Elizabeth L. Malone

Human Choice and Climate Change

This is four-part work providing an international view of climate change which is designed to complement the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Second Assessment report. The complete work is a benchmark document summarising current understanding of of the contributions of the social sciences to the interdisciplinary issues of global climate change. It brings together widely scattered information and highlights both current research strengths and key areas for further research. The books survey the state of the art of the social sciences with regard to global climate change research; recognise global climate change research as policy relevant; review what is currently known, uncertain, and unknown in the social science areas relevant to global change; assemble and summarise findings from the international research community; report these findings within behavioural and interpretive frameworks as appropriate; and assemble this information to enlighten the future formulation and conduct of policy-relevant scientific research. The volumes in this four-part work cover resources and technology (Volume 2); tools for policy analysis (Volume 3); and, in Volume 1, begin with the societal framework. Volume 4 is presented as a readable summary for non-professionals. The first chapter of Volume 4 comprises the introductory section of each of the three more specialist volumes.

Motivating Residents to Conserve Energy without Financial Incentives

Given the aim to motivate people to conserve energy in homes, we need to understand what drives people’s energy use behavior and how it can be influenced. This article describes applied energy conservation campaigns at two U.S. military installations where residents do not pay their own utility bills. Customized approaches were designed for each installation based on a broad social-psychological model. Before-and-after energy use was measured, and residents were surveyed about end use behaviors. Residents said they were motivated by the desire to do the right thing, set good examples for their children, and have comfortable homes. For sustained change, respondents recommended continued awareness and education, disincentives, and incentives. Findings support some aspects of a social-psychological model, with emphasis on altruistic and egoistic motives for behavioral change. These studies may have implications for situations where residents are not billed for individual energy use, including other government-subsidized facilities, master-metered apartments, and university dormitories.

Zen and the art of climate maintenance

Targets and timetables dominate the policy response to climate change. Is it wise to rely on a strategy that has yet to get off the ground? Or could Zen and social science suggestsensible alternatives?

Climate change, poverty, and intragenerational equity: the national level

This paper discusses seven propositions: climate change and poverty are linked by the issue of vulnerability; the hardest equity issues arise because of qualitative differences in the nature of climate change and policy impacts on the poor and those who are better off; poverty cannot be understood in terms of lack of goods or income, or even basic needs, but must rather be understood in terms of peoples ability to participate in the social discourse that shapes their lives; emerging multi-dimensional measures of poverty are much better than those based on income or needs, but may continue to underestimate sociocultural factors; eliminating poverty and developing societal resilience require building social diversity; climate change and policy impacts on the poor do not conform very well to analytic dichotomies of national and international, or intragenerational and intergenerational; in the final analysis climate protection and poverty elimination may be most effectively achieved through local-level actors and their global networks.

Incorporating stakeholder decision support needs into an integrated regional Earth system model

A new modeling effort exploring the opportunities, constraints, and interactions between mitigation and adaptation at regional scale is utilizing stakeholder engagement in an innovative approach to guide model development and demonstration, including uncertainty characterization, to effectively inform regional decision making. This project, the integrated Regional Earth System Model (iRESM), employs structured stakeholder interactions and literature reviews to identify the most relevant adaptation and mitigation alternatives and decision criteria for each regional application of the framework. The information is used to identify important model capabilities and to provide a focus for numerical experiments. This paper presents the stakeholder research results from the first iRESM pilot region. The pilot region includes the Great Lakes Basin in the Midwest portion of the United States as well as other contiguous states. This geographic area (14 states in total) permits cohesive modeling of hydrologic systems while also providing strong gradients in climate, demography, land cover/land use, and energy supply and demand. The results from the stakeholder research indicate that, for this region, iRESM should prioritize addressing adaptation alternatives in the water resources, urban infrastructure, and agriculture sectors, including water conservation, expanded water quality monitoring, altered reservoir releases, lowered water intakes, urban infrastructure upgrades, increased electric power reserves in urban areas, and land use management/crop selection changes. For mitigation in this region, the stakeholder research implies that iRESM should focus on policies affecting the penetration of renewable energy technologies, and the costs and effectiveness of energy efficiency, bioenergy production, wind energy, and carbon capture and sequestration.

Security, Governance, and the Environment

In the animal kingdom, there is a major distinction between organisms that have hard outer shells or external skeletons and those that have their bony support structures on the inside. The hard-shell species rely for their security on the integrity of their covering. Thus they are immune from predators until the shell is broken, at which point they rapidly succumb. The price that hard-shell species pay for their initial immunity is limited mobility and inflexibility of response options when attacked. In contrast, soft bodied animals with internal skeletons are easily damaged by attackers but repair more rapidly. Furthermore, their higher mobility and greater flexibility enable them to avoid many hazardous situations and to respond adaptively when they are unavoidable.

The future interaction of science and innovation policy for climate change and national security

Recent efforts to characterize the interactions among climate change and national security issues raise challenges of relating disparate bodies of scientific (both physical and social) knowledge as well as determining the role of innovation in meeting these challenges. Technological innovation has been called for to combat climate change, increase food production, and discover new ways of generating energy, and proposals for increased investments in R&D and technology deployment are to be met with everywhere. However, such policy decisions in one domain have impacts in other domains—often unexpected, often negative, but often capable of being addressed in planning stages. This technological tool allows its users to embody the knowledge of different domains, to keep that knowledge up to date, and to define relationships, via both a model and an analytic game, such that policy makers can foresee problems and plan to forestall or mitigate them. Capturing and dynamically updating knowledge is the accomplishment of the Knowledge Encapsulation Framework. A systems dynamic model, created in STELLA®, simulates the relationships among different domains, so that relevant knowledge is applied to a seemingly independent issue. An analytic game provides a method to use that knowledge as it might be used in real-world settings.

Energy efficiency campaign for residential housing at the Fort Lewis army installation

In FY1999, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory conducted an energy efficiency campaign for residential housing at the Fort Lewis Army Installation near Tacoma, Washington. Preliminary weather-corrected calculations show energy savings of 10{percent} from FY98 for energy use in family housing. This exceeded the projects goal of 3{percent}. The work was funded by the U.S. DOEs Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The project adapted FEMPs national ``You Have the Power Campaign at the local level, tailoring it to the military culture. The applied research project was designed to demonstrate the feasibility of tailored, research-based strategies to promote energy conservation in military family housing. In contrast to many energy efficiency efforts, the campaign focused entirely on actions residents could take in their own homes, as opposed to technology or housing upgrades. Behavioral change was targeted because residents do not pay their own utility bills; thus other motivations must drive personal energy conservation. This campaign augments ongoing energy savings from housing upgrades carried out by Fort Lewis. The campaign ran from September 1998 through August 1999. The campaign strategy was developed based on findings from previous research and on input from residents and officials at Fort Lewis. Energy use, corrected to account for weather differences, was compared with the previous years use. Survey responses from 377 of Fort Lewis residents of occupied housing showed that the campaign was moderately effective in promoting behavior change. Of those who were aware of the campaign, almost all said they were now doing one or more energy-efficient things that they had not done before. Most people were motivated by the desire to do the right thing and to set a good example for their children. They were less motivated by other factors.