Global change and regional integrity

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Ecological Modelling 75/76 (1994) 213-220

Global change and regional integrity J e n n i f e r M. R o b i n s o n * Environmental Research Center Leipzig-Halle, Applied Landscape Ecology, Permoserstr 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

Abstract

Global change involves multiple, strongly interactive systems and strong regional differentiation. Reality is extremely complex, and it is hard to model Global Change on a regional level, particularly for formerly communist areas of Central and Eastern Europe, where it is imperative that the analytic framework provide insight for restructuring after collapse. The Applied Landscape Ecology (ALC)) section of Umweltforschungszentrum Leipzig-Halle (UFZ), approached this methodological quandary with a hierarchical research framework which allows for interaction of conceptual (strategic), operational (dynamic), and tactical (detailed informational) layers. After a year of work, we find that our plan was conceptually naive in assuming that existing models could be adapted to address the critical problems in our region, and operationally naive in not allowing for people, procedures, organizational culture and politics. Key words: Global change; Environmental planning

I. Introduction

Humans are reshaping all regions of the Earth through processes such as soil erosion, percolation of pollutants into the ground water, and the movement of long lived toxins through food chains. Because these processes occur on time scales of human generations, they are easily entrained into feedbacks with economic, sociologic and political systems. It is likely that such feedbacks will overwhelm the hypothetical ceteris paribus dynamics of the physical system over the course of a

* Corresponding author. Present address: National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, SUNY, Box 610023, Buffalo, NY 14261, USA. 0304-3800/94/$07.00 © 1994 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI O304-3800(93)EO130-U

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few human generations. Models that fail to account for such feedbacks are likely to be seriously wrong. Some aspects of the system, notably commodity and financial markets, culture, and the fluid envelope (oceans and atmosphere), are globalized. These global features link what are otherwise strongly differentiated regions. In some cases, social linkages may be more important than physical ones. For example, Europe has severely depleted its non-renewable resource base, developed meta-stable patterns of renewable resource management and advanced to a state of slow population increase. Because European agriculture is over-productive and food constitutes a minor portion of the daily expenditures of the average European, her climate-food system is well-buffered. Europe's industrial metabolism, however, is fueled by imports and exports and is poorly buffered against feedbacks running through the politics of international trade. This paper reflects on (1) how Global Change studies have attempted to represent reality; (2) why integrated modeling is difficult; and (3) an alternative approach attempted at the Umweltforschungszentrum, Leipzig-Halle, Applied Landscape Ecology section (UFZ:ALt3).

2. How Global Change is usually modeled

Global Change is usually equated to physical, mechanistic, relatively well understood drives and linkages. Most studies focus on a few disciplinary fields. Feedbacks and co-occurring processes in other disciplines, particularly from social sciences, are widely omitted 'for simplicity'. Below I consider how narrow bounds and omission of feedback may affect studies of the agricultural consequences of climatic change. Climate-agriculture studies normally focus on crop yields, omit market feedbacks and assume that farmers do not adapt to climate change. Yet given several years to adjust, farmers are highly adaptive (e.g., Hayami and Ruttan, 1985), and given adequate incentives and policy support, the agricultural sector can do much to mitigate the effects of warming. On periods of decades, technological change, i.e., genetic engineering, may greatly increase agricultural potential. Trends will almost certainly be affected by feedbacks. Given the chronic agricultural surpluses in many parts of the world, lower yields mean higher prices, greater agricultural investment, and increased production. This feedback is manifested through global commodity market and its representation requires global agricultural production and trade models. Commodity markets, however, are strongly distorted by policy and institutional agreements (Liverman, 1987) and the adequacy of conventional models, which omit such factors, is questionable. Other feedbacks are likely to be strong four decades hence, particularly if global population has doubled and petroleum reserves have become seriously depleted. Greater food needs should, ceteris paribus, feed back to stimulate increased production. However, agricultural costs may rise due to increasing energy costs,

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loss of agricultural soils, conflicts between agriculture and other sectors for water, and needs to restrain agricultural pollution.

