Sustainability School


Bio-piracy (or bio-colonialism) refers to the hijacking of natural products by ”bio-prospectors” without recompensing the country of origin, or when invalid patents are granted. The term ”biopiracy” was launched in 1993 by the NGO RAFI (today ETC – Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration). Prospectors looking for natural compounds that can be used in biotechnology are often helped by indigenous peoples with knowledge of for example the medicinal effects of plants. Many prospectors have come to the biodiversity-rich developing countries in the tropics, exported organisms, identified active compounds, patented them and sold them for large profits – without recompensing the indigenous peoples or the country of origin.

Theft of intellectual property rights
This ”theft of intellectual property rights” is of course an ethical issue, but also an economic one, as these peoples and countries could have benefited greatly from the income generated by their knowledge and natural resources. Measures proposed to prevent bio-piracy have been requested by indigenous peoples or countries, while many call for the banning of the patenting of life. The patenting of lifeforms and living processes is covered under Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS-agreement (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights), under the WTO. TRIPS has, however, been heavily criticised for not protecting against biopiracy and looking more into protecting industrial, technical innovations produced by individuals or companies, rather than traditional knowledge.

/Miriam Huitric

More at:

http://www.vshiva.net/archives.htm#biopiracy
http://www.wto.org


Externalities occur when an individual's actions affect the well being of another in ways that need not be paid for according to existing rules. In recent years the study of externalities by economists has become extensive - not least because of concerns about the link between the economy and the environment.
   Ecological externalities are those that impact the environment. Externalities are positive when they benefit society at large and negative when they incur costs.
    The presence of externalities means that firms and consumers, motivated by their own private costs and benefits, ignore the negative impacts of their pollution on others, leading to excessive levels of pollution.
   For example, the full cost of asthma and bronchitis due to air pollution or the costs of climate change do not appear in the price of gasoline or on people's electricity bills. Because the market price of the action does not include a portion of its costs/ benefits, normal market incentives lead to positive externalities being under produced and negative externalities being overproduced from society's point of view.
   Ecological externalities often occur because property rights have not been clearly defined or effectively enforced. Other measures used to internalise these costs are government regulations and tax policies. For many environmental problems the individuals and corporations polluting do not have to bare the costs. Taxes, permits or other policies can internalise these costs so the real polluters have to pay the costs they inflict on others.

/Miriam Huitric

More at:

http://www.sectionz.info/Issue_1/hidden_costs.html


Vulnerability of both society and nature is receiving ever more attention as natural disasters, accidents and other unpredictable events appear to be becoming more common. It has received especial attention following the tsunami catastrophe in Southeast Asia. Vulnerability has, however, long been a concept in research for sustainable development. In this context it is a measure of the extent to which people, societies and ecosystems risk damage from environmental or socio-economic stress or disturbances.
    A vulnerability assessment can, for example, assess how large the risk is that people and the environment will be affected by climate changes and how sensitive they will be to such changes.



    The fundamental goal is of course to predict and avoid risk by identifying sites, groups of people and ecosystems that are particularly vulnerable. Lately, vulnerability has often been taken up in connection with the concept of resilience, and has been described as the latter’s opposite. Both of these concepts originate in different branches of science, nevertheless their research strikingly often reach similar conclusions on how one should strengthen resilience, or reduce vulnerability, in societies and ecosystems.
    A vital vulnerability lesson from the 26th of December is that coastal communities were particularly badly affected due to environmental degradation and poorly planned coastal development.
    Costly insights into vulnerability In a similar way, many have had costly insights into vulnerability following a major storm in southern Sweden. In a couple of hours the equivalent of a year’s worth of logging for the whole of Sweden was felled in an area covering a twentieth of the country’s forest area. This was, in part, a result of the modern-day forest industry’s blind focus on fast-growing spruce and that traditional knowledge on forest management has been forgotten.
    In the midst of all the turmoil, these two events may all the same lead to increased insight into how we should prepare ourselves for future natural disasters – not to mention the effects of climate change.

