MRI Blog

One of the main outputs of the MRI Global Commission was a set of mind maps related to themes that themselves emerged at the Perth Conference in September 2010. These mind maps record the thoughts and ideas of Commission members about how the MRI should pursued these themes in the future. One of my main tasks since the Commission meeting has been to translate these thoughts and ideas is more concrete project ideas that the community could pursue and the the MRI Coordination Office could support. While these proposals hardly rank as state secrets, we are not disseminating them widely but have rather asked Commission members for their review first.  If you, the reader, are interested in putting some effort into designing these future "Concerted Efforts" then send us a message via the website.

Soon after London, a select group of scholars from around the world convened at the Park Hotel in Asechi to participate in the IGBP/MRI Synthesis Workshop on Changing Mountain Cryosphere and its Downstream Impacts. This workshop lead to a commitment by Bodo Bookhagen and Ray Bradley to co-edit a synthesis paper with help from Wouter Buytaert, Bryan Mark and Sandy Milner. We expect to see this synthesis paper soon with a Policy Brief for IGBP later in the summer.

As MRI has two more Synthesis Workshops this year (one next week in Colorado and one in September in Switzerland) it is important to critique how we run the workshops. My observations from Aeschi:

1) It always takes longer than you think.  We programmed 15 minutes for talks but participants spent at least that much time again in discussion after the talks. This was time well spent re: the objectives of the meeting but of course put us way off schedule. We recovered somewhat by halting the presentations earlier than foreseen on day 1 (and moving the rest of the presentations to day 2) and using the rest of the day discussing the lessons learned from the talks given on day 1.


2)  Groups cannot produce outlines. Outlines must be proposed by one/two persons and revised by the group.   We started the meeting with only very rough outline. We then spent most of the meeting  discussing what needed to be covered in the outline but in the end it was simply impossible for the group to write an outline.

Two people with two "advisors" worked until midnight on the second day to produce the outline based on all the input given be others. The "two people" also became the two lead authors. 

I don't assert that we wasted effort over the first two days of the meeting, but I would assert that it would have been much easier if we had had a more complete outline at the outset of the meeting and had then related each presentation to the outline: did presentation X cause us to change the outline and how?

The alternative argument is that one would not get ownership of the outline and the subsequent writing work if the participants did not feel that they were the originators of the outline.  This is likely true, in which case, see 1) above in spades!

3) A strict outline approach based on assertions is essential to laying the foundation for writing.

The three days we had in Aeschi were not sufficient to get to the writing (see 1 again). Nonetheless the writing will not be very hard because we will have a well-annotated outline, in which each line is an assertion that will be "proved" by points beneath it. The outline does not consist of "topics" because a topic is not a message, and an article is fundamentally about communicating a set of messages.  It is surprisingly difficult to get people to "say what they mean". They tend to want to say "what they are speaking about" so one must get them passed that to get at  the real messages.   So for instance when people have said "hydrographs under climate change" we have had to push them to get assertions "hydrographs in the future will show more pronounced seasonality" and so on.

Once people know what points they are supposed to be supporting or proving, writing is easy.

4) Ownership must move from the organizers to the participants. Toward the end of the meeting I have made myself scarce as, despite my strong feelings about what should be in the document, I will not be writing it, and so shouldn't have power over the content. The content has to be that of the participants.

I am sure that I will have yet more observations as a result of the Building Resilience Synthesis Workshop next week.

This is what my wife calls "repurposing": I wrote this for the IHDP newsletter so I might as well post it here first.

Mountains as Arenas for Adaptation to Global Change

The global change in mountains research community, which in the past has often emphasized biogeophysical aspects of global change, focused squarely on institutional arrangements in its session at the PuP Conference, Mountains as arenas for adaptation to global change. The session organizers included UNESCO, the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI), the University of Highlands and Islands (UK), the University of Bern (CH) and Makerere University (UG). The session. The presenters and their abstracts can be found on the PuP Conference site. The MRI has made available recordings of the slides and the speakers' talks through its website .

Martin Price started the session by highlighting the utility of Biosphere Reserves as sites for experimentation on adaptation to global change, as the concept of Biosphere Reserves includes at its core both human use of the environment and research. Bob Nakileza and Willem Ferguson described transboundary conservation areas in the mountain regions of Africa similarly as sites for research on adaptation. Stephan Rist and Bishnu Ray Upreti looked outside government reserve boundaries at common property regimes and reported on pre-requisites for the expansion of such regimes. Jörg Balsiger with a host of co-authors reviewed a wide range of regional governance arrangements in mountains from NGO alliances to treaty organizations as potential adaptive mechanisms. Finally Christian Huggel and his co-authors examined the mechanisms by which scientific expertise can inform adaptation in mountain regions.

