Tag: Rich Pancost

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

Posted on 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

Professor Dame Julia Slingo: Modelling climate risk

Posted on by janet.crompton

When Professor Dame Julia Slingo visited the Cabot Institute last week, her message was clear: We need to look at climate risk in real world contexts.

Dame Julia was in the city to receive a Cabot Institute Distinguished Fellowship, which involved giving a talk about her work as a world leading meteorologist and Chief Scientist at the Met Office.

One of the first things she highlighted was that climate change isn’t isolated from other pressures like population growth and limited resources, so we need to understand the risks it poses in a real world context. We need to define the effects it may have on the security of food, water, health and energy around the world, and use the science as a guide to define an evidence-based and cost effective plan of action going forward. This, she said, is “one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century”.

Are we making extreme weather worse?

Today, the huge global population boom is putting an ever increasing strain on limited resources like land and water, which are also at risk from the cyclical climate variations that occur naturally. The big and controversial question is whether climate change caused by human activity has exacerbated the problem.

Dame Julia described an annual report produced by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) that analyses extreme weather events around the world each year, aiming to determine whether the effects were magnified by anthropogenic climate change. As she pointed out, it is important that we recognise that not every bit of bad weather can be attributed to climate change, however the AMS often do find that we have played a role in making the situation worse.

One example she picked out was 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 people across eight countries in central and north America. The AMS report found that if sea level had been at the level that it was 50 years ago, the devastating effects of the storm would not have been as bad. It also suggested that continuing on our current path of climate change will mean minor storms will have increasingly severe impacts, leading to Sandy-level hurricanes more frequently in the future.

“We need a more nuanced discussion”

Last year was the warmest on UK record, making a total of 8 out of 10 of our hottest years having occurred since 2002. While of course there is variability in our climate from year to year and even decade to decade, intricate scientific climate models have shown that these record-breaking UK temperatures are made ten times more likely due to anthropogenic climate change.

While we may prefer a hot summer, temperatures don’t change uniformly across the entire planet. Worryingly, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, leading to a huge decrease in the amount of sea ice cover and corresponding sea level rise, which is already threatening communities living on low lying islands. Dame Julia reminded us all that it’s not as simple as trying to prevent a 2°C global temperature increase. The danger that climate change poses depends on who you are and where you live, and we need models to show what the risks will be.

Predicting climate risk

So how can we predict what the effects of climate change will be across the world? It begins with having a sophisticated model of the current global system. The Met Office has led decades of climate modelling, producing incredibly sophisticated simulations of climate systems on both short term (weather) and long term (climate change) scales.

I was absolutely amazed by the intricacy of these models. Millions of lines of computer code recreate the true physical nature of the planet, to the extent where large scale meteorological patterns like El Niño are emergent properties of the model, that is to say that they are a result of the basic physics encoded in the model, rather than being specifically programmed into it.

By altering the model with new data taken from the present extent of climate change or its predicted level in the future, the Met Office can model the global response at incredible resolution, showing the specific risks posed with increasingly detailed clarity (while still incorporating the inherent uncertainties present in all models). These models can then be used to test potential mitigation approaches and of course inform the global communities of the dangers they face.

What can we do?

Dame Julia explained that her role as Chief Scientist is to determine the needs of the people around the world, their risk tolerance and the information they require to make their own decisions. Science, she says, has a lot to offer in enabling governments to make wise, informed and efficient decisions with how best to spend their funds within the wider context of other societal issues, upholding the global securities of food, water, health and energy for the future.

Flooded Pakistan



Image: “There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events” – Professor Dame Julia Slingo


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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

 
Sarah Jose

Why we must Bridge the Gap

Posted on by janet.crompton

Much of the climate change of the past century has been caused by our burning of fossil fuels. And without a change in that fossil fuel use, continued climate change in the next century could have devastating impacts on our society. It is likely to bring increased risk and hazards associated with extreme weather events. Refugee crises could be caused by rising sea levels or droughts that make some nations uninhabitable. Climate change will also make our world a more uncertain place to live, whether that be uncertainty in future rainfall patterns, the magnitude of sea level rise or the response of global fisheries to ocean acidification.  This uncertainty is particularly problematic because it makes it so much harder for industry or nations to plan and thrive.  Or to grapple with the other great challenge facing humanity – securing food, water and energy for 7 billion people (and growing).  Because of this, most nations have agreed that global warming should be held below 2°C.

Flooding on Whiteladies Road, Bristol. Image credit Jim Freer

These climatic and environmental impacts will be felt in the South West of England.  We live in an interconnected world, such that drought in North America will raise the price of our food. The effects of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and UK fisheries remain worryingly uncertain. The floods of last winter could have been a warning of life in a hotter and wetter world; moreover, it will only become harder to protect our lowlands from not only flooding but also salt water incursions as sea level rises.  The proposed Hinkley Point nuclear power station will have an installation, operating and decommissioning lifetime of over 100 years; what added risks will it face from the combination of more severe weather, storm surges and rising sea level?  Climate change affects us all – globally, nationally and locally in the 2015 European Green Capital.

That requires reductions in emissions over the next decade.  And it then requires cessation of all fossil fuel emissions in the subsequent decades.  The former has been the subject of most negotiations, including the recent discussions in Lima and likely those in Paris at the end of this year. The latter has yet to be addressed by any international treaty. And that is of deep concern because it is the cessation of all fossil fuel emissions that is most difficult but most necessary to achieve.  Carbon dioxide has a lifetime in the atmosphere of 1000s of years, such that slower emissions will only delay climate change.  That can be useful – if we must adapt to a changing world, having more time to do so will be beneficial. However, it is absolutely clear that emissions must stop if we are to meet our target of 2°C.  In fact, according to most climate models as well as the geological history of climate, emissions must stop if we are to keep total warming below 5°C.

In short, we cannot use the majority of our coal, gas and petroleum assets for energy.  They must stay buried.

Can we ‘geoengineer’ our way to alternative solution?  Not according to recent research. Last November, a Royal Society Meeting showcased the results of three UK Research Council Funded investigations of geoengineering feasibility and consequences. They collectively illustrated that geoengineering a response to climate change was at best complicated and at worst a recipe for disaster and widespread global conflict.  The most prominent geoengineering solution is to offset the greenhouse gas induced rise in global temperatures via the injection of stratospheric particles that reflect some of the solar energy arriving at Earth.  However, on the most basic level, a world with elevated CO2 levels and reflective particles in the atmosphere  is not the same as a world with 280 ppm of CO2 and a pristine atmosphere. To achieve the same average global temperature, some regions will be cooler and others warmer.  Rainfall patterns will differ: regional patterns of flood and drought will differ. Even if it could be done, who are the arbitrators of a geoengineered world?  The potential for conflict is profound.

