Post-Kyoto Climate Governance: Confronting the Politics of Scale, Ideology and Knowledge

Dr. Asim Zia, Assistant Professor CDAE, UVM and Gund Fellow, discusses key findings from his recent research about the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and the transition into a post-Kyoto climate governance regime. He includes analysis from his recently published book, "Post-Kyoto Climate Governance: Confronting the Politics of Scale, Ideology and Knowledge", which is followed by a lively discussion about the current state of international climate policy.

Feedbacks Between Deforestation, Climate, and Hydrology in the Amazon

Dr. Michael Coe, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center, discusses feedback between deforestation, climate and hydrology in the Amazon. Deforestation in the Amazon causes important changes in the energy and water balance by altering how incoming precipitation and radiation are partitioned among sensible and latent heat fluxes. The south-southeastern Amazon region has been most affected by these changes because of the combination of large-scale historical deforestation and its geographic position in a climatological and ecological transition zone. Dr. Coe finishes his tea by discussing what existing policy mechanisms can strengthen the protection of forests on private lands to mitigate future ecological impacts of externally and regionally driven climate change.

Specimen-based Modeling, Stopping Rules, and the Extinction of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Dr. Nicholas J. Gotelli, Professor of Biology, University of Vermont, presents quantitative analyses of historical museum specimen records and the results of contemporary avian surveys to estimate the probability that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is extant today. The reported rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in 2004 was one of the most exciting and controversial events in the history of conservation biology. The talk is a mixture of conservation biology and statistical modeling, with some elements of economics, history, and psychology added for flavor.

Carbon Pricing as Property Creation

Dr. James Boyce, Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses how carbon pricing - via a carbon tax or a cap-and-permit system - transforms the carbon absorptive capacity of the biosphere from an open-access resource into a form of property.  Under these systems consumers would pay for their use of this scarce resource based on their carbon footprints. James asks a key question  -  who should own this new property and get the money: corporations, the government, or the public?

During Dr. Ehrlich’s visit he gave a Burack Lecture on "What Are the Chances a Collapse of Civilization Can Be Avoided?”, to a packed crowd of almost 500 people.  Not content just to give one lecture, Paul was generous with his time – he guest lectured in courses, had lunch with students, birded with Allan Strong, and ate almost every meal with various faculty and community members.  He also sat down to chat with Taylor about science, human behavior, women’s rights, and the chances of societal collapse. Highlights from their conversation can be viewed in this video. 

The conference aims to explore “Building Local, Scaling Global: Implementing Solutions for Sustainability” examining lessons learned at local, regional, and state levels while taking a critical look at the constraints of scalable ‘solutions.’ The Conference Schedule is now on the conference website, where you will also find information about the plenary speakers and conference themes.

Health, Happiness, and Hahaha: Twitter's many reflections of Social Stories

Dr. Peter Dodds, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and Director of the Complex Systems Center, UVM, provides motivation for measuring well-being online through non-invasive observation, as a complement to traditional survey methods, and outlines recent `big data' efforts that have extracted emotional content from written expression. He reports in particular on a real-time, remote-sensing, non-invasive, text-based approach, which has been used to uncover collective dynamical patterns of happiness as expressed in the global social network Twitter, song lyrics, blogs, political speeches, and news sources. He discusses global levels of temporal, spatial, demographic, and social variations in happiness and information levels, as well as evidence of emotional synchrony and contagion. He employs a particular graphical method to show how individual words contribute to changes in average happiness between any two texts. Finally, he discusses how natural language appears to contain a frequency-independent positive bias, and how this connects to collective cooperation and evolution.

The Southern Brazil Agroecology Case

Dr. Abdon L. Schmitt, Gund Visiting Scholar, Professor, University of Santa Catarina-UFSC, Brazil, discusses how payments for ecosystem services (PES) for restoration activities might facilitate restoration while keeping small farms viable in Brazil.  Brazil's Atlantic Forest is a biodiversity hotspot harboring more threatened and endangered species than any other Brazilian ecosystem. Only substantial conservation and restoration can reduce the threat of catastrophic extinctions. Abdon discusses PES and how small farmers can adopt agroecology practices ranging from Voisin grazing systems and silvopastoral management to agroforestry in riparian zones, which can help protect and restore critical natural capital while enhancing farmers' income.

Connecting Gender Equality to Environmental Sustainability

Cheryl Hanna, Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School, discusses violence against women in the context of both the United States and internationally and how human rights courts have been making the links to violence against women and gender equality. She discusses the direct and often unexplored implications for the environmental movement, including things like reproductive autonomy and population control, household energy security, and sustainable agriculture.

It is an open publication available here: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1619/20120171.full

In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

Their study, published online on March 22, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, shows that population trends for most stocks of these animals remain unknown, but of those stocks that are known, many are increasing.

“At a very fundamental level, the MMPA has accomplished what its framers set out to do,” says co-author Andrew Read, professor of marine biology at Duke University, “to protect individual marine mammals from harm as a result of human activities.”

