Governance of Earth Systems: Science and Its Uses (Global Issues Series)

Global Issues Series General Editor: Jim Whitman This exciting new series encompasses three principal themes: the inter...

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Global Issues Series General Editor: Jim Whitman This exciting new series encompasses three principal themes: the interaction of human and natural systems; cooperation and conflict; and the enactment of values. The series as a whole places an emphasis on the examination of complex systems and causal relations in political decision-making; problems of knowledge; authority, control and accountability in issues of scale; and the reconciliation of conflicting values and competing claims. Throughout the series the concentration is on an integration of existing disciplines towards the clarification of political possibility as well as impending crises. Titles include: Berhanykun Andemicael and John Mathiason ELIMINATING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION Prospects for Effective International Verification Robert Boardman GOVERNANCE OF EARTH SYSTEMS Science and Its Uses Mike Bourne ARMING CONFLICT The Proliferation of Small Arms Roy Carr-Hill and John Lintott CONSUMPTION, JOBS AND THE ENVIRONMENT A Fourth Way? John N. Clarke and Geoffrey R. Edwards (editors) GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Malcolm Dando PREVENTING BIOLOGICAL WARFARE The Failure of American Leadership Neil Davison “NON-LETHAL” WEAPONS Nicole Deitelhoff and Klaus Dieter Wolf (editors) CORPORATE SECURITY RESPONSIBILITY? Corporate Governance Contributions to Peace and Security in Zones of Conflict Toni Erskine (editors) CAN INSTITUTIONS HAVE RESPONSIBILITIES? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations Annegret Flohr, Lothar Rieth, Sandra Schwindenhammer and Klaus Dieter Wolf THE ROLE OF BUSINESS IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE Corporations as Norm-Entrepreneurs Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low (editors) GOVERNING FOR THE ENVIRONMENT Global Problems, Ethics and Democracy Beth K. Greener THE NEW INTERNATIONAL POLICING Roger Jeffery and Bhaskar Vira (editors) CONFLICT AND COOPERATION IN PARTICIPATORY NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Ho-Won Jeong (editor) GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES Institutions and Procedures APPROACHES TO PEACEBUILDING

Alexander Kelle, Kathryn Nixdorff and Malcolm Dando CONTROLLING BIOCHEMICAL WEAPONS Adapting Multilateral Arms Control for the 21st Century W. Andy Knight A CHANGING UNITED NATIONS Multilateral Evolution and the Quest for Global Governance W. Andy Knight (editor) ADAPTING THE UNITED NATIONS TO A POSTMODERN ERA Lessons Learned Kelley Lee (editor) HEALTH IMPACTS OF GLOBALIZATION Towards Global Governance GLOBALIZATION AND HEALTH An Introduction Nicholas Low and Brendan Gleeson (editors) MAKING URBAN TRANSPORT SUSTAINABLE Catherine Lu JUST AND UNJUST INTERVENTIONS IN WORLD POLITICS Public and Private Robert L. Ostergard Jr. (editor) HIV, AIDS AND THE THREAT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Graham S. Pearson THE UNSCOM SAGA Chemical and Biological Weapons Non-Proliferation THE SEARCH FOR IRAQ’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION Inspection, Verification and Non-Proliferation Andrew T. Price-Smith (editor) PLAGUES AND POLITICS Infectious Disease and International Policy Michael Pugh (editor) REGENERATION OF WAR-TORN SOCIETIES David Scott ‘THE CHINESE CENTURY’? The Challenge to Global Order Marco Verweij and Michael Thompson (editors) CLUMSY SOLUTIONS FOR A COMPLEX WORLD Governance, Politics and Plural Perceptions Bhaskar Vira and Roger Jeffery (editors) ANALYTICAL ISSUES IN PARTICIPATORY NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Simon M. Whitby BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST CROPS Global Issues Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–79483–8 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series And the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Governance of Earth Systems Science and Its Uses Robert Boardman McCulloch Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Dalhousie University, Canada

© Robert Boardman 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23770–4

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Contents Preface

viii

List of Abbreviations

xi

1 Introduction: Ecological Imagination and Global Society

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Part I Science and Policy 2 Environmental Crisis and the Contexts of Science

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3 From Systems Complexity to Decisional Uncertainty

38

4 The Earth Theory Tradition

57

5

69

Geosphere-Atmosphere-Biosphere Integration

Part II Governance Challenges 6 Theorizing Governance and Community

95

7 Structures of Environmental Governance

118

8

Biological Diversity

131

9

Climate Change

154

Geological Hazards

176

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11 Governance, Science, and Earth Systems

196

References

218

Index

237

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Preface All environmental issues, like all politics, are local. They are also global. They go through complex processes at all levels of governance. They engage the concerns of residents of small coastal communities, activists in environmental organizations, and government delegates scrolling through their papers at international climate conferences. They have an unruly habit of spreading across national and other jurisdictional boundaries, display multiple forms of connectedness with each other, and have roots in different economies and cultures that give them many different forms. Three superclusters of these issues are the focus of this book: the mounting loss of global biological diversity and the threats to the world’s animal and plant species, the risks posed by anthropogenic climate change and the governance challenges involved in the politics of mitigation of, and adaptation to, these, and the problems that societies face as a result of multiple kinds of geological hazards, some of which precipitate natural disasters. Knowledge of global environmental issues is grounded in diverse disciplinary mosaics of the natural sciences. In the past two decades developments in the earth-systems sciences have added significantly to the understanding of these questions. Earth-systems research, broadly defined, now takes in the work of geologists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, chemists, palaeobotanists, and the practitioners of a multitude of other disciplines and subdisciplines. The insights and methodologies associated with these studies are transforming policy agendas and approaches to global environmental issues. In the process they reproduce or recast old questions of the relations between science and policy: to what extent do, and should, scientists shape the policies and decision-making processes of governments and international organizations? Are they listened to too much or not enough? At what point should their assessments of risks be translated into appropriate policy responses? How self-destructive, in terms of scientists’ capacities to influence governments and public opinion, are the uncertainties that are central to all scientific research? The coexistence of many disciplines in these policy areas raises some difficult questions. Exuberantly cross-disciplinary efforts have marked large areas of policy-related research on earth systems. Yet these have viii

Preface

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their limits. Discipline-mindedness is occasionally relaxed but it has an impressive resilience. The compartmentalization of knowledge enquiries has both risks and benefits in any area of environmental policy. One result may be an austere scholarly choice of work settings: working with others in loosely collective multidisciplinary collaborations on the one hand or sticking to single-author or cooperative discipline-bound efforts on the other. This book is neither of these. Based as it is in my own discipline of international relations, it is not by any means comprehensively interdisciplinary in character. But it does touch on, and draw ideas from, several disciplines of the natural and social sciences and of the humanities. It thus runs risks. I may have – or, to concede a more accurate guess, will have – misunderstood points, contexts, and connections in some scientific arguments. It is difficult to follow the sound advice of the ethnographer to speak the language of the society you find yourself in when there are so many of these. Further, developments in different disciplines, like those in multiple global environmental policy areas, form rapidly moving targets that threaten accounts with premature obsolescence. There is another hazard. A writer’s efforts to make use of ideas from multiple disciplines can result either in an awkwardly variegated style marked by ungainly juxtapositions or, more commonly perhaps, in an imperial grab for a metagenre that erases the distinctiveness of each contributing discipline. Styles in exercises where the goal is a set of rounded and general observations tend to be different from those involved in hunts for clues to understanding the particularities of specific cases. Both are common throughout many areas of the social sciences. Probing the philosophical or literary writings of particular authors traditionally rests on still other modes of interpretation and expression characteristic of some areas of the humanities. And though the two are connected, studying, as an observer, how global environmental policy works is different from joining in debates on the issues and proposing solutions to policy problems. There are traces of all of these in this book. Various irritants are probably unavoidable. Some social scientists get impatient with discussions of scientific findings that seem to be too ‘technical’ and which linger too long before getting into analyses of social and political interactions. Some environmentalists are irked by accounts that seem to ramble around the perimeters of knowledge areas instead of quickly seizing on whatever practical ideas they contain. I have two main aims: first, to explore the implications for environmental governance of recent scientific work in the earth-systems

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Preface

disciplines and to relate these developments to the history of ideas and to studies of the nature of the scientific enterprise; and second, with the aid of theories of governance, to discuss the record of interactions among scientific and other actors in relation to global environmental governance activities, particularly with regard to issues on the respective agendas of biological diversity, climate change, and geological hazards. The relations between ideas and institutions, and between scientific and policy processes, form an important underlying theme. I have deliberately approached these questions from several different directions. In addition to investigating a variety of sets of scientific findings and their connections with policy, I am also interested in exploring some aspects of the history and current status of earth-systems knowledge regardless of any immediate, obvious, or explicit policy implications they may contain. Developments in the natural sciences that bear on problems of global environmental policy can be seen as contributions to alternative versions of the theory of the earth. This elusive vision inspired many eighteenth-century scientists. There is evidence that a twenty-first-century equivalent, rich in policy implications, is in the making. Unlike its distant ancestors, this work in progress draws heavily on the biological, atmospheric, physical, and other sciences and, I would argue, requires for its development more sustained investments from the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Parts of the book have their origins in research on international environmental policy issues carried out with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and I gratefully acknowledge this assistance. I would also like to thank Jim Whitman, editor of the Global Issues series, for helpful suggestions. Warm thanks are especially due to my students in many years of teaching global environmental politics at Dalhousie University. I could normally rely on many to be good at reminding me that knowledge in these areas eventually has to answer to a criterion of usefulness and applicability to real-world environmental problem solving. I have kept the rule firmly in mind even when breaking it.

List of Abbreviations ADB AR4 BLI BRIC CBD CCAMLR CFC CHM CIIFN CITES COP CMS CRED DCESS EC EM-DAT EPA ESA ESSP EU FAO FAR FCCC FDA FWS GARP GBIF GCM GCOS GFZ GHG GMO GSA

Asian Development Bank Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC) BirdLife International Brazil, Russia, India, China Convention on Biological Diversity Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources chlorofluorocarbon Clearing-House Mechanism (CBD) Centro Internacional para la Investigación del Fenómeno El Niño Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species Conference of the Parties Convention on Migratory Species Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (Louvain) Danish Centre for Earth Systems European Commission Emergency Events Database Environmental Protection Agency (US) Endangered Species Act (US) Earth System Science Partnership European Union Food and Agriculture Organization First Assessment Report (IPCC) Framework Convention on Climate Change Food and Drug Administration (US) Fish and Wildlife Service (US) Global Atmospheric Research Programme Global Biodiversity Information Facility general circulation model Global Climate Observing System German Research Centre for Geosciences greenhouse gas genetically modified organism Geological Society of America xi

xii List of Abbreviations

GSN IBP IBOY ICSU IFI IGBP IGO IGOS IGY IHDP IMO IMoSEB IOC IPBES IPCC IRIS ISDR ISSC IUBS IUCN IUGG IUGS IWC IYPE JMA LRTAP LULUCF MA MAB MDG MEA MOP NAS NASA NEO NGO NOAA

Global Seismographic Network International Biological Programme International Biodiversity Observation Year International Council of Scientific Unions/International Council for Science international financial institution International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme intergovernmental organization Integrated Global Observing Strategy International Geophysical Year International Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme International Maritime Organization International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology International Strategy for Disaster Reduction International Social Science Council International Union of Biological Sciences International Union for the Conservation of Nature International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics International Union of Geological Sciences International Whaling Commission International Year of Planet Earth Japan Meteorological Agency Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution land use, land-use change and forestry Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Man and the Biosphere Programme Millennium Development Goals multilateral environmental agreement Meeting of the Parties National Academy of Science (US) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (US) near-earth object non-governmental organization National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (US)

List of Abbreviations xiii

OAS OECD OPEC ppm SADC SAR SBSTA SBSTTA SCOPE SSC STRP TAR UN UNCED UNCHE UNEP UNESCO UNGA USGS WCMC WCRP WDPA WG WHO WI WMO WTO

Organization of American States Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries parts per million Southern African Development Community Second Assessment Report (IPCC) Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (FCCC) Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (CBD) Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (ICSU) Species Survival Commission (IUCN) Scientific and Technical Review Panel (Ramsar) Third Assessment Report (IPCC) United Nations United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992) United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972) United Nations Environment Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations General Assembly United States Geological Service World Conservation Monitoring Centre World Climate Research Programme World Database on Protected Areas working group World Health Organization Wetlands International World Meteorological Organization World Trade Organization

In addition, the following abbreviations have been used in Chapters 4 and 6: TE TMS WN

James Hutton, Theory of the Earth Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations


1 Introduction: Ecological Imagination and Global Society

The earth’s innards and its outer surfaces are dynamic places. It occasionally reminds us of this fact. The most famous of Europe’s earthquakes devastated Lisbon in 1755. Observers noticed its effects in Morocco and on Scottish, Scandinavian, and other European coastlines and lakes. Its causes, variously seen as natural and divine, were much debated by the philosophers, theologians, and scientists of the day. Disasters still form part of the tale of humans’ relationships with natural systems. When we think now of these relationships, though, we tend to anticipate talk of human activities and their environmental consequences: the ceaseless flow of pollutants and dangerous chemicals, the alarming consequences for the earth’s other species of the planetary sprawl of humans, the production of the gases that are altering the chemical balance of the atmosphere, and lack of judgement in the use of natural resources. Human-made factors are also evident in natural disasters. Mangrove-clearing and other coastal developments intensified the impact in 2004 of the south-east Asian tsunami, and the weak enforcement of building codes and neglect of scientific warnings worsened the damage from Italy’s L’Aquila earthquake in 2009. Gauging the respective roles of natural and human-made sources of change, and identifying the multiple specific factors at work in different circumstances, form a large-scale scientific endeavour. Researchers track the interconnections among the earth’s geological, biological, atmospheric, hydrological, and other systems. As climate-change debates have demonstrated, these activities are fraught with social and political controversies. Science in these domains has significant policy overtones. It has structured much of the debate on anthropogenic climate change, though it has failed conspicuously to generate a comprehensive political, or even a scientific, consensus on the issue. Earth-systems 1

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Governance of Earth Systems

knowledge is poised to exert far-reaching influence on the course of global governance. Contributions to this knowledge from the natural and social sciences have the potential to forge a more coherent philosophical framework for ideas of sustainability and to assist in strengthening the foundations of the more complex post-environmentalist discourses of the present century. Viewing science and governance as the ingredients of a two-step process of problem analysis and of corresponding action is of course simplistic. Cultural and political currents are among the forces that charge science and scientific insights among those that mobilize political interactions. The complex relationship between the sciences and the governance of earth systems is the focus of this book. While governance activities directed towards improving the conditions of the earth’s systems are relatively novel, the grand project of trying to understand these reflects multiple scientific and philosophical traditions. These continue to influence scientists and the social and cultural circumstances that condition the reception of scientific findings. This chapter begins by introducing some of the images that are relevant to understanding the scientific and the broader social and political contexts of earth-systems enquiries and governance. These ways of looking at earth systems lead into questions of the pragmatic and utilitarian ends of scientific enquiries and their relations with norms that emphasize the intrinsic value of such activities. After touching on these, the chapter concludes with an overview of the topics and arguments of the book.

Imagined earths Thinking about the earth is an old profession. It is the geologist’s day job. Yet others – artists, novelists, philosophers, economists – in varying ways have drawn inspiration in their respective pursuits from, and helped to redefine, differing views of the earth. So have environmentalists and other advocates of the practices of sustainability. The task of understanding earth systems has increasingly engaged the imaginations of biologists, chemists, astronomers, and many other natural scientists. The resulting images are interesting from the perspective of the history of ideas, but they also, by shaping the actions of individuals and groups, have real-world consequences. They overlap and act on each other. I will look briefly at four. Some perceptions of earth systems are cultural or pre-scientific artefacts; the earth can be seen as a nourisher or a tormentor of human lives and societies, and as the source of the human

Introduction 3

predicament of chronic dependence on its resources; it is an object in space, about halfway through its life, with complicated processes that matter for us; and earth systems are increasingly important focal points of political debates and governance activities. Cultural constructs For those impressed by the explanatory power of theology, the details of the Lisbon earthquake were ominous. The havoc took place on All Saints Day (1 November). There were three waves of destruction. The origins of the event, as the great twentieth-century geologist Arthur Holmes wrote (1965: 899), could be found in the Devil and his legions of evil spirits; God’s anger against the scandalous behaviour of his worshipers in the Lisbon churches; the need for frightening sinners into repentance; the need to punish Portugal for the undue severity of its Inquisition; and the need to remind humanity of the flames of hell-fire within the earth. Holmes, of course, had his own somewhat different view. He had a geologist’s bemused impatience with those who disdained the search for the natural causes of earth-systems events. Some of the philosophers of the day thought along similar lines. Anticipating later debates on the human-induced costs of natural disasters, Rousseau argued after Lisbon that the ways buildings were made were factors in their destruction. Most famously, Voltaire seized on the disaster as a test case to expose the follies of theological reasoning. The protagonist in Candide, published four years later, visited Lisbon and there, as elsewhere on his journeys, learnt of the church’s false and elaborately contorted explanations of catastrophes and of the causes of human suffering. The understanding of earth systems has long been coloured by the values that members of different cultures bring to their observations. Traditionally the most eminent observers were those with expertise in the doings of gods. Many of the landforms of India were created by Rama. The coasts of Maine and parts of eastern Canada, according to Mi’kmaq elders, were shaped by Glooscap, who created islands by hurling large handfuls of boulders and soil into the sea. The rainbow serpent, who lives in deep waters, was the major influence in shaping the waterways and natural landscapes of many parts of Australia. The early history of western geology was intertwined with theological concerns. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus was a careful observer of geological phenomena, but clung to the older opinion that earthquakes

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were Poseidon’s work. A few centuries later, Pliny the Elder combined scientific research with a conviction that they were the earth’s revenge against miners. There was a popular belief into the 1600s that the stoneage tools found in many locales in Europe were implements that had fallen from the sky. Investigations of earth systems thus began with, though eventually rebelled against, writings grounded in biblical exegesis. In The Lessons of Nature, written in Scotland in the early 1600s, the poet William Drummond described the way God had ‘framed’ and continued to ‘correct’ the earth. In the prevailing (though not uncontested) view of many natural philosophers of the early part of the eighteenth century, the earth, having been created by God a few thousand years earlier, had remained much of a muchness ever since, apart from the effects of the flood survived by Noah and of a few other catastrophes. This picture suffered a blow from which it could not recover at the hands of James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and other geologists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Accounts that appealed to divine intervention were studiously forgotten as so much embarrassing ancestral clutter. Explanations that relied on catastrophes faded. They gave way to uniformitarian interpretations: the earth was being shaped, as it always had been in the past and always would be in the future, by very large numbers of very tiny changes over unimaginably long stretches of time. The rules of scientific cultures gradually took hold and displaced the views of outsiders. Geological ideas began to influence literary traditions, particularly romanticism. Writers continued to explore the earth’s internal structures. In Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth these contained much open space and navigable terrain, out of which the heroes were shot through a volcano at the end of their adventure. The inner earth of the nineteenth-century literary imagination was still a hazardous place, but no longer the furnace of horrors that terrified the residents of Lisbon. Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician who chronicled Alice’s travels, may have been influenced by the geology of an area near Ripon in Yorkshire, which he knew well and which is marked by dangerous shafts. Geology continued to have appeal in the following century. The origins of the earth’s topographical features were one of Douglas Adams’ concerns in the late 1970s. In the first of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy volumes we visit Magrathea and its ageing planet-construction industry, and hear from Slartibartfast of his coastline-making skills and his experiences in crafting the Norwegian fjords.

Introduction 5

Culturally grounded representations of earth-systems processes have a remarkable resilience. Many remain important in the responses of societies to environmental problems and natural disasters. Remnants persist of the so-called pathetic fallacy – the attribution of human traits to natural phenomena. Hurricanes and volcanic eruptions don’t just happen: the earth and its climate are angry. Such observations are not necessarily meant to be taken literally. People are skilled at the art of separating out and operating among different ontological genres. Some commentaries on the south-east Asian and Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 were reminiscent of those that followed the Lisbon earthquake. As in 1755, explanations were sought in errant human behaviour. According to one observer in Sri Lanka, Allah first sends small punishments, like loss of business. If we ignore the warning, He sends bigger ones – loss of life. If we still ignore the warnings, the big punishments, like earthquakes and tsunamis will come. (Pearson, 2005) The Japanese earthquake of 1923 exacerbated intercommunal tensions and prompted attacks on the Korean minority. The earthquake in Tangshan in China in 1976 was accompanied by widespread speculation that it was an omen of the kind that traditionally foreshadowed a change of emperors; Mao Zedong died a few weeks later. Western mutterings that the Chinese earthquake of 2008 might have been a metaphysical consequence of the government’s treatment of Tibet triggered widespread Chinese indignation. Sustainability constructs Late twentieth-century environmentalists repackaged the earth in critiques of the actions and mindsets of its human inhabitants. The earth was recast as a moral lodestone that could guide individuals and communities, if they were prepared to listen and learn, on to more ecologically benign paths. From the late 1960s, and particularly following the cultural impact of the Apollo 8 images of the earth seen from the moon, environmentalism took an increasingly global turn. Critics conjured dark tales of the global consequences of deforestation, overfishing, self-destructive patterns of energy use, habitat destruction, human population growth, and toxic chemicals. The intimate character of encounters with the forces and cycles of natural systems is the theme of many accounts of life in traditional

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communities. Junichi Saga’s richly textured descriptions of daily life in a small Japanese town vividly capture memories of early twentieth-century hazards, and a powerful communal sense of the fragility of the earth’s resources. One respondent recalled floods. If these occurred in August or September, ‘the ripe plants would be completely flattened and the paddy fields reduced to sand and rubble’ (Saga, 1987: 192). Recollections of a long history of unpredictable food shortages, as well as acute awareness of newer problems such as dependence on foreign supplies of oil, have continued to influence Japanese public attitudes and government policies. Economic and cultural factors combined for many years to justify a protectionist stance of resistance to imports of foreign rice. Arguments about the ecological dependence of humans on natural systems are couched in many ways. In the formulations of sustainable development, economies depend, unwisely in some cases, not only on resources such as forests and fish and oil and gas but also on a wide range of quantifiable ecosystem services such as pollination by bees. Natural resources are there for our use, but both prudence and the moral obligation we have to future generations dictate that these should be used wisely, that pollutants should not ravage stocks, that disruptions to wildlife species be minimized, that use decisions should be made by those who will be affected by them, and that adequate supplies are available for our descendants. For more pessimistic observers these considerations also point to an urgent need to curtail human population growth. Other critics point to the alarming consequences of the lack of awareness on the part of many of the world’s city dwellers of the dependence of the quality of their lives on the state of the earth’s natural cycles and processes. As in cultural representations, sustainability debates find a place for the spiritual beliefs that form an integral part of some views of earth systems. In a recent public hearing in connection with a proposed diamond mining development in northern Canada, a Dene woman objected to the project on the grounds that the area in question was where her baby teeth were buried. Another resident explained: She was about my age and I too had the experience of having my baby teeth buried in a ceremony. This was an important moment in life for both me and my mother. I know where my baby teeth are buried. Many people have sacred places like this. (White, 2009: 132) Earth systems have qualities of robustness as well as vulnerabilities. Life flourishes in seemingly inhospitable places, like the deep seabed.

Introduction 7

A rapid process of biological recovery began around Mount St Helens after the 1980 eruption, aided by natural processes that built on the living and dead plants and animals left in the area, and at Chernobyl after the 1986 explosion. ‘Bombsite flowers’ (fireweed or large willow herb) spread quickly in English cities to colonize new sites created by the civilian bombing raids of World War II. Fortunately, humans too, have ingenuity. Societies have responded in varying ways to environmental problems with regulatory arrangements for waste removal, water quality management, and energy use. European cities still have such problems, but they are not of the relative or absolute magnitude of those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished in the 1830s at the noise, smoke, and wastes of Manchester, a city he described as a ‘foul drain’ and a ‘filthy sewer’. There had been a rapid growth in the city’s population, from 17,000 in 1745 to 70,000 in 1801. It reached 303,000 in 1851 (Newsome, 1999: 22). Other English cities endured environmental hardships for centuries. London experienced a disastrous outbreak of plague in 1665. The practice of fertilizing crops with the material of cesspits helped spread dysentery. Oxford was one of the cities that handled its waste problems by simply adding to the piles on streets and at the city gates. A visitor described its streets in 1652 as ‘much annoyed with fylth, dunghills and other noisome rubbage’ (Cockayne, 2007: 93, 189). Scientific constructs The effects of human-made factors in generating environmental change and undermining sustainability are not always easy to assess. They interact with natural systems in complex, and typically poorly understood, circuits of loops, reinforcers, dampers, and blockages. Given this uncertainty, climate-change activists are often tempted to steer conversations away from a suspect consideration of the earth’s natural cycles and to maintain that the important links are simple. Greenhouse-gas production in modern economies is held to lead directly, and without the mediation of other variables, to consequences such as sea-ice melt in the Arctic. More ebullient views stress human capacities more than anthropogenic damage. At the extreme is the thesis that humans already have the knowledge and capability to engineer a planet that will serve their needs, and that regrettable side effects and unanticipated costs can be handled by scientists and other experts. The geomorphologist Barbara Kennedy is highly critical of the view that ‘Nature is becoming more inimical to the happy existence of suburban householders and that

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Something Should be Done About it.’ She argues that such views ignore the effects of the earth’s natural geological and hydrological processes, and cites the case of Bangladesh and the appeals made by its president for international assistance to help control the effects of floods: Did he wish the Monsoon circulation to be deflected? The Himalayas not merely reforested, but flattened? The topography of the Bay of Bengal to be modified? And the atmospheric circulation which produces typhoons in the Bay of Bengal to be deflected, too? (Kennedy, 2006: 118) In the current scientific view, we live on a relatively small rotating object, which moves in complicated rhythms around an ordinary main-sequence star. This in turn makes circuits of a typical spiral galaxy at a distance of about 27,400 light years from its centre. It has a solid inner core with a radius of about 1200 kilometres and, stretching outwards towards the surface a further 2300 kilometres, a liquid outer core made up of iron and some lighter elements (Lister, 2008). In the mantle are long, hot plumes that move upwards in cycles of a few hundred million years and which produce hotspots on the surface such as the Yellowstone supervolcano and the slowly lengthening Hawaiian island chain. The outer reaches of the upper mantle and the crust form the lithosphere. Surface dynamics centre on the moving and colliding plates on which rest the earth’s oceans and continents, and on the creation of new crust from mid-ocean factories. There are complex biogeochemical, hydrological, atmospheric, and other cycles and interactions with solar-system particles, forces, and objects. There is a total dependence of (most) life on energy from the sun. Stretched across the surface is the extremely thin film of the biosphere, which comprises living organisms and their chemical and physical environments, including the more immediate layers of the atmospheric envelope. Dominant within the biosphere are humans, whose activities shape landforms and help drive processes of global change. This is a view that would have seemed implausible to most past generations. An early version was proposed in the sixth century BCE by Anaximander of Miletus, who imagined the earth as a cylindrical object hanging in space. Edmond Halley, who won fame both for his numerous scientific accomplishments and for predicting the return in 1758 of the comet later named after him, suspected the earth was mainly a hollow shell. Generations of geologists have puzzled over the surface forms and hidden structures of the earth. As knowledge

Introduction 9

grew, older records were seen in a new light. Spanish accounts of years of heavy rains in seventeenth-century South America became part of the history of El Niño events. Progress has been accompanied by occasional eruptions of superheated arguments. Controversy over the idea that the earth’s surfaces might consist of moving plates divided geologists until consensus was reached on the new synthesis in the 1960s. Comparative knowledge of other planets and their histories, particularly of Mars and Venus, has steadily added refinements to the emerging image. Increasingly crucial to this intellectual history were the scientists who studied life. It became clear that living organisms could not be seen just as things perched on and exploiting a convenient chemical and physical environment. Coproduction rather than dependence was the more apt metaphor. Biology from the early nineteenth century moved in parallel with developments in geology, though over time the growing professionalization of each constrained the potential for exchanges. Charles Darwin was greatly affected by the uniformitarian arguments of his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, the first volume of whose Principles of Geology was published in 1830. Darwin was also intrigued by the many ways that the actions of living organisms, such as earthworms and coral polyps, have consequences for the world of the geologist. Biologists later debated the implications of the emerging subfield of ecology. Some latched eagerly on to the idea that the complex interrelations among organisms, communities, and their environments were an appropriate focus of biological enquiry. Others were deterred by the degree of abstraction this approach seemed to imply. Related notions were extended to the level of earth systems. The earth itself can be viewed as a kind of ecosystem, or a set of these. It is of a larger scale and of considerably greater complexity than a pond, a cliff face, or a parcel of desert, but it is open to study with similar ecological concepts and methods. As the twentieth century advanced, biologists steadily acquired deeper understanding of the workings of the biosphere. The stage was set for greater cross-fertilization with the work of geologists, atmospheric scientists, and others in the new interdisciplinary architectures of biogeochemistry and of earth systems. Policy constructs Particularly in the circumstances of globalization, the world’s societies and economies have become powerful drivers of ecological processes. Yet there is a crisis in global governance – the manner in which decisions are made about actions that affect the global environment.

10


The current capabilities of national and international governance actors are inadequate to these tasks. Problems of governance – the processes, institutions, habits, decisions, ways of thought, and norms through which a polity addresses itself to issues and pursues ends – are especially intractable at the global level. Their origins lie in part in the ancient codes enshrined in the territorial organization of societies, and in the extension of these to states from the 1600s in the Westphalian system. A scientific image of the complex interconnectedness of earth systems, and of the multiple interrelations among biological, geological, and other natural-systems phenomena, stands in bleak contrast to a political image of tribalisms, inequalities, and conflicts in global society. If the Hobbesian flavour of this contrast were the final word, the study of global governance would be simple: there would not be any governance to study, apart from the measures states take to guard their security interests. In practice, cooperation does take place among national governments on environmental and scientifically grounded topics as on other matters. It extends into an expanding variety of regional and functional niches. Actors other than states are involved. Issues other than those on the immediate security agendas of states help initiate processes, and values other than those of ethnicity and nationalism help drive them. Multiple connections link the different domains of globality, from the daily lives and decisions of household members and the residents of local communities to the politicking and the immersion in legal detail of delegates to international conferences. The study of global governance is interesting because it is not simple. Since the late 1960s, the global environment has attracted mounting attention from governance actors. A core grouping of multilateral environmental agreements such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and an expanding network of several hundred specialized agreements and regime fragments draw in states and other governance actors in a vast and historically unprecedented exercise aimed at encouraging them to collaborate on environmental policy. The growing sense of urgency that surrounds its constituent issues pushes events. The language of crisis has become a routine, perhaps overused, way of characterizing many global environmental problems, particularly those of anthropogenic climate change and the unsound use of biological resources. Two aspects are important. First, humans are changing their environments in profound ways. The consequences extend to such complex domains as atmospheric

Introduction 11

chemistry, marine and terrestrial biological diversity, the quality of air and freshwater, changes in coastal zones, the spread of disease vectors, the incidence of wildfires, and the depletion of the capital stocks of natural resources. Secondly, the costs of these changes, as well as their benefits, are inequitably distributed among the world’s societies. Poorer countries lack in varying degrees the scientific capabilities required to understand, monitor, and mitigate the negative consequences of earth-systems change. They are also disproportionately vulnerable to damage from earthquakes, mudslides, catastrophic floods, and other natural events. Similar considerations apply within societies. The responses and capabilities of ethnic and other groups vary in relation to natural disasters. They depend on factors such as community members’ access to transportation, support networks and insurance, income disparities, and trust of governments. Differential effects among groups were evident in Miami in relation to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and to Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, and in the tsunami that hit Aceh, Indonesia, in 2004 (Gaillard et al., 2008: 19–20).

Theory and the ends of knowledge The global environment agenda breaks down into multiple sets and subsets of issues. These include problems associated with the spread of harmful chemicals, threats to specific groups of plants and animals in the wild, the science and governance of Antarctica, and the interactions of environmental issues with public health and human rights issues. Each cluster of issues, moreover, comes with its own shifting mix of actor networks, legal frameworks, norms, governance systems, and processes of idea production. Many have a fluidity that defies easy categorization. No single taxonomic framework is adequate to the task of capturing this diversity. Thus while it is sometimes useful to talk of a single ‘environmental crisis’ (or, in the terms of the Brundtland Report in 1987, of a single global crisis incorporating environmental, development, energy, security, and other policy areas), it also helps to disaggregate issue sets and governance tasks. We can also occasionally relax assumptions of interconnectedness and study three grand areas of enquiry and action as relatively autonomous: those of global environmental change, or the significance of human societies and economies in altering earth-systems processes; the architecture of global governance, or the complex and disjointed mechanisms through which multiple actors try to steer processes of change; and

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global science, or the activities designed to add to our understanding of natural and human structures and processes. Each of the three considered in isolation presents formidable analytical and policy challenges. Colliding with and continually modifying each other, as they do in the characteristic circumstances of the early twenty-first century, they forge an iron triangle, many of whose structural features are unknown, which continues to frustrate aspirations for ecologically better worlds. The tasks of governance in these areas are closely connected with developments in science. Indeed a large part of the problem of understanding both global change and the optimal governance options associated with it is that of discovering the contours of applicable, practical, or useable knowledge (or, in light of the diversity of claims in these contexts, of knowledges in the plural). These are the topographies that suggest insights into the practices that can guide individuals, communities, and governments incrementally towards workable, just, effective, and least-cost solutions to environmental problems. Understanding the nature of governance processes, and the place of science and of scientific organizations within these, is as much a part of this challenge as understanding the biophysical forces at work in earth systems. This large-scale process of learning is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Unfortunately, sustained practices of collaboration among disciplines of the natural and social sciences are notoriously elusive. Useable scientific knowledge is a foundation of good global environmental governance. A very wide range of scientific enquiries is required to drive the project of understanding earth systems. Not too far into the contemplation of these tasks, however, the environmental pragmatist rebels. We don’t need to find out the temperature of a mantle plume, one might say, in order to plan a community recycling scheme for a Jakarta neighbourhood; and knowledge of the earth’s core cannot be used in a project to manage its rotation. For environmentalists, practicality is the keyword. Without it, they suspect, conversations about the earth risk becoming ‘mere prattle, without practice’, as the disgruntled Iago puts it at the start of Othello. Much of the discussion in later chapters surrounds just such questions of the use of scientific knowledge, and the adequacy of governance activities, in the challenges of repairing and maintaining earth systems. However, by definition and default an excessively utilitarian perspective, especially when coupled with an unremitting sense of high urgency, marginalizes many intrinsically fascinating questions that are integral to understanding earth systems and humans’ relations with, or place within, them but which fail the stern test of self-evident

Introduction 13

usefulness. It is useful to recall a lesson from the history of many sciences, that what turns out to be ‘useful’ may not be apparent when a research journey begins. Studies of earth systems and of global governance steering processes work at different speeds: ‘faster’ (to use an analogy with our foodconsumption habits) when there is a pressing need for action, ‘slower’ in situations where values other than material need seep in and knowledge goals are defined more as ends in themselves. Much discussion of climate change and other global environmental risks tends to be disproportionately cued to the first of these rhythms. Both kinds of learning are required: that directed towards urgently needed problem-solving knowledge, applicable in the multilevel arenas of global environmental governance; and very long-term processes of multidisciplinary enquiry that are less adrenaline-fuelled, some of them ‘pointless’, and that are directed ultimately, though with a licence to meander, towards understanding the systems of the earth. Many natural philosophers, or scientists as they were later called, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adopted as their goal the elaboration of a theory of the earth. Its questions fed into and were influenced by the characteristic Enlightenment values of rationality, secularism, and scientific reasoning; the practical value of knowledge; the equality, goodness, and improveability of individuals; and the pursuit of a natural ordering of societies. The geological parameters of the Enlightenment earth-theory project are still being explored. Biologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, and others joined in and contributed to its late twentieth-century reformulation in earth-systems terms. A full treatment still awaits the incorporation of insights from social scientists, including observers of governance practices, and scholars from the humanities. It may prove to be unattainable. Elusiveness, though, is a characteristic of slow-knowledge processes.

An overview The chapters of the book fall into two parts. Those in Part I (Chapters 2–5) explore the multiple relations between science and policy on global environmental and earth-systems issues. Though some of the discussion touches on themes in the history and philosophy of science, these are not the primary concern. Chapter 2 addresses the nature of the scientific enterprise, particularly in relation to the expanding range of topics on international environmental agendas and the governance mechanisms that have been devised to deal with these. Uncertainty

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is the theme of Chapter 3. An intrinsic feature of science, uncertainty themes reverberate through research in many areas of earth-systems enquiry. It raises difficult questions for policymaking, and is central to the protracted controversies over climate change. Chapters 4 and 5 review the origins and contemporary characteristics of earth-systems science. They are introduced in Chapter 4 by way of a discussion of the writings of the late eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, whose Theory of the Earth was instrumental in taking geological enquiry out of its earlier theological framing, and of the enduring concerns of later generations of geologists. The ideas of the earth-systems approaches and syntheses of the last two to three decades form the focus of Chapter 5. Part II turns to the governance challenges posed by scientific and by related environmental developments. Questions of the nature of global governance, its potential, and the constraints on its workings are discussed in Chapter 6. This explores a core group of theoretical approaches relevant for understanding global environmental policy: multilateralism, in its traditional interstate forms and in the enhanced variants that incorporate participation by scientific and other non-state actors; global civil society approaches; studies of epistemic communities; the functionalist tradition of emphasizing the need to design governance structures and norms to fit the requirements of practical problem solving in areas of human needs; and the cosmopolitan perspective, which directs attention towards common values shared across borders and to governmental initiatives that reflect these. As in the discussion earlier of scientific developments, these governance topics are introduced with the help of a Scottish Enlightenment thinker: in this case Adam Smith who, while perhaps best known for his work in economics, also wrote on the nature of international law and politics, on cosmopolitan ethics, and on the history and philosophy of science. Scientific ideas and organizations have played increasing roles in international environmental governance efforts. Chapter 7 discusses this historical and institutional context, and provides a foundation for the discussion of three large sets of global issue areas in the next three chapters. These are the problems of the continued loss of global biological diversity (Chapter 8); the interactions of scientific and policy communities in the area of climate change (Chapter 9); and the epistemic and governance issues posed by natural disasters and geological hazards (Chapter 10). The communication of environmental risk, and the reception of scientific information by publics and governments, form important strands of the responses to these issues. Each of these

Introduction 15

chapters looks at the critical ideas and policy-oriented insights of continuing scientific research; the organization of scientists and their institutional bases in transnational institutions, governments, and other bodies; the place of scientific bodies and other actors in relation to governance frameworks; and the wider multilevel contexts of discourses and activities at local, national, and regional levels. Finally, Chapter 11 returns to the themes of epistemic and governance renovation and assesses the prospects for a more comprehensively integrated theoretical basis for the science and governance of earth systems.


Part I Science and Policy


2 Environmental Crisis and the Contexts of Science

Problems of global environmental governance are chronically constrained by their dependence on three sets of constitutive processes. These are closely interrelated and each is crisis tinged. First, the scale and variety of the impacts of economies on natural systems have already attained a magnitude that makes it realistic to talk of large-scale, human-made environmental change. The effects touch on diverse biological, chemical, geological, atmospheric, and other systems. Secondly, while scientific knowledge of these processes has advanced significantly, the accumulated stock of epistemic capital remains inadequate for the dual tasks of understanding the interrelations between human systems and those of the earth, and of servicing the machinery of global governance. Controversy flourishes about what the findings of scientists mean and about the best ways to accommodate science within policy processes. Thirdly, global governance activities generally are themselves weak. In relation to global environmental policy they are capable of generating progress on some fronts but remain timorously unable to effect the innovations required to respond adequately to the challenges posed by earth-systems knowledge. This chapter explores the relations between science and policy that are embedded in each of these three sets of processes.

Anthropogenic global change A recurrent theme of global environmental discourses probes the human structuring of naturally occurring processes. The question is ever-present in discussions of specific issues, from air quality in Beijing to the threats from global warming to corals and amphibians, from the persistence of flame retardant chemicals in the Arctic to the spread of 19

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invasive species in North America’s Great Lakes. The anthropogenic question shapes others: what have been the main human impacts on the earth and its regions during the last dozen or so millennia, or since the end of the most recent glaciation? How important is the carbon dioxide produced by human activities in changing the earth’s land and sea surface temperatures? What is the optimal path to a sustainable society? These kinds of questions raise complex issues concerning the respective causal weighting of human and of natural variables (and of the multiple forms of interaction among these) in influencing processes of global change. Asking about the anthropogenic sources of global change, however, difficult as this is, does not in itself provide a comprehensive framework for assessing the ways in which natural systems interact with human activities. Earth-systems perspectives build on the conventional environmental policy questions – of estimating and mitigating the complex effects of human activities on the biosphere, atmosphere, and geosphere – by considering in addition a wide range of natural processes, whether or not these analyses can help to locate the parameters of anthropogenic change. Geological and oceans-atmosphere examples include tsunamis, the El Niño and La Niña cycles rising from processes in the Pacific Ocean, and the effects of solar particles. Few, if any, ‘natural’ sites remain on earth. Even those that appear to be pristinely unaffected by economic activities, such as many areas of the polar regions, are affected by the transport of pollutants. The consequences of modern economies extend into the atmosphere and to all parts of the biosphere. They obviously do not penetrate far into the earth (though there has been speculation about the possible effects on the earth’s plates of the changes in water load that might be brought about by anthropogenic climate forcing), but, at least in the earth’s outer coating humans have become major agents of change. Humans have been described as a significant, even the primary, geomorphologic agent. So substantial have been the changes during the Holocene, or the years since the last ice age, that some scientists prefer the term Anthropocene as a more appropriate label. As a result the term ‘global change’ has, in practice, become identified not with the record of alterations to earth systems throughout geological history but rather with the now transformative environmental consequences of human activities (Oldfield and Alverson, 2003: 1). Among these influences are the economic, cultural, and other factors that threaten species and habitats (see Chapter 8). The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recorded a total of

Environmental Crisis and the Contexts of Science 21

869 species that have already become extinct, and others that exist only in captivity or as cultivated forms. (IUCN, 2007, 2009a). In the US, 447 species of animals and 598 plant species are listed by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) as endangered and 162 animals and 146 plants as threatened. The fauna species on the endangered list includes 68 mammals, 75 birds, 13 reptiles, 13 amphibians, and 74 fishes (FWS, 2008). While threats to species, and their extinction, derive from natural processes, in many cases the most important factor affecting the status of a plant or animal species is loss or fragmentation of habitat as a result of the geographical reach of human activities. Interactions among multiple anthropogenic and natural drivers of threat affect many species. Frogs and other amphibians are threatened globally by chemical pollutants and by the destruction, fragmentation, or deteriorating quality of their habitats; warming climates reinforce these factors, for example, by facilitating the spread of the parasitic chytrid fungus. Human population growth is a critical source of pressure on earth systems. In ecological terms it raises the question whether our species has exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity. The human population is approaching 7 billion, up from just over 6.1 billion in 2000. This represents a substantial increase from the 1950 figure of 2.54 billion and even the 1975 total of 4.08 billion. The United Nations (UN) mediumvariant estimate is for a world population of slightly over 8 billion by 2025 and just over 9 billion by 2050 (UN, 2006). By the latter year, the US population is projected to be about 439 million. The aggregate figures and projections are useful guides, though such data have to be handled with care. They tell us nothing about the quality of the lives of people, their ages, or their different ecological weights and patterns of use of water, energy, and other resources. Some countries have stable or declining populations, while others are committed to population growth by selective immigration. Estimates of trends depend on judgements about food security, health care, the state of economies, and other factors. They are vulnerable to unanticipated developments like the increase in staples production in Asia sparked by the Green Revolution, and, more recently, the consequences of the transfer of agricultural land to the production of biofuel crops. Larger interpretive frameworks treat population estimates in differing ways, from the extremes of Malthusian pessimism about resource crunches to optimism about the capacity of markets and of human ingenuity to adapt. Societies have had divergent effects on their environments during the Holocene (Oldfield and Daring, 2003). Early hunters affected the large mammal populations of Europe, North America, and northern

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Asia, though how much so compared with diverse natural factors has not been settled. The invention of farming and the clearing of forests may have had climatic results that were greater than local in extent. Plato in the fourth century BCE observed the transformation by agriculture of areas bordering the Mediterranean. The Greek and Roman empires saw significantly increased uses of lead, copper, and other metals, with consequences for local and regional atmospheric pollution. Agricultural developments, the rise of towns and cities, the spread of plant and animal species, and the removal of forests and wetlands, were among the factors that radically altered the face of Northwestern Europe (Berglund, 2006). Even medieval cities ‘pulled both grain and wood from productive areas hundreds of times larger than they themselves covered’ (Hoffmann, 2007: 312). As much as one third of the Netherlands is currently below sea level. It has been estimated that without the protective barriers that have been patiently constructed since the sixteenth century, up to 65 per cent of the country would be under water daily during high tides (Hoeksema, 2008). Many Dutch communities remain vulnerable to damage not only from ‘normal’ serious floods but also from the rising sea levels anticipated in climate-change scenarios. Before modernity, or the deepening processes of industrialization from the mid-1700s, most of the environmental impacts of societies were predominantly limited, localized, slow to take hold, and, within varying time scales, reversible. Some effects are now regional or global in scale, and may have gone beyond the tipping points of manageable change (Turner et al., 1990; Costanza et al., 2007). International trade, atmospheric circulation, and other factors carry effects across borders. Activities during the past several decades – the draining of much of the wetlands habitat of the east coast of the US, for example, the intensification of frontier agricultural development in Brazil, the growth of megacities and their hinterlands in southern and east Asia, and the global proliferation of transportation, tourist, and other infrastructure – have had significant effects on biological diversity, the cycling of chemical elements, landscape features and geomorphology, atmospheric chemistry, watercourses, soils, and the functioning of ecosystems and the provision of ecosystem services. Accelerating demand in the present century for minerals, forest products, fresh water, conventional energy supplies, fish, and other natural resources adds significantly to the pressures on the capacities of natural systems. Many questions nonetheless remain problematic. The consequences of human actions cannot always be satisfactorily disentangled from those


of natural forces. The human costs and the economic and infrastructure damage from hurricanes, for example, in Latin America from Mitch in 1998 and Felix in 2007, depend in large part on societal preparedness and response capabilities. The loss of coastal vegetation increased the human and property cost of the Myanmar cyclone in 2008. Areas of the country had been transformed under colonial rule and after independence as governments cleared mangroves to make way for rice production, agriculture, and the growth of towns. Damage from floods – for example in Bangladesh and south-east Mexico in 2007, north-east India in 2008, and the Manila region in the Philippines and El Salvador in 2009 – is contingent on combinations of natural-weather variations and human interference with watercourses. The efficacy of evacuation routes, education, building codes, and early warning systems likewise determines the costliness of earthquakes and tsunamis. Separating out the human-made and the natural earth-systems sources of climate change presents greater analytical difficulties, not least because the multiple cause-and-effect links in scientific arguments are the subjects of intense political controversy. The science nonetheless indicates a broad, though potentially vulnerable, consensus on two points: that present conditions are those of warming, with global temperatures higher than those prevailing since the medieval warming period (Anderson et al., 2007: 3), and that human-made factors have become significant in the overall mix of factors affecting climate. These views have not been universally accepted by climate researchers (see Chapter 9). Nor is there a consensus that there is a scientific consensus on these points. Critics point to the persistence and effects of natural cycles such as those caused by patterns of variations in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, the consequences for climate of large-scale ocean circulations, and the unresolved complexities involved in gauging the consequences for earth systems of increase in anthropogenic carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). The 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) went further and more confidently than it had earlier in identifying human activities as a driver of change. There was a very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming. . . . Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse-gas] concentrations. (IPCC, 2007: 37, 39)

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Additional anthropogenic variables enter this picture when we consider the results of the adequacy of societal and governmental responses, in terms of both mitigation (controlling and reducing GHG production) and adaptation (taking steps to prepare for and minimize the costs of sea-level rise, changing storm patterns, epidemics, wildfires, vegetation shifts, and the other ingredients of climate-change scenarios). These factors have to be considered in relation to natural-climate variations. The earth’s history has been marked by many glaciations and periods of warming, of varying duration. Scientists decipher this record as they probe ancient pollen, ice core samples, deep-ocean sediments, and other means of unravelling phases of climatic history and differentiation among regions. Some changes have occurred abruptly and others with a monumental slowness. In some models (the snowball earth view) geohistorical processes of the spread of ice and snow may have engulfed most of the planet on several occasions. These large-scale changes clearly had no connection with human activities. Earth-systems processes and solar processes also shaped recent events. There was a warm period in Europe’s early middle ages that created opportunities for agriculture, leading to losses of forest cover, and made viable the Norse settlements in Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland; and a cold period stretched across Europe from the mid-1400s into the 1800s. The view that for the past ten to twelve millennia humans have been fortunate to live in a relatively warm interglacial period of uncertain duration and multiple temperature blips, and that a fresh round of glaciation will succeed it within the next few or more thousand years, is in many ways a safer bet than guesses about short-term future warming trends. Indeed something like this was the hunch of many climate scientists in the 1970s, before the emergence of the climate-change view that favoured projections of aggregate warming. But this is not an excuse for inaction. Even if human activities inadvertently postpone the onset or some of the stages of the next glaciation or alter some of its impacts, global society and its governance structures will still have to cope eventually not only with that event but also with the more climatically turbulent decades, centuries, and millennia before then.

