Reflection on Natural Resource Management and Writing Advice

1. :-)

2. Today… • Your homework (activity #2) • What is a reflection? • What does it teach us about NRM? • Writing advice… Precise statements… • Continuing with economic unit and then the Ecology unit • Readings (soft copy) – to complete economic/ecological unit and begin with NRM-SF. Already on website • From ‘tragedy of the commons’ to ‘Governing the Commons’ • Ecological civilization • Next unit: Sustainable Livelihoods Framework • Readings will be added on Tuesday on the page • Moodle • Will be accessible to you all tomorrow. Any questions – talk to Nadine

3. Alternatives to GDP • net domestic product is obtained by subtracting depreciation of manufactured capital from GDP. • Further adjusting GDP to account for the depreciation of natural capital yields environmentally-adjusted net domestic product (EDP): EDP = GDP – depreciation of manufactured capital – depreciation of natural capital • requires a monetary estimate for the depreciation of natural capital. • considers how much a nation is saving for the future • The World Bank’s genuine saving measure (S*) adds a social and environmental element to national saving rates. A nation’s genuine saving rate is calculated as: • S* = gross domestic saving – produced capital depreciation + education expenditures – depletion of natural resources – pollution damage

5. Natural Capital “We treat the earth like a business in liquidation.” Herman Daly Opportunity cost. Loss is not counted.

6. How to “account”? Economies are based on natural capital (physical assets provided by nature), manufactured capital (physical assets generated by human productive activities applied to natural capital), social capital (trust, mutual understanding, shared values, and socially held knowledge) and human capital (people’s capacity for labor and their individual knowledge and skills). Only the value of manufactured capital (structures and equipment)--and recently, software--is estimated in the current national accounts. Can you think of ways that the stocks of natural, social, and human capital might be measured? What kind of information would be needed?

7. “accounting” • Resource functions: the natural environment provides natural resources that are inputs into human production processes. • Environmental service functions: the natural environment provides the basic habitat of clean air, drinkable water, and suitable climate that directly support all forms of life on the planet. • Sink functions: the natural environment serves as a “sink” which absorbs (up to a point) the pollution and wastes generated by economic activity.

8. Different kinds of value • Use value: the values placed on a resource by those who directly use it. • Non-use value: • Option value: value of preserving the option of doing something else by doing nothing • Existence value: value of preserving something for its mere existence • Bequest value: value of leaving an undamaged (less damaged) world to future generations

9. Another problem with GDP

10. Accounting for households: missing Only two aspects of household production are currently counted in GDP: • the services of the house itself (the rent paid explicitly or implicitly by residents) and, • the services provided by paid household workers such as housekeepers and gardeners.

11. History of exclusion • Households not ‘productive’ • Not producing economic goods • Gender split: ‘economy’ – man’s world; ‘home’ – woman’s world • ‘too hard to distinguish from consumption’ • third person criterion: the convention that says that an activity should be considered to be production (rather than leisure) if a person could buy a market replacement or pay someone to do the activity in his or her place • ‘GDP measures market production’ • GDP aims to only measure production for the market. Since household outputs are not sold, this argument goes, it is consistent to exclude them from GDP. • The problem with this argument is that a substantial portion of GDP already reflects nonmarket production

12. Accounting for household production • Why? How? • Time use surveys

13. Accounting for household production • Replacement cost method • (for estimating the value of household production): valuing hours at the amount it would be necessary to pay someone to do the work • Opportunity cost method • (for estimating the value of household production): valuing hours at the amount the unpaid worker could have earned at a paid job • Many counties, including US, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, Thailand and the United Kingdom, have conducted or are conducting national time use surveys to aid their understanding of unpaid productive activities.

14. How to measure economic well-being? • Since the goal of macroeconomics is human well-being, we need to be sure the indicators we pay most attention to are ones that relate to the goal we want to achieve! • Re growth in production per capita, need to ask: what, for whom, and how • Well-being reducing products? Defensive expenditures? Loss of leisure? Loss of human and social capital formation? Well-being reducing production methods? Unequal distribution?

15. Other indicators • Index of sustainable welfare (1989) • Genuine Progress Indicator • a measure of economic well- being that adds many benefits, and subtracts many costs, that are not included in GDP. This measure is calculated by the nonprofit group Redefining Progress. • - starting point is the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) component of GDP for each year, as calculated by the BLS, on the reasoning that this number approximates the welfare associated with consumption. Then include externalities: (+) values; (-) social costs; (-) environmental costs • Human Development Index • an index of well-being made by combining measures of health, education, and income. Calculated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). • Life expectancy at birth; An index reflecting a combination of the adult literacy rate and statistics on enrollments in education; GDP per capita • Index: between 0 and 1 (Lebanon. 2007. 0.803)

16. Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) • partnership between an economist, Herman Daly, and a theologian, John Cobb. • They construct an indicator of aggregate welfare by taking into account the current flow of services to humanity from all sources (and not only the current output of marketable commodities which is relevant to economic welfare) • They deduct spending whose purpose is defensive or intermediate and not welfare- producing • They account for the creation and losses of all forms of capital by adding the creation of man-made capital and deducting the depletion of natural capital

17. Resources – as defined in economics

18. How do economists define resources?Public goods and common property resources • Rival: Goods whose use is limited to one user at a time. • Excludable: The right to use or consume the good can be refused to others. • A good that is both rival and excludable is called a private good. • Music at a concert is – non-rival and excludable. Why? • Club-goods: the “access-right” is the membership, which allows the members to enjoy all the club’s facilities in common • Common property resources: rival and non-excludable • Public goods: non-rival and non-excludable • Congestion threshold

19. Non-Excludable Excludable Open Access Regime: (misnamed: Tragedy of the commons) Oceanic fisheries, timberetc. from unprotected forests, air pollution, waste absorption capacity Market Good: Food, clothes, cars, land, timber, fish once captured, farmed fish, regulated pollution Rival} Potential market good (Tragedy of the “non-commons”)but inefficient: patented information, Pond, roads (congestible), streetlights Pure Public Good:climate stability, ozone layer, clean air/water/land, Biodiversity, information, habitat, life support functions, etc. Non-rival} Private beaches, private gardens, toll roads, zoos, movies Non-rival, congestible Public beaches, gardens, roads, etc.

20. Open Access Resources • Overuse of non-excludable or open access resources is a phenomenon that has been called the tragedy of the commons • paradox of aggregation: if everyone tries to obtain more for themselves, this behavior results in less for everyone. The pursuit of personal interest leads each individual user to take as much as possible of the resource, which increases the overall level of extraction of the resource and drives it irremediably to its destruction – and to the ruin of all the users. • Global commons: When the scope of a resource is regional or even global (ex: oceans. Atmosphere)

21. Tragedy of the commons • Overuse of non-excludable or open access resources is a phenomenon that has been called the tragedy of the commons • paradox of aggregation: if everyone tries to obtain more for themselves, this behavior results in less for everyone. The pursuit of personal interest leads each individual user to take as much as possible of the resource, which increases the overall level of extraction of the resource and drives it irremediably to its destruction – and to the ruin of all the users. • Global commons: When the scope of a resource is regional or even global (ex: oceans. Atmosphere)

22. Another perspective • Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. (1990). Elinor Ostrom. • In-depth analysis of several long-standing and viable common property regimes • Swiss grazing pastures; Japanese forests; irrigation systems in Spain and Philippines • Delineated a set of 8 ‘design principles’ common to each of the cases. • What do you think?...

23. Ostrom – governing the commons • Group boundaries are clearly defined • Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions • Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules • The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities • A system for monitoring member’s behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring • A graduated system of sanctions is used • Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms • For CPRs that parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises

24. Ostrom • “If this study does nothing more than shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve common pool resource problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation, it will have accomplished one major purpose”

25. OPTIONAL  Activity #3 – due in one week (Sunday night) • Examine other forms of economic measurement (other than GDP) and compare them with well-being. • Discuss relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction. • Discuss relationship between natural resource imports, natural resource exports, and economic growth?

26. Next unit: ecology Readings: in the office, and to be added to the website

27. What is Ecology? …. Oikos = home “By ecology, we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature -- the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and to its inorganic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relation with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact -- in a word, ecology is the study of all the complex interrelationships referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.” Ernst Haeckel, 1870. Ecology is the science by which we study how organisms (animals, plants, and microbes) interactin and with the natural world. 13 27

28. Questions of Scale: Ecological Systems Large and Small • Individual Organism(“No smaller unit in biology ... has a separate life in the environment...”) • Population (many organisms of the same species living together) • Guild (a group of populations that utilizes resources in essentially the same way) • Community (many populations of different kinds living in the same place) • Ecosystem (assemblages of organisms together with their physical environment; community + physical environment) • Biosphere (the global ecosystem, all organisms and environments on earth) 17 28

29. The Science of Ecology • Need to understand the dynamic in historical terms • Try to understand the general principles that govern the operation of the biosphere • Thus: human activities must be included • No valid distinction between ecology and human ecology • Human ecology: interdisciplinary study of relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments

30. Ecological systems… human view 19 30

31. Science of ecology • An ecosystem is > sum of its individuals parts • Interactions • Interdependence • Rarely any simple relationships • Not all relationships are equally important or equally sensitive • “the living and nonliving parts of ecosystems are so interwoven into the fabric of nature that it is difficult to separate them.” [eg: evolution. eg: succession] • Because of the interdependence: concept of community v important • Diverse organisms live together. Reciprocal interactions.

