study guide
Localization and the Bioregional Transition
Module 1
Keith Pezzoli, Ph.D.
Natural and Managed Ecosystems
Bending the Curve
Bending the Curve
By the end of this module we want you to understand the concept--and global megatrend drivers-- of “localization.” Localization is part of larger territorial shift in social, cultural, economic and ecological relationships that we call the bioregional transition.
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Learning Objectives (up to the Midterm).
Describe major characteristics of global urbanization (e.g., extent, speed, physical forms) and how the process unfolds differently in developing and developed countries.
Explain urban “localization” (as compared to “globalization”) and how the stresses giving rise to localization are compelling a bioregional transition.
Site three examples how cities are using Green Infrastructure to strengthen local resilience to climate disruptions (e.g., fire, flood, drought).
Characterize what is unique about sustainability science as a new transdisciplinary academic field with an interest in regions as a useful unit of analysis for linking research to action.
What’s Driving Localization?
Global demands and stresses on earth’s natural systems needed for human and non-human life are generating daunting risks, vulnerabilities and insecurity that spur localization.
Bending the Curve
This photo is a scene showing the devastation of the 9th Ward in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina (Aug 2005). New Orleans is a low lying coastal city in Louisiana on the Mississippi River, near the Gulf of Mexico. I took the photo, standing there looking at this scene in disbelief, taken aback by the massive devastation. Hurricane Harvey’s impact on Houston, Texas, and other places during 2017 is equally distressing.
Cities in low-lying coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate disruption including more intense rainfall, larger and more powerfully destructive storms and floods. Many of the world’s major coastal cities with 10 million or more people are threatened by climate change the impacts of which could cause large flows of environmental refugees.
Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 40 inches of rain over parts of eastern Texas and nearby waters, causing catastrophic flooding that inundated thousands of homes, while displacing thousands of people. CNN reported at the time that Harvey was the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the contiguous United States.
But its not just the weather that is cause for concern –climate disruption is negatively impacting ecosystems that human as well as non-human species depend upon for survival. The EPA points to evidence suggesting that climate change may be altering biological events which could fundamentally transform terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems including food webs.
These cumulative risks and vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the widening gap between haves and have nots of the world (inequality). At the same time the demand for natural resources including food, water, soil and energy is on the rise.
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From 2010 to 2030
50%
50%
30%
ENERGY
FOOD
WATER
Percentage Increases in Global Demand for Food, Energy & Water (2010-2030)
The global human population is expected to increase by 20% ( from ~7bn to 8.3bn) over the same period.
Bending the Curve
The global surge in demand for food, energy and water -- and the stresses this is placing on social, economic, political and environmental systems, including soil -- has prompted the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research on the Food-Energy-Water Security Trilemma. This trilemma links concerns about the world’s global food security tightrope (i.e., the spread of large-scale factory farming that depends heavily on petrochemicals and a genetically narrow spectrum of food crops), fresh water shortages, and megascale energy grid network vulnerabilities. This type of trilemma and related concerns are spurring the efforts of public and private sector entities to bolster the capacity of localized systems. It is becoming painfully clear that we need more locally and bioregionally reliable, resilient and regenerative systems to meet rising demands for food, energy, and water. This spurs localization.
Source of percentages: Source: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/mar/18/perfect-storm-john-beddington-energy-food-climate
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A Perfect Storm?
Global surge in demand for food, water, energy and natural resources; inequality within/across nations.