The session showed a wide range of institutional arrangements, of which many if not most could be seen as potentially adaptive. The very diversity of arrangements is itself an interesting research topic, but in any event, the inventory is very far from complete and needs to be pursued further.

The research community needs as well to address the performance and effectiveness of these institutional arrangements as adaptive mechanisms. These institutional arrangements all have idiosyncratic origins and are thus not simply different responses to the same demand, in the case for adaptation to global change, but in fact are responses to a great variety of different expectations. Thus we must disentangle their performance relative to their avowed missions from that related to adaptation to global change.

Finally and in keeping with the transdisciplinary thrust of the PuP Conference, research certainly has a role to play in the conscious development of new institutional arrangements focused on adaptation to global change, as opposed to the more academic project of assessing the utility of existing arrangements in a new context. But such research must take seriously engagement with existing network of authority to surmount its own preconceptions and to achieve true co-production of knowledge.

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Mountain Research Initiative Global Commission

Thirty-three researchers from five continents, and from political science to climatology met together as the Mountain Research Initiative Global Commission at Imperial College on 30 March 2012, the day after the PuP Conference, to incorporate lessons learned from the Conference and to chart new directions for the Initiative.

Prominent among the lessons learned at the Conference was the on-going consolidation within global change research community into a single project, Future Earth. This consolidation has many origins and implications, but on the face of it, MRI is well aligned with the motivations behind this new project. MRI's objectives have always included one on the provision of useful knowledge to policy and practice, something that is now central to Future Earth. Beyond that, MRI's emphasis on interdisciplinary research within the context of a kind of landscape fits very well the announced objective of more "integrated" research. While other GC research programs have pronounced disciplinary roots, MRI has from the beginning espoused a whole system approach. While espousing and conducting are two different things, but at least our community has a place-based focus that provides a unifying context for our disciplinary pursuits. Finally, MRI has promoted "real projects in real places" for years, principally through the development of regional networks to complement the Global Commission. Thus we are several steps closer than many other projects to incorporating stakeholders and "co-producing" of knowledge. But we are not yet there.

As for new directions, the Commission discussed ten different themes that emerged from our community's last major conference, Global Change and the World's Mountains, held in Perth in September 2010:

· Mountains in the Global South

· Nature and Trajectory of Ecological Systems under Global Change

· Nature of Institutions and Social Systems and their Interactions with Ecological Systems

· Nature of Global Social Drivers

· Long-Term Mountain Observing Systems

· Ecosystem Services

· Human Agency in the Mountains

· Communication

· Human Presence in the Mountains

· Integrated Analysis and Modeling for Land Sustainability

The brainstorming at the meeting was extremely productive and will lead to specific propositions for "Concerted Effort" by the global change in mountains community in the next five years.

Before I launch into more ruminations about Planet Under Pressure, I want to highlight some data. First. I tweeted extensively during the Conference. You can find those tweets under my Twitter name, MRIDIR, or under the hashtag #planetconf. I have been reviewing the conference today, a week later, and the tweets are a great record for me. I recommend that you try tweeting at your next conference, if only as a good way of recalling what happened.

And I suggest that you review some of the recording plenary talks. These are available here.

For the life of me, I can't understand why the organizers didn't record the speakers' slides along with their speeches! I's clear to me that MRI knows how to do this better than Elsevier!

On day 1 you should check out the talks by Diane Liverman and Will Steffens, talks that I mention in my earlier post. On day 2 Yves de Boer' is quite good, and during the panel discussion the business member, Keith Clarke, seemed particularly lucid. In general the business people at the conference seemed much less confused about social process and the ways forward than did the scientists.

I strongly recommend that you watch the plenaries on day 3, particularly the first by Richard Wilkinson, and the third by Laurence Tubiana, as well as the panel discussion led by Andy Revkin, formerly of the NYTimes. These may have been the best talks of the conference.

Finally on day 4, Johan Rockstrum's description of the new Future Earth consortium is very good. Richard Norgaard also spoke on day 4 and his video is under Parallel Sessions.

So what did I get out of all this? I was struck by the endless repetition of "need for new governance" with very little analysis of how to get there or even why we need to get there, other than the obvious observation that we don't seem to be approaching sustainable development very quickly, and in particularly have largely failed to address anthropogenic climate change. Laurence Tubiana said it well in her talk: in the 40 years since Stockholm 1972 (which is pretty much my entire professional life, and so I take this personally), sustainable development has been useful only as a diagnostic measure and has failed utterly to provide pathways toward its achievement.

To me the central question is "why?" Whenever I say this, there is a cacophony of responses. My soixante-huitard cousin harangues corporations. Andy Revkin talks about the scale of the problem exceeding our culture's grasp. Others talk about the need to change consciousness and so on. All of these may be true to some extent, but the fact is that the global change social science community has not examined this question as the social science question that it really is.

