All living things depend on their environment for energy and for the basic requirements that sustain life – air, water, food and habitat. This simple dynamic is not in dispute. However there is a growing body of evidence that suggests the relationship between environment and human health is in fact a reciprocal one, each having complex effects on the other. According to the UN Environment Programme, every human being has the right to a safe, healthy and ecologically-balanced environment…….but what exactly are these complex relationships, and how can we ensure that human rights to a safe and healthy environment are delivered, even under conditions of rapid global environmental change?

Much of our society’s development has depended upon technological advancements in our environment; improvements in agriculture, sanitation, water treatment, and hygiene have had revolutionary effects on health, well being and longevity. While our environment and the natural resources within in it sustain human life, it can also be the limiting factor in improving health, as well as being a primary source of disease and infection. Lack of basic necessities are a significant cause of human mortality. Approximately 1.1 billion people currently lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion do not have proper sanitation¹, so while advancements in managing the productivity of our environment has resulted in access to surplus quantities of food, water and services, for many, this development has not occurred equally across the world.

Our environment can also be a major source of infection. It is estimated that almost one quarter of global disease and 23% of all deaths can be attributed to environmental factors².  Pollution and other environmental hazards such as food contaminants, over-exposure to sunlight, algal blooms, flooding and drought increase the risk of a myriad of health concerns that include cancer, heart disease, asthma and respiratory diseases, anxiety, stress and depression as well as many other illnesses.   Environmental factors influence 85 out of the 102 categories of diseases and injuries listed in the World Health Report and in 2012, 7 million deaths worldwide were attributed to exposure to air pollution – now the world’s largest single environmental health risk³.   However social and political aspects that affect our environment such as housing conditions, access to education, access to green space and poverty are major influencing factors in the relationship between health, well-being and environment.

On the other hand, policies and processes that are undertaken with the aim of promoting health and well-being can have significantly detrimental effects on ecosystems as well as our human environments. For example, food production requires unsustainably large volumes of fresh water and causes environmental damage from pesticides and fertilizers, soil erosion, animal wastes and carbon emissions from food manufacture and transportation. Disease prevention can also drastically alter environments. For example, malaria was eradicated in many developed nations in the 1950s by draining wetlands and spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes. The destruction of these ecosystems to control malaria, and the addition of persistent and toxic chemicals into the soils and watercourses has had long-term detrimental impacts on these ecosystems at a regional scale. Wide-spread disease prevention on a global scale creates additional consequences for the environment as the subsequent increase in longevity and reduction in human mortality creates further pressures from overpopulation, increased use of fossil fuels, increased land-clearing, water use and agriculture, as well as generating high volumes of pollution and waste.

Recently, a socio-economic approach to evaluating the benefits and services provided by ecosystems has provided insight into the threats and challenges that may lie ahead. The ecosystems services approach provides a framework for decision making, and for valuing the ‘products, functions and services’ ecosystems provide, to ensure that society can maintain a healthy and resilient natural environment, now, and for future generations. For example, The UK National Ecosystem Assessment indicates that the United Kingdom relies on it’s ecosystems for a range of services that include climate regulation, waste removal, pest control, flood protection, food supply, potable water, natural medicine, aesthetics, recreation and tourism, among many others. However, this innovative approach recognises and strives to promote the philosophy that our environment provides much more than material benefits. It states clearly that ecosystems contribute to national security, resilience, social justice, health and well-being, and freedom of choice and action⁴. Therefore, the degradation of our environment, and the ecosystems it supports can have seriously harmful and far-reaching impacts on society, its governance and the economy.   Primary impacts of ecosystem degradation relate specifically to human well-being:

‘significant and detrimental human health impacts can occur if ecosystem services are no longer adequate to meet social needs’ World Health Organisation

Secondary impacts that may result from a decline in ecosystem function can affect jobs, income, local migration and, on occasion, may even cause political unrest and conflict. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report estimates that globally, the degradation of our planet’s ecosystems is costing us €50 billion each year.   This figure does not take into account the resultant impacts on national security and social justice, which have wide-ranging impacts on well-being, and the availability and access to food, water and healthcare provisions.

Of great concern is the way that the complex relationship between health and environment is evolving due to a culmination of global-scale changes including rapid changes in climate, flooding, drought and fluctuations in temperature, not to mention population growth and urbanisation. The World Health Organisation Global Forum on Urbanisation and Health in 2010 highlighted that for the first time in history more people live in urban settings than rural, and that conditions in cities will be among the most important health issues of the 21^st century⁵. Greater urbanisation puts ever increasing pressure on services such as housing and health. Understanding the surrounding environment, the impact that an ever increasing population has on it and how we can develop and increase services with the least impact is key.

The use of our natural environment has provided human civilisation with many benefits, but the costs to our ecosystems have been severe and extensive.   As our population continues to grow and our demands for food, fresh water, healthcare, fuel and building materials soar, we must ask ourselves what price we are prepared to pay. What legacy do we want to leave for future generations? Both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Health Organisation have made clear that unless we come to understand the relationship between environment and health and address they way we use and manage our environment, then we will substantially diminish the benefits and well-being that future generations can acquire from ecosystems, and severely compromise their ability to meet their basic human rights to a safe and healthy environment.

