Free energy sources in the very long run

Judson - 2017 - The energy expansions of evolution

The history of the life–Earth system can be divided into five ‘energetic’ epochs, each featuring the evolution of life forms that can exploit a new source of energy. These sources are: geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh and fire. The first two were present at the start, but oxygen, flesh and fire are all consequences of evolutionary events. Since no category of energy source has disappeared, this has, over time, resulted in an expanding realm of the sources of energy available to living organisms and a concomitant increase in the diversity and complexity of ecosystems. These energy expansions have also mediated the transformation of key aspects of the planetary environment, which have in turn mediated the future course of evolutionary change. Using energy as a lens thus illuminates patterns in the entwined histories of life and Earth, and may also provide a framework for considering the potential trajectories of life–planet systems elsewhere. 

Free energy is a universal requirement for life. It drives mechanical motion and chemical reactions—which in biology can change a cell or an organism. Over the course of Earth history, the harnessing of free energy by organisms has had a dramatic impact on the planetary environment. Yet the variety of free-energy sources available to living organisms has expanded over time. These expansions are consequences of events in the evolution of life, and they have mediated the transformation of the planet from an anoxic world that could support only microbial life, to one that boasts the rich geology and diversity of life present today. Here, I review these energy expansions, discuss how they map onto the biological and geological development of Earth, and consider what this could mean for the trajectories of life–planet systems elsewhere.

Worth reading in its entirety for the log-timescale perspective on energy budgets alone, but also as a fantastic piece of science writing and communication. "Of all the planets and moons in the Solar System, Earth is the only one to have fire..."

We're hiring @Berkeley!

The Global Policy Lab at UC Berkeley is now hiring multiple positions for a major research project at the nexus of environmental resource management, economic development, and econometric modeling. 

All job postings are open and applications will be under review immediately.

Positions available:

1. Post doc - for applicants with a PhD

2. Project manager - for applicants with a Masters or PhD

3. Research analyst - for applicants with a Bachelor's degree 

All positions are full time, start date approx.: 5 or 6/2016

See job descriptions and application instructions at: http://globalpolicy.science/jobs

PROJECT: MEASURING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The Global Policy Lab is beginning a two year research program bringing rigorous quantitative analysis to bear on the empirical measurement of sustainable development at industrial scale in a real world setting.

Sustainable development is a well-established theoretical concept in environment and resource economics, requiring that a population invest new capital resources at least as rapidly as they are removed or damaged from a system, however it has yet to be determined if this condition is met in any real world scenarios.

Achieving sustainable development requires that we are able to quantitatively monitor economic and environmental conditions and decisions in real time, so that the costs and benefits of management choices can be evaluated as they arise.

Our team will design, develop, and deploy a system to quantify and monitor management decisions at a full-scale mixed agricultural-industrial site in New Zealand. Our findings and innovations will advance our understanding of how sustainable development can be effectively achieved at the firm level, with the goal of similar systems being developed and deployed around the world.

The five member team will be based at  UC Berkeley and will be led by Principle Investigator Solomon Hsiang.

Learn more and apply at: http://globalpolicy.science/jobs

Social welfare and robots

As long as we're on the joint topics of ways to end an abstract and social welfare:

"Policies that redistribute income across generations can ensure that a rise in robotic productivity benefits all generations."

The ungated NBER working paper is here. (h/t Tyler Cowen, who has some thoughts on the general issue)

Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development

The students of the Columbia Sustainable Development Ph.D. program have put out the call for papers for the Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development. It's a great opportunity for Ph.D. students to meet colleagues from a broad array of disciplines, and a bunch of our younger colleagues will be there. Please pass it along.

Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development
April 25^th-26^th, 2014: Columbia University in the City of New York, USA

The graduate students in the Sustainable Development PhD program at Columbia University are convening the Fourth Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (IPWSD); scheduled for April 25th-26th, 2014, at Columbia University in New York City.

The IPWSD is a conference open to graduate students working on or interested in issues related to sustainable development.  It is intended to provide a forum to present and discuss research in an informal setting, as well as to meet and interact with similar graduate student researchers from other institutions.  In particular, we hope to facilitate a network among students pursuing in-depth research across a range of disciplines in the social and natural sciences, to generate a larger interdisciplinary discussion concerning sustainable development.  If your research pertains to the field of sustainable development and the linkages between natural and social systems, we encourage you to apply regardless of disciplinary background.

For details, please see the call for papers, or visit our conference website where a detailed list of topics, conference themes and other information is available.

Please share this information widely with graduate students and other interested parties. We look forward to seeing you in New York City in April!