In short, the deus ex machina of geoengineering our climate is neither a feasible nor a just option.  And again, the conclusion is that we cannot use most of our fossil fuels.

One might argue that we can adapt to climate change: why risk our economy now when we can adapt to the consequences of climate change later? Many assessments suggest that this is not the best economic approach, but I understand the gamble: be cautious with a fragile economy now and deal with consequences later.  This argument, however, ignores the vast inequity associated with climate change.  It is the future generations that will bear the cost of our inaction.  Moreover, it appears that the most vulnerable to climate change are the poorest – and those who consume the least fossil fuels.  Those of us who burn are not those who will pay.  Arguably then, we in the UK have a particular obligation to the poor of the world and of our own country, as well as to our children and grandchildren, to soon cease the use of our fossil fuels.

Energy is at the foundation of modern society and it has been the basis for magnificent human achievement over the past 150 years, but it is clear that obtaining energy by burning fossil fuels is warming our planet and acidifying our oceans.  The consequences for our climate, from extreme weather events to rising sea levels, is profound; even more worrying are the catastrophic risks that climate change poses for the food and water resources on which society depends.  It is now time for us to mature beyond the 19th and 20th century fossil-fuel derived energy to a renewable energy system of the 21st century that is sustainable for us and our planet.

We must bridge the gap.

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Are you a poor logician? Logically, you might never know

Posted on by janet.crompton

By Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol and Richard Pancost, University of Bristol


This is the second article in a series, How we make decisions, which explores our decision-making processes. How well do we consider all factors involved in a decision, and what helps and what holds us back?

It is an unfortunate paradox: if you’re bad at something, you probably also lack the skills to assess your own performance. And if you don’t know much about a topic, you’re unlikely to be aware of the scope of your own ignorance.

Type in any keyword into a scientific search engine and a staggering number of published articles appears. “Climate change” yields 238,000 hits; “tobacco lung cancer” returns 14,500; and even the largely unloved “Arion ater” has earned a respectable 245 publications.

Experts are keenly aware of the vastness of the knowledge landscape in their fields. Ask any scholar and they will likely acknowledge how little they know relative to what is knowable – a realisation that may date back to Confucius.

Here is the catch: to know how much more there is to know requires knowledge to begin with. If you start without knowledge, you also do not know what you are missing out on.

This paradox gives rise to a famous result in experimental psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning, it refers to a study they published in 1999. They showed that the more poorly people actually performed, the more they over-estimated their own performance.

People whose logical ability was in the bottom 12% (so that 88 out of 100 people performed better than they did) judged their own performance to be among the top third of the distribution. Conversely, the outstanding logicians who outperformed 86% of their peers judged themselves to be merely in the top quarter (roughly) of the distribution, thereby underestimating their performance.

John Cleese argues that this effect is responsible for not only Hollywood but the actions of some mainstream media.

Ignorance is associated with exaggerated confidence in one’s abilities, whereas experts are unduly tentative about their performance. This basic finding has been replicated numerous times in many different circumstances. There is very little doubt about its status as a fundamental aspect of human behaviour.

Confidence and credibility

Here is the next catch: in the eyes of others, what matters most to judge a person’s credibility is their confidence. Research into the credibility of expert witnesses has identified the expert’s projected confidence as the most important determinant in judged credibility. Nearly half of people’s judgements of credibility can be explained on the basis of how confident the expert appears — more than on the basis of any other variable.

Does this mean that the poorest-performing — and hence most over-confident — expert is believed more than the top performer whose displayed confidence may be a little more tentative? This rather discomforting possibility cannot be ruled out on the basis of existing data.

But even short of this extreme possibility, the data on confidence and expert credibility give rise to another concern. In contested arenas, such as climate change, the Dunning-Kruger effect and its flow-on consequences can distort public perceptions of the true scientific state of affairs.

To illustrate, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from our economic activities are altering the Earth’s climate. This consensus is expressed in more than 95% of the scientific literature and it is shared by a similar fraction — 97-98% – of publishing experts in the area. In the present context, it is relevant that research has found that the “relative climate expertise and scientific prominence” of the few dissenting researchers “are substantially below that of the convinced researchers”.

Guess who, then, would be expected to appear particularly confident when they are invited to expound their views on TV, owing to the media’s failure to recognise (false) balance as (actual) bias? Yes, it’s the contrarian blogger who is paired with a climate expert in “debating” climate science and who thinks that hot brick buildings contribute to global warming.

‘I’m not an expert, but…’

How should actual experts — those who publish in the peer-reviewed literature in their area of expertise — deal with the problems that arise from Dunning-Kruger, the media’s failure to recognise “balance” as bias, and the fact that the public uses projected confidence as a cue for credibility?

Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner admitted earlier this year he wasn’t qualified to comment on climate change.

We suggest two steps based on research findings.
The first focuses on the fact of a pervasive scientific consensus on climate change. As one of us has shown, the public’s perception of that consensus is pivotal in determining their acceptance of the scientific facts.

When people recognise that scientists agree on the climate problem, they too accept the existence of the problem. It is for this reason that Ed Maibach and colleagues, from the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, have recently called on climate scientists to set the record straight and inform the public that there is a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening.

One might object that “setting the record straight” constitutes advocacy. We do not agree; sharing knowledge is not advocacy and, by extension, neither is sharing the strong consensus behind that knowledge. In the case of climate change, it simply informs the public of a fact that is widely misrepresented in the media.

The public has a right to know that there is a scientific consensus on climate change. How the public uses that knowledge is up to them. The line to advocacy would be crossed only if scientists articulated specific policy recommendations on the basis of that consensus.

The second step to introducing accurate scientific knowledge into public debates and decision-making pertains precisely to the boundary between scientific advice and advocacy. This is a nuanced issue, but some empirical evidence in a natural-resource management context suggests that the public wants scientists to do more than just analyse data and leave policy decisions to others.

Instead, the public wants scientists to work closely with managers and others to integrate scientific results into management decisions. This opinion appears to be equally shared by all stakeholders, from scientists to managers and interest groups.

Advocacy or understanding?

In a recent article, we wrote that “the only unequivocal tool for minimising climate change uncertainty is to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions”. Does this constitute advocacy, as portrayed by some commenters?

It is not. Our statement is analogous to arguing that “the only unequivocal tool for minimising your risk of lung cancer is to quit smoking”. Both statements are true. Both identify a link between a scientific consensus and a personal or political action.

Neither statement, however, advocates any specific response. After all, a smoker may gladly accept the risk of lung cancer if the enjoyment of tobacco outweighs the spectre of premature death — but the smoker must make an informed decision based on the scientific consensus on tobacco.

Likewise, the global public may decide to continue with business as usual, gladly accepting the risk to their children and grandchildren – but they should do so in full knowledge of the risks that arise from the existing scientific consensus on climate change.

