Monday, 27 June 2011

• Back in Switzerland for the summer

  Back in Switzerland, I continued to work on the TPE Science Plan, implementing my suggestions for the Plan myself. I had warned my Chinese colleagues while in Beijing that had I made all my proposed changes in the Plan itself without first taking them through my guide to changes, it would look as if I were completely rewriting the Plan. (This is an unfortunate aspect of Track Changes in Word when simply moving text around makes it appear that everything has been deleted.I suppose Microsoft wasn't thinking of internal sales when they designed Track Changes.)

   The next step for TPE will be the Third TPE workshop in Iceland at the end of August, where I hope that the agenda will spend less time on accounts of rather isolated research on the Third Pole and more on discussions and commitment to more integrated projects.

   As existing projects such as MRI's Synthesis Workshops and the Newsletter have kept me quite occupied, I was pleased to spend a few hours with Daniel Maselli of SDC and Marinah Embiricos and Hanno Triedl, both from the Green Pioneering Summit of Verbier, catching up on progress toward the World Mountain Forum, a virtual global conference to "celebrate, conserve and construct" our mountain spaces around the world, especially through the engagement of public-private partnerships. The idea for this event hatched in Daniel's mind last year at the Verbier conference, and the concept was further refined at a two-day workshop in Verbier in mid-March.

  The organizers (Julia Klein, Anne Nolin and I) of the MRI workshop on Building Resilience of Mountain Social-Ecological Systems to Global Change  decided to postpone the workshop from fall, 2011 to spring, 2012. Many of those we wanted to come were not able to do so during the fall. In addition, we kept finding new people doing interesting research, and so we thought that a more general call to MRI membership would be good thing to try. Just launched the call a week ago, and Chris Ritter is accumulating the proposals.

  We did this as well for the Urban Growth in High Mountains workshop and got quite a good response, suggesting to me that MRI must always use open calls to see who is doing what out in the larger world. That workshop is scheduled for 1-5 November 2011 in Nainital, India, with Prakash Tiwari serving as host.

  On 16 June I participated in the first day of the NCCR Conference on Climate Economics and Law Conference. I heard two good keynote talks, one by Shardul Agrawala of OECD and a second, more provocative talk by Matthias Ruth from the University of Maryland, both addressing in their ways the relationship between mitigation and adaptation, (ironically, the only keynotes not yet published on the conference website). Mountain researchers might know of Shardul from his work on adaptation of Alpine tourism and skiing to climate change, a topic that he addresses at one of Martin Beniston's Wengen conferences. 

  While I was quite pleased to sit in on talks that focused less on the biophysics of,  and more on the costs of responding to, climate change, and indeed some of the legal issues involved in economic approaches, I was left with a sense that science still has not grappled with the true behavior of our current system. For instance we have models that lead toward optimal solutions if decisions were based on strictly economic grounds (i.e., including all externalities) given discount rates and some measure of equity. This is good information but only useful if the current system of governance is in fact interested in economic optimality, a discount rate that doesn't dismiss future generations as irrelevant, and some minimal level of concern regarding equity. Since this is a blog, I can state my personal conviction that most of the world's population wants to conserve scarce resources, cares about future generations and understands that we are all more or less in this together. In my personal analysis, and one that I would very much like to see either confirmed or rejected by evidence, there are however powerful forces that do not subscribe to that list of values and work very hard to ensure that the feasible space explored by economists is not explored at all by political actors. Regardless of how one might feel about the motivation of these forces, their operation is nevertheless part of the dynamics of our entire socio-ecological system. How they operate seems to me to be the most pertinent social science question of all.

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