Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

half the world’s power from the Sahara

There’s a big idea to provide half the world’s energy from solar panels in the Sahara desert, using the actual desert sand as a raw material to manufacture the panels. An interesting article in Science says that wind and solar farms on such a large scale could actually change the local weather drastically by altering wind and surface temperatures, ultimately increasing rainfall and allowing more vegetation in the desert.

In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.

Could this work on Mars? I guess not, because you don’t have the water vapor in the atmosphere to begin with. Unless you get that alien ice breaker thing from Total Recall (the 1990 version, again, I don’t recognize the 2012 version’s right to exist) – why do I keep coming back to this movie?

non use values

This paper mentions the importance of including non-use values in ecosystem services valuation.

Evidence of a Shared Value for Nature

Ecosystem service analysis aims to expand the accounting of human values for nature, yet frequently ignores or obfuscates a category of human values with potentially large magnitude, namely nonuse or passive use values. These values represent the satisfaction derived from the protection or restoration of species, habitats and wilderness areas, even if people never use them in any tangible way. The shunting of nonuse values to the background of ecosystem service analysis appears, in part, to be an attempt to avoid the perceived elitism of environmental values. To examine whether such values are the purview of the elite, we explore three types of evidence of who holds nonuse values. We find that when people are asked to 1) commit money via stated preference instruments, 2) respond to tweets, or 3) express opinions via surveys they demonstrate a significant willingness to protect and restore natural resources, regardless of their own use of those resources. Such values are represented in all socio-demographic groups that encompass race, ethnicity, immigration status, income, political affiliation, geographic location, age or gender, although the magnitude can vary among groups. The implications are that omitting nonuse values in ecosystem service analysis will tend to underestimate values, particularly for remote sites with limited use, and fail to represent important tradeoffs.

directed technological change

If I follow the general idea in this paper, it is that some government policy intervention, whether through taxes or direct R&D spending, is necessary to get green technological improvement to a rate that would be best for society.

Directed Technological Change in a Post-Keynesian Ecological Macromodel

Abstract: This paper presents a post-Keynesian ecological macromodel, which is stock-flow consistent, and incorporates directed technological change. Private and public R&D spending across three competing, yet complementary inputs – Labor, Capital, and Resources – follow a portfolio allocation decision, where inputs with relatively higher growth in costs, see higher R&D investment and productivity gains. Two policy experiments are reported; a market-based Resource tax increase, and a centralized green policy, where public R&D budget is shifted towards Resource-saving technologies. We highlight that in the presence of labor market institutions, which give rise to hysteresis, and limited R&D budgets, a policy of continuous Resource tax growth is needed to induce Resource-saving technological change to achieve a greener economy. This needs to be coupled with planned government spending adjustment to spur demand and boost investment. The findings also suggest that a mix of market-based and centralized policies may be optimal.

I had to look up the term “post-Keynesian”, and I’m still confused after reading the Wikipedia entry. Basically, these are people trying to carry on and build on Keynes’s original work. They emphasize the importance of long term aggregate demand on growth and employment, and the importance of money and interest rates in this system.

Hothouse Earth

This is the Hothouse Earth paper, which supposedly got media coverage last week that I completely missed despite scanning the media daily for articles on exactly this sort of topic. It argues that one or more tipping points leading to catastrophic feedback loops are looking increasingly likely if we exceed the 2 degrees C. So yes, we really need to get serious about not exceeding the 2 degrees C. But don’t worry, solutions exist! We need only take simple steps such as “decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”

Roman emperors were assassinated during droughts

This academic paper puts it pretty simply:

lower precipitation increases the probability that Roman troops, who relied on local food supplies, starve. This pushes soldiers to mutiny, hence weakening the emperor’s support, and increasing the probability he is assassinated.

The modern lesson might be that if ecological change starts to hurt your society, it might be better (for the ruler) to keep the military well funded and let everyone else suffer.

Eco-cities in Japan and China

Here’s a paper comparing and contrasting two eco-city developments in Japan and China.

Ecological urbanism in East Asia: A comparative assessment of two eco-cities in Japan and China

The growth of projects translating the concept of eco-city into practices has accelerated during the last fifteen years, making the eco-city a global phenomenon. Asia in particular has witnessed notable developments, characterized by strong governmental intervention and national initiatives to create model eco-cities. In Japan, the central government launched an “Eco-Model Cities” program in 2008 and has designated twenty-three model cities. In China, hundreds of municipalities have pursued plans to become an eco- or low-carbon city following the government’s demonstration projects. Across East Asia, the eco-city is promoted as an innovative urban policy capable of advancing the agendas of sustainable urbanization and the realignment of the post-industrial urban economy.

