Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development

The students of the Columbia Sustainable Development Ph.D. program have put out the call for papers for the Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development. It's a great opportunity for Ph.D. students to meet colleagues from a broad array of disciplines, and a bunch of our younger colleagues will be there. Please pass it along.

Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development
April 25^th-26^th, 2014: Columbia University in the City of New York, USA

The graduate students in the Sustainable Development PhD program at Columbia University are convening the Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (IPWSD); scheduled for April 25th-26th, 2014, at Columbia University in New York City.

The IPWSD is a conference open to graduate students working on or interested in issues related to sustainable development.  It is intended to provide a forum to present and discuss research in an informal setting, as well as to meet and interact with similar graduate student researchers from other institutions.  In particular, we hope to facilitate a network among students pursuing in-depth research across a range of disciplines in the social and natural sciences, to generate a larger interdisciplinary discussion concerning sustainable development.  If your research pertains to the field of sustainable development and the linkages between natural and social systems, we encourage you to apply regardless of disciplinary background.

For details, please see the call for papers, or visit our conference website where a detailed list of topics, conference themes and other information is available.

Please share this information widely with graduate students and other interested parties. We look forward to seeing you in New York City in April!

With kind regards,

The Fourth IPWSD Planning Committee

Sustainable Development Doctoral Society, 
Columbia University

Website: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/sdds/schedule-events/ipwsd_2014/

Contact: cu.sdds.ipwsd@gmail.com

Mathematics of Planet Earth

Here's an initiative that will suit FE readers:

More than a hundred scientific societies, universities, research institutes, and organizations all over the world have banded together to dedicate 2013 as a special year for the Mathematics of Planet Earth.

The initiative is multi-pronged, with everything from summer schools, curriculum materials, public lectures and a daily blog (which is quite good).

The idea behind "Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE) according to MPE:

Wanted: smarter global agriculture

Closing yield gaps through nutrient and water management

Nathaniel D. Mueller, James S. Gerber, Matt Johnston, Deepak K. Ray, Navin Ramankutty & Jonathan A. Foley

Abstract: In the coming decades, a crucial challenge for humanity will be meeting future food demands without undermining further the integrity of the Earth’s environmental systems. Agricultural systems are already major forces of global environmental degradation, but population growth and increasing consumption of calorie- and meat-intensive diets are expected to roughly double human food demand by 2050 (ref. 3). Responding to these pressures, there is increasing focus on ‘sustainable intensification’ as a means to increase yields on underperforming landscapes while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impacts of agricultural systems. However, it is unclear what such efforts might entail for the future of global agricultural landscapes. Here we present a global-scale assessment of intensification prospects from closing ‘yield gaps’ (differences between observed yields and those attainable in a given region), the spatial patterns of agricultural management practices and yield limitation, and the management changes that may be necessary to achieve increased yields. We find that global yield variability is heavily controlled by fertilizer use, irrigation and climate. Large production increases (45% to 70% for most crops) are possible from closing yield gaps to 100% of attainable yields, and the changes to management practices that are needed to close yield gaps vary considerably by region and current intensity. Furthermore, we find that there are large opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture by eliminating nutrient overuse, while still allowing an approximately 30% increase in production of major cereals (maize, wheat and rice). Meeting the food security and sustainability challenges of the coming decades is possible, but will require considerable changes in nutrient and water management.

Elinor Ostrom on cities and sustainability

Elinor Ostrom passed away this week, and in doing so deprives the world of one its great political economists. To wit: this thought provoking op-ed, published post-humously, on the role of decentralized policy making in sustainability:

Much is riding on the United Nations Rio+20 summit. Many are billing it as Plan A for Planet Earth and want leaders bound to a single international agreement to protect our life-support system and prevent a global humanitarian crisis. 

Inaction in Rio would be disastrous, but a single international agreement would be a grave mistake. We cannot rely on singular global policies to solve the problem of managing our common resources: the oceans, atmosphere, forests, waterways, and rich diversity of life that combine to create the right conditions for life, including seven billion humans, to thrive.  

We have never had to deal with problems of the scale facing today’s globally interconnected society. No one knows for sure what will work, so it is important to build a system that can evolve and adapt rapidly. 