Restored roles

Some marine mammals, like endangered right whales, continue to be in deep trouble, but other populations “particularly seals and sea lions, have recovered to or near their carrying capacity,” the scientists write.

“We have seen remarkable recoveries of some populations of marine mammals, such as gray seals in New England and sea lions and elephant seals along the Pacific coast,” says Read.

“U.S. waters are pretty compromised with lots of ship traffic and ship strikes, big fisheries, pollution, boat noise, “ Joe Roman says. “And yet it’s safer to be a marine mammal in U.S. waters than elsewhere,” he says, due to the Act’s strong protections against commercial and accidental killing — what the law calls “take” — and its aim to maintain sustainable populations of mammals and their ecological roles in oceans.

“It’s important to evaluate such broad legislation,” says Caitlin Campbell ’12, an Environmental Sciences graduate from UVM’s College of Arts & Sciences, and a co-author on the paper.

“A lot of people think that the hard part was getting it passed through Congress, but in reality you have to make sure that big protective measures like this actually are effective,” she says. “This paper shows that this act is doing its job.”

The research team — Campbell; Joe Roman in UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics; Irit Altman from Boston University; Meagan Dunphy-Daly and Andrew Read from Duke University; and Michael Jasny from the Natural Resources Defense Council — gathered hundreds of data sets from around the world, including from NOAA, Canadian agencies, and the IUCN. Their goal was to get an accurate picture of population levels and trends of more than two hundred stocks of marine mammals from the Pantropical Spotted Dolphin to the West Indian Manatee.

The team concluded that for many of these animals there simply aren't enough data. For seventy-one percent of the stocks they identified, they couldn’t say which way the population was heading, up or down. “There isn’t enough research,” Roman says.

But for the ones they could evaluate, they found that nineteen percent of stocks were increasing, while five percent were stable and only five percent were declining.

Another fundamental conclusion of this research: “stopping harvesting these mammals, stop fisheries bycatch, stop killing them — and many populations bounce back,” says Roman. Marine mammals are long-lived “so it’s going to take decades, maybe longer for populations to rebound,” he says, “but it seems the trends are increasing.”

Beyond whale oil

In 1934, trends were definitely not increasing for right whales, when an international treaty banned hunting these nearly extinguished creatures. But other protections lagged, and by the 1960s many whales and other marine mammals — including some dolphins and seals — faced plummeting populations and the risk of extinction.

Yet in the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense resisted legislation to protect whales and other marine mammals: they relied on sperm whale oil for use as a lubricant in submarines and other military engines, Roman’s team writes.

In one curious part of the complex negotiations at the White House, Lee Talbot, a canny scientist working for Richard Nixon, produced an affidavit from the DuPont Corporation stating that they could produce an artificial lubricant that could do the same job as the whale oil. This helped make the Pentagon more receptive toward whale-protecting legislation. In October 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act passed. This victory was also a key step toward the passage of the more forceful (though less ecologically oriented) Endangered Species Act that passed the next year.

Under these two laws, “countless tens of thousands of individual whales, seals, and manatees have been protected from harm since 1972,” the scientists write, “exactly as intended by those who crafted the legislation.”

In 1994, major amendments to the MMPA established a new framework for dealing with interactions between marine mammals and commercial fisheries, “which remains perhaps the most important conservation issue facing these iconic animals," says Andrew Read.

This new framework, relies on “a negotiated rule-making process,” Read says, looking for solutions to the incidental death of mammals in commercial fisheries. One of the strengths of the new process is that it “requires the direct involvement of fishermen, conservationists and scientists in the management process,” Read says.

Still, some deeply depleted species, like right whales, may never recover, and additional threats beyond direct killing remain. The Marine Mammal Protection Act has generally been ineffective in dealing with problems like increasing underwater noise from naval operations and other ships, new diseases, and depleted prey species in fraying food webs. “Existing conservation measures have not protected large whales from fisheries interactions or ship strikes in the northwestern Atlantic,” the team writes.

And this points to a new generation of challenges such as moving shipping lanes in whale feeding territory, slowing speed boats in manatee habitat, changing lobster fishing technologies and other fishing gear modifications, and continuing to improve ecosystem-based fisheries management. “That’s going to be hard and require real political will,” Joe Roman says.

The course examined the theory and ethics behind Common Asset Trusts and provided background research necessary for Vermont's citizens and legislators to make informed decisions about VCAT. Working closely with state politicians and NGOs and building on previous research, students identified what common assets should be included in the trust, how the trust should manage and allocate these assets, and how much revenue the trust could generate.