The Year of Environment and Health is a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Academy and its Global Environment and Society Academy. It endeavors to examine the key issues in the relationship between Environment and Health through the lens of Global Change.

Join us in a series of public lectures exploring some of the themes discussed above:-

• Urbanisation and Health
• Pollution and Health
• Ecosystem Services and Health
• Extreme Weather and Health

References

1. UNESCO http://www.unesco.org/bpi/wwap/press/pdf/wwdr2_chapter_2.pdf

2. WHO http://www.who.int/quantifying_ehimpacts/publications/preventingdisease.pdf

3. WHO http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/environmental_health/environmental_health_facts/en/index7.html

4. Convention on Biological Diversity http://www.cbd.int/

5. WHO Global Forum on Urbanisation & Health 2010

Energy is like blood; we can’t do without it but we don’t want to see it. When it comes to the energy debate, much of the focus is about what we don’t want. There are backbenchers who don’t want wind farms in one’s pleasant green, and parties who proclaim they don’t like nuclear. Where there was once a political reluctance to depend on domestic coal, these days our dependency on oil or gas from parts of Asia does not sit comfortably either. Collectively we sound almost like a protest party; blaming the government du jour or politicians in general, distrustful of those foreign ‘Big Six’, we want power returned to us, without too much of a plan as to how that’s done. .  Some of us have dreams, for sure;  fracking revolution, 100% renewables, nuclear renaissance, take your pick.  And then we are rudely woken up by another IPCC report about climbing emissions and pathetic little mitigation and adaptation to date.

Given the threats of climate change, our creaking energy infrastructure, the ongoing depletion of easily accessible resources and the growing issue of fuel poverty it is very clear that significant changes and investments are needed in our energy system. It’s not a shortage of good science that’s standing in the way. It’s a dearth of imagination, of ourselves as citizens and of the governments we elect.  We don’t even have to be original in order to be imaginative, there is plenty of inspiration out there, for us to bring home.  How much renewable energy would we have if we had been as imaginative as the Danes or the Germans?  How much safer and cleaner would your city be if it had reversed the urban pecking order between bikes and cars, like the Dutch have done, or had introduced congestion charges like London has?  How much wind power would we have if we lined up all our motorways (already noisy and lacking in aesthetic appeal) with wind turbines?  How much heat is being dumped into the atmosphere by our electricity-only power plants, and how many people in neighboring communities could be lifted out of fuel poverty is this heat was offered to them through district heating at a competitive price?

These are just some ideas that have been widely adopted by our neighbours.  It is not something futuristic or utopian, it is ‘normal’ next door. We should not waste much time with alternative history (if only we had done x in the past), but devote more effort to imagine a counterfactual geography; comparing ourselves with the best and keeping up with the Joneses in terms of more sustainable energy practices.  Maybe even beat them to it one day, and then watch in glee as they run to catch up with us.  ‘green’ with envy, if you like.

The above questions are not just rhetorical. Get a pen, calculator, back-of-an-envelope and google; every geeky citizen could do this.  I had a go at the first question. Turns out that we would have to quadruple our current on-shore windfarms before we can match the Germans on a MW/km² basis, and increase them by 6.5 times before we match the Danes on a MW/capita basis.  That is a lot of energy we allow to blow right past us, wasted. The Danes and Germans are not radical people. They are trying to be responsible citizens, taking their little steps towards the goals set out in the IPCC reports. We don’t have to follow them slavishly. Filling the land with wind turbines is not the only way forwards. But if you want to forego one particular solution, then you have to be extra imaginative with the remaining options.  Go get your pen and recycled paper. And share your imaginative solutions, also with your MP.

This month’s blog by Dr. Elizabeth Stevenson examines the role of science communication and public engagement in empowering the public to critically engage with scientific issues, enabling them to make informed choices and decisions – and crucially, to ask the key questions. In this piece, she argues that

Inspired by last semester’s ‘Fracking’ reading group and intrigued by several mentions of the need for a practice by which accurate, accessible information about fracking can be disseminated,  I was galvanised into action to write this blog about the roles which science communication and public engagement can play.

Science communication as a practice is all about making science accessible to public audiences who have varying degrees of knowledge, understanding and interest in science.  At the fundamental level, science communication requires the ability to take complex scientific concepts, research topics and issues and present them in an accurate yet accessible format.  It’s not about ‘dumbing down’ or being selective about the information or ideas communicated.  For example in his blog about fracking, David Reay gives an accurate yet simplified description of fracking. His description contained nowhere near the level of detail to be found in a scientific research paper, nor did it contain inordinate amounts of unexplained jargon.  His description was accessible, understandable and contained the main points and the big ideas in fracking.  This defines one of the key principles in science communication i.e. accurate communication of the key concept, the big idea, the main issue and not every last detail.