Global urbanization and the urban-rural disconnect
Climate change/ ecosystem degradation
Widening gaps between science and democracy; science and public reasoning, policy and planning
Photo: 9th ward hit hard by Hurricane Katrina -- an extremely destructive storm that hit the Gulf Coast of the United States in August 2005. It was the costliest natural disaster and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. Wikipedia
Date: August 23, 2005 – August 31, 2005
Fatalities: 1,245–1,836
Damage: $108 billion (2005 USD); (Costliest on record)
Category: Category 5 Hurricane (SSHS)
Affected areas: New Orleans, Cuba, Louisiana, Alabama, Bahamas, More
Did you know: Katrina is the costliest Atlantic hurricane ($108.0 billion in damage). wikipedia.org
John Beddington, UK government's chief scientific adviser: the growing population and success in alleviating poverty in developing countries will trigger a surge in demand for food, water and energy over the next two decades, at a time when governments must also make major progress in combating climate change
Over the period 2010 to 2030
Global population will increase by 20% (~7bn to 8.3bn)
Demand for food will increase by 50%
Demand for water will increase by 30%
Demand for energy will increase by 50%
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/mar/18/perfect-storm-john-beddington-energy-food-climate
Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus
Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws PNAS 2014 111 (16) 5773-5777; doi:10.1073/pnas.1404402111
Discusses unsustainable hypercompetitive systemic flaws threatening the US Biomedical Research Ecosystem, Alberts, et al. PNAS 2014)
A graduate education in the sciences produces individuals with broadly applicable skills in critical thinking and problem-solving, whose expertise could be invaluable in fields such as science policy and administration, the commerce of science, science writing, the law, and science education at all levels. Furthermore, recent surveys reveal that a substantial fraction of today’s graduate students in the sciences are interested in pursuing nonresearch careers (13, 14). However, for the most part, neither the faculty nor the students are well enough informed about such careers.
To that end, the NIH has recently announced a new program to encourage diversifying graduate education (15). Moreover, interdisciplinary MS degree programs that combine training in science with leadership, project management, teamwork, and communication skills match well with industry needs (11, 16) and should be expanded with federal support.
RE Democracy: Wendy Browns (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution.
Brown says this in Chap 1 Undoing Democracy:
[N]eoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones. Liberal democratic institutions, practices, and habits may not survive this conversion. Radical democratic dreams may not either. .....The institutions and principles aimed at securing democracy, the cultures required to nourish it, the energies needed to animate it, and the citizens practicing, caring for or desiring it — all of these are challenged by neoliberalism’s “economization” of political life and of other heretofore noneconomic spheres and activities.
Our "Bioregional Transition" theory of change speaks to this dynamic --where economization commodifies nature itself, including human and plant DNA as natural capital. One of the highly problematic aspects of economization is the enclosure of the genetic commons, and the way in which "nature" gets sliced and diced into fragmented bits using market rationality ---loosing site of the forest for the trees.
Bioregionalism calls for a countervailing "rooted" bioregional imaginary --a vision of an emergent, democratic, eco-polity that is territoriality-based.
Chap 6 : Educating Human Capital (previously published as "The End of Educated Democracy“) is a crucial challenge. Brown says:
Citizens cannot rule themselves, even if that means only thoughtfully choosing representatives or voting on referenda, let alone engaging in more direct practices of shared rule, without understanding the powers and problems they are engaging....
Our Popular Education approach sets out an approach to cultivate this kind of critical understanding. Given the profound inequities we see all around us, the broken institutions, etc., we argue that its time to build place-based "civic infrastructure" (e.g., neighborhood learning and research centers; knowledge-action networks).
Keith
What is Localization?
Localization is a territorial process that includes place-based policies, plans and local activities that are creating circular, resource-conserving, waste minimizing and regenerative systems of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. There are now books written on localization (see image)
Bending the Curve
So, WHAT IS LOCALIZATION?
Localization is a territorial process that includes place-based policies, plans and local activities that are creating circular, resource-conserving, waste minimizing and regenerative systems of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. There are now books written on localization (see image)
A circular economy is “a regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emission, and energy leakage are minimized by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops.”
EXAMPLES of localization include:
alliances to create local circular economies;
new types of local serving businesses based on repair, reuse, refurbishing, recycling, composting
urban agriculture and food forestry, bioregional planning
Source of quote: The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/overview/concept.
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Bioregional Imagination
As a framework for action “bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place.” (Robert Thayer)
San Diego-Tijuana Transborder Bioregion
San Diego
Tijuana
Bending the Curve
As a framework for linking theory and action, Robert Thayer and other Bioregionalists call for us to cultivate our bioregional imagination –suggesting that the concept “bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place.”
A bioregion’s boundary takes into account factors including climate, topography, flora, fauna, soil, and water together with the territory’s sociocultural characteristics, economy, and human settlement patterns. The image shown on this slide is our San Diego-Tijuana transborder bioregion, including the shared Tijuana River Watershed.