Some scientists do advocate for specific policies, especially if their careers have evolved beyond simply conducting science and if they have taken new or additional roles in policy or leadership.
Most of us, however, carefully limit our statements to scientific evidence. In those cases, it is vital that we challenge spurious accusations of advocacy, because such claims serve to marginalise the voices of experts.

Portraying the simple sharing of scientific knowledge with the public as an act of advocacy has the pernicious effect of silencing scientists or removing their expert opinion from public debate. The consequence is that scientific evidence is lost to the public and is lost to the democratic process.
But in one specific way we are advocates. We advocate that our leaders recognise and understand the evidence.

We believe that sober policy decisions on climate change cannot be made when politicians claim that they are not scientists while also erroneously claiming that there is no scientific consensus.
We advocate that our leaders are morally obligated to make and justify their decisions in light of the best available scientific, social and economic understanding.

Click on the links below for other articles in the series, How we make decisions:

The Conversation

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the Royal Society, from the World University Network (WUN), and from the ‘Great Western 4’ (GW4) consortium of English universities.
Richard Pancost receives funding from RCUK, the EU and the Leverhulme Trust.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Bristol 2015 – European Green Capital from an academic perspective

Posted on by janet.crompton
Two weeks ago marked the start of a 100 day countdown until Bristol becomes the European Green Capital 2015.  Associated with that, the University of Bristol announced its support for the city, describing how it would contribute to the Green Capital events, build on its existing foundation of green activity and make a step change in our partnership with Bristol.  These contributions span the entirety of the University, from its educational and research missions to its role as one of the largest businesses and employers in the city – and both of the University’s Research Institutes will be major participants.

As such, I wanted to offer the Cabot Institute’s perspectives on the Green Capital and the wider University’s engagement with it.  And how you can become more involved.

We have been involved in Bristol Green Capital from the very beginning, dating back to Philippa Bayley’s (Cabot Institute Manager) role in the Bristol Green Capital Partnership, first in helping with the bid and then serving as co-Director.  Amanda Woodman-Hardy (Cabot Institute Coordinator) serves on the Partnership’s Communications Action Group, Mike Harris (Cabot Institute Knowledge Exchange Manager) serves on the Industry Action Group, and Cabot academics populate many of the other Action Groups: Kath Baldock (Biological Sciences) on Nature, Wildlife and Green Spaces, Jonty Rougier (Mathematics) on Research and Evaluation, Chris Preist (Computer Science) and Caroline Bird (Law) on Energy, Trevor Thompson (Social and Community Medicine) on Health and Wellbeing and Sue Porter (Policy Studies) on Inclusion and Communities*.

We are deeply involved in this exciting event!  And we are committed to making it a success.  We have already committed over 5000 hours of service to the Bristol Green Capital effort and plan to increase that significantly over the coming months.  We want to work, learn and innovate with people from every part of this fantastic city. And we want 2015 to only be the next step in a growing partnership.

University of Bristol, credit UoB

One of our main commitments must be and will be educational.  Nearly 20,000 students attend this University and they go on to important careers all over the globe. The University has signed up to the UNESCO Global Action Programme commitment, in advance of the launch of the next UNESCO strategy for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and I applaud Chris Willmore’s and Judith Squires’ vision and drive to secure this commitment.   This education is already underway in many areas, including student engagement projects such as the University of Bristol’s Students’ Union Get Green, which has so far inspired over 800 students to take part in environmental projects.  And even though we are a Research Institute, we will use this framework to expand our engagement with the undergraduate experience over the coming years.  We have put on several events aimed at our student population but we want to do more; in particular, I hope that we can work with aspiring student leaders to make a difference both in Bristol but also across the country and the world, during their studies and throughout their lives.

A particular commitment from the Cabot Institute is to work with the Centre for Public Engagement and the wider University to host or co-host a wide range of events during 2015.  From Julia Slingo’s Cabot Fellowship acceptance talk in February to a major lecture during alumni weekend to a workshop and public debate on the Uncertain World, we will continue to invite inspiring intellectuals from across the globe and engage with local innovators.  But we will also use the numerous opportunities and the thriving creative energy in Bristol to showcase our own academics.

We have been approached by artists (such as the amazing team behind In Between Time), private organisations, businesses and clubs asking for academic perspectives on our changing world, our changing cities and thriving in them.  We are also looking forward to working with the Bristol Festival of Ideas which is taking the lead in organising much of the formal 2015 schedule, including a series of debates focussed on Youth, Business, Faith and Future Leaders. I hope that many of you will be keen to engage with these opportunities – opportunities to share what we have learned but also to initiate new collaborations.  Please contact us if you are interested in partnering or if you have your own ideas!

Finally, it is on this deeper level of collaboration that 2015 has the potential to make a real difference to the city and this University. The Green Capital Year must transcend the lectures, exhibits, debates and other events and serve as a launching point for innovative ideas and new models of working together. The sustainable and smart transformation of the World’s cities is essential to addressing many if not all of the environmental, food, energy and water security challenges we face. Much of the 2015 activity will reflect on the climate change negotiations culminating in Paris at the end of the year; this is also our chance to show that regardless of the outcomes of those negotiations, innovative cities and educational institutions can and will take the lead in transforming our world.

In 2015, the Cabot Institute and its Future Cities initiative will launch a new framework that will allow research to be conducted in partnership with groups from across the city and the world.  This will promote innovations in education, sustainability, creative technology and low carbon energy. Moreover, it will put many of our best students at the heart of the City-University relationship. Cabot and the Centre for Public Engagement are connecting community organisations to academics in order to craft novel masters and final-year undergraduate research projects. This is just one exciting way in which we can work together – our researchers, our students and our city partners – to co-produce new knowledge.

On a final note, I am particularly proud, as an employee of the University, that we have made our own pledges.  Our commitment cannot solely be research and education; we are too large a part of the city, too embedded into its fabric and infrastructure.  The University has already received national recognition for its sustainability work with a Green Gown Award in 2013 for Continual Improvement: Institutional Change and a Times Higher Award for Education for Sustainable Development. But these new pledges will take us further.  They include aiming to become a net carbon neutral campus by 2030; decreasing the University’s transport footprint; and ensuring that every single one of our students has the opportunity to undertake education for sustainable development.  Some of these will be hard to achieve. Others are only a start.  But our commitment is genuine.

As Professor Guy Orpen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol said in our press release:

“Bristol European Green Capital 2015 is a great opportunity for the city and the University of Bristol. We are centrally involved as a University, and as part of the city more widely, to show the world what can be done, and what we can do, to make cities happier and healthier places to live and work, throughout 2015 and far beyond.”

Cabot is excited to be part of this and we hope many of you are also keen to participate.