/Fredrik Moberg

More at:

The Stockholm Environment Institute:
http://www.sei.se

The Resilience Alliance:
http://www.resalliance.org

Biosafety is about minimising the potential risks to people and nature from the handling and transfer of living genetically modified organisms (GMOs or LMOs) produced through modern biotechnology, or genetic engineering. This technique means that new genes are transferred from an entirely unrelated species with viruses or bacteria as vehicles. The concept of biosafety came up as a response to the many concerns raised that GMOs could adversely affect other species, disrupt entire ecosystems and cause risks to human health. The means by which this could occur include spread of introduced traits to non-target species leading to genetic contamination, development of pest and herbicide resistance, contamination of food chains, displacement of traditional animal breeds and plant varieties thereby causing genetic erosion.
   Moreover, there are many potential socio-economic and ethical impacts. For example, introduction of GM-crops can replace locally adapted varieties and traditional export crops. Proponents, on the other hand, claim that these alarms are overstated and that genetic engineering can lead to, for example, increased food production and new medicines. Scientific findings, however, show that the GMOs do spread into the environment and can have negative ecological and even health effects. An increasing number of scientists therefore advocate the precautionary principle in the production, handling and introduction of GMOs.

The Cartagena Protocol
While many countries with biotechnology industries have had domestic legislation for a while, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety is the first international agreement to deal with the transboundary movement of GMOs. It aims to ensure that genetically engineered organisms and products are transported and used safely. It is also the first international treaty to recognise what is known as the precautionary principle, which allows rejection of food imports if there is evidence, but not necessarily proof, that they pose a danger to human health.
   The Cartagena Protocol is part of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and entered into force on 11 September 2003 after the small Pacific island nation of Palau had became the 50th country to ratify it. According to the CBD the Protocol is now ”legally binding in the international legal system and in the legal systems of States that have given consent to be bound by it; and henceforth States must comply with, and implement, all the provisions of the Protocol”. Critics, however, fear the treaty will be subordinated to trade and that GMO exporting countries could use the WTO trade rules to ignore the Protocol altogether.

/Fredrik Moberg

More at:

http://www.biodiv.org/biosafety


Institutions are central within the social science of natural resources management. Institutions are, in this context, defined as the norms and rules governing human interactions. They can be formal such as rules and laws, but also informal (unwritten) such as norms and conventions of society. Institutions set transaction costs for human actions and govern resource use by controlling access to and extraction of natural resources. By establishing defined courses of action, institutions minimise uncertainty and risk when actors exchange. For complex exchange problems, however, institutions can never be fully free of incompatible incentives. This can create the temptation to cheat. In the case of natural resources, institutions often fail to take the externalities of exploitation into account, which results in transaction costs that benefit the extractor but with environmental and social costs that are paid by no one and suffered by all.
    Existing knowledge will influence the development of institutions and, at the same time, institutions steer the development of knowledge. This partly explains the variety of institutional approaches to similar problems.
   Today a growing number of interdisciplinary environmental scientists emphasise institutions that deal with property rights and so-called common property resources, that is, institutions controlling access to a natural resource and how it can be used. There are four categories of property, though there is overlap between them: state-owned, private property, common property (group ownership) and open access (no rules). Common property (or common pool) resources, such as fisheries, have long been subject to overexploitation and misuse due to lack of institutions or their implementation (a situation called the tragedy of the commons). In recent years many scholars have, instead of promoting either centralised governmental regulation or privatisation, suggested the design of institutions that are organised and governed by the resource users themselves as a way to resolve the problem of the commons.

/Miriam Huitric

More at:

North D, 1990: Institutions, institutional change and economic preferences. Cambridge University Press.

Ostrom E, 1990: Governing the commons. The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.

Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. IHDP Report No. 9:
http://www.ihdp.uni-bonn.de/html/publications/ reports/report09/index.htm



Tragedy of the Commons In 1968 Garrett Hardin popularised the term ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ using the medieval commons tenure system for grazing as an example. A herder grazing his or her animals on the commons, which were accessible to all herders, reaped all of the benefits from his or her animals on the commons but shared the cost of overgrazing of the commons. Under such conditions, each individual will aim to maximise what he or she can appropriate from the land so as not to ‘lose-out’ to a fellow user. Hardin concluded that land degradation of the commons was inevitable as each individual acted independently and recommended either privatisation or nationalisation of the commons to prevent this.
    However, Hardin’s argument rested on two key assumptions: that there was no information on the state of the resource and no communication among users, which are rarely the case. Hardin’s commons were in fact open access. Open access occurs where there are no property rights or rules at all and it is widely accepted that under such circumstances ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ will indeed arise. Since 1968, many have gone on to show that it is possible to collectively manage shared resources. That is, common pool problems can be solved by voluntary organisations rather than by centralised governmental regulation or privatisation of the resource.
    Elinor Ostrom, at Indiana University, is maybe the most well known researcher behind the “revisiting” of the tragedy of the commons. She has described many examples of commons where use rights have been assigned to a group of resource users rather than to individuals or the state. Examples include communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries. Ostrom has, after studying several long-standing and viable common property regimes, outlined a set of "design principles" common to each of the cases. These include clearly defined boundaries, monitors who are either resource users or accountable to them, graduated sanctions, and mechanisms dominated by the users themselves to resolve conflicts and alter rules.

More at:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m0GER/is_n94/ai_21260249
Digital Library of the Commons:
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/cpr/index.php


Masking Environmental Feedbacks. We are aware of the negative impacts of many human activities on natural systems like lakes, forests, seas and wetlands. We also know that these natural systems provide the natural resources and ecosystem services that we all depend upon for our health and welfare. Still, at least in western society, our economies and societies do not seem to suffer much from these impacts. Part of the answer lies in our ability to mask environmental feedbacks. These are the signals from the environment indicating that it has changed, for example reduced fish catches. Masking occurs when environmental signals can be ignored due to for example technology, subsidies or the global market. In the case of fisheries, technology such as engines and sonar, allows fleets to travel further from the coasts and exploit deeper and increasingly dispersed stocks. Where fishing is uncontrolled it would normally lead to reduced catches due to over-fishing, but if new technology is introduced previously inaccessible catch might become within reach. And this can even lead to booms in catch. Even if such booms are mostly temporary they can attract many new fishers, who invest in new vessels and equipment. This is where subsidies come in. They artificially lower the real costs and risks of fishing. A main incentive for this subsidisation is to increase income. This is particularly true for export fisheries that can be important sources of foreign exchange in developing countries.
    Likewise, the global market masks feedbacks for both fishers and consumers. High market prices can mask reduced yields from fishers by maintaining their income. Moreover, if a fishery collapses in one country, or its prices are too high, an importer can simply import from a different country. Consumers are rarely aware of this switch.
   Masking of environmental signals can thus result in over-capitalisation (huge loans due to investments in expensive technology) of the fishery, which leads to economic dependence on a steady catch, regardless of the ecological reality in the water. This is not to say that technology is inherently bad, only that it must be properly managed to follow natural dynamics of the ecosystems.

/Miriam Huitric

More at:

http://www.ihdp.uni-bonn.de/html/publications/
workingpaper/wp02m.htm#_Toc417096392


Pollinators are animals, predominantly insects, that help plants with their reproduction. Pollination is an example of an ecosystem service often taken for granted and not valued fully - if at all - until lost. More than 90% of all flowering plants and more than two thirds of the world's important food crops depend on pollinators, the rest relies on wind pollination. By transporting pollen grains between plants, allowing them to set seed and grow fruit, the pollinators also provide us humans with a number of services that we otherwise would have to substitute.
    Both domesticated and wild pollinators have decreased drastically in number and distribution, due to disease, pesticides, and land use changes associated with modern agriculture. In Maoxian County, near the border between China and Nepal, thousands of people with paintbrushes pollinate apple trees because the bee pollinators have become extinct. It takes 20-25 people to perform the work of two bee colonies. Likewise, almond growers in California have invested large sums to replace the loss of wild bees with domesticated bees transported in large trucks from other states. In total, the loss of pollinators in the US has been estimated to cost farmers US$6-8 a year. A global estimate assessed the total value of the world's pollinators to US$400.