The Gund is excited about this honor and our on-going collaboration with RETN who submitted the video to the festival. Thank you and congratulations to Hilary Archer for her excellent work on this film, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBrAU9OLvqA

Although the Master of Public Administration degree is considered a terminal professional degree, the UVM-MPA program has distinguished itself for the applied and basic research conducted by its students and faculty.  For example, MPA ’12 graduate Erik Wells undertook a study of Designated Downtown or Village Center Districts for PA 306: Policy Systems.  Details from his research report were quoted in a speech by Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin and were used to expand the state’s tax credit cap by $500,000.  A current MPA student, Erin Flynn, is interning for the Joint Fiscal Office for the State of Vermont providing invaluable research in support of the comprehensive healthcare reforms being undertaken by the State of Vermont.  Current MPA student, Drake Turner, recently received the award for best social science and business poster during new UVM President Sullivan’s Installation celebrations for her research on Vermont’s Farm to Plate network.  MPA students routinely involve themselves in the activities of the UVM James M. Jeffords Center, the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, the Transportation Research Center, the Vermont Consumer Assistance Office, and the Center for Rural Studies.  Our program alumni go on to distinguished careers in federal, state and local government, nonprofit administration, policy analysis and higher education. 

Two examples of alumni distinguishing themselves include: MPA alumni Russell Mills ’07 who went on to get his Ph.D. from Kent State, spent two years with the FAA, is now an assistant professor at Bowling Green, and has established himself as one of the leading experts in airport governance in the country.  MPA graduate Richard Donahey  ’09 now serves as the comptroller for the State of Vermont Agency of Human Service. 

Our faculty have distinguished themselves as well.  MPA faculty members Asim Zia and Christopher Koliba are combining computer simulation with participatory modeling approaches to address climate change adaptation, water quality, transportation and energy needs of the region, involving a host of MPA students serving as research assistants on these efforts.  MPA faculty member Maura Collins Versluys (MPA ’07) was recognized by the Vermont Business Magazine for their Rising Stars Award for her commitment to business growth, professional excellence and involvement in their communities through her work on fair housing advocacy.  .

MPA faculty are drawn from Community Development & Applied Economics (CDAE), Psychology, and the Rubinstein School of Natural Resources, and an experienced set of scholar-practitioners who are or have recently been leaders in state and local government, leading nonprofits and businesses, health care and higher education institutions.  MPA faculty are active scholars in the areas of organizational and network behavior and change (Lawson, Anderson, Koliba and Zia), environmental policy, management and governance (Farley, Zia, Koliba and Ventriss),  ecological economics (Farley and Zia), climate change governance (Zia, Koliba and Farley), food systems (Kolodinsky, Koliba, Findley-Woodriff, and Zia), transportation (Zia, Koliba and Kolodinsky), public service ethics (Ventriss), energy (Koliba, Zia and Farley) and healthcare (Kappel, O’Donnell, Kolodinsky, Koliba and Zia),   Many MPA faculty have substantial experience as leaders within nonprofit organizations (Van Buren, and Collins), regional businesses (Findley-Woodriff), the healthcare system (O’Donnell and Kappel), state and local government (Cate and Zia), and higher education administration (Cate, Kolodinsky, Lawson and Koliba).  Because of the breadth of expertise of MPA faculty, the MPA degree appeals to students with a diverse array of interests including the environment, food systems, transportation systems, social services, land use planning, energy and healthcare, while preparing them  to lead and provide innovation across the public, nonprofit and private sectors. 

The 36 credit hour degree program provides students with a solid foundation in professional management competencies and public policy analysis methods, while allowing them an opportunity to “hand craft” their own learning pathways.  The core curriculum focuses on such areas as organizational behavior and change, policy systems and public and nonprofit budgeting and finance.   Elective courses are offered in such areas as advanced policy analysis and decision-making modeling, systems analysis and strategic management, healthcare policy, and nonprofit administration.  Striking a balance between theory and practice, MPA students engage in applied projects involving local and state governments, the Vermont State Legislature, social service, food system and environmental nonprofits within their classes and internship experiences. 

The pervasiveness of our society’s public policy challenges continues to call for the cultivation of public service leaders and innovators.  The UVM-MPA Program provides an opportunity for its student to address those challenges.  For more information visit the MPA website: www.uvm.edu/mpa

“We are delighted that Drs. Rizzo, Voigt, Koliba, and Keeton will be joining the Gund Institute community as Fellows.  Their work exemplifies what the Gund is about, and we are excited about the scientific collaborations and practical applications we can pursue together.” -Taylor Ricketts, Fellow and Director of the Gund Institute

Bill Keeton, Professor of Forest Ecology and Forestry, Chair of UVM of Forestry Program Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, UVM

Dr. Keeton came to UVM in 2001 and is currently a Professor of Forest Ecology and Forestry and the Chair of the UVM Forestry Program. His research focuses on forest carbon management, climate change impacts on forest ecosystems, ecologically-based silvicultural systems, structure and function of old-growth and riparian forests, natural disturbance ecology, restoration ecology, forest biodiversity, and sustainable forest management policy and practice in the U.S. and internationally. Bill is interested in developing and applying the best available science to questions of local, regional, and global environmental and forest ecosystem sustainability. He is on a number of environmentally minded boards and committees.

Chris Koliba, Director of the Master of Public Administration Program and Associate Professor in Community Development and Applied Economics, UVM

Dr. Koliba came to UVM in 1999 and has been a faculty member in CDAE since 2002. Dr. Koliba's research interests include organizational change, civic education, cross-sector collaborations, network theory and governance networks, and educational policy. He is an experienced workshop facilitator and also consults with community organizations and institutions, utilizing applied research and group development approaches to support program evaluation and organizational change.

