environmental uncertainty – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

The challenges of global environmental change: Why we (Bristol) should ‘bridge the gap’

Posted on February 16, 2015April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

Our planet and the people who live upon it face profound challenges in the coming century. As our population, economies and aspirations grow we consume increasing amounts of precious and finite resource. The side effects and waste products of this consumption also have profoundly negative impacts on our environment and climate, which in a vicious circle will make it even harder to support our food, energy and water needs.

In order to live on this planet, we must bridge the gap between wasteful lifestyles based on limited resources to efficient lifestyles based on renewable ones. Nowhere is that more apparent than in our consumption of fossil fuels. Much of our prosperity over the past two centuries has derived from the exploitation of these geological gifts, but those gifts have and are causing climate change with potentially devastating consequences. These are likely to include more extreme weather, loss of marine ecosystems and droughts; in turn, these could cause famine, refugee crises and conflict.

These climatic and environmental impacts will be felt locally in the European Green Capital as well as globally. We live in an interconnected world, such that drought in North America will raise the price of our food. The floods of last winter could have been a warning of life in a hotter and wetter world. Many of us in the South West live only a few metres above current sea level.

In my own work with Cabot Institute colleagues, I have investigated not just how Earth’s climate might change but how it has changed in the past. This shows that our climate forecasts are generally right when it comes to the temperature response to greenhouse gases, although perhaps they underestimate how much the poles will warm. More concerning, Earth history reveals how complex our planet is; with dramatic biological and physical responses to past global warming events. During one such event 55 million years ago, rapid warming transformed our planet’s vegetation and water cycle: rivers in Spain that had carried fine grained silts suddenly carried boulders. And that ‘rapid’ warming event occurred over thousands to tens of thousands of years not two hundred a reminder of the unprecedented character of our current climate change experiment.

Flooding in Whiteladies Road, Bristol. Credit: Jim Freer

Consequently, despite our best understanding of some factors, climate change will make our world a more uncertain place, whether that be uncertainty in future rainfall, the frequency of hurricanes or the timing of sea level rise. This uncertainty is particularly problematic because it makes it so much harder for industry or nations to plan and thrive. How do we ensure a robust and continuous food supply if we are unsure if the planet’s bread baskets will become wetter or dryer? Or if we are unsure how our fisheries will respond to warmer, more acidic, more silt-choked oceans?

Underlying this uncertainty is a deep ethical question about who will bear the risk and the inequality issues hidden within our choices. Most of us recognise that we are consuming the resources and polluting the environment of our children. But the inequity is deeper than that it is not all of our children who will suffer but the children of the poorest and the most vulnerable. Those whose homes are vulnerable to floods, who lack the resources to move or the political capacity to emigrate, who can barely afford nutritious food now, whose water supplies are already stretched and contaminated.

Bristol in 2015 will not bridge the gap by despairing at these challenges, but we can lead in acknowledging them. We can lead in showing how to avoid the worst uncertainty and taking responsibility for the consequences of where our efforts fall short. Most importantly, we can lead towards not just radical resiliency but inclusive resiliency.

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

Prof Rich Pancost

Pearls of wisdom: The importance of knowledge exchange when facing environmental uncertainty

Posted on July 28, 2014April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

Dame Pearlette Louisy at the Living
at the Sharp End of Environmental
Uncertainty Conference, Bristol, 17
July 2014. Image credit: Amanda
Woodman-Hardy

On 17 July 2014, Dame Pearlette Louisy, Governor-General of Saint Lucia, came to the University of Bristol to give a keynote talk on the challenges and strategies on environmental uncertainty from Saint Lucia and the Caribbean. Her visit marked the start of a Cabot Institute funded conference at the university, Living at the Sharp End of Environmental Uncertainty, where members of Small Island States (SIS) came together with academics and stakeholders to thrash out the problems facing SIS in a world of global environmental uncertainty. This blog post captures some of the key points from Dame Pearlette’s talk.