*In addition to those mentioned above, many Cabot academics and partners of the Cabot Institute have played major roles in winning the Green Capital Award and shaping the current programme. For example, Karen Bell of SPS helped shape the the Inclusion and Communities Action Group.
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This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

Prof Rich Pancost

The uncertain world

Posted on by janet.crompton
J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World
taken from fantasticalandrewfox.com

Over the next 18 months, in collaboration with Bristol Green Capital 2015 artists, civic leaders and innovative thinkers, the Cabot Institute will be participating in  a series of activities in which we examine how human actions are making our planet a much more uncertain place to live.

Fifty years ago, between 1962 and 1966, J. G. Ballard wrote a trio of seminal environmental disaster novels: The Drowned World, The Burning World and The Crystal World.  These novels remain signposts to our future, the challenges we might face and the way people respond to rapid and unexpected change to their environment. In that spirit and coinciding with the Bristol Green Capital 2015, we introduce The Uncertain World, a world in which profound uncertainty becomes as much of a challenge to society as warming and rising sea levels.

For the past twenty years, the University of Bristol has been exploring how to better understand, mitigate and live with environmental uncertainty, with the Cabot Institute serving as the focus for that effort since its founding in 2010.  Uncertainty is the oft-forgotten but arguably most challenging aspect of mankind’s centuries-long impact on the environment.  We live our lives informed by the power of experience: our own as well as the collective experience of our families, communities and wider society. When my father started dairy farming he sought advice from my mother’s grandfather, our neighbours, and the grizzled veterans at the Middlefield auction house. Experience helps us make intelligent decisions, plan strategically and anticipate challenges.

Similarly, our weather projections, water management and hazard planning are also based on experience: tens to hundreds of years of observation inform our predictions of future floods, drought, hurricanes and heat waves. These records – this experience  – can help us make sensible decisions about where to live, build and farm.

Now, however, we are changing our environment and our climate, such that the lessons of the past have less relevance to the planning of our future.  In fact, many aspects of environmental change are unprecedented not only in human experience but in Earth history. As we change our climate, the great wealth of knowledge generated from human experience is losing capital every day.

The Uncertain World is not one of which we have no knowledge – we have high confidence that temperatures and sea level will rise, although there is uncertainty in the magnitude and speed of change. Nor should we view The Uncertain World with existential fear – we know that warm worlds have existed in the past.  These were not inhospitable and most evidence from the past suggests that a climate ‘apocalypse’ resulting in an uninhabitable planet is unlikely.

Nonetheless, increasing uncertainty arising from human-induced changes to our global environment should cause deep concern.  Crucial details of our climate remain difficult to predict, and it undermines our ability to plan for our future. We do not know whether many regions of the world will become wetter or dryer. This uncertainty propagates and multiplies through complex systems: how do we make sensible predictions of coastal flood risk when there is uncertainty in sea level rise estimates, rainfall patterns and the global warming that will impact both?  We can make predictions even in such complex systems, but the predictions will inevitably come with a degree of uncertainty, a probabilistic prediction.  How do we apply such predictions to decision making? Where can we build new homes, where do we build flood defences to protect existing ones, and where do we abandon land to the sea?

Perhaps most worrying, the consequences of these rapid changes on biological and chemical systems, and the people dependent upon them, are very poorly understood. For example, the synergistic impact of warmer temperatures, more acidic waters, and more silt-choked coastal waters on coral reefs and other marine ecosystems is very difficult to predict. This is particularly concerning given that more than 2.6 billion people  depend on the oceans as their primary source of protein. Similarly, warming of Arctic permafrost could promote the growth of CO2-sequestering plants or the release of warming-accelerating methane – or both. Warm worlds with very high levels of carbon dioxide did exist in the past and these do provide some insight  into the response of the Earth system, but we are accelerating into this new world at a rate that is unprecedented in Earth history, creating additional layers of uncertainty.

During late 2014 and 2015, the Cabot Institute will host a variety of events and collaborate with a variety of partners across Bristol and beyond to explore this Uncertain World and how we can live in it. How do we better explain uncertainty and what are the ‘logical’ decisions to make when faced with uncertainty? One of our first events will explore how uncertainty in climate change predictions should motivate us to action: the more uncertain our predictions the more we should employ mitigation rather than adaptation strategies. Future events will explore how past lessons from Earth history help us better understand potential future scenarios; how future scenario planning can inform the decisions we make today; and most importantly, how we build the necessary flexibility into social structures to thrive in this Uncertain World.

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

Prof Rich Pancost

Deep impact – the plastic on the seafloor; the carbon in the air

Posted on by janet.crompton

We live in a geological age defined by human activity.  We live during a time when the landscape of the earth has been transformed by men, its surface paved and cut, its vegetation manipulated, transported and ultimately replaced. A time when the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the rivers and the oceans has been changed – in some ways that are unique for the past million years and in other ways that are unprecedented in Earth history. In many ways, this time is defined not only by our impact on nature but by the redefinition of what it means to be human.

From a certain distance and perspective, the transformation of our planet can be considered beautiful. At night, the Earth viewed from space is a testament to the ubiquitous presence of the human species: cities across the planet glow with fierce intensity but so do villages in Africa and towns in the Midwest; the spotlights of Argentine fishing boats, drawing anchovies to the surface, illuminate the SW Atlantic Ocean; and the flames of flared gas from fracked oil fields cause otherwise vacant tracts of North Dakota to burn as bright as metropolises.

Environmental debates are a fascinating, sometimes frustrating collision of disparate ideas, derived from different experiences, ideologies and perspectives.  And we learn even from those with whom we disagree.  However, one perspective perpetually bemuses and perplexes me: the idea that it is impossible that man could so transform this vast planet. Of course, we can pollute an estuary, cause the Cuyahoga River to catch fire, turn Victorian London black or foul the air of our contemporary cities.  We can turn the Great Plains into cornfields or into dust bowls, the rainforest into palm oil plantations, swamplands into cities and lowlands into nations.  But these are local.  Can we really be changing our oceans, our atmosphere, our Earth that much?

Such doubts underly the statements of, for example, UKIP Energy Spokesman Roger Helmer:

‘The theory of man-made climate change is unproven and implausible’.

It is a statement characterised by a breathless dismissal of scientific evidence but also an astonishingly naive view of man’s capacity to impact our planet.

There are places on Earth where the direct evidence of human intervention is small. There are places where the dominance of nature is vast and exhilarating and awe-inspiring.  And across the planet, few places are entirely immune from reminders – whether they be earthquakes or volcanoes, tsunamis or hurricanes – that nature is vast and powerful.

But the Earth of the 21st century is a planet shaped by humans.