Exercising Bioregional Imagination can help us collectively envision:
A regenerative economy that integrates human-nature relations, equitably and justly, in the design and function of cities, towns, and markets that and locally rooted, human-scaled and healthy.
Bioregional Justice: Equity and fairness in how earth’s diverse bioregion’s –including nature’s sources and sinks needed for life and living—can and should be accessed, utilized, and sustainably conserved for current and future generations (on an intra-bioregional as well a trans-bioregional scale of exchange).
Source: Thayer, Robert L. 2003. Lifeplace : Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Localization and the Bioregional Transition
The Bioregional Transition is a localization trend spurring greater integration of urban and rural life spaces, basic needs and activities in particular bounded territories (bioregions)
Thinking about localization from the larger perspective of a Bioregional Transition helps bring our understanding of cities into relationship with nearby rural areas, working landscapes, and wildlands. The bioregional transition narrative suggests innovative ways to approach carbon sequestration through agroforestry, carbon farming, building soil and green infrastructure that includes but also goes beyond the confines of the city. There is a newly emerging frontier in research on complex urban ecosystems that speaks to the concept/prospect of a “biological city” operated in the context of a healthy bioregion.
China is planning to create a brand new “Green City” two hours south of Beijing for more than 2.5 million people. A delegation of Chinese planners and government officials recently visited UC San Diego seeking guidance and professional connections to make the new city a world class exemplar of a "green, livable and modern urban area.“ Leaders of our Bioregional Center gave a special presentation to the visiting Chinese delegation in 2017. The scale of urbanization taking place in China is unprecedented. Now is the time in China, the USA and all around the world to incorporate a deeply biotic dimension, including living soil, into urban and bioregional planning.
The UN’s New Urban Planning Agenda, includes bioregional type commitments, made clear in the following two commitments adopted in 2016 at the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, Ecuador:
We commit ourselves to supporting local provision of goods and basic services and leveraging the proximity of resources, recognizing that heavy reliance on distant sources of energy, water, food and materials can pose sustainability challenges, including vulnerability to service supply disruptions, and that local provision can facilitate inhabitants’ access to resources.
We commit ourselves to long-term urban and territorial planning processes and spatial development practices that incorporate integrated water resources planning and management, considering the urban-rural continuum on the local and territorial scales and including the participation of relevant stakeholders and communities. http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/NUA-English.pdf
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1980s-present
E
D
E
D
1960s-1980s
Emphasis on sustainability puts Environment-Development interdependencies in a new light. See Week 1 study notes for details on the origins and meanings of sustainable development.
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Rosenzweig, Cynthia, William Solecki, Stephen A. Hammer, and Shagun Mehrotra. 2010. "Cities lead the way in climate-change action." Nature 467:909-911.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7318/full/467909a.html
Excerpt:
For years, the focus on the world's response to climate change has been on nation states, which have been mostly unsuccessful in brokering comprehensive agreements or taking action. Cities, by contrast, are preparing risk assessments, setting greenhouse-gas emission reduction targets, and pledging to act. Urban areas, home to more than half of the world's people, are emerging as the 'first responders' in adapting to and mitigating climate change.
Cities were initially ignored by most climate-change scientists. Early impact studies focused on ecosystems and agriculture. Many researchers assumed that cities in developed countries were inherently 'adaptable' — an assumption shattered by Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans in 2005. Furthermore, researchers needed complex models on small scales to examine the combined effects of heat islands, air pollution, engineering, architecture and urban design — models that haven't been possible until recently.
What the world needs is the same science-based foundation for cities that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides for nations. Scientists including ourselves are now coming together to provide this information, with several groups formed in recent years and influential publications due out soon. Physical scientists, health scientists and engineers are starting to answer specific questions about how cities and the urban environment will interact in the face of climate change. Social scientists are addressing the human and economic costs, specifically for at-risk populations. And all are learning to take a more holistic approach, considering mitigation alongside adaptation and disaster planning. Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7318/full/467909a.html
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“The bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place”.
Robert L. Thayer, Jr.
Bioregional theorists aim to understand and describe how human and natural systems coevolve in particular territories referred to as bioregions (lifeplaces). Bioregionalism integrates bioregional theory with action aimed at eradicating root causes of poverty, environmental degradation and unhealthy living conditions. Bioregionalists seek ways to enable human communities to live, work, eat and play sustainably within earth’s dynamic web of life.