This paper compares the policies and strategies of developing eco-cities in Japan and China using Kitakyushu and Tianjin Eco-city as case studies. It examines these cities’ common and contrasting approaches to ecological urbanism, their respective technological and urban design strategies, the relationship between eco-city building and local economic development, and the roles played by different stakeholders in this effort. The research focuses on their Key Performance Indicator systems and the spatial qualities they anticipate, which reflect fundamentally different ideas about what societal role an eco-city should best play. The comparative method sheds light on debates around important aspects of planning and managing an eco-city––namely, between new town and retrofit development, between top-down directive and bottom-up force, and between the eco-city as technology and as culture. This paper thus offers critical insight into the changing notions of urbanity within Asian society.

adjusting productivity/GDP for ecosystem services

Here’s a new paper on a method of adjusting productivity/GDP (they seem to use the terms interchangeably, which confuses me) for ecosystem services and natural capital depletion.

Environmentally Adjusted Multifactor Productivity: Methodology and Empirical Results for OECD and G20 Countries

This paper extends the analytical framework for measuring multifactor productivity in order\ to account for environmental services. A growth accounting approach is used to decompose a pollution-adjusted measure of output growth into the contributions of labour, produced capital and natural capital. These indicators allow the sources of economic growth, and its long run sustainability, to be better assessed. Results presented here cover OECD and G20 countries for the 1990–2013 period, and account for the extraction of subsoil natural assets and emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. The main findings suggest that growth in OECD countries has been generated almost exclusively through productivity gains, while BRIICS countries have drawn largely on increased utilisation of factor inputs to generate additional growth. Regarding natural capital, in countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile, reliance on subsoil assets extraction has contributed to a significant share of income growth. Results also point to a shift towards more environmentally friendly production processes in many countries. In fact, most OECD countries have decreased their emissions over the last two decades, and these pollution abatement efforts result in an upward adjustment of their GDP growth rates, allowing for a more accurate assessment of their economic performance.

It’s a little hard to tease out (from the abstract, since I haven’t read the paper) whether this means we are turning the corner and becoming more sustainable as a planet, or simply becoming more unsustainable at a slower rate than the past. I suspect it is the latter – so while it might be good news, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are on a sustainable path.

Red Queens and Black Queens

It sounds like a fantasy novel, but the Red Queen hypothesis is about species competing and co-evolving with one another over long periods of time. It is named after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who said “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” In other words, species have to constantly evolve and adapt, or they go extinct. 

The Black Queen hypothesis is hard for me to understand, but it refers to

the queen of spades in the game Hearts, where the usual strategy is to avoid taking this card. Gene loss can provide a selective advantage by conserving an organism’s limiting resources, provided the gene’s function is dispensable. Many vital genetic functions are leaky, thereby unavoidably producing public goods that are available to the entire community. Such leaky functions are thus dispensable for individuals, provided they are not lost entirely from the community. The BQH predicts that the loss of a costly, leaky function is selectively favored at the individual level and will proceed until the production of public goods is just sufficient to support the equilibrium community; at that point, the benefit of any further loss would be offset by the cost. Evolution in accordance with the BQH thus generates “beneficiaries” of reduced genomic content that are dependent on leaky “helpers,” and it may explain the observed nonuniversality of prototrophy, stress resistance, and other cellular functions in the microbial world.

In other words, organisms can sort of help their rivals, and there can be some survival advantage to this over long periods of evolutionary time. I’m not sure I quite get it, but there it is.

considering local government policy in water risk

This paper is about incorporating local government and utility policies/actions in measures of water risk, which in the past have tended to focus on physical measurements. This makes sense because there are some very water scarce places that have managed their limited resources well, and there are some moderately water scarce places where political and bureaucratic mismanagement of resources have led to crises. This probably makes some sense because when the lack of water is starkly obvious (if your country is a desert for example), it is impossible to ignore whereas when the problem is only going to crop up under extreme conditions, local politicians and less competent bureaucrats can ignore it the vast majority of time and nobody will raise the alarm. Better data might help make these crises more predictable and preventable, rather than seeming to sneak up out of nowhere.

Mapping Public Water Management by Harmonizing and Sharing Corporate Water Risk Information

by Colin Strong, Paul Reig, Julian Köbel and Cindy Noe – March 2018

In response to water crises across the globe, data on biophysical conditions associated with water risk have increasingly been collected and understood. However, a complete assessment of water risk also requires an understanding of public water management. Currently there is a lack of global comparable data on public water management, leading to incomplete assessments of risk and suboptimal risk mitigation activities. To fill in that gap in data, this Technical Note proposes the creation of a global comparable geodatabase of public water management indicators to spur tangible improvements in water management. The geodatabase will be populated by crowdsourcing data through the risk assessments of multinational companies that are incentivized to share anonymized public water management as an innovative risk reduction practice.

Antarctic ice sheet melt accelerating

The rate of melting in Antarctica is accelerating, according to a new study in Nature.

…it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation). Over this period, ocean-driven melting has caused rates of ice loss from West Antarctica to increase from 53 ± 29 billion to 159 ± 26 billion tonnes per year; ice-shelf collapse has increased the rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula from 7 ± 13 billion to 33 ± 16 billion tonnes per year.