With kind regards,

The Fourth IPWSD Planning Committee

Sustainable Development Doctoral Society, 
Columbia University

Website: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/sdds/schedule-events/ipwsd_2014/

Contact: cu.sdds.ipwsd@gmail.com

Envirodevonomics

There's a new working paper by Michael Greenstone and Kelsey Jack that's of obvious interest to FE readers:

Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for a Young Field
Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, existing measures of willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by affected households. This paper argues that this seeming paradox is the central puzzle at the intersection of environmental and development economics: Given poor environmental quality and high health burdens in developing countries, why is WTP so low? We develop a conceptual framework for understanding this puzzle and propose four potential explanations: (1) due to low income levels, individuals value increases in income more than marginal improvements in environmental quality, (2) the marginal costs of environmental quality improvements are high, (3) political economy factors undermine efficient policy-making, and (4) market failures such as weak property rights and missing capital markets drive a wedge between true and revealed willingness to pay for environmental quality. We review the available literature on each explanation and discuss how the framework also applies to climate change, which is perhaps the most important issue at the intersection of environment and development economics. The paper concludes with a list of promising and unanswered research questions for the emerging sub-field of “envirodevonomics.”

Is it true that "Everyone's a winner?" Dams in China and the challenge of balancing equity and efficiency during rapid industrialization

Jesse and I both come from the Sustainable Development PhD Program at Columbia which has once again turned out a remarkable crop of job market candidates (see outcomes from 2012 and 2011). We both agreed that their job market papers were so innovative, diverse, rigorous and important that we wanted to feature them at FE.  Their results are striking and deserve dissemination (we would probably post them anyway even if the authors weren't on the market), but they also clearly illustrate what the what the Columbia program is all about. (Apply to it here, hire one of these candidates here.) Here is the third and final post.

Large infrastructure investments are important for large-scale industrialization and economic development. Investments in power plants, roads, bridges and telecommunications, among others, provide important returns to society and are compliments to many types of private investment. But during rapid industrialization, as leaders focus on growth, there is often concern that questions of equity are cast aside. In the case of large-scale infrastructure investments, there are frequently populations ("losers") that suffer private costs when certain types of infrastructure are built -- for example, people whose homes are in the path of a new highway or who are affected by pollution from a power plant.

In public policy analysis and economics, we try to think objectively of the overall benefits of large investments to an entire society, keeping in mind that there will usually be some "losers" from the new policy in addition to a (hopefully larger) group of "winners."  In the cost-benefit analysis of large projects, we usually say if that a project is worth doing if the gains to the winners outweigh the loses to the losers -- making the implicit assumption that somehow the winners can compensate the losers for their loses and continue to benefit themselves. In cases where the winners compensate the losers enough that their losses are fully offset (i.e. they are no longer net losers), we say that the investment is "Pareto improving" because nobody is made worse off by the project.

A Pareto improving project is probably a good thing to do, since nobody is hurt and probably many people benefit. However, in the case of large infrastructure investments, it is almost guaranteed that some groups will be worse off because of the project's effects, so making sure that everyone benefits from these projects will require that the winners actually compensate the losers. Occasionally this occurs privately, but that tends to be uncommon, so with large-scale projects we often think that a central government authority has a role to play in transferring some of benefits from the project away from the winners and towards the losers.

But do these transfers actually occur? In a smoothly functioning government, one would hope so.  But the governments of rapidly developing countries don't always have the most experienced regulators and often pathologies, like corruption, lead to doubt as to whether large financial transfers will be successful.  Empirically, we have little to no evidence as to whether governments in rapidly industrializing countries (1) accurately monitor the welfare lost by losers in the wake of large projects and (2) have the capacity necessary to compensate these losers for their loses. Thus, establishing whether governments can effectively compensate losers is important for understanding whether large-scale infrastructure investments can be made beneficial (or at least "not harmful") for all members of society.

Xiaojia Bao investigates this question for the famous and controversial example of dams in China. Over the last few decades, a large number of hydroelectric dams have been build throughout China. These dams are an important source of power for China's rapidly growing economy, but they also can lead to inundation upstream, a reduction in water supply downstream, and a slowed flow of water that leads to an accumulation of pollutants both upstream and downstream.

Bao asks whether the individuals who are adversely affected by new dams are compensated for their losses. To do this, she obtains data on dams and municipal-level data on revenue and transfers from the central government.   She uses geospatial analysis to figure out which municipalities are along rivers that are dammed and also which are upstream, downstream or at the dam site.  She then compares how the construction of a new dam alters the distribution of revenues and federal transfers to municipalities along the dammed river, in comparison to adjacent municipalities that are not on the river.

Bao finds that the Chinese government has been remarkably good at compensating those communities who suffer when dams are built.  Municipalities upstream of a dam lose the most revenue both while the dam is being built and after it become operational. But at the same time, the central government increases transfers to those municipalities sufficiently so that these municipalities suffer no net loss in revenue. In contrast, populations just downstream look like they benefit slightly from the dam's operation, increasing their revenue -- and it appears that the central government is also good at reducing transfers to those municipalities so that these gains are effectively "taxed away." The only group that is a clear net winner are the municipalities that host the actual dam itself, as their revenue rises and the central government provides them with additional transfers during a dam's construction.

These findings are important because we often worry that large-scale investment projects may exacerbate existing patterns of inequality, as populations that are already marginalized are saddled with new burdens for the sake of the "greater good." However, in cases where governments can effectively distribute the benefits from large projects so that no group is made worse off, then we should not let this fear prevent us from making the socially-beneficial investments in infrastructure that are essential to long run economic development.