The scientific enterprise The art of global environmental governance depends heavily on insights from the earth-systems sciences. These are in various stages of incompleteness and maturation, though no science can ever be regarded as ‘complete’. Uncertainties and qualifications course through


them, as they do through all scientific activities (see Chapter 3). The nature of the relationship between scientific and policy processes at national and international levels is complex and multifaceted (Bocking, 2004; Harrison and Bryner, 2004). Two old philosophical problems have to be acknowledged before we go further. The first problem concerns the viability of knowledge pursuits. When we discuss environmental change, to what extent are we simply viewing the world through one or more of the many available sets of scientific and other interpretive lenses, some of them more overtly ideological than others? Is the residual bias built into such observations acceptable? Environmentalist views of earth systems come in a rich variety of forms. Some embrace the natural sciences. Others question their capacities, and object to the prestige the natural sciences have attained in societal discourses and the power they appear to have inside governments. The fact of contestation, however, does not mean that environmental knowledge is not feasible, that the sciences should be decentred to allow more room for other forms of knowledge, or that a full-scale retreat towards epistemic relativism is warranted. The findings and modes of good science remain a vital pillar of global governance. Its criteria define the rules for recognizing and acquiring evidence, the appropriate chains of practices and reasoning that lead to results, the provisional character of these, the importance of consensus in collaborative settings, and, in general, the nature of creativity in research communities. However, this route to understanding earth systems does have some built-in limitations. The conventionally defined good-science methodologies of the natural sciences tend to falter when confronted with humans. Human beings cannot be adequately investigated in the same way that we might study a sedimentary rock, the earth’s magnetic field, or a migratory bird. Since human activities have become important drivers of global change, understanding their mainsprings matters. Skills from many branches of the humanities and the social sciences are required to fill this gap. These disciplines are diverse. Most rest on differing principles of enquiry and interpretation from those that animate the natural sciences. All this does not mean there are fundamental flaws in the mindsets of practitioners of the natural sciences, but it does suggest a pressing need for greater interdisciplinary cooperation within and between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The second problem concerns the uses of scientific knowledge. Various kinds of usefulness have traditionally been attributed to the scientific enterprise. These are blended with, and may be an integral part of, the ostensible task of understanding nature. David Hume, in the

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context of his arguments on the difficulty, or impossibility, of detecting causality, put it this way: ‘The only immediate utility of all sciences is to teach us how to control and regulate future events by their causes.’ The appeal of practical applicability varies among different sciences and individual scientists. It is strong in ‘applied’ areas of ecology and in conservation biology. It can be sensed in the complex motivations that draw individuals into scientific research in different fields. Much scientific research on environmental topics rests on blends of environmentalist and scientific values (Sissenwine, 2007: 90–1). In some areas, for example in research in Antarctica, there has been tension among scientists and policymakers on the degree to which scientific research should stem from, and aim to answer, environmental policy questions. Many scientists favour tangible real-world usefulness as one of the ways of evaluating their work. Others, though, fear that such criteria are already too well entrenched in the minds of government officials and the managers of funding bodies. Environmental organizations and the advocates of sound public policy also value utilitarian criteria. Peter Haas (2004: 116) sees the generation of useable knowledge as the primary aim of research related to international environmental policy. This is ‘accurate information that is of use to politicians and policy-makers. It must be accurate, and politically tractable for its users’. Criteria like these do not of course invalidate scientific research, including earth-systems research that does not, or does not quickly enough, lead to useable products. However, they may implicitly demote such enquiries. The requirement of coming up with useful findings can easily trump questions that appear merely interesting, with unfortunate consequences for the generation of intrinsically valuable knowledge. It helps instead to view science as having a dual or hybrid character. The goal of earth-systems research is an understanding of nature and of the complex interactions among human and natural systems. There may or may not be useful applications of this knowledge. Research on ice-core samples from Greenland and Antarctica, for example, contributes to knowledge of the earth’s history. It has the additional benefit of usefulness – for assessing in conjunction with other geohistorical data propositions about anthropogenic climate change in the present – but such research is not and should not be done exclusively, or even primarily, for the purpose of adding to the stock of policy-relevant knowledge. This returns us to the question of the relations between science and policy. The view that science ultimately dissolves into the world of politics lies at one end of a broad spectrum of normative and empirical


opinions of these relations. At the other end lie interpretations that stress the primacy and the influence of science. The primacy of science In this perspective, arguments defer respectfully to the pathways and prescriptions of scientific research. Proponents fret about the ease with which politics can degenerate into preening, about the cultural marginalization of science, and about the misunderstandings born of ignorance, economic interest, or ill will that thwart the effective communication and application of scientific ideas – the foolish ‘vanities of popular reasoning’, as Galileo dismissed them with his characteristic verve in the 1630s. The geologist Tjeerd van Andel has written with alarm about mounting evidence of public suspicions of science and of scientists, and the apparent readiness of non-scientists to put faith in ideas like Lovelock’s Gaia (which he calls a form of religion). At the root of these problems, in his view, is a fundamental public misunderstanding of science: Behind it all lurks an alienation from the everyday world of science which reacts so slowly, demands proof at every step so unreasonably, discards old ideas only when they are obviously impossible and refuses to reward new genius immediately. (van Andel, 1994: 403) For many biologists and geologists, a quiet devotion to the world of the lab, conference, and field trip is unsatisfying. They need to communicate what they are doing not only to fellow scientists but also to others outside these communities. For some scientists, the frustrations of doing important policy-relevant science lead naturally to support for the activism of scientific communicators and entrepreneurs, pleas for greater investment in the spread of scientific literacy, and calls for the deeper embedding of scientific expertise inside governments and public policy networks. Accordingly, environmental scientists tend to welcome global governance arrangements that come closest to embodying good-science criteria. Judgements vary, but these usually include the agreements negotiated in the 1980s on the protection of the earth’s ozone layer from the threats posed by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other chemicals, and the UN convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP). In such contexts governance actors acknowledge the uncertainties of scientific research findings, but proceed nonetheless to devise effective, science-based policy initiatives.

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Opinions about climate-change institutions and processes have been more conflicted. The ecologist Paul Ehrlich mildly rebuked the IPCC in 2007 for excessive caution in its reporting of climate-change developments. However, he strongly defended its assessment against attacks from the ‘well-paid charlatans’ who, in his view, continued to spread denials of the realities of human-induced change (Ehrlich, 2007). James Hansen, an early leader of climate-change policy science, has concluded from the experience of the Kyoto Protocol that conventional climate-change politics does not work. Corporations are too powerful and too skilled in the greenwashing arts, he maintains, and governments too deferential and tentative (Adam, 2009). Dissenters, however, intensified their assaults on the IPCC as it gradually put greater faith in the dual thesis of warming trends and anthropogenic drivers. They accused it and its supporters of ignoring or even suppressing contrary scientific evidence, taking insufficient time to understand the complexity and the resilience of natural cycles, putting too much reliance on faulty modelling exercises and studies of virtual worlds, failing to consider adequately the monumental economic and social costs involved in the implementation of mitigation strategies, and making false claims of a non-existent scientific consensus. Widely discussed specific failings included the IPCC’s endorsement of exaggerated scientific claims related to the melt rates of Himalayan glaciers. Some defences and criticisms have been grounded in misunderstandings or false expectations of IPCC processes (see Chapter 9). This was established in the late 1980s not as an impartial and autonomous scientific organization but rather as a UN scientific advisory body whose working styles and processes were explicitly designed to incorporate sensitivity to the concerns of governments. The primacy of politics The second broad perspective on the relations between science and policy treats scientific research as an input into policy processes. Science in this view, including areas such as climate change, ecology, and conservation biology, is inescapably political (Forsyth, 2003: 4–5). This is not because its practitioners have partisan goals or political calculations in mind – though they may have – or because the observers of scientists are just following through the implications of an assumption that all things, from diets to the Olympic Games, are ‘political’, but simply because the activities and the outputs of science enter into, and are inevitably influenced by, the games of politics. A blurring of the boundaries between science and society is a feature of post-normal science. The dependence of environmental policy on


science has benefited from and amplified the traditional theory-laden element in scientific activities. Researchers thus pursue scientific projects that resonate both with their own values and with socially defined goals. The results of their work feed back into political controversies. Indeed Aynsley Kellow (2007) has argued that the corrupting seepage of diverse political values into research on climate change, biological diversity, and other questions has severely weakened the quality of environmental science. Scientists, and scientific organizations, try to influence governments for a variety of reasons. Alliances with the powerful – governments, corporations, colonial officials – were features of Victorian science. Some scientists act politically. They become ‘political scientists’, in the way Harold Varmus (2009: 126–8), a distinguished US scientist with many years of experience of lobbying Congressional committees, uses the term. They lobby, write in the media, perform as public intellectuals, argue policy-oriented cases to funding organizations, advise national governmental and intergovernmental agencies, take government jobs, work on private-sector contracts, and wear different hats on different scientific and policy committees. Stephen Bocking (2009) has described four models of environmental science: the familiar one of basic research; the research generated by governments and international agencies as part of their regulatory mandates; the advocacy science that stems from the concerns of citizen groups and environmental organizations; and scientific research devoted to technological innovation. However, the producers of research findings have no guarantee of the final say in decisions on the use of these. In some areas of university research, use and communication are constrained by contractual relationships with industry: Academic institutions play more complicated commercial roles than ever before. University endeavors range from the prosecution and marketing of intellectual property, to active venture capital investment, to intimate involvement in the far-flung contractual networks that are the knowledge economy’s center of gravity. (Owen-Smith, 2005: 63) Scientists do not even have an exclusive role in the interpretation of their own work. Others – non-scientists, lapsed scientists, anti-scientists, and the multiple critics of normal science – influence interpretations and the social circulation of scientific memes. The exponential growth of the scientific literature on climate change and biological diversity

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has clarified some policy issues and helped to lodge these on policy agendas, but it has not diminished the political conflicts and ideological divides on these questions (Hayward, 2006). Outside scientific communities, recipients are not so much listeners open to education as inventive users of science who ‘seek in it justifications for preferred political positions’ (Dimitrov, 2005: 14). A sharpening of political controversy has been particularly evident in the rise of climate-change issues. These have made a transition from bases in scientific discourses and the environmentalist margins to central locations in the mainstreams of ‘respectable’ politics (Gough and Shackley, 2001). Attempts by scientists and their organizations to communicate scientific ideas often provoke unanticipated objections – some legitimate, many scientifically ill-informed. Unsympathetic critics lie in wait and pounce on cautious scientific phrasings of probabilities, calls for more research and the regress of qualifications, as proof that their studies are unfinished or wrong. Scientists, moreover, need simplifying strategies in order to talk to publics and governments. These risk distorting findings. If they rely too much on simple metaphors and labels – like ‘global warming’ – they also risk sparking both political resistance from opponents and outbursts of well meaning but perhaps scientifically misguided political fervour from supporters. Contests about science are thus operative throughout policy processes. Multiple players, not only scientists, can access these circuits. Politics is unavoidable because of the policy-related questions that many scientists pursue, and the content of the policy recommendations they produce. On matters such as climate change, the protection of wildlife species, and the regulation of toxic chemicals, research and recommendations at some point bump into the interests of groups or contain prescriptions that implicitly allocate benefits and costs among these. Science cannot tell us what our moral or policy stance should be on such questions, or tell governments how to make trade-offs between, say, species losses and job losses. Many such problems have a ‘trans-scientific’ character: they are ‘policy-relevant questions that have scientific or technical components but cannot be resolved through scientific means’ (Keller, 2009: 31). Policy, then, ‘cannot simply be derived from knowledge, however firm the knowledge base may be’ (Underdal, 2000: 5). Although it deflates some of the claims, expectations, and egos of scientists, this second broad perspective is a useful reminder that the connection between science and policy is not a straightforward web of research, translation, and application. We would live in a dismally monochrome world if the link were as efficiently seamless as this.


The nature of governance Thinking about governance, the third broad set of questions, orients us towards the complex processes through which societies make, or fail to make, decisions about their natural environments. These processes have global dimensions, which arise from the fractured territoriality of global society. Multiple actors, governmental and non-governmental, are involved. They include almost 200 states. Each of these is sovereign in theory and in the constructions of international law, each marks out and iconizes an ecologically artificial territory, and each is driven by a shifting alloy of concerns in which self-interest, rather than global or neighbours’ needs, is typically dominant. Ethnic, national, linguistic, and other identities foster multiple layers of us–them thinking. Searches for common solutions are easily frustrated by the transaction costs and the other headaches of deals across borders. A profitable metaphor of governance in such settings is not so much that of a machine that produces useful commodities but rather that of a river-network of processes and activities (see Chapter 6). What room is there and should there be, in these circumstances, for rational science-based problem-solving? Several sets of constraints present themselves. Framing problems First, there are extensive political disputes about the nature of global environmental problems. Scientific arguments percolate through complex social, cultural, and political processes. Many developing countries since the early 1970s have framed global environmental issues as the property and responsibility of northern states. Some continue to view climate change in this way. Within richer countries, critics routinely grumble that environmentalism is excessively moralizing, relentlessly humourless, and annoyingly meddlesome. These kinds of constructions profoundly affect the reception of scientific communications and shape the politics surrounding the issues they address. They also influence views of governance. To the extent that governance actors portray global environmental issues as saturated in science or as grounded in the lives of individuals and communities, they are implicitly pressing claims about the policy processes that are appropriate to manage them. Differing perceptions shape the politics of specific issue areas. One initially influential view of global climate change in the late 1980s saw it as a set of policy issues that shared many characteristics with

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problems of ozone-layer protection. In this image both issue areas contained ‘problem’ chemical compounds: various CFCs and others in the case of the ozone layer, and carbon dioxide, methane, and other GHGs in the case of climate issues. Climate change, it followed, should be open to the kinds of governance approaches that were proving effective in the emerging ozone-layer regime. This perspective grossly underestimated both the complexities of the world’s energy economies and the differences between the two issue areas. It was nonetheless a natural jump from the assumption of comparable traits to suppose that climatechange issues could be successfully attacked through the expeditious negotiation of scientifically based international agreements containing binding timetables and targets. Similarly, different framings of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) lie behind the different agricultural trade policy approaches to them taken by the European Union (EU) and the US. Different private and governance actors view GMOs either as novel and risky, because they involve the genetic manipulation by scientists of plant species in laboratories, or as a normal part of a long historical line of well-established agricultural practices of plant breeding (Holmes, 2008: 159–60). Governance actors also construct ‘environmental’ policy agendas in different ways (Boardman, 2001: 62–75). Environmental terminology was not used in the late nineteenth century, even though issues such as urban sewage treatment and the protection of landscape formed parts of the tasks of national and local governments. In recent decades topics such as public health, protected areas, and human rights have jumped in and out of environmental narratives. Particularly since the late 1980s, these discourses have been increasingly reframed in the language of sustainability. Such approaches incorporate diverse ways of integrating economic with environmental policy concerns. Some accounts use ‘ecological’ rather than ‘environmental’ vocabularies as ways of highlighting the energy costs and the natural resources bill built into different goods and activities. The rise of climate-change issues to a dominant position in global environmental policy debates was associated with redefinitions that drew attention to their security implications as problems that would likely exacerbate twenty-firstcentury ethnic and interstate conflicts. Similarly, there is a considerable overlap between constructions of ‘earth-systems’ issues and those on traditional global ‘environmental’ policy agendas (Biermann, 2007). However, these also diverge, for example, in the emphasis that earth-systems approaches place on a variety of geologically and other naturally grounded problems.


Capacities and instruments A second set of governance questions directs attention to the instruments that governments use to respond to environmental policy issues, their capacities, and, more generally, the appropriate powers of governments in democratic systems. It is reasonable to suppose that many goals cannot be reached in laissez-faire settings. Ideological and other divides limit consensus on how far, and in what ways, governments should go beyond this. One traditional strand of environmental thought opts for giving them significantly greater power. The Swedish concept of a ‘strong society’, based on ideas of social cohesion and solidarity, is one such approach. A hypothetical ‘green state’ is a related model. This would be characterized by the predominance of types of state activity aimed at strong ecological modernization [and] a driving and predominant moral purpose in directing social and economic activity toward ecologically sustainable (and socially just) outcomes. (Christoff, 2005: 41) The classical liberal instinct, by contrast, is to want to minimize interventions by governments in societies and economies. The ideas of this tradition have been influential in recent years as many governments have drawn back from so-called command-and-control regulatory approaches to environmental policy, and moved instead towards strategies such as the encouragement of voluntary self-regulation by corporations and industry sectors. Instruments from both sides of this divide can be found in varying combinations in the repertoires of western governments. There are also significant repercussions in global environmental negotiations, since these involve consideration by states of different regulatory and other internationally sanctioned policy directions. Interstate cooperation Global environmental governance issues require cooperation among actors, as do their domestic equivalents. Processes are complex in both settings. In a world of fundamental economic and political inequalities, disproportionate burdens in environmental policy fall heavily on developing countries (Díez, 2008: 21). Many lack the scientific personnel and infrastructure to monitor environmental and earth-systems changes affecting them, the financial and human resources even to participate adequately in international conferences, and the capabilities to ensure compliance with domestic legislation. Policy performance in some is also chronically affected by corruption, as in the issues that

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have repeatedly surfaced in Kenya’s wildlife protection agency. The effectiveness of conservation policies in developing countries appears to be related to measures of democratic governance (Smith et al., 2007). Similar factors may influence earthquake response capabilities. There is nonetheless a long record of accomplishments in international environmental cooperation. Even traditional adversaries collaborate on shared problems, like Greece and Turkey when an earthquake strikes. Traditional tensions constrain prospects in other relationships, such as that between the US and Cuba on hurricanes, and among Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority on water supplies. International meetings have generated hundreds of agreements in areas such as ocean dumping, the trade in hazardous chemicals, the protection of natural heritage sites, the international trade in wildlife, and the ozone layer. States have responded with diverse mixes of supportive commitments and oppositional strategies. International case law and a complex legal body of more informal principles and guidelines supplement formal agreements. Since the landmark 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, the UN and its major agencies have sponsored an unceasing stream of both relatively unnoticed and high-profile intergovernmental meetings on global environmental issues. However, there is no authoritative international body on the global environment – an organization with a mandate and powers comparable, for example, to those of the World Trade Organization on international trade. Even if one were to be established, it is doubtful that it would add significant value to the existing network of intergovernmental bodies (Bauer and Biermann, 2005). Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that concern themselves with the environment vary widely in their powers, the scope of their concerns, and their effectiveness (Le Prestre, 2005: 330). They function in a dynamic world of tribalisms, staunch defences by states of their respective interests, and diverse and vocal non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Their capacities to achieve environmental policy goals depend on their ability to process complex bodies of scientific data, and on the consent of states, which determine their policy processes and outputs and their funding bases. For many years debates on global environmental governance took place in the context of the larger politics of western dissatisfaction with UN bodies, beginning with criticisms of politicization and bureaucratization in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the 1980s. States vary in their responses to IGOs. The US adopted a more assertively and across-the-board unilateralist posture from the late 1990s,


particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, though it cautiously signalled a re-welcoming of multilateralism in some environmental policy areas in 2009. The interests of some states tilt a little towards internationalist options. Japan became a global environmental policy player in the 1990s, with a major commitment to support earth-systems scientific research. The shift reflected strong calls for such steps from domestic groups and was aimed partly at deflecting US criticisms of its continued lack of support for UN peacekeeping and other security initiatives. However, important Japanese economic interests related to whaling and access to the forest resources of south-east Asia were unaffected. Some smaller, poorer or middle-weight countries have traditionally supported IGO-led environmental multilateralism, though, as in New Zealand, such postures are vulnerable to changes in their governing parties. So, generally, have international scientific organizations and environmental NGOs. Different states readily take on lead or crucial support roles in relation to environmental multilateralism, for example, by promoting a new international convention, chairing a scientific working group, hosting a major conference, or providing headquarters facilities for an international secretariat. Governance at multiple levels Governance characteristically functions at several levels. In health, agriculture, defence, and many other areas of public policy, what happens inside societies and states is intimately connected in multiple ways with developments outside their boundaries (Mahon et al., 2007). Economic globalization and regionalization, and the rising power of international trade and financial institutions, have deepened these connections. In the special case of the EU, regional governance arrangements in ‘domestic’ policy areas are more like those of a decentralized federal polity. Studies of the EU, and research on federal systems such as those of the US, Canada, and Australia, increasingly make use of the vocabularies of multilevel governance as a means of capturing the complex interactions among actors and levels that characterize policy processes (Piattoni, 2009). Up to a point this approach exploits vertical imagery. Subnational levels of environmental governance are constitutionally and politically important in federal systems and in heavily regionalized states like Spain. Central governments retain authority for foreign policy, including treaty-making powers and dealings with international and regional organizations. At other levels, city and state governments in the US have pursued initiatives on climate change, and in the US and in Canada groups have pushed successfully for local government initiatives to regulate the cosmetic, or household, use of pesticides.

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The imagery of ‘levels’ of governance, however, does not mean that there is a gradation of top-to-bottom authority. In terms of power and influence, levels are apt to balloon out at the national level and to erode at levels ‘above’ and ‘below’ this (respectively, for example, the regimes surrounding international environmental conventions and the activities of local governments). Often a more fruitful way of viewing multilevel governance is simply as a framework for studying the interactions among multiple governance players. In Canada the federal government negotiates international agreements, but because of the constitutional authority of the provinces on resource and environmental policy, it lacks much of the direct authority to implement these. Complex domestic negotiations thus precede, parallel, and follow on from international deals. How realistic is it to refer to a global level of governance? One problem here is that of social construction. Many, though not all, environmental issues are labelled as ‘global’. The word has a variety of connotations in narratives. One analytical approach is to distinguish among closely related terms. Thus ‘international’ or ‘transnational’ useages may refer to situations in which two or more neighbouring states and their respective internal governance levels are involved, and ‘regional’ terminologies to the problems and practices of states in conventionally defined geographical, economic, and political areas such as south-east Asia or North America. This strategy has the advantage of restricting the term ‘global’ to those issues in which all countries have a stake, such as climate change, continuing threats to the integrity of the ozone layer, and overfishing in the world’s oceans (Bryner, 2004: 70–1). Globalist language can also be used more for rhetorical than for analytical reasons. The labelling process then hides political games. To say an issue is ‘global’ prioritizes it and implies the urgent need for a genuinely multilateral search for solutions. Or, more ominously, it can reflect advocacy of interventions in the sovereign affairs of states, for example, when issues of deforestation and land use in Brazil are described as global because of their transregional atmospheric consequences. Environmentalists have traditionally emphasized the interdependence of global and local – or ‘glocal’ – issues. NGOs urge individuals to recycle, purchase vegetables from local farmers, reconsider consumerist values, bike to work, purchase carbon offsets, refrain from buying overpackaged goods, explore household solar and wind power options, and so on. This hints at an additional horizontal image of global governance. It characteristically takes in municipal-level governments. There is not necessarily an implicit ranking of governance levels, though localist actors may view states and international trade and financial institutions


with a degree of mistrust. The concern here is rather for locale, community, and spirit of place. What matters is not a strengthening of IGOs but the geographical and functional spread in global society of sensitive and responsive societal and governance arrangements. Global environmental governance thus straddles many kinds of ventures. It is beset by multiple tribulations. States and their delegates are present, but these jostle with the worlds of companies and transnational industry associations. NGOs are ubiquitous. Different actors take on, and shed, various forms of legitimacy. Forums compete for support. The forces of inertia vie with pressures for creative change, and the voices of internationalism and regionalism with a clamour of preferences for national and autonomous routes. Scientists have a role in such settings, but so do actors critical of their insights and even of the scientific enterprise itself. Constant politics of uncertainty surround exchanges on the communication of scientific findings. This takes us to the theme of the next chapter.

3 From Systems Complexity to Decisional Uncertainty

Since the early eighteenth century, wits fond of aphorisms have said that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. We can add a third. Uncertainty is also a certainty. Most remarks in science are, or rest on, propositions expressed in terms of probabilities and are characterized by varying degrees of uncertainty. They are typically hedged in with qualifications and with admissions, perhaps self-serving, of the incompleteness of knowledge and the need for further research. None of this means that science has failed a crucial test. It is a normal feature of the scientific enterprise. Outside scientific communities, however, a posture of hesitancy gives rise to misunderstandings. Ideas of consensus and probability, and terms like theory and hypothesis, lose much in translation when they cross borders. Politics, governance, decision making, and power are caught in these webs. The larger the element of uncertainty in scientists’ statements, the greater is the scope for their reinterpretation by others. This applies particularly in areas, like conservation biology and climate change, where the science takes off from a set of broad questions and values, some of which are shared with outsiders, and where the aim of researchers is not only to do good science but also to contribute to good policy. This chapter examines four kinds of uncertainty problems that have particular importance for global environmental governance. First, problems of scientific or epistemic uncertainty spring from the unavoidable constraints of knowledge searches in the natural sciences, especially in relation to complex and large-scale systems. A second and more specific set of problems arises when, as is the case in environmental policy, an understanding of human behaviour is an integral part of the framework of enquiry. Third, in decisional uncertainty the focus turns to the ways 38

From Systems Complexity to Decisional Uncertainty 39

social actors and governments make environmentally relevant decisions and, for example through use of the precautionary principle, how their decision making and interactions respond to epistemic uncertainty. Consideration of political uncertainty problems, the fourth category, sets these questions in the context of the multiple idea sets and the politics of pluralist democracies.

Scientific uncertainty A variety of policy-relevant uncertainty problems arise in relation to data, the methods used to acquire data, systems thinking, and modelling. I will look briefly at the earth-systems dimensions of these and then turn to the strategies scientists use to cope with these constraints. Earth-systems uncertainties The inadequacy and incompleteness of data are enduring features of all sciences. Darwin repeatedly expressed frustration at the gaps in fossil evidence – what he called ‘the extreme imperfection of the geological record’ – in searches for ancient forms of animal life. Data gaps, inaccuracies, and ambiguities intensify (and in part stem from) problems of understanding earth systems. Even a hypothetical condition of perfect data sets would not fully remove these constraints. One geologist subtitled a book on problems of interpreting earth systems Ten Ways to be Wrong (Schumm, 1991). As well as being a route to the testing of ideas, the search for data may be an important goal in itself. It is central to the task of determining the global conservation status of a threatened species. Indeed conservation biology has been described as a ‘crisis discipline’ on the grounds that researchers ‘lack basic natural-history information regarding thousands of species on the precipice of extinction’ (Kareiva, 2002). Good data are crucial to efforts to conserve and manage wildlife species. Inadequate or contested data magnify political controversies. This has happened in attempts to determine the numbers and trends in some populations of polar bears in Canada. As a result of disagreements on data assessments, different governance actors vigorously defend very different policy options ranging from advocacy of increased polar bear hunting quotas to support for moratoriums and more rigorous conservation strategies. The larger and more complex the systems, the greater are the pressures for better data and the more elusive these become. Multiple uncertainties have historically been a characteristic feature of climate-change science

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(Bengtsson, 2001). Assessing climate trends involves ‘a cascade of uncertainties’ (Schneider and Lane, 2006: 14). Data are required on an immense variety of topics relating to economies, for example, energy use, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and the palaeohistorical record of past changes. Data records are inevitably weaker the further back in time we go and they have traditionally been disproportionately derived from monitoring sites in rich countries. Climate scientists make extensive use of models to monitor systems, venture guesses about future conditions, and draw up policy recommendations based on these. There is limited knowledge of the factors at work in many areas, such as the dynamics of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and the interactive effects of aerosols or atmospheric particles. Because of critical data gaps, many important earth-systems questions cannot yet be answered, and the nature of the linkages among biological, geological, atmospheric, and other factors cannot be confidently quantified. The understanding of some phenomena, such as the likely course of a particular hurricane, is heavily dependent on accurate and typically unavailable data on initial conditions and incremental changes in these. Because they determine the level of confidence with which findings can reasonably be viewed, the methods of collecting data have indirect policy implications. Innovative techniques for acquiring data have shaped the course of earth-systems research. They made possible the systematic and accurate mapping of seafloors from the 1950s and expanded knowledge of the chemical constituents of rocks from the 1960s. Geologists and others use ingenious techniques for the indirect study of the earth’s mantle. Diverse and rich proxy sources of data have become common in research into the earth’s climatic history. They include the more familiar study of tree rings, together with studies of fossil pollens and spores; the record of atmospheric chemistry trapped in ice-core samples; sediments from lakes, estuaries, and seafloors; and corals, whose growth patterns are dependent on sea-surface temperatures. All provide clues about past conditions that contribute to assessments of the drivers and significance of current changes. Differences in the methods used in the history of climate research also have consequences. Records from early monitoring sites set up too close to cities, for example, may have had a heat-island bias. Scientists in the IPCC network have had to make adjustments to data sets put together in the past decades, for example on sea-surface temperatures, to facilitate comparability with recent observations (Le Treut et al., 2007: 102). An old puzzle from the 1940s was not finally resolved until over four decades later. It concerned the record of an apparent global cooling in


1945, amounting to a fall of about 0.3 °C in global sea-surface temperatures. The anomalous drop was over the years variously attributed to atomic explosions, an El Niño event, and changes in coal use. Historical research on the methods that had been used for recording temperatures finally provided the answer. Relatively few sea-surface temperature measures were taken in the early 1940s because of war, and most were carried out by the US Navy. When normal sampling was resumed in 1945, the tasks were initially taken over by British ships. But these used different, and more traditional, techniques. The US practice had been to make use of the water taken on board by ships to cool their engines; measures were thus subject to engine-room and other effects. The British crews, by contrast, used uninsulated buckets to collect seawater samples, and took measures on deck. The samples were thus cooler (Schiermeier, 2008). In some fields data are critically dependent on classification schemes and indices. The taxonomic schemes conventionally used to study wildlife species, and the definitions of terms in various categories of threat status (which have historically varied among countries), have an obvious bearing on the data that biologists seek. Critics have argued that the indices used to describe biological diversity may be inadequate to capture it and that some measures may tolerate evidence of significant reductions in the numbers of a population or species (Faith et al., 2007). There has been a prolonged controversy over the definitions and categories used by IUCN to collect data on and assess the global status of threatened and endangered species (see Chapter 8). Systems thinking has become a normal and scientifically productive way of viewing the earth. This approach not only enhances scientific capabilities but also magnifies research and data challenges. Researchers have to try to make meaningful connections among processes in the atmosphere, oceans, and other large-scale domains of the earth. Some of the characteristic challenges are evident in the study of weather systems. Here sequences of events tend to be highly dependent on small changes in initial conditions. It is notoriously difficult, and may in principle be impossible, to secure a full description of these conditions and changes in them over time. Uncertainties increase as multiple phases are included and spatial scales are expanded. Even a hypothetical condition of perfect knowledge of hurricanes would thus not necessarily lead to high levels of predictive power in relation to specific events. Scientists can nonetheless increasingly make more confident probability statements about the path of a hurricane as it takes shape. While weather-system predictions for practical use have improved

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considerably, particularly at local and mesoscales (timescales up to a few days and spatial scales of up to about 200 kilometres), inherent uncertainties still limit observers’ capabilities (Lin, 2007: 10–11, 55). The self-evident difficulty of such tasks is compounded by the argument that it may not be feasible to study earth systems using traditional lines of scientific enquiry. Earth systems are non-linear and highly complex, and their study is thus inescapably characterized by high levels of uncertainty (Schellnhuber, 2002: 151–9). Some researchers have accordingly used insights from chaos theory to study earth-systems complexities (Hergarten, 2002: Ch. 4), and to try to enhance earthquakeforecasting capabilities, or turned to ‘fuzzier’ conceptions of propositions that relax conventional scientific notions of rigour (Prentice, 1998: 223–4). Such strategies do not of course have universal appeal. Critics point out that uncertainties cannot be wished away by a strategy of embracing yet more sets of systems complexities. And the goal of understanding earth systems in an integrated fashion, some suspect, may just be unattainable in principle (Clifford and Richards, 2005). Systems thinking is closely related to a further source of uncertainty. This is the widespread use of models. Modelling, for example the development of coupled models of atmospheric and oceanic processes, has a long history dating back to the late 1960s (see Chapter 5). Depending on their interests scientists build in other phenomena, such as vegetation. These efforts have contributed to the design of a variety of earth-systems models that incorporate diverse biogeochemical cycles. The complexity and interconnectedness of climate processes and other earth-systems phenomena make modelling necessary. The general approach also builds on traditional scientific problem-solving strategies in relation to questions not amenable to experimental methods. Scientists obviously do not have the capability of, say, experimentally doubling carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere (ideally in conjunction with studies of an earth-like control planet) and waiting to see what happens. However, major problems accompany modelling. These have to accommodate multiple variations in spatial and time scales. Scientists from many disciplines are interested in earth-systems processes and adapt models to their respective concerns. The data and computer science demands are considerable, especially if the long-term goal is the production of smoothly running four-dimensional, high-resolution images of critical processes. The high degree of simplification that models often entail worries some observers. If earth systems are characterized by huge, and perhaps ultimately indecipherable, dimensions of complexity, they ask, how can its constituent structures and processes


be represented by simple abstractions of boxes, circles, arrows, and loops? By emphasizing multiple forms of systemic interconnectedness, moreover, modelling may discourage more rigorous attempts to frame hypotheses about specific relationships (Rodhe et al., 2000). To achieve their objectives, then, models have to leave out elements of the real world. Antarctica has had a problematic history in attempts to forecast ranges of sea-level rise in coming decades. It has often been left out of models because of inadequate data and incomplete knowledge and in order to simplify calculations in simulated realities. Model builders have to make decisions about what to include, what kind of detail is needed and where, and how comprehensive they should be in their use of explanatory or independent variables. Such choices reflect cultural and political values as well as scientific biases. One critic has observed that geologists ‘accept model calculations as representative of reality both on a naïve basis and in order to support their premise’ (Paul DeCarli, quoted in Glen, 2005: 109). To the degree that projects are intended to answer policy-relevant questions, researchers in practice have to make further choices aimed at making the models themselves and their inferences understandable to non-scientists. The dependence of climate science on modelling thus expands the uncertainty associated with key policy questions such as how climates are likely to alter as GHG concentrations rise (Stainforth et al., 2005). Coping strategies Science relishes uncertainty. It rests on a range of criteria, from formal definitions of the procedures which can best ensure the adequate testing of falsifiable statements to the more loosely understood assumptions that scientists use in practice to guide their research activities. Among the norms are respect for the judgements made by individuals and teams in areas recognized as within their sphere of expertise; shared understandings of how to evaluate data, methods, and models; a constantly mindful state of alertness to the possibility of alternative interpretations of phenomena; a commitment to procedures of consensus formation; a stoic acceptance of inconclusiveness; and faith in the collaborative nature of science. Other features, often surprising to non-scientists, include the role of intuition in scientific problem solving, a sense of aesthetic appreciation of the workings of natural systems and, for the mathematically inclined, of elegance in good representations of these, and the resort to whimsy for devising nomenclature and acronyms. Good-science norms thus recognize the unavoidability of epistemic uncertainty. So do the values underlying policy-oriented scientific

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research, such as that on climate change. In these areas, however, researchers have to come up with findings that, while respecting these norms, are nonetheless sufficiently malleable to form a basis for policy discussions. The IPCC, in trying to communicate both scientific findings and also the facts of uncertainty, has over the years produced a succession of rules for participating scientists (Manning, 2006). These guidelines have, at various times, covered issues such as the confidence with which a statement can be made, the range of likelihood glosses that can be attached to specific forecasts (such as predictions of temperature changes, sea-level rise, and changes in vegetation cover), and, for qualitative research, categories that indicate the extent of supporting evidence, its quality, and how much consensus there is on findings in the literature. An ethnographic eye can also detect socialization and acculturation processes in scientific communities. These too play a part in shaping responses to uncertainty. Scientists are typically not cowed into inactivity by an awareness of its presence. They defend and attack interpretations and colleagues in the vigorous games of science. In such exchanges they may put caution temporarily on hold, inflate the confidence levels they implicitly hook onto statements, and blur the boundaries between conjectures, assertions, and findings. Scientists during their careers also make critical choices, perhaps several times, about which field or subfield to enter and, more frequently, about which research questions to pursue. They operate within close-knit communities. Choices, relationships, and values then subtly influence each other. One GMO researcher has observed that someone opposed to or concerned about genetic engineering would not have chosen work in this area, but would instead have focused on another area of biology. Such a moral choice about biotechnology and genetic engineering would be made much earlier in their careers. The arrival on the job could therefore be taken as an indication that individuals in the work believed in its goals. (Holmes, 2008: 132) Such intra- and extra-community influences are more complex and pervasive in those areas of scientific research, like ecology in the 1970s and climate change in the 1990s, that stimulate and respond to intense public and governmental interest. In the case of climate change, moreover, much of the science and the syntheses of research findings have, in recent years, taken place in the highly institutionalized social context


of the work of the IPCC. Overall processes of consensus formation retain respect for the procedural norms of science and the autonomy of individual scientists and teams, but interwoven among these characteristics are strong direct and indirect influences from social values and public policy debates. Cultures of contention and conflict also appear. Heated exchanges and an impassioned clinging to divergent lines of reasoning marked the process that led eventually to consensus in geology in the 1960s on the plate tectonics view (Oreskes, 1999). Those on the losing side of the continental drift battle saw this not as the precursor to a creative Kuhnian paradigm shift but rather as a deeply depressing story of the silencing of critics and the victory of dogma over reason. One geologist wrote afterwards of ‘the confining walls of conformist dogma’ at work in his discipline (Cary, 1988: 120). ‘Dogma’ has been an intriguingly tractable word in the history of science. Francis Crick famously used the term in a positive light in 1958 to describe his view of the sequencing of information transfers from DNA to RNA to proteins. He wrote later that he coined the ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology, moreover, on the basis of only ‘fragmentary experimental results, themselves often uncertain and confused’ (Crick, 1970: 561). The more common pejorative sense of ‘dogma’ became a weapon of climate-change antagonists as the IPCC moved in the early 2000s to claim a scientific consensus on warming and on the causal significance of anthropogenic forcing. Proponents and their supporters detected dogma among sceptics and deniers; dissenters complained loudly of dogma in the IPCC and its scientific networks and of the unpleasant politics of achieving a false consensus by silencing questioning voices. Climate change was thus unique in its combination of a scientific controversy sharper even than that over continental drift, with a culture war that increasingly despatched supporters of contending views – scientists and non-scientists alike – into separate, strictly demarcated, and non-communicating encampments.

Anthropogenic uncertainty The magnitude and diversity of human impacts on the global environment have intensified during the Holocene (see Chapter 2). They are, for the most part, the accumulated effects in the past few thousand years of microlevel decisions by individuals, social groups, and governments about farming practices, the use of technologies, land reclamation, the exploitation of a resource, trade, the requirements of human habitation, and

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many other topics. Historically, those making such decisions typically did not give much thought to their global, or even their local, environmental repercussions. Many systems processes, and large portions of the earth’s surface, can increasingly be viewed partially as the products, or as emergent properties at the macrolevel, of these activities. This consideration adds a crucial dimension to the uncertainty issues we have been discussing so far. To understand global change, we have to understand not only the physical and biological systems investigated by natural scientists, a daunting enough task in itself, but also to navigate the interconnections between these systems and human decisions and actions. The implications for uncertainty are formidable. Human beings, and the multiple social groups to which they belong, by their nature generate uncertainty. They can be studied by sociobiologists, economists, and others in ways that reduce the uncertainty inherent in observations of them, but tangents of unpredictability constantly threaten would-be pattern-detectors. A persistent divide in the social sciences concerns the value of methodologies influenced by natural-science developments. Critics point out that humans are unlike the butterflies and boulders studied by biologists and geologists. They produce meanings. They ‘talk back’ to those observing them and may disagree with observers’ interpretations of their actions. These may or may not coincide with observers’ or even their own definitions of rationality, interest, morality, or consistency. Views and actions may change capriciously. They have theories of mind, or an understanding of the difference and personhood of others. They have their own tales to tell about environmental problems. For some, this understanding of natural systems expands to knowledge of ancient events and of the interiors of stars. We cannot adequately grasp what humans are doing in relation to their natural environments without understanding something of their thoughts and feelings and the multiple responses they have to living in groups. Some problems can be resolved through varying degrees of simplification, as in modelling, but these in turn open up fresh layers of difficulties. To the degree that discussions of biodiversity, climate change, geological hazards, and other issues play down such problems, or that modelling attempts make selective decisions to cut short the corresponding chains of variables, they fail to capture adequately either the mutability present in human responses to environmental problems or the explanatory factors that give rise to these. Systems complexities increase the incentive to marginalize or oversimplify some factors. A researcher might black box individuals and organizations on the assumption that much of what goes on inside minds and


in social interactions can reasonably be ignored, with minimal costs to research and to any pragmatic policy-relevant inferences it generates. Or researchers may implicitly rely on simple independent variables such as individual and organizational self-interest and see these as invariant by culture, time, and circumstances. Such strategies risk bringing humans into the global ecological picture only as grey two-dimensional figures who mindlessly pollute their environment and misuse natural resources. A related temptation has been to extrapolate from patterns of land use, resource consumption, oil depletion, habitat fragmentation, GHG production, and other activities. Identifying trend lines is useful, but its value is weakened if it leaves little room for appreciation of the likelihood, the causes, and the ecological consequences of learning, creativity, and innovation by individuals, groups, and governments. These kinds of issues have surfaced in debates in the IPCC. Some critics have charged that the IPCC has paid insufficient attention in its projections to the consequences of possible mitigation decisions by governments and other actors. It has, however, emphasized the significance of such decisions and investigated the likely consequences of different energy-use options (Romm, 2008).

Decisional uncertainty In the third type of uncertainty, attention shifts to deciding agents. These come in many forms: individuals, households, groups, government agencies, and multinational corporations, to name a few. Uncertainty conditions any decision at any level, from an individual’s selection of a television channel to a state’s resort to war. Making choices involves wrestling with different ways of assessing situations, the thoughts and actions of others, and the consequences of alternative courses of action. The subclass of ecologically relevant decisions involves uncertainty because of insufficiency of information about real-world conditions, including the intentions of others, unanticipated consequences, and the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. Choice in uncertainty The uncertainties of economic life were emphasized by Knight, Keynes, and other economists of the first half of the twentieth century. Uncertainty is also a staple of business activities and has been much studied in these contexts. The knowledge a firm has of its environment (in the sense of its external business milieu) is necessarily imperfect. Uncertainties proliferate in the vagaries of consumers; the

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tactics of competitors, suppliers, and subcontractors; the negotiating stances of workforce representatives; the prices of resources; the costs and the benefits of a new technology; the availability of credit; and the presumed fickleness of government policies. Thinking of strategies to contain multiple flows of uncertainties is a constant preoccupation. To cope, managers may even make decisions that appear to defy precepts of rationality, for example by consciously excluding relevant data or resorting to what company sceptics sometimes dismiss as ‘religious’ reasoning. Decision making in environmental policy, particularly where global levels are concerned, is particularly challenging because it requires judgements about complex and interacting ecological, economic, social, and other systems, and presupposes knowledge drawn from multiple disciplines (Young, 2001). Predictive capabilities are accordingly weak. Simplifying assumptions and other uncertainty-reducing strategies can help. Actors engage in metagames in which they compete to promote differing representations of realities and differing views of the presence and significance of uncertainty. An NGO might seek more data in order to criticize a government action more credibly and a government may take steps to improve its scientific advisory networks in order to expand its resources of useable knowledge. Neither can know for sure the consequences of different options – a carbon tax, for example, the reintroduction of a threatened species to an area, or the construction of a canal to divert flood waters. Actions may have unanticipated consequences that benefit ecosystems, as in the enrichment of biodiversity in the zone dividing North and South Korea. Increasingly insurance companies and investment banks are among the actors that have had to concern themselves with earth-systems issues. Traditional approaches are inadequate, however, for anticipating many low-frequency, high-cost events such as earthquakes, catastrophic wildfires, and tsunamis (Makowski, 2006: 53). Earth-systems risks associated with extremely long-term events like the onset of the next ice age, or very rare ones such as collisions with large near-earth objects (NEOs), in practice fall outside the range of social and governmental planning. Important subjective dimensions of uncertainty affect individual decision making and responses to risks. Actors may feel they have surer knowledge of situations and the likely consequences of their actions than is warranted by objective considerations or by the standards of less engaged observers. Subjective factors cushion unattractive prospects. There are varying degrees of relatively high tolerance, on the part of


those living in the area, of the very high risk of a major earthquake in California at some point during the next 10–30 years. Part of the acceptance of the risk stems from rational considerations, such as a calculated trust in the likely efficacy of emergency response measures, but a large part is not. Other responses of individuals to risk seem odder. A temporary increase in lipstick purchases was reported in the US in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Many people switched to cars, statistically a more dangerous form of transportation, rather than take flights. The choice was rational, up to a point, given memories of the catastrophe and uncertainty about whether more attacks would follow (Gigerenzer, 2004). Even so, the change resulted in an estimated several hundred additional deaths, disproportionately more on local roads than on interstate highways, in the 12 months after 9/11. Precautionary decision making The precautionary principle represents an attempt to steer processes of decision making under conditions of uncertainty. It can be tilted towards an anti-environmentalist posture, for example, by highlighting the risks, uncertainties, and economic costs involved in the inappropriate introduction of environmental policy measures. In practice the precautionary principle has been designed to press the case for appropriate environmentalist action. It reflects old truisms: in an uncertain world, it is good advice to be prudent and to look before leaping. This does not mean failing to act in circumstances where acting would be beneficial or making premature (‘decisive’ or ‘courageous’) choices before it is reasonable to do so. In older regulatory approaches, for example in relation to potentially hazardous foods or medicinal products, a presumption of safety was made until governments could demonstrate harm. By contrast, precautionary ideas emphasize the anticipation and prevention of hazards. Given inevitable uncertainty, at what point do we have enough information to make a good decision? What are the clues for recognizing when this point has been reached? (Myers, 2005: 99–102). Such questions have broad relevance across all areas of environmental policy, for example in issues connected with an invasive plant species, a mining project, a new food additive, or the location of a waste site. Diverse precautionary guidelines, including procedures for evaluating risk, have entered many national and international governance settings. These include the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US, though they are more explicit and entrenched in Germany and other EU jurisdictions.

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Unfortunately, the tipping points for action are difficult to identify with precision in legal formulas of risk assessment. Further, considerable data and analytical obstacles hinder the tracking by regulatory bodies of the effects of chemicals such as endocrine-disrupting substances. The consequences of pesticide applications are often difficult to assess: The extent of release during pesticide application may not be well characterized. Once the pesticide is released, the exposure pathways leading to an individual’s exposure are complex and difficult to understand and model. Some of the released substance may be transformed in the environment to a more or less toxic substance. The resulting overall exposure of the community near where the pesticide is released can vary substantially among individuals by age, geographic location, activity patterns, eating habits, and socioeconomic status. Thus, there can be considerable uncertainty and variability in how much pesticide is received. (EPA, 2009: 94) Precautionary arguments have also been widely used in debates on the use of renewable natural resources. Critics have used events such as the collapse of the cod fishery off Canada’s east coast to question traditional resource-use notions of yield and harvesting. Precautionary thinking in such cases is related to the spread in international law of ecosystem approaches, for example in relation to Antarctic marine living resources (Trouwborst, 2009). The precautionary principle has a wide range of potential applications in relation to geological hazards and natural disasters, for example, in decision making about the protection of communities and infrastructure along cyclone or lava paths, housing construction in earthquake zones, and on the appropriate responses to volcanic ash clouds. The Maldives and other island countries of the Indian and Pacific Oceans have to make tough short- and long-term adaptation decisions because of the uncertainties involved in projections of enhanced weather-system variability and global sea-level rise in coming decades. However, even the best procedural designs cannot eliminate politics. The precautionary principle remains for some not so much a technical device for coping with uncertainty as a value-laden, politically controversial instrument. The US and Canada are among the countries that have used the presence of precautionary terminology, veiled or explicit, as a litmus test to evaluate the political acceptability of international agreements. Both countries, as a result, were highly critical of the


biosafety protocol of the CBD. The legal embedding of the principle in various EU jurisdictions has not halted political controversy, for example, on whether the formal designation of protected species and sites should make allowance for non-scientific criteria such as economic impacts. In Europe and in the US, hearings allow for some measure of public participation on such issues, but conservationist critics have worried that these can too easily inflame anti-scientific biases.

Political uncertainty Political uncertainties cannot, then, be eliminated entirely from decisional procedures guided by precautionary approaches. Political debates pay varying amounts of attention to the concerns of scientists. Most subplots in these debates escape the strictures of good science. There is ample room for the proponents of different viewpoints to insert alleged certainties into data gaps, to overlook awkward questions about the provenance of specific knowledge claims, and either to deflate or treat as conclusive the tentative remarks of the cautious scientist. The habitat needs of politics are large. They expand as scientific issues become mixed with economic, moral, and other questions. The resulting mixtures structure policy processes on topics such as biological diversity, the management of the carbon cycle, and the conservation of coastal zones. Policy debates typically include gambits that ask about knowledge sources. Questioning what we know and how we know it is only partly a device aimed at increasing the truth value of propositions. It also springs from defences of and attacks on political and ideological viewpoints. Uncertainty statements can be used, together with the backing of the precautionary principle, to buttress the case for carbon regulation and the viability of a shift to a low-carbon future. They can also be deployed as instruments to support the opposing case. Critics in the US opposed to GHG regulation have made extensive and effective use of observations about the uncertainty of climate science findings and predictions as a means of derailing the case for government action (Oreskes, 2004). If firm and useable conclusions have not yet emerged from climate science, then actions by governments to control GHGs are premature and also high in both real and in opportunity costs (because scarce resources have to be diverted away from other policy areas). Market-oriented critics insist that, by damaging economies, such measures are likely to be counterproductive. Indeed the magnitude of the costs, according to climate-change sceptics, calls for a correspondingly higher degree of confidence that levels of scientific uncertainty

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have indeed been reduced significantly. China uses uncertainty arguments to defend caution in climate-change policy: There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous. Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects. We are not focusing on what will happen with a one-degree or two-degree increase, we are looking at what level will be a danger to the environment. In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today. (quoted in Watts [2009]) Debates on ecologically related issues have to cope with diverse knowledge situations, including those ‘where we don’t know what we don’t know’ (Forsyth 2003 : 233). The condition applies across all public policy areas. As former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it in early 2002, in much publicized (and parodied) remarks: [A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. A heartfelt and openly admitted faith in uncertainty is obviously not a secure basis for policy advocacy by an NGO or by a political party gearing up for an election. (The Know-Nothing Party had some electoral success in the mid-1800s in Massachusetts and other states, but its name was chosen for tactical reasons; voters were aware of the antiimmigration planks in its platform.) In practice much environmental policy advocacy, in an ironic contrast with the multiple uncertainties that permeate many areas of environmental science, is based on strongly held convictions. Epistemological sorties are thus part of wider political battles on science and its uses and on scientists and their roles. Uncertainty might be a norm of scientific cultures but it is widely misunderstood, or viewed as an embarrassing impediment, in public assessments (Bocking, 2004: 30). A normal public expectation is that when societies have to make decisions on science-related topics, scientists and other experts are capable of providing ‘the facts’ on which these decisions are at least partially to be based. Non-scientists are apt to get restless when scientists appear to shirk this duty by talking of probabilities, or when they disagree with each other, retreat into scientisms and apparent obscurities,


or display excessive caution in the face of self-evidently high-urgency policy problems. Some dislike the biases they detect in science, for example, where epistemologies discount other routes to knowledge or deflate the presumptions of non-scientists. On the other side of the relationship, scientists have their own qualms. Public and governmental expectations can appear overreaching. If they are not indifferent or overtly hostile to the scientific enterprise, non-scientists often appear too eager for speedy and useful results, too ready to jump to conclusions or to a supposed moral high ground and to generalize on the basis of a few anecdotal examples, too caught up in today’s news, and too impatient to tolerate the long processes of delayed gratification that accompany scientific research. There seems, in other words, to be a public and governmental preference for a statement that seems right, regardless of the evidence and reasoning that went into it, rather than for one that scores well on such criteria but could be wrong. Misunderstandings abound of the methods and mores of good science. Consensually accepted scientific viewpoints, such as evolution by natural selection, continental drift, and anthropogenically enhanced climate change, may be dismissed as ‘only theories’, with the implication that these are ‘merely opinions’ with which anyone, scientifically trained or not, might legitimately disagree. The arts of modelling, of making assumptions and relaxing them, of simplifying reality, and controlling the flow of complexities, are particularly vulnerable to misunderstandings. The scientific frame of mind is not well equipped to cope with such cascades of political uncertainties. The intra-community processes of science are so intense and demanding that any conclusion that somehow emerges from them tends to take on a settled air. As a result, for many scientists, public objections to scientific interpretations seem baffling or malicious, especially when sustained communications efforts fail to dislodge them. It is of course much too simple to generalize about scientists and nonscientists in a two-camp fashion. Each clustering is very diverse. Many scientists in environmental policy areas share the environmentalist values of non-scientists. They view their work as contributing to the understanding that can guide sound social and governmental action. They do not form a homogeneous group. The recipients of scientific communications likewise vary in their tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, their sympathy with scientific modes of reasoning, and the economic and other interests through which they filter scientific communications.