More at:

http://www.esa.org/ecoservices/poll/body.poll.fact.html



Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) are all around us. Companies, organisations, the weather, our immune systems, the economy, ecosystems, organisms, single cells and brains have all been given that label.
    In a CAS simple rules of cause and effect do not apply. A CAS is complex, unpredictable and constantly adapting to its environment. Hence, they are far from being machines that you can take apart and investigate the parts to understand the whole. The interaction between the parts or sub-systems allows the emergence of a system behaviour that would not be anticipated from the behaviour of components in isolation.
   A CAS can shift between several different stable states, and may even exhibit irreversible transitions between alternative states. It is characterised by non-linear relationships between the parts, complex feedbacks (specific causes are not easily linked to particular effects), time lags, and threshold effects. This makes planning and managing difficult as the agents (like plants and animals in an ecosystem or people in an organisation) interact and connect with each other in unpredictable ways. From these interactions patterns start to form that feed back on the interactions of the agents, but not necessarily controlling the system.
   For example in an ecosystem if a disease starts to deplete one species this results in a greater or lesser food supply for others in the system which affects their behaviour and their numbers. Integrated systems of people and nature also function as complex adaptive systems, sometimes called social-ecological systems. Recent research shows that managing complex adaptive ecosystems so that they continue to supply the goods and services human societies rely upon requires "adaptive management", that goes about by learning by doing.
   It is difficult to control all variation, change and uncertainty in nature in order to create trustworthy production systems in for example agriculture and fisheries. We need to ride change and make it work for us rather than forever battling to command and control it.

/Fredrik Moberg

More at:

http://www.trojanmice.com/articles/
complexadaptivesystems.htm


Response diversity is a newly proposed term that refers to the multitude of responses to environmental change and disturbances, among species contributing to the same ecosystem function. Biodiversity plays a crucial role in sustaining the capacity of ecosystems to cope with disturbance and change, a capacity called resilience by ecologists. In an ecosystem there are a number of so called functional groups of species, like organisms that are pollinators, grazers, predators, seed dispersers, decomposers, or organisms that fix nitrogen, generate soils or modify water flows. When such functional groups contain several species that perform a similar function, species can replace or compensate for one another in times of disturbance and insure against loss of ecosystem functions. If all species within such a functional group would be equally sensitive to a particular disturbance the system would have low response diversity and be very vulnerable. If, on the other hand, they respond in different ways to environmental changes there is high response diversity. It is like a financial asset manager that distributes his investment by purchasing shares in different companies across different (and unrelated) industries to spread the risk. Take a forest with many different species of trees, for instance. Some species are probably more fire tolerant than others, some might be less likely to fall during a storm and yet others might not be affected by an outbreak of a particular insect pest. They all respond in different ways to disturbances and hence provide insurance against the loss of all essential functions trees provide to a forest. Erosion of functional diversity and response diversity may lead to vulnerability due to alterations in nature’s capacity to supply society with essential ecosystem services and support.

Source:

Elmqvist, T., C. Folke, M. Nyström, G. Peterson, J. Bengtsson, B. Walker, and J. Norberg. 2003. “Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience”. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1(9):488-494.
Website: http://www.frontiersinecology.org


Anthropocene is a newly proposed term for the present geological epoch in order to illustrate the growing impacts of human activities on Earth and atmosphere during the last centuries. Anthropocene would take over from Holocene (“Recent Whole”), which has been the term for the postglacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years.
   The new term has been proposed by the two scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer. Examples of the worldwide influence of mankind on the Earth System include urbanisation that has increased tenfold in the past century, that humanity has transformed 30-50% of the land surface, and that in a few generations mankind is using up the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years ago – before the time of the dinosaurs. The level of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere has increased by more than 30% and 100% respectively.
   “Mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe million years to come”, says Crutzen and Stroemer. They propose the latter part of the 18th century as the starting date of the Anthropocene. “We chose this date because during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable”, they say.