Donna Rizzo, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, UVM

Dr. Rizzo joined UVM in the fall of 2002, and was one of the first PhD graduates of the Engineering program at UVM. Professor Rizzo has worked on computational approaches to multi-scale environmental problems, using a number of methods, including predicting local disease risk indicators from weather and developing a watershed classification system.

Brian Voigt, Research Assistant Professor at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, UVM

Dr. Voigt's research focuses on computer-based systems for modeling land use change and the interaction between humans and their environment. His interests also include: ecosystem services and natural hazards, addressing existing and emerging environmental issues through participatory modeling and spatial analysis, and creating knowledge to facilitate improved environmental management. Brian's current research topics include modeling freshwater ecosystem services and the spread of infectious disease in Tanzania and modeling environmental tradeoffs resulting from alternative development patterns in Chittenden County, VT.

Welcome to Brian, Donna, Chris and Bill!

Dr. Ehrlich's talk is entitled, "What Are the Chances a Collapse of Civilization Can Be Avoided?”  A reception will follow the talk in the Fireplace Lounge of the Davis Center.

Dr. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He is known for his tireless work in Population Biology, which covers ecology, evolutionary biology, behavior, human ecology, and cultural evolution. During his illustrious and occasionally contentious career he has authored and coauthored over 1000 scientific papers and articles in the popular press, and over 40 books. Some of his many honors include the First AAAS/Scientific American Prize for Science in the Service of Humanity; a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship; and The Crafoord Prize (equivalent to the Nobel Prize for areas where the Nobel is not given), awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Gund Institute for Ecological Economics will host Dr. Ehrlich on campus.  This talk is free and open to the public.

Responsibilities: The postdoctoral researcher will: develop a spatially-explicit statistical model integrating the ecology and economics of crop pollination services (building on our initial modeling efforts); work closely with project field teams to apply this model to several agricultural landscapes and crops within the US; use the fitted models to predict impacts of habitat enhancements on pollinator communities and crop productivity.  The post-doctoral researcher will work closely with both Dr. Ricketts and Dr. Lonsdorf, and will interact continuously with the broader project team (www.icpbees.org).

Qualifications:  Applicants must have a doctoral degree in ecology, economics, agricultural science, or related fields.  Successful candidates will have strong quantitative and statistical modeling skills, expertise in pollination or landscape ecology, successful experience with interdisciplinary collaboration, and a commitment to connecting research to real-world land management.

Application: Applicants should send a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and contact information for three references to Taylor Ricketts, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, at taylor.ricketts@uvm.edu.  Review of applications will begin on April 12, 2013 and we anticipate a start date of July 1, 2013. 

Setting: The University of Vermont is located in Burlington, between the Green and Adirondack Mountains and on the shores of Lake Champlain.  The Gund Institute is a transdisciplinary environmental research center involving 20 Faculty Fellows, visiting scholars, and graduate students (www.uvm.edu/giee/). Related efforts at UVM include a university-wide research initiative in Food Systems. 

The University of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Applications from women and people from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are encouraged.

The Natural Capital Project will be holding a training workshop on InVEST (our ecosystem services mapping tool) June 12-14 at UVM.  It will immediately follow the USSEE meeting that the Gund Institute is hosting on campus.

'NatCap' does about a dozen such trainings per year, mostly for conservation practitioners in developing countries.  But because we expect more than the usual number of academics and students at this one, we will include time to discuss improvements to the models, and to plan scientific collaborations around those improvements or around innovative applications. 

Link to more information and registration is here.

Human survival depends on many natural processes, which do not have a direct market value, such as nutrient cycling, climate regulation, water purification, pest regulation and plant pollination. Paradoxically, changes humans have made to landscapes, such as conversion of natural habitat to human uses and agricultural intensification, can compromise these ecosystem services. Pollination of crops by wild insects is one such vulnerable ecosystem service, as wild insects are declining in many agricultural landscapes. Flowers of most crops need to receive pollen before making seeds or fruits, and pollen transfer can be enhanced by insects that visit flowers. These insects usually live in natural or semi-natural habitats, such as forest margins, hedgerows or grasslands. As these habitats are lost from cropping landscapes, pollinator abundance and diversity decline and crops receive fewer flower visits. The most important crop pollinators includes bees, beetles, flies, butterflies, birds and bats.

This paper focused on understanding whether the ongoing loss of wild insects impacts crop harvest. For this purpose, the researchers compared fields with abundant and diverse wild insects to those with degraded assemblages of wild insects across 600 fields at 41 crop systems on all continents with farmland. The study found that fruit set, the proportion of flowers setting seeds or fruits, was considerably lower in sites with less wild insects visiting the crop flowers. Therefore, losses of wild insects from agricultural landscapes will likely impact both our natural heritage and agricultural harvest.