Decades of research demonstrate that a variety of overlapping policies at city, subnational, national, and international levels is more likely to succeed than are single, overarching binding agreements. Such an evolutionary approach to policy provides essential safety nets should one or more policies fail.

Emphasis is my own. The rest is worthwhile.

Columbia's IPWSD 2012 is this Friday

The second Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (previously here) is this coming weekend. The workshop is organized by our Ph.D. program's Sustainable Development Doctoral Society
and showcases current work on sustainability issues by Ph.D. students at institutions around the world. The lineup of student papers looks fantastic this year, so if you're in town Friday or Saturday you may want to swing by. The full schedule is available here.

Topics in Sustainability: Global Fisheries

The undergraduate class I'm co-teaching is getting into the part of the semester where each class is devoted to a major issue in sustainability. Topics we cover range from energy to hydrology to public health; with issues so large and time so limited each class can, at best, provide a very quick overview of the field and the major open problems in it. Given that I have to put together relevant and up-to-date background materials anyway, I figured I might as well put some links to all the materials on the blog for interested FE readers. Following RealClimate's Start Here page, I'm going to break the literature down a bit by target reader demographics so hopefully everyone will be able to find something interesting to chew on. Feel free to comment and give feedback as the topics go up; depending on how much use they get these posts might eventually turn into intermittently-updated pages.

On that note, let's begin with the first topic: Global Fisheries.

Readers with minimal technical background:

• National Geographic's 2010 Oceans issue, especially the article Seafood Crisis (also see, the 2007 NG article The Global Fisheries Crisis)
• A 2010 New York Times Magazine article on collapsing tuna fisheries which covers a lot of the main issues
• The Monterrey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch guides (also available as an iPhone app)
• Ocean 2012's video on overfishing

Readers with some science or technical knowledge:

• Pauly et al. Nature 2002, a mildly technical (and no-paywall) overview 
• Worm et al. Science 2009, nice recent overview article
• Pauly et al. Science 1998, fishing down the trophic chain (and a 2003 Nature article on the same)
• Watling and Norse, Conservation Biology 1998,  bottom trawling as the ocean's analog to clear-cutting
• Duarte et al. Science 2007, domestication of aquatic species (i.e., aquaculture) has progressed much faster than that of terrestrial species
• Swartz et al. PLoS One 2010, spatial expansion of fisheries since 1950

Readers interested in current research topics:

• Sumaila et al. J. of Bioeconomics 2010, overfishing may be driven by government subsidies
• Chassot et al. Ecology Letters 2010, empirical evidence that global marine primary production constrains catches
• Costello et al. Science 2008, catch shares as a global policy instrument 
• Branch et al. Nature 2010, the trouble with mean trophic level as a measure
• Pinsky et al. PNAS 2011, faster-reproducing ocean species collapse more quickly than slow ones under fishing pressure (opposite of the size / harvest pattern for most terrestrial species)
• Sethi et al. PNAS 2010, historical fishery development is driven by (...surprise?) profitability 
• Agnew et al. PLoS One 2009, a global estimate of illegal fishing activity

Who self-identifies as a sustainability scientist?

The footprint of sustainability science in terms of traditional scientific disciplines. (A) The percent distribution in terms of ISI disciplines determined based on the classification of journals where publications appeared. The field receives its largest contribution (about 34%) from the social sciences, and other large contributions from biology and chemical, mechanical and civil engineering. Other important contributors are from medicine, Earth sciences, and infectious diseases. A similar analysis for sustainable development shows the same patterns with only a small 5% increase in the relative contribution of the social sciences vs. biology. Copyright PNAS.

Geographic distribution of sustainability science publications. (A) National counts of number of publications. (B) National counts for number of citations received. Fig. S4 shows the analogous map for number of citations per paper. The maps show the wide geographic distribution of the field of sustainability science. This is unusual as compared to typical specialized fields in the natural sciences, for example, and notably demonstrates the quality and quantity of contributions from many developing nations. Note the strength of smaller nations such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Africa, Kenya, and of Brazil and China. Copyright PNAS.