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At the root of these mutual misunderstandings are nonetheless some mundane facts of political life. First, multiple audiences receive policyrelevant scientific findings and multiple users press these into action in policy processes. They reinterpret scientific statements, whether these are made with a high degree of confidence or come with thickly textured qualifications (Weiss, 2006: 316). Diverse groups – firms, policy institutes, environmental organizations, government agencies, intergovernmental bodies – come to these materials with their own framings of problems and preferred courses of action. Additional problems arise when risk communications stimulate memories of past messages. If a predicted flu outbreak or global temperature increase does not materialize, the failure jeopardizes subsequent communications by scientists and may provoke a general questioning of their credibility. Scientists and scientific organizations have to engage in their own interpretive processes in order to communicate findings to wider publics. This task is more straightforward where scientists share values and policy goals with the intended targets of communications, but even in these cases multiple reinterpretations by recipients produce additional political uncertainties. The communications resources of scientists are limited, moreover, by a lack of time in busy research environments and to some extent by calculations of the reputational costs that may be associated with media exposure. Climate-change scientists have attempted to enhance the credibility of their findings by highlighting epistemic uncertainties, only to find in some cases that this has the self-defeating effect of providing critics with fresh ammunition to criticize their assumptions, cast doubt on their findings, assert that these are only ‘opinions’, and deny their usefulness for policy. Additional layers of selective reporting and simplification by friendly NGOs help in circulating policy messages but risk diluting their associated scientific content still further. In a much-discussed and controversial critique, parts of which he later qualified, Bjørn Lomborg, himself a former Greenpeace supporter, argued that environmental groups not only oversimplify complex situations, they wilfully as well as through misunderstandings create and spread inaccuracies on a long list of topics such as fish stocks, topsoil, air pollution, coral reefs, and climate change. They replace carefully calibrated and provisional scientific observations with false certainties. Environmental groups manipulate data in order to construct and maintain the view that the global environment is rapidly deteriorating because of human actions, whereas in fact, Lomborg argued, there is ‘no ecological catastrophe looming around the corner to punish us’. Rather, we have


more leisure time, greater security and fewer accidents, better education, more amenities, higher incomes, fewer starving, more food, and healthier and longer lives. (Lomborg, 2001: 4–5, 348) The argument, not surprisingly, provoked a furious and concerted response by environmentalists and environmental scientists. Secondly, environmental ideas have their own logics. The main outlines of the conventional global climate-change narrative, if not the complexities and qualifications that climate scientists weave into it, are well known. Its structures are remarkably simple and the evidence in its supporting props is satisfyingly plausible. Its main points are easily communicated. Multiple daily sources of information and experience reinforce beliefs: hotter than usual summers in the 1990s, hurricanes, wildfires, and media images of smokestacks and of polar bears searching for ice platforms. Neither the persistence of the view nor its internal coherence indicates whether the anthropogenic climate-change thesis is either right or wrong. The larger processes of social and political psychology – the ways that beliefs are formed, maintained, altered, or protected in responses to information and influence attempts, and circulated in social networks – are different from those that govern processes in science. An understanding of both sets of processes is required for a comprehensive appraisal of climate change and other global environmental policy processes. Thirdly, ideas about the global environment do not exist in a political vacuum. They interact with other issues, particularly those concerned with the management of economies, public health, and the use of energy and natural resources. They connect readily too with big questions of the good society, the moral individual, the proper spheres of action of governments, and the appropriate balance between technical expertise and political judgement in the arts of governance. Clashes between the diverse ideologies that treat such subjects spark multiple political uncertainties. In ancient Athens, Plato (at least in The Republic) elevated his case against the inherent corruption of democracies into an argument for rule by those with scientific knowledge. His preferred society, or the model against which real-world societies should be understood and evaluated, was one from which uncertainty had been banished. Science, broadly conceived, became the supreme problem solver. It was there to advise governments not on what were probably their optimal policy options in conditions of uncertainty but to tell them what were the

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right decisions on defence, education, censorship of the arts, the diets of citizens, and the biological rules for producing future generations. Modern conservatives, by contrast, tend to object when too much deference is paid to scientific expertise in matters of public policy. Many suspect that this stance swiftly degenerates into a vote for a world of central planning mechanisms, powerful bureaucrats, the erosion of civic and economic freedoms, high taxes, and unappealingly visionary blueprints for the engineering of social improvement. Uncertainty, from this perspective, cannot be eliminated from society and attempts to test this proposition in environmental and other forms of policy experimentation are dangerous. Diverse liberal and social-democratic traditions also confront the problems of living with risk and uncertainty. Interventionist-minded liberal critics have traditionally disagreed with those influenced by the classical liberal accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on how much power governments should have and how extensive their activities should be. The unsafe bridge was a common example in the 1800s. Would a government warning sign suffice, leaving decision making and judgement for individuals? Should the public be barred because of risks to their safety? At what point, if any, should a new bridge be built with public funding and its management taken over by a government agency? Echoes of such underlying philosophical questions can be heard in a wide range of later issues such as the regulation of food and medicinal products, the treatment of carcinogens, the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, and adaptation and mitigation strategies in climate-change policy. In these as in any of the complex issue areas framed in the light of the environmental and earth-systems sciences, full confidence and uncontested propositions about the nature of realities, and about the consequences and the desirability of alternative social or governmental actions, are not achievable. Public policy areas that make extensive use of the insights of science require too, the arts of political judgement and the accommodative skills of political practitioners.

4 The Earth Theory Tradition

From the more general discussion in the last two chapters of the relations between science and policy, this chapter and the next turn more specifically to the ideas that have shaped the scientific understanding of earth systems. The account does not aspire to be comprehensive. It proceeds in two steps. Themes and directions in contemporary earth-systems research are discussed in Chapter 5. The present chapter serves as a preface to that discussion by looking briefly at a critical formative episode in the early history of earth-systems thinking. The first part of the chapter discusses the origin in the eighteenth century of modern scientifically grounded studies of the earth. Current earth-systems research cannot be adequately understood without taking into account the developments of this period. Somewhere towards its close lie the beginnings of the scientific discipline of geology. Before this, many scholars had pursued a ‘theory of the earth’, but geology had been in effect an extension of or a co-partner with theological enquiry. The views of the Scottish Enlightenment scientist, engineer, and businessman, James Hutton, exerted a major influence on the course of geological thought. His writings also reveal an interest in the interactions among geological, biological, and other processes that many later geologists tended to ignore, but which were rediscovered two centuries later in earth-systems syntheses. The second part of the chapter looks at the rise of the geological sciences and their connections with these later developments.

Enlightenment contexts There are important continuities as well as disjunctures between older and newer traditions of earth-systems study. Exploring them, however, 57

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can be hazardous. The scientific writings of past centuries are distorted if viewed just through the lenses of the present, or primarily in terms of questions about their influence on later ideas. Some pioneering historians of geology cast it as an unblemished record of progress in scientific understanding and social improvement. Methodological adjustments are required to probe early scientific texts. These often absorbed stylistic elements from philosophical and literary works, and differ profoundly from current genres of scientific writing. During the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, writings on the earth were deeply etched with moral and religious concerns. From current vantage points, the juxtapositions have an awkward air. Writers saw study of the earth as having value partly as a venture in natural philosophy (or science), but more because of the light such enquiries afforded of God’s purposes. Theological reasoning led to specific interpretations, for example the view of the earth as only a few thousand years old. This had not been a permanent feature of geological thought. Leonardo da Vinci had puzzled over fossils and had seen in them clues to the great age of the earth. Jean Buridan, writing in the fourteenth century, also viewed the earth as immensely ancient (Oldroyd, 1995: 26). Hutton, writing in the 1780s and 1790s, reinvigorated the idea. The earth was old – indeed, without a detectable beginning in time. More importantly, in his view, science could investigate its mechanisms without having recourse to divine independent variables. In the Scottish Enlightenment of roughly the second half of the 1700s, the creators, reworkers, and purveyors of ideas in geology sat alongside and argued with colleagues from many other fields of knowledge. Conversations prized geological topics. The effects in Scotland of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 were widely known, as were the ways in which David Hume and other philosophers had taken this event as evidence of the vacuity of conventional theological thought. The city of Edinburgh, set in the landscape of the Lothians and with a centre dominated by the Castle Rock, itself inspired geological ruminations (McIntyre, 1997). Clubs were the centres of intellectual life. There were many flavours – literary, economic, scientific, philosophical. Disciplinary boundaries were fluid and questioning across them was respected. Benjamin Franklin and others came to experience Edinburgh’s ‘ambience of learned cosmopolitanism’ (Sher, 2006: 109). Genius was seemingly ubiquitous. Knowledge was thought worth pursuing in large part to the extent that it could contribute to practical objectives, from the discovery of new metallurgical processes to the fostering of education and the

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moral development of individuals (Wood, 2003: 103). The values that permeated conversations rested on the core Enlightenment beliefs: in the rationality and goodness of individuals, secular reason as the basis for enquiry, the presence of orderliness and harmony in nature and the importance of corresponding traits in scientific and literary works, and in the civic and political values of liberty and equality.

James Hutton and the elusive theory of the earth James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe, was published in 1788 by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It had been presented in two papers to the society three years earlier. A longer study, in which Hutton expanded on the argument and responded to some of his critics, appeared towards the end of his life in 1795. In view of his stature in the history of geology and his reputation as an expositor of grand principles, it is easy to forget the wide range of his practical and intellectual interests. At various times he was busy with engineering, innovations in technology, business, canal-construction, farming, and the cutting edge world of steam power. He had had early training in law and graduated in medicine in the Netherlands. Business and scientific acumen was combined in his successful development of a process for extracting sal ammoniac from the residues in chimneys. He was an astute observer of rocks. At one famous site he observed tilted layers of both sedimentary and volcanic rocks and argued that these could not have been caused by a flood. The criticism from some of his contemporaries that his writings on ‘the constitution of the earth’ were merely speculative, and that they lacked a foundation in first-hand observations, was unfounded. By the 1780s theorizing about the earth was a well-established pursuit of natural philosophers. This was a scholarly form that had popular appeal beyond the universities, scientific societies, and literary clubs of the day. It made forays into the mysteries of fossils. It had literary and philosophical as well as scientific overtones. For many the appeal of earth theorizing lay in its location on the borders of theology and science. Of the two, the theological groundings were firmly established. One of the most popular books in this tradition in the early 1700s was Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth. Burnet’s subject was ‘the Sublunary World, This Earth and its dependencies, which rose out of a Chaos about six thousand years ago’. The chief phases of the earth’s past were Paradise and the Deluge (the flood of Genesis). In its future lay ‘the

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Conflagration, and what new Order of Nature may follow upon that, till the whole Circle of Time and Providence be completed’. Similar strands of reasoning governed much geological thought. The main point of studying the natural world, both physical and biological, was to augment our inevitably limited understanding of its divinely established order (Porter, 1977: 39). In establishing himself as a scientific modern, Hutton rejected evidence based on biblical texts. Careful reasoning and observations of nature were all that were required. For example, in the great eighteenth-century competition between the rival theories of water and of heat as the sources of rocks, Hutton insisted on the latter view. It was ‘subterraneous fire and heat’ (Theory of the Earth [TE], II [XIV]: 555) that made rocks and raised land out of the oceans. He wrote extensively on topics such as igneous rocks, the nature of mountains and valleys, the interpretation of strata, the origins of coal, the formation of soil, and the geomorphological effects of wind and water. His place in the history of geological and earth-systems thought, however, owes more to his other views: on the age of the earth and the workings in the past, present, and future of the same natural processes (the uniformitarian thesis); his image of the earth as characterized by endless flows and cycles and of interconnections between geological and biological phenomena; and his strenuous defence of science as the route to understanding earth structures and processes. Despite the last, he was influenced by a strand of Enlightenment deism. He wrote of the ‘living world’ as ‘an object in the design of things, by whatever Being those things had been designed, and however either wisdom or folly may appear in that design’ (TE, II [XIV]: 546). Yet geology, in a sense, was for him indifferent to theological argument. The two pursuits were separate. To understand the earth we do not need explanations that rely on a ‘supposition of evil’, a ‘destructive accident’, or ‘the agency of any preternatural cause’ (TE, I [I]: 164–5). He could concede that the earth reflected a design, and a designer, with purposes. But they were not his concern: [I]n this physical dissertation, we are limited to consider the manner in which things present have been made to come to pass, and not to inquire concerning the moral end for which those things may have been calculated. (TE, II [XIV]: 567) Thus he argued vigorously for the scientific study of the earth and insisted on the need for detailed geological observations in the field.


Science allows us to see clearly ‘the system of nature’, something that is out of reach of speculations that are merely ‘the creature of imagination’. It was only in science that any question concerning the origin and end of things is formed; and it is in science only that the resolution of those questions is to be attained … and we must not allow ourselves ever to reason without proper data, or to fabricate a system of apparent wisdom in the folly of a hypothetical delusion. (TE, II [XIV]: 563–4) Even so, teleological residues remain. They embarrassed later historians of geology. Hutton wrote repeatedly of ‘purposes’, ‘ends’, and ‘intentions’. The earth ‘represents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end’. Ours is ‘a habitable world; and on its fitness for this purpose, our sense of wisdom in its formation must depend’. Plants and animals depend for their existence on the physical world and are available for human use. Clearly evident in all the phenomena of the earth was ‘the presence and efficacy of design and intelligence in the power that conducts the work’ (TE, I [I]: 4–5). The (physical) earth was thus ‘the means appointed’ towards the end of animal life (TE, II [XIV]: 548). In sum: The purpose of the land of this earth … is to sustain a system of plants and animals. … From the bare rock exposed to the sun and wind, to the tender mud immersed in water, there is a series to be observed; and in every stage or step of this gradation, there are plants adapted to those various soils and situations. Therefore nothing short of that diversity of soils and situations, which we find upon the surface of the earth, could fulfill the purpose of nature, in producing a system of vegetables endued with such a diversity of forms and habits. (TE, II [VI]: 184) Hutton’s most famed argument is that natural changes over very long periods of time had shaped earth’s history. These processes continued to operate in the present and they would into the distant future. They could only be fully understood using the methods of science. They could be seen in the slow processes that create sediments (wastes) and which over time wear down mountains and change the landscapes of the earth. In the earth, in Hutton’s phrase, there was ‘no vestige of a beginning’ and ‘no prospect of an end’.

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Change, in this perspective, is everywhere, even though it is not always easily noticeable. The ceaseless flows and cycles – or ‘circulations’ as Hutton sometimes referred to them – of small alterations in rocks, waterways, vegetation, and so on were all ‘the effects of steady causes’. Each had ‘its proper purpose in the system of the earth’ (TE, I [I], 167). Everywhere there was ‘evidence of a general dissolution on the surface of the earth, and of decay among the hard and solid bodies of the globe’, and ‘a gradual destruction of every thing which comes to the view of man’ (TE, II [IV]: 157). Thus there is nothing formed in one epoch of nature, but what has been repeated in another, however dissimilar may be the operations which had intervened between those several epochs. (TE, I [IV]: 364) The result for Hutton was ‘a system of beautiful economy in the works of nature’ (TE, II [XIV]: 562). The human world, the non-human living world, and the physical world are profoundly interconnected. Hutton saw these links not just as evidence of complex relations of interdependence in natural systems but as hints of underlying purposes. The physical world of rocks and water made possible the world of plants and animals, and this in turn allowed the world of humans to flourish. It was of importance to the happiness of man, to find consummate wisdom in the constitution of this earth, by which things are so contrived that nothing is wanting, in the bountiful provision of nature, for the pleasure and propagation of created beings. (TE, II [VI]: 183)

Receptions and repercussions Hutton has a highly respected place in the history of scientific thinking about the earth. If not the sole pillar or founding father of the emerging science of geology, he was at least the primus inter pares of its animators. However, without the vigorous defence of his work by a colleague, the mathematician John Playfair, it is possible that he might have languished as a footnote of eighteenth-century scientific thought. Much of the commentary on Hutton in his day focused not on the uniformitarian thesis and his view of the age of the earth but on his then controversial ideas about igneous rocks. It took time, and diligence on the


part of Hutton’s defenders, before a balance among these views could be reached. Playfair aimed to correct the situation in which Hutton’s work seemed to be ‘known only through the erroneous statements of its opponents’ (White, 1956: xvi). Many natural philosophers were already sympathetic. Erasmus Darwin, for example, in the 1790s saw the earth as ‘millions of ages’ old. In 1802 Playfair set out the principles of ‘Huttonian theory’ with greater clarity, and more supporting data, than had Hutton himself. Charles Lyell later took the general logic of Hutton’s uniformitarianism to a more rigorous level in his influential Principles of Geology, first published in 1830. Continental European geologists moved along parallel lines. The related idea of the very old age of the earth likewise became a commonplace of geological enquiry. It was Hutton’s vision of the majestic flow of minute alterations that would from now on be the guiding rationale of research. Geologists turned their backs on the older stories of divinely wrought catastrophe, design, and punishment. Along with these geologists ditched too the increasingly suspect Huttonian language of purposes. Instead his advocacy of fieldwork, meticulous observation, and scientific method shaped professional norms. Yet an undertow of questioning commentary persisted. It marked some of the earliest receptions of Hutton’s writings. For many his observations on the origins of rocks were more important and controversial than his ideas on the age of the earth, and many contemporaries thought them wrong; the older idea, that basalt and other rocks were precipitated in water, appeared more scientifically credible (Young, 2003: 50). Greene (1985: 21) has argued that the ‘Hutton’ of later histories was too much the creation of deferential admirers. If history is written by the winners, Hutton owes much of his reputation to the fact that uniformitarian ideas and scientific mindsets came to dominate the new sense of professionalism in geology in the 1800s. Its practitioners were aware of the theological influences on the prehistory of their discipline and many tended to view its development as a Whiggish record of unstoppable progress (Bowler, 1988; Oldroyd, 1980) and as a morality tale of the victory of rationality and evidence-based practices over the protests of reactionaries. Critics of Hutton from the start objected to what they saw as a lack of consistency in the way he applied his professed scientific principles. Some of his contemporaries viewed him as too out-of-datedly preoccupied with the fusty obscurities of metaphysical enquiry. The criticism was partly due to the undeserved reputation Hutton acquired for writing dense and obscure prose. Part of the problem stemmed from his use

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of the term ‘theory’. This was the way scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commonly described their attempts to understand the earth, but it implied speculation, particularly for classically educated scholars aware of the Greek origins of the word. As the commitment to scientific method took hold, such connotations lost their attractions. General theory, whether of the Huttonian or any other kind, quickly fell out of geological fashion. In his account of Huttonian theory, then, Playfair helped to ensure the wider scientific acceptability of uniformitarian ideas. He did so in part by cleansing these of Hutton’s own theological and teleological references (though he took care to defend Hutton against charges of ‘atheism and impiety’, suspicions that had been aired in commentaries on his view of an earth with ‘no vestige of a beginning’). Others were not so generous. In 1808 the Scottish geologist Robert Jameson launched a fierce attack on Hutton, Playfair, and others responsible for these monstrosities known under the name of Theories of the Earth. Almost all the compositions of this kind are idle speculation, contrived in the closet, and having no kind of resemblance to any thing in nature. (Kennedy, 2006: 20) ‘Speculation’, however, had enjoyed a long history as a respectable occupation for natural as well as for other philosophers. Playfair himself used the word in a non-pejorative sense in his account of Hutton’s methods. Hutton used ‘theory’ in a variety of senses – as laws and principles operating in his field of study, the processes that led to the discovery of these, hypotheses testable in the real world, and as an aid in the task of geological observations. Theory was integral to science. Writing of the importance of heat in the formation of earth structures, for example, he criticized as prejudiced those who disagreed with his view, adding: ‘No other Theory will in any degree explain appearances, while almost every appearance is easily explained by this Theory’ (TE, II [XIV]: 555). And sometimes not noticed, or even quoted, are what are arguably the crucial words that introduce his most famous comment. In saying that we find no traces of a beginning (or an end) in the earth’s history, he was expressing a carefully reasoned proposition, one that implied the qualification, uncertainty, and the invitation to further empirical research that marks the outlook of the scientist. As Playfair (1956 [1802]: 120) put it, to say that


we see no mark, either of a beginning or an end, is very different from affirming, that the world had no beginning, and will have no end. The first is a conclusion justified by common sense, as well as sound philosophy; while the second is a presumptuous and unwarrantable assertion, for which no reason from experience or analogy can ever be assigned. Yet while Hutton saw his uniformitarian interpretations of the earth as springing naturally from scientific methods, there is no reason in principle why the two should necessarily be linked. A scientific approach could equally well house, and would be open to considering, the view that the earth might have been shaped by catastrophic events as well as, or even instead of, by processes of extremely slow change. All that matters for science is that an idea be testable against the empirical evidence. Indeed catastrophes of various kinds, including major floods and multiple asteroid collisions, have since re-entered the world views of geologists. So have interpretations that incorporate considerable variability in rates of change across time, regions, and types of phenomena. For Hutton, however, the notion of sudden calamitous changes was too intimately associated with the views of those he castigated as blinded by theology and prejudice.

Towards earth systems Hutton’s long shadow touched not only geology but also a variety of other disciplines. Residues of his emphasis on the importance of the connections and interdependencies among physical and biological phenomena, of cycles, long-term processes, and ‘circulations’ can also be seen in recent thinking on earth systems. Geology after Hutton, or more particularly following the synthesis by Lyell, adopted a more ruggedly empirical character. In a much-quoted observation (by H. H. Read in the 1950s), ‘the best geologist is he who has seen the most rocks’. The nineteenth-century pioneers of geological fieldwork did not have the luxury of e-mail and geographical positioning systems. Richard Fortey (2004: 434) has described them as nothing short of heroes: they trekked across remote areas with little more than a hammer and a notebook. There was nobody to airlift them to safety; they had few maps to follow. The fieldwork tradition has continued. So has the view of the usefulness of geological research. Geology told Hutton and his contemporaries

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useful things about coal and mineral deposits, and provides their twenty-first-century counterparts with vital information about the location of oil and natural gas and minerals, the vulnerability of buildings to earth movements, and the natural-systems underpinnings of sustainable development. Over time, research developments and new technologies added topics to bulging research inventories. In the second half of the twentieth century, detailed analysis of the chemical composition of rocks became possible as did indirect study of the mantle plumes and other internal features of the earth. New frames of reference took shape. Consensus was reached in the 1960s on the existence and likely movements of the earth’s continent- and ocean-bearing plates following the accumulation of evidence on, and understandings of, the mechanisms of seafloor spreading. Shortly afterwards geologists, with partners from other disciplines, began the study of rock samples from the moon and the indirect study of other planets. Their reach extended far back in time into studies of the rocks, plant life, and atmospheres of past earths. Hutton’s influence is detectable outside geology. It had a bearing on the development of earth-systems thinking and frameworks and on the evolution of the other constituent disciplines of these approaches, particularly biology. Throughout Theory of the Earth, Hutton addressed questions that linked geological enquiries with studies of plants and animals. And, translated through the writings of Lyell, Hutton’s associated arguments about timescales and long-drawn-out processes of change exerted a powerful influence on Darwin. Darwin left for South America on the Beagle in 1831, the year after the publication of the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology. The ship’s captain gave him a copy. This was a book that, as he wrote later, ‘altered the whole tone of one’s mind’. Darwin was himself a reluctantly lapsed geologist (Herbert, 2005). He had done serious geological field research and had written about island formation and other geological topics. He often met with Lyell to discuss issues such as rock formations in South America and the origins of coral islands (Wilson, 1972: 447), and cited Lyell’s ‘noble views’ extensively in The Origin of Species. Like Lyell, and Hutton earlier, Darwin distrusted scientific explanations that relied on big, sudden changes (though Lyell, for his part, like many geologists of the period, remained deeply sceptical about the manner in which he applied uniformitarian reasoning to the theory of evolution). He portrayed the challenges that faced nineteenth-century biology as fundamentally similar to those that


geologists had confronted in the 1700s and, through Hutton’s efforts, surmounted: Natural selection acts only by the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure. (Darwin, 1972 [1859]: 94) Darwin, again like Hutton, was also intrigued by the multiple points of contact between the phenomena of geology and biology. For example, he noticed that rocks on various Atlantic islands did not occur naturally there. He argued that they had been carried there by ice during the ice age, and that it was likely they had brought plant seeds with them (Darwin, 1972 [1859]: 359). He also explored the other direction of the relationship: from biology to geology. In a study lasting almost three decades, he looked at the surface changes to an area around his home resulting from the movements of earthworm castings, and made calculations of the considerable weight of materials that resulted and their movement on land and into waterways. The long-term indirect influence of Hutton’s earth theorizing can be seen in contemporary earth-systems studies of the connections among geological and biological processes, and in the pervasive imagery of systems that has been employed in recent years to understand them (Oldroyd, 1995: 285; Watson, 1999: 77). Even some of the standard complaints levelled against Hutton by his contemporaries – that his work was not based on real-world observations, that it did not give rise to empirically testable propositions, and that, in a word, it was metaphysical or ‘speculative’ rather than scientific – have resurfaced in the controversies on studies of earth systems influenced by Gaia thinking. In this long process of intellectual change, however, other developments worked to the detriment of the public standing and influence of geology. The social repercussions of nineteenth-century science reflected the emerging stature of biology more than that of geology. The revolutionary view of evolution by natural selection polarized debates in mid-Victorian England. This has gone on to become a normal context of scientific and social thought. Geology, by contrast, suffered from its erroneous identification with the concerns of scholars who studied

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only things that had happened in the very distant past and that gave no insights into the present. The stereotype is unfortunate and highlights the limited social understanding even of early uniformitarian ideas. Hutton’s own writings also touched on issues important in social, economic, and political theory. Yet, ironically, his success in furthering the cause of the scientific study of geology – or of Playfair, Lyell, and others in securing the wider scientific acceptance of his ideas – ultimately served to hide much of the discipline behind the walls of natural sciences. There, unlike biology, it was in practice largely out of the reach of the philosophers, social scientists, and others who sought to understand the significance of the natural environment of societies.

5 Geosphere-Atmosphere-Biosphere Integration

‘The marvellous thing about the face of the earth is that it is such a mess.’ Richard Fortey (2004: 432) makes this remark near the end of his ‘intimate history’ of the earth. Messiness is not a description that would have occurred in the 1790s to Hutton. He had sensed order, harmony, and a ‘beautiful economy’ in the physical world. Fortey, though, is not using the word ‘mess’ in a derogatory sense. Nor is he denying that there is order in the systems geology describes. He is thinking of things that, as an eminent geologist, he knows and loves best: rocks. Many different geological and biological processes in many different time periods have left marks on particular locales. Understanding these presents daunting challenges. Messiness activates ordering impulses. It led to the familiar typecasting of rocks as igneous, metamorphosed, or sedimentary (and to the categorization of geologists as ingenious, metaphoric, or sedentary [Anderson, 2007: 189]). It stimulates the much more complicated task of ordering earth-history events such as glaciation, the movement and shifting alignments of plates, the evolutionary links among species over time and the extinctions of these, and atmospheric change. The scientific study of the earth as a system, or a complex set of systems, began to take shape during the 1980s. The thinking underlying this change has significantly older scientific and philosophical roots. In its widespread use of the terminologies of interacting ‘spheres’ – the biosphere, for example, the hydrosphere, and the multiple levels of the atmosphere – there are even intriguing echoes of medieval cosmologies. The rise of earth-systems studies has been described as a revolution in scientific thinking. As with all revolutions, there are marked continuities with trends of the past. This new ordering enterprise takes in enthusiasts from many disciplines. It has branched into many forms. Some earth-systems efforts involve ‘softer’ forms of interdisciplinary 69

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cooperation protective of the values of autonomy and diversity. Others are ‘harder’ in their pursuit of a more uniform methodological rigour, particularly through enhanced quantification and modelling capabilities, and deeper patterns of interdisciplinary integration. The three spheres referred to in the title of this chapter – the geosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere – give a sense of the complexity and scope of the earth-systems sciences. Each is rich in policy implications. These broad categories are also scientific guides for the three governance areas explored later (see Chapters 8–10). However, the labelling should be regarded at best as a shorthand reference to the now very broad ranges of interests of earth-systems scientists. This chapter is necessarily selective in its approach. I discuss first the social, political, and other factors that gave rise to these developments and influenced their course; secondly, the defining characteristics of the scientific study of earth systems, including policy controversies over geoengineering; and thirdly, some of the significant themes that have persisted in this research, particularly with reference to earth-systems dynamics and cycles, and the reverberations of changing notions of time and space. The examples draw on developments that have different blends of policy and ‘pure-knowledge’ relevance. The final section returns to the topics discussed in Chapter 4 to ask, in light of this discussion, how far earth-systems research has progressed towards the achievement of the eighteenth-century goal of a theory of the earth.

Sociology of a revolution Many diverse actors, policy concerns, and disciplinary biases influenced the development of earth-systems science. There are multiple audiences and animators. The changes grew out of diverse social and political contexts, some in direct response to climate change, biodiversity loss, and other global policy issues. A consistent integrating challenge has been that of trying to understand the earth and its constituent systems as a whole. At its most ambitious, earth-systems science is thus an emerging ‘holistic superdiscipline that tries to embrace all processes in nature and society as one interlinked system’ (Lövbrand et al., 2009: 7). However, despite an abundance of shared and overlapping concerns and interests among scientists from multiple disciplines, researchers have not created a new, unified earth-systems discipline with clear boundaries. Emergent frameworks have not supplanted older disciplines. Considerable messiness continues to characterize the terrains of earth-systems science.

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A creatively disorderly exuberance has nonetheless yielded valuable scientific insights into global policy issues. These scientific developments have taken place against a background noise of scepticism. First, some critics, especially those worried about the more determinedly integrative thrust of some research, have taken issue with what appear to be its ontological and epistemological premises. Do systems and cycles – as opposed to real things like giraffes and granite – have an existence outside the minds of observers? Are inferences drawn from the virtual worlds of computer simulations a reliable policy guide? If assumptions about the chaotic or non-linear character of such systems suggest the need for novel, flexible, or more relaxed methodologies to study them, are researchers in effect conceding that the enterprise is not scientifically justifiable? A second set of issues concerns the applications or ends of earthsystems knowledge. Much earth-systems effort has been oriented towards understanding policy issues related to global climate change. It thus irks critics alarmed at the scientific and social spread of the anthropogenic thesis. There are applications too for resource use, sustainable development, response capabilities in relation to natural disasters, the alleviation of poverty, and other issues. Debates on these raise critical questions about the adequacy of knowledge bases for policy, particularly in light of persisting uncertainties. Further, if earth systems are in principle ‘manageable’, this in turn raises the morally troubling thought that they might be best governed by scientific and policy elites from the world’s rich countries. The democratic criteria of good environmental governance, and the participatory assumptions that have been central to discourses on sustainable development, are thus put at risk. Several sets of factors – political, institutional, cultural, as well as intellectual and scientific – interacted with each other and influenced the rise of earth-systems frameworks. Many continue to shape them. First, various national and international scientific and governmental actors supported these developments as potential means to solve emerging problems. During the 1980s, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists and engineers were advocates. Understanding the earth, they argued, required knowledge of the cycles of the atmosphere and oceans, the terrestrial biosphere, and other earth domains; external factors, particularly forcing from the sun; and the transformative effects of human activities (NASA, 1988). International scientific bodies, particularly the geological member organizations of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) acted as prodders, catalysts, and facilitators. Participation by national

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bodies in the work of international scientific organizations has traditionally been an important context for advances in geology (Schofer, 2003). The meetings of the International Geological Congress in 2008 focused on developments in earth-systems science and their value in promoting global sustainable development. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the ICSU’s Special Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) was important in sponsoring meetings and publications on the global carbon cycle (Bolin et al., 1979) and biogeochemical cycles (Bolin and Cook, 1983). From 1988 the IPCC was an especially influential, if controversial, voice in policy-related climate-change science. The Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB), formed by UNESCO, in the 1960s and 1970s sponsored much international collaborative work on terrestrial and marine ecological processes (see Chapter 7). Its final stages overlapped with the work of scientists in the International GeosphereBiosphere Program (IGBP). Despite limited resources, IGBP networks and activities have been crucial in promoting links among scientists engaged in geological, chemical, atmospheric, biological, hydrological, and other aspects of earth-systems research, and they extended these concerns into the social sciences. Antarctic scientific organizations in Australia, the US, Britain, and other countries have likewise operated in multidisciplinary settings. These contributed to the rapid growth of understanding of the role of the polar regions in global circulation processes. The ‘hole’ in the ozone layer detected over Antarctica in 1984 led to an unprecedentedly quick intergovernmental response and the creation of a science-based international regulatory regime. The experience stimulated further debate on the prospects for a deepening of the engagement of scientific organizations with global policy processes. The UN and several of its autonomous agencies also have a stake in global questions. The UN convened major international conferences on the global environment in 1972, 1992, and 2002. These addressed many issues that coincided with those raised in earth-systems research, particularly climate change and threats to global biological diversity, the topics of the two major international conventions that emerged from the 1992 meetings. International scientific bodies were increasingly active in these developments. The soft-law products of international processes, for example Agenda 21 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), led to further assessments by earth-systems scientists of the ways they could contribute to global goals. Secondly, environmental policy debates in western countries took on increasingly globalist dimensions from the late 1980s. Many scientists, from the biological as well as the geological sciences, saw the


development of earth-systems knowledge as a framework that would underpin international policy development. In particular, the rise of the climate-change issue spurred and grew out of mounting scientific interest in the global carbon cycle, the consequences of perturbations produced by fossil-fuel-dependent economies, and the prospects for low-carbon transitions. Climate-change research has been closely linked to broader studies of the linkages and couplings among the earth’s atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, and other systems. Its dependence on expanded data sets, advances in computer science and data-handling capabilities, and refinements in modelling, strengthened the scientific infrastructure required for progress in earth-systems science. Other features of global environmental agendas reinforced these trends. They included concerns about threats to biological diversity, in both marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and debates on the implications for the earth’s carrying capacity of human population growth. Pressures on ecologists to produce practical guides for policymakers and global initiatives increased significantly with the rise of environmentalism from the 1970s (Pickett et al., 2007: Chapters 8 and 9). Thirdly, the rise of the earth-systems sciences was facilitated by a secular spread of systems thinking across disciplines. This had been implicit in the development from the 1860s of ecology, a field which focused on study of organisms and their environments. Controversy followed criticisms that some approaches in biology were becoming too based on abstractions. Ludwig von Bertalanffy and others pressed the case for holistic systems approaches. The concept of the biosphere was developed by the geologist Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s (though the term had been used in the 1870s by Eduard Suess in his studies of the Alps), and contributed to a globalizing trend in biologists’ interests. Macroecologists later sought to identify emergent processes in largescale regional and global earth systems (Brown, 1995: 11). Comparable processes in other disciplines smoothed problems of transdisciplinary communications. Some social scientists from the 1970s had seen potential in the application of systems concepts to the study of global environmental governance (Miller and Miller, 1983). However, despite emphasis on anthropogenic change in the IGBP and in climate-change modelling efforts, much of this activity remained marginal in both the social sciences themselves and in the development of earth-systems knowledge. A fourth set of influences sprang from the accumulation of earthsystems research developments. Antecedents included earlier studies on global population and natural resource use trends, for example, in the

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policy-related studies associated with the Club of Rome in the late 1960s and 1970s. The sequence of the four IPCC reports on climate change from 1990 to 2007 had a more direct bearing on earth-systems science. These drew attention to the requirement for policy and for scientific research of a sound infrastructure of earth-systems knowledge, and of models coupling atmospheric with other systems. Growing scientific emphasis on the complexity of earth systems and the interconnections among them had ripple effects throughout many disciplines. These developments drew together strands of geology, chemistry, and other disciplines in the emerging field of biogeochemistry. This focuses on questions such as the workings of the global carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, and other cycles and the flows of nutrients through earth systems. Research on climate-related topics over several decades greatly expanded understanding of earth systems. It contributed to knowledge of the rise of oxygen and other phases in earth’s climatic history and the histories of plants and ice ages. Such studies increased appreciation during the 1980s and 1990s of the complexity of multiple earth-systems relationships, for example the consequences for earth systems of the rise of living organisms and the co-evolution of these with climate (Schneider and Londer, 1984), the impacts of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations on terrestrial ecosystems (Luo and Mooney, 1999), and the cumulative effects of human impacts during the Holocene (Ehlers and Krafft, 2006; Anderson et al., 2007). Essential for judging the significance of anthropogenic influences on the global carbon cycle, knowledge of climates in different geohistorical periods became an important pillar of policy arguments. Fifthly, technical, analytical, and methodological developments accelerated. These included changes in remote sensing technologies. Climate data sets from NASA observations and other sources improved. As in other sciences earth-systems progress was facilitated by Internet development (Johnson et al., 2000). Data handling and analytical capabilities grew rapidly. These both responded to and made possible the growing sophistication and realism of climate, natural resource, vegetation cover, and other features of models. Sixthly, as conceptions grew of earth-systems study as essentially a multidisciplinary enterprise, different disciplines rediscovered and redefined their own positions in relation to it. Earth-systems scientists themselves encouraged the process of attracting, or creating, additional bases of disciplinary expertise. Specialists joined from chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, archaeology, and other disciplines, and subfields such as palaeobotany and agricultural history.


The rapidly growing subfield of environmental geology provided a productive entry point for earth-systems concepts and approaches into the larger discipline. A final set of factors stemmed from the momentum of a growing institutionalization of earth-systems approaches in research and teaching. Research centres include, in Europe, the Danish Centre for Earth System Science (DCESS) and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and, in the US, centres and programmes at Stanford, Columbia, and other universities. In the US the Earth System Science Education Program from 1991 promoted university earth-systems science studies as a means of enhancing traditional geological curricula. In part this reflected a wider sense that geology and the traditional earth sciences had lost ground in science education and that earth-systems innovations would help reverse this trend. The Geological Society of America (GSA) has revisited the question of curriculum change, along with earth-systems science developments generally, in its meetings. These developments interacted with increased flows of earth-systems textbooks at various levels and overviews in the 1990s and early 2000s (e.g. MacKenzie, 2002; Kump et al., 2004; Ehlers and Krafft, 2006; De Wet and Merritts, 2008; Stanley, 2008). Earth-systems courses began to treat questions in geology, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and other fields that, even a few years earlier, would have stayed firmly behind separate disciplinary doors.

Character of a movement Some attributes of the study of earth systems arise from the traditional base these have had in the geological sciences. Others are emergent properties of the rise of interdisciplinary earth-system science. Prominent among its features are a commitment to synergistic collaboration among scientists from different disciplines, a conviction that earth systems study is useful and has practical value, and assumptions about the epistemic virtues of modelling. Multidisciplinarity The earth-systems sciences are built on increasingly multidisciplinary tendencies in various disciplines. Van Andel (1994: xiii) wrote of geology in the 1990s that ‘most major issues concerning the earth require an interdisciplinary skill so wide-ranging that few are now able to create a synthesis of substance’. Acknowledgement of the need for robust cooperation among scientists, whether in looser and more decentralized

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(multidisciplinary) formats or in more integrated (inter- or transdisciplinary) ways, is a defining characteristic of the study of earth systems. Individual scientists, and different scholarly cultures, vary considerably in their interest in such exercises. There are problems within disciplines. As a result of internal pressures and specializations, biology and geology have each become large fragmented collections of subcommunities. Institutional and communication barriers among earth-science disciplines were already evident in the 1980s (von Engelhardt and Zimmerman, 1988: ix). Many have persisted: In spite of the fact that there is only one Earth, there are more Theories of the Earth than there are of astronomy, particle physics or cell biology where there are uncountable samples of each object. Even where there is cross-talk among disciplines, it is usually in code and mixed with white noise. Too often, one discipline’s unproven assumptions or dogmas are treated as firm boundary conditions for a theoretician in a slightly overlapping area. (Anderson, 2007: ix) Multiple deals and trade-offs are involved in the complex games of attracting participants into collaborative arrangements, maintaining trans-border communities, and protecting valued disciplinary bases. As a result of these constraints, many areas of earth-systems research are in practice weighted still towards the geological sciences and their various subfields. Geologists forged partnerships with scientists in neighbouring areas such as inorganic chemistry, particularly, as new analytical techniques emerged to aid the geochemical study of rock formations (Lentz, 2003; Young, 2003: 411). A growing range of research enquiries brought contacts with specialists in a wide variety of other fields, from astronomy to materials science (Anderson, 2007: ix–x). Chemistry was one of the disciplines that performed an important bridging role by connecting studies of living organisms and physical processes and, more generally, forming the foundation for research in the hybrid field of biogeochemistry. Tiny organisms have been a critical part of the earth’s history for about 3.8 billion years. Some were important parts of the history of the emergence of an atmosphere with sufficient abundance of oxygen to sustain larger animal life. Different species thrive in diverse settings. Some would be extreme or lethal to others, for example in Antarctica, in arsenic-rich environments and in the high-temperature towers near ocean-ridge vents. Their presence in diverse physical settings indicates the importance of multiple


interacting geological-biological processes. Microorganisms mediate, or otherwise influence, weathering and other processes and the workings of carbon, nitrogen, and other biogeochemical cycles (Falkowski et al., 2008). In some earth-systems areas there are collaborations with experts from the social sciences. There are commonalities with geography, for example, because of its defining spatial base and the traditional importance of the subfield of physical geography (Pitman, 2005). Economics is another contender for a lead social-science role, in part, because of its shared interest in quantification and modelling. Through its humandimensions work and various projects, the IGBP has been active in encouraging participation by social scientists. In practice, however, the social sciences have lagged substantially behind the natural sciences in interest in earth-systems developments. Geoengineering A concern for human welfare has been an emblematic driver of much earth-systems research. This partly reflects the traditional practical concerns of many geologists. Defenders of earth-systems constructs emphasize their potential not only to add to the scientific understanding of the earth but also their long-term practical usefulness, particularly for climate-change policies. Thus [w]e need to study the Earth as a whole in order to understand the reality of climate change. . . . Studying the planet as an interconnected, integrated system allows us to comprehend more fully the evolving global interactions of smaller-scale effects, such as urbanization, volcanic eruptions, coal burning, and deforestation. (Ernst, 2000: 520) The argument can be extended to multiple problems of the uses of the earth’s natural resources. With the aid of progress in earth-systems science, governments and other actors become better equipped to make sound decisions on the management of energy, water, biological, mineral, and other resources. Earth-systems science is thus an integral part of a future ‘earth resources management infrastructure’ (King and Birk, 2004: 45). Discussion of the usefulness of earth-systems knowledge takes many forms. In practice much of it has come from assessments of climatechange requirements. As part of the task of investigating mitigation and adaptation strategies (see Chapter 9), research has been directed

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towards engineering and technological ways of tackling climatechange problems. The term geoengineering began to be used in the 1970s in connection with early approaches to global carbon dioxide management. Widespread scientific discussion followed of ways to handle the gas (Schneider, 2001). Various techniques of direct site-specific capture, removal, disposal, and process management have been investigated and applied, for example, in relation to coal-burning power stations. Much more ambitiously, Wallace Broecker, who coined the phrase ‘global warming’ in the mid-1970s, has proposed deploying artificial ‘trees’ to absorb carbon dioxide. About 20 million trees would be required for the US. Stimulating algae growth in marine areas, for example by spreading iron filings, could be a way of enhancing their role as a carbon dioxide sink. Lovelock has suggested the possibility of using large tubes to draw up nutrients to ocean surfaces for this purpose. Schemes for targeting other parts of climate processes include solar radiation management systems, for example, using orbiting mirrors to deflect part of the sun’s radiation. An alternative envisages the creation of an artificial sulphur particle belt in the stratosphere (Crutzen, 2006). Studies of the global atmospheric cooling that follows major volcanic eruptions, particularly that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, have encouraged these ideas (Bengtsson, 2006: 229). The Toba eruption in Indonesia some 73,500 years ago, for example, led to several years of regional cooling estimated at up to 15 °C and global cooling of 3–5 °C (Rampino and Ambrose, 2000). While the term geoengineering has been associated with climatechange policy debates, the underlying notions have a much wider presence. A broader definition takes in diverse discussions of weather systems and natural-resource uses. For example, devices in the Caribbean designed to channel cold water upwards could potentially cool sea surfaces and hence control the area and duration of hurricanes. Debates on the benefits of major river diversions have returned. The issue was prominent in Spanish politics in the early 2000s, though a proposal to find ways to move water from the north to the dryer south and southeast was put on hold after the 2004 election. Falling levels of the Dead Sea have led to proposals for restocking it by way of a major channel from the Red Sea. There has been speculation that the water needs of several African countries could be eased by building a large conduit south from the Mediterranean, perhaps in addition by turning this into a land-locked lake by damming the straits of Gibraltar. The Chinese government has begun to explore ways of channelling large-scale water


supplies to the north from the abundant resources in the south of the country. The specifics of geoengineering ideas are often less important than the ways of thinking about earth systems that prompt them. Some echo unsavoury earth management ideas of the past, such as those that drove much Soviet resource planning and the ‘drain the Everglades’ movement in the US in the early 1900s. In the 1950s there were serious discussions of using atomic explosions to dislodge Canadian oil sands resources in order to make these easier to exploit and, in the Soviet Union, to break up large areas of Arctic sea ice. Some geoengineering technologies could have applications in warfare. However, proposals are not always intended as ready-made solutions. Some are put forward as stimuli to investigation, testing, and idea creation. To some extent they can be seen as a logical extension of the recent Holocene history of the human domination of the earth. The earth is already increasingly a product of human engineering. [Developing] the capability to engineer at the level of global systems – from energy, transportation, and information systems to the carbon and nitrogen cycles – is the next great challenge for engineering. (Allenby, 2000) Scientists’ worries that climate-change problems were not being tackled seriously by governments, particularly in the wake of the IPCC’s 2007 report, led to increased attention to geoengineering options by the US and British governments and their scientific academies in 2009–10. Some proposals, however, would do little more than provide excuses to avoid the real policy issues. Sceptical scientists and engineers have expressed concern even about public discussions of geoengineering. Wider debate could spread the false impression that the required mitigation technologies will soon be available and that the costs are not insuperable. Such misperceptions would then reinforce disincentives to take steps to ease the world’s economies out of their dependence on oil and gas. The public airing of climate-change geoengineering proposals, however, may also act to reinforce pressures for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by concentrating minds on the possibility that such measures may become, by default, the only remaining option (Royal Society, 2009). Further, the strenuous politics of designing (and denouncing) big projects deters creative thinking on more modest and more viable engineering schemes, for example, in relation to local water supply and renewable energy problems. Formidable problems of

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democratic decision making are involved. Geoengineering proposals, whether of the climate-change or resource-use variety, tend to avoid issues like who should make decisions on the initiation and monitoring of projects and whether all groups likely to be affected, including the weak and poor, would have a voice. Prevailing and prospective states of knowledge make the probability of success of large-scale interventions in earth systems doubtful. For example, stratospheric sulphur aerosols might be required for hundreds or even thousands of years to make a significant change to fossil-fuelgenerated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (Brovkin et al., 2009). It is unlikely that the required delicate fine-tuning could be achieved. The effects of particles likely depend on their distribution, size, and movement in the atmosphere (Rasch, 2008). Earth-systems uncertainties suggest there would be a variety of unanticipated consequences of major geoengineering schemes for the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems (Govindasamy et al., 2002). Threats to marine ecosystems, including commercial fisheries, could result if a deployment of iron particles restricted oxygen levels in surface regions. Lovelock (2008) compares the knowledge gaps confronting today’s geoengineers with those facing medical researchers before the 1940s, arguing that ‘our ignorance of the Earth system is overwhelming’. Modelling The methodologies and approaches of earth-systems research are diverse. Eclecticism is a function of the wide range of disciplines, subfields, and hybrid research constructs that form part of the overall undertaking. Modelling, however, has been a defining feature of some areas, particularly in relation to climate change and research into atmospheric couplings with the oceans, the terrestrial and marine biospheres, and geological processes. Models are simplified descriptions of systems. They are indispensable instruments of the study of earth systems. They have become essential for investigating the complex flows linking geological, biological, atmospheric, hydrological, and other systems. In part, this is because of the non-availability of experimental methodologies (Lliboutry, 2000: 3–4). Modellers can insert new variables and change the values of others, and study interactions and effects. In computer simulations they can visualize complex processes of change in ocean currents, ice cover, and other conditions. Depending on the quality of the data they can reconstruct past events, such as those leading to a specific earthquake, pollutant trail,


or algae bloom, with the aim of identifying and discriminating among the causal factors at work. The goal may be to capture key aspects of processes at local spatial levels or at levels up to that of the earth system as a whole. Models are extensively used for forecasting and for judging the probable consequences of different policy interventions in complex interacting systems. Much modelling effort has been driven by questions raised in climatechange research. The aim of influencing policymakers has thus influenced research design and the choices of variables. Attempts to model climate change began in the early 1960s (NRC, 2002: 74–5). General circulation models (GCMs) proliferated with the rising urgency of policy debates in the area. Expanded data sets and revolutionary changes in data-handling capabilities helped. Scientists have used models of past climates, including episodes of abrupt change, as means of understanding the earth’s current climate. The coupling of atmospheric dynamics with oceans dynamics is central to these tasks. Such approaches are thus critical to the central policy-related question of estimating the weightings of the anthropogenic and natural-systems factors associated with climate change. Related pressure for enhanced modelling capabilities came from the biological sciences. A variety of biogeographical models have been developed since the mid-1980s. These look at changes in the global distribution of plants in various biomes (tropical forests, deserts, temperate grasslands, and so on) and the factors influencing these processes. Models became more complex, for example, through the inclusion of variables, insights and questions from biogeochemical research on the nitrogen and other element cycles, and studies of atmosphere–ocean coupling (Prentice, 2001: 182; Ri and Prentice, 2008). Biologists have used diverse local, regional, and global vegetation models in conjunction with climate scenarios of changing temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations (Betts and Shugart, 2005). A recent study of a biodiversity hotspot in southern Western Australia simulated likely climate-change effects on the ranges of various Banksia species. Depending on the climate-change scenario used, different patterns of losses and migrations were predicted. The researchers estimated that 5–25 per cent of the species studied would suffer complete range losses by 2080 (Fitzpatrick et al., 2008). Comprehensive earth-system models are still more ambitious. Examples include the Earth Simulator project launched by a group of Japanese scientific and government organizations in 2002. The rationale for such ventures is that research on specific change processes,

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for example climate or vegetation, requires an understanding of the whole system: The construction of reliable prediction models of the complex Earth system is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century, with immense societal and economic benefits at stake. . . . If we want to develop reliable numerical models that can be used to predict how the Earth system will evolve and how it will respond to man-made perturbations, then we cannot treat the components independently. The whole system must be modelled as an interactive whole. (O’Neill and Steenman-Clark, 2002: 1267) Earth-systems models vary in the extent and manner of their treatment of economic and social variables. Human activities related to GHG production are routinely incorporated into diverse climate-change modelling efforts. Modellers interested in biodiversity make similar provisions. Modelling, whether of the earth system as a whole, or of particular component processes, or groups of these, is highly dependent on the availability of relevant high-quality information and on the cyberinfrastructure of data-handling and analysis capabilities. High resolution, however, is often not feasible even in many local or regional modelling efforts or those restricted to a handful of variables. Sceptics suspect that these constraints indicate the likelihood of the continued failure of modelling exercises to achieve their goals. Limitations in monitoring systems and sensor webs on earth and in space constrain data gathering. Major challenges are involved in acquiring adequately detailed local and regional data on atmospheric chemistry, vegetation history, and other topics. Various communication problems, some legally based, also hinder interactions among earth-systems modelling projects. Many modelling efforts provoke criticism of their relative lack of integration with real-world data. Climate-change policy advocacy is weakened to the extent that it relies on the multiple abstractions of modelled worlds and their futures. In practice, however, diverse empirical observations lend support to the various trends identified in models, for example of accelerating losses of Arctic sea ice, increased annual water flows from Greenland ice, and behavioural changes in migratory species in response to seasonal changes. The rapid growth and increased availability of data sets combined with developments in statistical techniques and computing capabilities, for example for multicomponent applications (Sivagama et al., 2009),


continue to make many advances possible. Optimists maintain that phases of doubt and sagging morale in the global modelling community, and the conflicts and controversies traditionally associated with these developments, may be just the inevitable accompaniments of long-term progress (Le Quéré, 2006). An ordinary laptop can now carry out successions of calculations for an earth-systems simulation that, even a few years ago, would have required large-scale team efforts and expenditures. Statistical and computer-science techniques such as support vector machines, which have been used by biologists and other researchers to manage very large amounts of data, have promising applications in earth-systems areas.

