Energy%20Systems%20and%20Ecosystem%20Services;%20a%20emerging%20research%20agenda

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Energy Systems and Ecosystem Services a emerging
research agenda

• Dan van der Horst
• School of Geography, Earth Environmental
  Sciences
• University of Birmingham
• 25/02/2013

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structure

• Ecosystem Services the basics
• My research on land use change (LUC)
• Reflections on natural resource management in
  the 21st century
• My research on low carbon communities
• Emerging research agenda Ecosystem Based
  Development

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The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA)

• Launched in 2000 by the then UN Secretary General
  Kofi Annand, who stated that there has never
  been a comprehensive global assessment of the
  worlds major ecosystems.
• MEA is designed to provide decision-makers with
  information to manage ecosystems in a more
  sustainable manner that will maintain both
  biodiversity and the ecosystem services that are
  essential to human well-being (HWB).

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Key definitions

• Ecosystem. An ecosystem is a dynamic complex of
  plant, animal, and microorganism communities and
  the nonliving environment interacting as a
  functional unit. Humans are an integral part of
  ecosystems. Ecosystems vary enormously in size a
  temporary pond in a tree hollow and an ocean
  basin can both be ecosystems.
• Ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the
  benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These
  include provisioning services such as food and
  water regulating services such as regulation of
  floods, drought, land degradation, and disease
  supporting services such as soil formation and
  nutrient cycling and cultural services such as
  recreational, spiritual, religious and other
  nonmaterial benefits.
• Well-being. Human well-being has multiple
  constituents, including basic material for a good
  life, freedom and choice, health, good social
  relations, and security. Wellbeing is at the
  opposite end of a continuum from poverty, which
  has been defined as a pronounced deprivation in
  well-being. The constituents of well-being, as
  experienced and perceived by people, are
  situation-dependent, reflecting local geography,
  culture, and ecological circumstances.

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MEA background

• Involvement of governments, the private sector,
  nongovernmental organizations, and scientists
• An interdisciplinary project, involving thousands
  of scientists from across the world
• Aimed to provide an integrated assessment of the
  consequences of ecosystem change for human
  well-being and to analyze options available to
  enhance the conservation of ecosystems and their
  contributions to meeting human needs.
• Should help to inform the implementation of UN
  conventions such as The Convention on Biological
  Diversity, the Convention to Combat
  Desertification, the Convention on Migratory
  Species, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.
• It should also help to achieve the United Nations
  Millennium Development Goals and to carry out the
  Plan of Implementation of the 2002 World Summit
  on Sustainable Development.
• Supposed to identify areas of broad scientific
  agreement and also point to areas of continuing
  scientific debate.

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MEA 5 overarching research questions

1. Conditions trends to date?
2. Likely future changes?
3. What we can do to enhance well-being ESHWB?
4. What do and dont we know about ESHWB and how
   do we deal with such uncertainties in our
   policies?
5. What tools and methods do we have/need to assess
   ESHWB, and policies to protect or enhance these

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About the MEA conditions trends to date

• How do ecosystems contribute to human well-being?
• How have ecosystems changed and how has this
  increased or reduced their capacity to contribute
  to human well-being?
• Thresholds, regime shifts, irreversible changes?
• Critical factors affecting the observed changes?
• Costs, benefits and risks associated with
  observed changes and how are these distributed
  over space and over sectors of society?

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• Provisioning services (use values) are
  characterised by public accessibility and by the
  availability of substitute resources. For
  example, the recreational use value of a woodland
  depends, inter alia, on how many people can
  access that woodland and how many other woodlands
  substitute sites are available to these people.
• Cultural services (non-use values) also relate
  to accessibility and substitute sites but more in
  a conceptual rather than a literal sense as many
  examples of non-use values, particularly those
  ones that do not require physical access, are
  non-exclusive and non-rival. In other words,
  their enjoyment by one person does not
  necessarily limit or diminish another persons
  ability to access and enjoy this service through
  exclusion or consumptive diminishment.
• Regulating services (protection values) refer
  to indirect (conservation) use values related to
  the ability of ecosystems to mitigate the impacts
  of antropogenic emissions or natural phenomena.

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Ecosystem Service cascade (Haines-Young
Potschin, 2009)
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Assessment methods are complementary
co-dependent

• Functional or biophysical assessment Social
  assessment Valuation

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Back to my own research(on Land Use Change)
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Generic model for assessing LUC drivers, patterns
and processes
Theory
Drivers For LUC (market, Policy, CC)
Fieldwork to understand process behind patterns
Patterns found
Pattern Analysis
LUC data
Methods used - Pattern analysis GIS, RS,
Stats - Fieldwork participant observation, div
qual methods, questionnaires biophysical
surveys/sampling
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Case study of windfarm approval patterns (van der
Horst Toke, 2010)
Theory (env. justice social capital)
Wind Energy policy
Wind farms Approved/ rejected
Patterns found
Pattern analysis
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Case study on farmer uptake of a PES scheme (van
der Horst, 2011)
Theory (Innovation diffusion as a
spatio-temporal process)
Data of Farmers joining
ESA PES scheme
Patterns found
Pattern analysis
Cummulative uptake over time
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Case study of village ecology jatropha curcas
(in progress)
Theory/Hypothesis (speculationMarx?)
Drivers For LUC (historic jatropha hype)
Fieldwork (ground truthing)
village Tree cover (RS)
Patterns found
Pattern analysis
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Reflections 1Human nature relationship

• unspoiled nature is a human construct
• We are not external to nature
• we are shaping our ecosystem and this changed
  ecosystem is shaping us (health, wellbeing..).
  This is a feedback loop
• We should shape our ecosystem in a smarter way,
  creating a positive feedback loop.