As hives of the honey bee are frequently added for improved pollination, the researchers asked whether this application can compensate for limited abundance and diversity of wild insects and fully maximize crop harvest. They found that variation in honey bee abundance improved fruit set in only 14% of the crop systems they served. Furthermore, wild insects pollinated crops more effectively, because an increase in their visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey-bee visitation. Importantly, high abundance of managed honey bees supplemented, rather than substituted for, pollination by wild insects. These results hold even for crops stocked routinely with high densities of honey bees for pollination, such as almond, blueberry, mango or watermelon. Although honey bees are generally viewed as a substitute for wild pollinators, this study demonstrates that they neither maximize pollination, nor fully replace the contributions of diverse, wild-insect assemblages to fruit set for a broad range of crops and agricultural practices on all continents with farmland.

The results of this study reveal that new practices for integrated management of both honey bees as an agricultural input and diverse assemblages of wild insects as an ecosystem service will enhance global yields of animal-pollinated crops and ensure long-term agricultural production. These practices should include conservation or restoration of natural or semi-natural areas within croplands, promotion of a variety of land use, addition of diverse floral and nesting resources, and more prudent use of insecticides that can kill pollinators.

But unlike nuclear weapons, the climate problem doesn’t sleep. It grows.

What to do? Asim Zia’s list of ways to reduce our accelerating output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide includes: respecting tropical forests, “dematerializing” consumption, re-directing waste streams into productive uses, and, “shifting to local, organic food systems,” he writes.

But, mostly, it will require getting off our fix to fossil fuels. Replacing energy and transportation systems that run on oil, gas and coal — with renewable sources — is an astoundingly complex task. And yet it’s the only way to avoid global climate catastrophe, he argues.

To get there will require more than voluntary targets and technocratic input, Zia believes. He has written a new book, Post-Kyoto Climate Governance, that calls for a deep re-thinking of our politics and economic assumptions, a clearer understanding of the cleavage between the developed and developing nations, and a shift away from expert-based international organizations, like the World Trade Organization, to “democratically anchored governance networks.”

In his book, Zia, an assistant professor in Community Development and Applied Economics and fellow in the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, ranges over several disciplines, looking for the causes of failure in international climate policy. And he’s looking for solutions. These may require dramatic new approaches, like global taxes, new forms of organized confrontation, and a willingness to reconsider reflexive attachments, he argues, like a belief in the benefits of free trade.

UVM Today spoke with Asim Zia about his new book, published on Jan. 28, by Routledge. We wanted him to lay out his map for developing new global climate governance, a post-Kyoto approach that, as he writes, “ confronts the politics of scale, ideology, and knowledge.”

UVM TODAY: We’ve known about the threats from climate change for several decades, but have made little progress. Why?

Asim Zia: We have made some small attempts at fixing this problem, but, so far, the efforts have been at the margins. There are institutions and practices that need to be fundamentally reformed for us to be able really tackle this problem.

My new book is about understanding those institutional and governance challenges. And it also looks into the last twenty years of the United Nations climate treaty negotiation process to understand what needs to happen next.

My fundamental conclusions are that we need to put up an international trade tax, and, secondly, we need to have an international carbon tax, at a global scale, and, thirdly — this is still questionable — that we need to reform the U.N. system.

How much time do we have to do this work?

In my recent NPR blog, we present the carbon budget that is available to us if we want to stop global warming below two-degrees centigrade. And that leaves us maybe seven years, maybe ten years. We are probably running neck-to-neck with the time we have left.

There’s a lot of new science and concern about blowing far past the two-degree target. Now I see reports about a “four-degree world.” Has four degrees becomes the new benchmark?

Maybe. At the beginning of the Doha round of negotiations, for example, the World Bank released a report on a four-degree centigrade world.

And then there have been a bunch of other papers saying that even if we take action now, it’s becoming unlikely that we’ll hold to a two-degree centigrade world unless we do some kind of reverse engineering or geo-engineering — which in itself is highly questionable.

Part of the problem is that the 1992 climate negotiations in Rio left the goal vague: that we, as a community of nations, should not cross dangerous thresholds in the atmospheric limits.

Those dangerous limits have typically been interpreted as two degrees centigrade. Some, like Bill McKibben or the groups doing planetary boundaries work, are focused on 350-parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Some people talk about 550-parts-per-million — but it’s not necessary that 350 or 550 would translate into two degrees.

What I am trying to communicate in this book is that instead of fighting about these goals and targets, we need to reform institutions.

 For example?

For example, free trade. International free trade is an institution that has not been touched upon in any climate negotiations! International free trade is mandated under the World Trade Organization — which is, in itself, a big multilateral negotiation process at the global scale.

But, essentially, when you promote free trade of goods and services, it’s the “externalities” from the production of those goods and services that leads to the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Our global institutions since the end of World War II have been designed to perpetuate a production and consumption process that is leading to perpetual and increasing growth of fossil fuel-induced greenhouse-gas emissions. So, till the time that we reform these international institutions that are leading to the greenhouse gas emissions, we cannot deal with this problem adequately.

Challenge free trade? But that’s the quasi-religion of countries around the world. How does advocating for limits on free trade fit into real politics?