3. Perverse reality Nature is anything but 'pure and simple'. Climate, geochemistry, hydrology, biological populations, and the other ecosystem components interact freely, on a baffling variety of scales in time and space. Cross-cutting models are inherently difficult to construct. Disciplines and sub-disciplines grow up around areas where Nature is mathematically and structurally consistent. Chemistry works with kinetics and stochiometry; climatology and oceanography use fluid dynamics; population ecology uses demographics, etc. Crossing disciplinary lines forces one to confront the mathematical inconsistencies of Nature, with a result that is ordinarily called 'interface' problems. Complex systems respond, simultaneously, to subsystems, neighbors, and supersystems. Nature shifts in and out of chaotic behavior. Chaos on one level provides shocks that are in effect stochastic to adjacent levels. In one domain (river systems, tree branching) Nature is self-similar, in another (cellular to biochemical processes), not. In one domain (planktonic food webs) she appears networked, in another (Linnean taxonomy) hierarchical, and in a third (community), weak hierarchical structure links networked and semi-autonomous operators (organisms). Optimizing tendencies are common, but optimization is usually perverted by imperfect information, dynamics, conflicts between local and more general optima, etc. Semi-autonomous closed systems are periodically overwhelmed by a super-system (weather, toxic events), or sister system (invasion), or by unstable behavior of their own subsystems (pathology). Nonlinearities occasionally cause normally-weak linkages to become strong or amplify small effects. Linkages are such that indirect effects are often stronger than direct effects.., and indirect effects manifested through system facets that we have omitted from our models can easily make fools of us. Thus, unlike classical physics and chemistry where equations can pose as Law, modelers of complex systems can produce only partial analogies of a real situation. On the scale of decades to centuries, human intervention complicates natural systems in a least three ways. First, as dramatically pointed out in the Club of Rome studies (e.g., Forrester, 1971; Meadows et al., 1972), human population growth, industrial growth, and agricultural growth have reinforced one another over the last century, leading to ever increasing pressure on natural systems, and momentum that has the potential to produce overshoot and collapse. As a result, pure expression natural ecosystem dynamics is likely to become increasingly rare, and a mixture of perturbed, partially controlled, and engineered ecosystems is likely to become the norm. Biology may provide surprises as we rearrange and violate the integrity of self-organizing systems. High population densities and fast exchanges make us vulnerable to epidemics. We cannot calculate the probability that the AIDS epidemic will be followed by an equally deadly but more contagious

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plague, nor can we rule out the possible evolution of an uncontrollable diseases of rice, wheat, maize, potatoes, or soybeans. Second, changing technostructure alters what is physically and biologically possible and rearranges the spatial and temporal organization of systems. Modern problems with nitrogen excess in regions of intensive agricultural production follow directly from the invention of processes for synthetic fixation of nitrogen early in the century. Were it not for these inventions, food scarcity would have kept human numbers far below present levels. Late 20th century land use is strongly shaped by proliferation of internal combustion engines in the forms of automobiles, tractors, bull dozers, backhoes and chain saws. If, in the coming decades, enzyme structure and function are deciphered, and 'designer' genes bring fundamental changes to biotic processes as human aging (doubled life span), photosynthesis (development of a super-Rubisco; Morrell et al., 1992), or decay (fine tuned balance of synthesis and decay, effective removal of organic toxins) the 22nd century environment will look quite different from the late 20th century environment. Third, socio-politico-economic systems exhibit both cyclic and erratic behavior. Economies fluctuate with amplitudes at least equal to those of weather systems (see Berry, 1991), and the effects of economic fluctuation contribute to changing social norms and changing patterns of land, energy, and material use. Socio-political events, such as wars, revolutions, internal collapse of regimes, and the formation of cartels periodically redirect the bumpy progress of economies. For example, the ecological consequences of recent changes in Eastern Europe are far from clear, and we are fortunate to be ignorant of the ecological consequences of large-scale nuclear war. In sum, we have some ability to predict climatic change, population trends, and resource decline, but only weak predictive power with respect to technological change, and very weak predictive power for long term socio-politico-economic systems and failures in integrity of natural systems. The importance of highly uncertain areas cripples our predictive power for the system as a whole. The essential complexity of regional-to-global change, in its broad, integrated whole, is well beyond the state-of-the-art of modeling. At best, we can capture the behavior of coherently behaving subsystems, and hope we have not failed to include important slaving processes, exogenous influences, or latent internal dynamics. The single most important aspect of modeling, thus, is problem definition and choice of model boundaries. This is more art than science; there are, and can be, no recipes.

4. An approach to the dilemma

UFZ : AL() is primarily concerned with reconstruction and sustainable development of the Leipzig-Halle-Bitterfeld region. Reconstruction will take decades, and a system cannot be locally sustainable unless it also sustainable within the context of changing global realities. The following is my personal interpretation of our collective approach, but I believe it is essentially representative.