However, science communication offers more than the provision of accurate scientific knowledge.  Continuing with the theme of fracking, one of the main concerns around fracking is not about what we know but about what we don’t yet know.  For example the level of uncertainty about potential short and longer term damage to local environments where fracking is taking place.  However, fracking does not have a monopoly on uncertainty in science.  All scientific knowledge and technological advance is subject to varying degrees of uncertainty in terms of both the scientific knowledge itself and around the political, economic and societal consequences when this knowledge is applied in innovative technologies in societal contexts.  During the process of innovation there will inevitably be uncertainties and yet this issue of uncertainty is not fully understood by public audiences.  The question is not ‘do we know everything? ’It is ‘do we know enough? ’Or ‘how can we best make a decision using what we do know?’ and ‘What else do we need to consider?’ I would argue that one of the roles of science communication is to empower publics to ask these critical questions.

Finally we need a ‘safe space’ where these conversations can take place.  Another role of science communication (and public engagement) is to create the opportunities, the facilitation expertise and ‘spaces’ conducive to achieving productive discussions between scientists, industrialists, publics and policy-makers.  The framing of the discussion questions is key to ensure that the discourse is not polarised from the outset (e.g. fracking vs a ban on fracking).  Instead, questions can framed to enable productive dialogue. For example by asking the question ‘Under what conditions could fracking be acceptable?’ can enable exploration of the subject rather than defence of entrenched positions.

Therefore I return to my original title and argue that science communication and public engagement with science have a role far beyond communicating factoids.  This role encompasses informing publics, empowering them to critically engage with scientific knowledge and issues and enabling constructive dialogues to take place.

Dr Elizabeth Stevenson is the Programme Director of the MSc Science Communication and Public Engagement at the University of Edinburgh.  Her PhD is in chemistry and she has over fifteen years of experience in the field of science communication.

Dr. Dave Reay

provide solutions for those seeking to reduce their own carbon footprint. He explores the reality of making personal sacrafices to live a low-carbon lifestyle and illustrates the ways in which we as a society could re-imagine the approaches we take to our professional endeavors. Could digital technologies provide us with the tools to make our visions of sustainability a reality?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I’m currently on the return leg of a trip to give a climate change talk at a big science conference – the European Geophysical Union (EGU) – in Vienna. Almost a decade ago I made the decision that, wherever possible, these trips would be made in a low carbon way. I haven’t been on a plane since.

However, after these past 5 days of travel by clackety rails and lumpy seas it’s now clear that a much speedier AND lower carbon option would have been to attend and present at the conference online. The over-lit expanses of the conference centre were teeming with the usual multitude of academics and students dodging poster tubes but, alongside this traditional format, was a system (called PICO) that allowed virtual participation via the internet. Though some of the ‘researcher bonhomie’ is inevitably missed as a virtual participant, it’s a route that opens attendance up to so many more people and has the potential for big carbon savings.

As academics, attending international conferences is a standard part of the job with most of us having cut our presentation-teeth as jittery doctoral students at annual meetings like the EGU. The skills and networks that grow from this practice are certainly important yet, with advances in technology and the huge challenge of climate change, it seems high time that virtual meetings and presentations came more to the fore.

In other facets of academia the benefits of virtual meeting and learning technology are being more successfully reaped. Participation in online learning is growing apace across the world and higher education is a lead player in this. At the University of Edinburgh our inaugural set of free-access online courses (called ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ or ‘MOOC’s) attracted 300,000 registrations. Together with a growing portfolio of online honours and Masters courses the ‘virtual’ student body at Edinburgh is now fast outgrowing its face-to-face counterpart.

This revolution in the way we teach and learn could do wonderful things. It could link us with great students anywhere in the world whose circumstances would, in the past, never have allowed them to study with us. Students with families to look after, jobs to hold down, and insurmountable visa restrictions could now more easily become part of the global community that is the University of Edinburgh. The environmental benefits may also be far-reaching, with distance-learning students avoiding some or all of the carbon-intensive travel between Edinburgh and home.

Based on the success of our existing distance education courses (such as our Carbon Management Masters), and internationalisation initiatives such as the Global Academies, Edinburgh is well set to ride the online learning wave. This is an opportunity to realise the kind of ‘sustainable growth’ that most businesses and governments can only dream of – growth that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.

The only certainty when predicting the future is that it will be different to what you expect, and in the field of climate change this is something we know only too well. Nevertheless, a future in which online learning becomes a core part of higher education provision seems a good bet. As for academics, and our embracing more actively the technological substitutes for conference globe-trotting, the revolution may have a rather more sedate pace. For myself at least, the first question I’ll ask next time a conference invite comes in will be: “Do you do ‘Virtual’?”.

Dave Reay is a Reader in Carbon Management in the School of Geosciences. He is director of the MSc in Carbon Management and also runs the online MSc course ‘Climate Change Impacts & Adaptation’ .

For those who want to travel in Europe without flying one of the best resources available is ‘The Man in Seat 61’

As far as winters go, Edinburgh’s this year has so far been rather mild.  The mercury has fallen below zero in the city only a handful of times, and even then just at night.  The gas company should be getting less of my hard-earned dosh than may have otherwise been the case (price-rises excepted, of course).  Global warming? Bring it on and hand me the sun-cream! Turn this pasty Northerner into an olive-skinned Mediterranean type.