I do not delude myself into thinking that this is a trivial project nor that the data needed are easily available, but we must first see the question itself as something worthy of study, not just speculation and anecdote. As a result of this failure the community flails about, lurching from one mantra ("learning societies", "communication", "transdisciplinarity") to another without the benefit of evidence. (This is not entirely true as IGEC did a decent job and when Oran Young speaks it is still worth listening. Nonetheless I don't think that they went far enough into the dynamics of change.)

For me the problem takes almost crystalline form when we speak of "internalizing externalities". Numerous people correctly diagnosed our predicament as a market failure: that the full costs of our activities, particularly our consumption of fossil carbon energy, are not included in the costs of the goods and services that we buy. I suspect that few would contest that if these externalities were internalized, the market would work efficiently to reduce if not eliminate them. I think Richard Norgaard clearly said as much, that markets work well within the context of the incentives that underlie them. Such an approach is completely congruent with the prevailing market ideology of the world, and simply requires "getting the price right". And there are many "revenue neutral" options by which higher prices for fossil carbon (and other environmental damages) are offset by lower income taxes, so that one creates a price signal without necessarily changing the overall economic situation of households and firms. Yet for all the options that exist we have systematically failed to do so.

The response of many in the conference is then to promote changes in consciousness: less consumption, gross national happiness instead of product, etc. I see much merit in these idea, yet I fail to understand how they are easier to achieve - a quasi-religious conversion for billions of people - than simply getting the price of coal and oil to include their full costs in the world's commodity markets. I suspect those advocates might answer is that we would need this change in consciousness in order to change the political economy that sets world energy prices. While I don't know if I agree with that statement either, it at least embodies a hypothesis about the force and structures that lead to social change (or the maintenance of the status quo). We should treat such an implication as a hypothesis to examine, one of many that that global change social science should explore!

Andy Revkin said at one point that he doubted that the international climate negotiations would have succeeded even if there hadn't been a deliberate campaign by special interests to discredit the science. This is an experiment I dearly wished we could run: what would the world be like if there hadn't been such a campaign? Would we in fact have been able to stay with a 2°C warming instead of a 3-4°C warming? Some points in history are critical, where taking one route closes off forever other options. It is painful of course to recognize that we could have had a much better world if the "merchants of doubt" had not weighed so heavily on our political system. I fear that in the past 20 years we have indeed missed the turnoff to a better world, and that while we shouldn't give up, the world that we could've achieved is no longer available to us. Discounting the role of disinformation makes that miss marginally more palatable: maybe we couldn't have made that turn anyway, not because of a conspiracy but because the larger culture was in the way. However I doubt that assessment, and would like to focus the light of critical inquiry on the question.

There is of course much more to understand than just the role of well-financed interest groups. While they are undoubtedly important, and maybe more important than we generally believe, they are nonetheless part of a much larger process of social change, or more grandiloquently, human development. It is this system, the human equivalent of a coupled ocean-land surface- atmosphere model, that we lack. Yet without a clearer delineation of the structure and function of this system, all proposals for how science should interact with society are fundamentally anecdotal. While they are possibly true and might be "win-win", would any of us accept such anecdotes about oceans or atmosphere or the land surface without proof?

Upon first entering the huge ExCel Center (more like the Shanghai combination airport and train station!) I not surprisingly bumped into a bunch on familiar people: Dave Schimel, Dennis Ojima, Ray Bradley, Prakash Tiwari and his wife Bhagwati, Chad Dear, Jeremy Littell, Jörg Balsiger, who else am I forgetting. It is gratifying to see that some of the mountain community is here.

Technically the conference is close but not equal to the AGU. The hall has wireless everywhere but very few power outlets, so you can tweet for awhile but soon power management becomes an issue. The organizers are streaming the plenary talks, and have established two-way communication with remote sites, so that observers at distant locations can send in questions via SMS or Twitter. The website allows some searching but if you want to find out who is speaking about mountains, you can only search the pdf of poster title, not session presentations. The AGU supports searches much better!

The talks: the first two by Diane Liverman and Will Steffens, focusing respectively on drivers of change and responses by the earth system were excellent and I hope that we can eventually provide a link on our website to either their ppts or to video stream put out by the conference. The main points here were that the drivers, principally population growth, GHG intensity and land use are still increasing but their rate of change is dropping. Most interesting statistic from Liverman: since 1950, average child/woman global has dropped from around 5 to around 2.5. This highlights the central role that women play in global change via their fertility. (Of course, as a husband and a father of three women I know that women also run the rest of the world too!). To be clear, LIverman did not say that GHG emissions were bending lower as we all know that they are not, but rather that GHG intensity has declined significantly, so we can say that the situation could have been worse than it is. Finally she should a great slide about GHG emission by income level within one country (UK? US?) that clearly showed that the impact of the higher income deciles was 50- 100% greater than the poorer deciles.