Themes of a narrative Of the many themes that recur in earth-systems research, three are of particular interest. They structure much policy-related discussion. These are the metaphors of cycles and continuous flows, or what Hutton called ‘circulations’; a concern with the diverse temporal character of processes of change, from abrupt to very long-term processes; and deepening consideration of the solar-system dimensions of earth-systems functioning. Circulations The spectacle of the earth’s grand cycles, ceaseless flows, and interminable circulations was particularly appealing to Hutton. His reference to ‘continual change’ and ‘endless succession’, and his use of terms like ‘systems’ and ‘circulations’, suggest the importance he attached to the general image. The earth’s complex and cyclical dynamism is thus an old idea in geology. It is a common thread that runs through modern geological thinking from Hutton to the study of plate tectonics (Oldroyd, 2006: Ch. 14). It animates much of the debate on climate change and it has remained a central theme in the study of earth systems. The ideas apply to biological as well as to geophysical systems. Processes of change linking the oceans and atmosphere, and the geosphere and biosphere, operate on multiple timescales, from the few decades or few hundred years that it might take to renew the waters of a lake to the few hundred million years required to recycle the seafloor of the oceans. Geologists finally reached a consensus on broad ideas about the movements of the earth’s plates, and the mechanisms that drive these, in the 1960s. A dozen or so such plates (or a number between eight and 20,

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depending on definitions and continuing research) support the oceans and continents (Anderson, 2007: 41–2). They vary in size as well as in ranges of thickness, from the large Pacific and Australian-Indian plates to the small Caribbean and Juan de Fuca plates. We tend to notice them when they grind and crash, for example, in the critical boundary regions of the Pacific rim that include the earthquake zones of Japan and California. The earthquakes associated with their movements seem to come in clusters, as in the dozen in Turkey between 1939 and 1999, and the sequence of five in the mid-century that ruptured plate edges in the northern Pacific region (Bürgmann, 2009). The 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami resulted from accumulated stress from the 1830s between the converging plates of the region (Fernando et al., 2008: 267). Also detectable by geologists is their buoyancy. Northern hemisphere plates continue to rebound from the weight they carried during the last ice age. Observable effects in the past few thousand years include rising sea levels in central America. Moreover, since continents have in their history moved in and out of regions, understanding plate movements gives insights into the earth’s biological and atmospheric history. The basic picture took a long time to emerge. Intense controversy surrounded the process (Oreskes, 1999). That parts of the east coasts of south and north America might once have been connected to parts of the west coasts of Africa had occurred to many map readers of the past. Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist as well as a geologist, in the early 1900s based his view of the break-up of old continents in part on interpretations of past climates. Absent from this view, however, as he himself acknowledged (Kennedy, 2006: 100), was an account of how and why the continents moved. He also wrongly estimated their speed, thinking they romped around the world at what would now be seen as the extraordinary rate of several metres a year. It was not until the mid1900s that the crucial step of a satisfactory mechanism appeared. From the 1950s, echo-sounding technologies made possible the mapping of ocean floors. The build-up of evidence led to the proposal that it was seafloor spreading from central zones, involving the continuous creation of new crust from magma in the earth’s mantle, that drove large-scale processes. Supporting evidence came from sediments retrieved from deep-sea drilling from the 1960s and the historical record of directional shifts in the magnetism of rocks. Local field research added detail, for example, on rocks at sites of former intercontinental linkage in Nova Scotia and Morocco. Later research extended dynamic and cyclical imagery deeper into the earth. The idea emerged of the crust itself being recycled – that crust


not only comes from but returns to the mantle (Anderson, 2007: 225). Geophysicists suggested that long plumes in the earth’s mantle, perhaps several hundred kilometres across and with higher temperatures than their environments, rise up slowly towards the earth’s surface. There has been speculation that these plumes may pulse in multimillion-year cycles. John Tuzo Wilson had earlier described the linear formation over time of the Hawaiian islands and accounted for this by identifying a slow seafloor movement over a hotspot linked to a mantle plume. This process of island creation is continuing. Obviously plumes cannot be directly observed. In 2003 the first images of plumes were constructed using data from multidecade seismic-wave records of earthquakes. Scientists have identified several such areas in addition to the Hawaiian chain. Samoa appears to be one, for example, though its hotspot status has been difficult to establish with confidence (Koppers et al., 2008). Cycles of multiple kinds are also a familiar part of the world view of biologists, for example in the processes of respiration and photosynthesis in green plants and in the remarkable 13- and 17-year cycles of some cicadas. Similar imagery has been absorbed by studies in biogeochemistry. This emerging interdisciplinary field has been defined as encompassing ‘chemical reactions in the atmosphere, the oceans, crustal minerals, and living organisms’ (Schlesinger, 1997: 3). It has been particularly concerned with the global cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements through earth systems. Global cycles of this kind influence, and are affected by, human activities. The main plot of the climate-change narrative centres on the enhanced greenhouse effect. It highlights the direct and feedback consequences for the natural workings of the carbon cycle of human activities such as deforestation and the extensive use of hydrocarbon fuels. Among other things it explores the prospects for the improved management of carbon-cycle processes through the protection and expanded use of sinks and reservoirs. Coal burning and other activities also affect the global sulphur cycle. Greatly increased fertilizer use has repercussions such as the eutrophication of lakes and other consequences for the global nitrogen cycle (Gruber and Galloway, 2008). The run-off from farms resulting from intensified agricultural development has increased threats to lakes, river ecosystems, and coastal marine life around coastline regions of Brazil and east Asia. Critical processes in forest ecosystems centre on the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by microorganisms. These processes are accordingly vulnerable too to changes resulting from human activities.

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Critical global functions are undertaken by various aspects of the hydrological cycle. This affects the storage and transport of chemical elements. The formation of sea ice in the waters between Greenland and Labrador, for example, produces large volumes of cold salty water which travels south and transports nutrients to marine regions as far away as the Southern Ocean (Van Andel, 1994: 202). Atmospheric and ocean processes are closely interrelated. Very large-scale processes such as the north Atlantic Ocean oscillations play critical roles in the regulation of global temperatures. Time Hutton greatly expanded understanding of the timescale of the earth’s history from its scripturally restricted limits to a beginningless and endless condition. He removed consideration of beginnings, a theological topic in his view, from geological enquiry. With the limited tools available in his day, such questions in practice lay outside the bounds of what scientists could study. Even the process of mapping the earth was still far from complete. Many of the earth’s historical, prehistorical, and geological pasts have since come into view. Without these pictures, earth-systems studies would lack a crucial comparative dimension for understanding the ecological, atmospheric, and other impacts of human actions. Scientists have investigated detailed climatic conditions on scales varying from the last few decades to the most recent several hundred thousand years. Historical, archaeological, and anthropological research has traced the agricultural and urbanizing developments of the past few thousand years. There are records of copper emissions into the atmosphere in Roman times and in China’s Northern Sung dynasty about a thousand years ago (Borsos et al., 2003). Study of environmental change during the full span of the Holocene and in earlier periods is important in climate research as a means of assessing natural variability and anthropogenic change. In some periods the earth underwent rapid temperature changes of a few degrees centigrade. Scientists have also recorded long stable periods of both higher and lower temperatures (Anderson et al., 2007: 5–8). As a result of developments in modelling and the use of a variety of proxy and analytical techniques scientists have been able to explore many details of earlier climate history, for example in studies of the Last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago (Peltier and Solheim, 2004: 335). The traces left by atmospheric gases in ice core samples have provided detailed knowledge of climatic conditions during the past few hundred thousand


years; some developments in techniques, for example, for studying the fossil shells of marine organisms, allow estimates of temperatures on less-than-monthly scales a few hundred million years ago. A sense of very long time takes research back to the creation of the earth about 4566 million years ago (Anderson, 2007: Ch. 1). We are thus back, ironically, to the questions that guided pre-scientific geological enquiry before Hutton’s uniformitarian rejection of their appropriateness. Important events in earth’s history include the oxygen revolution. The rise of the gas, shaped among other things by the effects of ultraviolet radiation on water and the global spread of stromatolites, represented a transformation of the chemistry of the atmosphere. The growing variety and abundance of oxygen-dependent organisms interacted with these processes. Several multi-million-year cycles have been detected in subsequent patterns of the rise and extinction of species (Huggett, 2006: 149–51). Living organisms were active forcers of earth-systems history. Lovelock has maintained that the emergence of abundant life on earth, in effect, created the atmospheric and other conditions it required, and in the process tipped the atmosphere more sharply into thermodynamic disequilibrium. As David Oldroyd (1995: 297) has written, it was the rise of life that made the earth what it is. We are not merely inhabitants of the planet, adapting ourselves to it. Life has verily constructed the planet.

Space A third feature of the study of earth systems has been a spatial expansion to consider their setting in the solar system, or more specifically in the earth-moon-sun system. Comparative study of other planets has become a central feature of earth-systems science. Mars, like the earth, has experienced impacts. An early event may have radically reshaped its surface into a divide between the southern highlands and the lower northern plains (Kiefer, 2008). Venus experienced an extreme greenhouse effect. This has been a source of alarm for climate-change pessimists who anticipate comparable earth processes. There were probably similarities with earth in its early history but the two planets evolved differently. The earth has a hydrological cycle and oceans cover a large area of its surface, and some atmospheric carbon dioxide has moved to rocks; by contrast Venus has a high concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere but has lost its water (Svedhem et al., 2007).

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The earth has always moved through regions of space in which it interacts with diverse objects, particles, and forces. The geohistorical record of asteroid and other impacts means that ‘we must incorporate sudden, unpredictable, cataclysmic events from space into our inventories of geological processes’ (Marvin, 1999: 112). Such events and their interactions with earth systems were particularly evident in the early history of the planet. Hutton’s strict view of uniformitarianism has thus had to be modified to accommodate catastrophist explanations. Knowledge of specific periods, however, is not yet able to provide a history of the significance of impacts compared with changes arising from earth-systems dynamics. There has been speculation since the 1600s on collisions. Scientific research on the question accelerated in the 1980s following the work of Luis and Walter Alvarez. The most famous such collision is the K/T event about 65 million years ago, now identified with a site near Chicxulub, Mexico, which led, or contributed decisively, to the extinction of dinosaur species. An asteroid break-up about 160 million years ago may have set up the long train of events leading to this collision (Bottke et al., 2007). The much bigger and older impact centred on Sudbury, Canada, left behind the material for the modern mining economy of the area. At the end of the Permian period, about 250 million years ago, many groups of species suffered devastating losses. About 96 per cent of marine species became extinct. The cause may similarly have been an impact, or a collision, whose effects interacted with the large-scale volcanism evident at the time. Alternatively, the catastrophe may have been precipitated just by earth-systems instabilities (White, 2002). The biological and other effects of collisions are significant. It has been estimated that the K/T event affected the functioning of global ecological and other systems for over two million years (Huggett, 2006: 117–21). Impacts create winners and losers. Mammals were the longterm victors after the end-Cretaceous event. It has been suggested that the major period of biodiversity growth about 470 million years ago followed an asteroid break-up that led to waves of frequent impacts of smaller objects on earth (Schmitz et al., 2008). There has been speculation that an impact may have precipitated the changes that led about 12,800 years ago to a northern-hemisphere cooling period (the Younger Dryas period). Smaller events, and a constant rain of debris, continue in the present. It has been estimated that more destructive events – such as the explosion over the Tunguska area of Siberia in 1908 – occur about once every thousand years (Brown, P. et al., 2002; Steel, 2008).


The earth–sun relationship is central to life on earth and the dynamics of its oceans and atmosphere. Surges in particles from the sun can do significant damage to electrical systems on earth. Patterns of solar forcing, or changes in the radiation coming from the sun, and orbital forcing – the effects resulting from changes in the earth’s movements – have consequences for earth systems. Inferences drawn from research on past earth climates have to be adjusted to accommodate the effects of the long-term increase in the brightness of the sun. The way the earth moves through space (in addition to its annual seasonal variations) has consequences for climate. Scientific interest in the idea, developed by Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian mathematician and engineer, in the early twentieth century, revived in the 1970s. In this view small changes in the path of the earth’s orbit around the sun, the angle of its tilt towards the sun, and in the direction of the axis, each take place in multi-thousand-year cycles, and these alter the amount of heat the earth receives from the sun, with consequences for climate regimes generally and the incidence of ice ages in particular. Evidence from Arctic ice cores, ocean sediments, and other sources was put forward in the 1980s in support of the orbital forcing view (Van Andel, 1994: 90–5, 241). One implication is that because ocean and land areas respond differently to such factors, there may be consequences for weather patterns. Support for a link with the historical incidence of monsoons has recently been inferred from a study of stalagmites in a cave in east central China (Overpeck and Cole, 2008). There may be complex interactions of solar and orbital changes with Atlantic and Pacific ocean-atmosphere systems (Emile-Geay et al., 2007). However, it remains far from clear how significant orbital forcing is compared with other influences on the history of the earth’s climate, or to what extent its effects are dependent on interactions with other factors.

Theory of the earth revisited In this and the previous chapter we have been looking at developments in earth theorizing or, to put it in its modern form, in scientific efforts to understand earth systems. How near completion is the grand project of a theory of the earth? One late eighteenth-century view was that geological knowledge was still so limited, and the history of geology so littered with past failures, that attempts to construct a theory of the earth should not even be attempted. Playfair strenuously countered this opinion in his defence of Hutton. There was

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no reason to suppose, that man, who has numbered the stars, and measured their forces, shall ultimately prove unequal to this investigation. (Playfair, 1956 [1802]: 511–12) For much of the time since then questions about the theory of the earth would not have made much sense to geologists. Such theories, they might have responded, were what philosophers used to dream up: real scientists actually study the earth. This, of course, is an oversimplification. Scientists are also interested in the establishment through scientific practices of principles and laws. They are influenced by ideas and findings from the past, even if this takes the form of rejecting (or forgetting) these. The images that appealed to Hutton – of dynamism and continuous change, of interconnectedness among the earth’s physical and ecological systems, and of the dependence of human life and well-being on these processes – are at play in the modern earth-systems sciences. Scientists now, however, are much more aware than was possible in the late 1700s of the complexity of these relationships; the impacts humans have on earth systems; the history of past earths; and the way lines of influence among geological, biological, atmospheric, and other phenomena move in more than one direction. They have also rediscovered the appeal of earth theory terminology. It can be seen in the titles of books such as Anderson’s Theory of the Earth (1989) and New Theory of the Earth (2007), Oldroyd’s Thinking about the Earth (1995), Kennedy’s Inventing the Earth (2006), and Shaw’s Craters, Cosmos and Chronicles: A New Theory of the Earth (1994). Questions about the current status of the theory of the earth call for three levels of answers. First, the question can be posed in the conventional terms of geology and traditional neighbouring earth-systemsrelated subdisciplines such as those of chemistry. Many, perhaps most, big questions have been resolved. Scientists have secure knowledge of important structures and processes: how the earth’s plates move, how rocks are formed, how rivers work, how mountains are made. This gives some geologists grounds for optimism about the prospects for concluding a theory of the earth (Fortey, 2004: 433). Gaps in data and in the understanding of key topics daunt others: ‘We are still far from a Theory of the Earth, or even a theory of volcanoes’ (Anderson, 1999: 33). If the criteria are stretched to extremes, to include the ability to describe and account for earth-systems history in detail and to predict specific events like a volcanic eruption, a hurricane, a near-earth-object collision, or an


ice age, then the project is clearly still very far from complete. However, a theory does not need to be able to demonstrate this level of historical or forecasting precision to be counted a success. Secondly, the development of a theory of the earth can be viewed in the complex terms of the earth-systems natural sciences. These are many, biological, atmospheric, as well as geological. Here there is more reason for caution. Crucial pieces of many puzzles are missing. Moreover, progress towards a comprehensive theory of the structures and processes of earth systems is checked by the incompleteness of the first kind of theory of the earth, that of the geological sciences (Lovelock, 2006: 135–8). Geologists have acknowledged the need for a grand theory of earth systems that connects understanding of physical phenomena with the worlds of living organisms (Oldroyd, 1995: 308). However, the biological sciences themselves contain many gaps and uncertainties (Moorcroft, 2006). Many important phenomena studied by ecologists are well known, but ‘theoretical explanations in terms of basic physical and biological principles have remained elusive’ (Brown, J.H. et al., 2002). Researchers have successfully probed many aspects of oceansatmosphere couplings and the complexities of geosphere-biosphereatmosphere interactions, but the distance still to go remains impressive. While some efforts build on studies of human activities during the Holocene, the goal of incorporating these into earth-systems researches remains elusive. In this third conception of earth-systems knowledge, insights about human activities from the social sciences and the humanities are drawn into evolving natural-science frameworks. Humans are not separate from the processes studied by earth-systems researchers, but the task of understanding them necessarily touches on a very large span of different issues of the kind raised in the human sciences. Some areas of research, for example in ecological economics and in parts of geography and archaeology, are explicitly oriented to bridging gaps between the social and the natural sciences. Developments on each of these three levels have far-reaching implications for policy and governance as well as for the scientific understanding of earth systems for its own sake. This is especially true of the third. Compared with the other two, however, research on that level has barely begun.


Part II Governance Challenges


6 Theorizing Governance and Community

The previous two chapters looked at the evolution of scientific ideas about earth systems, and the links between these and policy areas such as biodiversity and climate change. The discussions of governance processes in Part II concentrate on responses to three large clusters of issues. These are the interconnected sets of problems of the conservation of global biological diversity, climate change, and transboundary geological hazards. This chapter sets these policy responses in perspective by exploring the theoretical bases for understanding global governance. It begins by discussing the historical and philosophical settings out of which ideas of governance grew. Initially, as in Chapter 4, I do this by revisiting the writings of a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, in this case James Hutton’s colleague Adam Smith. I discuss his ideas of governance and of community and speculate on what his views might be on global environmental governance. The chapter goes on to discuss several key theoretical perspectives in international relations that are particularly relevant to understanding developments in global environmental governance and ends with a short characterization of the nature of governance.

Adam Smith on governance and community The choice of Adam Smith in the present context might look a little odd. Many environmentalists and social reformers have found little congeniality in his thought. He seems excessively fond of business, unconcerned about the costs of unregulated markets, too much an advocate of the liberalization of international trade, and inordinately suspicious of even the most modest of social-policy initiatives by governments. However, he occupies a crucial place in the history of thought 95

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on governance and community, even though these topics are often neglected by students of his writings. We do not need to agree with him on specific points in order to gain from the study of his writings. One problem lies in the polymathic breadth of Smith’s thought. This has often been shrunk, by admirers and detractors alike, even to the point of caricature. There is more to him than the stereotype of a single- or simple-minded advocate of market principles would suggest. He wrote extensively on ethics, including cosmopolitan ethics, and considered sympathetically a number of policy areas in which government interventions might be justified. He raised intriguing questions about international politics and the role of international law and had a wide-ranging interest in the natural sciences. There is a risk in a brief summary of overlooking key points and qualifications in the tangles of economic and philosophical topics he addresses, missing some of the implications of the resonant metaphors he drops into texts, pausing insufficiently to ponder the meticulous care with which he phrases points, and ignoring his fondness for what he called ‘digressions’. Coincidentally, Smith was a neighbour in Edinburgh and a close colleague of Hutton. They had contrasting personalities. An early biographer referred to Smith’s reclusive habits. Smith had moved back to Edinburgh in 1778, having been a professor of logic and then philosophy at Glasgow University in the 1750s and early 1760s. He was already a grand scholarly figure with an illustrious international reputation secured by major books on ethics and political economy. Smith and Hutton were both active in the new Royal Society of Edinburgh and, with the chemist Joseph Black (who among other things discovered the properties of carbon dioxide and its concentrations in the atmosphere), founded the more informal Oyster Club. Its other members included John Playfair, the early promoter of Hutton’s uniformitarian ideas. Adam Smith investigated four broad areas of thought that have particular significance for discussions of environmental issues: the world of economics or political economy, the nature of governance in the harsh contexts of international politics, the ethical ties among individuals in communities and the prospects of community formation across borders, and the history and philosophy of science. However, he did not always draw explicit connections among these diverse subjects. One problem has particularly troubled some readers of Smith. The so-called Adam Smith problem rests on the supposed tensions between his economic and his ethical writing. For some nineteenth-century critics, the sensibility of his ethical stance, found primarily in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1976b [1759]),

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the first edition of which was published in 1759, seemed at odds with the tough-minded pro-business posture found in his economic work, particularly in the editions from 1776 of The Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1976a [1776]). In the former he writes of duties to others, their sufferings, the power of conscience, and the minutiae of ethical conduct. In parts he is more sombre and the tone is sometimes like a secular sermon. In the latter he promotes free trade, opposes government activism, and heartily applauds the pursuit by individuals of their own interest. His conscience appears muffled, indifferent to the pain of the victims of capitalism. Smith’s ethical and economic views, though, are interdependent: growing economies foster the capacities that underpin good ethical judgements, and these contribute to the making of a prosperous society. He also implicitly emphasizes the significance of the different roles individuals play. As a businessman an individual acts, and in Smith’s view should act, out of material self-interest; but as a member of a nation, or of a family or group of friends, he can be asked for restraint and the observance of moral rules. There are other apparent tensions in his work. At times he seems attracted to the prospect of a spreading internationalism grounded in the liberalizing of trade. He discusses cosmopolitan ethics at length. At other times he is much more focused on power and on the economic and security interests of Britain. His views on trade edge him towards what later would be seen as a liberal view of the economic interdependence of nations, and of the potential of the engines of prosperity to forge a more peaceful world. Yet his appreciation for the facts of power leads him to adopt a realist perspective on the behaviour of states and he remains an unrelenting advocate of the need for strong military defences. Governance The Wealth of Nations reveals Smith’s more familiar persona. Here we encounter a classical liberal: distrustful of governments and worried about their power, alert to their often faulty reasoning, resentful of taxation (the art of ‘draining money from the pockets of the people’), supportive of the freeing of trade and business from government prying and regulation, and convinced that good things happen when economies prosper and that economies prosper when individuals are left to their own devices. Like other philosophers of his day, he believed that an understanding of human nature was crucial for understanding how societies function. He argued that a concern for self is a central, and good, element of human nature. He acknowledged more unseemly aspects of our

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psychological make-up, such as a love of dominating others (Wealth of Nations [WN], 1: 388 [III.ii.10]). When we meet or think of rich people we tend to praise them and wish to emulate them. His intent is not to try to correct such tendencies (though he is ready to chide people for their excesses). The approach, in a sense, is ethnographic: he is interested in the details and the consequences of people’s behaviours. Some aspects of human nature ground economies. We have a ‘disposition to truck, barter, and exchange’, as one of his students reported him as phrasing this important principle (Smith, 1978: 348 [vi.48]). By their nature, and in the many daily self-centred calculations they make, individuals are compelled to be alert to the interests of others. Economies thrive on such considerations. It was ‘not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’ (WN, 1: 26–7 [I.ii.2]). Economies are thus filled with many interdependent relationships. Through the division of labour, economies can produce and we can possess the many products needed for daily living: [W]ithout the assistance and cooperation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. (WN, 1: 22–3 [I.i.11]) However, sundry dark forces connive to frustrate the harmonious workings of the economic machine that produces these results. They include powerful groups, the governments who pander to them, and the various blockages that thwart the free circulation of goods among nations. A habit of forming groups is, for Smith, another feature of human nature. But it is one that worried him. Masters as well as workmen, he observed, have a tendency to combine with their fellows to protect their interests. Dangers are inherent in this: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices. (WN, 1: 145 [I.x.c.26]) Since groups are ‘natural’, Smith could not ask governments to eliminate them; but he insisted that governments should not encourage the bad consequences that result from their excesses. In general, governments should


not attempt to regulate business activity. The failings of mercantilist or state-managed economies furnished him with much supporting evidence. The traditional state defence of agriculture is a case in point. Smith’s argument here is directed both to the governments who indulged in such practices and to the writings of the eighteenth-century economists who believed that wealth grew out of agriculture and the land. Policies of supporting the countryside are bound to be self-defeating because they undermine the natural interdependence among the agricultural and industrial sectors of economies (WN, 2: 686 [IV.ix.48]). Government-imposed restraints on trade are thus anathema (although Smith allowed for some exceptions and recognized that in practice protectionism would not halt soon): If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage. (WN, 1: 457 [IV.ii.12]) It was better to buy wine from France than for Scotland to produce it at great expense and technical ingenuity. Restrictions on trade, moreover, have paradoxical consequences. Smith pointed out that the British government restricted alcohol imports and did so in large part for moral reasons, but the resulting scarcities of wine in British cities resulted in greater drunkenness than was found in the wine-producing countries themselves (WN, 1: 492 [IV.iii.c.8]; 2: 891 [V.ii.k.50]). If governments should not regulate economies and trade, what should they do? Smith defended the idea of small government, but he qualified the general proposition in some interesting ways. At the minimum, there have to be armies. Indeed he described war as ‘the noblest of all arts’ and frequently praised martial spirit and signalled the dangers that hover when it is lacking. And societies need institutions of justice, meaning primarily mechanisms for protecting property. There should also be some government role in support of education. Societies and economies benefit from the provision of education even to the poorest. Education turns people into better citizens: The more they are instructed, the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders. (WN, 2: 788 [V.i.f.61])

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Smith did not, however, open the door to a comprehensive state role. Even the poorest should be able and encouraged to contribute something to the cost of the education of their children, for example through the payment of fees to teachers. Smith also looked favourably on a variety of public works of the kind that all members of society benefit from and that private business cannot adequately provide, such as canals. However, an important criterion for government actions in these areas was that there should be a benefit to all. It was ‘unjust that the whole society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society’ (WN, 2: 815 [V.i.i.3]). Finally, he envisaged some actions by governments to relieve poverty. He was opposed to taxes on necessities. He rejected the common prejudice of his day and class that many workers were lazy, and noted that those doing hard physical labour required adequate rest and leisure time. He itemized a variety of health problems suffered by workers in different occupations. Some commentators have argued that Smith, in effect, supports the state provision of at least minimal health care programmes (Kennedy, 2005: 227). His sympathy for workers’ circumstances appealed to nineteenth-century critics of the alienating consequences of capitalism. He wrote of the human costs of the division of labour. Under such regimes, a worker’s task involves ‘a few very simple operations’ and there is no room for learning and creativity. The labourer thus generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. . . . His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial values. (WN, 2: 781–2 [V.i.f.50]) Smith also considered the external roles of governments. His support of defence as a crucial activity of the state, and of ‘martial values’ as an essential component of both the moral education of individuals and the defence capabilities of states, is based on an image, Hobbesian at times, of international politics as irremediably conflict prone. He is a realist as well as a liberal (Wyatt-Walter, 1996). A harmony of interests might apply within a country, but at the international level there was, for Smith, no hand, visible or invisible, to steer nations towards amity. Indeed Independent and neighbouring nations, having no common superior to decide their disputes, all live in continual dread and suspicion of one another. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments [TMS]: 228 [VI.ii.2.3])


International law is little help. The respect of states for it is often very little more than mere pretence and profession. From the smallest interest, upon the slightest provocation, we see those rules every day, either evaded or directly violated without shame or remorse. (TMS: 228 [VI.ii.2.3]) Community Smith also addressed questions of the appropriate roles of governments and the nature of the international system in his writings on ethics. The two sets of arguments are not incompatible, but the lines of reasoning, and the styles, differ. They are more instrumental and interest-based in Smith, the political economist and more affective and communitygrounded in Smith, the ethicist. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he devoted much attention to day-to-day moral problems and to the usual culprits that give rise to these (selfishness, vanity, a love of power, envy, yearning for the admiration of others, and so on). He could not universally condemn these attributes, however, as in his view many assisted the workings of economies and the cultivation of a moral order in society. Imagination is a human quality. It makes ‘wealth and greatness’ attractive and persuades us to work hard to attain these. This is a ‘deception’, but a useful one: It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe. … The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. (TMS: 183–4 [IV.1.9–10]) He conceded that some tendencies – admiring the rich rather than the wise, neglecting to sympathize with the poor – can be morally corrupting. But prosperity is good. Smith refused to accept that wealth should not be pursued and enjoyed merely because not all members of society share it. He condemned

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whining and melancholy moralists, who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, in the horrors of death, under the insults and oppression of their enemies. (TMS: 139 [III.3.9]) Self-regard, however, is not the same as selfishness or indifference to moral codes. While concern for self guides the moral judgements that individuals make, they are also steered by an inner guide and critic. This voice, that of the ‘impartial spectator’ or ‘the authority of the man within the breast, is always at hand to overawe them into the proper tone and temper of moderation’ (TMS: 292 [VII.ii.1.44]). Selfish concerns are thus restrained: ‘The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society’ (TMS: 235 [VI.ii.33]). Communities exist on the basis of ‘sympathy’. This can mean compassion, or empathy for the sufferings of others, but it can also refer to a more generalized ability to understand others. Either way, Smith seemed to hanker after a kind of Edinburgh-club model of community, in which pleasure is obtained from ‘conversation and society’ and arises from a certain correspondence of sentiments and opinions, from a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical instruments coincide and keep time with one another. (TMS: 337 [VII.iv.28]) This model of a community can only work if there is ‘a free communication of sentiments and opinions’ and if solutions are arrived at by ‘reason and persuasion’. Like economies, then, communities cannot be planned. The invisible hand creates wealth out of multiple economic transactions among individuals; sympathy generates community on the basis of multiple interpersonal interactions and moral judgements. Individuals are unwitting agents in the production of these goods. Smith deeply suspected the would-be planner. At the extreme this is the ‘man of system’ who, driven by ideology and intolerance, attempts to shape society according to a vision and who


is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. … [He forgets that] in the great chessboard of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. (TMS: 233–4 [VI.ii.2.17]) The momentum of this argument about sympathy and community also compelled Smith to address the themes of Stoic thought of ancient Greece and Rome. Some features he found appealing, such as the importance of the care of self, the principle of living in accordance with natural laws, and the virtue of enduring both adversity and good fortune with equanimity. He was repelled, though, when Stoicism seemed to cultivate apathy, relativism, and indifference and ultimately he was sceptical about its cosmopolitan strain. Cosmopolitanism is an unavoidable topic since it could be seen as a logical extension of Smith’s arguments about community. If we have fellow-feeling with others, and wish ‘to feel how each other is affected, to penetrate into each other’s bosoms’ (TMS: 337 [VII.iv.28]), why should such expressions of sympathy halt at the borders of states? His approach was to observe what naturally took place and to imbue this with normative weight. People in practice rank the moral obligations they feel towards others, in circles rippling out from self, family, and friends. Their weight diminishes the further afield the imagination travels. It was thus inaccurate to see an individual as a ‘citizen of the world’ (TMS: 140 [III.3.11]). Any individual is naturally tied by feelings to a nation. Further, [t]he love of our own country seems not to be derived from the love of mankind. The former sentiment is altogether independent of the latter, and seems sometimes even to dispose us to act inconsistently with it. (TMS: 229 [VI.ii.2.4]) France has three times the population of Britain, he observed, but that does not lead Britons to value France’s prosperity three times more highly than their own. Thus for Smith the armed forces and other

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institutions of states are legitimate expressions of community, not barriers obstructing a supposedly better path to a world community. We naturally care primarily for our own small ‘departments’. The events which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most, and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows. (TMS: 292 [VII.ii.1.44])

Smithian environmental governance: A thought experiment Smith’s influence extends through the socialist writers of the 1800s who, among other things, liked his labour theory of value, as well as the emerging classical tradition of economic thought erected by Ricardo, Marshall, Mill, and others. It has been less obvious in international relations theory, partly because of the way early IR theorizing tended to detach itself from debates in economics. His writings cover topics that have since fallen within different scholarly categories – ethics, the philosophy and history of science, governance, public policy studies, sociology, economics. Yet it is this breadth that is particularly useful when we look at the implications of his views for environmental governance. The fact that he does not directly address environmental policies or the workings of international institutions need not deter us from speculating about the value of a Smithian perspective for understanding these. Neither was present in the eighteenth century. Nor was the welfare state. He insisted, however, that in his books he was elaborating, for readers, principles of broad applicability. Questions of the nature of economies and of governance, the transformation of the earth’s resources into the wealth of societies, the power of states, the moral duties of individuals and their identities in groups, and other characteristically Smithian themes resonate within environmental policy debates. His perspective is broadly like that of market environmentalism. Smith had little patience for government interference, economic planners, or ‘men of system’. Wealth, which in his view could not be generated by the state, makes good things possible, including good moral judgements, the arts and sciences, political stability, and presumably, sound thinking and practices on the environment. From his praise for the ‘progressive’ state (in which economic growth promotes the happiness of most people) and his denunciation of the ‘whining moralists’ who object to prosperity, we can infer that he would not support a global environmentalist ethic of reduced consumption or zero growth.


Smith also respected, however, what he saw as the orderliness and harmony of nature. Indeed he had been mostly interested as a university student in mathematics and the natural sciences. The natural order might, for him, have been set in motion by God (Hill, 2001; Rothschild, 2001: 68, 134–5), but he strayed into such design issues even less than Hutton. His starting point was rather the sense of ‘wonder’. This had since prehistoric times driven humanity’s attempts to understand ‘the theatre of nature’, and was the basis of his view of philosophy as ‘the science of the connecting principles of nature’ (Smith, 1980a [1795]: 31, 45, 48; 1980b [1795]: 107). He wrote sympathetically of the Greek view of the universe as a complete machine, as a coherent system, governed by general laws, and directed to general ends, viz. its own preservation and prosperity, and that of all the species that are in it. (Smith, 1980b [1795]: 113) In conjunction with his concept of sympathy, there is a basis here for the development of a Smithian global conservationist ethic (Frierson, 2006). The view has parallels with that of Hutton (see Chapter 4). In Hutton’s geology, minute changes over long periods of time forge the physical order of the earth; in Smith’s political economy, multiple small-scale daily decisions made by individuals, in their capacities as both ethical and economic agents, manufacture a social order. In each case an invisible hand, respectively geological and economic, drives emergent order. In each case, moreover, the results are good: a habitable earth for Hutton, a moral and prosperous society for Smith. In general he did not want governments to stray too far from their primary responsibilities of providing security and protecting property. He warned (in the Smithian equivalent of the precautionary principle) that no actions should be taken that might jeopardize economic progress or undermine the moral agency of individuals. He would thus likely veto many proposals for environmental policy action, particularly if they involve top-down regulations and command-and-control instruments. He would, possibly, be hesitant about even discussing such matters. One commentator finds in him a ‘modesty’ on many public policy topics, ‘in which he simply averts his gaze from the great public objectives of improving entire societies’ (Rothschild, 2001: 145). However, Smith’s writings also contain hints of the acceptability of some form of environmental policy role for governments. A Smithian

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respect for science could lead to support for government action when experts reach consensus on matters such as endangered species, climate change, or the carcinogenicity of compounds. His concept of sympathy, particularly if it is extended to include duties to non-human species, could likewise be a supporting bulwark for government actions and the basis of a moral code for individual decisions affecting nature. In Smithian logic it is not in the interests of members of a society to allow their natural-resource stocks of soil, fish, fresh water, and energy to diminish to the point where these can no longer sustain a ‘progressive’ economy. Here too are philosophical bases for government measures on sustainable development. Smith’s views of public works and health also offer possibilities. The latter-day environmental policy equivalents of his canals include tsunami warning systems, earthquake-zone building codes, and national parks and protected areas. These are in the public interest, but are not best secured by reliance on private business. Public expenditures on them benefit all members of society. A government role could be justified on such public-works criteria in other areas, for example investment in geothermal, wind, or tidal power. However, since the possibility of longterm financial returns arises, the governmental role in such cases would, for Smith, presumably be more modest and would perhaps at most take the form of limited-term or co-partnership deals with firms. Similarly, his acknowledgement of the health hazards of different occupations suggests the requirement of considering government measures in relation to air- and water-borne pollutants and toxic-chemical residues in foods. Government collaboration with industry might be acceptable, then, but its conditions would have to be carefully defined. Smith would probably see such ventures as a slippery slope leading to the still greater power of groups. Cooperation between governments and environmental NGOs would also be problematic. On the one hand, these can do useful things that a thrifty and small government might not wish to do, such as scientific research on threatened wildlife species. Their instincts, like Smith’s, are collaborative. Like him, they support the free circulation of information and ideas. On the other hand, they like to lobby governments and try to persuade them to strengthen their regulatory grip on society. They are afflicted with un-Smithian ‘enthusiasms’ of various kinds. Some NGOs are opposed to economic growth, are run by or appeal to ‘men of system’, question the need for large expenditures on military defence, and promote a risky cosmopolitanism. And in the last resort, they too are groups: they have interests. They have to be approached with caution, even suspicion.


Smith’s views of international politics and law call for vigilance about ever-present threats to national security. They remind waverers of the unreliability of treaties. He would not be surprised to discover the ‘pretence and profession’ behind states’ declaratory support for the Kyoto climate-change agreement, or their evasion of their commitments under it ‘without shame or remorse’. Perhaps governments in a Smithian world would not concern themselves with such topics. He insists, after all, that security is a foundational pillar of the duties of governments. Even here, however, there is a possible chink. In times of crisis such as war or financial panic, the range of acceptable actions by governments expands. Were he to concede that global matters such as climate change or the availability of fresh water constitute crises, or that they have significant security dimensions, he too could become a latterday advocate of effective multilateral environmental agreements.

Theoretical perspectives on environmental governance Much discussion of governance since the eighteenth century has turned on exchanges about states. Some interpretations emphasize, as Smith did, the power of states and their capacities to promote their interests and thus frustrate the growth of international law. Others maintain that international institutions have problem-solving power and can curb the impulses that provoke interstate conflicts. Some theoretical approaches are useful because they distantiate themselves from actors’ concerns. Others have particular value because their questions and insights resonate with real-world discursive practices and representational themes. There are multiple interconnections among these. Perspectives characteristically mix normative and analytical concerns. This blending shapes approaches to key questions. Differing perspectives not only propose ways of tackling the problem of the state analytically but also contain prescriptive preferences that lean towards either the enhancement or the diminution of state authority. Theoretical enquiry about global governance, and more particularly about environmental governance, thus draws freely, if sometimes unwittingly, on a long history of thought about the state and the international system. Five perspectives usefully illuminate differing aspects and tendencies in global environmental governance and play with themes common in the arguments of governance actors themselves. These are the approaches that emphasize respectively multilateralist cooperation, global civil society, epistemic communities, functionalism, and cosmopolitanism.

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Multilateralism Growing international cooperation on environmental issues from the late 1960s reflected the tenets of multilateralism. The predominant actors were still states, and approaches to global problems were crafted on this basis. States were increasingly joined, however, by others, particularly intergovernmental and non-state actors. States nonetheless initiated, often felt compelled to attend, and determined the working rules – including rules on the participation of NGOs – and the outcomes of international conferences. They were also the drivers of the fate of international conventions, such as the 1973 and 1992 agreements respectively on the international protection of wetlands and on biological diversity. The enduring problems of governance thus surrounded questions of compliance, political and legal interpretations of the obligations of states, appropriate responses to ‘soft-law’ innovations, funding mechanisms, and the intersection of environmental agreements with trade and other issues on international economic agendas. Environmental issues coaxed states into diverse patterns of leadership and resistance ranging from proactive diplomatic initiatives, for example, by Germany in relation to the 1979 migratory species convention, to objection by non-participation, as in the US response to the 1997 agreement on GHG emissions. Intergovernmental bodies are central to the theories and politics of enhanced multilateralism. Yet while they retain important institutional trappings – secretariats, executive and representative bodies, and actorness in international law – the relative autonomy of IGOs is constrained by states. These, as well as their complex organizational makeup, the nature of the issues they handle, and shifting political circumstances, influence the varying IGO modes of innovation, inertia, adaptation, and learning (Siebenhüner, 2008). There are also significant institutional components in international environmental agreements, such as provisions for scientific advisory committees and Conferences of the Parties (COPs). Through such legal frameworks states pursue their international environmental policy interests. Increasingly they do so in contexts characterized by influence attempts by multiple actors, including environmental NGOs and associations representing business sectors. These developments expand the scope for coalition politics (Forman and Segaar, 2006). A mounting sense of crisis in environmental multilateralism in the 1990s and early 2000s erupted from several factors. Earlier developments, particularly the expeditious creation in the mid-1980s of the ozone-layer regime, the major UN conference on environment and


development held in 1992, a flurry of new international conventions, and growing international scientific consensus on climate change, emphasized both the urgency and the manageability through international cooperation of global environmental issues. Yet many states, including many developing countries – and also the US, formerly a leader on international environmental issues – were increasingly ill-disposed towards multilateral initiatives. These developments coincided with a widespread Smithian retreat of the state and the reemergence of ideological critiques of environmentally interventionist governments. At the core of multilateralist advocacy lies the argument that states acting alone cannot solve transnational, regional, or global environmental problems. Strategies of ignoring or marginalizing international forums are thus self-defeating and irrational. Unlike state-decentring perspectives, multilateralist theory retains faith in the abilities of appropriately equipped states to achieve common goals. Different versions stress variously the need to strengthen state capacities, for example by expanding their scientific and technical resources and the political weight of environment agencies inside governments, or to promote the repertoires and effectiveness of IGOs and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Multilateralist discourses are weakened, however, to the extent that they neglect the importance of domestic politics. The internal affairs of states have assumed greater external significance as domestic actors have pondered both the promise and the likely costs to national economies and identities of global governance developments. Some states – Canada, India, Russia, Spain, Australia, and others – contain multiple subnational governments, a phenomenon that complicates in varying ways the negotiating strategies of national governments and the politics of the implementation of international agreements. Complexities also result from the internal structuring of governments. Environment and naturalresource responsibilities are typically distributed among several government departments and agencies. These may change in reorganization exercises or as a result of interagency politics. Foreign and later finance ministries in the US, Canada, and other western countries, for example, moved swiftly to establish ownership of climate-change policy when it became apparent to them that the issues were not technical, low politics ones of the kind that environmental agencies traditionally handle. Global civil society Global civil society perspectives share with multilateralist theory a belief in the need for entrenched collaboration on environmental

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issues, but diverge from it by calling into question the problem-solving capabilities of states. Some doubt the good faith and political will of governments. There is disagreement over whether states can and should be resuscitated as primary players, for example with the aid of cooperative NGO-state or multistakeholder governance formats, or whether their mounting irrelevance dismisses such approaches as culde-sac politics. Deeper divides result from environmentalist controversy over the legitimacy or pragmatic value of NGO collaboration with large corporations. Environmental groups are in many ways the quintessential global environmental actors. They are active across a wide range of policy processes, from agenda formation to MEA implementation. They have acquired political capital from suspicions that governments are too preoccupied with other matters, too short term in their thinking, or too deferential to business interests to respond adequately to environmental problems. The non-state sector is diverse. While traditional environmental NGOs like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are often the most visible actors, the private sphere also includes firms and the representative associations of different industrial sectors, professional associations, churches, media organizations, local community citizens’ groups, and scientific institutions (Le Prestre, 2005: 102–27; Pattberg, 2007). Obviously there cannot be a unified global environmental voice shared by all such groupings. Environmental NGOs undertake a variety of governance roles. Some activities are, in effect, defined by the legal and taxation rules of different jurisdictions concerning the operation of private organizations. Education, data collection, the publicizing of supportive scientific findings, and the mobilization of public opinion are central roles for many. Some aspire to a comprehensive environmental viewpoint, while others restrict themselves to specialized sectors. Different ones lobby governments, make presentations to the hearings of legislature committees, and engage in direct-action campaigns. The traditional lenses of pressure group studies are inadequate guides to the diversity of environmental NGOs. Some are in effect co-partners with state actors. At the transnational level, IUCN, which grew out of a loose coalition of conservation NGOs and a handful of sympathetic government agencies in the 1940s, engages in governance activities midway between those of NGOs and IGOs (Arts, 2004). Intergovernmental forums routinely make provision for the presence of NGOs, for example, through rules on the participation of observers. Many more groups take part in the public forums accompanying major UN conferences.