However, if I were with our friends across the pond, perhaps I might see things a bit differently – at least at the moment.  As I sit here writing at the end of January 2014, yet another cold snap and snowstorm are hitting the East Coast of the US.  And this is after even Hell froze over (well, Hell, Michigan anyway) in the midst of the Artic Vortex that gripped North America over Christmas and New Years.  Global warming? What global warming?  Thank heavens for cheap shale gas to keep the frostbite away by turning the heating up without busting the bank.  Drill, baby, drill!  Or has this year merely been a typical winter that seems cold relative to recent, mild ones? Our memories are sometimes rather short…..

Those in many parts of Africa and Asia may have yet a different perspective on this global warming business.  Failing monsoons, droughts, floods, rising sea levels.  While this may be “weather”, the longer-term climate patterns are changing, becoming less reliable and more extreme.  People living (or trying to live…) in these regions are likely to feel the effects of changing weather patterns much more profoundly that I am, sitting here on a hill in Edinburgh (which may become beachfront if Antarctic ice-sheets melt – the irony, living on a tropical island in a world destroyed).  These countries and regions are less able to adapt to and/or combat these changes – the simply don’t have the same level of resources as, for example, the EU does.  To paraphrase: It’s the climate, stupid!

Whilst I’m certainly no historian, I ask you: where we might be today if we had not discovered the uses of wood, charcoal and coal to create heat, and through heat create work, and through work initiate the Industrial Revolution?   And we still use a heap of coal today for generating energy (in addition to other fossil fuels).  I might also argue that the Industrial Revolution continues – it’s merely moved South and East.  If it weren’t for the abundance such energy-rich compounds, what would our life be like today? Would it be better or worse?  I don’t have an answer to such a philosophical question.  Hmm, where can I get my hands on Dr. Who’s Tardis to pose that to Aristotle?

What does seem to be evident, however, is that change won’t happen overnight – likely not this decade or even the next.  According to an article in Scientific American the major global energy transitions (from wood to coal to oil) have each taken between 50 to 60 years. Developed economies are “locked-in” to certain technologies and infrastructure that are tried and tested. These economies are also (still) the largest portion of the global economy.  In a mad-dash catch-up exercise to narrow the wealth gap between the Developed and Emerging worlds, Western dominance over the global economy is beginning to ebb away.  In terms of GDP, China is now the world’s second-largest economy, Brazil is 7^th and India is 10^th; but their growth has largely been fuelled by fossil fuels, coal in particular.  Unless an unexpected technological advancement occurs that changes the economics of non-fossil fuel energy generation (not to mention storage), worms may have feasted upon my remains (or at least be eyeing up this old bag-of-bones in anticipation) before renewable energy reaches a meaningful share.  So, what do we do about it?

The “Responsible Investing” movement – such as the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing, to which the University of Edinburgh is only the second higher education institute to be a signatory – has gathered pace over recent years.  But who wouldn’t invest responsibly? Or put another way, how should we define responsible? And then how do we implement that definition?

For some, such as Bill McKibben and http://350.org/, “responsible” is about divesting from fossil fuels, on environmental as well as financial grounds.  McKibben’s article in Rolling Stone of a couple of years ago, and that of “Unburnable Carbon” from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, remain thought-provoking reading.

But is divestment today, or even within the next five years, “responsible” if the transition to world where renewable energy finally provides the majority of energy generation is indeed 50-60 years away?  Is the opportunity cost of not having a voice that company management may listen to or not participating in the earnings fossil fuel companies will generate for the foreseeable future an acceptable risk for our pension funds (state, personal and/or corporate), universities’ endowment funds or charity and foundation funds?  The unintended as well as intended consequences of actions must be weighed up before action is taken – if such consequences are desirable, go for it!

Finally, I pose a question wrapped in hope.  With the immense annual revenues they generate from you and I consuming their product (in one form or another), could fossil-fuel companies actually become an engine of change?  Is a culture shift from “Big Oil” that knows only about drilling to “Big Energy” that knows how to develop viable, non-finite alternatives possible?

A pipedream perhaps – but without dreams, and the fortitude to try to turn dreams into reality, we will live in a much poorer place.

Stephen Porter is a tree-hugger come investor.  He worked in the institutional investment management industry for nearly 20 at some of the leading global firms, engaging with the senior leaders of asset owners such as sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds and charitable foundations to create custom solutions to meet their specific requirements.  To atone for such “sins”, in 2012 Stephen embarked upon a rather different path – enrolling in Edinburgh’s MSc in Carbon Management.  Stephen has also begun part-time PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoScience, exploring the links between climate change mitigation and losses across the food supply chain.  Helping to fund his further student excesses, Stephen joined with two Edinburgh PGT peers to found a (currently) small sustainability consultancy. Oh, and he’s also a husband and a father to three boys under eight – so please excuse the grey hair!