32. Science of ecology – human activities • Human activities • Adding species: invasive, exotics • Subtracting species: habitat loss; exploitation; climate change • Pesticides vs biological control / community aspect. • DDT to kill mosquitoes (Borneo). DDT killed lizards (direct contact and prey)  decrease in village cats  increase in poisonous lizards  increase in straw-loving caterpillars inhabiting the thatched roof; end result: plague of rats + destruction of roofs of villagers’ huts • Biological magnification / bioaccumulation • Many synthetic chemicals affect species composition of plankton in ocean  impacting structure of oceanic food chains + atmospheric carbon dioxide

33. Pesticides… • Rachel Carson: Silent Spring • “Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves." • Interested in relationship between pesticides and breast cancer? http://www.silentspring.org/ - Silent Spring Institute • Of the 3,000 high-production chemicals used in the United States, 43 percent have never undergone basic toxicity tests. Only 7 percent have been tested using the full battery of standard toxicity tests.

34. Toxicologists: guided by 3 principles • Principle 1 • In terms of measuring chemicals - you only find what you are looking for, and only if it is present in sufficient quantity to be detected by the method used to measure it. • Principle 2 • The dose makes the poison! Paracelsus (1493-1541) is credited with this dictum when he wrote, “All substances are poisons, there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.” • Exposure is the magnitude, duration, and frequency with which organisms interact with biologically available toxicants. • Principle 3 • “No instrument has yet been devised that can measure toxicity. Chemical concentrations can be measured with an instrument but only living material can be used to measure toxicity.” • John Cairns, Jr. and D.I. Mount, 199, Environmental Science and Technology

35. Biological control • Importation of a natural enemy – typically where the pest came from. Classical biological control; not directly conducted by the farmer or gardener first major successful example of this method occurred over 100 years ago and involved the control of cottony cushion scale, a serious pest of the California citrus industry. • Conservation biological control – manipulating to increase the equilibrium density of natural enemies already native to the region; conserving natural enemies; one of the easiest ways for producers to initiate biological control on their farms • Inoculation biological control - releasing small numbers of natural enemies at prescribed intervals throughout the pest period, starting when the pest population is very low. The natural enemies are expected to reproduce themselves to provide more long-term control. The expected outcome of inoculative releases is to keep the pest at low numbers, never allowing it to approach an economic injury level [another way? multi-culture]

36. Integrated farming systems • Integrated pest management • Physical control [keeping pests away from crops] + • Cultural control [rotating crops] + • Biological control + • Possibly – chemical and resistant crop control • Note: organic food production applies many of the same concepts as IPM but limits the use of pesticides to those that are produced from natural sources, as opposed to synthetic chemicals.

37. Homeostatic stability • Homeostasis: include mechanisms of self-maintenance and self-regulation that (may) produce a relatively stable balance or dynamic equilibrium • Apart from local disruption due to volcanism and earthquakes, status of natural ecosystems threatened only by long-term changes in climate and geology and by the actions of humans • Density-dependent causes of mortality; predator-prey cycle • Biosphere: open system in a steady state that is driven fairly by the constant input of energy from the sun and in which a finite stock of materials is constantly recycled

38. Steady state: life cycle • Sunlight  phytoplankton to giant trees;  • Producers  primary consumers  secondary consumers  decomposers • Absence of complexity in human agricultural fields: responsible for pest problems (monoculture … small is beautiful…)

39. Steady state: biogeochemical cycles • No boundaries • Hydrological cycle • Phosphorus cycle • Nitrogen cycle • Sulfur cycle • Carbon cycle • Materials needed to maintain processes of life are used – and then recycled. Finite quantity of each element. No waste in nature; one organism’s waste is another’s food • These cycles are interdependent • Human activities: increase in organic waste + nonorganic waste

40. Albatross • Largest wingspan • 21 recognized species; 19 ‘threatened’ and other 2 are ‘nearly threatened’ • Why? • - interaction with fishing operations, particularly longlines. A typical longlining operation involves releasing a single line (that may be up to 100km long) off the stern of the boat with as many as 3,000 baited hooks along its length. They are common ship followers and strike at the baited hooks as they are being set, subsequently drowning when the line sinks below the water. • - pollution

41. The great garbage patch, kills over 10,000 albatross each year.  Unfortunately, many albatross mistake the garbage for food and die quite painful deaths from the consumption of plastics and other toxins.

42. A Physical Model for the Water Cycle • The biosphere contains 1,400,000 teratons (TT, 1012 metric tons) of water, 97% of which resides in the oceans. • Other water compartments include: • ice caps and glaciers (29,000 TT) • underground aquifers (8,000 TT) • lakes and rivers (100 TT) • soil moisture (100 TT) • water in atmosphere (13 TT) • water in living things (1 TT)

43. Global water cycle; units in billion billion grams (10^18)

45. Acidic streams from refuse of coal mines (Pennsylvania)

49. Steady state: limits of ecosystems • Why are human-made wastes a problem for ecosystems? • Ecosystems can survive certain stresses to which they are adapted – • if given enough time and • if resilient enough

50. Steady state: price of intervention • Issue of ecosystem disturbance: become an economic one  trade-offs between benefits and costs