Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

cognitive bias

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This open access article has a nice summary of cognitive bias research.

Black swans, cognition, and the power of learning from failure

Failure carries undeniable stigma and is difficult to confront for individuals, teams, and organizations. Disciplines such as commercial and military aviation, medicine, and business have long histories of grappling with it, beginning with the recognition that failure is inevitable in every human endeavor. Although conservation may arguably be more complex, conservation professionals can draw on the research and experience of these other disciplines to institutionalize activities and attitudes that foster learning from failure, whether they are minor setbacks or major disasters. Understanding the role of individual cognitive biases, team psychological safety, and organizational willingness to support critical self‐examination all contribute to creating a cultural shift in conservation to one that is open to the learning opportunity that failure provides. This new approach to managing failure is a necessary next step in the evolution of conservation effectiveness.

dystopian Schumpeter meets Keynes

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This article is about a serious attempt to consider climate change in a traditional economic model. Where does the dystopian part come in? Well, it sounds like the model suggests we are not going to innovate our way out of the consequences of climate change.

For these reasons, we develop the Dystopian Schumpeter meeting Keynes (DSK) model, which is the first attempt to provide a fully-fledged agent-based integrated assessment framework. It builds on Dosi et al. (2010, 2013, 2016) and extends the Keynes+Schumpeter (K+S) family of models, which account for endogenous growth, business cycles and crises. The model is composed by heterogeneous firms belonging to a capital-good industry and to a consumption-good sector. Firms are fed by an energy sector, which employ dirty or green power plants. The production activities of energy and manufacturing firms lead to CO2 emissions, which increase the Earth surface temperature in a non-linear way as in Sterman et al. (2013). Increasing temperatures trigger micro stochastic climate damages impacting in a heterogeneous way on workers’ labour productivity, and on the energy efficiency, capital stock and inventories of firms.

The DSK model accounts both for frequent and mild climate shocks and low-probability but extreme climate events. Technical change occurs both in the manufacturing and energy sectors. Innovation determines the cost of energy produced by dirty and green technologies, which, in turn, affect the energy-technology production mix and the total amount of CO2 emissions. In that, structural change of the economy is intimately linked to the climate dynamics. At the same time, climate shocks affect economic growth, business cycles, technical-change trajectories, green-house gas emissions, and global temperatures…

Simulation results show that the DSK model is able to replicate a wide array of micro and macro-economic stylized facts and climate-related statistical regularities. Moreover, the exploration of different climate shock scenarios reveals that the impact of climate change on economic performances is substantial, but highly heterogeneous, depending on the type of climate damages. More specifcally, climate shocks to labour productivity and capital stocks lead to the largest output losses and the highest economic instability, respectively. We also
find that the ultimate macroeconomic damages emerging from the aggregation of agent-level shocks are more severe than those obtained by standard IAMs, with the emergence of tipping-points and irreversible catastrophic events.

abrupt ecological change

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Being able to forecast abrupt ecological change might be a good idea.

Abrupt Change in Ecological Systems: Inference and Diagnosis

Abrupt ecological changes are, by definition, those that occur over short periods of time relative to typical rates of change for a given ecosystem. The potential for such changes is growing due to anthropogenic pressures, which challenges the resilience of societies and ecosystems. Abrupt ecological changes are difficult to diagnose because they can arise from a variety of circumstances, including rapid changes in external drivers (e.g., climate, or resource extraction), nonlinear responses to gradual changes in drivers, and interactions among multiple drivers and disturbances. We synthesize strategies for identifying causes of abrupt ecological change and highlight instances where abrupt changes are likely. Diagnosing abrupt changes and inferring causation are increasingly important as society seek to adapt to rapid, multifaceted environmental changes.

how fish will move under climate change

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It seems to me that fish might be able to adapt to climate change a little easier than other species, because they can just swim to a new part of the ocean that is now like what their old part of the ocean used to be like.

Projecting shifts in thermal habitat for 686 species on the North American continental shelf

Recent shifts in the geographic distribution of marine species have been linked to shifts in preferred thermal habitats. These shifts in distribution have already posed challenges for living marine resource management, and there is a strong need for projections of how species might be impacted by future changes in ocean temperatures during the 21st century. We modeled thermal habitat for 686 marine species in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans using long-term ecological survey data from the North American continental shelves. These habitat models were coupled to output from sixteen general circulation models that were run under high (RCP 8.5) and low (RCP 2.6) future greenhouse gas emission scenarios over the 21st century to produce 32 possible future outcomes for each species. The models generally agreed on the magnitude and direction of future shifts for some species (448 or 429 under RCP 8.5 and RCP 2.6, respectively), but strongly disagreed for other species (116 or 120 respectively). This allowed us to identify species with more or less robust predictions. Future shifts in species distributions were generally poleward and followed the coastline, but also varied among regions and species. Species from the U.S. and Canadian west coast including the Gulf of Alaska had the highest projected magnitude shifts in distribution, and many species shifted more than 1000 km under the high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Following a strong mitigation scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement would likely produce substantially smaller shifts and less disruption to marine management efforts. Our projections offer an important tool for identifying species, fisheries, and management efforts that are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Climate Change and Global Child Health

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According to the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Climate change threatens to reverse the gains in global child health and the reductions in global child mortality made over the past 25 years. There is broad recognition that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are causing climate change. The problem of climate change transcends geopolitical boundaries and will have extensive impacts on child health and security. With implications for all of humanity, climate change will disproportionately affect children and the poor, magnifying existing disparities in social determinates of health.