References

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/polar-vortex-chill-fails-to-make-history/

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v310/n1/full/scientificamerican0114-52.html

http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/07/Unburnable-Carbon-Full-rev2.pdf)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

http://www.docs.sasg.ed.ac.uk/GaSP/Governance/SociallyResponsibleInvestment.pdf

The University of Edinburgh has a long and proud history of taking action to address environmental challenges and social concerns, and our latest opportunity is responsible investing.

This is not something new- students and student groups such as People and Planet have been campaigning for many years on these issues, and the University has had a socially responsible investment policy in place since 2003. None the less, it is timely to consider what more we can do.

The University’s strategic plan contains a clear commitment to ‘make a significant, sustainable and socially responsible commitment to Scotland, the UK and the world’. In response, we already have a social responsibility and sustainability strategy and a climate action plan. We want to manage our own impacts, teach our students about the big global challenges of the twenty-first century, and apply our knowledge and research to making a real contribution to solving these issues. Those strategies are now being complemented by the development of a socially responsible investment approach.

I joined this University six months ago both because it convinced me that it wanted to be amongst the world’s best when thinking about social responsibility and sustainability, and because I saw a great opportunity for us to improve and to make changes for the better.

One of my first tasks has therefore been to help the university figure out exactly what being a responsible investor means, having been the first University in Europe to have signed the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment in early 2013.

“[Y]ou’re on earth. There’s no cure for that!”

Hamm in Endgame

― Samuel Beckett

 1.   Equity Issues in Tackling Environmental Challenges

It is no secret that international climate change negotiations are not making significant progress – mostly due to different perceptions and visions of the appropriate balance of responsibilities and allocation of costs among different countries. On the ground, a myriad of climate change response measures (renewable energy development, forest management for reducing greenhouse gas emission, etc.) raise concerns about actual and potential negative impacts on the broader environment and on human rights.

Across the board of environmental issues affecting our planet, global environmental protection is bedevilled by formidable questions concerning the Global North/South divide, the tensions between development and environmental protection, social and economic equality, human rights, different historic contributions to current global environmental challenges, asymmetries of power, and justice.

The evolving regulatory framework to address global environmental challenges raises equity and justice concerns. These concerns hinder progress at all levels; the functioning of a highly complex web of legal measures, involving multi-level relationships between governments, private companies, bilateral donors and NGOs, as well as indigenous peoples and local communities is hampered by:

• Vested interests and power asymmetries;
• Different visions among states of the appropriate balance of responsibilities and allocation of costs in addressing environmental challenges; and
• Fragmented efforts and limited effectiveness.

In particular, while environmental management is increasingly seen as an area that presents significant opportunities for business development, job creation and public sector savings, acute equity concerns pivot on the accompanying risks. First, among states, the risk of a profit-driven and high-tech environmental agenda which tends to side-line developing countries; and second, within states, the risk of the marginalisation of indigenous peoples and local communities and their contribution to environmental management, which is difficult to quantify in nakedly economic terms.

However, faced with such complex and difficult terrain, it is not an option to give in to pessimism; to say, like Hamm in Endgame, that there’s simply no cure. Improvements to the regulatory framework can, and should, be explored.

 2.         The Promises of Benefit-sharing

The idea of “benefit-sharing” may provide a new approach to these questions. Benefit-sharing basically implies that the States and local people that preserve the environment should benefit (in monetary, but also social, cultural and environmental terms) from the use of natural resources (such as forests, seeds, fish, minerals) involving others (local governments, NGOs or foreign companies, for example). In this sense, benefit-sharing is expected to contribute to forge fair and long-term partnerships among those deciding about, involved in and affected by the use of natural resources.

Benefit-sharing therefore entails not only assessing burdens, costs and risks, but also exploring constructive, proactive and culturally-sensitive opportunities to address environmental challenges while respecting and contributing to the realization of the human rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, and respecting the views and responding to the needs of developing countries.

Although benefit-sharing is increasingly deployed in a variety of international environmental agreements (biodiversity, climate change, oceans, land and agriculture) and also in human rights and corporate accountability instruments, no single vision or comprehensive understanding exists of its contribution to equitably address global environmental challenges. Can benefit-sharing realise its promise of serving as a creative legal tool for equitably addressing these challenges? To what extent can it accommodate the special circumstances, cultural preferences and vulnerabilities of developing countries, and of indigenous peoples and local communities, in transitioning to the green economy? At present, there is no systematic study of whether benefit-sharing can theoretically and practically work as a means of finding consensus among States on how to address global environmental challenges, and of protecting the rights of indigenous peoples to participate in decision-making on natural resource development and continue to have access to natural resources for their cultural, spiritual and livelihood needs. Several questions remain unanswered:

• How is benefit-sharing utilised under different international treaties?
• What does benefit-sharing mean and how does it work in different countries and localities?
• Does benefit-sharing effectively support fairness in the areas of biodiversity, climate change, oceans and agriculture at different levels?
• What is the role of law in ensuring an equitable approach to environmental management?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of different organisations in promoting the idea of benefit-sharing?

