by David Steven | Apr 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence
Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, perhaps we can save the planet from us, and us from ourselves.
It’s an interesting argument – part true, and part wishful thinking (as Michael of course recognises). In the face of a threat, people either round up a posse and drive it out of town, or they abandon Main Street to the bad guys and cower in shuttered houses. There’s a knife edge, in other words, between atomisation and collective action.
We can see this happening at the moment, where the food crisis is (mostly) driving countries towards a narrower view of their self interest – as they block exports and build up reserves, even if this is leading to a less effective collective outcome. The UN, meanwhile, is trying to round up the posse…
This is classic Prisoner’s Dilemma territory – where players make a rational decision to compete, even though co-operation would make more sense in the grand scheme of things. They treat a non-zero-sum game like a zero-sum one.
An iterated prisoner’s dilemma (where the game is repeated with the same players), however, has a different logic. Robert Axelrod:
What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today not only determine the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choice of players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current situation.
This ‘shadow of the future’ argument reminds me of the controversy over the use of discount rates in the Stern review. Stern’s critics argued strongly for a higher discount rate – they wanted to shrink the shadow of the future. As John Quigley explains:
Nordhaus and Boyer propose an even higher rate of 3 per cent, which is tantamount to saying that the future (certainly anyone more than two generations away from us) can go to hell for all we care, since the welfare of our great-grandchildren has about a tenth of the weight we accord the current generation. Not surprisingly, this translates into a ‘do-nothing now’ approach to global warming.
In his talk, Mainelli identified four types of glue that can hold together a collaborative response: knowledge (or shared awareness, as Alex and I refer to it); markets (mechanisms for pricing risk and rewarding response); standards (which frame choices); and policies (which regulate them).
But the stickiness of the glue is determined by how much of the future we mix in. Given narrow horizons, there’s little chance that a communal response to a risk can emerge. This quote, from the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, captures the challenge well:
The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail, none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, South Asia
What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically making the connections between cause and effect (between climate change and migration) is pretty easy and serves a useful purpose – it highlights an issue and a set of tangible actions that the government can either deliver on or think further about. But there two things we need to take into account.
Firstly, everyone seems to agree there is a real dearth of evidence on the causal links between risks and issues. Much of what we know rests on stories, specific observations, estimates (or in some cases guesstimates) and anecdotes. All of these are time and context specific and yet they can have a major effect on the system often resulting in superficial and perverse actions. For one thing it is much easier for governments and international institutions to focus on ‘food bombing’, ‘blanket throwing’ and ‘water distribution’ than identifying and managing root causes which demands sophisticated, process driven approaches based on a shared awareness of the problem and a common agenda.
This leads to a second issue – that we don’t have a standard approach across the system to conflict or fragile and failing states and as we don’t always agree on the scale and nature of the problem we (government’s, international institutions and NGOs) end up taking quite differing approaches (so for example we focus on public education when we should be thinking of risk reduction)… this doesn’t mean we should be looking for a unified theory of development, as one NGO person scoffed at but it does mean evidence becomes a key factor in how we manage the problems in the future.
by Alex Evans | Apr 24, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Here’s a CNN interview I did at an unholy hour this morning on rising food prices. Some of the cutaway footage they’ve spliced in is truly random. One shot shows someone (in Africa, as far as we can tell) looking with concern at a crack in the wall of his hut. Er…
by Alex Evans | Apr 23, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
On the front of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, via John Robb – a sign of things to come, perhaps:
BOULDER, Colo. — When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled. “I’d rather see green grass” than brown dirt patches, says 82-year-old Florence Tatum, who lives in Mr. Nash’s Boulder neighborhood, across the street from a house with a freshly dug manure patch out front. “But those days are slipping away.”
Since 2006, Mr. Nash, 31, has uprooted his backyard and the front or back yards of eight of his Boulder neighbors, turning them into minifarms growing tomatoes, bok choy, garlic and beets. Between May and September, he gives weekly bagfuls of fresh-picked vegetables and herbs to people here who have bought “shares” of his farming operation. Neighbors who lend their yards to the effort are paid in free produce and yard work. A school-bus driver, Mr. Nash rises at 5 a.m. and, after returning from his morning route, spends his days planting, watering and tending his yard farms and the seedlings he stores in a greenhouse behind his house.
Farmers don’t necessarily live in the country anymore. They might just be your next-door neighbor, hoping to turn a dollar satisfying the blooming demand for organic, locally grown foods … “Agriculture is becoming more and more suburban,” says Roxanne Christensen, publisher of Spin-Farming LLC, a Philadelphia company started in 2005 that sells guides and holds seminars teaching a small-scale farming technique that involves selecting high-profit vegetables like kale, carrots and tomatoes to grow, and then quickly replacing crops to reap the most from plots smaller than an acre. “Land is very expensive in the country, so people are saying, ‘why not just start growing in the backyard?’ ”
But for the neighbors, the new face of farming can have a decidedly ugly side. The sight of vegetable gardens — and the occasional whiffs of manure from front-yard minifarms — is not their idea of proper suburban living.
You can see their point. Heavens, they’ll be giving up the SUV next. It’ll be anarchy. Still, it’s a nice counterpoint to last time we heard from John on the subject of the future of the ‘burbs: back then, you’ll recall, he was wondering about armoured suburbs. That said, mind you:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ssSZK74fw]
by Alex Evans | Apr 22, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
I’ve just published a new Chatham House paper on why food prices are rising and what it means for development: download it here.
One of the paper’s main arguments is that we need to make sure that the urgent doesn’t crowd out the essential in discussions of global food strategies: immediate action on humanitarian assistance needs to be matched by a sustained effort to invest in shared awareness between policymakers of what needs to be done to achieve “the feeding of the ten billion”. From the press release:
While the current focus on humanitarian aid is welcome, we need to be thinking now about the long term, too – especially how to grow food supply and make sure that the process benefits rural poor people. What we’re seeing now is just the start of a multi-decade challenge: feeding a global population set to approach ten billion by 2050, in the face of climate change, tighter energy supply, and growing competition for land and water resources.
How we frame and perceive the issue matters enormously. If the prevailing narrative is a Malthusian story of insufficiency, then the risk is of self-fulfilling prophecy – if for example fears that there isn’t enough to go around lead to countries panic-buying food for stockpiles, pushing prices up even more. Instead, we need to see this as a transition to a new stable state. Feeding a world population of ten billion people in 2050 won’t be easy, but it can be done with forethought, collective action and if we don’t panic.
Update: coverage on Associated Press, The Independent and Channel 4 News. One of the many pleasing aspects of publishing things through Chatham House is the general assumption that any of their authors will be as august as the Institute itself. Thus the Independent has kindly conferred upon me a doctorate that I’m fairly sure I do not have; more recently, El Pais has promoted me to Professor.