Defining environmental uncertainty

Defining ‘environmental uncertainty’ is a tricky prospect. What does the term actually mean? It’s embedded into the Cabot Institute’s strapline of ‘Living with environmental uncertainty’ but it can be hard to define. Dame Pearlette felt there were two principle components to ‘environmental uncertainty’ – a lack of knowledge and a lack of knowledge about how an environmental system will change in the future.

Environmental challenges in the Caribbean

Hurricane Tomas, 2010. Image credit: Ryder Busby

The challenges facing the Caribbean are strongly based around environmental uncertainty. It is an area highly prone to devastating natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes. Being a small geographical area its vulnerability is increased especially as its dependence on tourism and agriculture for income can ruin its resilience by the occurrence of one natural event. The limited capacity to develop, coupled with limited human resources and a fragile ecosystem means that the Caribbean’s ability to implement disaster risk reduction is relatively low.

One of the key things that stood out for me in Dame Pearlette’s talk was that the locals are noticing the effects of climate change already. A little rhyme they use about the hurricance season goes like this:

June – Too Soon
July – Standby
August – You must
September – Remember
October – It’s all over

What is shocking is that hurricane season now lasts six months (June to November) leaving communities on tenterhooks for half of the year. Comparing this to the old rhyme, it is clear to see that this is a much longer season than it used to be.

Sadly communities in the Caribbean are particularly vulnerable to all sorts of environmental impact. Those living on reclaimed land or at sea level are prone to flooding by high water tides. Communities also rely heavily on coastal and marine resources leaving them vulnerable when these are damaged by environmental events. There is also the problem of getting insured in the Caribbean. The islands are classified as high risk which has led to very high insurance premiums for people who can ill afford them. This has led to communities not redeveloping after disasters.

Disaster management in the Caribbean

Haiti after Hurricane Tomas had passed through.
Image credit: DVIDSHUB

Caribbean disaster management is difficult as the people who live there cannot manage disaster responses by themselves. However there are fantastic organisations across the Caribbean who are key to managing risk and are helping to build a resilient and sustainable future:

The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency seeks to reduce the risk and loss associated with natural and technological hazards and the effects of climate change to enhance regional sustainable development.
The Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre coordinates the Caribbean region’s response to climate change, working on effective solutions and projects to combat the environmental impacts of climate change and global warming.
The Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility serves Caribbean governments and community’s by providing insurance funds to communities quickly after disasters. They also look at building resilience after disaster.
Environment and Sustainable Development Unit is responsible for providing natural resource and environment services to ensure sustainability of the people’s livelihoods.
UWI Seismic Research Centre serves as official source of information on earthquakes and volcanoes in the Caribbean.
Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies promotes and facilitates sustainable development.
Caribbean Youth Environment Network empowers young people and their communities to develop programmes/actions to address socio-economic and environmental issues.

Dame Pearlette was keen to point out that enhanced international cooperation is needed if we are to improve sustainable development in the Caribbean region.

New approaches to Saint Lucia’s landslide problem

Saint Lucia is volcanic in origin and it has steep slopes. Most flat land there is situated in a narrow belt, which is where most settlement is located. Hurricane Tomas hit Saint Lucia in 2010 and it had a large impact on the community and its financial health. Two years later there was a landslide on the main arterial road Barre de L’Isle. This cut the island in two and caused substantial damage to infrastructure, buildings, the East Coast Road, slopes and water catchments including the Roseau Dam which collected a lot of silt. Saint Lucia are still trying to desilt the dam which is causing water shortage problems this year.

It is particularly difficult to reforest slopes after landslides as all the soil is swept away leaving bare rock. Landslide disaster risk is increasing and new approaches to designing and delivering landslide risk reduction measures on-the-ground are urgently needed. In response to that challenge, researchers at the Cabot Institute developed a novel methodology, Management of slope stability in communities (Mossaic), the vision for which is to provide low cost, community-based solutions, such as low cost drains and other related measures to reduce landslide hazard.

You can read more about how the Cabot Institute has been working with St Lucia on this poster and this powerpoint presentation.