National roles intersect with these activities. In international settings NGOs attempt to strengthen regimes in order to structure the behaviour of national governments and to give themselves the means to critique compliance failures. During the 1990s Canadian environmental groups put pressure on the federal government to introduce endangered species legislation and argued successfully that this was an obligation arising from Canada’s signature of the CBD in 1992. Some groups participate directly in policymaking. The Canadian chapter of WWF, for example, has been a traditional governance player on endangered species policy, and Wetlands International was a close co-partner with federal environmental officials in shaping Australia’s policy on regional migratory birds agreements. Epistemic communities By virtue of their roles in disseminating information, generating knowledge, and shaping and circulating ideas global civil society actors are also partners in epistemic communities. Scientific organizations are central to the workings of these communities. Environmental issues are steeped in perspectives from the natural sciences such as those from conservation biology (in problems of threatened wildlife species and ecosystem restoration), inorganic chemistry (in issues of pollution from toxic compounds), and atmospheric science (in climate-change policy issues). Studies of global environmental governance adopt various views of the relationship between science and policy. The main alternatives have been described as variations on the rational-instrumental approach, where science is viewed as something separate from politics and has the role of ‘providing verifiable facts about reality on which rational policy decisions can be based’; and interpretations based on a political-institutional perspective, where it is assumed that scientific knowledge ‘is not independent of political context but is produced by scientists who are embedded in particular natural and social orders’ (Gulbrandsen, 2008: 100–1). This does not exhaust the possibilities, and in practice both kinds of processes are common. Political interactions in which scientific findings play an important part are complex and subject to unceasing games of renewal, gridlock, and inertia. There are close conjunctures between the worlds of policy-relevant science on the one hand and scientifically grounded governance processes on the other. The notion of epistemic community draws attention not only to the co-production and circulation of knowledge but also more generally to the ways in which different actors construct social, political, and natural worlds. The discourses of NGOs, scientists, and other

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governance actors have significantly altered many features of the global environmental agenda, and prevailing views of governance practices, in the past 40 years. Ideas from economics have contributed to the synthesis of sustainable development, for example, and ethical debates have served to foster political appreciation of problems of equity and environmental justice. Functionalist logic Functionalist theory, a novel and influential contribution to the peace debates of the 1930s and 1940s, in effect aims to prise issues free of the control of states. It has a strong resonance with several critical ideas in global environmental governance, particularly through its faith in the viability of effective cooperation among diverse actors on scientific and technical issues that serve human needs. Transnational approaches to practical problems of the environment are eminently sensible, from this perspective, because pollutants, toxic chemicals, and wild species of plants and animals cross borders. The process of creating what might become a functionally borderless global society is thus one in which problems are more easily solved. As a bonus, collaboration of this kind, in functionalist perspectives, makes for a more peaceful world. Even so, there are some ambiguities in functionalism’s orientation to the state. On the one hand, functionalism tends to have a marked anti-state tone. State structures, even when these are mobilized to act in concert with each other, are viewed as incapable of serving the health, food, water supply, employment, security, clean air, and other needs of individuals and communities. Functionalist perspectives opt instead for intersocietal cooperation mediated through international technical agencies. They anticipate a gradual transformation of global society as individuals transfer loyalty and support towards these institutions and away from those of their nation. On the other hand, this ambitious exercise in the decentring of the state is qualified. A related principle of functionalist logic insists on a posture of indifference to the kinds of actors who can solve specific problems. If it works and does the job, any tool and any actor is acceptable. This pragmatic stance of not prejudging governance claims thus keeps the door open to states as participants in global, sectorally based, task-oriented cooperation. In a similar way to, but more explicitly than, multilateralist and global civil society theory, functionalism operates on two levels. It aims simultaneously to promote the welfare of people living in different societies and also to build a foundation out of which a more peaceful world will emerge. While these in a sense are logically


distinct enterprises, functionalist arguments tend to frame the first as a means, or even as the only reliable means, towards achieving the second. David Mitrany, a pioneer of these approaches, was adamant that functionalist routes were not steps towards a world government but rather practical peace-oriented alternatives to the federalist schemes he saw as fundamentally flawed. Drawing on his extensive background of research on the economic and social problems of south-east Europe, he argued that on big international problems such as health and the management of economies, the work of international technical bodies should be the basis of global governance architecture. Thus ‘The functional approach was always a theory of government, but it was not necessarily a theory of state government’ (Ashworth, 2005: 219). Participants in the evolution of global environmental governance have shared some of these views. However, divergent images of the state affect the outlooks of actors. Many environmental NGOs maintain that states are essential: they are needed to implement international agreements, negotiate the bridging of gaps between rich and poor countries, compensate developing countries for undertaking costly obligations, clamp down on domestic environmental wrongdoers, and lend added legitimacy to the awareness-raising activities of civil society groups. This view of states is thus based not on a functionalist deep scepticism about their problem-solving capacities but rather on a determined drive to renovate them and to create in them greater resources of political will and environmentalist enthusiasm. Cosmopolitan visions The cosmopolitan project tries to recover and reintroduce ethical values of community into the relations of individuals and groups divided by jurisdictional borders. Like functionalism, its preference is for an increasingly borderless world, but it takes a different route: affective, ethical, and communitarian, it contrasts with the determinedly practical, instrumental, and technical intuitions of functionalism. This is an approach to peace and transnational cooperation through the moral improvement of individuals and the cultivation of what Smith called ‘sympathy’. Different expressions of cosmopolitanism reflect differing conceptions of the state. More modest forms tolerate a world of states and explore the changes required for people and governments to live in relative harmony with different others. More ambitious schemes seek the abandonment of a perennially conflict-prone international system and its replacement by a world polity and community. Supporters of

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multilateralist options suspect, as Smith himself did, that the cosmopolitan project rests on shaky foundations. The idea of shared values across borders has wide applicability for environmental governance, particularly on issues of environmental justice. It has had traction in debates on human rights abuses, poverty and inequities, and immigration and asylum (Hayden, 2005; Linklater, 2006; Baker, 2009; van Hooft, 2009). These issues can lead to calls for actions compatible with traditional state norms, for example, for expanded development assistance, changes in refugee laws, and thirdparty mediation in armed conflicts. Other options, however, pose threats to principles of sovereignty, non-interference, and the legal equality of states. They do so on the basis of appeals to higher-order sets of values that transcend jurisdictional boundaries and to evaluations of chronic imperfections in the state system. In practice the state system constrains the abilities of private bodies and individuals to act across borders to defend ecological integrity and human rights. The rise of concepts of humanitarian intervention, however, and of ideas of common environmental problems checks older practices grounded in the presumption of the normative primacy of states. Doubts about cosmopolitan reasoning and its applicability to ecological governance recall criticisms of the functionalist project. It appears to deny self-evident realities of power, politics, human nature, and identities. Connotations, some unseemly, proliferate. Cosmopolitanism ‘can suggest an unpleasant posture of superiority toward the putative provincial’ (Appiah, 2006: xiii). Individuals sense a moral obligation to act in response to human suffering, but the obligation, as Smith observed, diminishes with distance – and with temporal and cultural as well as geographical distance. Ethical responses to others under conditions of globalization may, as a result, turn inward and result in more intense localisms. Interventions across borders are unavoidably problematic, especially since intervenors, whether great powers or development NGOs, believe in and are skilled in the art of conjuring up morally plausible rationales for their actions. Transnational environmental politics cannot be understood, however, without an appreciation of the extent to which notions of care and common values across borders have permeated the values of individuals and of civil society groups. These responses represent qualified, pragmatic versions of cosmopolitanism. They are not usually elements of grander packages of ideas envisaging the collapse of the state system and its replacement with a global polity. Indeed they rely at crucial points on calls for stronger, not withering, states and, as in ‘fair-trade’


arrangements, for complex deals among corporations, local communities, NGOs, and other actors in which governments are themselves players. Cosmopolitan ideas and practices nonetheless coexist with disparities of state power and economic inequities and with wide cultural differences in the representation of environmental problems. Searches for global environmental solutions that rest on supposed common values may degenerate into a politics of power relations, as the strong try to impose their ecological view of the world on the weak. To the extent that such a risk exists, a realist might respond that the state system is a better guarantor of the protection of citizens of poor countries than well-meaning schemes for its abolition. In practice cosmopolitan thinking has reinforced evolving principles of sustainable development and stressed the need for accommodation among groups, a sensitivity to inequities, and the application of democratic criteria to global environmental policymaking. Problems of justice of the kind that cosmopolitanism has historically addressed are widespread in environmental policy. Climate-change negotiations deal with problems of translating into policy terms a notion of obligation (as a function of GHG production) qualified by economic development status. There are significant inequities in the distribution of the world’s scientific and technological capacities to understand earth-systems problems. Groups in richer countries owe a debt to poorer countries to the extent that they benefit from the ecological and economic changes that poorer countries make. For example, mangrove habitats have been transformed into a basis for shrimp aquaculture economies in several developing countries. Consumers in Europe and North America are the beneficiaries, while local coastal communities in the exporting countries bear the costs of a reduced capacity to withstand storm damage and a loss of the resources and ecosystem services of mangroves (Turner and Fisher, 2008). Similar transnational ethical considerations arise with the extensive use of coral for building materials for tourist complexes, for example in the Maldives, or the multiple factors that led to significant losses in the coral reefs around Jamaica in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Governance as process and activity Ideas of governance build on traditional ideas of what governments do and should do. However, they deliberately skew these towards metaphors designed to capture fluidity, continued movement, multifacetedness,

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streams of activities, and the elusiveness of goals. The leitmotif is process. Governance refers to ‘the processes and institutions, both formal and informal, that guide and restrain the collective activities of a group’ (Keohane and Nye, 2000: 12). Multiple competing and cooperating actors take on steering roles. While institutions are elements in these processes, approaches to global governance tend to begin with an acceptance of the absence, and the absence of the possibility, of global institutions cast in the mould of their domestic counterparts. International institutions of many kinds exist, but these are not equipped with authoritative law-making authority, enforcement mechanisms, and taxation powers, and they do not operate in a context of global constitutional frameworks and electoral systems. ‘[N]o one holds the view that we can have global governance of the globe – that is, of human social life in its entirety’ (Whitman, 2009: 5). Governance notions tend to rest instead on Lockean assumptions of the possibility of cooperation among members of a society and the optimism of liberal international theory, generally, that progress towards a more peaceful, richer, and fairer world is achievable. Governance actors often differ, however, on how much ‘government’ – in the traditional sense of compliance demands and authority – can and should be inserted into environmental and other international agreements (Barrett, 2003: 292–3). Choices have to be made between depth and breadth: between trying to secure a wide measure of agreement among states (which tends to produce a relatively non-onerous instrument) and insisting on a document which has more clout and places more obligations on parties (which easily alarms governments and increases the numbers of non-signatories and compliance slouches). The accumulated stock of multilateral environmental agreements reflects both kinds of processes. Some governance ideas reaffirm, while others contest, the normative centrality of states in these processes. Further, the domain of global governance can be defined in a more restricted fashion to refer to processes in international regimes, or in a more expansive way to include activities at local and national levels (Whitman, 2009: 35–6). It has horizontal as well as vertical dimensions (see Chapter 2). The views of both the observers of and the participants in governance activities are significant. Multiple state and non-state actors continually redefine situations, issues, and the steering procedures of governance. They use these framings not only to understand complex social and political worlds but also as means of altering the perceptions and actions of others. Governance entails study of


how we think about governing. It is a field of enquiry that problematises the collective and often taken-for-granted systems of thought that make governing strategies appear natural and given at certain times in history. (Lövbrand et al., 2009: 8) A proliferation of definitions and approaches has left some critics objecting that ‘governance’ lacks meaning and is little more than an alternative term for describing international relations (Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2006). The reach and the reality of governance are nonetheless considerable. Understanding governance is a crucial task in the study of global society generally and of environmental arrangements more specifically. The study of governance, Jim Whitman (2005: 16) argues, has become more important and compelling as questions of public policy grow in complexity; as the number and powers of actors and interested parties within states … increase; as states find themselves pinched between increasing public expectation and constrained or shrinking resources; and as various kinds of transnational relations proliferate, unmediated by state authority.

7 Structures of Environmental Governance

Contemporary global governance has continuities with a long tradition of statecraft. Environmental policy activities at these levels are partly directed towards collaborative problem solving, but they are constrained by, and partly serve as a politics of the reaffirmation of, traditional state structures. The structures and dynamics of environmental governance are nonetheless subject to change. The rise to positions of prominence in many governance formats of global civil society organizations represents one such notable innovation. Scientists and scientific bodies play a variety of non-state and intergovernmental roles in these settings. This chapter discusses these developments. It looks first at global environmental governance activities and the contexts of international politics that influence and are influenced by their course and then at the expanding governance roles of scientific actors. A third section introduces the broad framework used in the following three chapters to discuss, respectively, the global governance of biodiversity, climate change, and geological hazards.

Making haste slowly: Environmental governance as a process Global environmental governance functions in political contexts shaped largely in past centuries. Adam Smith was writing at a time when governance in international politics was limited to the diplomacy of states, particularly the great powers, and to issues of war, security, alliances, and the negotiation of deals on territory. Not surprisingly, he and others were attracted to Hobbesian portrayals. There seemed to be a perpetual possibility of war, a condition which bred and sprang from suspicion, the fragility of international law, and the structuration of balance-of-power politics. 118

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The core principle, reflecting the seventeenth-century Westphalian conception of the rights and powers of rulers, affirmed the independence and sovereignty of states and their theoretical equality. The rise of nationalism in Europe influenced some features of states and statecraft, as did domestic processes of democratization from the second half of the 1800s. Various philosophical and legal discourses sought peace through confederation and mechanisms to strengthen international law. Diverse traditions converged in some nineteenth-century practices, for example in diplomatic exchanges designed to prevent small south-east European or North African conflicts from degenerating into inter-great-power war and in experimentation with institutionalized dispute-settlement procedures. Subsequent catastrophic wars created the circumstances which led to the creation of large-scale intergovernmental institutions aspiring to universal membership and the performance of multiple kinds of governance tasks. Thinking about the need for common approaches by states to important issues, and criticism of the failures of governments to move in these directions, are characteristics of liberal international theory as well as of environmentalist narratives. Some early arguments were particularly alert to economic considerations. Free traders in nineteenth-century Britain advocated policies that meshed neatly with its interests. Trade liberalization eventually became one among many recipes for promoting a more orderly and peaceful international society. Especially after the experiences of economic depression and world war, other parts of the liberal tradition became more institutionally oriented. Diverse organizations designed to encourage multilateralist cooperation on problems of food security, human rights, energy, global financial management, conflict resolution, and other matters became steadily entrenched in the post-1945 world. As first the League of Nations and later the UN took shape, then, they were influenced by various strands of the theory and practice of nineteenth-century diplomacy. Intergovernmental cooperation on practical or technical questions, again with Europe as the base, had already tackled issues such as railway gauges, postal communications, and health protection for travellers. The emerging functionalist tradition of international cooperation saw, in such developments, not only practical cross-border problem-solving initiatives but also, through the changes they could generate in the habits of peoples and governments, an ingenious means of creating a more peaceful world. International cooperation on a variety of what later would be called environmental or sustainability topics also grew in the late 1800s and

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early 1900s. Governance developments during this period included agreements on fisheries, seals, and migratory birds; the rise in Europe and in North America of NGOs and of loosely organized transnational networks linking them; and regularized contacts among government agency officials on issues such as national parks and protected areas. There were also early murmurings of the legal obligation of states to refrain from inflicting environmental damage across their borders. The principle has been elaborated and much discussed since, for example, in terms of its potential to effect accommodation among states on climatechange issues. The ‘no-harm rule’ is rooted in the primacy of territorial sovereignty in international law and consists of both the right of a State to exploit its sovereign territory and the duty not to harm the sovereign territory of other States when exercising that right. (Hamilton, 2008: 107) Older interstate norms influenced this emerging body of environmental governance activities. The ideas persisted of non-interference in the internal affairs of states and of the need for limitations on the powers of international institutions. European cooperation in the 1930s on migratory water birds, for example, went some way towards reframing these as a common transnational resource that all range-state governments had a duty to conserve, but in general NGOs and supportive government agencies reluctantly had to acknowledge that such matters in practice lay within the discretionary powers of states (Boardman, 2006: 38–44). Governance efforts to optimize the state–private balance resulted in a combination of parallel evolution and limited collaboration. The intergovernmental stream included a major UN conference on environment and natural resources in 1948 (a precursor to key developments later such as the 1968 biosphere conference and the UNHCE in Stockholm in 1972 and its successors); the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); the gradual adoption by UN agencies, for example UNESCO and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of significant environment-related additions to their mandates; the rise of regional intergovernmental arrangements, many with some form of environmental policy goals; and a steady flow of international conventions, such as those on marine pollution, dumping, and other issues from the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The non-governmental stream, particularly from the late 1960s, brought a growth in numbers, resources, political clout, and the thickness


of their relations with other actors of national and transnational NGOs. The IUCN emerged in the late 1940s as a mixed body, mostly nongovernmental in character but with extensive national government agency participation. Scientific organizations, particularly those affiliated with the ICSU, augmented non-state actor participation in intergovernmental settings. The later tilt towards earth-systems frameworks added significant governance challenges to this evolving tradition (Biermann, 2007; Lövbrand et al., 2009). Some of their associated issue clusters coexist comfortably with those on traditional agendas, such as the conservation of wildlife species and their habitats and issues related to the disturbance of natural ecosystems by toxic chemicals. Others, particularly geological hazards and natural disasters, have a place on earth-systems policy agendas but a more uncertain presence in traditional environmentalist discourses and governance arrangements. By emphasizing the interconnections among diverse geological, biological, chemical, atmospheric, and other issues earth-systems thinking greatly magnifies the complexities, uncertainties, and resource requirements of science-based global governance. It joins the ranks of the many discourses of public policy and international relations that have been compelled to readdress what is meant by governance and what its limitations and potential are in a post-Westphalian global society. Governance actors reflect on their surroundings, their options, and what they are doing and try to influence the course of these processes in others. Three aspects of these reflective games are prominent: thinking about the issues themselves and the ways these are framed, distinguished, and interconnected; about the policy options available for responding to them; and thinking about governance arrangements and the likely consequences of different configurations. Much global environmental politics has centred on the intricacies of specific issue-based discourses. Changes in ideas influence and interact with revisions to policies and governance arrangements. For example, normative alterations have changed prevailing representations of whale species, from the view that these are resources manageable through the application of sound harvesting and sustained-yield rules to the argument that they have intrinsic or non-material ethical values and hence merit protection and the abolition of use practices (Epstein, 2008). Similar processes of discursive change precipitated redefinitions of the legitimacy of NGOs as participants in global governance processes. There has been a shift towards perceptions of climate change as shot through with security worries. This is a product of scientific

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accounts of anticipated developments such as sea-level rise during the twenty-first century, vegetation changes and the agricultural implications of these, resource conflicts, and increases in human movements and refugee flows. As with global security questions, the environmental arena is characterized by uncertainties in relation to the character of issues, policy options and their consequences, and the effects of different governance arrangements (Kavalski, 2008: 437–9). Differing perceptions have political implications. For example, the rise of security thinking and terminologies on climate change and other questions also reflects traditional Westphalian normative assumptions of the priority of security issues on the hierarchy of the concerns of states. When governance actors re-label climate change as a ‘security’ issue, they are, in effect, supporting its promotion to higher rungs on national and interstate agendas. Many of the issues treated in global environmental governance have few connotations of this high-politics kind. Some environmental issues tend to take on political significance when they are translated into the logics of others, such as the discourses of economic development, human rights, and health policies. Many have accordingly met with relative indifference in some areas of IR research, particularly those where conventionally defined security issues are still seen as the heart of the discipline. From this perspective, collaborative, technical, low-politics governance activities lack the excitement that justifies a central disciplinary role. As Fettweis (2006: 691) has put it, ‘Cooperation and trust are somehow not as compelling as conflict and betrayal.’ Environmental topics form a relatively coherent group of issues. The politics and governance of these display both similarities and differences with others such as finance, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics. International inspection systems are elements of the nuclear proliferation and some fisheries regimes, for example, but are not a tool of endangeredspecies protection or hurricane tracking. By the same logic, however, the environmental arena, on closer investigation, also breaks down into governance fragments. Sectoral or subsectoral governance processes, each with differing mixes of actors, norms, and regime types, cohere around disaggregated issues such as climate change, wildlife trade, international disposal of toxic wastes, invasive species, marine pollution, and coastal management. Indeed the closer we look at environmental governance, the greater appear the diversity and the growth of specialized sectoral governance frameworks. In the UN, the World Health Organization (WHO), and other complex organizations different environmental issue sets


are typically handled by different and varying configurations of actors and processes. The persistence of subdivisions of these kinds raises issues of the quality of governance. Too much messiness frustrates norms of good governance by constraining the potential for coordination and the interactor politics of reasonable accommodation. But too much organizational neatness threatens the creativity and dynamism that comes from autonomy, a sense of ownership of issues, specialization, consensus on divisions of labour, and bottom-up cooperation. Coordination and harmonization politics form an integral part of the overall mix of environmental governance. Often, however, these activities add to rather than diminish the complexity and fragmentation of the area. Some meta-coordination efforts are directed towards the traditionally elusive goal of securing greater cross-issue coherence in global governance. Their advocates, weary of the de facto sectoralization of governance activities into relatively discrete arenas dedicated to specific sets of issues such as fisheries, peacekeeping, and development assistance, revisit some of the critical questions aired in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates on confederation, world government, and other approaches to peace. A minimum goal is to secure and exploit the incremental achievements of plurilateral game playing across different sectors. Some observers detect a complex dynamic within environmental and other governance practices that contains the potential for deeper institutionalization. Preuss (2008: 37) identifies a broad process of the ‘constitutionalization’ of global society: [O]nce incipient elements of an institutional structure have emerged in which the tension between collective values and instruments of the human community on the one hand, and the spheres of individual actors, primarily states, on the other, come to the surface, the need for finding an institutional framework for dealing with this tension and the ensuing conflicts becomes undeniable. However, it is not self-evident that a strengthening of any centralizing tendencies that might exist is desirable. Critics of world government have traditionally observed that in such hypothetical schemes armed conflicts do not disappear but become civil instead of interstate wars, while powerful or incompetent national governments morph into powerful or incompetent international ones. Sceptics have much evidence for the proposition that even modest global governance ventures are inexorably constrained by costs, the politics of self-interest, and

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fatigue. The collaborative efforts of collective environmental problem solving nonetheless persist. They make incremental progress. States acting in isolation cannot manage complex global problems such as those of the transborder flows of pollutants, invasive species, and climate change.

The rise of scientific policy communities The relations between science and policy in global arrangements reflect views of the international system and governance and of the uses and ends of scientific research (see Chapter 2). Science-driven arguments maintain that scientific institutions significantly influence governance processes, while policy-driven interpretations put science in a highly circumscribed context of pressures from multiple governance players. Views blend normative with empirical points. Scientists tend to believe, not unreasonably, that scientific arguments should be deciding factors on policies such as climate change. Their critics respond with the claim that the opinions of scientists should be subject, like those of any constituency, to the rules governing decision making and politics in pluralist systems. Versions of such perspectives recur in the constructions of actors. They help them to make sense of the complex worlds in which they operate. Understanding these views and their institutional consequences thus assists the analysis of governance processes. Scientific views are filtered through multiple transmission lines. Diverse audiences on the receiving end of communications vary in their reception of these. They reinterpret, ignore, or highlight risk communication and other messages; adapt them to fit prior beliefs and policy preferences; and make selective use of scientific findings in their political tactics. Scientists themselves have multiple roles in relation to global governance. These include research activities in the field and lab on policy-related issues, participation in international conferences, work in government agencies, cooperation with colleagues in a variety of transnational networks in which policy issues are discussed, acting as delegates or observers at international meetings, performing advisory roles on national and intergovernmental bodies, and participating in and working to strengthen the capabilities of transnational scientific organizations. Norms and organizational traits, and intraorganizational conflicts between scientists and officials in national governments and IGOs, reflect scientists’ beliefs in the borderless, cosmopolitan character of science. Martin Rees (2008: 43) describes science as


the only truly global culture: protons, proteins, and Pythagoras’ theorem are the same from China to Peru. Research is international, highly networked, and collaborative. And most science-linked policy issues are international, even global. The work of transnational scientific organizations and their national counterparts can be seen throughout all phases of environmental governance processes: from planning, agenda setting, debates on mandate changes, programme evaluation, and the activities of scientific advisory committees to the politics of implementation of multilateral agreements and the search for legal and institutional innovations. Three components are particularly significant: national scientific bodies, transnational scientific organizations, and the scientific advisory networks of IGOs and MEAs. National settings National frameworks centre on academies and specialized research institutions. They overlap with the scientific advisory machinery of governments. The academies in Britain (the Royal Society), the US (the National Academy of Science [NAS]), and Canada (the Royal Society of Canada) have traditionally incorporated a variety of advisory and policy-related tasks. Each of these has, at various times, taken an international lead scientific role on climate change, the ozone layer, and other global issues. Such bodies tend to have an internationalist orientation because of the collaborative nature of science and its indifference to borders. As one NAS official has expressed it, the ‘trans-border and global’ character of science means that it is in the vital interest of the US science community, and more broadly of US society, to maintain close linkages with science communities throughout the world. (Clegg, 2008: 2) In recent years the global issues of the environment, health, natural resources, energy policy, and natural disasters are among those that have mobilized national science communities and their representative organizations. Transnational networks As the activities of international scientific organizations have grown, they have increasingly intersected with developments in global environmental

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governance. The core framework is the International Council for Science (formerly called the International Council of Scientific Unions [ICSU]). This draws together international associations representing scientists from different disciplinary groupings, including biologists (the International Union of Biological Sciences [IUBS]) and geologists (for example, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics [IUGG]). The primary tasks of these bodies involve the promotion of transnational scientific collaboration. This role naturally feeds into, and is influenced by, policy-related activities. Their origins lie in the emergence of transnational associations, congresses, and unions of scientists in the nineteenth century. States responded to these developments in different ways in subsequent decades, variously encouraging and cooperating with them, restricting their activities as potential threats to security or policy, and using the opportunities they presented to gain prestige, for example by hosting large international scientific conferences (Doel et al., 2005). Some overtures by national governments were troubling for the instinctive internationalism of many scientists. However, the attention of governments proved attractive to those scientists who wished to use international scientific bodies as means of precipitating domestic policy initiatives. It is not possible to draw a clear line demarcating ‘environmental’ scientific collaboration from other areas. A continuing series of transnational scientific programmes has had significance for global environmental policy. The ICSU, with one or more of its member associations, has been an active promoter of many of these activities. The major forerunner was the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957–8), which among other achievements helped shape the course of the Antarctica regime. The MAB, a product of UNESCO and leading international scientific bodies, was influential in the rise of international biodiversity policy in the 1970s (see Chapter 8). A much broader multidisciplinary scientific base characterized the IGBP. This built on the MAB experience to pull together international scientific expertise in earth-systems science and, more particularly, in relation to the earth’s biogeochemical cycles. An associated initiative, the International Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme (IHDP), emerged from the International Social Science Council (ISSC) in 1990; the ICSU became a joint sponsor in 1996. These and other groupings have explored the institutional requirements of expanded global environmental governance, for example, through the Earth System Governance Project. Natural and social scientists participating in the IGBP and IHDP frameworks cooperate in other programmes,


for example in the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and in Diversitas, which focuses on biodiversity knowledge. A group of these organizations joined to form the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). Transnational scientific collaboration that focuses explicitly on environmental issues includes the work of the ICSU’s SCOPE. The ICSU has traditionally viewed its role as being to support scientific projects in which transnational cooperation adds significant value, as in fields where sustained interdisciplinary contacts across borders are critical. This mandate interacts with the related goal of providing information or advice to intergovernmental bodies on international topics that have significant scientific dimensions, for example, through its historically strong relationship in Paris with UNESCO secretariat officials. This dual role is continually being redefined, interpreted, and tested in particular cases. Since scientists routinely, and increasingly, collaborate with international colleagues, the ICSU constantly risks becoming more marginal in the world of global science. There has been criticism that it should not support international interdisciplinary programmes indefinitely, allow these to continue without adequate monitoring, or sponsor projects that could be pursued more successfully through other institutional networks (Royal Society, 1996: 3). Similar evaluative criteria arise in discussions among ICSU officials and scientists themselves. SCOPE, for example, has been criticized for approving many environmental projects for which funds or volunteer scientists are not available and for failing to set clear priorities and goals in its decision making on project selection (ICSU, 2008c: 21). A recurrent problem is the evident difficulty scientists in many policyrelated contexts have of focusing on important policy questions, even in cases where these can be clearly identified, as opposed to interesting scientific questions. SCOPE in its history has put emphasis on scientific and technical reports, some of which are of interest only to other scientists, though it later added short policy assessments to its publications repertoire. As one review of IHDP expressed it: While researchers often want to ‘get on’ with their research . . . the fact is that research in such a field as the human dimensions of global change needs to be focused on the contributions that it can make to the policy agenda. (ICSU, 2006: 2) This tension, between contributing to science and contributing to policy development, has hindered collaboration and coordination

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among transnational scientific programmes. It also constrains the development of the kinds of effective internal governance structures in institutions that might resolve it. Such governance problems have characterized international scientific bodies since the nineteenth century. Clusters of groupings, programmes, and organizations – the ESSP, for example, and the ICSU itself – face the difficult task of devising governance mechanisms that simultaneously acknowledge the autonomy of their constituents while nudging these towards the pursuit of common goals. Institutions have invented, or applied, various constitutional formulae on the relations between smaller executive bodies and largerscale meetings of members or member organizations. General assemblies, for example, tend to be a relatively expensive option, though they have been tried in several cases, including SCOPE. Governance design efforts in the ESSP initially produced a somewhat loose and disparate structure and a reorganization of 2007 led to another that some participants found too large and cumbersome (ICSU, 2008b: 18–19). Scientific advisory bodies In addition to their activities in national and transnational scientific organizations, scientists are also found in formal advisory bodies. These are integral to the making of environmental policy by national governments. They are also central parts of IGOs, NGOs, and the institutional structures of multilateral agreements that deal with global environment policy. MEAs typically include mechanisms for the provision and reception of scientific advice. A scientific advisory body comprising government officials or government-approved scientists is one of the standard formats. The task of scientific advisory bodies is to provide information and reviews of the scientific literature for the decision-making organs of IGOs and MEAs. Participating scientists may provide assessments of environmental trends, advice in relation to appropriate research priorities, clarifications of policy options, and opinions of the probable results of alternative courses of action (Lohan, 2006a: 17–19). However, governance institutions are not restricted to these channels. Formally, and informally, they take information and advice from a variety of non-state, governmental, and intergovernmental sources. Some of the circuitry is complex. The FCCC, for example, has its own scientific advisory body but this coexists with an earlier institution, the IPCC, which was set up to furnish scientific assessments to the UN on dangerous anthropogenic climate change (see Chapter 9). The scientific materials produced by many advisory bodies are potentially available to multiple actors, including non-state actors. This


raises issues of their use and accessibility (Fritz, 2001). NGOs such as Greenpeace and the WWF have their own scientific advisory networks. The WWF also makes extensive use of the data on threatened species generated by the scientific advisory body of IUCN (the Species Survival Commission).

Sectoral dynamics: A framework Chapters 8–10 focus on three large-scale clusters of earth-systems and global environmental issues. These are the issue sets, respectively, of the conservation of biological diversity, the management of problems created by growing evidence of anthropogenic (human-induced or -enhanced) climate change, and issues arising from geological hazards and natural disasters. Each set of issues is heavily science based. There are considerable differences among them, however, in terms of governance actors, evolving norms, the extent and intensity of engagement by domestic publics, the economic implications of the issues addressed, and the configurations of governance processes. There are also significant subsectoral governance fragments in each and a proliferation of thriving specialized subcommunities. Traditional environmentalist concerns with anthropogenic change are significant in biodiversity and climatechange politics. Traces of these arguments can be seen in critiques of the spread of human activities into the habitats of many species, debates on the principles appropriate to the use of biological resources, and in the controversies on the patterns of energy use that drive climate change. The area of geological hazards also draws on earth-systems science frameworks but diverges from more conventional global environmental perspectives by tackling problems in which forcing is exclusively by natural processes. It has also differed from climate-change and biodiversity governance by avoiding the negotiation and the compliance politics of multilateral environmental agreements. Studying this diversity requires a common framework. For each area, I will discuss the interplay between science and policy by raising four sets of questions. The first two relate primarily to the work and organization of scientists, and explore respectively the epistemic foundations of issue areas and the transnational scientific networks that link scientific organizations. A reference to ‘foundations’ is a little misleading since scientific research takes place in multiple political and cultural contexts and is influenced by these. However, it is useful to explore the scientific origins of the framings of issues and their role in the determination

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of political agendas. Types of knowledge other than those produced by natural scientists, including ideas of the appropriate forms of governance, are also at play here. Governance practices are influenced by the rise of scientific bodies that connect expert groupings in different countries. Different sets of these are activated by, and exert influence on, the issues and politics of each of the three areas. The third element relates to the global governance frameworks that characterize each of these areas. The institutions of multilateral environmental agreements – COPs, secretariats, working groups, protocol mechanisms, and so on – are important because of the way they stimulate influence attempts by scientists and others, shape ideas, and structure the incentives that modify the games of governance actors. Finally, the discussion sets these frameworks in multilevel contexts. While the focus is on the ‘global’ governance activities centring on UN agencies, multilateral environmental agreements and IGOs, assessments of these developments have to take note of the complex relations they have with governance processes at local, national, and regional levels.

8 Biological Diversity

Biological diversity is the oldest of the three earth-systems governance issue clusters discussed in this and the following chapters. Its constituent issues date back to late-nineteenth century conservation efforts. Entwined with colonial and trade enterprises, some gave rise to early instances of global policy processes. Biodiversity topics were later woven into the discourses of sustainable development and ecosystem services. A sense of their urgency has persisted. Scientific research has documented declines in many species; stresses in biodiversity hotspots; and threats to habitats from intensified human activities, for example in the agriculture, mining, forestry, and tourism sectors of economies. Growing awareness of the complex linkages of biodiversity with other earth-systems processes, particularly climate change, and the still comparatively weak knowledge base related to the world’s species and habitats and their conservation requirements – especially in marine areas – are among the factors that have maintained these issues on global agendas. Biodiversity issues are now embedded in a wide range of global and regional intergovernmental agreements and institutions.

Epistemic foundations The basic ideas of biological diversity are old ones in ecology. Scientists gave them a new twist from the 1980s as problems of threats to wildlife species were incorporated within sustainability debates. Pressures for change came from environmental NGOs, the traditional activities of IUCN in relation to threatened species conservation, and accelerated governance developments, particularly those associated with the CBD of 1992. By that time biological diversity 131

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had grown from an esoteric, seldom-used, vague expression to an encompassing concept representing the concern for all life on earth at multiple levels of organization. (Farnham, 2007: 27) Given this breadth it is not surprising that some scientists questioned whether the concept had value. However, in both scientific and policy debates the term usefully stressed the importance of variety for the healthy functioning of ecological systems. Biodiversity is ‘the variety of life on Earth and the interactions, cycles, and processes of nature that link it all together’ (Johnson and Klemens, 2005: 18), or the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part. (MA, 2005: 18) Biodiversity is thus implicitly a policy as well as a scientific area. Since biological resources are extensively used, economic questions are also at stake. The primary concern is the identification of threats to diversity, particularly vulnerabilities resulting from human activities, and clarification of the appropriate policy responses. In practice discourses have framed much of the biodiversity problem in terms of species. Some species are targets because they are indicators of ecosystem health, or flagships for conservation attention by NGOs. Threats to species and their extinction are natural processes, and in geological history these have been associated with multiple features of earth-systems dynamics such as volcanism, algae blooms, asteroid collisions, and the rise and fall of ice ages; but human activities have intensified the pressures on species, particularly in recent decades. Global processes of habitat change and fragmentation result from the spread of transportation networks, the growth of cities and their hinterlands, industrial and tourist infrastructure, chemical pollutants, deforestation, invasive species, agricultural development, and other factors (Pimentel et al., 2006: 1–4). These diminish the natural geographical and ecological connectivity on which many species rely and reinforce the need for policy responses such as protected corridors. Some accounts emphasize the conservation requirements that follow from ethical judgements of the inherent value of non-human species. Attending to biodiversity also contributes directly to human well-being, for example, through improvements to health and in economic development (Lasén Diaz, 2006).

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Too much emphasis on species, however, may distort concerns about habitats. These are the ecological support systems of species. Particular sites are the homes of complex communities. Different types of ecosystems and biomes have intrinsic conservation value. Regions such as the tropical forests of Brazil and Indonesia contain many species still unknown to science. The world’s biodiversity hotspots, or those particularly rich in biodiversity values, are increasingly a focus of conservation policy. Indeed one of the difficult issues in conservation debates concerns the extent to which policy attention and scarce resources should be devoted to these rather than to other items on lengthy biodiversity agendas. Many regions, such as areas of the Arctic and Southern Oceans, mangrove coastlines, and the world’s arid and semi-arid zones, have important conservation values even though they contain far fewer species (Pimm et al., 2008: 25). Identifying threats to species, then, has traditionally been a focal point of global biodiversity debates. In 2008–9 IUCN identified a total of 17,291 species (out of 47,677 that were assessed) as threatened with extinction, that is, falling in the categories of critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable. Different groupings of species are affected differently. For example, 22 per cent of mammal species are threatened or extinct, 31 per cent of amphibians, 13.6 per cent of birds, 27 per cent of warm-water reef-building corals, and 24 per cent of freshwater fishes endemic to Europe (IUCN, 2009a; Vié et al., 2009: 16–18). Threat assessments are subject to chronic difficulties. Species counts are daunting data-gathering exercises. Some, for example in relation to various bird species, are dependent on the vagaries of amateur volunteer interest. Moreover, the existence of different methodological routes to understanding the concept of biodiversity is a source of controversy. There have been intense debates among conservation biologists on the appropriate tools and concepts for gauging diversity trends. These have included critiques of IUCN’s own approach. Particular assessments are contested among scientists and by local communities, as has happened with counts of various amphibian species in Brazil and some polar bear populations of northern Canada. Underlying such efforts is the monumental challenge of improving scientific knowledge of the majority of the species of the biosphere. This is ‘a vast, staggeringly complex, highly dynamic system’ consisting of species occupying ‘virtually all . . . of the Earth’s terrestrial and aquatic surfaces’ (Naeem et al., 2002: 4). Of an estimated total of 8–9 million eukaryotic species (in effect, species except bacteria) – or possibly even greater numbers, up to 100 million in some guesses – less

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than 1.8 million are known and described (Hilton-Taylor et al., 2009). Biodiversity is thus intrinsically more complex than other environmental concerns, such as the stratospheric ozone hole or even global climate change. By definition, biodiversity is diverse: it spans several levels of biological organization (genes, species, ecosystems); it cannot be measured by simple universal indicators such as temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration; and its distribution and management are more local in nature. (Loreau et al., 2006: 245) Arguments about the significance of trends in biodiversity loss are central to larger discourses on sustainable development and earth-systems processes. Sound conservation strategies are needed because of the growing extent to which human activities are causal factors in species declines and degraded ecosystem health. Anthropogenic factors include disruption of coastal and marine ecosystem processes in the Caribbean and south-east Asia; the widespread fragmentation of forest habitats; overfishing leading to population collapses; and a spread of invasive species resulting from international trade, transportation, and the other links between national economies (CBD, 2006a: 9). The simplification of agroecosystems means that only a tiny minority of species are used in food production. It has been estimated that about 90 per cent of the global food supply is accounted for by only 15 plant and eight animal species (Pimentel et al., 2006: 5). Yet sustainable agriculture and forestry depend on the existence of diverse genetic resources in the wild. Local communities in Brazil use many plant species for pharmaceutical purposes. These ancient practices have led to growing and controversial interest on the part of international pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies in compounds with potential use in the treatment of diabetes, gastrointestinal problems, pain, skin diseases, immune systems problems, and other diseases (Gilbert, 2000: 214–17). Because of multiple uncertainties and incomplete knowledge, however, many species have been, and will be, lost as a result of human activities without scientists being aware of these or of their possible economic or medicinal benefits. The scientific study of biological resources is thus inseparable from questions of politics, economics, and culture. Both biological and economic aspects of biodiversity policy structure the CBD. Particularly since 1996, IUCN has promoted greater international understanding


and application of the precautionary principle. The biodiversity research agenda extends to the monitoring of trends and the assessment of the effects of measures such as protected-area networks, wildlife corridors, species recovery programmes, control measures for invasive species, the implementation of biodiversity-loss reversal goals, and the application of sustainability criteria in relation to used species. All these have complex economic and social dimensions. Conservation issues are also grounded in ethics and connect with issues of social justice and human rights. Wild species of fauna and flora have intrinsic value, from which stem the traditional discourses of conservation ethics. Yet while biodiversity conservation activities have clear economic and cultural benefits – as do the transformations of natural sites into human-dominated agroecosystems – these benefits are not distributed equitably either globally or within societies. Nor are the costs of biodiversity losses or of economic development. Biological processes are closely integrated with wider earth-systems processes. Darwin made the point in his famous earthworms study. Biota move hundreds of thousands of tons of elements and compounds between the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere every year. It is this biogeochemical activity that determines soil fertility, air and water quality, and the habitability of ecosystems, biomes, and ultimately the Earth itself. . . . [C]learly to understand the functioning of Earth systems requires not only understanding biogeochemistry, but also the role that biodiversity plays in this complex system. (Naeem et al., 2002: 3–4) Global ecosystem services include what have been called provisioning services, for example supplies of water, food, and medicinal materials. Others include processes often not quantified or even noticed, such as regulating services – those that assist in cleaning air and water, mitigating floods, regulating climate, and preventing extreme soil erosion – and the supporting services required for ecosystems to function, such as pollination and the cycling of nutrients. There are also cultural services, including values associated with the aesthetic appreciation of landscape (Melillo and Sala, 2008). The global economic value of ecosystem services has been estimated at about 4.5 times that of the gross world product (Boumans et al., 2002). Just as appropriate attention to biodiversity policy strengthens ecosystems, so the provision of a diverse range of ecosystem services – for example ensuring the protection of wild

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plant and animal species while promoting agricultural modernization – is required for the optimal use of land (EASAC, 2009: 9–10). Biodiversity conservation measures have taken on increasing significance as instruments for mitigating climate change, for example, through strategies of restoring degraded lands and programmes of afforestation (CBD, 2009: 2). The observable effects of changing climates on species, including evidence of local declines, have become increasingly prominent in both biodiversity and climate-change debates. Migratory birds, butterflies, and other species have had to adapt to the temperature, timing, vegetation, and other consequences of changing seasons. The ranges of many species have already shifted northwards or southwards towards the polar regions (Parmesan, 2005: 52–3).

Transnational scientific networks Biologists have responded in a variety of ways to the problems of policy-related biodiversity science. The normal institutional apparatus of enquiry – conferences, workshops, journals, and monographs – has historically been one springboard for action. From the 1970s, scientists increasingly debated the merits of different educational and information strategies aimed at publics and governments. Various options found advocates: for the creation of science-based bodies more sharply focused on policy, emphasis on quiet scientific diplomacy within the advisory networks of government and intergovernmental bodies, and the steady cultivation of conservation cultures through the publicizing of issues and findings. Pressures for institutional and policy change have arisen from national and transnational scientific bodies and from environmental organizations. Scientific bodies and programmes Transnational scientific networks related to the biological sciences grew rapidly in the early twentieth century. The objective of contributing to policy development was not consistently a feature of these efforts. The IUBS was created in 1919 as part of the growing ICSU network (see Chapter 7). Its aim was to encourage scientific cooperation in the biological disciplines by encouraging transnational programmes and projects in which collaboration across borders added significant scientific value. Institutional mechanisms centred on the IUBS General Assembly and a handful of related institutions. There was no formal policyoriented wing. Little known publicly, and in practice often peripheral for most professional biologists, the IUBS and other like-minded bodies


were nonetheless instrumental in shaping the idea that transnational scientific collaboration could have profound implications for national and international policymaking. The International Biological Programme (IBP), operational from 1967–74, grew out of debates among scientists connected with the IUBS and ICSU and from initiatives by European organizations and the NAS. Its founders were inspired by the scientific successes and the public and policy impacts of the IGY (1957–8), particularly in relation to Antarctica. A counterpart for the biological sciences seemed the next logical step. Enthusiasm for such a route was initially greater on the part of European and Canadian biologists compared with their colleagues in the US (Bocking, 1997: 230–1). Many biologists, and more specifically ecologists, were increasingly viewing their discipline from the perspective of policy debates on the sound use of the earth’s natural resources. It was clear that many problems of this kind were inherently global and ‘beyond parochial interests’ (Sargent, 1965: 101). The development of useable knowledge from the biological sciences would require a strong acceleration in the growth of ecology, especially in those areas of knowledge needed to solve problems already facing mankind. . . . Having such information now, not later, or in 1970, not 1980, may have profound effects upon decisions to be made as man completes his domination of the earth. (Smith, 1968: 5) The focus of the IBP was on the use of biological resources and human impacts on natural systems. Collaboration was structured around the themes of conservation of terrestrial communities; human adaptability; the productivity of freshwater, marine, and terrestrial communities; production processes; and the use and management of biological resources. Related events reinforced activities, particularly the convening by UNESCO of a major intergovernmental conference on the biosphere in Paris in 1968 and preparatory work for the UN environment conference in Stockholm four years later. The IBP model thus represented an indirect approach to policy issues. International governance developments, and rising environmentalist concerns among members of multiple scientific communities, prompted the ICSU to create the SCOPE in 1969. This was more explicitly geared to issues of global environmental policy. SCOPE increasingly emphasized global themes of sustainability and the importance of generating focused scientific knowledge that could be used by governments, IGOs,

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and NGOs. SCOPE scientists have since been active in a variety of multilateral settings. Its mandate was much larger than ecology. The traditional policy-related concerns of the biological sciences – biodiversity, conservation strategies, threats to wildlife habitats, invasive species, the ecological consequences of agricultural chemicals, and so on – nonetheless continued to influence its priorities and activities. The range of topics has expanded to include research and policy debate on aspects of biogeochemical cycles, the use and management of global natural resources, and issues related to human health and chemicals in the environment. The ambitious scope of SCOPE, however, weakened its capacity to act as a mechanism for promoting specific biodiversity goals. In the late 1980s many biologists were increasingly uneasy about gaps in the attention of publics and governments to important biodiversity issues. Preparations for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) of 1992, a showcase product of which was to be the CBD, reinforced this sense of unease. Discussions in SCOPE and the IUBS led to the creation of a new body, Diversitas, in 1991. The ICSU and UNESCO later gave it formal support. Its emphasis was on questions that became pivotal in the evolving CBD framework, for example on ecosystem functioning, problems of the loss of biodiversity and how this trend could be corrected, and classification and methodological questions associated with biodiversity science. Specific policy-related topics included problems of savanna biodiversity, Arctic and marine ecosystems, invasive species, and the multiple links between biodiversity and sustainability goals. The generation of useable knowledge and the spread of public education have also been central to the tasks of Diversitas, for example in the activities associated with the International Biodiversity Observation Year (IBOY) in 2001–2. Environmental organizations and biodiversity In addition to these pressures from scientific bodies, converging influences arose from many intergovernmental bodies and environmental NGOs. Both types of organizations have a long pedigree. Transnational contacts among European nature conservation NGOs, for example in connection with the protection of migratory and threatened bird species, expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. BirdLife International (BLI), the lead NGO in this area, emerged in the 1990s out of an organization established in London in the early 1920s. IUCN, which was formally set up in 1948, had part of its institutional origins in a small transnational conservation unit active in the


Netherlands in the 1930s. These kinds of developments were significant as laboratories for experimenting with different governance models of the relations between scientific experts and policymaking institutions. The creation of UNESCO in 1946 added an important intergovernmental component to this evolving network. The promotion of international scientific cooperation was central to its objectives. Following a succession of biodiversity-related initiatives, it set up the MAB in 1970 to encourage collaboration in areas of sustainability and the conservation of biological diversity. In various formats since then, MAB activities ‘have favoured actions that bring out the tight links existing between biodiversity conservation and human development’ (Cibien and Etienne, 2008: 12). MAB activities were thus compatible with those of ICSU bodies. Indeed both paths benefited from informal contacts between officials of the two secretariats in Paris. However, it differed from them in two respects. First, MAB had a hybrid scientific and intergovernmental personality. It was a creature of UNESCO and governed by a council of national government representatives elected at UNESCO’s General Conference. Second, it quickly developed a core set of policy objectives. These centred on the creation of a global biosphere reserve network. These reserves are areas of strict legal protection by governments with especially stringent rules applying in the core areas of designated sites. Renewed pressure for network development followed UNESCO’s General Conference in Seville in 1995. After criticisms grew of uneven supervision by national governments, a regular review process was initiated in 1998 (Price, 2003). By the early 2000s, over 500 biosphere reserves had been created. Network development was constrained, however, by variability in the regulatory approaches of governments and by UNESCO politics. The US and other western countries were increasingly critical during the 1980s of UNESCO. A combination in the 1990s of general anti-UN sentiment in the US, and of specific allegations that private land ownership was threatened by the biosphere reserve system (as well as by the world heritage network, also a UNESCO invention, and by Washington’s own endangered-species legislation), effectively brought US activity in the programme to a halt. It was cautiously revitalized from 2003. Towards a unified biodiversity voice? By the early 2000s, neither of these streams of transnational scientific cooperation – on the part of scientific organizations, particularly those associated with the ICSU network, and through NGOs and intergovernmental frameworks – appeared to be effective in promoting

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science-based global biodiversity conservation goals. Some critics tapped lessons from climate-change developments. In that policy arena there was an energized scientific community, a core international scientific body, an international convention with its own scientific committee, and widespread public and governmental debate characterized by a sense of the high urgency of the issues (see Chapter 9). From its earlier status as the defining set of global environmental issues, biodiversity seemed somehow to have fallen behind in the international competition for attention, credibility, and priority. In a much-publicized statement published in Nature in July 2006, a group of leading scientists questioned the ‘slow and inadequate’ response to the ‘magnitude and urgency of the biodiversity crisis’. They attributed the failing to a widespread lack of awareness of the issues and to misperceptions of biodiversity conservation as a threat to economic development. They also noted differences with climate-change policy: In contrast, the CBD and other international agreements concerned with biodiversity do not have the structural means to mobilize the expertise of a large scientific community to inform governments. Consequently, the scientific community often doesn’t feel involved in the global political process, which tends to exacerbate the disconnect between science and policy and a general attitude of powerlessness and fatalism. (Loreau et al., 2006: 245) However, developments from 2005–10 indicated that filling this institutional niche was more problematic for biodiversity than it had been for climate change. This period was marked by growing concerns on the part of scientists at the mixed record of progress towards the CBD and EU goals of halting biodiversity loss by 2010, and scientific work on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) follow-up. Scientific debates continued to highlight gaps in research on species and habitats and to try to define the optimal priorities for global biodiversity policy (Brooks et al., 2006). At the major international conference on biodiversity held in Paris in early 2005, President Chirac echoed the call for a new international scientific biodiversity body. Participating scientists, and the conference’s scientific committee, emphasized the importance of biodiversity, particularly in relation to the achievement of the MDG, reiterated that global biodiversity was being changed by human activities at an unprecedented rate, and argued that these facts were not


sufficiently appreciated by governments and public opinion (IMoSEB, 2005). There was general agreement that the wide circulation of useable and easily accessible scientific information was desirable, but considerable uncertainty about how best to do this (Guralnick et al., 2007). Multiple sources of information on biodiversity are available. These include the mechanisms set up through the CBD, IUCN, and other bodies; the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) from 2004; and the Biodiversity Observation Network. These vary, however, in terms of their usefulness for governments, NGOs, and other governance actors. Debates thus reflected a growing impression on the part of biodiversity scientists that greater coordination was needed among international scientific groupings. One upshot was the International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity (IMoSEB). While there was a general recognition of the need for cooperative relations with governments, as well as with other governance actors, scientists differed on the appropriate nature of this relationship. Governments were obviously important as makers of laws, sources of research funding, recipients of information and advice, and as guarantors that scientific research would be geared towards policy objectives. But an independent voice for scientists was also crucial. Some scientists, including the Harvard biologist Edward Wilson, argued strongly for an international scientific mechanism for biodiversity comparable with the IPCC in relation to climate change. For their part, government and IGO officials showed some reluctance to support a scientific-advisory mechanism that could become a vehicle for lobbying and political pressure from coalitions of biodiversity scientists and environmental NGOs. Comparisons with the very different policy area of climate change were also questioned. Some government officials suspected that additional institutional mechanisms would hinder rather than help the task of conserving biodiversity. Doubters argued that international arrangements like the IPCC were inappropriate for biodiversity, which was more localist in its orientation. There was also the sensitive political problem of avoiding competition, or the appearance of competition, with existing scientific advisory bodies such as those created by the CBD, the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), and other multilateral agreements. Arguments grew, accordingly, for the closer involvement of governments themselves in international policy-related biodiversity science processes (again, as in the climate-change science–government interface). Options along these lines had the support of officials from UNEP and IUCN. Corresponding mechanisms were the subject of discussion at a multistakeholder meeting held in Kuala Lumpur in late 2008.

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Still another body was mooted: the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This and other routes to the more effective provision of scientific advice on biodiversity still faced the problems inherent in blending scientific evaluations with the voices of multiple stakeholders. A successful mechanism, in the view of one senior CBD official, would have to be ‘policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive’ (CBD, 2009: 3).

Global governance frameworks We have been looking, so far, primarily at scientists in their capacities as experts outside, but interacting with, governance frameworks. These roles overlap with the work of those operating within biodiversity regimes. Biodiversity conservation and its multiple issue areas are promoted by a wide range of intergovernmental arrangements. There is a complex grouping of key institutions, in and outside the UN system, a core group of MEAs, and a proliferation of specialist biodiversity bodies. A policy-oriented scientific presence is ubiquitous in these networks. Multilateral environmental agreements The CBD is not the only global biodiversity agreement. Nor in some policy sectors is it the most important. However, it has good claim to be regarded as the most comprehensive intergovernmental arrangement for promoting biodiversity goals. The CBD built on the sustainability debates of the late 1980s that grew out of the influential Brundtland Commission report of 1987. Preparatory work on the convention was based, in part, on work by IUCN experts, but its distinctive blend of economic and biological concerns took it in a different direction from that body. It was a focal point of discussion and a primary product of UNCED in 1992 and entered into force in 1993. The main objectives of the CBD are biodiversity conservation. It thus embraces traditional issues of species and habitat conservation. Its equally important emphasis on biological resource use, however, extended its range to cover a wide variety of sustainable development issues, including genetic resources in relation to forestry, agriculture, and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries (McGraw, 2002). Policy issues of genetically modified organisms soon became a major issue in the CBD regime. These pitted leading agricultural exporting states, including the US, against the EU’s regulatory impulses. This combination of economic and biological concerns gave the CBD an unprecedented breadth.


