environmentalresearchweb blog

« Integrating renewables: optimal mixes | Main | The oldest ideas about glaciers »

Coarse-grained systemic sciences

“Global Sustainability - a Nobel Cause”, is the title of a book that just has been published by Cambridge University Press. A number of nobel price winners and eminent scientists in sustainability research gathered to write up their thoughts on sustainability. This book certainly does not fulfill coherent scientific standards (peer-reviewed, novel insights) but is very promising in bringing some relatively simple but profound thoughts together. Also, as a clear pro: this book is freely available online, and individual chapters can be downloaded as pdf.

What can we, then, learn from this book? Let us start with Geoffrey West’s observation that current scientific endeavors have, to a large degree, failed to come to grips with the essence of the long-term sustainability challenge: the pervasive interconnectedness and interdependency of energy, resources, environmental, ecological, economic, social, and political systems (West, 2010; see also Creutzig and Kammen 2009). My own specific example of this statement (Creutzig and Kammen, 2010) looks at the specific examples of biofuels, rephrasing the by now established view that a simple-minded view of biofuels as zero-carbon sources of energy misses the point, as a) the carbon content can be not only significant but even surpassing that of conventional fuels and b) a number of additional sustainability issues such as biodiversity loss, deforestation and food insecurity threaten to diminish any feasible positive impact on the climate change front.

So what is the possibility and challenge of using a coarse-grained systemic approach that builds on, but also goes beyond, piece-meal wise investigations? Wolfgang Lucht calls for the enterprise to construct new mental images of the whole - or taking a crude look at the whole as Murray Gell-Mann says - that must be founded in rational analysis and, equally important, cultural production (Lucht, 2010). In fact, according to Lucht, a controlled transition in the interlinked social-environmental world system is to be achieved, only by making transitional progress not just in the environmental domain, where the impacts have to be lessened, but also in the social domain, where the problems have their origin. This transitional progress building on rational-scientific insights (that transcend the techno-economic totalitarian aspects of enlightenment) then could enable a sustainable transition path as depicted in the figure below.

The small problems left are (1) to fill these grand themes with contents and (2) to integrate the findings into the “societal self constructions that dominate human processes” (Lucht, 2010). Regard the first issue, my blogging colleague Carey King suggests to look at EROI - energy return on energy invested -, noting that EROI is lower for renewables than for fossil fuels with respect to human time scales, and that a future lower EROI implies a reduction in societal complexity (this conjecture requires more thoughts though). Geoffrey West points at the fundamental nature of time scales, explaining the supra-linear scaling of agglomerations, and hence supra-exponential growth that requires an ever accelerating rate of innovation (not sustainable). These spotlights indicate the pressing need for a consistent growth theory which includes natural capital degradation (and appropriate ressource flow exploitation), agglomeration dynamics and structural change, the clear definition of a perspiciuous welfare function of sustainability, and finally a proposal for a non-catastrophic deceleration of the human socio-economic system.

References

Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C. and West, G. B. (2007) Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(17), 7301- 6.

Creutzig, F.,  Kammen, D (2009) The Post-Copenhagen Roadmap Towards Sustainability: Differentiated Geographic Approaches, Integrated Over Goals INNOVATION, Vol 4 (4): 301-321

Creutzig, F.,  Kammen, D (2010) Getting the carbon out of transportation fuels. In H. J. Schellnhuber, M. Molina, N. Stern, V. Huber & S. Kadner (Eds.), Global Sustainability - A Nobel Cause. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, UK.

Schellnhuber, H. J. (1999). Earth System Analysis and the Second Copernican Revolution. Nature 402, Suppl., C19 - 23.

West, G. (2010) Integrated sustainability and the underlying threat of urbanization. In H. J. Schellnhuber, M. Molina, N. Stern, V. Huber & S. Kadner (Eds.), Global Sustainability - A Nobel Cause. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, UK.

 

 

Posted by Felix Creutzig on February 14, 2010 3:11 AM | Permalink