The paper:

Dams and Intergovernmental Transfer: Are Dam Projects Pareto Improving in China?
Xiaojia Bao  

Abstract: Large-scale dams are controversial public infrastructure projects due to the unevenly distributed benefits and losses to local regions. The central government can make redistributive fiscal transfers to attenuate the impacts and reduce the inequality among local governments, but whether large-scale dam projects are Pareto improving is still a question. Using the geographic variation of dam impacts based on distances to the river and distances to dams, this paper adopts a difference-in-difference approach to estimate dam impacts at county level in China from 1996 to 2010. I find that a large-scale dam reduces local revenue in upstream counties significantly by 16%, while increasing local revenue by similar magnitude in dam-site counties. The negative revenue impacts in upstream counties are mitigated by intergovernmental transfers from the central government, with an increase rate around 13% during the dam construction and operation periods. No significant revenue and transfer impacts are found in downstream counties, except counties far downstream. These results suggest that dam-site counties benefit from dam projects the most, and intergovernmental transfers help to balance the negative impacts of dams in upstream counties correspondingly, making large-scale dam projects close to Pareto improving outcomes in China.

In figures...

In China, Bao obtains the location, height, and construction start/stop dates for all dams built before 2010.

click to enlarge

For every dam, Bao follows the corresponding river and calculates which municipalities are "upstream" and which are "downstream." She then computes finds comparison "control" municipalities that are adjacent to these "treatment" municipalities (to account for regional trends). Here is an example for a single dam:

Click to enlarge

Bao estimates the average effect of dam construction (top) and operation(bottom) on municipal revenues as a function of distance upstream (left) or downstream (right).  Locations just upstream lose revenue, perhaps from losing land (inundation) or pollution. Locations at the dam gain revenue, perhaps because of spillovers from dam-related activity (eg. consumer spending). During operation, downstream locations benefit slightly, perhaps from flood control.

click to enlarge

Government transfers during construction/operation upstream/downstream. Upstream locations receive large positive transfers. Municipalities at the dam receive transfers during construction. Downstream locations lose some transfers (taxed away).

click to enlarge

Transfers (y-axis) vs. revenue (x-axis) for locations upstream/downstream and at the dam site, during dam construction. Locations are net "winners" if they are northeast of the grey triangle. Upstream municipalities are more than compensated for their lost revenue through transfers.   Municipalities at the dam site benefit through revenue increases and transfers.

click to enlarge

Same, but for dam operation (after construction is completed). Upstream locations are compensated for losses. Benefits to downstream locations are taxed away. Dam-site locations are net "winners".

Click to enlarge

Urban bus pollution and infant health: how New York City's smog reduction program generates millions of dollars in benefits

Jesse and I both come from the Sustainable Development PhD Program at Columbia which has once again turned out a remarkable crop of job market candidates (see outcomes from 2012 and 2011). We both agreed that their job market papers were so innovative, diverse, rigorous and important that we wanted to feature them at FE.  Their results are striking and deserve dissemination (we would probably post them anyway even if the authors weren't on the market), but they also clearly illustrate what the what the Columbia program is all about. (Apply to it here, hire one of these candidates here.) Here is the second post.

Around the world, diesel-powered vehicles play a major role in moving people and goods. In particular, buses are heavily utilized in densely populated cities where large numbers of people are exposed to their exhaust. If bus exhaust has an impact on human health, then urban policy-makers would want to know this since it will affect whether or not it's worth it to invest in cleaner bus technologies. Upgrading the quality of public transport systems is usually expensive, but upgrading could have potentially large benefits since so many people live in dense urban centers and are exposed to their pollution. Deciding whether or not to invest in cleaner bus technologies is an important policy decision made by city officials, since buses aren't replaced very often and poor choices can affect city infrastructure for decades -- so its important that policy-makers know what the trade offs are when they make these decisions.

Unfortunately, to date, it has been extremely difficult to know if there are any effects of bus pollution on human health because cities are complex and bustling environments where people are constantly exposed to all sorts of rapidly changing environmental conditions. As one might imagine, looking at a city of ten-million people, each of whom is engaged daily in dozens of interacting activities, and trying to disentangle the web of factors that affect human health to isolate the effect of bus pollution is a daunting task. To tackle this problem, we would need to assemble a lot of data and conduct a careful analysis. This is exactly what Nicole Ngo has done.

Between 1990 and 2010,  New York City made major investments that transformed the city's bus fleet, reducing its emissions dramatically. To study the impact of this policy on human health, Ngo assembled a new massive data set that details exactly which bus drove on which route at what time every single day. Because the city's transition from dirty buses to clean buses occurred gradually over time, and because the dispatcher at the bus depot randomly assigns buses to different routes at different times, the people who live along bus routes were sometimes exposed to exhaust from dirtier buses and sometimes exposed to exhaust from clean buses.  By comparing health outcomes in households that are randomly exposed to the dirtier bus pollution with comparable households randomly exposed to cleaner bus pollution, Ngo can isolate the effect of the bus pollution on health.