That’s really the problem here. I call it, in my book, the politics of ideology. There’s a free-market, free-trade ideology that is dominating the discourse in an institutional setting.

Or take the carbon tax. In the EU, the carbon tax has been aligned with certain green parties or some left-wing parties, so there is a radicalization of the discourse.

But if you look at it rationally, if you look at all the analysis, these coupled human/natural system computer simulation models will tell you that the carbon tax and trade tax have low transaction costs, and they would stimulate local markets.

This approach could revitalize local communities that are losing their vitality to grow, for example, local organic food. And this kind of food production is an important piece in this picture for reducing methane emissions and reducing carbon emissions from agro-industrial systems. Then there are energy implications. Decentralized energy systems could be promoted, like solar and wind and community-based energy systems, through taxes and institutional reforms. But that is not being talked about.

Whenever somebody mentions international carbon taxes someone else says, “Oh, that’s not politically feasible.” Well, why is that? It’s not really feasible because those lobbies have been able to hijack the discourse.

Taxes are sticks. For example, tobacco taxes have been successful in reducing tobacco use in this country. Similarly, gasoline taxes have been successful in Europe in improving the fuel economy of cars. These taxes are proven.

What’s wrong with carbon markets and “cap and trade?” Can’t those work within existing free trade arrangements?

Let’s look at deforestation. Twenty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation. I’ve studied tropical forests for the last nine years in many countries including Peru, Tanzania, Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia.

These loose market mechanisms, like carbon markets and cap-and-trade and REDD+ have not been able to adequately deal with or stand against the free market mechanisms, which are causing the problem in the first place.

International free trade rules result in lifting a lot of environmental regulations that were put in place inside these countries to protect tropical forests. They’re now being deforested because of globalization of their markets. It’s not just the local timber mafias. The major drivers are the international agro-industries. You have all kinds of companies — mining, coal, Chinese companies, Canadian companies —  cutting down tropical forests, releasing greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

These cap-and-trade mechanisms, like REDD+, are still just starting to be negotiated and piloted in a few countries. But I am very skeptical about their effectiveness. It is just creating a new artificial market for carbon with the same problems as the European carbon market, which tanked after the global recession.

Cap-and-trade has only been successful in few isolated conditions, like the sulfur dioxide market in the U.S. — and that was successful because the market was clearly defined. We knew exactly which coal-fired power plants to tackle so you can do effective monitoring of those plants.

Global carbon markets, and cap-and-trade mechanisms like REDD+ and the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism were designed as experiments under Kyoto. We should acknowledge that that experiment has failed.

How much do your proposed governance reforms require a kind of human rationality, an enlightened self-interest, that seems in rather short supply when it comes to climate change?

There is this game theoretical perspective — that leads to this “prisoner’s dilemma” situation, which we are observing right now, where each actor tries to protect their own interests and the institutions are also designed in a way to protect individual interests — like the market economy, for example.

But the result is the tragedy of the commons: when everyone protects their own interests, at the collective level we are not able to protect anyone’s interest. The atmosphere is called the pure tragedy of the commons because it’s such perfect application of that idea.

Noboby owns it, and so we all dump our trash in it?

Exactly. That view is deterministic and tragic — and leads to a point where we are looking at not a four-degree-centigrade world but maybe an eight-degree-centigrade world by 2200, and we’re toast. It’s that sad.

Even if you look at some of the more advanced modeling applications, they suggest or recommend that high-greenhouse gas emitters, like the United States, not take any action but wait until the last minute, because then they’ll get a “better deal.” They are so cynical about that.

That model has limitations: it is probably good at describing one situation, but this kind of modeling is not good at setting norms, the value-based discussion that we need to have.

We should look to international cooperation practices and international norms that have been built over thousands of years of negotiations and wars. Climate change is a global-scale crisis that we cannot just keep under the carpet and say that this is going to happen sometime in the future. It’s happening now. It’s not going to be one country’s problem. If we have climate refugees, they are going to migrate. It will create security challenges like terrorism and economic destabilization.

What is it going to take for governments to change and adopt new approaches to climate?

This is a democracy. So there are always checks and balances, and that is one of the challenges in climate change. Historically, policy changes are incremental unless you look at revolutions like the Stalinistic revolution or the Iranian revolution. And the climate change challenge is that we need fast change, radical change, within existing institutions. A carbon tax, an international trade tax: these are radical changes.

The hope and need is to seek for quick change that doesn’t result in toppled governments and bloodshed?

Exactly. There will be some adverse impacts of carbon taxes and international trade taxes, but there are established compensation mechanisms that could be used to compensate people in vulnerable populations who are affected adversely.

But I don’t think that cost will be higher than the cost of not taking action. The cost of not taking action will be enormous in terms of mass migrations, extreme weather events, and just the sheer chaos that can be expected under an eight degree centigrade warmer world.

What are your personal hopes and fears about climate change?

I, myself, come from a developing country. Pakistan is very vulnerable. Both Pakistan and India are very vulnerable to climate change — and they have done the least to cause it, but they would suffer the most in the first fifty years or so.