 3.         New Project at Edinburgh Law School

A new five-year project at Edinburgh Law School, commencing in November 2013, seeks to address these equity issues by investigating benefit-sharing as an under-theorised and little-implemented regulatory approach to tackling environmental challenges. The project is titled: “BENELEX – Benefit-sharing for an equitable transition to the green economy: the role of law” and is led by Dr Elisa Morgera (School of Law) and funded by the European Research Council.

A project website will be launched in early 2014. For further information, please contact Annalisa Savaresi: annalisa.savaresi@ed.ac.uk

Dr Elisa Morgera is Senior Lecturer in Global Environment Law at the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh, and the Director of the LLM Programme in Global Environment and Climate Change Law. Elisa specializes in international, European and comparative environmental law, and has published widely on biodiversity, corporate accountability and the rights of indigenous and local communities. For more information about Elisa and her work visit http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/elisamorgera

In this article Dr. Hamish Ross discusses the value of interdisciplinary conversations in policy and research, in organisations like GESA, and in his own discipline of Environmental Education.  He argues that at a time of rapid and complex planetary change, that education is vital to change management and in this sense, Learning for Sustainability becomes more a practice of Learning as Sustainability.

I have stolen the title of this blog from an excellent book I like to recommend  – Arjen Wals’ and Peter Blaze Corcoran’s (2012) Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change, Wageningen Academic Publishers. I was wondering why interdisciplinarity mattered, since it is in part what the Global Environment and Society Academy (GESA) represents.  And I was wondering what was its utility to my own field, which is environmental education. Usually it is asserted that the real world does not arrange itself into disciplines and so neither should our educational institutions be so arranged.  But for educational purposes the world has to be packaged in some arbitrary way, so the point seems important but not entirely decisive.

However, working across disciplines is surely creative, and creativity might be necessary for planetary survival.  The academic discussion about learning for sustainability includes a significant co-evolutionary model of learning and socio-environmental change, which reads as follows.  We are unable to predict, or even process, what is happening or will happen in rapidly-emergent, complex, uncertain, risky and global systems.  What we can do, given some appropriate moral purpose, is make experimental interventions, or not, in our social and geophysical world, remain alert to their consequences, re-consider, try again, carry on.  Change happens and learning is central to the management of change.

The model has sometimes been referred to as ‘learning as sustainability’.  The more crisis-laden the prospect of (un)sustainability, the more intense, and perhaps creative, must be learning as sustainability.
I begin some of my classes with an exercise that was shown to me by the excellent Rob Bowden of Rosie Wilson of LifeWorlds Learning.  A student will recount her weekend to one of her peers for a minute or so, interrupted repeatedly by her classmate, and each interruption is nothing more than a random and unrelated word or phrase.  The recounting student must absorb this word into her narrative and carry on telling it.  In due course the pair swap roles.  After trying this exercise, most participants agree that it is surprisingly easy to absorb a random word into one’s narrative and surprisingly hard to think up a random word in the first place, let alone in the face of a narrative, let alone use it to interrupt someone who is speaking.

Even interdisciplinary conversations, then, might not be as interrupting as we hoped. But the ambition and courage to creatively interrupt must be as important to learning as sustainability as is the ambition to simply better represent the world.

Dr. Hamish Ross is a lecturer in Social Studies and Environmental Education at Moray House School of Education. Hamish’s principal research interests are in the field of citizenship and environmental education.

Dr. Richard Milne

that that bring a sense of security to our society. Dr. Milne examines four of these global-scale threats and asks the question of whether we will be remembered by generations to come for our willingness to stand together to combat these threats, or for our ‘business as usual’ response, ignoring all of the warning signs.

The mythical four horsemen of the apocalypse were Death, Famine, War and Pestilence.  Death of course is ever present, but the other three struck fear into human hearts because they could ride in swiftly and take thousands of lives.  Yet society always survived these visits, because the horsemen always ride off again.  Wars end, famines recede, and epidemics run their course.  In the modern world, not much has changed.  War is country-hopping in the middle east, Pestilence whispers “bird flu” into the ears of bored journalists, and Famine has reinvented himself as “Economic Crisis”, because money seems to have replaced food as our basic need.  They may take some of us, but they will never take us all. Indomitable humans!

The real threats to human society are long-term.  They arrive not on a charging steed, but at snail’s pace, like lumbering but unstoppable zombies.  They are discussed, yet never seen as urgent.  However their threat is ultimately far greater than that of the original horsemen, because the damage they do is likely to be permanent, or at least far harder (and slower) to reverse.  When the history of the current century is written, the main story of the early years will not be wars, terrorism and credit crunch.  It will be about whether or not we dealt with these threats.  Meet the Four Tortoisemen of the Apocalypse.

Tortoise 1: Climate Change

Forget polar bears!  If climate change is allowed to run unchecked, the conditions that allowed civilisation to form will disappear, to be replaced by a far more unstable planet.  Humans may survive, but the comfortable lifestyle of today will be a distant memory.  Man-made climate change is accepted by all competent scientists, but doubted by the public for two reasons.  One is that incredibly sophisticated and well-funded propaganda campaign called “climate skepticism”.  The other is that no sane person wants climate change to be real, and certain types of people form their beliefs based on what they want to be true, rather than what the evidence says.  This makes them willing to accept, uncritically, even the most idiotic arguments of climate “skeptics” while rejecting the clear and obvious evidence that climate change is already happening.