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A powerful example of humanity’s impact on our planet is our Plastic Ocean.  We generate nearly 300 billion tons of plastic per year, much of it escaping recycling and much of that escaping the landfill and entering our oceans. One of the most striking manifestations of this is the vast trash vortex in the Northern Pacific Gyre. The size of the vortex depends on assumptions of concentration and is somewhat dependent on methodology, but estimates range from 700 thousand square kilometres to more than 15 million square kilometres.  The latter estimate represents nearly 10% of the entire Pacific Ocean.   Much of the plastic in the trash vortex – and throughout our oceans – occurs as fine particles invisible to the eye.  But they are there and they are apparently ubiquitous, with concentrations in the trash vortex reaching 5.1 kg per square km*.  That’s equivalent to about 200 1L bottles.  Dissolved.  Invisible to the eye.  But present and dictating the chemistry of the ocean.

More recently, colleagues at Plymouth, Southampton and elsewhere illustrated the widespread occurrence of rubbish, mainly plastic, on the ocean floor.  Their findings did not surprise deep sea biologists nor geologists; we have been observing our litter in these supposedly pristine settings since some of the first trips to the abyss.

My first submersible dive was on the Nautile, a French vessel that was part of a joint Dutch-French expedition to mud volcanoes and associated methane seeps in the Mediterranean Sea.  An unfortunate combination of working practice, choppy autumn seas and sulfidic sediments had made me seasick for most of the research expedition, such that my chance to dive to the seafloor was particularly therapeutic. The calm of the deep sea, as soon as we dipped below the wave base, was a moment of profound physical and emotional peace.  As we sank into the depths, the light faded and all that remained was the very rare fish and marine snow – the gently sinking detritus of life produced in the light-bathed surface ocean.

As you descend, you enter a realm few humans had seen…. For a given dive, for a given locale, it is likely that no human has preceded you.

Mud volcanoes form for a variety of reasons, but in the Mediterranean region they are associated with the tectonic interactions of the European and African continents.  This leads to the pressurised extrusion of slurry from several km below the bottom of the sea, along mud diapirs and onto the seafloor. They are commonly associated with methane seeps; in fact a focus of our expedition was to examine the microbes and wider deep sea communities that thrive when this methane is exposed to oxidants at the seafloor – a topic for another essay. In parts of the Mediterranean Sea, they are associated with salty brines, partially derived from the great salt deposits that formed in a partly evaporated ocean about five and a half million years ago.

And all of these factors together create an undersea landscape of indescribable beauty.
On these mud volcanoes are small patches, about 20 cm wide, where methane escapes to the seafloor.  There, methane bubbles from the mud or is capped by thick black, rubbery mats of microorganisms.  Ringing these mats are fields of molluscs, bouquets of tube worms, great concrete slabs of calcium carbonate or white rims of sulphide and the bacteria thriving on it. Streaming from these seeps, down the contours of the mud cones, are ribbons of ultra-dense, hypersaline water.  The rivulets merge into streams and then into great deep sea rivers. Like a photonegative of low-density oil slicking upon the water’s surface, these are white, high-density brines flowing along the seafloor.  Across the Mediterranean Sea, they pool into beautiful ponds and in a few very special cases, form great brine lakes.

And two kilometres below the seafloor, where humans have yet to venture our rubbish has already established colonies. Plastic bottles float at the surface of these lakes; aluminium cans lie in the mud amongst the microbial mats; between those thick slabs of calcium carbonate sprout colonies of tube worms and the occasional plastic bag.

Image from Nautile Dive to the Mediterranean seafloor.  Shown are carbonate crusts that form where methane has escaped to the seafloor as well as tube worms thriving on the chemical energy available in such settings.  Plastic debris has been circled in the upper right corner.

We have produced as much plastic in the past decade as we have in the entirety of the preceding human history.  But the human impact is not new.  On our very first dive, we observed a magnificent amphora, presumably of ancient Greek or Roman origin and nearly a metre across, half buried in the mud.

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Today the human footprint is ubiquitous. Nearly 40% of the world’s land is used for agriculture – and over 70% of the land in the UK.  Another 3% of the land is urbanised.  A quarter of arable land has already been degraded.

There are outstanding contradictions and non-intuitive patterns that emerge from a deeper understanding of this modified planet.  Pollinators are more diverse in England’s cities than they are in our rural countryside.  One of the most haunting nature preserves on our planet is the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea – fraught with landmines but free from humans, wildlife now dominates. And of course, although global warming will cause vast challenges over the coming centuries, that is largely due to one human impact (greenhouse gas emissions) intersecting with another (our cities in vulnerable, low-lying areas and our borders and poverty preventing migration from harm).   And on longer timescales, we have likely spared our descendants of 10,000 years from now the hassle of dealing with another Ice Age.

Glyptodon, source Wikipedia

But there can be no doubt or misunderstanding –  we have markedly changed the chemical composition of our atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide levels are higher than they have been for the past 800,000 years, perhaps the last 3 million years.  It is likely that the last time the Earth’s atmosphere contained this much carbon dioxide, glyptodons, armadillo-like creatures the size of cars, roamed the American West, and hominids were only beginning the first nervous evolutionary steps towards what would eventually become man. Methane concentrations are three times higher than they were before the agricultural and industrial revolutions.  Also higher are the concentrations of nitrous oxides.  And certain chlorofluorcarbons did not even exist on this planet until we made them.

The manner in which we have changed our planet has – at least until now – allowed us to thrive, created prosperity and transformed lives in ways that would have astonished those from only a few generations in the past.  It is too soon to say whether our collective impact has been or will be, on the whole, either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for either the planet or those of us who live upon it. It will perhaps never be possible to define such a complex range of impacts in simple black and white terms.  But there is no doubt that our impact has been vast, ubiquitous and pervasive.  And it is dangerous to underestimate even momentarily our tremendous capacity to change our planet at even greater rates and in even more profound ways in the future.

*Moore, C.J; Moore, S.L; Leecaster, M.K;
Weisberg, S.B (2001). “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North
Pacific Central Gyre”. Marine
Pollution Bulletin 42 (12): 1297–300. doi:10.1016/S0025-326X(01)00114-X. PMID 11827116.


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

Prof Rich Pancost

Climate change in the media

Posted on by janet.crompton

This winter, devastating floods and extreme weather have battered the UK.  Similarly, we have been battered by an endless barrage of news, opinion and political grandstanding.  Encouragingly, a narrative is beginning to emerge that now is the time for disaster management not a complete dissection of our short- and long-term flood defense system (an opinion we have advocated ourselves). That is encouraging.

It is vital that the issue of climate change be a central part of that discussion. Climate change is one of the most profound challenges facing humanity – a challenge recognised by scientists, politicians, lawyers, businesses and even the military. However, it is a challenge associated with uncertain and complex consequences, with the most pernicious concerns not necessarily being climate change itself but how it exacerbates other issues, such as flooding but also food security, access to resources, the spread of disease and fostering conflict.  It cannot sit in isolation from the rest of the news, and it demands nuanced exploration by the media that facilitates the responsible formation of opinion and policy.