The spatial scale of bioregional initiatives varies. Bioregionalists focus on watersheds ("ridge top to ridge top"), multiple watersheds ("landscape scale"), river basins, and even much larger swaths of the earth’s surface. These scales are nested one within the other. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann (1977, 400) articulated one of the most widely cited definitions of bioregion: “The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.” Inhabitants define for themselves their bioregion’s boundaries. The most relevant factors include climate, topography, flora, fauna, soil and water together with the territory’s socio-cultural characteristics, economy and human settlement patterns. Robert L. Thayer, Jr. (2003, 55), a widely noted bioregional activist-scholar, aptly argues, “the bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place”.
Kirkpatrick Sale (2000, 55), another leading proponent of bioregional theory and action, outlines three nested spatial scales pertinent to bioregionalism. The largest scale is the Ecoregion—roughly 20,000 square miles or more (e.g., Ozark Plateau in the USA, Sonoran Desert in Mexico, Chilean Mattoral). The scale beneath this is the Georegion (e.g., the Central Valley of California nested within the Northern California Ecoregion). At the smallest end of the spectrum is what Sale calls Morphoregions (several thousand or less square miles), identifiable by human settlement patterns including cities, towns, infrastructure, factories, fields and farms. Given the emphasis bioregionalism places on reconnecting people to the land in ways familiar to its inhabitants, it is at smaller scales where most bioregional action takes place. In people’s lived experience bioregions are “life-places” where biogeography, ecology, culture, economy and history interact in a distinct, discernable pattern.
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Human beings are social animals; we need healthy relationships and “rooted” attachments with one another and with the land, waters, habitat, plants and animals upon which we depend.
Bioregional Theory
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Natural Assets and Green Infrastructure
http://www.metrovancouver.org/planning/development/ecologicalhealth/Pages/NaturalAssets.aspx
The California-Baja California border region encompasses a wide range of ecosystems, topography, dense urban areas, and agricultural developments that coexist in a limited geographic area and create numerous human-animal-environmental interfaces. These interfaces pose a significant risk to animal, human, environmental, and plant health, as evidenced by frequent wildlife die offs, antibiotic resistant bacteria in streams, beach closures due to fecal contamination, pesticide toxicities, zoonotic infectious disease outbreaks, and vector borne diseases.30 With the increasing awareness that prompt detection, diagnosis and response to newly emerging infectious diseases requires working outside of traditional disciplinary silos and forging new multi-sectoral partnerships, and the recognition of the marked absence of any organization comprehensively addressing the health risks posed by these complex interfaces, EWIDS founded One Border/One Health (OBOH) in June 2011.
Valuing Environmental Amenities, Incentivizing Conservation Behavior & Forecasting Economic Activity
Environmental and natural resource economists work on a wide range of policy issues. Much of this work can be cast in terms of characterizing the policymaker’s objective function and then asking what policy actions maximize this objective. Usually, but not always, this takes the form of a benefit-cost analysis. The first issue that usually arises when performing such an analysis is that changes in environmental amenities (e.g., biodiversity, air quality) are not typically priced in monetary terms. When this happens, the policy process tends to value the change in an environmental amenity either at infinity or much more often at zero. Economists have spent considerable effort estimating the implicit monetary value that people place on changes in a wide-array of environmental amenities. The second issue that typically arises is the policy change of interest operates through having firms or households change their behavior. Here economists look at the mechanisms (e.g., changes in taxes, information provision, minimum performance standards) through which different types of incentives actually change behavior. Third, economists forecast the amount of activities likely to take place under a given incentive structure. Rather than standard economic quantities like employment rates, the attention of environmental economists is focused on forecast quantities like gasoline consumption, bycatch rates in fisheries, the rate at which old cars are scrapped and water use.
Presenter name:
Richard Carson, Ph.D.