Its organs have explored and supported programmes on the biodiversity problems of agriculture; dry and sub-humid lands; forests; continuing and emerging plant protection issues; problems of inland waters, islands, marine, and coastal areas; mountains; and the development of biofuels, in addition to general or cross-cutting issues such as those of alien species, biodiversity loss reduction, protected areas, and the legal applications of ecosystem thinking. This broad expanse creates overlaps with other biodiversity governance arrangements. The FAO, for example, has a wide range of continuing biodiversity interests related to agriculture, forestry, and fisheries; IUCN is traditionally the lead player on global species and conservation issues; and the two polar regimes (the governance arrangements of the Arctic Council and the Antarctic Treaty System) have extensive scientific and policy activities on species and habitat conservation. In practice, coordinating norms and practices have emerged. These reflect areas of consensus on the distribution of biodiversity governance tasks. The activities of an earlier cluster of core biodiversity conventions continued after the launch of the CBD. Three of these – the Ramsar agreement on wetlands protection (1971), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of 1973, and the migratory species convention (1979) – are particularly important in global biodiversity governance. The Ramsar convention set up procedures for the nomination by governments and the internationally agreed designation of protected wetlands. Ramsar parties have the obligation of protecting at least one designated site, but otherwise governments retain autonomy in relation to wetlands conservation policy. The agreement represented the culmination of several decades of collaboration among scientists and conservation organizations in Europe and the US. Its work is still closely associated with a network of lead NGOs, particularly Wetlands International (WI), and the international activities of key states, particularly the Netherlands. Ramsar was significant historically as an early instrument dedicated to the protection of habitats. There have been continuing debates, however, on the priority of its more traditional data gathering and policy debates on bird species, and the relationship of this work to ecosystem services and economic development, for example, in west African countries (de Groot et al., 2006). CITES also adopted a list approach. Its objectives are not the protection of threatened species but, more specifically, the protection through international listing of plant and animal species threatened by international trade. Both biological and trade criteria are thus required

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for a species listing (Wijnstekers, 2003: 51–2). These are listed in its three appendices (respectively, where trade is banned or controlled and a third appendix under which a government can list species not included in the other two) and are the subject of continuing CITES controversies. The CMS grew out of discussions at UNCHE in 1972 on the need for some form of endangered species convention. In view of sensitivities about sovereignty, a policy focus on migratory species, rather than on threatened species generally, was a more practical, if indirect, route into this policy area. Germany was an early lead supporter of the idea in discussions in the UNEP Governing Council in the 1970s. As a framework convention, the CMS is important for its encouragement of regional or range-state species agreements. Non-signatories may belong to these. Several have been negotiated, for example, on African-Eurasian waterbirds, albatrosses and petrels, and Wadden Sea seals (CMS, 2004: 11–16). The primary governance activities of the CMS centre on listings of species in appendices (of endangered species requiring protection and those with an ‘unfavourable conservation status’). Unlike the CBD, it does not aim for comprehensive coverage of conservation and resourceuse policy areas. It has remained largely outside issues of commercial fisheries. In practice, too, many international species governance arrangements have existed alongside it, for example the agreements on polar bear protection among the Arctic states and on marine species in Antarctica and the regional migratory bird regimes in Europe and North America. Coordination problems are magnified by the fact that multiple IGOs have also taken on board biodiversity governance tasks. The work of UNESCO was noted earlier. The nexus of biodiversity and economic development is the focus of several parts of the UN system. The FAO, for example, has interests in sharks, stingrays, and other fisheries conservation and management issues, and its activities in relation to agriculture and forestry take it into several areas of global biodiversity policy. The same is true of the roles of the WHO on topics such as primary health care and toxic chemicals in the environment and of the IMO on dumping at sea and marine pollution. Scientists as advisors Scientists and their organizations are also located within the governance frameworks of biodiversity MEAs and IGOs. Two continuing models, those of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and the IUCN, date from the 1940s.


Early models The whaling convention of 1946 affirmed the principle that regulation has to be grounded in scientific research. The IWC set up a scientific committee to provide the database for regulations on quotas, sanctuaries, species and population protection measures, and so on. However, as norms changed over time, the concept of ‘scientific’ research became a convenient political screen behind which sceptical states, particularly Japan, could hide a whaling economy. The convention itself was weak and more oriented to traditional resource-use thinking than to conservation philosophies. It did not incorporate later principles of good environmental governance, such as ecosystem approaches and the precautionary principle and multistakeholder participation (Currie, 2007). The approach taken by IUCN from 1948 was more compatible with such innovations. It soon developed a scientific advisory network, the Species Survival Commission (SSC), which took on the central task of gathering, analysing, and communicating data on the world’s threatened species of fauna and flora. The resulting Red Data Books and related publications reach wide audiences through conservation NGOs and national policy debates. The SSC is currently working to complete comprehensive global assessments of species by 2012. Although IUCN performs other governance tasks (for example, providing expert judgements in the evaluations of natural-site nominations for the world heritage system and a support role in relation to the international polar bear agreement), this process of collecting biodiversity data and fostering debates on their implications has continued to be its chief rationale. The SSC has undergone several restructuring exercises to meet these goals and to adapt to changing biodiversity priorities. Coordination of a network consisting of about 7500 experts operating on a volunteer basis in over 100 species and other groupings is obviously a considerable administrative and political challenge. A steering committee oversees this complex network (IUCN, 2009b). IUCN species assessment methodologies have been a focus of scientific controversy. Some critics have argued that these result in inaccurate or misleading representations of the threat or conservation status of different species. The categories used – ‘critically endangered’, ‘endangered’, ‘vulnerable’, and so on – may, in this view, inflate extinction risks or reflect normative biases that define conservation goals in relation to arbitrarily defined historical norms (Webb, 2008). IUCN approaches, however, have the advantage of clarity and transparency. They provide simple and useable measures that can be employed by environmental NGOs and national governments in the framing of legislation, conservation priorities, and species recovery projects.

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Biodiversity MEAs The CBD and other biodiversity MEAs have produced diverse operational definitions of the relations between scientific expertise and decision making. The roles of scientific advisory bodies generally include assessing biodiversity management issues and also (except, for much of its history, in the case of Ramsar) identifying research priorities. They also furnish statements on policy options for decision-making bodies, ranging from identifying possible actions and their consequences to making formal recommendations. For example, the scientific committee of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) produces the population and other scientific data and the policy advice needed for decisions on species management and conservation. Tasks sometimes vary with the political sensitivity of the issues. In the whaling regime, the scientific committee gathers data and evaluations in relation to appendix-listed species but does not make recommendations on amendments. Identifying gaps and uncertainties in species data is also typically a responsibility of international scientific advisory bodies (Lohan, 2006a: 19–21). As in the IUCN model, much of this work depends on volunteer contributions by scientists in collaboration with formal scientific advisory bodies and officials in convention secretariats. Of the three older biodiversity MEAs noted earlier, Ramsar adopted a variety of institutional approaches to scientific advice before establishing its Scientific and Technical Review Panel (STRP) in 1993. These changes reflected shifts in scientific thinking that steadily expanded Ramsar’s scientific role beyond its traditional collection of data on wetlands bird species. In the original rules the STRP was to consist of individuals, elected at COPs, who had ‘appropriate scientific and technical knowledge’. These experts participate as individuals and not as representatives of governments (Ramsar Convention, 2008a: 1). The composition and duties of the STRP have been the subject of continuing debates at Ramsar COPs, especially in light of the growing number of topics discussed in Ramsar forums on wetlands ecosystems issues. These include the effects of climate change, the impacts on wetlands of mining and extractive industries, and the spread of avian flu viruses (Ramsar Convention, 2008b: 15–17). Ramsar processes are also characterized by close relations with leading NGOs and other organizations. The scientific panel includes representatives from Ramsar’s key non-governmental partner organizations, including WI, BLI, IUCN, and WWF. Many more NGOs, and also IGOs, are routinely invited to take part as observers, for example


representatives of the scientific advisory bodies of the CBD and CMS, and of specialist NGOs such as Ducks Unlimited, the Society of Wetland Scientists, and the UK-based Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (Ramsar Convention, 2008a: 3). The scientific bodies on animals and plants of CITES were formally established in 1987. (Until 2007 issues of nomenclature and taxonomy – important for scientific advice and also for facilitating compatibility with the species-listing work of other regimes – were handled by a separate committee.) These bodies provide species and trade data compiled from national statistics, state nominations of species for appendix listing, and the regular reports of governments; give scientific advice, particularly where serious trade pressures threaten a species; and conduct periodic reviews of listed species. The latter task is dependent on the active participation of national scientific bodies, for example in recent CITES assessments of a crocodile species in the US and an amphibian species in China (CITES, 2009: 2). Scientific evaluations are typically juxtaposed in regime processes with economic and political arguments. There has been a long history in CITES of governments proposing species listings that were not justified under its formal criteria. Such strategies reinforce the need for clarity and transparency in scientific procedures. The complex listing procedure rests on contributions from the scientific advisory committees and the CITES secretariat as well as national bodies and specialized NGOs. It has been designed and amended with the aim of minimizing the incentives for states to use interest-based strategies in approaching CITES issues (Gehring and Ruffing, 2008: 124–6). Controversies over particular species, such as the African elephant and the polar bear, are inseparable from normative evaluations of species values, both economic and non-material. Traditional conservation thinking has increasingly been challenged by policy arguments from some developing countries advocating the expanded economic use of wildlife for trade, food, and tourism, for example, through investments in game ranching, hunting, and turtle species economies. Cooperation with NGOs is essential in listing and other processes. The animals committee regularly invites technically qualified individuals and representatives of organizations to participate. In particular, CITES works closely with the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) in Cambridge. This specialist NGO was set up by IUCN in 1979 and has been supported by it and by WWF and UNEP since. It produces biodiversity and other data sets for use by institutions and international agreements (WCMC, 2006: 15–16). Together with

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information from TRAFFIC, a UK-based NGO which monitors and publicizes issues in the international wildlife trade, this information feeds into the work of the scientific committees and the CITES secretariat on international trade and species data, for example, in the preparation after each COP of updated Checklists of CITES species. The CMS set up its scientific council at its first COP in 1985. This reviews data on particular species and makes recommendations to COPs on conservation requirements and research priorities. As with CITES, the routine work of the convention surrounds appendix listings. Listings, and the processes leading to them, are significant in the CMS framework as supports for existing and potential range-state agreements. In addition the scientific council undertakes more general studies, for example, in relation to the species implications of climate change and unregulated fisheries. One constraint is often the difficulty of finding experts willing to participate (CMS, 2008: 2). Officials from the major biodiversity NGOs, for example the Zoological Society of London and BLI, regularly participate in this policy-relevant scientific work. CBD approaches The designers of the CBD framework in 1991–2 were thus able to draw indirectly on a substantial historical record of experience of global science-based biodiversity governance. Article 25 set up the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA). Its members are experts from government agencies of CBD parties. Its main functions are to provide assessments of biodiversity and of the effects of measures taken through the CBD, advise on innovative technologies on biodiversity conservation and use, identify new and emerging issues, and give advice on international scientific cooperation in areas of biodiversity (CBD, 2008: App. A, 5–6). In addition, a division of the secretariat is formally mandated to collect data and disseminate scientific knowledge on biodiversity (Siebenhüner, 2007: 263–5). The centrality of scientific assessments and advice in the work of the CBD has made this scientific body a continuing focus of governance discussions. Each COP typically includes discussion of its modus operandi and of ways of ‘improving’ its operations. This term is usually translated to mean improvements in the quality of the scientific advice the SBSTTA provides decision-making organs. The economic and other reverberations of many of the topics it handles means that this cannot be a politically neutral exercise. Much discussion has arisen from a feeling that the scientific committee is inadequately representative of the world’s biodiversity scientific


community. Debates have explored ways of expanding its links with that community and hence of communicating scientific findings more effectively to state delegations at COPs (CBD, 2008: App. B, 6). SBSTTA members have their own contacts with the outside scientific world. In addition the scientific division of the secretariat maintains links with scientists in Diversitas, for example, the MA process and the scientific advisory networks of other biodiversity MEAs. Advocacy of stronger links has been tied to three considerations. First, critics argue that scientists and organizations not formally connected to the CBD could usefully play a larger role in the formulation and implementation of its decisions and programmes and in the communication of CBD policies to publics, other scientists, and governments. A second argument relates to the CBD’s own scientific capabilities. These would be enhanced, reformers have suggested, by clearer peer review of SBSTTA reports. Third, such linkages could provide opportunities for tapping expertise from scientific networks and for setting up expert groups on core CBD themes such as marine protected areas and forest biodiversity. These kinds of exchanges are inseparable, however, from the larger issue of the rules governing the composition of the SBSTTA. The broadly intergovernmental nature of internal CBD processes, defenders argue, facilitates realistic decision making in COPs. Too much revision would dilute the governmental character of the scientific committee, something that states would naturally resist. From the other side of the science-policy relationship the ‘endlessness’, uncertainty, and inconclusive character of the scientific process also limits the potential for major governance innovations. Scientists disagree with each other on many questions and are constantly engaged in the discovery of new questions to ask. These instincts are not always conducive to good governance practices in MEAs. There were criticisms during the 1990s that reports and statements from the SBSTTA were too often insufficiently focused on questions relevant to the goals of the CBD, or else were vague in their conclusions and recommendations. To make the scientific committee’s reports more comprehensible and useable, the secretariat was eventually given the task of developing and maintaining a database of its assessments on agricultural biodiversity, soils, plant genetic resources, and other thematic and cross-cutting areas. The scientific and policy-advisory tasks of the SBSTTA overlap, but there is also some divergence. Much of the scientific work has policy implications. Some is explicitly designed to encourage policy debate within and outside the CBD framework, for example, through new editions of the Global Biodiversity Outlook. SBSTTA meetings also generate

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more focused policy advice in the form of recommendations. These often include proposed drafts of COP decisions. At its 2008 meeting, for example, the SBSTTA agreed on recommendations on a wide variety of biodiversity issues relating to agriculture, forestry, marine areas, inland waters, invasive species, and climate change. Many recommendations of this kind, or parts of them, are either simply endorsed or modified in minor ways by COPs.

Multilevel contexts Biodiversity issues and actors spread across multiple levels of governance. This global network is characterized by considerable fragmentation and sectoral specialization, for example in relation to raptors and orchids, as well as by cross-cutting pressures for collaboration and coordination. NGOs have been a distinctive feature of transnational biodiversity governance for over a century. Much activity remains profoundly localist in character. Groups and volunteers carry out such tasks as beach clean-ups, fauna and flora counts for possible protected sites, and responses to coastline oil spills. There is a long history of autonomous biodiversity legislation by states beginning with regulations on hunted species. Governments also respond in different ways to cross-border biodiversity conservation issues. Multiple regional IGOs in Europe, the Caribbean, and elsewhere have entered this complex actor mix. National biodiversity policies developed in an uneven fashion. Protected areas are a traditional objective. The CBD identified these as an indicator of progress in relation to its 2010 biodiversity goals (CBD, 2006b: 66). However, there remain wide differences among jurisdictions, for example, in their tolerance of economic activities and human habitation within protected areas, and even on terminologies. These make cross-country monitoring notoriously difficult (Chape et al., 2005: 445–6). Economic, cultural, and other factors in different domestic settings affect biodiversity policies. Farmers in Ireland, Spain, and other countries have, at different times, been among the leading critics of the extension of the EU wild species and habitats protection regime. US critics have targeted the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since the 1970s because of its potential to intrude into areas of private land ownership and state government powers. Others object that the system is too weak and that many listings have, in practice, contributed little to species recovery goals because governments have not provided the required substantial funding (Ferraro et al., 2007).


Global biodiversity policy is thus associated with complex multilevel and multiactor governance processes. The Arctic states coordinate the international polar bear regime, for example, on the basis of scientific information from an IUCN specialist group. Within Canada, where approximately two-thirds of the world population is located, governance is shared among four provincial governments, three territorial governments, various agencies of the federal government, and aboriginal government organizations. These have diverged in recent years on key issues of hunting and assessments of the threat status of specific polar bear populations (Boardman, 2009). More generally, the state and provincial governments of the US, Canada, and Australia have their own legislative and regulatory frameworks on endangered species, hunting, protected areas, and invasive species. There are complex sharings of tasks with the respective federal governments. Seemingly permanent debates mull the allocation of these. Partly because of such complexities, much international law on biodiversity has had little impact on Canadian law (Affolder, 2006). Authority on parks and green spaces extends global governance to municipal levels in various jurisdictions, as in Sweden. Multilevel governance on biodiversity also characterizes regional settings. The EU’s main instruments, particularly the wild birds (1979) and habitats (1992) directives and the development of the Natura 2000 network, have had profound impacts on national governments. Institutionalized compliance mechanisms centre on the persuasive, negotiating, and sanctioning powers of the European Court of Justice and the European Commission (EC). EU biodiversity goals have also increasingly been integrated into the rural development and agricultural policy sectors. Biodiversity MEAs have limited room for manoeuvre in many regional settings. They are dependent on the political will and capacities of regional states. Moreover, the ‘drivers of biodiversity loss are themselves broadly constant or increasing’ (CBD, 2006b: 59–61). By 2005, only about one half of CBD parties had prepared the required national biodiversity strategies and action plans (CBD, 2005: 2–3). The development of cooperative practices among MEA secretariats, for example through regular meetings of senior officials and participation in multiple COPs, has deflected much of the criticism by governments of duplication in global biodiversity governance. Formal and informal COP discussions, and exchanges between secretariats and government agency officials, exert subtle pressures on states. In Canada, acceptance of the obligations of CBD membership, combined with a sustained campaign by NGO coalitions, eventually led the federal government to

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pass its own endangered species legislation in 2002. CITES has an even more developed governance system. States’ duties in relation to listed species require trained staff at customs points, effective data management systems, and sound administrative frameworks. Even so, infractions of the permit and quota rules are common and the effectiveness of government practices and the quality of reporting vary considerably. Biodiversity NGOs are crucial actors in governance processes. They practice various forms of coordination. For example, BLI focuses on the world’s threatened bird species but refrains from intervening too far into the wetlands species policy areas that remain the province of WI. National and international conservation groups informally minimize overlaps when making decisions on the funding of projects (Halpern et al., 2006). NGOs have directly and indirectly influenced governance discourses and processes. Several contributed to planning for the CBD in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in relation to its more traditional nature-conservation goals. However, they were not able to secure a provision in the CBD for the creation and maintenance of global biodiversity listings (Arts, 2004: 504). The MDG similarly included provisions on sustainability, biodiversity, and protected areas that reflected influences from leading conservation NGOs. The major challenge remains nonetheless that of building the global biodiversity knowledge base, using this to promote greater awareness of biodiversity issues, and ensuring its availability for use by multiple governance actors. Large numbers of biodiversity NGOs, local and transnational, generate data both as a goal and as a spin-off of conservation projects. IUCN’s data sets on threatened species are a basic resource for planning in this area. The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), based on work by IUCN experts and maintained through UNEP-WCMC, has been widely used for policy development, for example, by the CBD’s scientific advisory body and in the planning of the protected area provisions of the MDG (Chape et al., 2005: 446). Disseminating biodiversity information is particularly difficult in many developing countries. So is making the argument that biodiversity matters. Basic information may be left unprocessed on websites and hence difficult for government agencies and NGOs to use (Laihonen et al., 2004). The effectiveness of the CBD’s own ClearingHouse Mechanism (CHM) depends on the adequacy of the biodiversity information provided by governments and other national sources, and the quality of these varies. It has value for some scientists and NGO experts, but its use is limited compared with its potential to develop as a critical resource for multiple stakeholders (Siebenhüner, 2007: 271).


Other problems arise from a lack of scientific consensus on the optimal ways to monitor changes in global biodiversity and the impacts of conservation programmes. Pereira and Cooper (2006) have proposed a global biodiversity monitoring network that would use a variety of indicator species, for example various bird species, as well as statistical maps of land-use changes and measures of changes in the conditions of different types of habitats. There is thus simultaneously too little information (for example in relation to many marine species and habitats) and too much: there are multiple sources of biodiversity facts and an abundance of data that are not consistently and conveniently useable by governance actors.

9 Climate Change

Compared with biodiversity, the climate-change sector is characterized by much higher levels of mobilization of scientific research, government attention, activities by intergovernmental bodies and non-state actors, and engagement by publics and the media. The politics of communication strategies have traditionally been a dominant feature. Governance, scientific, and other actors compete vigorously to win acceptance of preferred viewpoints. Experimentation with global and multilevel institution building has also exceeded the record in biodiversity. This is a complex issue area. Multiple epistemic subcommunities investigate insurance requirements, floods, greenhouse-gas mitigation, compensation for developing countries, renewable energy sources, and other problems of the climate-change universe. From the late 1990s climate change began to dominate debates on global environmental issues, almost to the point where many took it as synonymous with these. In policy terms it became increasingly detached from its environmental family and moved rapidly up the ranks of issues on the agendas of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. Studies of biodiversity and other environmental topics were partially reoriented to the needs of climate-change problem solving. Yet climate change has remained a highly contested area. Debates have become more polarized over time. Even the claim that a scientific consensus exists on the nature of the problems of climate change, and their causes and potential remedies, is controversial. Multifaceted disputes, pummelled by secular ideological divides, are widespread in and beyond scientific communities. The discussion in this chapter begins, as for biodiversity, with an exploration of the questions that have driven scientific processes. 154

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Epistemic foundations The establishment of the IPCC in the late 1980s was a critical point in the scientific generation of policy-oriented findings. However, this was not the start of the study of climate trends and the discussion of their policy implications. Questions of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and of the fossil-fuel economies that enhance them, had been on scientific agendas, if at times only in marginal ways, for several decades. Indeed, we can speculate that if the IPCC had not existed, climate-change science might have developed along broadly similar lines to those it took in the 1990s and early 2000s, though possibly with higher levels of scientific frustration with politicians and doubters. The IPCC from the outset had a hybrid scientific and intergovernmental character. Both elements added to perceptions of its political legitimacy. Scientific objectivity remained crucial to its overall role, though critics increasingly charged it with violating this norm. Both characteristics helped it to defend its interpretations of scientific findings against scientific, free-market, and diverse political attacks in Northern countries and against arguments from sceptical developing countries that climate change was a rich-country problem and not a global one. Some of the core questions have their origins in nineteenth-century science. In the 1890s the versatile Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius speculated on the consequences of a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. In England in the 1930s Guy Callendar collected data from weather stations to study the effects of carbon dioxide changes on global temperatures. After the early decades of the twentieth century, however, interest in the topic tended to wane. Other factors, particularly water vapour, seemed more important factors determining atmospheric processes. It appeared doubtful that human activities could significantly affect climate stability. The capacity of the oceans and features of terrestrial systems to absorb carbon dioxide were persuasive considerations for many scientists. Signals of change began to appear in the 1950s. Gilbert Plass in the US calculated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere in future decades would lead to a rise in global surface temperatures by 3.6 °C (Plass, 1956: 377). Arrhenius’ estimated range had been 4–6 °C. Plass investigated the role of human activities, particularly fossil fuel use, deforestation, and other aspects of land-use change. He estimated the amount of carbon dioxide that the burning of fossil fuels was adding to the atmosphere each year and argued that most of this could not be absorbed by the oceans or through photosynthesis.

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These accounts of these topics were not as familiar then as they became in the early 2000s. Related policy issues did not engage the attention of governments. Science grew as more systematic observations became possible, particularly from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii from the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s, US government agencies began to ask questions about the policy significance of the links among fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions, and climate change (Rowlands, 1995: 67). Environmental NGOs occasionally took up these linkages in general critiques of the sources of pollution and misuse of the earth’s natural resources. The UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1972 aired the issues. It formally urged support for continued scientific work through the Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP). As scientific interest in climate problems grew in the 1970s, however, speculation tended to be less about warming than about the likelihood of near-future periods of interglacial global cooling and the long-term prospect of a fresh round of glaciation. Major uncertainties persisted about both climate trends and forcing factors. National and international scientific organizations gradually became aware of the issues. In 1979 an influential US report (the Charney report) estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide would increase global surface temperatures by 1.5–4.5 °C (NRC, 1979). The estimate echoed through later debates. In their initial work on the First Assessment Report (FAR) in the late 1980s, IPCC scientists discussed whether it was possible to narrow this estimate; the difficulties proved insurmountable and research groups proposed a range between 1.9–5.2 °C (Bolin, 2007: 61–2). International scientific networks played an increasing role from the late 1970s. In 1979 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) convened the first World Climate Conference. This noted both the uncertainties in the science and also the probability that fossil fuel burning, deforestation, and other activities were contributing to atmospheric warming processes. A succession of international scientific meetings during the 1980s reinforced the momentum. The major conference in Toronto in 1988 stemmed from a growing scientific focus on global change in the Royal Society of Canada and the internationalist orientation of key individuals such as the climatologist Kenneth Hare. The IGBP, set up by the ICSU in 1986, became a forum for discussion of the earth-systems contexts of change, though its biogeochemical interests meant that it was less focused on climate research than some scientific activists had hoped. Developments in relation to the ozone layer moved quickly in the mid-1980s. These followed the discovery of an ozone ‘hole’ over the

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Antarctic, and built on earlier research on the effects of CFCs on the atmosphere. An expeditious process of regime creation, centred on the Vienna convention (1985) and the Montreal protocol (1987), suggested to many scientists that a comparable exercise in global problem solving in relation to anthropogenic climate change might be feasible. The optimism foundered, however, in the much greater complexities of climate-change issues and, particularly, their deep linkages with the economic and energy-use structures of modern societies. It was in this rapidly changing milieu that the IPCC began its work in 1988. Several additional factors shaped policy-oriented climate science. First, knowledge grew of the changing chemistry of the atmosphere and its interconnections with oceans and other earth-systems processes. Technical innovations allowed the handling of very large amounts of data. These developments created their own problems. Historical climate records and their methodologies had to be revisited. Difficulties resulted from the differential availability of data by regions, including disparities in the richness of observations on richer and poorer countries, and on specific challenges such as obtaining accurate measures of solar irradiance and variability. A continually expanding inventory of questions, for example, on aerosols and on the climate consequences of methane in soils, put relentless pressure on data producers. Second, studies of the earth’s climate history matured. Such knowledge is essential for putting current climate data in historical perspective and for gauging the proportion of observed change that can be explained by natural-systems variability. These issues are also central to political controversies on anthropogenic climate change. Research on past climates relies on a variety of approaches such as study of corals, pollen traces, and the chemistry of the bubbles trapped in ice core samples. Even within recent geological history, during the Holocene, there is evidence of considerable variability in surface temperatures. Some changes occurred abruptly. Scientists have identified different sets of climate cycles during this period, estimated respectively at about 2500 and 1500 years (Anderson et al., 2007: 3–5). Research on recent and on more distant geological pasts led also to the estimates, much publicized in the media and in political debates, that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were at their highest in the past several hundred thousand years (Oldfield and Dearing, 2003: 144). Third, sophisticated modelling efforts quickly became critical drivers of knowledge processes (see Chapter 5). These represented significant advances on the coupled oceans–atmosphere and other models developed from the late 1960s. Many made increasing provision for

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biological, chemical, physical, economic, and other variables. Models have been used to study and postdict recent and distant pasts, for example the atmospheric changes triggered by the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, and the factors that led to shifts of temperature in the Last Glacial Maximum (IPCC, 2004: 33–4). IPCC scientists also had to adapt older methodologies. For example, earlier practices had arbitrarily built in so-called flux adjustments or corrections to bring models into closer alignment with known climate and other realities (Le Treut et al., 2007: 117–18). The work of modelling groups in several countries became the basis for widely circulated interpretations of trends and projections such as those on rising twenty-first-century sea levels. From the early 2000s, a growing number of simulations indicated that the IPCC was being too conservative and was consistently underestimating sea-level rise. The estimated increase in the IPCC’s 2007 report was between 0.18–0.59 metres by 2100 (compared with 2000). Some critics argued that warming trends were more consistent with much bigger future increases. Scientists continued to explore geological pasts and to debate the merits of comparisons with present circumstances. The last interglacial period, for example, saw a sea-level rise globally of 4–6 metres. Multiple uncertainties continued to mark many areas of research, such as the significance in coming decades of changes in the rates of release of methane from wetlands and from melting permafrost, and of toxic chemicals from glaciers. Incomplete scientific knowledge, for example of the effects of calving on upstream ice flows and various features of icesheet dynamics, limited the capacities of model builders to incorporate changes in the polar regions. Some analyses of likely twenty-first-century trends included projections of greater snow and ice accumulation in Antarctica (Horton et al., 2008). Studies revealed mounting evidence after 2007, when the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), of accelerated thinning and other changes in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. A flurry of modelling efforts looked at the possible effects on these sheets of local temperature increases (Lenton et al., 2006), and at the regional as well as the global implications for sea-level rise, for example for coastal regions of the US (Bamber et al., 2009).

Transnational scientific networks The ICSU and its constituent organizations formed an important precursor to IPCC activities. Scientific research on climate issues, and contacts with IGO officials, gathered pace from the late 1960s. The IUGG

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established an atmospheric sciences committee in 1965. Exchanges with officials of the WMO secretariat accompanied its activities. These discussions led to the start of the GARP (Bolin, 2007: 24). The slowly accumulating experiences of large-scale transnational scientific collaboration in other areas, particularly the IGY in the late 1950s and later the MAB (see Chapter 7), also influenced developments. A landmark scientific meeting at Villach, Austria, in 1980 emphasized the growing urgency of the problem of anthropogenic climate change. Later meetings, at Villach in 1985 and Toronto in 1988, called for an international convention on the issue. The Toronto conference also urged a cut in GHGs of 20 per cent by 2005. At Noordwijk in 1989, scientists called for the stabilization of GHG emissions as soon as possible. Officials of WMO, ICSU, and UNEP set up an advisory group on GHGs in 1986. Participating scientists and officials reached broad agreement in 1987–8 on the need for an intergovernmental body that could provide regular assessments of the state of climate-change science to governments through the UN. While formally the mandate of the IPCC was to provide scientific advice to the UN, in practice its leaders and members saw it as having a much broader educational and awareness-raising role. It was designed to contribute to governmental and public judgements of the seriousness of the issues – or, in the critical UN phrase, the risks of ‘dangerous’ anthropogenic climate change. In practice its scenario and forecasting activities have focused on the period to 2100. Various subgroupings were tasked to provide information on climate trends and their forcers and to explore the consequences of both these and the major response options of mitigation and adaptation. A dual sense of urgency and confidence became increasingly characteristic of IPCC statements over time. Research findings between TAR (2001) and AR4 (2007) allowed the IPCC to make statements on the atmospheric, biological, economic, and other aspects of increasing GHG production in much greater detail than before and with higher levels of confidence. The report of Working Group II (WGII) for the AR4 process elaborated on the consequences of warming trends for natural systems such as glacial lakes, permafrost, and lakes and rivers and the biological and ecological implications, for example, for migratory bird species, the ranges of plant and animal species, and marine and freshwater fish species (IPCC, 2008: 8–9). Processes were dependent, however, on the state of climate-change science. As with any scientific area, this has always been a work in progress. Discussions were thus not a matter of simply translating a given body

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of knowledge into formats accessible to outsiders. They also involved an active process of interpretation and problem solving, grounded in the recruitment and organization of appropriate scientific experts who shared the general IPCC ethos. Scientific puzzles and struggles to resolve them recurred. In the second assessment process, for example, there was much talk of a ‘missing sink’ because of data that suggested that of carbon dioxide emissions due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation in tropical countries, only about 45 per cent remained in the atmosphere (Bolin, 2007: 121). Over time the IPCC confirmed the view of its original founding and participating scientists that human activities were altering the natural variability and cycles of climate change. Confidence in this view increased markedly between the FAR and AR4. By the late 1990s scientists working on the TAR concluded that the abundances of GHGs in that decade were higher than in any other period of the past few hundred thousand years. Estimates put carbon dioxide abundance at around 280 ppm during most of the Holocene until approximately the mid-1700s. It underwent a sharp rise following the onset of industrialization processes in western Europe and North America to 367 ppm in 1999 and 379 ppm by 2005 (Le Treut et al., 2007: 100). The accumulated data led to the conclusion in AR4 in 2007 that [w]arming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level. (IPCC, 2007: 2) The other part of this message related to human-made factors. In 1995, during the Second Assessment Report (SAR), scientists in Working Group I (WGI) had concluded cautiously that ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.’ By 2001 its conclusion for the TAR was that there was ‘new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities’ (Le Treut et al., 2007: 118). Multiple uncertainty issues were discussed extensively in the IPCC, particularly in relation to the third (Bengtsson, 2001) and fourth (Stainforth et al., 2005) assessment processes. Awareness of the policy implications of statements, and of their vulnerability to political criticism, generated an elaborate formalization of modes of expression. Uncertainty debates also reflected disciplinary differences among scientists. WGI members,

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for example, usually had better data sets to work with than those in other working groups, and in their own disciplines they tended to make more use of statistical probability techniques and terminologies (Manning, 2006). The scientific and communications implications of different types of uncertainty were examined, including situations where experts simply disagreed on the interpretation of scientific findings on a topic (Ha-Duong et al., 2007). The resulting culture of uncertainty alertness called for precise markers to be attached to statements. The guidance note and its revisions for participants in the fourth assessment process developed a five-point scale of confidence from very low to very high and a ten-point scale grading the probability of a particular outcome (from exceptionally unlikely to virtually certain). The work of the IPCC thus rested on a delicately balanced mingling of scientific and policy-related tasks. Drawing together scientific findings and communicating these to policymakers involves both. The IPCC thus became a secondary producer of scientific knowledge. In tackling the big questions it was asked to consider – for example, whether ‘dangerous’ climate change was taking place, what were the causes of trends, and how important were human activities in producing these – it mobilized many parts of an existing, rapidly growing, and diverse scientific community and, more importantly, actively shaped its development. The criticism naturally arose that this formative effect was too marked. Critics suspected that the informal rules of participation – through by-invitation recruitment and self-selection by volunteer scientists sympathetic to the general anthropogenic climate-change thesis – in effect skewed its products in support of a prior and contentious political viewpoint. There were complaints that sceptical scientists were in practice excluded, that internal dissent was discouraged, and that consultative procedures were, perhaps as a result of deliberate decisions, inadequate to the task of securing a fair hearing of all scientific perspectives on any given topic. The processes of the IPCC were in fact characterized by extensive debates and disagreements. Limitations on these, however, arose inevitably because of its policy-advisory role. It was set up as an intergovernmental body. This characteristic shaped its work, procedures, and observers’ and participants’ views of its role. It was designed to fill the institutional and policy-advisory gap identified by climate scientists in their meetings of the 1980s. As Bert Bolin, the first chair of the IPCC, later wrote, scientific organizations such as the IUGG already existed at that time, and these had extensive contacts with intergovernmental bodies, particularly the WMO. However,

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an organ that provided an international meeting place for scientists and politicians to take responsibility for assessing the available knowledge concerning global climate change and its possible socioeconomic implications was missing. (Bolin, 2007: 39) Overall assessments and answers to specific questions were, from this perspective, necessarily selective. Bolin argued that the selection of key scientific findings by him and by WGs for the FAR was based on an evaluation of what might be the most important conclusions of the ongoing assessment as seen from a political point of view. In that sense politics was mixed with scientific facts. (Bolin, 2007: 59) In IPCC processes scientific findings had to negotiate their way through a variety of internal governmental filters before they emerged in the form of reports, statements, and summaries. The elaborateness of procedures grew over time. Different forms of science–policy interactions took place at different stages of processes and at different times in IPCC history. The (government-elected) scientists who made up the Bureau of the IPCC (the chairs, co- and vice-chairs of the IPCC and of its three working groups) led processes by initiating assessments, proposing questions for the working groups, and, following approval of these steps by governments, selecting or confirming expert authors and reviewers for these tasks using both scientific and geographical representation criteria. This general pattern varied over time. In its early history, for example, the bureau and the IPCC chair had more powers over invitations to experts. Membership of the bureau was based on scientific criteria but some members evidently received directions from their governments. Bolin (2007: 84) saw this as unavoidable in an intergovernmental body. Moreover it was ‘not necessarily a disadvantage if a stringent distinction was kept between scientific and political arguments’. He also insisted on protecting scientific integrity by reminding government officials that scientific arguments rested on the interplay between different viewpoints and that ‘unanimity was not required’ (Bolin, 2007: 70). Governments re-entered the exercise to comment on drafts of sections by scientific experts. At this point in the process Bolin saw the political antennae of WG co-chairs as critical. He noted, for example, that these were not always able ‘to keep a clear distinction between

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country delegates, on one hand, and representatives of NGOs’ on the other (Bolin, 2007: 116). In the final stages of assessment processes, government delegates had to approve the crucial summaries for policymakers. These procedures too changed in various ways, particularly following concerns voiced by governments during the first and second assessment processes. Thus the summary for policymakers in the synthesis reports came to require line-by-line approval from government delegates, ‘which means in practice a word-by-word approval’ (Siebenhüner, 2003: 16–17). Supporters of these nuanced forms of governmental influence defended them on the grounds that they contributed to the soundness, and the likely impact on governments, of the policy advice of scientists and in general assisted the flow of effective communications between scientists and government officials. Critics claimed that they skewed scientific appraisals and gave governments too much leverage. In 1994, for example, government delegates from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) objected strongly – though unsuccessfully – to a draft paragraph from WGI on the stabilization of carbon dioxide concentrations (Lohan, 2006b: 268–9). This hybrid scientific-governmental character profoundly influenced the institutional development of the IPCC. It encouraged a greater degree of formalization than would have occurred in a purely scientific and non-governmental body – for example, if, hypothetically, these tasks had been handed instead in 1988 to a new institution of the ICSU. IPCC’s lead scientists viewed procedural legitimacy as crucial. Procedural refinements, however, came at the cost of some loss of flexibility to respond to changing circumstances and hindered the capacity of the IPCC to ensure attentiveness to the views of the many scientific, governmental, and non- and inter-governmental actors with a stake in its deliberations (Miller, 2005: 195–6).

Global governance frameworks As this record suggests, it is not possible to make a clear-cut demarcation between scientific and policy organizations with respect to climate change. Science–policy relations grew still more complex from 1992 with the emergence of the FCCC. This had its own scientific advisory committee, the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA). The FCCC did not impose specific quantitative or target-date obligations on signatory states, largely in deference to US objections during

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negotiations. It took much of its rationale nonetheless from the emerging consensus of scientific meetings of the 1980s. Ideas generated in later exchanges among scientists; representatives of ICSU associations; IGO secretariats, particularly those of the WMO and UNEP; and government officials from the Netherlands, Sweden, and other countries continued to influence its development. The FCCC aimed (in Article 2) to secure ‘stabilization’ of GHG levels in the atmosphere in order to prevent ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ with the earth’s climate system. The word ‘dangerous’ in this context, which had also been used to guide IPCC activities, is more normative and evaluative than scientific. Bolin (2007: 94) saw it as a ‘political concept’. It either raises the nonscientific question of where the boundary lies between dangerous and non-dangerous warming, and of how degrees of danger can be assessed, or, if it rests on an assumption that any degree of warming is hazardous, it becomes meaningless (Hansen, 2005; Mann, 2009). The terminology was important, however, for helping to distinguish the respective terrains of science and policymaking on global climate change and for directing scientific consultations along policy-relevant paths. The IPCC had been formed in 1988 in a political context of longterm anticipation of the next big UN environment conference in the sequence that began at Stockholm in 1972. The nature of the future meeting’s contribution to a climate-change regime was not known then, though some kind of intergovernmental agreement was widely anticipated. Once the FCCC had been concluded (at the UNCED in 1992), and its scientific advisory machinery set in motion, the IPCC in a sense had to redefine itself. The new role of the FCCC could have implied that the IPCC would become progressively more redundant or that it would be downgraded to become, in effect, merely one of several resource tools available to SBSTA experts. However, the climate science community by that time had a stake in the IPCC. The fact that it was itself an intergovernmental body also facilitated communications with the convention framework (Bolin, 2007: 85). The initial response was the creation in 1993 of an intermediary body, a working group that investigated relations between the two frameworks, divisions of labour, and, more specifically, the nature of the continuing scientific role of the IPCC. The IPCC also began to adapt its scientific products to the new realities, for example, by publishing a variety of shorter technical reports in addition to its continuing work on large-scale assessments (Lohan, 2006b: 274–5). A significant overlap between the two persisted. The FCCC’s own scientific advisory body, which reported to COPs, was governmental

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in character though members had to have relevant scientific competence. Its capacities, and its organizational complexity, expanded with the setting up of specialist expert groups on particular topics. It is the focal point of the convention for liaising with and reporting on IPCC activities. The SBSTA was tasked in Article 9 of the convention to ‘provide assessments of the state of scientific knowledge relating to climate change and its effects’, identify relevant state-of-the-art technologies, provide advice on international scientific cooperation, and respond to scientific questions from COPs. The first of these has continued in practice to be the primary role of the IPCC. This has made it difficult for the SBSTA to add, in effect, ‘summaries of summaries’ for government delegations in the convention’s COPs. The creation of the FCCC thus put an additional layer of complex process between scientists and policymakers. While this potentially created more technical resources for governments, it also heightened scientific and procedural uncertainties. In the early 2000s, for example, IPCC scientists felt that their resources of expertise on deforestation and land-use questions were not being utilized effectively in the convention framework, mostly because of doubts on the convention side of the relationship of their capacity to generate appropriate methodologies (Lohan, 2006b: 306). Moreover COPs and the Kyoto Protocol Meetings of the Parties (MOPs), are primarily intergovernmental rather than more balanced science–policy forums. Scientific opinions tend to reflect the positions of governments. There were renewed complaints in relation to the sequence of meetings in 2008–9 that some states, for example Canada – by that time a determined critic of Kyoto-style regime developments, and with interests in oil-sands development to protect – were increasingly controlling government scientists’ voices. The SBSTA has tasks, defined in the climate-change convention, that distinguish it, though not without overlaps, from the IPCC. For example, part of its role (in Article 9) is to give advice on ‘ways and means of supporting endogenous capacity-building in developing countries’. Several areas of its work have responded to problems of the relations between economic development and climate change, for example, in small-island developing countries. These include reports and advice on deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; humaninduced land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF); issues of mitigation; technology transfer; the participation of developing countries in international scientific cooperation; and their capacities to engage in data gathering and scientific research on climate change. The Nairobi programme has been directed towards social and economic aspects of

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climate change, particularly with regard to gaps in the availability and accessibility of data, the resources needed for observation networks and sharing the resulting data, and methods of integrating relevant information into the climate-change planning of developing countries (SBSTA, 2008: 3–4, 11–12; SBSTA, 2009: Annex I, 18).

Multilevel contexts As in biodiversity, governance activities on climate change take place at multiple levels though the range of these is different. Much biodiversity conservation effort, for example, has historically targeted local levels. Developments in the IPCC and in the FCCC framework form only a part of overall global governance activities, and of science–policy interactions, on climate change. The mixed or poor compliance records of key states in relation to the core global mechanisms have provided much of the material for assessments of the Kyoto protocol. These in turn shape policy debates on features of a post-2012 undertaking, including ideas about prospects at other governance levels. Multilevel governance approaches suggest the benefits of studying multiple interactions among levels and actors. For example, IPCC statements circulate among and influence other actors, and these use informal access points in attempts to reshape IPCC agendas; FCCC developments, particularly through COPs, present states with legal and policy options to which governments respond with diverse strategies; and ideas and actions at the interstate level percolate through, and to a limited extent respond, to activities at local community levels. This vast canvas is beyond the scope of the present discussion. However, we can identify some persistent features. I will focus on epistemic developments and the multilevel circulation of ideas, including arguments about the most appropriate policy instruments for governments; the processes of scientific and risk communication that are woven into these complex processes; the experimentation with governance approaches at regional, national, and subnational levels; and the shifting patterns detectable in climate-change debates, particularly as attention has turned increasingly to issues of adaptation. Consensus and controversy Climate change is the most publicized and politicized of the three clusters of earth-systems issues we are discussing. Continuities of themes, and a succession of phases, have characterized debates. Different scientific and policy issues have vied for centrality. Multiple actors in a large variety

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of cultural and political contexts have framed and prioritized issues in diverse ways. Since the late 1990s political controversies on the climatechange governance mechanisms have intensified. The IPCC has been a focal point of these debates. Intense controversy ignited in 2009–10 over procedures in the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Some exchanges reflect the normal processes of controversy in science. Indeed there are intriguing comparisons with the earlier polarization of scientific opinion in continental-drift debates. But unlike those, in the climate-change arena strongly-held scientific views spring in part from and are used in association with defences of competing policy positions. The process has resulted in multiple constructions of the IPCC. It is variously an impartial translator or synthesizer of scientific knowledge, or a bulldozing lobbyist for a scientifically untenable and value-laden political judgement. One strand finds fault in the presumption of a consensus in climate-change science. Critics point to divisions of scientific opinion, an abundance of uncertainties beyond those acknowledged in reports, the incompleteness of research and knowledge gaps, a demonizing of critics and sceptics, and, within the IPCC community, a record of suppressed dissent and resignations (Hayward, 2006: 902–4). IPCC processes, from this perspective, tend to discount contradictory findings and fail to allow time for an adequate soliciting of the views of experts. It is a ‘coalition of advocacy in favour of climate alarmism’; where doubts arise, this alarmism kicks in to interpret data in ways that confirm its views (Boehmer-Christiansen and Kellow, 2002: 148, 173–5). Worse, opponents charge IPCC scientists and their supporters with circulating or tolerating ‘junk science’. Others have objected that the normal principles of forecasting used in other areas of public policy research are not evident in IPCC processes and that its work represents only the ‘opinions’ of a group of scientists; vagueness in assessing the consequences of different policy options thus makes it inadequate as a basis for public policy development (Green and Armstrong, 2007). Interacting with these controversies are more general clashes of political ideas. To a much greater extent than in other environmental and earth-systems policy areas, discussions of climate change are inseparable from rival ideological views of the roles of states and markets, questions of equity and social justice, and competing depictions of the structural relations between economies and natural systems. The data and interpretations in successive IPCC reports have been mined extensively by NGOs and others to support philosophical assaults on the norms and practices that shape the high-risk dependence of modern societies on dwindling oil and gas resources.

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James Hansen, an early scientific leader in both ozone-layer research and in global warming debates, argued in 2009 that any post-Kyoto initiative was ‘guaranteed to fail’ because of the way the institutions of economic power reinforce the natural inertia of governments (Adam, 2009). Critics anticipate very high penalties, in economic and social terms, as a result of continuing failures on the part of governments and IGOs to devise effective climate-change mitigation strategies and argue that the costs of these strategies are acceptable. The EC has estimated that the investment cost of maintaining overall GHG levels at 450 ppm would be about 0.5 per cent of global GDP in the period 2013–30 (European Commission, 2007: 2). A contrasting policy critique maintains that there are very high, and typically underestimated, economic and restructuring costs of compliance with GHG emissions-reduction goals such as those of the Kyoto accord (Pielke et al., 2008). The high-cost issue has been raised by many scientists, including the leading physicist Freeman Dyson. It is logically distinct from arguments about uncertainties and intrascientific conflicts, but in practice often draws on evidence of divisions in the scientific community to underline the point. Diverse free-market and other critics of the anthropogenic climate-change view have argued that climate data sets are too limited to provide an adequate basis for inference, that reliable records are too recent to give evidence of longterm trends, that observations are constrained by urban heat-island and other effects, and that there is excessive reliance on models and simulations as opposed to real-world data (Green et al., 2004). Risk communications Climate-change processes thus incorporate the normal processes of communication, and the communication of risk, between scientists and outsiders. However, these are much more complex than in other areas (Hulme, 2009: Ch. 7). Layers of metadiscourses augment explorations of the ostensible scientific points at stake. Proponents compete in attempts to structure the terms of debates – for example by coining phrases like ‘global warming’ and promoting others like ‘sea-level rise’ and ‘Arctic heat-wave’ – and to ensure the comparative advantage of arguments from their respective arsenals. The consequences on the pro-IPCC side have been impressive. The production and distribution of messages about uncertainty are key elements in these risk-communications games. The more that uncertainty beliefs are buttressed as the primary receptors and filters for complex climate-change statements, the more quickly public trust

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in the substantive content of these statements evaporates. Critics have charged that an anti-environmental countermovement, based on industry associations and conservative think tanks, has emerged in the US and other western countries since the late 1990s. By repeatedly emphasizing scientific uncertainties it has mounted a ‘sustained assault on scientific communication – attempting to confuse both policy-makers and the general public about climate change’ (McCright, 2007: 201). Audiences vary in their responses to uncertainty. The responses to statements that acknowledge uncertainty as part of the scientific process tend to be different from those in situations in which it is evident that the experts disagree (Patt, 2007). Each is typical of IPCC processes. Some recipients of scientific climate-change messages tolerate uncertainty and evaluate qualified interpretations and probability statements favourably while others respond by opting for adverse or wait-and-see postures. Supporters of the work of the IPCC have been divided on the question of whether, and if so how much, they should engage more determinedly in user-friendly exercises designed to communicate more effectively the urgency and importance of climate change. Tactics include greater use of humour, novels, non-documentary films, and public-relations devices of publicizing the individual scientists behind IPCC products. This kind of self-questioning reflects mounting levels of frustration on the part of scientists at the failure of the sequence of IPCC reports, and of activities within the FCCC framework, to trigger appropriate longterm policy responses by governments. Scientific communications of any kind, however, have inherent constraints. A strategy that focuses more attention on the messenger than on the message, which has sometimes been the case with the IPCC’s communications, is risky. Problems arise from the uncertainties of research findings, the need to simplify scientific statements, and the inherent complexities and multidisciplinary character of much IPCC work. Differences among the potential audiences for such messages add to these difficulties. So do the temptations on the part of the news media to simplify messages still further and to retreat into stances of alarmism, indifference, defeatism, or denial. The mixes of scientific and normative content in messages help proponents to amplify their arguments but restrict their capacity to make statements perceived as ‘objective’ (Schenk and Lensink, 2007). Resistance to risk communications arises naturally when they are seen by recipients as ‘yesterday’s news’ or as the products of agents’ attempts to impose a viewpoint rather than to encourage a conversation. Delivering more numerous, louder, simpler,

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better targeted, more confident, or more creatively presented messages will thus not necessarily help mitigation advocates. Quantification in IPCC and other scenarios also provokes differing responses. To some extent this is a necessary ingredient of science and a requirement of sound policy advice and public education. However, the degree of numerical precision typically attached to scientific estimates of the ranges of sea-level rise, surface temperatures, vegetation changes, the spread of diseases, and other conditions in distant future years like 2100 is easily misunderstood. It can therefore undermine the credibility of reasonable attempts to anticipate future circumstances and clarify policy options. Climate-change communications have been both assisted and compromised by the attention of some recipients to anecdotal evidence. When Europe and the US experienced warmer than usual summers and a succession of unexpected extreme weather events in the 1990s and the early 2000s, reference to climate change, whether scientifically justified or not, rather than to natural-systems variability was almost a reflex of public and media responses. The year 2008 was the eighth warmest on record since measures began in the mid-nineteenth century, and it too was marked by several highly publicized extreme weather events (WMO, 2009c). If such phenomena influence public attitudes on climate change, these are also vulnerable to abrupt reversals. For example, there was evidence in 2009 of greater multi-year Arctic sea-ice stability; the early 2000s in general saw a higher degree of global climate stability than had earlier been anticipated in scenarios; and this century may be marked by cooling years or even decades. Such phenomena are not incompatible with scenarios of longterm warming. Any trend line is rippled. Rising carbon dioxide levels were not always associated in geological history with temperature changes. However, by altering the political contexts of science such changing physical circumstances aggravate communications difficulties. Moreover, communication does not take place in a linear two-actor relationship. Multiple players other than IPCC sympathizers are active in these n-person games, some of them equipped with greater persuasive capabilities. Even in liberal democratic polities, corresponding government policies do not necessarily follow on from evidence of a shift in public opinion. Democratic theory, moreover, tends to doubt that they always should. The processes leading to changes in public attitudes are related to but different from those that effect movement in the thinking and policies of governments. Both levels are important. Climate-change communications attempts aimed at publics have, in many ways, been a resounding success. Environmentalists iconized the

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Kyoto Protocol. This achieved an unprecedentedly high brand identification for an international law document. IPCC reports have continued to influence climate-change activism, for example in the ‘350’ goal (of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) of environmental NGOs and the more general goal of keeping temperature increases this century at below 2 °C. There is considerable public knowledge in western countries of the basic arguments of anthropogenic climate change, and broad acceptance of the argument that it matters (Stern, 2006: 527). A 19-country public opinion survey carried out in 2009, in China and some developing countries as well as western states, indicated that on average 60 per cent of the public were in favour of their governments’ giving a higher priority to climate-change policy (WPO, 2009). Governments have varied in their responses to risk communications. The rise of climate change as a mainstream policy issue for western governments was pushed by, and precipitated, scientific and policy assessments of its importance for economies and energy uses. A group of national scientific academies in 2005 anticipated an increase in global primary energy demand of nearly 60 per cent by 2030, with fossil fuels continuing to function as the main energy source. The intensified pursuit of GHG emissions controls, they argued, and more sustained investigation of geoengineering options, is thus urgently required (Royal Society, 2005b). Climate change also occupied an increasingly critical place in evaluations by the US and other western states of emerging twenty-first-century security issues and on the agendas of G8, G20, and other high-level meetings. Nicholas Stern concluded his major 2006 economic assessment by arguing that urgent action should be taken to reduce the risk of committing the world to the real possibility of very high temperature increases. The next few years will be critical. . . . Success will depend on continuity in the process of building carbon markets, and imagination and ambition in scaling up co-operation in areas such as technology and reducing deforestation. (Stern, 2006: 657) Multilevel experimentation Policy debates on climate change in OECD countries have explored a variety of mechanisms that might lead to more extensive compliance with Kyoto GHG emissions targets and to a strengthened successor regime. Searches for alternative national, rather than international, governance arrangements are also part of these exercises.