UK aid supplies are loaded onto HMS
Daring by UK military personnel in the
Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan.
Credit: Simon Davis/DFID/Flickr

Experts (including but certainly not limited to academics), the public and the media form a triangle around policy makers, ultimately influencing the decisions that our governments make.  Most government decision makers genuinely want to enact policies that will be beneficial, but they must make those decisions in a sometimes confusing storm of information and misinformation, opinions and ideology, and short-term political imperatives.  Therefore, experts, the public and the media should work together – although the members of the Cabot Institute provide advice directly to government, we must also help foster the political climate that allows the best, evidence-based decisions to be made.

Given the complexity of climate change issues, I have been pleased to see some parts of the media adopting a more sophisticated discussion of the topic. For example, fewer journalists have asked whether climate change ‘caused’ Typhoon Haiyan or the UK’s severe winter storms and more have asked how climate change might affect such events in the future and how that might impact food prices. More are discussing how the extreme winter will exacerbate the refugee crisis in Syria. These are subtle but important expansions of the media conversation that reveal an increasing understanding of probability and the multiplication of risk.

Credit: Jackl

However, media sins persist, many of them specific to climate change but arising more generally from the external factors that have transformed the entire industry over the past two decades: a need for ratings, a need to entertain, and (most damaging in the case of environmental issues) a rapid news cycle that is better at responding to current events than in depth analysis and long-term considerations.  This has been particularly illustrated by both the media and political reaction to the floods of this past winter.

Most frustrating is the persistence by some parts of the media in creating a debate on the scientific evidence for climate change – a debate that does not exist but presumably enhances the entertainment value of the discussion.  I’m not opposed to debate.  In fact, I am eager for more rigorous, fact-based debate on this and other issues.  This is where the academic community and media could come together and bring real value to our community. But it is deeply frustrating to become entrained in non-debates regarding the underlying physics of global warming and the greenhouse effect, when there are important discussions about how much warming will occur, what the consequences will be and the cost-benefit of different policy decisions.  To its credit, media coverage is increasingly moving in that direction and ongoing coverage much better reflects the balance of scientific opinion.

However, in the aftermath of big climate news events, such as the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report or a spate of unusually cold weather, this non-debate is resurrected.  At these times, it is frustrating that the media rarely acts as a moderator of baseless and factually incorrect claims – on both sides of the topic.  Lobbyists and pundits are allowed to repeatedly state that the IPCC report is ‘mumbo jumbo’  or that the science of climate change is a ‘conspiracy’.  It is not entirely the climate deniers who abuse evidence; some advocates for climate change action, with whom I am sympathetic, describe a ‘climate apocalypse’ or ‘climate breakdown’, fearsome concepts that upon scrutiny mean nothing scientifically.  Unfortunately, the policy of some organisations (I’m looking at you, USA Today) mandates that any editorial comment on climate change requires equal space for the opposite opinion; it is analogous to an editorial on the space programme being counterbalanced by an opinion from the Flat Earth Society. Some media agencies are adapting; Paul Thornton, the LA Times letters editor, refuses to run letters in the newspaper from some climate sceptics in order ‘to keep errors of fact off the letters page.’  There are important discussions to be had, but these will be forgotten if we become mired in debates over putative hoaxes, conspiracies or divine judgement of our hedonistic lifestyle.

One way forward is to bring more creativity to the conversation by bringing in new expert voices.  As with many other policy debates, the climate change discussion has become ossified into rather turgid and unhelpful patterns: scientists vs sceptics, environmentalists vs business.  These are poor representations of the actual issue.  Insurance companies are deeply concerned about climate change.  Our military believes that climate change could exacerbate future conflicts.  Religious leaders believe that preventing climate change that disproportionately harms the poorest of the planet is an ethical issue.  I would urge the media to ignore the uninformed but highly opinionated partisans who put themselves out there, and instead seek out the quiet but knowledgable voices of those who truly understand the challenges facing us and have firsthand understanding of the economic and social consequences.  Similarly, I would urge the academic community to focus not only on our expertise – expertise that while deep is often narrow –and explore collective expertise with some of our partners.  We should be doing our part to invigorate the conversation by bringing together different cohorts of knowledge.

The most pernicious challenge, however, and one exemplified by the media coverage of the devastating floods that we have experienced this winter, is the fickle nature of the news cycle.  Climate change is covered in a sporadic and ad hoc manner – in the aftermath of a severe storm or the release of a new finding.  Climate change should not be headline news once a year but rather a continuous part of the news cycle, reflecting its widespread impact on our environment and lives. Encouragingly, this is the trend; a quick survey of the BBC website reveals that articles reflecting on climate change are published every few days.  What is missing is a more long-term perspective – how will climate change make typhoons worse in twenty years, how could it exacerbate unrest in parts of the world already stressed by ethnic or religious tensions, will it cause greater instability in global food markets? This is the information the public needs in order to make informed personal and political decisions.

Tamsin Edwards

This change in dialogue also requires a change within the academic community.  We tend to think about engagement in the same way that we think about our other academic outputs – discrete publications containing discrete results and leading to discrete press releases.  With a few notable exceptions, such as our own Tamsin Edwards, we are less skilled in commenting on the wider issues.  This partly occurs in IPCC reports, but that alone is insufficient because it is infrequent and a synthesis of the literature, such that it is less engaged with current events or specific ongoing policy decisions.

In short, academics need to recognise our roles as well-informed experts and enter the public dialogue.  There is an ongoing and legitimate debate whether climate change scientists should comment on specific policy, but it is glaringly evident that we should be injecting climate change into the conversation where it is relevant, on topics as far-ranging as flooding, land use and planning, sustainable energy, global insecurity and agricultural strategies.  We do not have all of the answers.  Sometimes our most important contribution is raising unasked questions.  We do not have to work alone; we can build coalitions of knowledge.   But no matter how we do it, we must work with the media – all parts of the media – to share what we have learned.

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

Prof Rich Pancost

Climate lessons from the past: Are we already committed to a warmer and wetter planet?

Posted on by janet.crompton

Last September, the Cabot Institute and the University of Bristol hosted the 2nd International Workshop on Pliocene Climate.   Following on from that, we have just  released a short video describing what the Pliocene is and its relevance for understanding climate change.

The Pliocene is a geological time interval that occurred from 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago.  This interval of Earth history is interesting for many reasons, but one of the most profound is that the Earth’s atmosphere apparently contained elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide – in fact, our best estimates suggest concentrations were about 300 to 400  ppm, which is much higher than concentrations of 100 years ago but lower than those of today after a century of intensive fossil fuel combustion.