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Reflections 2Technology ecology

• Technology allowed us to become the most invasive
  of all species, occupying all ecosystems.
• From crude technology to Biomimicry.
• From technology to extract ES and protect these
  against competition
• To technology to restore lost ES (e.g.
  geo-engineering)

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Reflections 3Geological irony

• We mine fossil fuels (accumulated ecosystem
  services)
• And that energy gives us the power to act as a
  geological force Anthropocene.
• Now we are running low on (cheap cleanish)
  fossil fuels
• Now we need to invest in infrastructure to adapt
  to climate change which we have created (requires
  more energy..)

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Why do we create externalities?

• (assuming that we are not bad people assuming
  that we are not very poor)
• Bad impact is in a place far away
• Bad impact is in a time far away
• Bad impact is diffuse
• Bad impact has multiple causes
• Bad impact is (otherwise) invisible
• Globalisation as externalisation through space

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Wrong national boundaries, sectoral boundaries,
zoning, property regime

• Redraw boundaries (national, sectoral) through
  institutional reform
• Redraw property relations through commodification
  of nature
• Change Agents ICT revolution (making divisible
  what is invisible), shifts in economic landscape,
  public opinion?

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Principles of Adaptive Management?

• Build resilience in infrastructure redundancy
  (back-up) contingency (plan B) recovery
• Increase storage
• Diversify supplies
• Avoid new bad lock-in (high energy/dirty
  energy)
• No blanket approach Find/use local synergies
• Shorter supply-demand feedback loops
• Soft measures 1 reduce demand
• Soft measures 2 dev./support coping strategies
• Accept experiments learning by doing
• Shared knowledge, decisions, learning

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Cultural lock-in from our industrial past the
pastoral myth

• The open countryside space is portrayed as a
  space of consumption in which ramblers walk and
  walk freely experiencing peace and quiet and
  spectacular scenery. The lands value lies not in
  its productive activity, but as an escape for
  city-dwellers, as somewhere to reconnect with
  nature, and to inspire art, literature and music
  (Woods, 2003, p 285).

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Back to my own research again(on low carbon
communities)
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Renewable Energy development as a form of smart
(re)localisation

• Linking production and consumption (no
  sustainable consumption without sustainable
  production)
• Linking production to social impacts (impacts of
  the production process impacts of energy
  services provided)
• Linking people and organisations through a supply
  chain or a grid (power relations shift with
  distance, connectivity, directionality)
• Community building?

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Community as a focus for collective action in RE
deployment

• Broad research area since Tonnies Gemeinschaft
  und Gesellschaft.
• To what extent can socio-technical transition to
  a low carbon society be understood in terms of
  (lack of) collective or community action?
• What examples/types of low carbon munities are
  there?
• What collective resources are being mobilised?
• How are these being mobilised? (process?)
• Giving these observations, what can we expect for
  the future? (mainstreaming?)

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Locating low carbon communities
Island community
Intentional community
place
scale
Virtual community
Interest (culture, value etc)
bowling alone?
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Community (trans)formation engagement with RE
Community of place
Westray?
e.g. eco-village
e.g. threat to back-yard (greentrified?)
Community of practice
Community of interest
Innovation-diffusion, Capacity building
e.g. consumer Co-ops urban Wind co-ops
e.g. veggie vans Solar guerrillas off-gridders
Virtual Community
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Intentional green community Findhorn
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Left Selling green electricityBelow Selling
green technology (solar water heaters)
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But we also have depleted communities

• communities where the economy is in decline
  and the resources of the area, according to
  profit-seeking capital, are used up. However,
  depleted communities are more than simply
  locations that lack growth mechanisms they are
  also areas to which people retain an attachment.
  A depleted community, therefore, continues to
  exist as a social entity because it is shaped by
  positive social forces as well as by negative
  economic forces. While the economic signals are
  for people to move, the ties to community, the
  emotional bonds and the social benefits of living
  there create a powerful resistance to leaving. A
  depleted community, therefore, maintains a strong
  and active network of social relations.
  (Johnstone and Lionais, 2004, p. 217)
• Ex-mining (Barnsley, Kirklees) - Remote rural
  (Westray, Unst)

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(Island) Westray

• Biodiesel from waste cooking oil
• Electric car (converted), charged by a wind
  turbine
• Wind to heat (kirk, youth centre, care centre)
• GSHP (now standard for new houses)
• Farm digester
• Community wind farm
• Biomass boiler for cardboard
• Aim carbon neutral by 2012

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Capitalist production develops technology, and
the combining together of various processes into
a social whole, only by sapping the original
sources of all wealth - the soil and the
labourer (Marx)
inputs Slurry Grass Paper Crab shells
Concept of Shared Value (Michael Porter)
outputs Domestic heat Electricity for
grid Fertiliser for land
Digester
Outcomes Lower heating bills Income for farmers,
income for biogas company Drink water quality
improvement Local sustainable waste
disposal Cost avoidance for local fish processing
plant Reduced GHG emissions
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Towards Ecosystem Based Development?

• Extends from ecosystem based management
• Work with nature (not develop OR conserve)
• Work to scale (disecologies of scale)
• Create shared value (more than just avoiding
  externalities)
• See human activities and technologies as part of
  nature (anthropocene, biomimicry)
• Challenging paradigms Positive lock-in
  transaction benefits value of redundancy
  learning-from-failure as a public good