Tortoiseman 2: Overpopulation.  

The same sort of people are therefore likely to reject other inconvenient threats like overpopulation.  The facts are undeniable:  Earth’s population is growing exponentially, doubling every 40 years. Agricultural innovation tries to keep pace by increasing food production, but the increase is at best linear, and hence starting to fall behind.  If you keep adding people to a finite planet, then sooner or later large numbers of them will starve, even if no floods or famines occur; the only argument to be had is how soon.  Overpopulation deniers, however, insist that we can grow our population forever. Some of the deniers are those with devout religious beliefs about procreation, but perhaps more dangerous are the right-wingers, whose credo is that all human needs can be met by economic growth. This is an illusion, created by uneven wealth distribution and the fact that lack of money is the only cause of hunger here.  In reality, economic growth moves resources around and can create jobs, but can’t magically grow a finite resource like farmable land area.    The solution to overpopulation is to educate young women and give them control over their family sizes, but most of the public, just seem to view overpopulation as unimportant.  Like climate change, it is seen as happening elsewhere, if at all.  No-one links it to immigration; if they did, opinions might change.

Projected World Population 1800 to 2100 (Source: Dr. Alex McCalla & UN FAO)

Tortoiseman 3: Ecosystem Destruction.  

This is a problem everyone knows about, but most people either don’t care, or perceive it with sadness rather than fear.  A forest lost here, a species lost there, it’s a shame but why worry when there’s a war going on and people dying?  Occasionally the link is visible – for example most people are aware that the loss of bees will impact heavily on food production, yet food production relies in subtler ways on innumerable biological relationships.  Wasps pollinate some flowers like raspberries, and can pick off pest species too.   In a functioning ecosystem, food webs create checks and balances: when one species becomes more common, its predators and parasites follow suit and reduce their numbers again.  These processes can control pests of agriculture without recourse to insecticide sprays; modern monocultures do still allow booms of pest species but it would be far worse if their natural predators disappeared.  This is an example of what are termed “ecosystem services”.  Plants purify groundwater.  Fungi and other soil organisms recycle nutrients.  Forests and bogs trap rainfall and reduce the flooding from sudden heavy rainfall events.  The fish we eat from oceans sit near the top of marine food webs which could collapse due to overfishing, ocean acidification or other pollution.  We rely on a functioning ecosystem, both locally and globally, to meet our food and other needs.  Too few people realise that to grow food you need soil, and that modern agricultural methods are eroding soil all over the planet.  Yet those who speak out against continuing ecosystem destruction are labelled as sentimental, treehuggers, enemies of progress, the list goes on.  Any one of these alone would be threat enough, yet each makes the others worse.  More people means more carbon emissions.  More warming means more farmland lost to deserts and rising sea levels.  Lost farmland and growing population forces people to cut down forests, realising more carbon and degrading stressed ecosystems still further. Meanwhile a growing population forces us to flog more food out of existing land, pouring on fertilisers and pesticides because our natural allies in soils and pest predators have been reduced or removed.  Yet these chemicals come with their own carbon footprints, and damage the ecosystem still further. Climate change creates extreme weather, destabilised ecosystems remove biological defences from floods and plagues of pests.  It’s a vicious circle and brings us to the fourth Tortoiseman, riding shotgun for the others.

Tortoiseman 4: Food Security

Of all of these, this is the one likely to impact first, and most, on our comfortable lives in the developed world.  Overpopulation would mean a progressively smaller share of global food production if things are divided equally, and as they are not, it will instead mean more rapidly shrinking shares for the poorest.  Yet the developed world is not immune.  Bouts of extreme weather have destroyed wheat crops in sufficient quantities to push up the price of bread, yet climate change has barely shown its teeth in the past ten years.  Far worse is to come.  All it will take is a coincidence of several major extreme events, causing crop losses all over the world, to bring us to a point where suddenly we can’t guarantee enough food for everyone in (say) Britain.  It may only last a week or two, but a crisis like this will change forever how we see our lives and what threatens them.   Finally we will start to realise, as a wise man once said, that you can’t eat money.  Yet once again, the real problem lies further ahead, not with the unpredictable present but in a future where we know food production will get more and more challenging while the number of mouths to feed increases.  This is a problem that won’t go away, unless we deal with all these problems now.  We cannot leave our descendants to face the horrors of mass starvation.

We all want to think that human civilisation is indestructible, and that the way things are now is how they will always be.  It is human nature.  Yet great civilisations have fallen throughout human history, very often because of environmental change that they themselves had caused.  Today mankind will stand or fall as a single species, because we are all now interconnected and what we are doing to the environment affects everyone.  We are also perhaps unique in that we understand completely the things that we are doing and how they threaten are future.  The challenge, therefore, is whether we can come together to turn back the Four Tortoisemen of the Apocalypse.