Strategies for the Saint Lucia government

Dame Pearlette outlined some key strategies that Saint Lucia is implementing to improve its resilience to natural hazards and environmental uncertainty including a climate change adaptation policy; a strategic programme for climate resilience; a special programme on adaptation to climate change; a pilot programme for climate resilience; and a national environmental education policy and strategy.

However there is one key challenge and that is of funding. Saint Lucia has debts and what is troubling is that it is now difficult to borrow because lenders are not sure of Saint Lucia’s ability to pay their loans back which means the country continues to depend on external assistance of NGOs. Although not an ideal situation, there is interesting work being funded by NGOs. One such NGO is UNDP who are working with communities to achieve environmental sustainability with emphasis on the poor to build capacity.

Education for sustainable development – the future of environmental management?

At the end of Dame Pearlette’s talk, she shared her thoughts on the best way forward. She strongly felt that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is the best way to bring about environmental change. Even though no Caribbean policy for ESD exists, there are many groups trying to embed ESD into their institutes of learning. Dame Pearlette said that knowledge management is the management of an organisation’s knowledge assets for the purpose of creating value. The key principle of uncertainty is about lack of knowledge. Therefore knowledge creation and knowledge sharing is paramount for managing sustainability and thus it is the individual or country’s responsibility to ensure it keeps learning to reduce its environmental uncertainty.

Here at the University of Bristol, we also believe that ESD is a worthwhile ambition to embed sustainable development into our own curriculum. At the Cabot Institute we have appointed an intern to undertake a Community Based Learning project to place environmental postgraduate students with organisations in the local community. By embedding our environmental knowledge and sharing it with our communities, we can help build a more sustainable world and more resilient communities to what seems to be a growing plight of environmental uncertainty.

This blog is by Amanda Woodman-Hardy (@Enviro_Mand), Cabot Institute, University of Bristol.

Further reading: The Sinking Pacific: Climate Change and Aid in Tuvalu

Amanda
Woodman-Hardy

Making decisions in an environmentally uncertain world

Posted on October 30, 2013April 20, 2023 by janet.crompton

Improved decision making in the face of environmental uncertainty is at the heart of the Cabot Institute. Although individuals, businesses and society aspire to make logical decisions, informed by evidence and wisdom, we are also influenced by a complex mixture of emotions, ethics, political opportunism and personal beliefs. These murky waters become even more challenging to navigate when dealing with the inherent uncertainty in the basic evidence. And it becomes almost impossible when pre-conceived beliefs and opinions replace evidence. In such scenarios, uncertainty can be manipulated as a tool to undermine evidence and justify flawed decisions. This is the particular challenge of decision making in the context of complex environmental, economic and ecological issues.

To a scientist confronted with evidence that human activity is changing our environment at unprecedented rates, it is apparent that environmental uncertainty is rarely appropriately deployed in policy making. Most perniciously, it is commonly argued that the risk of an action (i.e. loss of biodiversity or increasing CO2 emissions) could be at the low end of the probability distribution – ‘the temperature might not warm that much’, ‘we might not get more hurricanes’. That is not proper governance; that is hiding behind uncertainty and hoping for the best. Nor is it appropriate to govern based on the worst-case scenario. But nor can we govern by solely considering the most likely outcome. We must recognise the range of possibilities and plan within it – strategically, flexibly, resiliently. In other words, the uncertainty brought about by ongoing environmental change is itself a profound cause for concern and a challenge for governance.

However, environmental uncertainty is not an opaque label for things ‘we do not understand’ and by an extension it is not a cause for inaction.

Rich Pancost’s old farm, US Midwest

I grew up on a farm in the US Midwest and so environmental uncertainty to me mainly concerns our food and the people who provide it. Anyone who has ever been involved in farming understands how uncertain our environment can be. And they understand how undermining and economically challenging that uncertainty is, especially with respect to the weather (weather is not the same as climate, but it makes for a useful environmental analogy).