I have been working there — and some of work is reported in this book — in setting up early warning systems, dealing with climate-refugee problems. If you look at the map, Pakistan is on both sides of the Indus River. The massive flooding in 2010 was part of the trend of more and more flooding during the monsoon season. If you look at the last sixty years of data, you can see that this is caused by climate change. So we are trying to understand the planning regime in Pakistan so that we don’t have more development in those regions which would be affected by floods or droughts.

That is very personal to me. I have been in the refugee camps. I have seen people who have been displaced for years. After 2010 floods, 20 million people were displaced and two million are still displaced today, after three years. I was there two months ago and visited a couple of camps. It’s very personal to me, because those are the people seeing climate change up front.

We need to tackle and reform those global institutions that are causing local problems. It’s not going to happen by just creating new markets — that’s my main message.

The Natural Capital Project:

Dr. Taylor Ricketts, Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and Professor of Natural Resources at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at UVM, discusses his research with the Natural Capital Project. The Natural Capital Project is developing tools for quantifying the values of natural capital in clear, credible, and practical ways. Taylor discusses InVEST, a family of software-based tools that enable decision-makers to quantify the importance of natural capital, assess tradeoffs associated with alternative choices, and integrate conservation and human development. He explains his work examining the benefits of native pollinators for farmers in maximizing their crop production. His overall goal is to optimize the management of landscapes to allow farmers to make a living while species and biodiversity thrive. Taylor also explores how he is applying this work to the Vermont landscape by looking at the variety of locally important crops and farmer livelihoods that depend on pollination services.  

Towards a Holistic Forest Carbon Management Approach:

Dr. William Keeton, Professor of Forest Ecology and Forestry, UVM, discusses how the scientific community is divided on the question of which forest management strategies are most effective at increasing carbon sequestration and storage in forest ecosystems. There is an extensive literature showing that, despite increased rates of carbon uptake and flux to wood products, intensified forest management results in a net increase in carbon emissions. Others have argued the opposite in several recent papers, maintaining that intensified forest management actually maximizes net sequestration. Both views are supported by evidence, but are limited by uncertainties and assumptions in the carbon accounting. Are carbon management strategies mutually exclusive? In this Gund Tea, Bill argues that they are not. In fact, they are potentially complimentary if employed within a broader framework of landscape management, so long as net carbon storage increases and net emissions decrease. Within the near term scientific research may converge on a unified set of recommendations through improved carbon accounting and modeling.

Ecological and Socioeconomic Aspects of Community-based Conservation in Namibia:

Dr. Robin Naidoo, Senior Conservation Scientist, WWF-US, discusses ecological and socioeconomic aspects of community-based conservation in Namibia. The benefits of biodiversity conservation to the provision of ecosystem services have been inferred from many studies of systems in controlled laboratory conditions.  Research on how varying degrees of biodiversity affect tangible economic benefits in real-world socioeconomic systems is much more scarce.  In this Gund Tea Robin shows how biodiversity impacts income generation on communal conservancies in Namibia, both in terms of aggregate gains and efficiencies in production.

Dr. Matson’s research addresses a range of environment and sustainability issues, including sustainability of agricultural systems; vulnerability of particular people and places to climate change; the consequences of tropical deforestation on atmosphere, climate and water systems; and solutions to global change in the nitrogen and carbon cycles. With multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, managers, and decision makers, she has worked to develop agricultural approaches that reduce environmental impacts while improving livelihoods and human wellbeing.

Dr. Matson is the Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, a Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.   She is the author of numerous scientific publications and books, including the National Research Council volume titled Our Common Journey:  A Transition toward Sustainability and Seeds of Sustainability: Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution. A MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she is the founding co-chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, a past president of the Ecological Society of America, serves on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund, Climate Central and ClimateWorks.  She also has served on the science leadership committee for the International Geosphere-Atmosphere Programme, the U.S. National Academies’ Board on Sustainable Development and Committee on America’s Climate Choices, and many other national and international groups.  Dr. Matson received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire; her M.S. in Environmental Science from Indiana University; and her Ph.D. in Forest Ecology from Oregon State University.

The talk is free and open to the public.  Please join us.

You can listen to the interview here.  

Gund Fellow Joe Roman was featured in the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" for his unorthodox method of controlling invasive species: he cooks and consumes them -- with style. Green crabs, introduced from Europe and now voracious and prolific, often out-competing native North American shore dwellers, Roman suggests enjoying soft-shelled in spring, sauté in butter, garnishing with parley and serving with French bread. Roman has also teamed with a New Haven sushi chef to turn pesky burdock into a comestible glazed with soy sauce and honey, "to give locals a taste of their own backyards." Read the story at NewYorker.com (subscription required)... or contact UVM University Communications.

Gund Fellow and Director the UVM Transportation Research Center, Austin Troy, discussed infrastructure for bicyclists Copenhagen for Slate Magazine. Troy writes that the city's dedication to cyclists -- building racks, lanes and timing traffic lights so bicycles never hit a green and can navigate intersections with ease -- has lead to 58 percent of Copenhageners getting on their bikes daily, a trend that saves energy and money. While only 0.4 percent of commuters currently bike in the United States, Troy believes we could catch up with a similar commitment to the needs of cyclists. Read the story at Slate.com...