In this paper, Ngo focuses on infant health (although I expect she will use this unique data set to study many more outcomes in the future) and measures the effect of a mother's exposure to bus pollution during pregnancy on a child's health at birth.  This is hard problem, since its impossible to know exactly all the different things that a mother does while she's pregnant and because Ngo has to use pollution data collected from air-quality monitors to model how pollution spreads from bus routes to nearby residences.  Despite these challenges, Ngo is able to detect the effect of in utero exposure to bus pollution on an infant's health at birth.  Fetuses that are exposed to higher levels of bus-generated Nitrous-Oxides (NOx) during their second and third trimester have a lower birthweight on average and fetuses exposed to more bus-generated particulate matter (PM) during those trimesters have a lower Apgar 5 score (a doctors subjective evaluation of newborn health).

The size of the effects that Ngo measures are relatively small for any individual child (so if you are pregnant and living near a bus route, you shouldn't panic).  But the aggregate effect of New York City's investment in clean buses is large, since there are many pregnant mothers who live near bus routes and who were exposed to less dangerous emissions because of these policies. Since its easiest to think about city-wide impacts using monetized measures, and because previous studies have demonstrated that higher birth weight causes an infants future income to be higher, Ngo aggregates these small impacts across many babies and estimates that the city's effort to upgrade buses increase total future earnings of these children by $66 million. Considering that the city upgraded roughly 4500 buses, this implies that each bus that was upgraded generated about $1,460 in value just through its influence on infant health and future earnings. Importantly however, Ngo notes:

This [benefit] is likely a lower bound since I do not consider increased hospitalizations costs from lower birth weights as discussed in Almond et al. (2005), nor could I find short-run or long-run costs associated with lower Apgar 5 scores.

and I expect that Ngo will uncover additional health benefits of New York City's bus program, which will likely increase estimates for the program's total benefits. Furthermore, I suspect that these estimates for the value of pollution control can be extrapolated to diesel trucks, although Ngo is appropriately cautious about doing so in her formal analysis.

These results are important for urban planners and policy-makers in cities around the world who must decide whether or not it is worth it to invest in cleaner public transit systems.  In addition, they are an excellent example of how great data and careful analysis can help us understand important human-environment relationships in complex urban systems.

The paper:

Transit buses and fetal health: An evaluation of bus pollution policies in New York City 

Nicole Ngo

Abstract The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reduced emission standards for transit buses by 98% between 1988 and 2010. I exploit the variation caused by these policy changes to evaluate the impacts of transit bus pollution policies on fetal health in New York City (NYC) by using bus vintage as a proxy for street-level bus emissions. I construct a novel panel data set for the NYC Transit bus fleet to assign maternal exposure to bus pollution at the census block level. Results show a 10% reduction in emission standards for particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) during pregnancy increased infant Apgar 5 scores by 0.003 points and birth weight by 6.6 grams. While the impacts on fetal health are modest, the sensitivity of later-life outcomes to prenatal conditions suggests improved emission standards between 1990 and 2009 have increased total earnings for the 2009 birth cohort who live near bus routes in NYC by at least $65.7 million.

In figures...

Bus routes in New York City, which Ngo links to residential exposure through geospatial analysis:

(click to enlarge)

Buses are upgraded throughout the two decades, with several large and abrupt changes in the fleet's composition:

(click to enlarge)

When dirtier buses are randomly assigned to travel a route, Ngo can detect this using air-monitoring stations near that route:

(click to enlarge)

Using her mathematical model of bus pollution (and its spatial diffusion) Ngo computes how New York City's investment in buses lead to a dramatic reduction in exposure to bus-generated pollutants:

(click to enlarge)

Exposure to bus-generated NOx during the second and third trimesters lowers birthweight, and exposure to bus-generated PM lowers Apgar5 scores:

(click to enlarge)

Job placements (2012) for Columbia University's Sustainable Development PhD program

Apparently there are fantastic jobs for people with doctorates in Sustainable Development (who knew?).  New placements this year:

Ram Fishman will begin as an assistant professor of economics and public policy at George Washington University.

Geoffrey Johnston will be starting a post doc at Johns Hopkins doing malaria modeling.

Jesse Anttila-Hughes (yes, our Jesse) will begin an appointment as an assistant professor of economics at the University of San Francisco.

Mark Orrs will begin as a professor of practice in sustainable development at Lehigh University.

I (Sol Hsiang) be joining Jesse in the bay area in Fall 2013 as an assistant prof. of public policy at Berkeley.

Fight Entropy is moving to San Francisco! 

Placements from 2011 are here.

Columbia's IPWSD 2012 is this Friday

The second Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (previously here) is this coming weekend. The workshop is organized by our Ph.D. program's Sustainable Development Doctoral Society
and showcases current work on sustainability issues by Ph.D. students at institutions around the world. The lineup of student papers looks fantastic this year, so if you're in town Friday or Saturday you may want to swing by. The full schedule is available here.

