Paul Raskin

Global Scenarios: Background Review for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The long-range outlook for the world’s ecosystems depends on the course taken by global development in the coming decades. Current global trends and ecological dynamics are consistent with very different outcomes, defined by alternative assumptions about the technological, economic, demographic, geopolitical, and social aspects of development and the ways in which institutions, personal and public values, and natural systems may be expected to respond to historically novel stressors. Recent advances in scenario analysis have addressed the dual methodological challenge of exploring these uncertainties in an organized way and determining what would be needed to make the transition to sustainability. This paper reviews global scenario research, setting current efforts in a historical context. It focuses on seven recent studies that are comprehensive, regionally disaggregated, and narratively rich—and thus of greatest relevance to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). It summarizes their social visions and the level of quantitative detail used in these exercises. Taken together, this suite of global scenario studies provides a useful platform for the MA by offering insight into the complex factors that drive ecosystem change, estimating the magnitude of regional pressures on ecosystems, sounding the alert on critical uncertainties that could undermine sustainable development, and understanding the importance of institutions and values. But these studies are only a point of departure. The integration of changing ecosystem conditions into global development scenarios, as both effects and causes, is at the cutting edge of scenario analysis. The paper concludes by identifying directions for this research program and suggesting ways that the MA can contribute to this effort.

National greenhouse gas accounts: Current anthropogenic sources and sinks

This study provides estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from the major anthropogenic sources for 142 countries. The data compilation is comprehensive in approach, including emissions from CO, CH4, and N2O, and ten halocarbons, in addition to CO2. The sources include emissions from fossil fuel production and use, cement production, halocarbons, landfills, land use changes, biomass burning, rice and livestock production and fertilizer consumption. The approach used to derive these estimates corresponds closely with the simple methodologies proposed by the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Task Force of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The inventory includes a new estimate of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion based principally on data from the International Energy Agency. The research methodologies for estimating emissions from all sources is briefly described and compared with other recent studies in the literature.

Estimating greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel consumption Two approaches compared

Abstract Two approaches to estimating energy sector greenhouse gas emissions at the national level are compared. The new results for 1988 CO2 emissions presented here are within 2% of Oak Ridge National Laboratorys estimate for the world total, but vary by more than 10% for 52 of the 139 countries compared. The differences are traced to the energy statistics used, the treatment of bunker fuels and the handling of non-energy products. In addition, our greenhouse gas emission accounts include estimates of CO, CH4 and N2O from fossil fuel combustion. Together these add a global heating effect of about 8% of the CO2 contribution to global emissions. Emissions estimates by country and region given in Table 1.

Scenarios for the Baltic Sea region: a vision of sustainability

Summary This paper presents integrated scenarios of the Baltic Sea region to the year 2030. It summarises research conducted for Baltic 21, a region-wide process to Identify strategies for sustainable development The aim is to illuminate the requirements for a transition to sustainability. This includes a view of where the region is now, where it seems to be heading if conventional development patterns persist, and where alternatively it could aim – a sustainability vision.ln the sustainability vision, a high degree of economic equity and full employment are attained, greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced, the acidification of soils and waters are kept within safe tolerance levels and the Baltic Sea is restored to ecological health. Preconditions for realising this future include the diffusion of clean and efficient technologies, reorientation of consumer demand towards less resource-intensive products, public support for strong sustainability policies, and a cooperative climate between nations.

From Social Costing to Sustainable Development: Beyond the Economic Paradigm

We are witnessing a major transition in public policy regarding economics, the environment and human well-being. Appropriately enough, it has come at the onset of a new century, indeed millennium. Despite the groundwork laid before us, and that being laid today, we expect that our counterparts and the world’s citizens decades from now will recognize some but not all of the methods and approaches developed today, and hope they will look back with some kindness upon our modest beginnings.

Global Energy, Sustainability, and the Conventional Development Paradigm

Abstract The conventional development paradigm assumes that the values, consumption patterns, and dynamics of the western industrial system will be progressively played out on a global scale. In this inquiry, we explore the implications of the conventional paradigm for the evolution of global energy patterns, and the compatibility with notions of sustainability. We present a global long-range conventional development scenario to the year 2050, and identify major environmental, resource, and social pressures and uncertainties. These include the economic and geopolitical consequences of fossil fuel depletion, the environmental and security implications of increased nuclear generation, the risk of significant climatic change, and the threats to social cohesion of distributional inequities. Such potential problems could negate the basic scenario assumption of steady economic and social development. By clarifying the stress points in a conventional picture of energy development, the scenario provides a useful ...

Ecology of Scientific Consciousness

Any inquiry into the origins and character of science and its place in human activity based on a thorough-going materialism must confront a fascinating dilemma. For a in a framework which avoids the intractable problems involved in maintaining a spirit-matter dualism by assuming a single natural reality with only internal relations, scientific consciousness is at once a constituent part and historical product of the very natural processes it addresses. Since humanity is a part of nature, and further, that which nature has become and is becoming, a satisfactory understanding of nature must rest upon self-understanding. But self-understanding itself develops as part of the historical process, and has always, however implicitly, been an important mediating factor in human knowledge of extra-human reality; it is both a progressive result of and moving force in that historical process.