Gund Fellow Eric Zencey, was interviewed on Public Radio International's "The World," and explains that renewable energy sources are yielding a higher rate of return than oil, asserting that, "the age of oil should be over." Zencey also talks to "The World" about reconsidering traditional measures of GDP, advocating "gross domestic transactions," to factor in additional barometers of productivity and of national happiness. Read the stories at The World.org here... and here...

Posting from Doha, Qatar, at the United Nations-driven Conference of Parties (COP 18), Asim Zia, Gund Fellow (with co-author Stuart Kauffman), urges immediate and transformative economic shifts to avoid a widespread climate crisis. Read the post at NPR.org.

Finally, an opinion piece for ABCNews.com on a global movement proposing that human well-being is as significant to measure as GDP (evidenced by a groundbreaking high-level meeting at the UN last April), notes that Vermont is one of the first U.S. states to embrace the idea, charging the Gund with developing and measuring alternative indicators. Read the story at ABCNews.go.com...

The State of Vermont has been described as a "laboratory" for sustainability science and policy, with progressive programs in energy and land-use planning, ecological economic indicators to guide public policy, and a grassroots movement to transition to a post-fossil fuel economy. In the spirit of "getting on with sustainability already", this year's meeting will be organized around an emerging optimism that local solutions are bubbling up everywhere, and 2013 is the year to synergize and strategize.

Proposals for paper, panel, poster, and workshop submissions are currently welcome, especially as they relate to the conference themes.

Please visit the Call for Papers page to submit your presentation ideas using our online form. Abstracts are due by February 15, 2013. For questions, please contact conference organizers at ussee13@uvm.edu or call UVM's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at (802) 656-1353. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee, chaired by John Gowdy, former president of both the USSEE and ISEE.

Raising Whales: How Cetaceans Engineer the Oceans:

Dr. Joe Roman, Gund Fellow and RSENR Research Assistant Professor, discusses how the restoration of whales is essential in maintaining the integrity and resilience of marine ecosystems. Great whales are the largest animals in the history of life on Earth, playing an essential role in the structure of the ocean. They prey on fish and invertebrates and are preyed upon by killer whales.  After death, their carcasses create unique habitats, upon which hundreds of deep-sea species depend.  Whales enhance the growth of marine life by transporting nutrients in the water column and around the globe. Their depletion has likely altered the structure and function of the oceans, reducing the many ecosystem services provided by these enormous ocean dwellers. 

Climate Change Mitigation on Agriculture-Forest Landscapes:

Dr. Eva “Lini” Wollenberg, Gund Fellow and RSENR Research Assistant Professor,  discusses how agriculture and forestry contribute about one-third of anthropogenic emissions, yet also are one of the most promising sectors for mitigation. She addresses the challenges in managing mitigation in agriculture-forestry landscapes, including a framework for "sustainability governance" of major commodities such as livestock, palm oil and cocoa in forest areas.

The Vermont Genuine Progress Indicator: 

Gund Research Fellow, Eric Zencey, discusses the Vermont GPI Project, which is compiling an updated Genuine Progress Indicator for Vermont for implementation as an alternative policy and budgeting instrument in the state. 

A sustainable economy needs a better basic indicator of progress and well-being than Gross Domestic Product. GDP doesn't deduct costs like ecosystem degradation and it ignores many positive contributions to well-being, like infrastructure or unpaid domestic work. The Genuine Progress Indicator is emerging as one standard methodology for including costs and benefits like these in our basic economic accounts.  The Gund Institute has been authorized by the state of Vermont to compile such an indicator set, and to report it regularly to the governor's office and the legislature for use in their decision making. 

Taylor and Brendan are PIs on a 2012 SESYNC project that uses geo-referenced household, health, and agricultural surveys in combination with biophysical and governance data to better understand the relationship among human health and welfare, ecological condition, and natural resource governance. With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa the project looks at impact evaluations, characteristics of interventions that work, and forecasts potential future outcomes under changing socio‐economic conditions. Results from their work will inform future planning around the governance of natural resources; identify potential areas of conflict between biodiversity, livelihoods, and health; and propose adaptation projects based on an understanding of how changing populations will affect and be affected by changes in ecological conditions.

You can read SESNYC’s coverage of the workshop here: http://www.sesync.org/finding-link-between-conservation-and-human-health

The BPE Conference was held in late October at the University of Vermont and included two days of seminars, workshops, break-out discussions, and field trips. The conference was co-sponsored by the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, University of Vermont's Transportation Research Center, and the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/12/07/166720029/a-view-from-doha-the-time-to-tackle-climate-change-is-now

In their blog, Asim and Stuart Kauffman discuss the developments in Doha and the overarching concern that failure to agree to a binding international agreement to limit emissions puts the world on a 4°C warming trajectory. They conclude with thoughts on policy and governance ideas that are necessary to avoid this trajectory.