In this blog, Dr. Richard Milne argues that one of the key battle grounds in climate science will be fought with the world’s media.  He makes the case that the battle will be lost or won by the ways in which we learn to communicate accurate science to the general public and the media – and in doing so, influence public opinion.

Dr. Richard Milne

This week, national newspapers and the BBC have all reported back from a press conference called to discuss the supposed “stall” in global warming.  Most have reported the science fairly accurately (even the Daily Mail, which doesn’t have a good track record here).  However, in many cases the viewpoints of climate “skeptics” have been presented and not challenged.  That is a dangerous oversight.

Let’s be clear: climate “skeptics” do not have a leg to stand on.  Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, gaps in our understanding of climate change made climate skepticism a legitimate position, and such skepticism helped drive scientists to close the gaps, leading to a robust mountain of evidence confirming that CO₂ from humans is warming the planet.  Perhaps the last genuine skeptic was Richard Muller, who led the massive BEST project, which reanalysed climate data from scratch, and came up with exactly the same conclusions as the IPCC.  We are left with a small band of maverick scientists, most of them not trained in climate science, who refuse to accept man-made climate change no matter what evidence is thrown at them.  Such mavericks exist outside of every major scientific consensus, but in other fields they languish in obscurity unless they find evidence to prove themselves right.  Not so climate “skeptics”: right wing media and politicians are lining up to shove them into the public eye.  For example, right-wing politician Nigel Lawson set up the GWPF to publicly oppose action to tackle climate change, but only one of its 24 academic advisors has training in climate science.

In reality, every single argument put forth by the “skeptics” falls apart if treated with genuine skepticism. This is the premise of the excellent website “scepticalscience.com“, which is a great place to go if you hear an argument against man-made global warming that you don’t know how to refute.  A true skeptic, when faced with two competing hypotheses, will subject each one to equally rigorous scrutiny, much like Jeremy Paxman interviewing two politicians of different parties.  However, climate “skeptics” invariably accept without question any argument that appears to refute man-made climate change, while rejecting automatically any that supports it.  That is not skepticism, it is denial.

Discussing the “stall” in global warming, none of the journalists gave enough emphasis to the key point: that ocean temperatures have climbed steadily, and in uninterrupted fashion, even as temperatures on land wobble up and down a bit.  Perhaps scientists haven’t emphasised this enough.  Conversely, both the BBC and the Independent (usually the most accurate newspaper on climate change) mention the views of “skeptics” without challenging them.  The Independent states in one place that “Skeptics claim that this shows there is not a strong link between the two, whereas climate scientists insist that rising carbon dioxide concentrations are largely responsible for the rise in global temperatures.” That is like saying “some believe 2+2=4, but others think 2+2=5”.  Imagine hearing that from a Maths teacher, without subsequently explaining why 2 + 2 is certainly 4.  The BBC article states that “climate sceptics have for years pointed out that the world is not warming as rapidly as once forecast,”  and ends with  “many people will take a lot of convincing.” All three quotes serve to legitimise climate “skepticism”, whether they intend it or not.  They will be seized upon by those determined to believe that there isn’t a problem: as noted above, they’ll ignore the rest of the article, and take away the message that even the BBC isn’t convinced that the climate scientists are right.  Were there not a co-ordinated campaign to avoid action on carbon emissions, all this might not matter.  But there is, so it does.

Climate “skepticism” has gradually transformed from legitimate scientific doubt into the most well-funded and co-ordinated propaganda campaign that the world has ever seen.  Fox News is constantly telling viewers that climate change is either natural, or a hoax. The Koch brothers plough enormous sums into funding climate denial at all levels, while right-wing organisations like the CATO foundation pay expert misinformers like Patrick Michaels to tell the public they can keep burning fossil fuels.   In America and Australia, the main opposition parties are controlled by climate deniers, indicating that a large section of the electorate either reject climate science or do not view rejection of it as a reason to vote against someone.  Even in Britain, climate “lukewarmist” Peter Lilley is on the commons energy committee, and the climate-denying UKIP is gaining political ground.   These people have real influence.

If your national football team needs to beat Brazil 7-0 to progress to the knock-out stages, one is tempted to smile and say, well there’s still a chance then, isn’t there?  This is the great triumph of climate “skeptics”.  Even if wise people don’t believe them, they have planted in our heads the possibility that climate scientists might be wrong, and that we can carry on regardless.  Although the BBC article makes clear elsewhere that warming is fully expected to continue, it leaves the door open for this delusional hope that climate change might just go away if we do nothing.  It is therefore feeding the agenda of the “skeptics”.

It is surprising to me that journalists can grasp the basics of climate science, but not public opinion, which you’d think they should be experts in.  If human civilisation is to carry on in a recognisable form into the next century, we need to act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  That will only happen if public opinion is strongly behind measures to cut emissions, and accepting of short-term costs to these.  This in return is reliant on public opinion catching up with what scientists already know: climate change is real, dangerous and most certainly down to us.  To this end, “skeptical” voices need to be challenged wherever they pop up, and the last thing we need is confused journalists helping them out. Credit is due, therefore, to the Guardian, who pitched their article on the topic just right.