All that said, Will Steffens pointed out that the physical indicators of the earth system (e.g. atmospheric CO2) do not show any such slowing of the rate of change. He emphasized complex systems and tipping points, discussing the ice sheets, the Amazon and Siberia permafrost as three important possible tipping points. The map he showed (which we have all seen before) shows Tibet as another potential tipping point, the only one that explicitly involves a mountain region. This could conceivably be an MRI Concerted Effort.

Sandra Diaz gave an overview of how the tree of life (an evolutionary view) and the web of life (the trophic view) are being pruned by humans. Not only are we losing branches of the tree but we are also lopping away the top-level consumers while jacking up the primary producers with nitrogen.

Anthony Giddens, a sociologist, addressed the state of humanity. Here again my unease with the community's inability to articulate a clear social science vision was exacerbated. Giddens focused largely on the unreality of international treaty negotiations and stressed much more action at multiple levels of governance. He discussed the need for a new politics of "utopian realism", a theme that is well put, but once again he failed to address how one creates such a politics, and did not sketch how a more serious social science research agenda could lay the basis for such an approach. Nor did he offer any insights about economics and markets, something the Watson notes - "must get the economics right" - but similarly failed to articulate as a program. ON the light rail last night coming back for an incredible Indian dinner in London, Jörg Balsiger said that all this has been done already by others not present. We as a research community need to find that work and elevate it.

I had a similar problem with the panel discussion of eminent folks, not one of whom said, in reply to "What is one thing that you would think would lead to progress?", increase the market cost of fossil carbon. And it was not as if what they did say was easier or more likely to occur ("more transdisciplinary science", etc., etc.). I figure that if you are free to suggest things that plausible but nonetheless difficult, raising the price of fossil C would be at the top of the list!  The social science question is thus "since such a change would be both biophysically effective and would fit with the current ideology of market economics, why hasn't it happened?"

What themes emerged at the AGU 2011 meeting that the MRI community might want to follow up with a Synthesis Workshop, or with a new category of activity that I'll just call a Concerted Effort?

Treeline appeared in many talks and posters, perhaps not surprisingly as Session B12B focused on treelines! I particularly liked W.K. Smith's talk in which he addressed how high elevation treeline environments differed from arctic or antarctic treeline environments, with for instance much higher radiation loads and much lower partial pressures. I noted shortly after the AGU that a recent paper by Malanson et al. in JAAAR proposed next steps in treeline research, so perhaps we don't need a Synthesis Workshop  but rather a Concerted Effort to pursue the lines of inquiry laid out by George, Lynn and Co.  A treeline effort modeled on MIREN(the mountains invasive network with standard protocols, etc.)  might be a viable option.

Many people reported on the use of smart sensor networks. When I asked if there were any platform that supported dialogue among developers and users of such sensor networks, no one seemed to know of any. So we have a very promising approach being developed by many different labs around the world with little interaction. Hmmm, this sounds to me like a good topic for a platform hosted by MRI.

Himalayan glaciers were also the topic of many different projects but it appeared to me that the projects weren't conferring with each other. There were projects funded by USAID, by NASA, by the EU and so on. And there will certainly be a number of papers that appear in the near future that attempt to fill the gap created by the IPCC AR4 gaffe. Still I wonder if a workshop where all the researchers could confront the data and analyses of others would not be a useful adjunct to the appearance of several disconnected summary papers in different journals. The point would not be to eliminate competition or even to seek consensus, but rather to accelerate the process of review and critique.

High resolution analyses and models of mountain meteorology also fascinated me. The role of aerosols in the form of snow, how clouds formed over mountainous islands, the development of jets that impede circulation: it seems that we are still learning quite a lot about the basic mechanisms of mountain meteorology. As climate change occurs physically through changes in these processes, a better understanding of them,  and especially of how changes in forcing will alter them seems like the most effective way to improve our forecasts of climate change.

The MRI Coordination Office has launched a call for new ideas for Synthesis Workshops, some of which might actually be the basis for what I am calling Concerted Efforts. If you want to propose something, click here!

Session titles are now available for the IGBP Congress in March 2012 with abstracts due on 19 August 2011.

It's worth a few minutes of your time to peruse the list of sessions. There should shortly be a session on mountains in that list, but there are already some quite interesting sessions. One that caught my eye was one on tipping points in social networks chaired by Andy Revkin and involving Google and BBC.  Such a session smacks of the real world of politics and perception, a topic that, while recognized as central to our issue, never seems to be explored well enough at these kinds of meetings.