Academic Vice Chancellor Area:
General Campus
UCSD School or Division:
Social Sciences
UCSD Department or Unit:
Economics
What research problem(s) (if any) are you trying to solve? Or, what education/training are you offering related to this theme?:
There are a wide range of issues that environmental economists at UCSD’s Center for Environmental Economics routinely work. Some of these are long-standing issues such as the set of policies by which different government agencies attempt to influence the nature of automobile use in the United States. Some of these represent the adaptation of techniques developed in the U.S. to value changes in water quality for the new British clean water act and preserving tropical rainforests in Malaysia. Some involved the development of new quasi-experimental approaches to measure the impact of air pollutants on worker productivity. Some involve development of new incentive structures to help foster conservation efforts in developing countries with standard contract enforcement mechanisms. In other instances, forecasting efforts are focused on the relationship between oil price shocks and macroeconomic events like recessions, the influence of major technological changes like sonar fish finders on catch rates or how income growth in China is likely to influence carbon dioxide emissions. The Center for Environmental Economics offers a year-long weekly seminar workshop. The Department of Economics and the Graduate School of International and Pacific Studies offer relevant undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. levels.
What ideas, tools, processes, etc. (if any) are you employing that could be useful to collaborations in this thematic area?:
There are a wide range of issues that environmental economists at UCSD’s Center for Environmental Economics routinely work. Some of these are long-standing issues such as the set of policies by which different government agencies attempt to influence the nature of automobile use in the United States. Some of these represent the adaptation of techniques developed in the U.S. to value changes in water quality for the new British clean water act and preserving tropical rainforests in Malaysia. Some involved the development of new quasi-experimental approaches to measure the impact of air pollutants on worker productivity. Some involve development of new incentive structures to help foster conservation efforts in developing countries with standard contract enforcement mechanisms. In other instances, forecasting efforts are focused on the relationship between oil price shocks and macroeconomic events like recessions, the influence of major technological changes like sonar fish finders on catch rates or how income growth in China is likely to influence carbon dioxide emissions. The Center for Environmental Economics offers a year-long weekly seminar workshop. The Department of Economics and the Graduate School of International and Pacific Studies offer relevant undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. levels.
If any or all of these questions apply, please be sure to include: Have you encountered any problems that you need help with?:
Much more so than other branches of economics, environmental and natural resource economists rely heavily on representations of the biological and/or physical systems that influence the human behavior they are interested in. These systems can both enable and constrain what is possible. Actions taken in the current period generally have long-run implications. Many alternative courses of action rely heavily on (potentially) available solutions. As such, scientists and engineers are natural collaborators with economists. The political process most often determines what the objective function that government agencies are told to pursue, and incentive structures often take the form of laws and bureaucratic regulations. Non-monetary incentives and information provision are sometimes more effective than monetary incentives at inducing desirable changes in behavior and, are often complementary to the taxes and subsidies that are the natural tools of economists. As such, collaboration with other social scientists can be useful. Many environmental problems have strong spatial orientation which can make GIS a useful tool. Unlike macroeconomics which suffers from having too little data, work on some environmental policy issues merge together extensive data from the science and engineering side of the problem with extremely large amounts of data on actions taken by economic agents. These raise issues of how to adequately handle big data to answer substantive questions. Funding agencies now often want to see a more comprehensive examination of an issue than they did in the past and it is hard to develop the collaborative record such agencies desire to see at the last moment as a proposal is being put together.
http://researchinitiatives.ucsd.edu/valuing-environmental-amenities-incentivizing-conservation-behavior-forecasting-economic-activity
Workshops:
Understanding Nature and Protecting the Planet (February 4, 2014)
From my onebioregion one health paper
Intact ecosystems play an important role in maintaining a diversity of species in balance and regulating the transmission of many infectious diseases. While human activity has impacted ecosystems for thousands of years, the past century has witnessed unprecedented rapid human population growth and economic development, driving extensive ecological changes and the emergence of both new and previously recognized infectious diseases.
Food, Water, Soil
Bending the Curve
De Young and Princen, 2012
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03.06.17 | p. 7
1. Site Suitability Analysis of 810 Vacant Lots for Urban Ag Use
2. Potential for Agricultural Incentive Zoning: San Diego County
Asset Mapping of Vacant Land for Urban Agriculture and Green Infrastructure
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Ocean View Growing Grounds
Urban Agriculture and Food Disparities: Addressing the food-water nexus in disadvantaged neighborhoods
Research Institutions
Civil Society & Planning
Bioregion & Ecological Democracy
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Global Food Initiative