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Some actors find autonomous national strategies more attractive than intergovernmental arrangements because they allow states to extricate themselves from Kyoto-style quantification and regulation. In a sense they become escape routes that allow sceptics in the Czech Republic, for example, to build a case for exemption from international rules, and in Canada to argue that tough controls on emissions from the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries are a prerequisite for a future global climate-change regime. Critics have also charged that intensity criteria (where GHG emissions goals are related to energy consumption per unit of GDP or of a company’s production) have become increasingly attractive because they permit corporations and states to evade the costs of real-reduction targets. For others, though, national schemes prepare the ground for more rigorous international arrangements, for example, by contributing to the growth of internationally concerted carbon regulation systems. Supporters claim that national governance activities give more scope for a flexible prioritizing of sectors, for example air transportation; for selection among the large range of regulatory and other carbon policy instruments, and mixes of these, at the disposal of governments; and for moves towards intensity measures of performance. In recent US debates, strong national legislation, within or outside an international framework, has also been defended on the grounds that it is a means of securing a global spread of regulation through the unilateral imposition of trade penalties on countries lacking ‘commensurable’ climate policy regimes. The upshot has been growing interest and experimentation with a variety of cap-and-trade and other systems in European and North American jurisdictions. Arrangements extend to a variety of governance levels. Groups and governments at municipal and state levels in the US responded to criticisms of federal failings in the early 2000s by pressing for broader multilevel governance strategies. About one-half of state governments in the US have brought in GHG emissions regulations, for example in California’s Global Warming Solutions Act and the state’s related policy initiatives on hybrid vehicles. North American developments across jurisdictional boundaries include the Global Warming Initiative in 2003 of the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington; the 2001 agreement on climate-change mitigation among the New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers; and the agreement negotiated in 2009 by the premiers of western Canadian provincial governments. Community groups critical of national-level gaps have similarly driven policy activism at local levels. Many municipal governments have

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powers in relation to land use, wastes, and other policy sectors that can be mobilized to pursue issues on climate-change agendas (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006). Debates within national associations of municipal level governments, and the creation of transnational networks of city governments on climate-change policy, reinforce this momentum. Subnational governance levels, however, are typically subject to more constitutional, policy, and capacity constraints than apply at the levels of national governments. Some state or cooperative interstate government initiatives in the US arguably stray into federal powers by attempting to regulate across state boundaries and may thus violate the supremacy or commerce clauses of the US constitution (Ferrey, 2008). The adaptation turn While IPCC scientists pondered post-AR4 options after 2007, the flow of scientific studies, policy papers, and NGO statements increased. Monitoring of climate trends confirmed continuities with earlier observations and projections. Combined sea-surface and land-surface global temperatures in 2008 were 0.31 °C higher than the average for 1961–90 (WMO, 2009c). Discourses continued in the multiple sub areas of climate-change debates – on nuclear power, biofuels, international compensation for vulnerable developing countries, the biodiversity and health consequences, and so on. There was evidence too of changing directions. More specifically, rising attention to issues of adaptation represents a major shift in scientific and policy debates on anthropogenic climate change. To some extent this political dynamic is grounded in an acknowledgement of the failure of mitigation. It also reflects scientific estimates of the probability of continued global surface temperature increases to 2100 regardless of GHG-emissions control measures that may be taken in the 2010s or 2020s. Though the argument is less common, the adaptation turn is also logically a consequence of the argument that natural variability and cycles, rather than human activities, are shaping changing climates. Whatever the causes of changes, we have to respond to them. Adaptation arguments thus build on evaluations of the benefits and threats presented by climate change. They encourage exploitation of the economic benefits, for example, from the opening of multiseasonal or year-round marine transportation routes in the Arctic and in restructurings of agricultural sectors. They also call for greater investment in public works, technology transfers, policy innovations, and development assistance programmes to cope with climate-related problems

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such as those of disease, refugee movements, coastal flooding, drought, storm damage, housing, and the loss of arable land. Adaptation issues were traditionally present in IPCC and FCCC approaches but were generally secondary or even marginal (Schipper, 2006). The reasons for the comparative neglect were more political than scientific. Too much attention to adaptation issues implicitly challenged mitigation logic, the drive from the 1980s to control GHG emissions, and the IPCC’s scientific work on climate-change mitigation policy options. Wide-ranging scientific debates nonetheless took place during the 1990s on adaptation issues in relation to water resources, coastlines, and epidemics, for example, as well as on the likely adaptation requirements of different types of vulnerable societies. Studies also recognized linkages between mitigation and adaptation. Changes in land use in forestry and other sectors, for example, can serve both as adaptive responses to climate change and as GHG mitigation strategies. The overwhelming IPCC focus, however, was on the identification of GHG emissions effects and of the likely consequences of businessas-usual and innovative policy responses to these changes. Particularly during the AR4 process and after its conclusion in 2007, however, many scientists felt that the IPCC had systematically underestimated warming trends and their consequences for developments such as sea-level rise. It was also evident that governments were not about to leap in concert into determined mitigation postures. In view of the uncertainties of feedbacks and time lags, scientists argued, the most likely GHG policy measures would have impacts on the long-term consequences of emissions that were severely inadequate. Passive adaptation, or relying on the normal capacities of societies to manage change, would thus be insufficient. Debate continues on whether, or to what extent, mitigation approaches should be regarded as a failure and scientific and policy attention should shift unequivocally towards adaptation. There has been growing scientific attention to the broad range of mitigation options presented by geoengineering technologies. The Royal Society’s report on geoengineering in 2009 argued that these, particularly carbon dioxide removal methods and possibly stratospheric aerosols and other solar radiation management technologies, will become increasingly necessary to the extent that current and projected legal and policy approaches to reducing GHG emissions fail to accomplish their objectives (Royal Society, 2009). There is also a good case for viewing mitigation and adaptation as mutually reinforcing approaches. Mitigation and adaptation ‘each manage different components of future climate-related risk’ (Jones et al.,

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2007: 685). Adaptation strategies can be used extensively at local levels, for example in projects to check coastal erosion and urban flooding risks, within an overall global governance framework in which effort is still made to control the production and flow of GHGs. The economic costs of even modestly proactive responses to the adaptation problems posed by climate change, however, are considerable. Complex economic and social issues result from assessments of the consequences of sea-level rise in coming decades on European coastal regions. Societies in Europe vary considerably in their likely exposure to such changes, the measures they have taken or which are under way, and in levels of societal and governmental ‘worry’ (Tol et al., 2008). In 2007 the EC released its Green Paper on a broad range of climate-change adaptation issues in the EU, including problems of floods and emergency civil protection measures. Specific groups inside many countries face different degrees of vulnerability to change and the societal and economic costs of adaptation. Changing sea ice and permafrost conditions in northern Canada have a variety of consequences for local communities. The reduction of ice platforms affects polar bear populations and hence Inuit cultural norms and hunting practices, for example, and changes in seasons and temperature regimes alter snowmobile routes and create new housing construction problems. Estimates of economic costs rise still further where political judgements place a large share of responsibility for adaptation burdens on northern states. Developing countries require international assistance to pursue adaptation goals (Stern, 2006: 503). There are multiple and varied requirements, for example, in relation to adaptation by smallholder farmers in the agroforestry sector (Verchot et al., 2007) and problems of the spread of dengue fever in southeast Asia. More so than mitigation strategies, adaptation to the effects of climate change thus has a wide array of implications for the activities of development NGOs and the international development policies of northern states and international financial institutions (IFIs). These will have to pay attention to specific vulnerabilities associated with the sensitivity of particular populations to climate impacts that may not have been in the agenda in the past. These include taking care of people living in coastal areas, lowlands, drought- and flood-prone regions or people whose livelihoods directly depend on resources that are going to be negatively affected by climate change. (Lemos et al., 2007)

10 Geological Hazards

Diverse geological phenomena shape the third cluster of earth-systems governance issues. Policy debates on hazards, spurred by events such as the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Haiti earthquake and Iceland volcanic eruption of 2010, have grown in recent years. Natural-hazards topics are extremely varied. They cover hurricanes and other extreme weather phenomena, earthquakes, and the complex phenomena associated with El Niño events. Although there are well-established national and international response mechanisms for some aspects of disaster relief, in general the governance systems here remain much less developed than those in play for biodiversity and climate change. The area lacks a core framework agreement like the FCCC or those that shape biodiversity policy. There are also significant definitional problems. Some accounts of geohazards bring in climate change too. Others locate issues within a large umbrella category of risks that includes social dislocations, economic crises, and terrorist attacks. Environmentalists traditionally excluded consideration of natural hazards from their discourses. Focusing instead on human-made sources of environmental change, they were often reluctant to consider natural systems as an autonomous set of policy issues; natural-variability arguments are also bases for climate-change scepticism or denial. These questions have nonetheless increasingly been incorporated into global debates about the policy implications of earth-systems processes. Geological formations and processes also have many ‘positive’ economic and cultural values. They contribute to sustainable development. Various national and international processes for selecting sites for heritage protection or protected-area status make use of geological criteria. The discussion in this chapter, however, focuses on geological phenomena as sources of economic and social hazards. 176

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Epistemic foundations Three sets of difficulties are relevant to the problem of framing the geological hazards issue area. First, the range of questions is large, fluid, and diverse. Some typologies are mostly restricted to the social, economic, and policy implications of the geologist’s traditional sphere of earthquakes, volcanoes, and other earth movements (IGOS, 2007: 15–21). Diverse physical phenomena are involved. Landslides triggered by various factors are a significant part of the scientific agenda. In 1986, a significant outgassing of carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon led to 1700 deaths. Some approaches add weather-related and other earth-systems phenomena. ‘Extreme’ events thus include earthquakes; wildfires; pandemics; volcano eruptions; mudslides; floods; droughts; and extreme weather phenomena, such as ice ages, hurricanes, tornadoes, and sandstorms. (Gad-el-Hak, 2008: xvi) According to Steve Sparks, co-organizer of a Royal Society meeting on the subject in 2005, the scope is much broader than this: By extreme natural hazards we mean everything from hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, right through to the threat of supervolcanoes, comets or asteroids and even the long-term impact of climate change. (Royal Society, 2005) Many problems here are interconnected. Tsunamis, for example, can result not only from earthquakes but also from major landslides and volcanic eruptions. Intersections between natural-hazards and climatechange phenomena, for example in the floods and drought conditions that afflicted regions of west and east Africa respectively in 2009, complicate analyses and policy responses. There are abrupt as well as slow-moving processes. In September 2002, the Kolka glacier, in the Russian Caucasus region, broke up as a result of a several-month-long build-up of ice and debris. Most of the pieces were propelled rapidly downstream a distance of 19 kilometres (Evans et al., 2009: 314). Second, there are integral links with the general policy area of disasters. Hazards causing disasters may be economic, epidemiological, and political as well as natural. A hazard can be defined very broadly as

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a potentially damaging physical event, phenomenon or human activity that may cause the loss of life or injury, property damage, social and economic disruption or environmental degradation. Hazards can include latent conditions . . . and can have different origins: natural (geological, hydrometeorological and biological) or induced by human processes (environmental degradation and technological hazards). (UN, 2005: 6) This expanded framing of hazards broadens the range of comparative policy cases far beyond natural phenomena to include, for example, the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001; the European heat wave of 2003; the stampede and deaths during the Hajj at Mina, Saudi Arabia, in 2006; the listeriosis outbreak in Canada in 2008; and many instances of building, dam, and bridge collapses, flu outbreaks, sports stadium disasters, oil spills, urban fires, economic depressions, armed conflicts, and other events. Third, even when we restrict the focus to geological or natural hazards, there are ambiguities in the ‘natural’ component of definitions. In climate-change discourses, the challenge of identifying and responding to anthropogenic causation has been divisive and has generated prolonged scientific and political controversy. Discourses on geological hazards, by contrast, accept that complex mixes of natural and human factors are at work in events. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are natural events, but the consequences in terms of human suffering and property damage are related also to factors such as spreading urbanization, building codes, the construction of houses on hillsides in vulnerable areas, transportation routes, and emergency measures capabilities. Flooding and landslides are more frequent and costly in regions where wetlands have been drained or where riverside or coastal vegetation has been removed. Climate-change analyses, which point to the likelihood of rising sea levels and an increased frequency of extreme weather events, magnify the framing problem by blurring still further the line between natural and anthropogenic events. Some experts have accordingly focused on the category, still very broad, of ‘natural and human-induced environmental hazards’. This takes in earthquakes and floods, together with other events ‘that may be the unintended consequences of human activity’ (ICSU, 2005: 24). Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed that ‘today’s disasters owe as much to human activities as to the forces of nature. Indeed the term “natural” is increasingly misleading’ (Annan, 1999).


The records of natural disasters show an increase in recent decades. Between 1900 and 1940 there were about 100 in each decade; the number increased to 650 in the 1960s, 2000 in the 1980s, and nearly 2800 in the 1990s (ICSU, 2005: 9; ISDR, 2008: 20). Some of this increase may reflect enhanced scientific monitoring capacities. More significant, however, is the increase in the number of people affected by geological hazards as a result of the growth of megacities and expanded settlements in developing countries. These vulnerabilities carry with them the prospect of increasing volumes of social displacements and refugee flows and mounting burdens on public health, educational, and socialwelfare systems. The number of people affected by natural hazards grew from about 90 million in 1990 to 255 million in 2003 (Guha-Sapir et al., 2004: 53). The 2010 earthquake in Haiti affected more than three million people. Natural and human-made or -enhanced factors thus combine to make people living in areas of east Asia and the Pacific, southern and south-east Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and parts of Latin America disproportionately vulnerable to high-cost natural hazards. There is a long history of Asian natural disasters. Deaths from an earthquake in China in 1556 have been estimated at nearly 830,000 (IGOS, 2007: 16) and that in 1976 at about 242,000. An estimated 300,000 deaths followed the cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1970. Floods have been prominent in the hazards affecting many regions. The Mississippi floods of 1927 were instrumental in leading to long-term changes in the US that increased the powers of the federal government. Significant flash floods in Europe, for example in Lynmouth in 1952 and in the Piedmont region in 1968 and 1994, have had death tolls ranging from a few dozen to several hundred (Gaume et al., 2009: 70; Barredo, 2009). Both natural and anthropogenic factors are at work. The floods in England in late 2000 were triggered by heavy rainfall, but in many areas their extent was the result of factors such as urbanization and the inadequate maintenance of drainage ditches (Kelman, 2008: 98–9). The economic consequences of events are significant. The damage caused by the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995 has been estimated at over $130 billion. About 100,000 buildings were destroyed and serious problems followed fires, water-supply disruptions, and damage to electricity and rail systems (Horwich, 2000: 521–2; Guha-Sapir, 2004: 38–40). The Wenchuan earthquake in China in 2008 destroyed or damaged over 13,600 schools and colleges and nearly 19,000 health care facilities. Costs were estimated at about 10 trillion RMB or roughly the same as

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the GDP of Sichuan province (ADB, 2008: 3; Chen et al., 2008). Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 produced economic damage estimated at over $4 billion (Munich Re, 2009: 20). Major seasonal costs are associated with tornadoes and other weather phenomena in North America, for example in the effects across eastern Canada and the north-east US of the major ice storm of 1998. The total global annual costs attributable to natural hazards are about $50–60 billion, with an accumulated total of about $1.5 trillion between 1980 and 2007 (Gaume et al., 2009: 70; WMO, 2009a: 7). Uncertainties and unanticipated consequences are present in all areas of natural hazards. Events have differential impacts on groups and societies. Some benefit unexpectedly. Damage to its competitors from Hurricane Mitch in 1998 gave Ecuador a temporary trade advantage in its exports of bananas, melons, and other goods (Pilar, 2002: 135). Knowledge gaps constrain comprehensive planning. Mud volcanoes, for example, vary greatly in size, activity, and their societal consequences. The most famous recent one, in Sidoarjo in north-east Java, began its eruption in 2006 following deep drilling by an oil and gas exploration company. Its flows, which were later affected by earthquakes, have forced the evacuation of thousands of people from the area (Mazzini et al., 2007). Risks from solar-system processes represent a sui generis subcategory of scientific and policy debates on geological hazards. They include damage to electrical systems from solar particles as in the effects across North America and Europe of the solar storm of 1859. Unlike floods, cyclones, and earthquakes there is no historical database for the past few hundred or few thousand years of multiple collisions with NEOs and of their associated costs for human societies. The potential for damage, though, is clearly far greater. Collisions have had far-reaching global as well as local consequences throughout geological history (see Chapter 5). In the present, moreover, ‘“local” can include blasts large enough to destroy a modest-sized country and kill a large fraction of its inhabitants’ (Morrison, 2006). The impact of a 600-metre asteroid has been estimated to be roughly the equivalent of a magnitude-9 earthquake. Knowledge of objects and their paths has grown rapidly as a result of monitoring in multiple NEO surveys since the early 1990s (Bottke et al., 2004), but there are still major areas of uncertainty. Small objects tend to burn up in the atmosphere. Even so there can be significant damage as in the 1908 Tunguska event. This probably resulted from a 20–30-metre body or fragment (Bland, 2005: 2794).


Transnational scientific networks Many scientific organizations research geological hazards. Multiple epistemic subcommunities focus on particular aspects and issues. Grouping these together for purposes of discussion thus contains some artificiality, but the synthesizing notion of geological or natural hazard retains both scientific and policy relevance. As with biological diversity and climate change, scientific actors in this area come in a variety of governmental, private, and hybrid forms. Some are primarily non-governmental with varying degrees and kinds of governmental or private-sector linkages. Others, both national and transnational, have more sustained links with governments. Scientific bodies have also been set up directly by governments and function within them. Scientific organizations responded to rising public and media interest from the mid-1990s in natural hazards and disasters, particularly in the wake of a succession of highly publicized earthquakes and the tsunami and Katrina events of 2004–5. The conferences of national geological associations have steadily expanded their explorations of hazards questions. The American Geophysical Union developed a growing interest in the area in the 1990s. There are many research centres, including the Centre d’Etudes Risques Geologiques, in Geneva. Growing business appreciation of the significance of risks has led to the rise of specialist research bodies such as Think Geohazards in the US, which provides advice to companies. The insurance industry has a significant stake in natural-hazards research. The actual and anticipated costs of natural disasters have impacted it heavily. An insurance availability crisis followed the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California, as earthquake insurance companies rushed to limit their coverage. One of the leading international companies, the Munich Reinsurance Company, maintains its own geological hazards research and data-collection staff. Other leading companies support the work of research centres, for example Aon Benfield’s sponsorship of the Hazard Research Centre at University College London. The widely recognized central body for data collection is the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), a unit of the Université Catholique de Louvain set up in 1973. Supported by the Belgian government, and a WHO collaborating centre, CRED’s original interests were primarily in the public health aspects of disasters. However, particularly since 1988, it has expanded this base to collect data on a wide variety of natural disasters and their human and economic costs. It makes these available in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and in publications, including the Annual Disaster Statistical Review. Through its foreign

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disaster assistance programme, the US has been among the governments supporting the work of CRED. The data are used extensively by governance actors, for example the WMO and the UN’s flagship International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), as a basis for assessing geohazard trends and for natural-disaster planning. Related transnational networks of scientists include the IGBP and the ESSP. A broader policy-related forum role is undertaken by the ICSU and its constituent organizations. The multiple connections between geological and environmental topics, including natural hazards, were a growing concern from the 1970s. The ICSU promoted attention to these links as part of its more general case for building stronger scientific foundations for sustainable development, for example, through its participation as an NGO in the Johannesburg World Summit in 2002. Scientists argued that the issues called for substantial investment of resources and more sustained responses by governments and greater public understanding of geoenvironmental linkages. Interest grew on the part of earth scientists participating in the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), more specifically through its Commission on Geological Sciences for Environmental Planning, and the IUGG. The IUGG set up its GeoRisk Commission in 2000. This was later active in planning and research on the Pacific Ocean tsunami warning arrangements and their extension to the Indian Ocean (IUGG, 2005: 2). Discussions in the IUGS Council in 2000 led to the International Year of Planet Earth (IYPE) (2007–9), an ambitious public education, training, and research initiative supported by the earth-sciences division of UNESCO and many scientific associations and NGOs. More focused interest in policy-related work on hazards research grew out of discussions by ICSU scientists on environment and sustainability issues in the early 2000s. However, related activities were slow to develop. Both within the ICSU framework and outside it, many national and international scientific activities in the area of geological hazards were already under way. These seemed to rule out further initiatives. The eventual consensus, however, was that there were gaps that an ICSU initiative could fill, particularly in relation to the uses of scientific knowledge by governments and other national and intergovernmental actors. As some participants observed, governments did not always rely on scientific advice, and the actions they took sometimes made matters worse. Like biodiversity experts, geologists were attentive to the lessons that could be learnt from the IPCC experience in the climate-change area. The upshot was extensive debate over several years on the idea of an ICSU natural-hazards programme that would encourage research


while being sensitive to existing programmes and the broader context of the Hyogo framework, and that would also pay attention to problems on the science–policy interface and aim to strengthen the translation of scientific knowledge into actions by governments and other stakeholders (ICSU, 2005: 24–8; ICSU, 2008a). Among states, scientific expertise on geological hazards is heavily concentrated in the north. Several leading agencies of the US government carry out related tasks. Their work has both domestic and international significance. The US Geological Service (USGS), under the Department of the Interior, has historically undertaken research and monitoring in relation to earthquakes. Domestic monitoring is carried out through the Advanced National Seismic System, through which USGS scientists collect and make available data from monitoring sites and networks. There are also extensive transnational aspects of these activities, for example, through the collaboration of US centres with associations of the ICSU framework. Through cooperation with partner institutions in the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) consortium, the USGS also supports the Global Seismographic Network (GSN) of monitoring stations. In 2005–8 the USGS contributed to a significant expansion of the seismic monitoring capacities of Caribbean countries participating in the network (IRIS, 2008: 8). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates under the Department of Commerce. Through its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and other bodies, NOAA has very broad-ranging scientific responsibilities in relation to climate and oceans and hence on hazards and disasters resulting from droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Its Earth System Research Laboratory communicates scientific findings through the ESRL Quarterly and other publications. More specifically, geological hazards data are made available through the public education work of NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center (Dunbar, 2007). Like the USGS, NOAA is also a significant transnational actor. Subsidiary bodies maintain extensive transnational contacts, for example, with the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and Australian centres on tsunami risks and warning systems. Relations with IGOs include links with the WMO on national and regional tsunami warning systems, and with UNESCO’s IOC on a variety of oceans– atmosphere issues. Among its functions NASA monitors NEOs. It has been one element in a larger grouping of scientific and non-governmental monitoring exercises. Improvements in detection technologies have greatly expanded NEO databases in the past two decades. The Spaceguard Survey began

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searching for asteroids of about one kilometre in size in the late 1990s and later set the goal of identifying 90 per cent of potentially hazardous objects greater than 140 metres in size by 2020 (Morrison, 2006; NASA, 2007). In October 2008, for the first time, a full monitoring sequence was completed: an asteroid (2008 TC3) was detected by a team in Arizona; the Minor Planet Center successfully predicted its entry over northern Sudan early the next morning; and fragments were later collected. Despite extensive scientific and engineering debates on the prevention or mitigation of impacts – the missing element in this sequence – none of the often controversial potential technologies has reached a point of testing or application (Stone, 2008).

Global governance frameworks In the absence of a cluster of MEAs, or a core intergovernmental undertaking, the governance architecture on natural hazards has evolved in a haphazard fashion. The area is characterized by complex networks and nodes of national and transnational, governmental and private, and science and policy actors. The capacities and resilience of elements in the UN system, and of states and NGOs, have been critical features of policy discourses. Debates extend across issues of the science of geological hazards, public education, preventive measures, mitigation strategies, and post-disaster relief and reconstruction. Several specialized agencies and programmes of the UN system are active in the area. The World Bank began appraisals of problems of natural disasters and geological risks affecting developing countries in the mid-1990s, particularly in relation to financing requirements. The earth sciences form a significant part of UNESCO’s mandate to encourage international scientific cooperation. Its traditional educational and training goals were also evident in its support for the IYPE. Its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) has, among other things, investigated problems of tsunami warning systems since the mid-1960s, particularly in relation to states in the Pacific Ocean region. The WMO set up a Natural Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Programme in 2004. In addition to building on WMO’s traditional interests in oceans and climate, this has aimed to foster capacity building and education and awareness of natural-hazards issues. WMO activities have also been central, with other IGOs and with transnational scientific organizations and national meteorological agencies, to the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), and the plans launched in 2009 for a Global Framework for Climate Services. The WCRP is also a


focal activity, though given its very wide range of interests it has been criticized for a lack of prioritizing (WMO, 2009b: 11). Together with the WHO and other IGOs, WMO also has a stake by virtue of its expertise in issues arising from El Niño phenomena, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Coalition formation among governance actors grew from the 1990s in response to specific events. Both NGOs and IGOs have critical governance roles in promoting natural-disaster preparedness and post-disaster activities (UNGA, 2005: 17–18). The earthquake in Maharashtra, India, in 1993 has been described as ‘a key turning point in international postdisaster reconstruction policies’ (Krishnadas, 2008: 347). Following the 2004 south-east Asian and Indian Ocean tsunami, more than 40 IGOs, national organizations, and NGOs quickly formed the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition as a critical part of the international post-disaster response. Debates intensified during the 1990s – which was designated by the UN as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction – on the need for more focused, concerted, and effective UN mechanisms. While natural hazards are a global phenomenon, vulnerabilities, postdisaster requirements, and gaps in terms of scientific and preparedness capacities are particularly acute in developing countries. A major conference held at Yokohama in 1994 set the basis for the development of a global framework for disaster reduction and responses, particularly with regard to problems of developing countries. The focal point of the UN system is the ISDR. There is an associated interagency task force and secretariat. The ISDR views natural hazards and disasters from the overall perspective of sustainable development. It promotes the basic goal of state capacity building through the encouragement of scientific research, public education, and multiactor partnerships. A central part of this task has been to encourage states to create and maintain disaster planning mechanisms or national platforms for disaster risk reduction. The current global framework for natural-hazards planning, the Hyogo Framework for Action for the period 2005–15, guides much international cooperation on natural disasters, including the work of the ISDR. It drew on the experiences of the Yokohama process from 1994, and later debates on natural disasters at the UN World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 and in the preparations of the MDG. The UN conference on disaster reduction held in Kobe, Japan, in early 2005, just three weeks after the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, finalized the Hyogo framework. There was broad participation by states, IGOs, and NGOs. The associated public forum attracted 40,000 participants. The declaration agreed at the conference recognized the ‘intrinsic relationship’ among the goals

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of disaster reduction, sustainable development, and poverty reduction. It called for ‘a culture of disaster prevention and resilience’, urged states to give high priority to disaster risk reduction strategies, and noted particularly the ‘urgent need to enhance the capacity of disaster-prone developing countries’, particularly the least developed countries and small-island developing countries (UN, 2005: 4; ISDR, 2007).

Multilevel contexts The work of the ISDR and other governance arrangements has to be seen in the broader context of national and local approaches by governments and civil-society organizations. States display a wide range of different responses as they confront their respective risk-assessment and capacity-development challenges. The regional dimensions of these are particularly significant. I will discuss the development of response capabilities by states and regional bodies, including mechanisms for risk communications; the rise of early warning systems; the contexts of international politics and of interstate and ethnic conflicts that affect responses to natural hazards; and the complex economic and social issues associated with El Niño phenomena. Response capabilities Several factors affect the responses and preparedness of states in relation to geological hazards. The Hyogo process, together with mounting realization of the human and economic costs of natural hazards, has contributed to a significant expansion of state capacity-building efforts. By 2008, about 50 countries had either established or were in the process of setting up national platforms for disaster risk reduction (ISDR, 2008: iii). There is wide variation in terms of risks, monitoring capacities, scientific infrastructure, and resources for disaster risk reduction. Some states face specific high-priority risks, such as the risks of a major flood in London for which the Thames Barrier was designed. Capacity gaps typically make developing countries still more vulnerable to the natural hazards that disproportionately affect them. Poorer countries lack the resources for supporting research stations and the information-technology capabilities required for the optimal use of hazards knowledge. Little sustained international research was done by geologists in Sumatra and Haiti prior to the earthquakes of 2004 and 2010. There are also major gaps in terms of civil society organizations. Well-organized and funded community groups and NGOs are important for monitoring, cultivating social preparedness, and planning


and implementing disaster responses. Some Latin American countries have been able to minimize the potential public health risks of El Niño events by greater investments in insecticide use for malaria prevention. Extensive engagement by NGOs in regional states followed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Cuba, as a centrally planned economy with high natural-hazard risks, has mobilized scientific resources and invested heavily in public education and emergency-planning capabilities (Sims and Vogelmann, 2002). China, which similarly identifies disaster risk reduction as a high-priority national goal, adopted a 12-year disaster reduction plan in 1997 and set up a National Committee for Disaster Reduction in 2005 in the context of the Hyogo framework discussions (ISDR, 2008: 1–2). Response capacities in relation to tsunamis, landslides, and other major hazards depend heavily on the adequate communication of risk at three levels: by scientific and technical bodies to governments, among the emergency measures and other agencies of governments, and from these to communities and civil-society organizations. Warnings and advisory reports have to be issued during and in the period immediately preceding anticipated events. All this requires a long-term commitment to awareness raising generally (Dunbar, 2007), and more specifically to public education for the residents of high-risk areas such as Naples. Community groups and NGOs are central to these tasks, particularly since members of local communities may be resistant to risk messages (Iervolino et al., 2007). For example, emergency plans are in place for a possible eruption of the Katla volcano, which lies under the Mýrdalsjökull icecap in southern Iceland, near the volcano which erupted in 2010, but studies indicate that many residents do not recognize the risks and that they would not respond to evacuation warnings (Bird et al., 2009). The problem of communicating risks is notoriously difficult in the very different area of NEOs. These attract media and public discussion but scientific assessments, and monitoring exercises themselves, are often treated as marginal by scientists and governments (Morrison et al., 2004). This is partly because surveys tend to conclude that the probabilities of collisions in the next few decades, or even centuries, are extremely low. In addition, estimates put events into an unrealistically long-term policy environment, for example of a Tunguska-like event every thousand years or so, or of half-million-year-range collisions with one-kilometre asteroids. There have also been disagreements among scientists and government agencies about the priorities for searches among types of larger and smaller bodies (Brown, P. et al., 2002). Collision questions have nonetheless gained growing policy credibility as a

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result of the uncertainties associated with assessments, the potentially catastrophically high cost of impacts, a record of ‘near-misses’, and the highly publicized images of the Shoemaker-Levy collision with Jupiter in 1994. The British government’s own study in 2000 pointed to ‘incomplete knowledge’ as the major source of uncertainty in analyses of risk from NEOs, and this led to increased support for research and monitoring (Ministry of Science, 2000: 6; Williams, 2007). Regional levels of governance also vary considerably in terms of their natural-hazards preparedness and response capabilities. Responses to disasters depend not only on the capacities of IGOs, NGOs, and multiactor transnational coalitions but also on the complexities of interstate relations within different regions. The countries affected by high geological risks, moreover, do not fit neatly into conventionally defined political regions. They include countries facing tsunami risks, for example among the 18 main Pacific Ocean states, and those affected by the lower-level economic and social problems arising from El Niño cycles. Some regional arrangements are comparable with the biodiversity agreements of range states in the CMS system. The development of the Hyogo framework has been a significant influence on these developments. Concerns about rising natural-disaster threats forced the issue on to the G8 agenda in 2005. G8 leaders responded with various offers of aid during their 2009 meeting at L’Aquila, Italy, the site a few weeks earlier of a major earthquake. There have been several attempts to create regional planning mechanisms. For example, EU bodies accelerated their deliberations in the early 2000s on a community approach to problems of natural and human-made disasters. The results have included a strategy to assist developing countries with disaster risk reduction (EU, 2009). The OECD has paid growing attention to natural hazards. Following a lead by German scientists and government officials, it launched in 2009 a public–private partnership designed to improve scientific forecasting of earthquakes and assessments of their human and economic risks. The natural-hazards programme of the Organization of American States (OAS) is limited, but aims to ensure that member states have adequate scientific data and advice on preparedness planning. Developments after the 2004 tsunami included a special Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) high-level meeting in Jakarta in January 2005, which agreed on the need for a regional early warning system. China, Russia, and other members of the Shanghai cooperative framework have signed an agreement on mutual aid following natural disasters.


Early warning systems The general concept of early warning systems has wide applicability across many types of natural hazards, including extreme weather events and droughts as well as volcanic eruptions (Glantz, 2009). However, it has been most developed nationally and regionally in relation to earthquakes and tsunamis. Earthquake warning systems operate or are being developed in many countries, including Japan, the US, Mexico, Turkey, Taiwan, Italy, and Romania. Differences in capabilities and requirements arise from factors such as the distance of possible epicentres from major population centres. This distance is about 300 kilometres in the case of Mexico City but very short in California. Scientific monitoring and warning arrangements in California thus have significantly less time to communicate risks. They also have to rely on the less satisfactory method of tracing seismic P waves (primary longitudinal waves) as the basis for forecasts of the location, size, and multisite effects of earthquakes (Wurman et al., 2007). Extensive transnational scientific networks link research and monitoring centres. The GSN facilitates data exchange on earthquake risks among more than 150 monitoring stations. The earliest regional tsunami warning system, for parts of the Pacific Ocean, was set up by NOAA in 1949. The agency remains a key player in international developments. Its network of pressure sensors in the Pacific Ocean, and to a lesser extent in the Atlantic, monitors fluctuations in sea levels in order to determine tsunami risks. Research by NOAA scientists has indicated that tsunamis may also be detectable in early stages by using satellite-based radar systems that can track changes in the ‘texture’ or roughness of sea surfaces (Godin et al., 2009). The 2004 tsunami increased the urgency of extending warning arrangements to the Indian Ocean as well as to all areas of the Pacific. Many of the countries affected already had some systems in place. However, these needed substantial development, and far-reaching educational and community initiatives, to make them effective (UNESCO, 2005: 3.1–3.3). NOAA, the USGS, and other US agencies initiated a technical framework for an Indian Ocean system in 2005. Cooperation among regional governments, support through the IOC, and expanded technical assistance programmes developed it further. North–south scientific linkages on monitoring and scientific research have spread, for example, between German and Indonesian scientists and government agencies. The Pacific Ocean states carried out a full early-warning-system test in October 2009. As noted earlier, multiple links are involved in monitoring and warning activities. Monitoring stations and networks need to draw accurate

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inferences from the data they collect; government agencies and other bodies have to be able to quickly process data from these stations; and decisions on the issuing of appropriate warnings, and the effectiveness of these, require close cooperation among local, national, and other levels of government and civil-society organizations (Fernando et al., 2008: 286). Difficulties in developing warning capabilities continue to arise from scientific uncertainties and knowledge gaps. For example, there are no historical records of tsunami impacts along the coast of Bangladesh, but in the 2004 tsunami two children died there when a tourist boat sank (UNESCO, 2005: 3–8). Conflicts and natural-systems diplomacy The efficacy of regional arrangements is also affected by interstate relations within regions. Cooperation takes place on natural-hazards matters, both long-term and as ad hoc responses to particular events, but multiple international and intrastate hostilities and conflicting interests, as well as concerns about state sovereignty, limit its extent. Natural-hazards cooperation has little or no presence in relation to intense structural conflicts. In relations between North and South Korea, though, talks on flooding issues in border areas have provided a useful low-politics option, along with arrangements on family visits and other issues, at times when the two governments decide on the need for enhanced bilateral communications. The significance of international politics and intergroup conflicts can be seen in a variety of earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, and other contexts in east and south-east Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. China relaxed its traditional hesitancy about receiving international support, and about providing detailed information on its natural disasters, following the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. Technical cooperation with Japan on earthquake prediction and mitigation began in the early 2000s. Collaborative scientific relations were later developed between the China Earthquake Administration and the JMA aimed at data collection, monitoring, and forecasting (CEGRP, 2008). Significantly, the Red Cross organizations in China and in Taiwan also negotiated agreements on post-disaster assistance. These contributed to the aid for housing and other reconstruction activities that China sent to Taiwan following typhoon Morakot in 2009. However, an important political subtext of this collaboration was its confirmation for Beijing of its view of Taiwan’s status as a province of China rather than a separate political entity. Historic political undercurrents also surfaced in protests in some Taiwan villages against receiving assistance from Beijing.


Technical and reconstruction cooperation between Greece and Turkey in 1999 followed the earthquake in Marmara. These activities were widely seen at the time as catalysts for a rapprochement between the two traditional adversaries (Ker-Lindsay, 2007: 57–72). Greek government agencies immediately offered assistance. The government sent rescue teams, firefighting aircraft, medical supplies, and personnel and other assistance. The municipal governments of Athens, Piraeus, and other cities added to these efforts. There was related substantial assistance from civil society organizations, including the Greek chapter of Médecins sans frontières. A comparable Turkish government and non-governmental response followed the Athens earthquake shortly afterwards. However, the effects in terms of the general course of bilateral relations appear to have been temporary. Gradual changes in the relationship were under way before the Marmara earthquake. The cooperation of the next few months reinforced but did not create these (Kadritzke, 2000). There was nonetheless for a time a notable softening of the nationalist tone of news media reports in both countries. This spirit of collaborative ‘earthquake diplomacy’ did not last long into 2001. A variety of stubborn divisive issues – Turkey’s EU membership, Aegean territorial disputes, the rights of the Turkish minority in Greece – returned, though some in a revised form that offered the prospect of a longer-term settlement. Later earthquakes in Turkey, for example in 2002 and 2003, also prompted offers of assistance from Greece but the events and reconstruction activities lacked the immediate political impact of the 1999 disaster. The constraints on natural-hazards problem solving imposed by traditional bilateral relationships have also been evident in relation to hurricanes in the Caribbean. Typical paths take many across Cuba, Haiti, and other countries of the region to the southeastern US. The US embargo on trade and contacts with Cuba, however, together with the Cuban government’s sensitivity to the political risks of deepening scientific and technical collaboration with northern states, has severely curtailed cooperation. The wider politics of the OAS also puts Cuba outside programmes such as the Inter-American Network for Disaster Mitigation. Cuba has generally declined US offers of post-disaster assistance. Havana has tried instead, in such cases, to shift the agenda back to the embargo. In 2001 US sales of food to Cuba were permitted following Hurricane Michelle. Proposals for the expansion of such programmes were opposed by President Bush, then under pressure from anti-Cuba forces in Congress. In 2008 Cuba rejected a modest US aid offer in response to Hurricane Gustave and called instead for a trade relaxation and sales through US companies.

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Both countries have benefited from unpublicized technical cooperation. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center routinely flies aircraft into Cuban air space with permission. C-130 planes of the US Air Force have also done this, for example, to track Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2006. Havana gave the US overflight permission for Haiti earthquake relief operations in 2010. There has been a modest sharing of data. Some Cuban officials have taken training courses in the US. However, domestic politics in both countries make sustained collaboration hazardous. The head of the Cuban Meteorological Institute has defended this potentially controversial level of technical cooperation with the US on the grounds that it is ‘necessary to save human lives’ (Cuba Project, 2006). The Cuban government argued in favour of bilateral cooperation on responses to hurricanes and natural disasters during official Cuba-US talks held in 2009. Such arrangements remain extremely limited. Scientific cooperation on hurricanes and other natural hazards is nowhere near the level it would be if Cuba–US scientific relations were to be normalized. The national scientific academies of both countries have supported such a move (Pastrana and Clegg, 2008). Disasters have complex effects on societies divided by local and interethnic conflicts. These also influence both preparedness and response capacities. The 2004 tsunami affected, in particular, Aceh in Indonesia and also northern Sri Lanka, both regions of conflicts. Following a magnitude-9.3 earthquake, it impacted the area of Banda Aceh and Lhok Nga in three destructive waves, the second with a height of 15–30 metres (Paris et al., 2009: 60). Scientific knowledge of the area was limited since in more than three decades of conflict there had been little geological study. The impact of the disaster initially eased tensions and the incidence of violence in Aceh as groups and government bodies collaborated on rescue and relief tasks (VanRooyen and Leaning, 2005: 435). However, anger at the failings of governmental and international relief efforts later spilled over into intergroup relationships. The disaster affected groups differently. There was a relatively small death toll among Simeulue people in Aceh because community members shared a ‘disaster subculture’. They recognized tsunami signals early and were able to flee to higher ground. Members of other groups, however, particularly those living in cities, lacked these assets and suffered higher casualties (Gaillard et al., 2008). ENSO issues The issues arising from El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena are cyclical products of the ‘huge seesaw in surface atmospheric pressure


that rocks slowly and irregularly every 2–5 years’ (Clarke, 2008: 1). El Niño events are difficult to forecast, particularly in periods up to a few months before their start, as are estimates of the probable characteristics of their various phases (Saravanan, 2008: 322–3). They are generally associated with a lower level of human and economic costs than many of the other geological hazards discussed earlier. There were significant El Niño events in 1982–3 and 1991–2; a much-studied stronger event in 1997–8, followed by La Niña effects into early 2001; and another in 2006–7. The consequences of these events extend across a wide range of public policy issues, for example in agriculture, fisheries, water supply, health and the spread of disease, energy consumption, housing, floods, droughts, and biodiversity. The effects are particularly evident in Latin America, and to a lesser extent in Africa and the south-east Asia and Pacific regions, but there are consequences too, for example in terms of variations in seasonal energy requirements, for North America. Latin American states are traditionally those most affected. There were major El Niño impacts on shrimp fisheries in Ecuador in the late 1990s because of a decrease in larvae and the migration of shrimp to Panama, and also declines in rice and soy production. The fisheries sector in Peru lost over 35 per cent in value in 1998 (CIIFEN, 2009). Effects can be marked in other parts of the world. The 1991–2 El Niño had particularly severe effects on agricultural production in southern Africa. Researchers have traced the effects in Indonesia since the late nineteenth century of El Niño events on the incidence of local droughts and losses in agricultural production (Subbiah and Kishore, 2000: 1–2). US and UN agency experts estimated the total economic costs of the 1997–8 El Niño in a range between $32–96 billion (Glantz, 2001). Other consequences include public health risks. ENSO-related changes in rainfall and humidity increase the risks to people without protective immunity, and who are thus more vulnerable to mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and Rift valley fever. Before DDT and other control measures were introduced, the malaria risk in Punjab increased by about five times during El Niño years (WHO, 2000). Increasing ocean temperatures off Latin America in these events have major impacts on coastal states. It has been estimated that in Colombia a 1 °C change in sea-surface temperature leads to about a 20 per cent increase in cases of malaria (Mantilla et al., 2009). El Niño-related flooding in coastal areas of Peru that are normally dry has also led to outbreaks of malaria. However, in countries of the region where insecticides, anti-malaria drugs, and other measures are available the effects are much diminished or minimal (Gagnon et al., 2002).

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Among other ENSO effects, there are implications for global biodiversity conservation objectives. The impacts on the fisheries of Peru and Ecuador have historically been among the most characteristic features of El Niño events. Many other kinds of consequences, such as the effects on migratory species, are much less understood. For example, populations of herbivorous green turtles on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand appear to be affected, but those that are carnivorous are not (Clarke, 2008: 279). The succession of events since the 1980s has led to learning and adaptive responses by societies. Levels of public awareness of the risks and demands for scientific data grew steadily in Ecuador, for example, on the part of farmers’ organizations. Shrimp businesses responded to ENSO-related losses in the 1980s by creating hatcheries. Attention to the lessons of earlier events similarly led to greater preparedness on the part of southern African states in the 1990s. There were widespread discussions between government officials and farmers and their organizations on drought mitigation techniques. For example, government agencies in Mozambique advised farmers in vulnerable areas to plant crops on low ground so that these would retain moisture longer (Harsch, 1998). ENSO phenomena have met with mixed responses by regional IGOs. ASEAN devotes more attention to the regional environmental problems of transboundary haze and sustainable cities, though it also provides data for governments and private organizations on weather-related risks. The issues have received more attention in southern Africa. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) framework uses data from both international sources and regional monitoring stations. In successive El Niño events officials have been able to provide governments, farmers’ organizations, and other groups with earlier warnings of the extent and severity of effects. In Latin America, the main regional preparedness and research response to the Hyogo framework is through the sustainable development programme of the OAS. El Niño policy, though, has traditionally not been among its major elements. OAS meetings have encouraged governments of the region to provide El Niño information to farmers and other vulnerable groups, to share data and early-warning experiences, and to work to strengthen the response capabilities of actors in the inter-American system. The government of Ecuador takes the main regional and international lead role. Various agencies collect ENSOrelated data and encourage wider social and policy debates on related issues. The key body, the Centro Internacional para la Investigación del Fenómeno El Niño (CIIFEN), in Guayaquil, acts closely on El Niño issues

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with the Andean Development Corporation and serves as a regional data resource for the WMO and ISDR. In general, then, there has been little sustained cooperation among affected states compared with that in groupings such as the smallisland developing countries on climate-change and sea-level rise issues. Uncertainties in terms of the timing, severity and the geographical spread of effects, and the multi-year gaps between events constrain governance initiatives. The multifaceted character of events, and the effectiveness of sectoral policy responses in dealing with some of their agricultural, public health, and other effects, also reduce the appeal of more concerted regional and transregional measures. The damage involved, however, and the wide geographical spread of effects, indicates that there is considerable potential for intra- and inter-regional cooperation on monitoring and capacity building among states, civilsociety actors, regional IGOs, the regional offices of UN agencies, and IFIs. Greater investment in research and monitoring would assist predictions of events and assessments of their likely economic and social effects.

11 Governance, Science, and Earth Systems

In the previous chapters we continually disentangled and reconnected aspects of the tightly knit triad of global environmental change, global science, and global governance. The first centres on the transformative environmental effects of human activities and the complex interactions of these with natural systems. Earlier chapters discussed, in particular, changes with respect to biological diversity, climate, and geological hazards. Secondly, the kind of knowledge required for understanding these changes can be seen in evolving scientific conceptions of earth structures and processes, from that of James Hutton in the late eighteenth century to the insights of the earth-systems disciplines and the emergence of frameworks linking them in the late twentieth century. These have had various relations with other knowledges relevant to understanding earth systems. Thirdly, ideas and practices of governance have undergone significant change from the somewhat bleaker prospects envisaged by Adam Smith over two centuries ago. Globalizing cooperative practices have emerged in multiple public-policy areas and have interacted with the converging theoretical perspectives that have been developed with the aim of understanding them. Governance developments and the uses of science are the twin themes of this final chapter.

Processes of governance Thinking about reforms is an integral part of the routine practices of governance. It affects their normal workings and surfaces in concrete proposals for renovation and restructuring. 196

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Politics as usual Pessimistic would-be reformers are apt to see the dead hand of tradition and continuity everywhere. Effective problem solving in policy areas like the environment requires transnational cooperation, but this operates within the constraints set by the international system. Different issues, including the very large number of subissues on environmental agendas, are affected in different ways. The notions and realities of sovereignty, economic interests, and the legal equality of states are important for understanding both the limits to what can be achieved through governance and also the potential of governance practices to effect change. Some observers agree with Smith that governance activities of the traditional kind within states not only are but should be limited, and that their architecture should be kept largely free of interference from reformers and those he called ‘men of system’. The problems of global environmental governance are now so implacably troublesome, however, that it is difficult to conceive of effective mechanisms emerging unless they are ushered in by interventionist actors. While imposing some constraints on states, transnational norms and structures work more consistently and insidiously to regulate the activities of non-state bodies. IGOs lack much of the capacity for influencing state behaviour desired by their supporters. Institutions rely on their member states for operational and programme funds and their political support for policy initiatives. Conventions, protocols, and other developments in international law are likewise the products of prior interstate deals. These often reflect debilitating compromises between the goals of securing a maximum spread of signatories and parties and a deepening bite of substantive obligations. Governance gaps in the late 1990s and early 2000s prompted widespread criticisms of the inadequacy of responses to malaria control, HIV/AIDS, human rights abuses, climate change, and many other global issues. The failures evoked fears of an irreversible collapse of multilateralism. Yet the cultures of traditional international ways also present opportunities. Cannier reform-minded actors – states as well as NGOs – tend to keep ideas for change hidden until favourable political circumstances emerge. The complexities of interactor politics sometimes lead to deadlock, but they also nourish non-zero-sum games in non-trivial areas. Governance processes enhance the potential for coalition formation among different actors. As a result cooperative tendencies converge from several directions.

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The activities of states in relation to global environmental issues take many forms. Some lead or support while others resist or divert innovations. Different theories of government and of the nature of the international system are embedded in their respective political cultures. Germany took an early lead in CMS developments, for example, and its scientists and government officials have been active in promoting attention to tsunami and other geological risks in south-east Asia; since the late 1940s France has hosted a long series of major international conferences on global resource and environmental issues; and the Netherlands is a lead player on all international discussions related to the use and degradation of wetlands, and problems of floods, storm surges, and coastline defences. States undertake many different types of temporary or sustained governance roles. They publicize and promote global issues that tally with their interests: Malta on marine environmental law, for example, the Maldives on the climate-change problems of small-island developing countries, and Australia on international cooperation on coral reefs. Though its role was overshadowed by its later reversion to unilateralist and anti-IGO instincts, the US was a natural leader of many global environmental policy developments in the early and mid1970s, for example in relation to CITES, and for a brief period of time in the 1990s. Various US federal agencies maintained an internationalist tradition, particularly in relation to developing countries, concerning tsunami threats and earthquake monitoring. Regional developments produce more intense and variegated interactions and, particularly in the case of the EU, it is increasingly through these that states view and plot their participation in global governance enterprises. Many thousands of non-state actors amplify the ‘horizontal’ dimensions of global governance. Perhaps a few dozen environmental NGOs also play lead roles within the institutional frameworks of IGOs and multilateral environmental agreements as observer participants, providers of data, and governance partners. Collaborations linking NGOs with firms and business associations have grown in importance. National and transnational scientific organizations, both directly and through their formal and informal interactions with the scientific advisory bodies of MEAs, influence governance developments in relation to issues such as geological risks and natural disasters, the environment of the polar regions, and the integrity of the ozone layer. The fluidities of global processes also rely on and encourage localities. Some city developments – in Masdar in Abu Dhabi, for example, Portland in Oregon, and the planning for Dongtan, near Shanghai – have been projected as international green-initiative role models.