New tool for interfering with malaria transmission

Geoff Johnston, a doctoral candidate at Columbia's PhD in Sustainable Development, is on the team behind this recent study in PNAS.  He's promised us a non-technical summary soon.

Quantitative assessment of Plasmodium falciparum sexual development reveals potent transmission-blocking activity by methylene blue

Sophie H. Adjalleya, Geoffrey L. Johnston, Tao Li, Richard T. Eastman, Eric H. Ekland, Abraham G. Eappen, Adam Richman, B. Kim Lee Sim, Marcus C. S. Lee, Stephen L. Hoffman, and David A. Fidock

Abstract: Clinical studies and mathematical models predict that, to achieve malaria elimination, combination therapies will need to incorporate drugs that block the transmission of Plasmodium falciparum sexual stage parasites to mosquito vectors. Efforts to measure the activity of existing antimalarials on intraerythrocytic sexual stage gametocytes and identify transmission-blocking agents have, until now, been hindered by a lack of quantitative assays. Here, we report an experimental system using P. falciparum lines that stably express gametocyte-specific GFP-luciferase reporters, which enable the assessment of dose- and time-dependent drug action on gametocyte maturation and transmission. These studies reveal activity of the first-line antimalarial dihydroartemisinin and the partner drugs lumefantrine and pyronaridine against early gametocyte stages, along with moderate inhibition of mature gametocyte transmission to Anopheles mosquitoes. The other partner agents monodesethyl-amodiaquine and piperaquine showed activity only against immature gametocytes. Our data also identify methylene blue as a potent inhibitor of gametocyte development across all stages. This thiazine dye almost fully abolishes P. falciparum transmission to mosquitoes at concentrations readily achievable in humans, highlighting the potential of this chemical class to reduce the spread of malaria.

From the author summary:

The scale of the malaria epidemic remains vast, causing up to 225 million symptomatic infections and ∼780,000 deaths each year, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this sobering backdrop, there are encouraging signs that treating infected individuals with antimalarial therapies and combating the Anopheles mosquito vector with insecticides can substantially reduce the burden of disease. First-line therapies rely on pairing potent derivatives of the Chinese plant extract artemisinin with longer-lasting partner drugs in regimens referred to as artemisinin-based combination therapies. Clinical reports and mathematical models indicate that additional reductions in disease incidence will require treatments that not only cure patients but also decrease the transmission of malarial parasites to Anopheles mosquitoes (1). Here, we have investigated the ability of various antimalarial agents to inhibit transmission. This work reveals that methylene blue (MB), the first synthetic compound ever used in clinical therapy (2), has potent transmission-blocking activity superior to current first-line therapies. 

Interruption of transmission can be achieved with drugs that inhibit the development of parasite sexual forms, termed gametocytes, within red blood cells. In the case of the most lethal human malaria pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum, these gametocytes progress through five developmental stages over 10–12 d before becoming infectious to mosquitoes (Fig. P1A). Prior studies have found that some drugs that target the disease-causing asexual blood stages also inhibit early stage gametocytes (3). However, identifying compounds that inhibit the metabolically less active mature stages has proven considerably more difficult, in part because of a lack of robust experimental tools. To address this concern, we have developed recombinant parasite lines and analytical methods that enable precise measurements of drug action against gametocytes as they mature and attain infectivity. 

To investigate the abilities of known antimalarials to affect gametocyte viability at different stages, we genetically modified P. falciparum parasite lines to express GFP-luciferase reporters from gene promoters known to be active in early, mid, or late stage gametocytes. The production of gametocytes was triggered by starvation-induced stress, and their subsequent development and gametocyte maturation were monitored by quantifying luciferase activity. Measurements of the rate of action of antimalarial compounds, tested at different doses in vitro, revealed the remarkable potency of the thiazine dye MB against all developmental stages (Fig. P1A). Subsequent experiments revealed that MB almost fully blocked transmission of P. falciparum gametocytes to Anopheles mosquitoes (Fig. P1B), reducing parasite infectivity by 78–100%. The small proportion of mosquitoes that were infected had a >98% reduction in the numbers of parasites developing in the midgut. Most of the effect of MB on parasite transmission can be attributed to its potent activity against mature stage V gametocytes. Parallel studies also observed a potent effect with dihydroartemisinin, the active metabolite of artemisinin compounds, with inhibition occurring primarily against early stage gametocytes. Comparable activity against early stages was observed with key partner drugs, including amodiaquine and lumefantrine (4). 

The experimental system that we developed for these studies will enable high-throughput screening to identify additional transmission-blocking compounds. Our study also provides experimental tools to further probe gametocyte biology, including studies on the cellular processes and molecular components that dictate the formation of gametocytes and promote transmission (5). A renewed emphasis on this phase of the malarial parasite life cycle, using reporter systems such as the one described here, promises to further aid expanding efforts to roll back malaria.

Who self-identifies as a sustainability scientist?