I don’t know if “reverse” means we stop making gains, or if child mortality rates actually revert to where they were 25 years ago. Either way, it kind of suggests the amazing progress of recent decades may have peaked, at least for the time being.

dematerialization and decoupling

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This paper is called Dematerialization, Decoupling, and Productivity Change. These are all buzzwords that will catch my eye. It makes a distinction between relative (ecological footprint is growing slower than the economy) and absolute (ecological footprint is not growing or is shrinking) decoupling. If you accept the concept that ecological footprint cannot grow forever, the distinction is important! This paper seems to cast doubt on the idea that there is any soft landing where absolute decoupling occurs automatically or by choice without significant pain.

The prospects for long-term sustainability depend on whether, and how much, we can absolutely decouple economic output from total energy and material throughput. While relative decoupling has occurred – that is, resource use has grown less quickly than the economy – absolute decoupling has not, raising the question whether it is possible. This paper proposes a novel explanation for why decoupling has not happened historically, drawing on a recent theory of cost-share induced productivity change and an extension of post-Keynesian pricing theory to natural resources. Cost-share induced productivity change and pricing behavior set up two halves of a dynamic, which we explore from a post-Keynesian perspective. In this dynamic, resource costs as a share of GDP move toward a stable level, at which the growth rate of resource productivity is typically less than the growth rate of GDP. This provides a parsimonious explanation of the prevalence of relative over absolute decoupling. The paper then presents some illustrative applications of the theory.

climate-friendly investing as a stag hunt

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No, the idea is not that killing and eating stags has a lower carbon footprint than beef (although it might, but if everyone did it would there be enough stags to go around?). The stag hunt is a game studied by game theorists similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Players can maximize their outcome by cooperating, but there is a risk in assuming other players will also cooperate, and therefore an incentive to make choices that are low-risk for individuals but sub-optimal for everyone.

Green Investment and Coordination Failure: An Investors’ Perspective

To achieve the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C, private investors have to shift capital from brown to green infrastructures and technologies and provide additional green investment. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic perspective on the challenge of triggering such investments. The question of climate change mitigation is often related to the prisoner’s dilemma, a game with one Nash equilibrium. However, the authors perceive investment for mitigation and adaptation as a coordination problem of selecting among multiple equilibria. To illustrate this, we model a non-cooperative coordination game, related to the stag hunt, with a brown equilibrium with lower payoffs that can be achieved single-handedly and a green equilibrium with higher payoffs that requires coordination. As multiple experiments show, in such games actors often fail to coordinate on a payoff dominant equilibrium due to uncertainty. Thus, we discuss how uncertainty could be reduced along two options: one that concerns a change in the payoff structure of the game and another that concerns subjective probabilities.

value of learning curves in climate change planning

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This article gives an example of how to put an economic value on climate change adaptation incorporated in a larger planning framework.

The Economic Value of Climate Information in Adaptation Decisions: Learning in the Sea-level Rise and Coastal Infrastructure Context

Traditional methods of investment appraisal have been criticized in the context of climate change adaptation. Economic assessment of adaptation options needs to explicitly incorporate the uncertainty of future climate conditions and should recognise that uncertainties may diminish over time as a result of improved understanding and learning. Real options analysis (ROA) is an appraisal tool developed to incorporate concepts of flexibility and learning that relies on probabilistic data to characterise uncertainties. It is also a relatively resource-intensive decision support tool. We test whether, and to what extent, learning can result from the use of successive generations of real life climate scenarios, and how non-probabilistic uncertainties can be handled through adapting the principles of ROA in coastal economic adaptation decisions. Using a relatively simple form of ROA on a vulnerable piece of coastal rail infrastructure in the United Kingdom, and two successive UK climate assessments, we estimate the values associated with utilising up-dated information on sea-level rise. The value of learning can be compared to the capital cost of adaptation investment, and may be used to illustrate the potential scale of the value of learning in coastal protection, and other adaptation contexts.

envisioning a water-energy utility with smart metering

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This article envisions a single utility that provides water, electricity, and natural gas service, meters all three at the household level, and is able to integrate them using smart grid concepts. To me it illustrates some concepts of how multiple utilities and government agencies, each making cost effective operating and capital investment decisions within their narrowly defined missions, do not necessarily add up to an efficient whole.

Integrated intelligent water-energy metering systems and informatics: Visioning a digital multi-utility service provider

Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.

gamification and water planning

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This article is about gamification and water planning.

A review of water-related serious games to specify use in environmental Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Serious games and gamification are nowadays pervasive. They are used to communicate about science and sometimes to involve citizens in science (e.g. citizen science). Concurrently, environmental decision analysis is challenged by the high cognitive load of the decision-making process and the possible biases threatening the rationality assumptions. Difficult decision-making processes can result in incomplete preference construction, and are generally limited to few participants. We reviewed 43 serious games and gamified applications related to water. We covered the broad diversity of serious games, which could be explained by the still unsettled terminology in the research area of gamification and serious gaming. We discuss how existing games could benefit early steps of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), including problem structuring, stakeholder analysis, defining objectives, and exploring alternatives. We argue that no existing game allows for preference elicitation; one of the most challenging steps of MCDA. We propose many research opportunities for behavioral operational research.