Image by NASA

Consequently, the Pliocene could provide valuable insight into the type of planet we are creating via global warming.  Our video release happens to coincide with pronounced flooding across the UK and focussed attention on our weather and climate.  There is little doubt that increased carbon dioxide concentrations will cause global warming; instead, the key questions are: how much warming will there be and what are the consequences of that warming? One way to study that is to examine previous intervals of Earth history also characterised by high carbon dioxide concentrations. The comparisons are not perfect, of course; for example, during the Pliocene the continents were in roughly but not exactly the same positions that they are in today.  But it can serve as another piece of the puzzle in predicting future climate.

One of the key lessons from Earth history is climate sensitivity.  Climate sensitivity can be expressed in various ways, but in its simplest sense it is a measure of how much warmer the Earth becomes for a given doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.  This is well known for the Pleistocene, and especially the past 800,000 years of Earth history, an interval with detailed temperature reconstructions and carbon dioxide records from ice core gas bubbles.  During that time, and through multiple ice ages, climate sensitivity was about 2.5 to 3°C warming for a doubling of carbon dioxide, which is in the middle of the model-based range of predictions.

Ice core sampling.
Image by NASA ICE (Ice Core Vitals) [CC-BY-2.0]
Wikimedia Commons

Ice core records, however, extend back no more than a million years, and this time period is generally characterised by colder climates than those of today.  If we want to explore climate sensitivity on a warmer planet, we must look further back into Earth history, to times such as the Pliocene.  Reconstructing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the absence of ice cores is admittedly more challenging.  Instead of directly measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles, we must rely on indirect records – proxies.  For example, carbon dioxide concentration influences the number of stomata on plant leaves, and this can be measured on ancient leaf fossils. Alternatively, there are a number of geochemical tools based on how carbon dioxide impacts the pH of seawater or how algae assimilate carbon dioxide during photosynthesis; these are recorded by the chemical composition of ancient fossils.

These estimates come with larger error bars, but they provide key insights into climate sensitivity on a warmer Earth.  Recent research indicates a convergence of Pliocene carbon dioxide estimates from these various proxies and gives us more confidence in deriving climate sensitivity estimates.  In particular, it appears that an increase of carbon dioxide from about 280 parts per million (the modern value before the industrial revolution) to about 400 parts per million in the Pliocene results in a 2°C warmer Earth. Accounting for other controls, this suggests a climate sensitivity of about 3°C, which confirms both the Pleistocene and model-based estimates.

It also suggests that we have yet to experience the full consequences of the greenhouse gases already added to the atmosphere.

So then, what was this much warmer world like?  First of all, it was not an inhospitable planet – plants and animals thrived.  This should not be a surprise; in fact, the Earth was much warmer even deeper into the past. The climate change we are inducing is a problem for humans and society, not our planet.

However, the Pliocene was a rather different world.  For example – and importantly, given current events in the UK –  these higher global temperatures were associated with a climate that was also wetter* than present.  That provides important corroborating evidence for models that predict a warmer and wetter future.

 Image by w:en:User:Ivan and licensed as GFDL

Perhaps most striking, sea level appears to have been between 10 to 40 metres  higher than today, indicating that both the Greenland Ice Sheet and  Antarctic Ice Sheet were markedly smaller.  To put that into context, the Met Office has already commented on how flooding in the UK has been and will be exacerbated by sea level rise of 12 centimetres over the last 100 years and a further 5 to 7 centimetres by 2030.

We must be careful in how we extract climate lessons from the geological record, and that is particularly true when we consider ice sheet behaviour.  One widely discussed concept is ice sheet hysteresis.  This is a fancy way of saying that due to feedback mechanisms, it could be easier to build an ice sheet on Greenland or Antarctica than it is to melt one.  If such hysteresis does stabilise our current ice sheets, then we should not assume a planet with 400 ppm of carbon dioxide will necessarily have sea level 20 metres higher than that of today. But if hysteresis is rather weak, then the question is not whether we will see massive sea level change but rather how long it will take (Note: It is likely to take centuries or millennia!).

Most importantly, the collective research into Earth history, including the Pliocene, reveals that Earth’s climate can change.  It also reveals that climate does not just change randomly: it changes when forced in relatively well understood ways.  One of these is the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. And consequently, there is little doubt from Earth history that transforming fossil carbon into carbon dioxide – as we are doing today – will significantly impact the Earth’s climate system.

* See Brigham-Grette, J., Melles, M., Minyuk, P., Andreev, A., Tarasov, P., DeConto, R., Koenig, S., et al., 2013. Pliocene Warmth, Polar Amplification, and Stepped Pleistocene Cooling Recorded in NE Arctic Russia. Science 340 (6139), 1421-1427. doi: 10.1126/science.1233137 and Salzmann, U., Haywood, A.M., Lunt, D.J., 2009. The past is a guide to the future? Comparing Middle Pliocene vegetation with predicted biome distributions for the twenty-first century. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 367 (1886), 189-204.

This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute.  Rich will be giving a public lecture on how biogeochemical cycles have regulated the global climate system throughout Earth’s history on 25 February in Bristol.  The event is free and open to all, do come along to learn more.

To learn more about the Pliocene – and palaeoclimate research, in general – you can watch Professor Gerald Haug’s public lecture, Climate and Societies, recorded at the Cabot Institute as part of the 2nd International Workshop on Pliocene Climate.

Prof Rich Pancost

Environmental uncertainty: A challenge to both business and vulnerable communities

Posted on by janet.crompton

In September, the IPCC published the Fifth Annual Report on the Physical Basis of Climate Change.  It devotes little attention to the human and ecological impacts of global environmental and climatic change, topics that will be addressed by working group reports released in early 2014 .  Nonetheless, the trajectory of climate and other environmental changes and their implicit impacts on society are stark. Despite numerous treaties and efforts at mitigation, concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to increase, and at greater rather than diminished rates. If those rates continue they will result in global warming of 3 to 5.5°C by 2100. This in turn, will result in dramatic changes to the global hydrological cycle, including both more evaporation and more rainfall.

A More Uncertain Climate

Flood by Paul Bates

The results will be a more hostile climate for many as land can become either drier or more flood-prone or both, changes exacerbated in coastal areas by sea level rise.  Freshwater supply will also be affected by the forecast changes in climate. The quantity of water flowing in glacier or snow-melt fed river basins will change, affecting around a sixth of the world’s population[i], while coastal freshwater will be contaminated with saline water[ii]. Areas of the Mediterranean[iii], Western USA[iv], Southern Africa[v] and North Western Brazil[vi] are projected to face decreased availability of freshwater.

Key to understanding who will be affected is our ability to predict changes in rainfall, seasonality, and temperature at a regional scale.  However, regional climatic predictions are the most challenging and least certain, especially with respect to the nature and amount of rainfall. For vast parts of the world, including much of South America, Africa and SE Asia, it is unclear whether climate change will bring about wetter or drier conditions. Thus, uncertainty will become the norm: uncertainty in rainfall; uncertainty in weather extremes and seasonality; and most importantly, uncertainty in water resources.