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We begin from the premise that the formerly communist regions of Europe need to develop ecologically, economically, and socially viable societies. We believe that a quality which, for present purposes, I call 'integrity' is more important than any specific problem. The term designates the property of coherent wholeness, health, and internal well-being that characterizes intact, adaptive, self-regulating and self-repairing systems. Integrity goes beyond the normal definitions of resilience, stability, or sustainability in including aesthetic value, creativity and ability of the system to seek collective betterment, including radical change if needed. The distinction is important. In the coming decades, social viability in Europe is likely to demand industrial restructuring under increasing competition with lowwage manufacturing in East Asia and eventually conversion from a petroleum-based economy. The societies that flourish in the next century will be those who effectively use the opportunities opened by social and technological change. The needed flexibility has no single source, but comes through the interaction of cultural, moral, attitudinal and institutional factors, such as know-how, cooperativeness, clear-sightedness, diversity, attitudes toward nature, work, authority, and material goods, and institutions for protecting common goods. Although these are called 'soft' factors, attempts to bring economic development to 'less developed' regions have repeatedly shown that they are hard and powerful facets of reality. In the wake of communism, cultural systems are in flux in Central and Eastern Europe. Adaptive responses are far from guaranteed, and self-destructive responses, such as ethnic violence, speculative madness, and institutional corruption, individual dishonesty, and cynicism are to be feared. For these lands 'sustainability' is an empty phrase unless it is cast in the context of social integrity. Models are inadequate tools for the problem setting. While invaluable for perceiving how, where, and why systems may become unstable and how they may respond to external forcings, models are not known for ability to come up with creative solutions or address the need for new structure to cope with changing circumstances. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions, modelers have avoided 'soft' parameters, or buried them in elasticities and dummy variables.

5. An attempt

We approached the problem hierarchically. At the top were strategic criteria. These addressed questions such as: What are viable scenarios for regional development in the face of probable events in the global system? What parameters, subsystems, subjects and linkages are important? What are the essential mathematical features of the realities of concern and the scales and methods appropriate for capturing the essence of that reality? The middle level consisted of dynamic conceptual models, designed to capture the essential behavior of the subsystems specified as strategically important and to enrich understanding of how these subsystems work. At the bottom were detail-oriented systems that project dynamic

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LEGEND

EXISTING MODELS AND LINKAGES BETWEEN THEM

INTERACTING PROBLEMS IN LEIPZIG-HALLE

REGION

Fig. 1. Model availability (top) vs. regional problems in Leipzig-Halle Bitterfeld urban conglomeration (bottom).

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concepts into spatial or categorical reality using techniques such as GIS, input-output modeling, and data base management, which move from the operational to tactical details. A Geographical Information System (GIS) that cast a large number ( ~ 50) of disciplinary dynamic models on a common map base was to play a central role in the exercise. Strategic criteria were to serve to select and integrate models and to evaluate system function. The framework was intended to permit a broader, looser sort of conceptualization, in which multiple systems co-evolve, and users may seek model inputs and model results in the form of maps. The presence of multiple models, drawing on overlapping data sets, and projected onto the same map base would make testing more rigorous by supporting checks for reasonableness and consistency between models in the spatial domain as well as in the temporal. After a year of effort, our effort is in disarray. The members of the group responsible for strategic criteria are divided over the conceptual framework. Non-trivial technical questions have arisen in trying to link dynamic models to GIS. GIS scientists and technicians got impatient for guidance on what to work on and have proceeded to occupy themselves with other tasks. Model selection has been inconclusive. Bibliographic research showed that tens of thousands of papers mentioning models have been published in the last several years. The upper panel of Fig. 1 shows how these references are distributed in subject space; the lower panel indicates the environmental problems we see as critical in our region. The available models do not address our central concerns, nor can they easily be patched together to address strategic problems, such as how to attract, design, and maintain an environmentally benign industrial metabolism. Cross-disciplinary linkages, e.g., those from the environmental quality of a region to its ability to develop and maintain a viable economic base, are poorly developed. Structural understanding of the change from socialist to market economy is extremely poor. New models may be appropriate, but their form cannot be defined without above input from the strategic level and data from the information system level.

6. Conclusions Regional aspects of Global Change are inherently difficult to study. Getting past the present, inadequate state-of-the-art requires a variety of disciplinary fields, traditions, and qualities of understanding. The various critical parts have no historical tradition of working together, and unifying them is not simple. In retrospect, our mechanistic, hierarchical approach was inadequate. As is widely recognized by information systems managers, information system design is unlikely to succeed if it considers only hardware, software and data and does not extend people, procedures, organizational culture and politics (Zack, 1992).

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References Berry, B.J.L., 1991. Long-Wave Rhythms in Economic Development and Political Behavior. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland. Forrester, J.W., 1971. World Dynamics. Wright Allen Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hayami, Y. and Ruttan, V.W., 1985. Agricultural Development: An International Perspective. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD. Liverman, D.M., 1987. Forecasting the impact of climate change on food systems: Model testing and model linkage. Climatic Change, 11: 267-285. Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W.W. III, 1972. The Limits to Growth. Universe Books, New York, NY. Morell, M.K., Paul, K., Kane, H.J. and Andrews, T.J., 1992. Rubisco: maladapted or misunderstood? Aust. J. Bot., 40: 431-444. Zack, M.A., 1992. An information infrastructure model for systems planning. J. Syst. Managem., 43(9): 16-19 and 38-40.