/Line Gordon

More at:

Crutzen, PJ, and Stoermer, EF 2000. “The Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter, 41, 17-18.
(http://www.igbp.kva.se//uploads/nl_41.pdf)


Natural Capital is an extension of the traditional economic notion of capital. The term was coined to represent the natural assets that economists, governments, and corporations tend to leave off the balance sheets. Natural capital can be either non-renewable resources, like fossil fuels and mineral deposits, or renewable resources, such as the quantity of fish or timber that can be harvested without affecting the sustainability of the stock. A third category of natural capital is ecosystem services (e.g. the generation of fertile soils, purification of air and water, the mitigation off floods and drought, pollination and pest control). These goods and services provided by natural ecosystems are of immense economic value - many are literally priceless, since they have no known substitutes. We simply cannot live without them. Natural capital has constantly been on the decline since the beginning of industrialisation.
   Now, many argue that we are facing a historic juncture in which the limits to increased wealth are not the lack of conventional form of capital assets (machines, buildings and infrastructure), but the lack of natural capital. As this natural capital is already depleted in many poor countries, there is a growing need to find a new system of development in developing countries – a system that realises the full value of ecosystem goods and services. A system that takes natural capital into account.

More at:

http://www.wri.org/business/tm_03_natural_capital.html
http://albaeco.com/sdu/06/index.htm


Hydrosolidarity is an ethical concept developed by the Stockholm International Water Institute. It is based on the realisation that wise water use and governance is central to alleviate poverty, hunger and lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Hydrosolidarity provides guidelines for problem solving in a river basin, where water resource has to be shared. It provides recommendations that can be used as a base for stakeholder discussions, interactions and conflict reconciliation.
   Hydrosolidarity is the opposite of "hydroegoism", the fragmented and sectoral approach to water management, where the strongest lobbyists tend to win. Human activities and ecosystems depend on the same water, so trade-offs are inevitable between activities upstream and downstream. Upstream consumption by water dependent human needs must be balanced with aquatic ecosystems and other water dependent human needs downstream. In addition, upstream pollution loads affect ecosystems and people downstream. Also, balancing is needed between different sectors, such as between water for city supply and water for irrigation. Hydrosolidarity has grown to be an internationally accepted concept. It has been central in the discussions on a sequence of conferences in Stockholm as well as the World Summit in Johannesburg and the third World Water Forum in Tokyo.

More at:

http://www.siwi.org


Shifting baselines is a rather new concept that has been used to analyse everything from deteriorating ocean water quality to the declining welfare of city dwellers. A baseline is a reference point - how things used to be. It can describe a pristine coral reef filled with an abundance of colourful large fishes or tall grass prairies filled with buffalo. The shifting of a baseline is often chronic, slow, and hardly discernible. Many baselines started to shift long before ecologists started to investigate them. Consequently, we tend to accept a degraded state as normal or even as an improvement. For example, salmon in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River today are twice as abundant as in the 1930’s – but the 1930’s numbers reflect a baseline that had already shifted. In the 1930’s, the number of salmon in the river was only 10% of what was in the 1800’s. Marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson and 18 co-authors focused attention on shifting baselines in a seminal article in Science last year. They concluded that overfishing has altered the oceans to the extent that it is difficult to even imagine how full of life they once were. The message is that we can't wait any longer to take action, but also that we can help the oceans regenerate, for example by establishing marine reserves. Now Hollywood is helping to get the message across through a public awareness campaign called "Shifting Baselines."