The footprint of sustainability science in terms of traditional scientific disciplines. (A) The percent distribution in terms of ISI disciplines determined based on the classification of journals where publications appeared. The field receives its largest contribution (about 34%) from the social sciences, and other large contributions from biology and chemical, mechanical and civil engineering. Other important contributors are from medicine, Earth sciences, and infectious diseases. A similar analysis for sustainable development shows the same patterns with only a small 5% increase in the relative contribution of the social sciences vs. biology. Copyright PNAS.

Geographic distribution of sustainability science publications. (A) National counts of number of publications. (B) National counts for number of citations received. Fig. S4 shows the analogous map for number of citations per paper. The maps show the wide geographic distribution of the field of sustainability science. This is unusual as compared to typical specialized fields in the natural sciences, for example, and notably demonstrates the quality and quantity of contributions from many developing nations. Note the strength of smaller nations such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Africa, Kenya, and of Brazil and China. Copyright PNAS.

Cool google earth visualization here. Related post here.  The paper (open access):

Evolution and structure of sustainability science 

Luís M. A. Bettencourta and Jasleen Kaur

Abstract: The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and corporations, and their goals have become central to the mission of research laboratories and universities worldwide. However, it remains unclear how far the field has progressed as a scientific discipline, especially given its ambitious agenda of integrating theory, applied science, and policy, making it relevant for development globally and generating a new interdisciplinary synthesis across fields. To address these questions, we assembled a corpus of scholarly publications in the field and analyzed its temporal evolution, geographic distribution, disciplinary composition, and collaboration structure. We show that sustainability science has been growing explosively since the late 1980s when foundational publications in the field increased its pull on new authors and intensified their interactions. The field has an unusual geographic footprint combining contributions and connecting through collaboration cities and nations at very different levels of development. Its decomposition into traditional disciplines reveals its emphasis on the management of human, social, and ecological systems seen primarily from an engineering and policy perspective. Finally, we show that the integration of these perspectives has created a new field only in recent years as judged by the emergence of a giant component of scientific collaboration. These developments demonstrate the existence of a growing scientific field of sustainability science as an unusual, inclusive and ubiquitous scientific practice and bode well for its continued impact and longevity. 

Earth Institute online stuff

See the EI blog "Vanishing Tropical Glaciers"

I recently had the pleasure of working with Kevin Krajick and David Funkhouser at the Earth Institute (EI) and they pointed me to some useful EI resources on how to effectively discuss science with the media.

Also an interesting find is the impressive blog of the EI: State of the Planet.  They have a steady stream of solid coverage for global events, general issues and ongoing research at the EI (for example, check out this sequence of posts about the Arctic Switchyard Project).

As Jesse always says, check it out.

Columbia University's Sustainable Development PhD Graduates of 2011!

On Saturday, six of us from Columbia University's PhD program in Sustainable Development graduated amid great fanfare. In reverse alphabetical order (since Ram got to walk across the stage first):

Marta Vicarelli wrote the dissertation "Essays on Climate Risks and Vulnerability-Reduction Strategies" and will be an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst following a Postdoc at Yale University.

Anisa Khadem Nwachuku wrote the dissertation "Critiquing Economic Frameworks in Sustainable Development: Health Equity, Resource Management and Materialism" and is working for McKinsey & Company.

Gordon McCord wrote the dissertation "Essays on Malaria, Environment and Society" and will be an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations & Pacific Studies at University of California San Diego.

Chandra Kiran Krishnamurthy wrote the dissertation "Essays on Climatic Extremes, Agriculture and Natural Resources" and will be a Postdoc at Umeå University of Sweden.

Solomon Hsiang wrote the dissertation "Essays on the Social Impacts of Climate" and will be a Postdoc at Princeton University.

Mukul Ram Fishman wrote the dissertation "Theoretical and Applied Dimensions of Natural Resource Management" and will be a Postdoc at Harvard University.

Jump if you're a doctor!

May 6th-7th, 2011: Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development

LICRICE model for the global
distribution of tropical cyclone winds

Event Announcement:

Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development
May 6th-7th, 2011: Columbia University in the City of New York, USA

The Ph.D. students in Sustainable Development at Columbia University are convening the first Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (IPWSD); scheduled for May 6th-7th, 2011, at Columbia Universityin New York City.  The IPWSD is a conference open to graduate students (both Masters and Ph.D.) working on or interested in issues related to sustainable development.  It is intended to provide a forum to present and discuss research in an informal setting, as well as to meet and interact with similar graduate student researchers from other institutions.

The IPWSD schedule includes sessions by 35 speakers from institutions across the US, Europe and several other countries who will be giving talks on issues of sustainable development from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds, including economics, environmental science, engineering, psychology, sociology, law, and others. There will also be an introductory talk on Friday, May 6th,  by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, and a panel discussion on "Climate Policy in the Face of a Catastrophe" with professor Scott Barrett, professor Mark Cane, and Andrew Revkin, editor of the "Dot Earth" blog for the New York Times.