We had about 30 head of cattle on our small Ohio dairy farm , and my brother, parents and I needed to put aside 4000 bales of hay every summer. I loved that job – I remember the smell of drying hay and the fat bumble bees buzzing in the clover. I remember being with my family, the satisfaction of completed work and the closeness that came from achieving things together. But it was hard and uncertain work, my father cutting the grass, raking it and baling it, quickly over successive hot days so that it would dry before a summer rain shower could strip away the nutrients. Or worse: before an extended few days of rain saturated the mowed hay on the ground, causing it to become fungus-ridden and rotting it away in the field. We could work with a prediction of rain and we could work with a prediction of no rain or even drought. But we could not work with an overly uncertain prediction. Even worse were wrong (i.e. overly certain) predictions. We navigated the probabilistic terrain of the daily weather forecasts somewhat by instinct, but the stakes were high, and just three or four bad decisions in a summer would have been financially catastrophic. The farm is long gone but my Mom is still addicted to the weather reports.

The barn

But uncertainty does not mean paralysis; it means risk management. We mitigated the risk of wasted crop by renting and working fields that could yield 4500 bales rather than 4000. And those 4000 bales of hay were themselves, risk management, exceeding our likely needs. Gathering the bales and storing them in our barn’s loft was hard, sticky, hot and gritty work. The hay was delivered to the loft by a metal elevator – metal plates carried by metal chains up a metal chute, all powered by our forty-year old International Harvester tractor’s power take-off shaft. I loved doing this work on the farm – its physicality and the stimulus of all of your senses – but I do not miss that tremendous rattling, clanging noise! The loft itself could reach temperatures of 110°F and was filled with clouds of dust and darting, irritated wasps. Our necks would burn and our forearms would be filled with tiny splinters of hay.

We worked hard and put away 4000 bales each summer even though we would probably only need 3500, because we had to err on the side of caution in case there was an early winter. Or a long winter.

That is environmental uncertainty – and risk management – to me. Cutting the hay when the forecast predicts a 35% chance of rain and watching 400 bales of alfalfa rot in the field. Renting more land than we would likely need. Working 20% harder than necessary – just in case.

All of us understand this, whether it be maintaining the garden, managing the allotment or planning a holiday. This is part of human history: sound, profitable, secure decision-making has always required a confrontation with environmental uncertainty; consequently, almost all societies have strived to mitigate risks by understanding the environment, managing essential resources, and building up our own resilience.

From IPCC 2013, Working Group 1

What is disturbing and unique about the 21st century is that we are no longing mitigating environmental uncertainty but instead, we are very rapidly increasing it. We are changing our planet and where and how we live upon it. Increasing carbon dioxide emissions might warm the planet by 1.5°C. Or 3°C. Or 5°C. Such warming will probably cause the Southwest of England to have wetter summers and the great food-supplying regions of the American Midwest to become drier. But there is a probability that the opposite will happen. How does the small farmer plan? For that matter, how does the huge international agritech firm plan? I would argue that the greatest challenge posed by our changing environment is not how much the Earth warms but the uncertainty in how much it will warm and the uncertainty associated with the consequences of that warming. Planning for our future – perhaps for the first time in human history – is actually becoming more uncertain every year.

But we are also learning much more about ourselves and our environment, and this perhaps makes the future a bit more certain than it might otherwise be. Currently the Met Office is improving our prediction tools and tailoring specific advice to farmers; engineers are learning how we might mitigate or even adapt to this uncertainty; and we are developing methods to limit our dependence on fossil fuel and thus the associated climate change. And we are learning how to make sound decisions in the face of it. To achieve these objectives, the Cabot Institute and similar entities are bringing together a wide variety of scientists, social scientists, managers and engineers, all of whom share expertise with the community and industry. That expertise includes those who deal specifically with quantifying uncertainty, the underlying psychology and sociology of decision making, and the clash of ethical and pragmatic ideas that inform policy making. The world’s population is growing and with it our basic food, water and energy needs; to provide for those needs, we must make our future more certain but also more resilient and adaptable.

This blog was written by Professor Rich Pancost, Cabot Institute Director, University of Bristol

Prof Rich Pancost