Posted on by janet.crompton

Sadly, the climate change rhetoric can sometimes feel a bit like the announcements at an airport; a little monotonous and irrelevant. Most of us have been guilty of tuning out, turning a blind eye and continuing with our life thinking the announcement isn’t really for us; we’re getting a different flight.

Sitting down for the hour long talk by Gernot Wagner at @Bristol on Tuesday evening was a little like hearing the last boarding call when you’re at the other end of the airport in a day dream. It was a shock.

‘Climate Shock’ was an hour of uncomfortable truths and mind boggling economics. As a scientist I am regularly exposed to the raw figures: Temperature in degrees, CO2 in parts per million, mean sea level increase. Never before had I been faced with the human implications of climate change in such stark and uncompromising terms.

The talk was run by Bristol Festival of Ideas and supported by the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute and slotted in comfortably with Bristol’s position as green capital of the Europe. Gernot Wagner walked us through his recent book ‘Climate shock’, co written with Martin Weitzman. At each turn of the page (or change of the slide) there was a new, fresh perspective on the climate change debate. Instead of seeing the problem and solution in science, Wagner saw it in economics.

With the cool detachment of a mathematician, Wagner attempted to communicate the uncertainties in our climate change predictions. Despite a considerable accumulation of knowledge, we are still powerless to predict the exact effect on our fragile planet. Wagner pointed out that, should temperatures rise by 6 degrees, the effects would be catastrophic. We are only a fraction of the way down the slippery slope of temperature increase and despite an escalation in extreme weather we still aren’t digging in our heels and climbing back up. With any other predictable, large-scale disasters we work tirelessly to insure and mitigate. Why, Wagner asked, are we not doing the same for climate change?

$0.40

Using economics to convey the potential impacts, Wagner stated plainly that for every $1 we spend on CO2 producing activities, it is actually costing us $0.40 in future damages. We are already a planet in debt.

Wagner’s solution was atypical. Instead of sending us forth from the room as eco warriors, recycling like our lives depended on it, he emphasised a different message. He said the way to mitigate global warming is to harness the economic power of supply and demand.

$150

His case study was Sweden. He introduced it with a single figure: $150.

This is the Swedish tax on each ton of CO2: as the price of CO2 went up, demand went down. Now, Wagner claimed, Sweden is nearly carbon neutral. His argument is that policy is the way to save the world- far more so than individual effort.

The realism of his suggestions made his talk fascinating. For the first time I not only grasped the terrifying toll that climate change is taking, but also felt hopeful that there might be a solution. While the solution might be unpopular in our short sighted capitalist society, it is absolutely essential for maintaining long term economic stability.

The moral of the story? The best investment you will ever make is in our planet.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday – What can we learn from traditional societies?

Posted on by janet.crompton
On 27 September, Pulitzer Prize-winning polymath, author Jared Diamond, gave the first talk in the Bristol Festival of Ideas series, in conjunction with the Cabot Institute, to promote the paperback release of his new book “The world until yesterday”. The book surveys 39 traditional societies and their attitudes to universal problems such as bringing up children, treatment of the elderly and attitude to risk. The aim of the book is neither to idealise nor disparage these traditional societies, but to investigate what lessons can be learned from unindustrialised peoples.
 

Constructive paranoia

Photo©JahodaPe­tr.com (Papua Guide)
One such tribe was the Dani whom Diamond lived with while studying local ornithology in Papua New Guinea. He opened his talk with a tale of the fear and trepidation that the New Guinean tribe showed when he suggested making camp under a dead tree in the jungle. Their “constructive paranoia” – while completely at odds with Diamond’s own Western attitude – was essential to their survival in an ecosystem rife with environmental dangers. Diamond mused that not only were accidents caused by the physical environment less frequent in Western society, but the consequences were less likely to be fatal or permanently disabling, due to our healthcare system. This alters our perception of the risks associated with hazardous behaviour.
 

Perception of risk

We worry too much about dangers that do not kill many people – like terrorism, nuclear accidents, plane crashes and DNA based technologies – but are comparatively blasé about the risks of alcohol, smoking and cars. Westerners tend to overestimate the risk of things beyond our control; things that are unfamiliar; that kill many people at once or in a spectacular way, while we underestimate risks that we encounter every day but assume “It will never happen to me”. This can be demonstrated by comparing personal ratings of danger with the number of actual deaths, but this does not take into account changes in personal behaviour to protect against significant risks. Diamond recounted another tale of a tribe living in close proximity to a pride of lions. Though the risk of being killed by a lion was very real, few tribes people were actually killed due to the various precautions taken such as travelling in groups and making a lot of noise so as not to startle the lions.

 

Conflict management

Jared also briefly covered further topics from the book, such as our treatment of the elderly, whose collective wisdom and knowledge is now usurped by the rise of the world wide web. He also examines differing strategies for dealing with conflict. While in the West we concentrate on perceived wrongs, and who is “in the right”, more traditional societies contend with disputes with those who they will continue to live with and trade with for the rest of their lives. Their model for conflict-management more closely resembles the idea of ‘restorative justice’, where victims and perpetrators meet to discuss the incident. The emphasis is on restoring a working relationship rather than assigning blame or retribution.

 
“The world until yesterday” goes on general sale by Penguin Books in paperback on 29 October 2013.

This blog has been written by Boo Lewis, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

Boo Lewis, Cabot Institute blogger

Watch the Jared Diamond event again online.

 

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