For further details on the  Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (IPWSD) please refer to our:

Homepage: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/sdds/schedule-events/ipwsd/

Program/Schedule: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/sdds/schedule-events/ipwsd/program

To attend, please RSVP to: cu.sdds.ipwsd@gmail.com by Wednesday, May 4th.

Sustainable Development Articles

Our colleague James Rising points us to his newly coded up creation Sustainable Development Articles:

I put together a site for collecting Sustainable Development papers and articles! This is for all of us who wish there were a better way to find, share, and keep track of good SD reading material.

[...]

If you use Mendeley [previously blogged on FE here] for organizing your papers, you can drag-and-drop papers into the site by joining the Mendeley group "Sustainable Development to sd.existencia.org Bridge" and putting the papers there. With a delay (~ 1 hr), they'll show up on the site!

There's already a bunch of great stuff up there. Go take a look.

Welcome High School for Environmental Studies students!

Greetings and welcome to students from the High School for Environmental Studies!

Sol and I have gotten wind that you're going to be our online guests leading up to our talk on April 5th. We're very happy to have you guys here and hope you're as excited as we are. We've set up this page up so you have an easy and accessible place to find out more about climate change, sustainable development, and our research. In particular you might want to check out any post tagged with the HSES tag, since those are going to be oriented more specifically towards you. Please feel free to check back every now and then for new content and links, and if you have any questions don't hesitate to email either of us (Jesse: jka2110@columbia.edu Sol: smh2137@columbia.edu).

Assorted reference links:

• The Sustainable Development Ph.D. program at Columbia
• Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz are our program's (very interesting) co-founders
• Jesse and Sol's personal websites
• What is economic development?
• What is sustainable development?
• Understanding the science behind climate change

Previous posts on the blog that you might like:

• Understanding nuclear accidents
• How we know what we know about the climate
• Urban ecology doesn't care about your locavore agenda
• The structure of human knowledge
• Risk denialism and the costs of prevention

General advice on getting ready for college, research, environmentalism, etc.:

• Study Hacks is a great resource for students of any age, but especially for those of you preparing for (and stressing out about) college
• What is the purpose of research?
• Sustainability as a simple concept: The parable of St. Matthew Island

Urban ecology doesn't care about your locavore agenda

I'm not sure how well this comes through on the blog, but Sol and I (and, I think it's safe to say, many if not most of the people in our program) have fairly nuanced views on the subjects that people normally associate with "sustainability." Green architecture, recycling, organic foods, hybrid cars, and a host of other topics that spring to mind when someone mentions sustainability tend to be partial solutions to complex problems, and the ways in which they interrelate and sometimes even interfere with each other can be very difficult to disentangle. A really lovely example of this comes from today's NY Times article about urban beekeepers' honey turning red:

Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Ms. Mayo, who tends seven hives for Added Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.**

I think this a really lovely illustration of how the ways in which we like to conceptualize "doing the right thing" and "acting sustainably" are often based on very tenuous understandings of how science and complex systems actually work. Proponents of eating locally make many claims about its benefits that are often unproven, or difficult to test, or sometimes even known ex-ante to be false. That's not to say that eating locally is not a good thing; it's to say that the answer to that question is complicated and depends on factors that vary with geography, the food in question, what you consider to be 'local,' etc.

Which is why this is such an interesting little article. Urban apiculture has become very popular of late and, I'd say, is probably on bar a pretty good thing; the value from having more pollinators around alone is probably fairly high, and if people are getting good honey out of it all the better. But pursuing local food as a sort of monolithic good is bound to fail, sometimes in predictable ways like the disconnect between local net primary productive potential and local demand, and sometimes in unpredictable ways such as having your honey turn up shades of Red Dye No. 40. Food production is inextricably and definably a part of the local ecology, and when your local ecology is urban that means you're going to end up with different outcomes than out in farmland.

So, if this post were to have a moral (and not to pick on these beekeepers because, like I said, I think urban apiaries are pretty net beneficial), it's this: don't take as received wisdom what those around you claim is "sustainable"; don't claim that the solution to a sustainability problem you've currently settled on is fool-proof or even the right one; and internalize the fact that the world is a complex place and thus anyone who claims they've figured out an answer to a major problem and are "trying to do their part" to advance sustainability should be able to robustly prove that that's true or else humbly say that they don't know.

* Note: Photo copyright New York Times 2010.

** I'd just like to say that, as a native New Yorker, I'm not very surprised that Red Hook was causing trouble.

The structure of human knowledge

Following up on Jesse's post:

After dinner today I told Brenda that I wanted a network map of all papers ever written so we could see where the biggest gaps in human knowledge were. In moments she had us browsing the site well-formed.eigenfactor.org looking at a coarser approximation of my dream (see picture).

I highly recommend any academic or casual intellectual browse the highly interactive site, it is simply too interesting, beautiful and [maybe] important to ignore.

Perhaps the two most striking observations one can make from simple visual inspection are that (1) biologists write a lot of papers and (2) social sciences/mathematics/computer science are extremely insular (observe the big "hole" in the network picture).