Diverse subnational governments continue to explore and exploit opportunities for actorhood in relation to climate-change and naturalresource development. Group volunteers and local community leaders are crucial to governance activities such as population counts in biodiversity assessments, species restoration projects, and earthquake and tsunami warning systems. Individual governance players have historically been crucial in many settings, as in the scientific entrepreneurship of Bert Bolin (in many Swedish bodies and in SCOPE, and then particularly as chair of the IPCC), Kenneth Hare from Canada (on a variety of global initiatives on arid zones, the ozone layer, and climate change), and Robert Watson (for example, as chair of the IPCC, co-chair of the MA, and chief scientist of the World Bank). These and other features of global governance do not add up to a neatly uniform system. Multiple bits and pieces of the fabric of environmental governance, many of them typically autonomous, have their own structures and dynamics, identities, and a sense of their place in the overall scheme of things. They vary in their attention to science, governance procedures, their patterns of interrelationships, the stakes they have in different issue areas, and the interest the public and the media have in them. Fragments, then, rather than rationally organized sets of systems, characterize environmental governance. A characteristic format links states through networks of collaboration among officials from specialized government agencies such as those dealing with toxic chemicals management or threats to wildlife species. Subcommunities and their boundaries, for example those of the various MEAs that structure biodiversity governance, are shaped by complex scientific, historical, and political factors. The differential impacts of perceptions of urgency and crisis also affect governance areas. A succession of crises led to the growth of national and international prevention and response capabilities in relation to oil spills on coastlines. Presumably a Tunguska-like event over an urban area, or the onset of change in North Atlantic currents, would transform a variety of earth-systems governance arrangements. The international politics of climate change altered as it was steadily redefined in actors’ framings as a high-politics area with significant economic and security implications. It has eclipsed other earth-systems issues, such as those on biodiversity agendas, with equally strong or stronger claims to governance attention. The politics of renovation The routine of politics as usual, then, is an unruly mixture of enthusiasm for change and defence of status-quo habits. Traditional governance questions – for example, who should decide? How should matters be

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decided? – are inseparable from issue-based discourses. Advocates of specific policy positions, whether for carbon taxing regimes or for an easing of endangered-species rules, claim or imply that these would have systemic governance benefits. When they contemplate change, governance actors – environmental NGOs, scientific groupings, middle powers, business associations, subnational governments in federal countries – tend to hint at the need for institutional reforms of a kind that would, in practice, accentuate their own roles. Discussions of global environmental reform options, in institutions and processes as well as in policies and actions, highlight a number of alternative intervention points. These range from the internal deliberations of scientific teams to the procedures that conventionally determine the workings of international legal processes. They include the five possibilities of Better science: This set of options focuses on such questions as the need for more data, improved indicators, an enriched understanding of key biophysical relationships, expanded interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of more effective data handling and other technical capabilities. Better communication of science: Intervention opportunities here relate primarily to the post-research steps of circulating information, concepts, and assessments of the consequences of different policy paths. Approaches tend to assume the achievement of a substantial area of consensus on a topic based on good-science norms and focus on the requirements of optimal risk communication. Better reception of science: The other side of the communications relationship centres on recipients and audiences, both public and governmental. The goal is to overcome problems such as misinterpretation and indifference through both specific innovations and a more general spread of scientific literacy. Better science-based governance: Debates along these lines focus on mechanisms that could secure an improved balance between scientific and other voices in governance processes. The criteria for evaluating the optimal weightings among these clearly vary. Actors’ preferred options may give more prescriptive emphasis to scientific contributions or to procedural formats that restrict these to starting-point roles in agenda formation and other governance processes. Better governance: Consideration of governance reform issues centres on processes in general, regardless of the extent to which these involve


science. Proposals typically vary with theoretical perspectives on global governance, particularly those calling for strengthened multilateralism, greater civil-society participation, a firmer embedding of knowledgebased expertise, moves to functionalist-style multistakeholder formats, or the encouragement of forces promoting shared values across borders. To explore these discourses on change and their interweaving with governance processes, I will look first at issues that gravitate towards the governance end of this range of possibilities and then at those more oriented to solutions through scientific research and risk communications. Governance options Discussions of governance renovation tend to be directed primarily either to enhancing the capacities of states to solve environmental problems or to decentring these by publicizing the merits of other governance actors. Both approaches rest on assessments of the progress in and of obstacles to environmental governance. The historical record includes substantial evidence of incremental advances. MEA regimes have developed along a variety of timescales. They assist the definition and spread of principles in international environmental law, such as the obligation on a state to refrain from causing environmental damage to others, and encourage regional cooperation, the gradually spreading acceptance of the precautionary principle, and concepts of ecosystem-based governance. Despite setbacks, as in the compliance record of states party to the Kyoto protocol, many arrangements, such as those of CITES, also impact the policies and the administrative structures of states. Practices contribute to an accumulating reservoir of ‘how-to’ knowledge of governance. The model of launching framework conventions, and following this up with specific agreements, has facilitated progress on the protection of migratory species, the ozone layer, Antarctica, climate change, and other areas. International bodies have found ingenious ways of incorporating NGOs into governance arrangements, for example as observers and participants in the parties’ conferences of international conventions, through collaborative arrangements inside national governments, and with community organizations and governmental and scientific bodies in early warning systems. Global environmental governance has become a large-scale enterprise of assemblies, conferences of parties, intergovernmental working groups, national and international scientific advisory bodies, public–private partnerships, and other formats. The sheer volume of regularly scheduled

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activities may sometimes give the illusion rather than evidence of progress, but the overall result is a respectable incremental governance record. The traditional governance reform dilemma persists: choosing the appropriate point on a continuum from landscape-changing ‘big-bang’ creations to the step-by-step politics of cautious ‘coral-reef’- or ‘tree’building exercises. The interests of multiple stakeholders, as well as the uncertainty politics of major innovations, tend to make the latter route a more travelled one. Processes are also influenced by the wider contexts of UN-system reform debates, major review and goal-setting exercises such as the MDG and the MA, and continuing explorations of alternative world-government futures. Developments within states, such as the evolution of policy ideas on climate change in the US, and transnational policy debates, such as those sparked by the Brundtland Commission and the Stern Review, are also influences on renovation politics. Debates on earth-systems and environmental topics, however, tend to be heavily sector specific. Pivotal questions concern ways to improve environmental governance performance rather than the interconnections between developments in this arena and global governance generally. Many sectors are themselves highly specialized, as in the governance arrangements that handle the international trade in hazardous wastes, tsunami warning systems, or migratory bird species. A continuing theme nonetheless focuses on the pros and cons of fragmentation and of approaches to system-wide environmental coordination. Environmentalists have often been critical of UNEP, traditionally the flagship UN arrangement, though one formally limited in its mandate. Ideas for UN-system change have included creating a new central council, analogous to the Security Council, or some form of world body with specialized-agency status like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and WHO (Meyer-Ohlendorf, 2006; Bauer and Biermann, 2005). A step-level down (or an alternative) is advocacy of strengthened coordination among existing institutions, for example through the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination. Reform proposals confront the institutional diversity of environmental governance and the preservationist impulses of existing bodies. The CBD had to define its biodiversity goals in an institutional context already shaped by the existence of several significant international agreements in this area. Yet changes occur. Coordinating practices have emerged, for example among senior officials of the biodiversity MEA secretariats and leading conservation NGOs. Widely accepted lead roles


are common in many sectors, such as that of the WHO, in conjunction with a network of collaborating centres in different countries, in relation to epidemiological issues, primary health care, and a variety of issues on the health–environment interface. However, such innovations do not indicate a trend of creeping centralization. While ostensibly better able to solve harmonization problems, stronger central institutions come with costs. Even the limited powers of UNEP, for example in relation to some issues of MEA secretariat staffing, tend to provoke criticisms from the organizations affected. A larger organizational format would still face the problems of coordinating the work of subunits, handling relations with non-compliant states, and navigating multi-issue complexities. It might be more capable of prioritizing among environmental issues. However, enhancing or demoting the profile of any particular set of problems – environmentrelated public health issues, for example, toxic chemicals management, or national platforms for disaster preparedness – likewise has costs. Actors in ‘shuffled-down’ areas would be denied opportunities for creative self-promotion. This was a productive feature of early developments in relation to the ozone layer in the 1980s. It has continued to mark the politics of a large number of biodiversity and ecosystem services issues such as those related to threats to frogs, migratory birds, polar bears, and bees. Much governance requires ingenuity and flexibility. It is often reliant on a voluntarist spirit. A supportive state (or often in practice the handful of government-agency officials representing it at international meetings) can jump in to chair a working group or task force, for example, host an innovative conference, help to fund the participation of developing countries’ delegates to scientific meetings, or engage in the diplomatic promotion of a new international agreement. Fragmentation provides uneasy states with additional opportunities to frustrate emergent patterns of collaboration but it also contributes to governance by providing multiple venues for their participation. A continuing problem, and the basis for much political controversy, surrounds the appropriate definitions of governance areas. The constructs of the natural sciences do not translate conveniently into discrete governance arenas. Large-scale framings – like ‘the global environment’ – are inadequate for revealing the fine inner structural detail and multifaceted character of the many issues this term covers. Even the groupings that formed a focus of earlier chapters – biodiversity, climate change, and geological hazards – are not immune to this general problem. Each represents a sizeable cluster of relatively discrete issues

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and subcommunities. In practice, the politics of fragmentation means that multiple environmental governance communities may have little in common and only minimal contacts with each other. Major governance problems, moreover, are posed by the interconnections among multiple areas that are characteristic of environmental policy – between climate change and public health, for example, biodiversity and forestry, earthquakes and building design, or flooding and land use. Science options Problems of risk communication, and of the communication and reception of science more generally, are widespread in environmental governance. Responses to scientific information, and its fog of detail, uncertainties, and jargon, vary with different public and governmental contexts. The processing of information on matters such as endangered species or climate-change mitigation is subject to confirmation bias. It has to compete with pressures from anecdotal evidence and the personal experience of individuals. Messages may have appeal simply by virtue of their fit with the beliefs of different receptive audiences. Some of the obstacles derive from the complexities of global risk communications processes. There are at least four sets of basic functions. To adapt the trophic-level metaphor from ecology, these comprise primary producers (scientists working in relevant areas as government scientists or in private research institutions) and secondary producers (the scientists, NGOs, advisory bodies, and others who use and reframe scientific findings with the aim of communicating information and ideas, with policy glosses, to publics, media organizations, governments, and other actors). On the other side are primary consumers (those, including other scientists, who receive and translate scientific communications and the various initial policy framings of these) and secondary consumers (national governments and the policymaking bodies of IGOs and MEAs). This breakdown is obviously too simple. Processes also involve feedbacks, and multiple kinds of tasks are carried out by specific actors. The categorization might also imply that governance processes are uniformly top-heavy in scientific deliberations, whereas in fact governance arrangements differ in how science based their constituent issues are. However, this typology usefully highlights some of the key relationships in science–governance interfaces and the institutional gaps and weaknesses in communications strategies on global environmental issues that have perturbed observers. For example, leading biologists have called for a hybrid scientific–intergovernmental body, loosely based on the IPCC in relation to climate-change issues, to communicate


biodiversity findings and policy arguments more effectively. The IPCC model has also been discussed by scientists keen to ensure wider understanding and sounder policy planning in relation to geological hazards. There have been arguments for trained cadres of specialists, skilled in the arts of translating and communicating ideas to publics and governments on the global environment and on the associated risks of catastrophes (Leroy, 2006). Debates on risk-communications strategies have been particularly widespread in relation to climate change. Simplification, if achieved, for example, by playing down qualifications and probability complications, may catch an audience’s attention, but at the cost of accuracy in the representation of the science and in the long term, therefore, of its credibility. Among the tools in its arsenal the IPCC opted for a conventional view of scenario quantification as a key to political as well as scientific acceptance. It thus ran the risk of its estimates, for example, on the upper ends of the range of sea-level rise possibilities by 2100, being reinterpreted as blunt ‘predictions’. Even allowing for rapidly growing knowledge bases and data-handling capacities, the selection of dates like 2100 also has risks; a 1910 forecast of conditions in relation to any public-policy issue in 2000 would not have provided policymakers with much useable knowledge in any subsequent decade. Broader public concerns about climate change, threats to biodiversity, and diverse geological hazards have led to novels, films, and other imaginative means of communicating risks. Scientists vary in their responses to earth-systems disaster movies that may have a dubious relationship with good science but which might contain a good policy message. The abundance of information from NGO and other websites suggests that these more conventional formats may have reached their limits and may no longer give issues a competitive edge. Familiarity breeds blasé as well as informed responses. Some messages reinforce polarizing tendencies as they are grafted on to opposing sides of preexisting cultural cleavages. For climate-change scientists, concepts of uncertainty and of natural variability in earth systems are particularly difficult to communicate. These are widely circulated by ‘deniers’ and other opponents as critical means of countering anthropogenic interpretations of the dangers from overproduction of GHGs. Given what is for many the impenetrable character of most scientific literature, even a possible future of open-access scientific journals might not help the general risk-communications task. Excesses of global environmental communications efforts also inadvertently revive older stereotypes of environmental thinking as narrowly focused, ignorant of economic

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realities, too prone to welcome bureaucratic interference in people’s lives, and insufficiently realistic or ‘political’. The issues on the conventionally defined ‘environmentalist’ agendas of risk communicators and the recipients of their messages are many, but they tend to fall within large traditional categories like the conservation of species and habitats, the dangers from pollutants, and the sound and sustainable management of natural resources. Natural hazards such as earthquakes and hurricanes fit uneasily, if at all, within traditional frameworks as these tend to be more comfortable with issue areas where anthropogenic explanations of change are plausible. On balance the biological sciences have fared better in large-scale communication ventures than the traditional earth sciences. This is partly because of a continuing misperception of the subject matter of geology as restricted to the events of long-dead aeons, and partly because of the more immediate ethical pull of species and their habitats. Both fall far behind the successes of climate-change communications exercises. These benefit from their links with the self-evidently ‘real’ issues of energy and economies. The geosciences nonetheless remain relevant for policies in economic development and sustainability across many areas such as mining, natural hazards, problems of semi-arid areas, and energy security. As one observer wrote nearly 20 years ago, however, geologists have a long way to go in creating a general awareness that an understanding of natural processes must be incorporated into our planning for the future. (Berger, 1991: 295) The politics of restructuring Normative debates on alternative global politics futures, beyond the frameworks of incremental institutional reforms and policy changes, have explored many possibilities. Models and scenarios include those that revisit and revive traditional notions of statehood, more vigorous forms of economic globalization, a deepening of the processes of constitutionalization and institutionalization in global society, multilateralist extensions of international law and organizations within a world of states, and a spread and entrenchment of cross-border values of community. Each has a mixture of advantages and drawbacks for environmental policy performance. Nationalist sentiment, for example, is generally an unwelcome presence in world-government debates. However, it is a traditional resource in advocacy of lead roles by states in relation to global environmental issues, the protection of threatened species as


elements in larger networks of national heritage values, the promotion of environmental education in school curricula, or the more effective enforcement of regulations affecting business. The phenomena of economic globalization, including growth, inequities, and recessions, similarly present diverse opportunities for environmental and energy policy change. Various interest-based formulations, based either on states or on broader constellations of actors, also point to the potential of enhanced multilateralism and other cooperative games. Of the arguments about alternative global society futures, however, several critical strands of environmental thinking have a special resonance with ideas of transnational political community. Communitarian forms of global society restructuring were discussed by Adam Smith. He was reluctant to endorse them, however, because of his acknowledgement of the facts of power and interest in interstate politics, of the strength of nationalism, and of the diminution for individuals of a sense of ethical bonds with distance. The recent rise of studies of cosmopolitanism has revisited these questions in specific contexts such as those of human rights, refugees and asylum, economic development, armed conflicts, and the global environment. A convergence of multiple issues and of emergent governance processes constitutes an incipient global polity within which the idea of a world or global citizenship has been put into play. (Hayden, 2005: 5) The cosmopolitan project has attracted the interest of environmentalists worried about the constraints imposed by the territorial and ethnocentric divides of global society, frustrated with the limitations and recurrent failures of conventional multilateralism, and increasingly oriented to globality as a normative framework of policy debate. Cosmopolitan forms thus re-emerge as the global-society counterparts of the biophysical interconnectedness of earth systems. They represent a very large-scale expansion and integration of the social imagination, or the problems of understanding different others, with the ecological imagination, or thinking in a sustained fashion about the natural-systems dimensions of the lives of individuals and the dynamics of their communities. They are particularly alert to the risks of an unequal spread of costs and benefits in the use of global resources and ecosystem services and the greening of economies and local communities.

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There is no single brand of cosmopolitan thought. Traditional or more fundamental forms envisage a disintegration of the state. ‘Realist’ or pragmatic variants hope to rescue states by restructuring them. They emphasize the juxtaposition and the complex interplay of state structures and national, ethnic, and other identities with the rise of definitions of transgroup moral obligations. In some situations, as in responses to the Turkish and Greek earthquakes of the 1990s, the latter may be relatively short-lived. Various strands of cosmopolitan thought thus point towards different kinds of either state-tolerant or state-averse restructurings of environmental governance processes: for example, change by way of more entrenched patterns of accommodative politics in IGOs, institutional and policy reforms that open states to influences from global and other ecologically grounded arguments, more vigorous ecological localisms, and shifts in identity politics towards both local-community and transborder associations. There are productive points of contact with functionalist theories. These, however, typically put less stress on values and more on the potential – for problem solving and for peace – of concentrating on specific technical tasks in diverse multiactor forms, each defined by the requirements of specific issues.

Science, knowledges, and earth systems Scientific knowledge has multiple uses. Different parcels are essential requirements of governance in different policy areas. More generally, political actors seek a competitive advantage by exploiting the inferences they read into scientific reports. Non-material considerations indicate more the intrinsic value of research and its products. These diverse ways of viewing science and its uses are closely related. Literatures of advantage and wonder Adam Smith made a distinction between two kinds of enquiries. Investigations where the observer might expect to gain some ‘advantage’ from greater understanding (as in studies of the nature of economies and of the workings of international trade) were different, he thought, from those that started from a state of ‘wonder’. This attitude, which he took from his studies of science in ancient Greece, characterized thinking in science or natural philosophy. As Hutton was aware from his background in both business and geological research, studies of this kind can also be done with an eye to material gain as in investigations of potential ore-rich rock formations or of wild plant species that might help farmers breed better crops. Smith himself did not pursue this aspect


in his scientific writings, though related ideas of the transformation of the earth through entrepreneurship in ‘progressive’ societies were central to his work in political economy. The scientific study of earth systems now comprises vast areas of research by many scientists from many disciplines. The range needs of ‘advantage’-based enquiries reach far into the terrain of research pulled by ‘wonder’. ‘Useful’ scientific research, however – the kind that is supposed to lead to practical insights and useable knowledge – is not a binary opposite of ‘curiosity’-driven research. The latter often has a useful by-catch. Similarly, useful research cannot be done without attending to the questions and criteria of good science that have been defined and honed in centuries of disinterested practices. Science shares features with other types of knowledge. Their social settings are important. Knowledge searches derive from and play various roles in relation to social conditions and activities. Hobbes, in the mid-1600s, saw security, of the kind that he thought could best be provided by powerful governments, as a prerequisite for scientific knowledge. Without security, not only was there the constant risk of violence but there could be no science: there could be ‘no knowledge of the face of the earth’. Sceptical or disillusioned observers from Greek thought onwards have argued that the knowledge embodied in the moral codes of societies merely serves to protect the interests of the powerful. Various traditions in the social sciences detect links between the contents of knowledges and their uses. In some structuralist political economy traditions, knowledges and ideologies have to be viewed in relation to the groups which benefit from and those that are harmed by their consequences. One of the insights of functionalist theory in IR, reflecting the influence on it of pragmatist theory, is that useful knowledge is produced by and in turn shapes cooperative problem-solving activities in areas of human needs. The global environmental arena is thus marked by an unceasing interweaving of both knowledge production processes and of governance processes. Different tendencies arising from the duality of knowledge processes, however, emphasize either production for policy use or cultivation for the intrinsic values of the products and of the processes that lead to these. Policy uses Global environmental discourses, and many regions of the sciences that interact with these, are practically oriented. They ask questions about endocrine-disrupting substances or the release of methane from melting

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permafrost not because, or not only because, these are scientifically interesting questions, but because the answers to them imply a need for consideration of actions by individuals, societies, and governments. Asking what is happening and why, and what can be done about it, are two sides of the same coin. Loose assemblages of inextricably linked ‘is’ and ‘should-be’ questions structure narratives. This widespread disposition reflects two sets of influences on environmental thought, respectively from the policy sciences and the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. First, debates on environmental and sustainable-development policy are closely connected to the working assumptions of the policy sciences. Research is valued to the extent that it has something useful to say to policymakers and governance institutions and, more broadly, to civilsociety actors. Its practitioners negotiate the dividing lines that lead, on the one side, to the obscurities of excessively scholarly research and, on the other, to the risks of being too hand in glove with institutions of power. As a result, policy-oriented environmental research shares three characteristics that Rayner (2007) has identified as attributes of the policy sciences. Research is issue- or problem-oriented, rather than being directed towards an understanding of general principles; it has a significant normative component, which arises from the felt obligation to locate, discuss, and evaluate different policy options; and, because of the multifacetedness of any public-policy issue, research is inherently multidisciplinary and draws on different mixes of insights from natural- and social-science disciplines according to the topic. Researchers and governance actors thus become co-producers of the consensually defined knowledge bases of public policy. Prescriptively oriented studies of knowledge governance, public administration, and governance processes, generally, are integral parts of these overall tasks. Secondly, environmental enquiries have connections, some robust and others more tenuous, with pragmatist traditions. As for Dewey, James, and other pragmatist philosophers in the US in the early 1900s, there is a concern for the real-world consequences of propositions. The desirable end products of research are insights which, when applied in practice, have beneficial effects on environmental conditions. Action is accordingly an indispensable truth-checking mechanism. Some aspects of environmental thinking, though, have traditionally set limits to a thoroughgoing pragmatism. Environmentalism also comprises a body of convictions, variously interpreted but not open to fundamental revision, that centre on views of human activities as the primary drivers of environmental change. Pragmatism, then, relates not to the


consequences of adhering to these as opposed to other possible core beliefs but rather to the practical value knowledge findings might have in producing results that steer societies towards predefined goals. Even here, though, pragmatism may have limited hold. An environmentalist predisposed to viewing large companies with suspicion, for example, would probably not look favourably on arguments that highlight the pragmatic benefits of cooperating with them. Governance activities are thus closely associated with a continual questioning of what constitute the criteria of policy-applicable scientific knowledge. Gaps in data are not typically viewed as a major road-block. Acceptance of the facts of uncertainty in biodiversity data, and of limited knowledge of the world’s fauna and flora species, is central to the development of global conservation policy. Scientists can make seasoned estimates where there are clear knowledge gaps, as in assessments of the probable consequences of pesticide applications or, in climatechange debates, on the significance of polar ice-sheet dynamics. While the achievement of some goals would be useful – such as high-resolution, four-dimensional multidisciplinary models of local, regional, and global climate-change processes, or close-to-real-time simulations of earth movements in regions at risk – these are constrained by data, data handling, and other factors. The precautionary principle builds in part on knowledge of the unanticipated consequences of past decisions, for example of sedimentation and fisheries costs in relation to hydroelectric-power and irrigation dams and the heightened storm-damage risks resulting from the economic transformation of riparian and coastal areas, and in part on a pragmatic appreciation of the need in some circumstances for guesses and for a frank tolerance of incomplete knowledge. As in economic policy, governments and publics have to deal with the facts of disagreements among environmental experts. This too is part of precautionary processes. The multidisciplinary character of global environmental policy issues makes for large areas of divergence in policy prescriptions. Dissensus is accepted as a norm of policy debate among economists. In practice it is not a barrier to the use by governments of economic knowledge. The comparable stresses and strains of environmental argument, however, tend to be seen as indicators of failure or of disciplinary immaturity. They provide opportunities for political critics to move in and claim scientific support for their own policy positions or to undermine the credibility of research efforts. Disagreements among scientists vary in their policy significance. Those on various issues in relation to climate change quickly became key features of policy debates. Outsiders’ expectations, as in ecology from the 1960s and on

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climate-change issues three decades later, magnify some internal disputes among scientists while contributing nonetheless to the formation of scientific policy communities. Different global environmental research areas vary considerably in their public-policy quotient. The practical aspects of research in some areas, for example by conservation biologists on threatened and migratory bird species, are oriented more to local actions by civilsociety groups and communities than to policymakers in national governments and IGOs. Climate-change research has an even broader multilevel range of applicability. It has conspicuously outranked all global environmental competitors as a priority item on policy agendas. Prime ministers and presidents, and foreign ministers and finance ministers, are involved. The consequences of its associated beliefs have significance beyond their immediate contributions to climate-policy development. Bjørn Lomborg has argued that the centrality attached to climate-change issues is unbalanced and that the prevalence of beliefs in anthropogenic climate change has led to a spread of unjustified fears. Moreover, ‘worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things’ (Lomborg, 2009). The opportunity costs of a belief in the equivalence of climate-change and environmental problems include reduced attention and resources devoted to other environmental issues as well as to other public-policy questions. Even if anthropogenic climate change were somehow found to be less of a problem than was earlier thought, the adaptation problems arising from natural climatic variability would still have to be tackled. So would the many other problems, such as the loss and fragmentation of habitats, on global environmental agendas. Intrinsic-value uses A large region of shared concerns links ‘faster’, or more urgent, policyoriented approaches to environmental knowledge, with ‘slower’ ones that emphasize the intrinsic values of research on earth systems. There is something of an irony in mentioning the latter. Such enquiries are the stuff of normal science. In the social and political contexts of global environmental debates, however, notions of intrinsic values tend to fare poorly when confronted by the hegemonic questions that shape discourses (for example, ‘What has this got do with policy?’ Or, ‘How is this related to climate change?’). Discourses of immediacy and urgency prevail over more fundamental questions geared towards the major twenty-first-century intellectual challenge: trying to understand the earth and its systems and the place of humans within these. Notions of


‘use’ are different in these two broad genres. Many scientific enquiries typically straddle both, however, for example by anticipating a flow of useable products as possible spin-offs of research. This duality occurs in the social sciences too, as in questions about people’s responses to anthropogenic climate-change information, states’ compliance with international regime rules, consumer choices among products with varying ecological production costs, or firms’ strategies in relation to government policy innovations. Research on earth systems takes place at many levels. At the grandest, it contributes to the earth-theorizing tradition that took a decisive new turn as a result of the writings of Hutton in the late eighteenth century. The tradition has three streams: studies of physical earth processes – a multidisciplinary endeavour resting primarily on the activities of geologists; more scientifically enhanced versions that build in insights from additional neighbouring subfields, particularly those of the biological sciences; and efforts that also aim to incorporate views from the human sciences. Each has policy repercussions at multiple levels including consideration of different kinds of geoengineering applications and, ultimately, of terraforming practices. Each also involves long-term enquiries permeated by ‘slow’-knowledge values and each dissolves into a variety of relatively more integrated and decentralized interdisciplinary formats. Scientists in any of the traditional earth-systems disciplines, for example biologists in relation to knowledge of terrestrial and marine species and ecosystems, tend to oscillate between a sense of excitement at the prospect of closing in on answers to enduring questions, and awe at the immensity of what remains unknown. The condition seems to be universal. Mathematics has even been compared with its situation a thousand years ago: ‘Very little has been discovered until now compared with the amount yet to come’ (Ash and Gross, 2006: 30). However, it is the third level of earth-systems studies that raises many of the most difficult questions. Human societies during the Holocene have demonstrated a remarkable and now rapidly expanding growth and global reach of their capacities to engineer changes in their environments. Understanding the human difference – discovering the amount of global change that can be explained by anthropogenic variables – thus becomes a central scientific project. However, this greatly expands the ensembles of systems and of disciplines beyond those traditionally located within the frameworks of earth-ideas enquiries. At stake here are critical questions of the sources of human behaviour and the root causes of societal responses to issues of environmental policy and sustainable development. These kinds of questions tend to

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be marginalized in many natural-science accounts. Yet these often contain hidden perspectives on such questions. Social and political theory is curled up in scientists’ accounts like the dimensions of string theory. Connecting natural- with social-science enquiries is a requirement both of the policy sciences and also of research that is not channelled towards a goal of useable knowledge. The task of linking these disciplinary groupings can exploit some epistemological compatibilities, but it is subject to major constraints. Some are institutional and cultural. Cross-fertilization is also hindered by a general neglect of important questions of the relations between natural and human systems in western thought, compared with attention to questions of individuals, rights, equality, war, and other themes. More specifically, despite their philosophical weight, there was surprisingly little seep through of big ideas in the earth sciences, such as plate tectonics and geochemical cycles, compared with the impacts on philosophy and social thought of developments in biology. Many social scientists, even those working in the policy sciences, are still deterred by discussions that appear too ‘technical’. Notions of the separateness and distance of natural-systems enquiries have limited the development of a number of disciplines, even those, such as environmental history that aim to treat such questions (Asdal, 2003). Diverse culturally grounded imagery of earth systems remains a continuing formative influence on attitudes and on responses to environmental questions. Viewing earth-systems processes not as separate from but as integrally connected with important questions of economies and societies is a critical step in the long-term process of adding to knowledge and improving governance. Some forms of transdisciplinary collaboration are facilitated by the presence of policy or social-action goals, such as the aim of regulating GHG production. Without this push, cross-border links may be project specific and short lived. Ethnocentric divides apply even within particular disciplines. Biology, for example, has been described as a patchwork of competing and overlapping views sustained by a patchwork of overlapping – and competing – schools, sources of funding, and social institutions and values. (Maienschein, 1999: 50) Up to a point this kind of fragmentation assists cross-border cooperation, in that such efforts do not have to be sanctioned by a central disciplinary mechanism. However, to the extent that subcommunities themselves take on some of the cultural trappings of disciplines, these


too can be highly resistant to transboundary enterprises. Three kinds of responses to the issues posed by relations between the natural and the social sciences are worth noting. First, as in many areas of climate-change and earth-systems modelling, insights from the social sciences are brought into frameworks forged primarily by natural scientists. E. O. Wilson, from biology and sociobiology, has been a leading advocate of general processes of epistemic integration by means of the spread of natural-science methodologies. Some global environmental formats, however, are weakened by the short cuts they are obliged to take to incorporate human-society variables: prioritizing some disciplines or subdisciplines over others or some theories of human behaviour over others, for example, expanding the range of simplifying assumptions, or bracketing individuals and social groups in order to restrict analysis to flows of inputs and outputs. A second kind of strategy acknowledges significant structural differences among disciplines, but emphasizes the potential created by their compatibilities. Researchers on global environmental issues have lamented the lack of a common framework for studying these on the grounds that this could facilitate broadly based interdisciplinary cooperation (Costanza et al., 2000). Hybrids relevant to global earth-systems research include ecological economics and environmental geography. These kinds of approaches afford greater possibilities of delving into the important ‘why’ questions about human behaviour that tend to be obscured in natural-science-based earth-systems modelling. A third tradition relevant to environmental enquiry insists that there is only a very limited area of creative overlap between the natural and social sciences. Condorcet in the 1780s wrote of the differences between these: Everything would be equal between them for a being who, a stranger to our species, would study human society as we study that of beavers or ants. But here, the observer is himself part of the society he observes, and truth can only have judges who are either prejudiced or seduced. (Quoted in Rothschild, 2001: 141) The strain of environmentalism that is sceptical of the claims of the natural sciences and their alleged reductionism raises similar objections. Many developments of the social sciences and humanities in the late twentieth century were, despite their diversity, marked by profound doubts that the natural sciences could be of use to them, and by a

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belief that the two – understanding humans and understanding natural systems – were ‘logically distinct undertakings’ (Skinner, 1985: 6). There are corresponding blind spots in the natural sciences, as when naturalscience epistemologies are vested with the stature of being the only ways of knowing, or when the participants in governance processes are judged primarily on their capacities to understand, or on their readiness to agree with, specific scientific arguments. The skills of the historian and philosopher are particularly relevant to the long-term task of augmenting the traditional range of studies of earth systems and the governance issues they present. There is of course a long history of links between the arts and the natural sciences. Several periods of ancient Chinese landscape paintings reflected sophisticated levels of geological knowledge not present in Europe then (Needham, 1959: 599). Some European writings mixed styles of exposition. In the late eighteenth century, for example, Erasmus Darwin set out some of his theory of evolution in the form of poetry, with extensive prose footnotes of a more conventionally scientific kind. An interest in the detail of the natural world linked writers in the romantic tradition with practitioners of the natural sciences. Wordsworth, a friend of Hutton and other geologists, wrote both landscape poetry and detailed scientific accounts of the topography of particular sites in north-west England. However, ensuring the upkeep of the barriers between the arts and humanities and the natural sciences has been more characteristic of recent decades. Toril Moi’s comment, just a little tongue in cheek, could not have come from a natural scientist, or indeed from most social scientists: [I]f you want to be a really radical student today, one that annoys the professors terribly, you can just start by claiming that words have meanings. (Moi, 2003: 147) Many questions investigated in earth-systems disciplines, especially where these are accompanied by policy debates on their implications, touch on questions that arise naturally in the social sciences – for example, on organizational decision making, the social processes of attitude formation, the sources of individual behaviour, the nature of governance, and the significance of institutions in wider social processes. Greater two-way flows are thus needed between the natural and the social sciences. The diverse and often conflicting ways in which humans and their societies are understood within the social sciences


and the humanities, however, in addition to the persisting and multiple divides between these and the natural sciences, make it doubtful that a comprehensive earth-systems theory is achievable. Success in enterprises of the third kind, then, where an understanding of the sources and significance of human activities is central could, in practice, probably only come on the basis of prior decisions about the range of ‘acceptable’ disciplines, questions, and approaches. These judgements would by definition invalidate claims to comprehensiveness. Studies of global change thus lack a theoretical multidisciplinary core. This is ultimately required for questions directed towards understanding the potential of governance and the transformative activities of human agents in the multiple contexts of earth-systems processes. On the optimistic side of this balance sheet, though, the other two grand designs of the earth-systems project, those that play with different configurations of the natural sciences, continue to flourish. John Playfair, in his vigorous defence of Hutton at the start of the 1800s, argued strongly against the sceptics who did not think it would be possible to achieve a theory of the earth. Having ‘numbered the stars’, he thought, scientists should be capable of understanding how the earth works. Fortunately, the absence of a satisfactory general theory of the more ambitious type, or, perhaps, of the possibility of arriving at one, does not mean that no useful things related to knowledge goals will arise from efforts to assemble such a construct. Like governance, knowledges are best defined as processes or activities. Nor does this gap weaken the pragmatic case for more effective multilevel global environmental governance in different issue areas based on specific bodies of knowledge. These are already abundant and useable.

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Index Abu Dhabi, 198 Aceh, 11, 192 Adams, Douglas, 4 adaptation, see climate change Africa, 78, 177, 179, 193 Agenda, 21, 72 agriculture, 22, 175 Alvarez, Luis and Walter, 88 American Geophysical Union, 180 amphibians, 21 Anaximander, 8 Annan, Kofi, 178 Antarctica, 26, 40, 43, 50, 72, 76, 158 Anthropocene, 20 see also Holocene anthropogenic change, 1, 10–11, 19–24, 45–6, 74, 81, 86, 213 anthropogenic uncertainty, 45–7 Apollo 8, 5 Arctic, 170 Arrhenius, Svante, 155 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 188 asteroids, see near-earth objects Australia, 35, 81, 109, 198 Bangladesh, 7, 23, 179 biodiversity conference (2005), 140 Biodiversity Observation Network, 141 biofuels, 21 biogeochemistry, 76 biological diversity, 48 definitions, 131–2 information, 141, 152 biology, 39, 214 and geology, 7, 9, 91 biosphere, 8 biosphere reserves, see Man and the Biosphere Programme BirdLife International, 146 Bocking, Stephen, 29 Bolin, Bert, 161, 162, 199

Brazil, 133, 134 BRIC countries, 172 Broecker, Walter, 78 Brundtland Report, 11 Buridan, Jean, 58 Burnet, Thomas, 59 California, 49, 172 Callendar, Guy, 155 Canada, 3, 35, 36, 39, 50, 133, 137, 172, 175, 180 federalism, 36, 109 international agreement, 50–1, 111, 151, 172 oil sands, 79 capacity building, 33, 186 cap–and–trade, 172 carbon dioxide, 20, 42, 155 see also greenhouse gases carbon regulation, 172 carbon tax, 48 catastrophes, 4, 88 Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, 181–2 Centro Internacional para la Investigación del Fenómeno El Niño, 195 chaos theory, 42 Charney Report, 156 chemistry and earth-systems science, 76 China, 78–9, 86, 179 climate change, 52 natural disasters, 187, 190 Chirac, Jacques, 140 chlorofluorocarbons, 27 chytrid fungus, 21 cicadas, 85 climate change, 23, 115, 155–8, 212 adaptation, 24, 173–5 debates on, 1, 45, 51–2, 55, 166–9 government agencies, 109 237

238

Index

climate change – continued mitigation, 24, 174 natural systems and, 23 ozone layer and, 32 public opinion, 55, 171 security issues and, 121–2 uncertainties, 40 Club of Rome, 74 comets, see near-earth objects command-and-control, 33 computer science, 82–3 Condorcet, Marquis de, 215 conservatism, 56 constitutionalization of global society, 123 continental drift, 83–4 Convention on Biological Diversity, 10, 142, 150 biosafety protocol, 51 Clearing-House Mechanism, 152 scientists and, 140, 148–50 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, 146 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, 143–4, 152, 201 scientists and, 147–8 Convention on Long-Range Transport of Air Pollution, 27 Convention on Migratory Species, 108, 141, 144 scientists and, 148 coral, 9, 198 cosmopolitanism, 113–5, 207–8 Cretaceous, 88 Crick, Francis, 45 Cuba, 34, 191–2 cycles, 42, 72–3, 85 cyclones, 180 Nargis, 180 Czech Republic, 172 Danish Centre for Earth System Sciences, 75 Darwin, Charles, 9, 39, 66–7, 135 Darwin, Erasmus, 216 data, 74 biodiversity, 134 gaps in, 40–1, 134, 211

proxy, 24, 40, 86 Dead Sea, 78 decision making, 48–9 Dene, 6 dengue fever, 175, 193 developing countries, 11, 33–4, 115, 147, 175, 186 Dewey, John, 210 Diversitas, 138 Dodgson, Charles, 4 dogma in sciences, 45 Drummond, William, 4 Dyson, Freeman, 168 early warning systems, 189–90 earth age of, 59–60 cultural views of, 2–5 governance and, 9 history, 86–7, 157 images of, 2–11 structure, 8, 84 Earth Simulator Project, 81 Earth System Governance Project, 126 Earth System Science Education Program, 75 earth systems science definitions, 1, 70 disciplinary divides, 76 epistemological issues, 71 evolution of, 70–5 interdisciplinary research and, 69–70, 74–7 non–linearity, 42 space, 87–8 teaching, 75 themes, 75–89 time, 86–7 uncertainties and, 39–43 earthquakes, 1, 5, 84, 179, 189, 208 Haiti, 186 Kobe, 179 L’Aquila, 1, 188 Lisbon, 1, 3, 5, 58 Maharashtra, 185 Marmara, 190–1 Northridge, 181 Sumatra, 186 Tangshan, 5, 179

Index 239 Wenchuan, 5, 179 see also early warning systems ecology, 73, 211 ecosystem services, 6, 135 Ecuador, 180 193, 194 Edinburgh, 58 Ehrlich, Paul, 28 El Niño, 9, 20, 185, 187, 192–5 Enlightenment Scottish, 57, 58–9 values, 59 environmental discourses, 2, 5, 32 environmental geology, 75 environmental issues, 36, 72, 121, 203 environmental science models of, 29 epistemic communities, 111–2, 124–9 ethnic conflict, 192 European Union, 32, 35, 49, 140, 142 and biodiversity, 151 and climate change, 168, 175 and natural disasters, 188 federal systems, 35 firms, 47–8 see also multinational corporations floods, 179, 186 flux adjustments, 158 Food and Agriculture Organization, 120, 143 Fortey, Richard, 65, 69 Framework Convention on Climate Change, 10, 166 scientists and, 128 France, 198 Franklin, Benjamin, 58 Friends of the Earth, 110 functionalist theory in international relations, 112–13, 119, 209 Gaia theory, 27, 67 Galileo, 27 general circulation models, 81 see also modelling genetically modified organisms, 32, 44 geoengineering, 7, 77–80, 174 geological hazards definitions, 177–80 early warning systems, 189–90 response capabilities, 186–8

Geological Society of America, 75 geology, 2 history of thought, 63, 65–8, 89 public views of, 67–8 geomorphology, 20 German Research Centre for Geosciences, 75 Germany, 49, 108, 144, 189, 198 Global Atmospheric Research Program, 156 Global Biodiversity Information Facility, 141 global civil society, 110 Global Climate Observation System, 184 Global Framework for Climate Services, 184 Global Seismographic Network, 183, 189 global warming, see climate change glocal issues, 36 governance, 12, 31–7, 197–8 actors, 197–8 biodiversity, 142–50 climate change, 163–6 fragments, 122–3 geological hazards, 184–6 issue framing and, 31–3 multilevel, 35–7, 150–3, 166–8, 171–3, 186–90 reform, 197, 199–206 theory, 31, 107–15 Great Lakes, 20 Greece, 34, 190 Green Revolution, 21 green states, 33 greenhouse gases, 23, 43, 159, 168, 173, 205 Greenland, 24, 26, 40, 82 Greenpeace, 110 Haas, Peter, 26 Halley, Edmond, 8 Hansen, James, 28, 168 Hare, Kenneth, 156, 199 Hawaii, 85 Herodotus, 3 Hobbes, Thomas, 209 Holmes, Arthur, 3 Holocene, 20, 21, 74, 79, 157, 213

240

Index

humans, study of, 46, 213–4 Hume, David, 25, 58 hurricanes, 40 Andrew, 11 Felix, 23 Gustave, 191 Katrina, 11, 181 Mitch, 23, 180 Hutton, James, 4, 57–8, 69, 83, 86, 89–90, 208, 213 and Adam Smith, 96, 105 biography, 59 deism and, 60 influence, 62–4 theory of the earth, 59–62 uniformitarian ideas, 61 view of science, 60–1, 64 Hyogo Framework, 183, 185–6, 188, 194 ice ages, 24, 84, 86–7 ice cores, 24, 157 ice storms, 180 Iceland, 24, 187 Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, 183 India, 3, 109 Indonesia, 78, 133, 180, 189, 193 insurance companies, 181 interdisciplinary research, viii–ix, 214–5, 216–7 intergovernmental organizations, 34 coordination, 144, 151 regional, 150 structure, 108 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 23, 40, 44, 72 criticisms of, 28, 47, 155, 161 discussion of by biologists, 141 governments and, 162 history, 155 organization, 159–60, 162 reports, 23, 74, 79, 156, 158–60, 173 risk communications, 169–70 International Biodiversity Observation Year, 138 International Biological Programme, 137 international cooperation, 33, 119, 122

International Council for Science, 71–2, 126–8 and climate change, 158 and geohazards, 182–3 SCOPE, 72, 127, 128, 137–8, 199 and UNESCO, 127 international financial institutions, 175, 195 International Geological Congress, 72 International Geophysical Year, 126, 137 International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, 72, 126, 156 International Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme, 126 international inspection systems, 122 international law, 108 see also Smith, Adam international relations, 119–20 Hobbesian view of, 10, 118 International Maritime Organization, 120, 144 International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity, 141 International Social Science Council, 126 International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, 182, 185 International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 20–1, 110, 131, 133, 134–5, 143 scientists and, 145, 152 species data, 20–1 Species Survival Commission, 145 International Union of Biological Sciences, 126, 136–7 International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, 126, 158–9 International Union of Geological Sciences, 182 International Whaling Commission, 145 scientists and, 145 International Year of Planet Earth, 184

Index 241 James, William, 210 Jameson, Robert, 64 Japan, 5–6, 35, 81, 145 Kellow, Aynsley, 29 Kennedy, Barbara, 7 Kenya, 34 Keynes, J. M., 47 Knight, Frank, 47 Know-Nothing Party, 52 knowledge gaps, 80, 213 intrinsic values, 12–13, 212–7 theories of, 11–13, 25–6 useable, 12–13, 209–12, 217 Kolka glacier, 177 Kyoto Protocol, 28, 168, 171, 201 see also Framework Convention on Climate Change landslides, 177 League of Nations, 119 Leonardo da Vinci, 58 liberalism, 33, 56 listeriosis, 178 Lomborg, B., 54–5, 212 Lovelock, James, 27, 78, 80, 87 Lyell, Charles, 4, 9, 63, 65, 66 Maine, 3 malaria, 187, 193 Maldives, 50, 115 Malta, 198 Man and the Biosphere Programme, 72, 126, 139 Manchester, 7 Mao Zedong, 5 Mars, 87 Masdar, 198 Massachusetts, 52 mathematics, 213 Mauna Loa Observatory, 156 Médecins sans frontières, 191 medieval cities, 22 Mediterranean, 78 methane, 158 see also greenhouse gases microorganisms, 76–7 migratory species, 82, 136, 212

Milankovitch, Milutin, 89 Millennium Development Goals, 72, 140, 202 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 140, 202 Mississippi, 179 mitigation see climate change Mitrany, David, 113 modelling, 42–3, 80–3, 157–8, 211 Moi, Toril, 216 Montreal Protocol, 157 Morocco, 1, 84 mud volcanoes, 180 multilateral environmental agreements, 109, 116, 128, 201 and biodiversity, 142–50, 202–3 multilateralism, 108–9 multinational corporations, 134 municipal governments, 172–3 Myanmar, 23, 180 National Academy of Science, 125 natural disasters and conflicts, 190–2 data, 179 economic costs, 179–80 natural hazards see geological hazards natural systems and human systems, 23 near-earth objects, 48, 88–9, 183–4, 187 Netherlands, 22, 59, 180 New Zealand, 55 Newfoundland, 24 nongovernmental organizations, 35, 108, 110, 113, 120–1, 150 and biodiversity, 152 and environmental science, 138–9 and geological hazards, 185, 186–7 Nova Scotia, 84 Nyos, Lake, 177 oceans-atmosphere systems, 20, 81, 157 Oldroyd, David, 87 orbital forcing, 89 Oregon, 172

242

Index

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 188 Organization of American States, 188, 194 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, 163 Oxford, 7 oxygen in earth history, 74, 87 ozone layer, 32, 72, 156–7 Permian, 88 Peru, 193, 194 Philippines, 23, 78 Pinatubo, Mount, 158 Plass, Gilbert, 155 plate tectonics, 83–4 Plato, 22, 55 Playfair, John, 62–3, 64, 89–90, 96, 217 Pliny the Elder, 4 polar bears, 39, 133, 147, 151, 175 policy sciences, 210 politics and environmental issues, 28 pollution, 20 population growth, 21 pragmatism, 209, 210–11 precautionary principle, 49–51 Ramsar Convention, 143, 146–7 Read, H. H. 65 Rees, Martin, 124 regulation, 33 religion and geological thought, 34, 58 risk communications, 168–71, 205–6 romanticism, 4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3 Royal Society, 125, 174, 177 Royal Society of Canada, 125, 126 Rumsfeld, Donald, 52 Russia, 109, 177 Saga, Junichi, 6 Samoa, 85 Saudi Arabia, 178 science

critics of, 215 global nature of, 124 public views of, 30, 52–3 socialization processes in, 43–5 uncertainty and, 43–5 values, 26 science and governance, 24–9, 111, 141, 200–6 scientific advisory bodies, 128–9, 144–50 scientific communications, problems of, 54, 124, 169–70 scientific policy communities, 124–9 and biodiversity, 136–42 and climate change, 158–63 and geological hazards, 181–4 sea-level rise, 44 small-island states, 50 Smith, Adam biography, 96 and cosmopolitanism, 96, 103, 207 and environmental governance, 104–7 ethics, 96, 101–4, 106 governance, 95–101 governments, powers of, 98–100, 105, 106 international law, 96, 100–1, 107, 118 political economy, 97–8 science, views of, 105, 208 thought, features of, 95–6 social democratic ideas, 33, 56 social sciences and the environment, 46, 77, 91, 210, 214 solar radiation management, 78 solar system, 8, 87–8, 180 Southern African Development Community, 194 Southern Ocean, 86 Soviet Union, see Russia Spaceguard Survey, 183–4 Spain, 78, 109 Sparks, Steve, 177 species, threatened and endangered, 20–1, 132–3, 145 Sri Lanka, 5 states and international science, 126

Index 243 Stern, Nicholas, 171 Suess, Eduard, 73 support vector machines, 83 sustainable development, 5–7, 186 Sweden, 33 systems thinking in science, 41 Taiwan, 190 terrorism, 35, 49 theory of the earth, 13, 57–68, 89–91 Think Geohazards, 181 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 7 TRAFFIC, 148 transborder environmental effects, 22 tsunamis, 1, 5, 11, 84, 185, 192 Tunguska event, 88 Turkey, 34, 84, 190 Typhoon Morakot, 190 uncertainty anthropogenic, 45–7 decisional, 47–51 political, 51–7 politics and, 38 scientific, 39–45 uniformitarian ideas in geological thought, 4 see also Hutton, James United Nations, 72, 119 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 34, 120 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 109, 138, 156, 202 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 34, 72, 120, 139, 182, 184 United Nations Environment Programme, 147, 159, 203 United States and climate change, 51–2, 108, 172 Endangered Species Act, 150 Environmental Protection Agency, 49 federalism, 179 Food and Drug Administration, 49 multilateralism, 34–5, 139, 198 NASA, 71, 74, 183

NOAA, 183, 189, 192 pesticide regulation in, 35 relations with Cuba, 34 USGS, 183 universities, 29 van Andel, Tjeerd, 27, 75 Varmus, Harold, 29 vegetation models, 81 Venus, 87 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 73 Verne, Jules, 4 Vienna Convention (ozone layer), 156 volcanoes, 90 Iceland, 187 Mount Pinatubo, 78 Toba, 78 Mount St. Helens, 7 Voltaire, F.-M. de, 3 Washington, 172 Watson, Robert, 199 weather systems, 41–2, 180 Wegener, Alfred, 84 Westphalian system, 10, 119 wetlands, 22 Wetlands International, 146 whaling, 121, 145 Whitman, Jim, 117 Wilson, E. O., 141, 215 Wilson, John Tuzo, 85 Wordsworth, William, 216 World Bank, 184 World Climate Conferences, 156 World Climate Research Programme, 184–5 World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 147, 152 World Database on Protected Areas, 152 World Health Organization, 122, 144, 203 World Meteorological Organization, 156, 159, 161, 182, 184–5 World Trade Organization, 34 World Wildlife Fund, 110, 129 Younger Dryas period, 88

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