More at:

http://www.shiftingbaselines.org


Virtual water is the water embedded in traded commodities such as wheat and livestock. It requires approximately 1 000 tonnes of water to grow a tonne of wheat, 2 000 tonnes of water for one tonne of rice, and 1 200 tonnes of water for one tonne of maize. (The actual crop volume that can be produced with a given amount of water depends on climatic conditions, the irrigation system used, soil type, and so forth.)
   Trading foodstuffs implies the trade of virtual water. With increasing trade and globalisation, the export of virtual water has also grown. Today, most of the world's poorest countries are in zones where there is or will be water scarcity. Many feel that importing food is the best way to feed these countries, because it is much easier to move a tonne of grain than 1000 tonnes of water. A key question for human development is if there will be sufficient freshwater, part of it traded as virtual water, to meet population growth. The Middle East and North Africa import up to 40 million tonnes of cereals and flour annually. The virtual water represented by these commodities amounts to twenty percent of all water used in the region. More virtual water is imported into the region each year than flows down the Nile into Egypt for agriculture.

More at:

Article about virtual water by Professor J.A. Allan, University of London.


Principle 10 of The Rio Declaration stresses the need for citizen participation in environmental issues and access to environmental information held by public authorities.
   A major step in this direction was the adoption of a 1998 UN convention in the Danish city of Aarhus (Århus) that links environmental and human rights. It states that sustainable development can be achieved only by involving all stakeholders.
   Principle 10 is also emphasised in Paragraph 119 of the Johannesburg World Summit Plan of Implementation. Moreover, the Johannesburg World Summit saw the launch of the Partnership for Principle 10 (PP10). The partnership is defined as "Type II," meaning that it involves non-governmental stakeholders; "Type I" denotes an inter-governmental agreement. PP10 provides a way for governments, organisations, donors, and other stakeholders to work together to provide the public with access to information, thereby encouraging participation in decisions involving environmental sustainability. The PP10 partners include the governments of Sweden and Uganda, the European Commission, the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Environment Program, and the World Bank. "A public participation system that integrates social and environmental concerns in economic decisions is essential to promote sustainable development," said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI), at the launch in Johannesburg. WRI is one of the main PP10 partners and is serving as the interim secretariat. PP10 will produce three global reports and 45 national assessments the coming decade and provide US$25 million in aid to implement priorities identified by the assessments.

More at:

http://projects.wri.org/project_description.cfm?
ProjectID=133
http://www.pp10.org

Closing the Gap: Information, Participation and Justice in Decision-making for the Environment is a good source for those interested in work with principle 10. It can be found at: http://www.accessinitiative.org/publications.html


The ecosystem approach seeks an optimal balance between conservation and utilisation of biodiversity as well as an understanding of ecosystems in a socio-economic context. Twelve principles defining the ecosystem approach appeared on the international political agenda in 1998 in Malawi during the Fourth Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity. In the implementation plan from the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development, the ecosystem approach is emphasised several times.
   The ecosystem approach aims to maintain the capacity of ecosystems to produce desired goods and services. Social and economic information is integrated with environmental information to evaluate how human exploitation of an ecosystem affects its functioning and productivity in the short and long term. Urban areas, which depend on ecosystem goods and services, must therefore be included in ecosystem management systems, and human needs and activities should be integrated with conservation goals, even in protected areas..
   Instead of focusing on one dominant ecosystem good, such as fish, or service, such as flood control, an ecosystem approach tries to include all possible ecosystem benefits so that trade-offs become efficient, transparent, and sustainable. It emphasises that ecosystems should be managed as whole entities, including linkages to adjacent ecosystems and across state or national borders when needed.
   An ecosystem approach requires an informed public discussion, and management should be decentralised to the lowest possible level. Local and indigenous stakeholders, who often have intimate knowledge of local ecosystems and a direct interest in keeping them healthy, need to be integrated into decision-making processes. However, local interests must be balanced with the wider public interest.

