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Commons not tragic after all

Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.

And for that very agrobiodiversity-relevant insight she has just won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

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A global micronutrients campaign in the offing?

At next year’s G20 meeting in Canada, expect news of a big, co-ordinated global campaign [on “hidden hunger”], like the one against malaria.

Or so suggests a box in last week’s Economist, which calls the idea a no-brainer. I thought there was such a thing already. Anyway, let’s hope this new initiative on micronutrients, if it materializes, will take proper account of the contribution of dietary diversity and agrobiodiversity.

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Too hot to fight

A short piece in the latest Economist describes a paper in Climate Change on the historical correlation between temperature and war. Up to about 1740-1750 colder years were also more warlike years, at least in Europe (the authors quote a paper that suggests there’s a similar correlation for China). This correlation is never particularly strong, though it is occasionally statistically significant, but then it breaks down entirely and shoots up into very slightly positive (though non-significant) territory.
graph

Dr Tol and Dr Wagner suggest that in the more remote past the effects of cold weather on harvests led to supply shortages, and that these increased the likelihood of people fighting over food and the land needed to produce it. They argue that the reason the relationship between warfare and cold vanishes in the mid-18th century is that this is the moment when the industrial revolution began. Both agriculture and transport improved rapidly at this time. Systematic plant breeding, the introduction of new crops and new forms of crop rotation, and better irrigation increased the food supply. Improvements in roads and the large-scale construction of canals allowed food to be transported from areas of plenty to areas of scarcity.

Does this have implications for the future? Presumably, it implies that we need not worry about war breaking out in Europe due to climate change. Not so fast.

Just because cold, rather than heat, caused problems in Europe during the millennium that Dr Tol and Dr Wagner examined does not mean rising temperatures pose no threat. The lesson, rather, is that the way to minimise the likelihood of climate-induced conflict in the future is to continue the process of crop improvement (for example, by taking advantage of the potential of genetic engineering) so that heat- and drought-tolerant varieties are available; to make farmers aware of these new crops and encourage their use; and to promote free trade and non-agricultural economic development. That way people will have no cause to fight, and tyrants no excuse to stir them up.

There is no correlation in this dataset between precipitation and war, but that’s the one I’d be watching.

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Tajikistan to sustain agrobiodiversity in the face of climate change

A Google Alert pointed me to an article in the Times of Central Asia purportedly about a new Global Environment Facility-funded project in Tajikistan intriguingly entitled “Sustaining Agricultural Biodiversity in the Face of Climate Change.” Alas, the article is behind a paywall, so I wont even link to it, but some judicious googling led me to a UNDP press release. Which eventually led me to the project documents. Here are the objectives of the project in brief:

  • Strengthened institutional and financial framework for the agro-biodiversity conservation and joint use of the benefits of the sustainable use of the agro-ecosystems.
  • Increased mechanism of co-operation with local communities on agro-ecosystem management including the traditional knowledge of conservation.
  • Ecosystem-based conservation and management of wild crop relatives established in the selected territories/communities.
  • Lessons and experiences from target Jamoats created conditions for replication and expansion of conservation programmes.

A bunch of “possible interventions” are listed under each of these headings, but it’s unclear to me from the documents that are available online what will actually be done. This may be a project to write a bigger project. I just don’t know enough about how GEF works. If you know more, drop us a line.