Those combined effects lead to an additional and perhaps the most profound uncertainty for the latter half of the 21st century: uncertainty in food production and access. In the absence of other factors, climate uncertainty and more common extreme events will compromise agriculture at all scales, yielding increased food prices and increased volatility in markets.

 

Impacts on the Poor

Although the human impacts of climate change will be diverse, their effects will be worst for the most impoverished and, by extension, least resilient population groups.  The UN reports that climate change could “increase global malnutrition by up to 25% by 2080.”  And all of this occurs against a backdrop in which access to food is already a challenge for the poorest of the world already a challenge for the poorest of the world [p5], a situation exacerbated by the global financial crash.

These risks to the poorest result from a lack of resources to mitigate harm, lack of power to protect resources, and the global competition for resources.

Those who lack the financial resources to migrate or build more hazard-resistant homes will suffer most from extreme events, as has been sharply illustrated by those suffering most in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.  Those who can least afford to dig deeper wells into more ancient aquifers as water resources diminish will go thirsty.  Subsistence farmers – and those dependent on them – are less resistant to climate shocks (desertification) and adverse weather events (flooding) than commercial farmers.

Land ownership for the poorest is often tenuous, and displacement from land a serious problem for many.  Previous switches to biofuels have led to land competition, resulting in both loss of land to subsistence [p6]  farmers, and diversion of commercial production leading to shortages [p7]  and increased food prices. Within communities, these effects are not evenly spread as marginalised groups, such as women, are the least likely to hold land tenure [p8] .  Similarly, there is increased competition for water [p9]  between peoples, but also between water for industry (including agriculture) and water for drinking. When water is scarce, pollution of fresh water is common, and governance is weak, the poorest are likely to lose out.

 

Image by Mammal Research UnitUniversity of Bristol

Food competition will most likely be exacerbated by other factors: rising demand from a rapidly expanding population and a growing demand for meat from a global ‘middle class’; the increased economic divide between post-industrial and developing nations; the ongoing depletion of soil nutrients and associated impacts on the nutritional value of our food.  The combination of these factors will result in profound impacts on food security. Who decides what gets grown? Who can afford it in the context of global markets and the loss of agricultural land? The poorest members of even the wealthiest societies are the most vulnerable to dramatic and unpredictable changes in food costs[p10] .

‘Wicked Problems’

These issues yield a profoundly challenging ethical issue: the wealthy who are most responsible for anthropogenic climate change, via the greatest material consumption and energy demand, have the greatest resilience to food market fluctuations and the greatest means for avoiding their most deleterious impacts.  Therefore, these issues challenge all governments to dramatically and swiftly act to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the associated climate change.

Unfortunately, many proposed mitigation strategies could also have negative consequences for food prices and availability. Increasing energy prices, such as those brought about by a carbon tax, will be passed onto food prices.  Genetically modified foods could be essential to feeding a growing population, and we would urge that future efforts expand to incorporate a greater degree of climate resilience in crops; however, the patents on those crops can make them financially inaccessible to the poorest nations or build critical dependencies.

Although sustainable agriculture and crops might reduce the impact of climate change and uncertainty in some countries, these solutions can be deleterious for the poorest.  They are more likely to live in regions and areas most negatively affected by climate change, most likely to be relying on subsistence/small scale agriculture and least likely to have access to the global market as consumers.  In other words, a stable global market will be of little direct benefit to them; in fact, most of these populations are likely to face competition for land/water use from globalised markets (for biofuels or commercial farming).  In short, what builds food resilience in one nation might be exposing the most economically vulnerable in another.

In fact, when properly mobilised for the benefit of the community, access to new energy sources – even if in the form of fossil fuels – can be transformative and facilitate the economic growth needed to access increasingly globalised food markets [p12].    Domestic access to gas reduces the need to collect wood for fires, reducing deforestation, improving air quality, and freeing up time for communities to address other development needs.

This is not an argument against mitigation of climate change, but it does need to be balanced against human development needs; and this represents one of the world’s most profound challenges. In some circles, we consider this a ‘wicked’ problem: a problem that has multiple causes, probably in interaction, and where information is incomplete, such that proposed solutions might be incomplete, contradictory, complex and work across multiple causes in complex systems.

Challenges and Opportunities

Biofuel by La Jolla

Wicked problems are not intractable, however, and previous studies of land use for biofuels provide clues as to how a complex solution could be more sustainable for all; well planned switches to biofuels which consider local custom in land tenure can provide more land for agriculture, and reduce deforestation pressure.

In such situations, we argue, solutions which focus on halting or slowing climate change alone, and then coping with the business and development problems that they might create answer the wrong question.  Our challenge to the business (and academic) community, then, is to engage with some wicked questions:

  • What are the business opportunities in improving the social and physical environment?
  • Can the global agricultural system be a single resilient network, rather than a competition?
  • What technology or innovation is needed to support a resilient food network?
  • How can innovative solutions to these challenges generate local income, allowing reinvestment in education and development?

These are difficult questions but they also represent opportunities for development and growth in poor communities.  A world with increasing environmental uncertainty is a challenge for both businesses and vulnerable communities.  But it could also be a shared opportunity for growth and development: to innovate and identify new solutions, to co-invest in local resilience and risk reduction, and to share the growth that arises from more stable communities.

 

[i] Z Kundzewicz, L Mata, N Arnell, P Doll, P Kabat, K Jimenez, K Miller, T Oki, Z Sen & I Shiklomanov, Freshwater Resources and their Manegemtn. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2007
[ii] R Buddemeier, S Smith, S Swaaney & C Crossland, The Role of the Coastal Ocean in the Disturbed and Undisturbed Nutrient and Carbon Cycles,  LOICZ Reports and Studies Series, 2002, 84
[iii] P Etchevers, C Golaz, F Habets & J Noilhan, Impact of a Climate Change on the Rhone River Catchment Hydrology,Journal of Geophysical Research, 2002, 4293
[iv] J Kim, T Kim, R Arritt & N Miller, Impacts of Increased CO2 on the Hydroclimate of the Western United States, Journal of Climate, 2002, 1926
[v] M Hulme, R Doherty & T Ngara, African Climate Change, Climate Research, 2001, 145
[vi] J Christensen, B Hewitson, A Busuioc, A Chen, X Gao, I Held, R Jones, R Kolli, W Kwon, R Laprise, V Magana Rueda, L Mearns, C Menendez, J Raisanen, A Rinke, A Sarr & P Whetton, Regional Climate Change, The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,2007, 847

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This blog is written by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute and Dr Patricia Lucas, School for Policy Studies, both at University of Bristol.
Prof Rich Pancost

This blog has kindly been reproduced from the Business Fights Poverty blog.

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