More at:

http://www.biodiv.org/programmes/cross-cutting/ecosystem/principles.asp


Decoupling is about finding ways of decoupling economic growth from environmental impact. Producing goods and services using fewer raw materials and energy has also been labelled eco-efficiency. Research indicates that even ambitious goals for a four or ten-fold increase in the efficiency with which we use energy, natural resources and other materials are feasible (the Factor 4 and 10 objectives).
   Economic growth is often achieved using increased use of energy and materials, with subsequent emissions and pressure on ecosystems. Continued economic growth in developed countries and accelerated growth in many developing countries will therefore lead to enormous problems unless policies can stimulate more decoupling.
   Resource use is often measured in relation to gross domestic product (GDP) growth. For instance, the use of plastics and aluminium has increased faster than GDP for several decades, while paper use has increased at more or less the same rate as GDP and iron and steel use has increased more slowly. However, this indicator can be deceiving; though energy use and emissions of carbon dioxid have had a tendency to decrease per unit of GDP, the total use of primary energy and absolute emissions of carbon dioxid have increased in most countries. Moreover, the GDP itself does not reveal if economic growth is a result of overexploiting the natural resources and ecosystems.

More at:

A recent report on decoupling can be found at the website of The Swedish Environmental Advisory Council.The Wuppertal Institute has worked on factor four. Factor Ten Institute


Adaptive management: Learning by doing is the essence of adaptive management of the natural environment and its resources. Adaptive management views policies as hypotheses and management actions as experiments. It acknowledges that policy must satisfy social objectives, but also must be continually modified and flexible for adaptation to surprises. For surprises will always arise when dealing with complex and variable ecosystems that we will never have complete knowledge of. There is often great uncertainty regarding future conditions of the ecosystems, the relationships among the different components in the systems, the management objectives, and how abundant the resources really are. Adaptive management is aided by researchers as well as local users, takes onboard new information regarding natural systems and adapts to new situations and disturbances. According to a growing number of ecologists such flexible management that is open to learning stimulates a sustainable development by enhancing resilience (see sustainability school of the previous issue) in coupled human and natural systems.

More at:

Adaptive management - accept disturbance!
http://www.albaeco.com
Conservation Ecology Vol 3 Iss 1


Ecosystem resilience is a measure of how much disturbance (like storms, fire and pollutants) an ecosystem can handle without shifting into a qualitatively different state. It is the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and surprises and then rebuild itself. It is during this rebuilding phase that renewal and innovation takes place in resilient systems. Without resilience, systems become vulnerable to disturbance that previously could be absorbed. Clear lakes can suddenly turn into turbid, anoxic pools, grasslands into shrub-deserts, and coral reefs into algae-covered rubble. The new state may not only be biologically and economically impoverished, but also irreversible.
   Biodiversity plays a crucial role in ecosystem resilience by spreading risks, providing "insurance", and making it possible for ecosystems to reorganise after disturbance and adapt to change. Ecosystems seem to be particularly resilient if there are many species performing essential functions (such as photosynthesis or decomposition) and if the species within such "functional groups" respond in different ways to disturbances. If this is the case, then species can replace or compensate for one another in times of disturbance and insure against loss of ecosystem functions.
   Social resilience is the ability of human communities to withstand and recover from stresses on their infrastructure, such as environmental change or social, economic or political upheaval. Resilience and diversity in societies and their life-supporting ecosystems is therefore crucial in maintaining options for future human development.

More at:

Building resilience - a necessary task?
http://www.albaeco.com
The Resilience Alliance - http://www.resalliance.org


Ecosystem Services are environmental functions that benefit humans, like water and air purification, flood control, erosion control, generation of fertile soils, detoxification of wastes, regulation of climate, pollination, and aesthetic and cultural benefits. Another important ecosystem service is the maintenance of biodiversity, which is critical to agriculture and many industries including pharmaceuticals. Unlike ecosystem goods like seafood and timber, most ecosystem services are not traded in economic markets. Nevertheless, they are crucial to human well-being and economic development. The value of ecosystem services should therefore be incorporated into decision-making processes.

More at:

http://www.esa.org "Ecosystem Services: Benefits Supplied to Human Societies by Natural Ecosystems" by Gretchen C. Daily and 10 others. Issues in Ecology 2, Ecological Society of America.