Cool google earth visualization here. Related post here.  The paper (open access):

Evolution and structure of sustainability science 

Luís M. A. Bettencourta and Jasleen Kaur

Abstract: The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations, and their goals have become central to the mission of research laboratories and universities worldwide. However, it remains unclear how far the field has progressed as a scientific discipline, especially given its ambitious agenda of integrating theory, applied science, and policy, making it relevant for development globally and generating a new interdisciplinary synthesis across fields. To address these questions, we assembled a corpus of scholarly publications in the field and analyzed its temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition, and collaboration structure. We show that sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s when foundational publications in the field increased its pull on new authors and intensified their interactions. The field has an unusual geographic footprint combining contributions and connecting through collaboration cities and nations at very different levels of development. Its decomposition into traditional disciplines reveals its emphasis on the management of human, social, and ecological systems seen primarily from an engineering and policy perspective. Finally, we show that the integration of these perspectives has created a new field only in recent years as judged by the emergence of a giant component of scientific collaboration. These developments demonstrate the existence of a growing scientific field of sustainability science as an unusual, inclusive and ubiquitous scientific practice and bode well for its continued impact and longevity. 

Sense and Sustainability

I recently "discovered" a great podcast: Sense and Sustainability.  Impressively, it's run by Jisung Park, a PhD student at Harvard econ, along with his colleagues (clearly none of them have reached the dissertation-writing-panic-stage of their respective programs). Check it out.

Sense and Sustainability is a production devoted to exploring the diversity of perspectives on issues of sustainable development. This semi-weekly podcast features guests from a range of disciplines, in an attempt to provide a more holistic sense of what we mean by ”sustainability”. We seek to provide a forum for educated yet accessible, incisive yet balanced conversations about a broad range of issues pertaining to global sustainable development. 

You can download episodes from our website www.senseandsustainability.net, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes (search: “Sense and Sustainability”). 

Sense and Sustainability is a collaborative effort with Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

Jobs in sustainability

Several of my colleagues are now looking for jobs in sustainability.  Ram points us in the direction of this impressive database hosted by Duke (notably heavy in biological fields).

Searching NatureJobs for "sustainable" also brings up 134 positions at the time of posting.  Also see job listings at the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.  Environmental economists can also see this page at Michigan State.

If you know of more listings, please post a comment.  Maybe we'll assemble a database if we find enough.

Urban ecology doesn't care about your locavore agenda

I'm not sure how well this comes through on the blog, but Sol and I (and, I think it's safe to say, many if not most of the people in our program) have fairly nuanced views on the subjects that people normally associate with "sustainability." Green architecture, recycling, organic foods, hybrid cars, and a host of other topics that spring to mind when someone mentions sustainability tend to be partial solutions to complex problems, and the ways in which they interrelate and sometimes even interfere with each other can be very difficult to disentangle. A really lovely example of this comes from today's NY Times article about urban beekeepers' honey turning red:

Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Ms. Mayo, who tends seven hives for Added Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.**

I think this a really lovely illustration of how the ways in which we like to conceptualize "doing the right thing" and "acting sustainably" are often based on very tenuous understandings of how science and complex systems actually work. Proponents of eating locally make many claims about its benefits that are often unproven, or difficult to test, or sometimes even known ex-ante to be false. That's not to say that eating locally is not a good thing; it's to say that the answer to that question is complicated and depends on factors that vary with geography, the food in question, what you consider to be 'local,' etc.

Which is why this is such an interesting little article. Urban apiculture has become very popular of late and, I'd say, is probably on bar a pretty good thing; the value from having more pollinators around alone is probably fairly high, and if people are getting good honey out of it all the better. But pursuing local food as a sort of monolithic good is bound to fail, sometimes in predictable ways like the disconnect between local net primary productive potential and local demand, and sometimes in unpredictable ways such as having your honey turn up shades of Red Dye No. 40. Food production is inextricably and definably a part of the local ecology, and when your local ecology is urban that means you're going to end up with different outcomes than out in farmland.

So, if this post were to have a moral (and not to pick on these beekeepers because, like I said, I think urban apiaries are pretty net beneficial), it's this: don't take as received wisdom what those around you claim is "sustainable"; don't claim that the solution to a sustainability problem you've currently settled on is fool-proof or even the right one; and internalize the fact that the world is a complex place and thus anyone who claims they've figured out an answer to a major problem and are "trying to do their part" to advance sustainability should be able to robustly prove that that's true or else humbly say that they don't know.

* Note: Photo copyright New York Times 2010.

** I'd just like to say that, as a native New Yorker, I'm not very surprised that Red Hook was causing trouble.