I'll let the data speak for itself (please please look at the site); but the only thing I'll say is that if anyone wanted to create a new field, bridging the social and physical sciences looks like a conspicuously good place to start.

Sustainable Development PhD Research Symposium Oct 28th

Here is the Earth Institute announcement for an upcoming event at Columbia University on October 28th.

Sustainable Development Ph.D. Research Symposium

Date: Thursday, October 28th

Time: 4.00-6.30 PM

Location: Jed D. Satow Conference Room; 5th Floor, Lerner Hall; Columbia University

---

---

The first annual Sustainable Development Ph.D. Research Symposium has been scheduled for Thursday, October 28th, 4.00-6:30 PM, in the Jed D. Satow Conference Room (5th Floor, Lerner Hall).

The purpose of the symposium is to showcase the pioneering research of the Ph.D. Program in Sustainable Development’s 5th and 6th year doctoral candidates to the wider Columbia University community and invited guests from the private sector, governments, and NGOs. It will be attended by: the Director of the Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs; the Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Prof. John Coatsworth; the program’s Academic Directors, Prof. John Mutter and Prof. Wolfram Schlenker; and many of the program’s core faculty.

The symposium will consist of a series of short presentations, followed by short question and answer sessions and a general discussion.  The topics of the presentations will cover many of the most pressing global sustainability issues, including the global economic losses to tropical cyclones, the future of India’s dwindling groundwater resources, drought and floods and poverty traps in rural Mexico, the effects of climate change on Indian agriculture and the connections between Malaria ecology and demography.

---

---

SCHEDULED SPEAKERS:

(1) Chandra Kiran Krishnamurthy: A Quantile Regression Approach to Estimating Climate Change Impacts on Crop Yields. [Link to Chandra's profile].

(2) Gordon McCord: Improving Empirical Estimation of Demographic Drivers: Fertility, Child Mortality & Malaria Ecology. [Link to Gordon's profile].

(3) Anisa Khadem Nwachuku: The Materialism Paradigm: Neither Sustainable, nor Development. [Link to Anisa's profile].

(4) Marta Vicarelli: Exogenous Income Shocks and Consumption Smoothing, Strategies Among Rural Households in Mexico. [Link to Marta's profile].

(5) Jesse Anttila-Hughes: The Long Term Fertility Impacts of Natural Disasters. [Link to Jesse's profile].

(6) Ram Fishman: How Low Will It Go?  The Future of Groundwater Tables and Irrigation in India. [Link to Ram's profile].

(7) Solomon Hsiang: Global Economic Losses to Tropical Cyclones. [Link to Solomon's profile].

(8) Aly Sanoh: Municipal Taxes, Income, and Rainfall Uncertainty. [Link to Aly's profile].

Madagascar

Jesse and I have been working hard and haven't posted anything in a while. I don't have much time to offer comments, but this is a really interesting piece in last month's NGM.  It follows groups of loggers and others in Madagascar and I think it does a good job capturing some of the challenges of development and the political economy of resource extraction.

For anyone who's interested in commitment problems of political economy, this is a good quote:

In September 2009, after months during which up to 460,000 dollars' worth of rosewood was being illegally harvested every day, the cash-strapped new government reversed a 2000 ban on the export of rosewood and released a decree legalizing the sale of stockpiled logs. Pressured by an alarmed international community, the government reinstated the ban in April. 

And I also liked this breakdown of who gets to keep what from the forest:

For weeks they camp out in small groups beside the trees they've singled out for cutting, subsisting on rice and coffee, until the boss shows up. He inspects the rosewood, gives the order. They chop away with axes. Within hours a tree that first took root perhaps 500 years ago has fallen to the ground. The cutters hack away at its white exterior until all that remains is its telltale violet heart. The rosewood is cut into logs about seven feet long. Another team of two men tie ropes around each log and proceed to drag it out of the forest to the river's edge, a feat that will take them two days and earn them $10 to $20 a log, depending on the distance. While staggering through the forest myself, from time to time I come upon the jarring apparition of two stoic figures tugging a 400-pound log up some impossible gradient or down a waterfall or across quicksand-like bogs—a hard labor of biblical scale, except that these men are doing this for money. As is the man the pair would meet up with at the river, waiting to tie the log to a handcrafted radeau, or raft, to help it float down the rapids ($25 a log). As is the pirogueman awaiting the radeau where the rapids subside ($12 a log). As is the park ranger whom the timber bosses have bribed to stay away ($200 for two weeks). As are police at checkpoints along the road to Antalaha ($20 an officer). The damage to the forest is far more than the loss of the precious hardwoods: For each dense rosewood log, four or five lighter trees are cut down to create the raft that will transport it down the river.

At a bend in the river, the pirogues pull up to shore. A man with a mustache squats in a tent, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. His name is Dieudonne. He works with the middleman, the boss on the ground, entrusted by the timber baron to select the trees for cutting and oversee the logs from the riverbank to the transport trucks. There have been 18 trucks this morning. Thirty or so rosewood logs lie scattered around Dieudonne's tent. His cut is $12 a log.