S.A.P.I.EN.S http://sapiens.revues.org Lodel 0.8 Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? Mainstream Economic Theory and the Environmental Crisis http://sapiens.revues.org/index806.html The economic theory that serves as the basis for coordinating economic activities in the global market system and for implementing economic solutions for environmental problems is neoclassical economics. In economic textbooks, the creators of this theory are credited with transforming the study of economics into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that neoclassical economic theory was created by substituting economic constructs derived from classical economics for physical variables in the equations of a soon-to-be outmoded mid nineteenth century theory in physics. The mathematical formalism that resulted from these substitutions was predicated on unscientific axiomatic assumptions that remained essential unchanged in subsequent extensions and refinements of neoclassical economic theory. And this explains why the mathematical formalism used by contemporary practitioners of neoclassical economic theory effectively precludes the prospect of implementing scientifically viable economic solutions for a broad range of very menacing environmental problems.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Robert L. Nadeau) Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://sapiens.revues.org/index806.html What is the Price of Carbon? Five definitions http://sapiens.revues.org/index793.html What is the value of a tonne of CO2 that has not been emitted into the atmosphere, or in other words, the carbon price? It all depends on what you mean by value! The purpose of this note is to elucidate and illustrate five frequently used definitions of the carbon price for one tonne of carbon (as in carbon dioxide) avoided: 1. The expected mitigation of climate-change damage, 2. The cost of reducing CO2 emissions, 3. The social cost of carbon, 4. The politically negotiated value and 5. CO2 market prices.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Minh Ha Duong) Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://sapiens.revues.org/index793.html Computer-generated Visual Summaries of Spatial Databases: Chorems or not Chorems? http://sapiens.revues.org/index795.html Chorems can be defined as representations of elementary structure of a geographic space or as schematized representations of territories, and as such they can represent a good candidate for generating visual summaries of spatial databases. Indeed for spatial decision-makers, it is more important to identify and map problems than facts. Until now, chorems were made manually by geographers who needed an exhaustive knowledge of the territory under study, a clear-cut set of rules to decide what the salient phenomena are, and who had no problems to cartography them. Here we present a methodology based on spatial data mining, that both diminish the requirements in terms of starting knowledge, and provide a more rigorous approach to select the important features.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Robert Laurini, Monica Sebillo, Giuliana Vitiello, David Sol-Martinez et Françoise Raffort) Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://sapiens.revues.org/index795.html Quantifying uncertainty in an industrial approach : an emerging consensus in an old epistemological debate http://sapiens.revues.org/index782.html Uncertainty is ubiquitous in modern decision-making supported by quantitative modeling. While uncertainty treatment has been initially largely developed in risk or environmental assessment, it is gaining large-spread interest in many industrial fields generating knowledge and practices going beyond the classical risk versus uncertainty or epistemic versus aleatory debates. On the basis of years of applied research in different sectors at the European scale, this paper discusses the emergence of a methodological consensus throughout a number of fields of engineering and applied science such as metrology, safety and reliability, protection against natural risk, manufacturing statistics, numerical design and scientific computing etc. In relation with the applicable regula-tion and standards and a relevant quantity of interest for decision-making, this approach involves in particular the proper identification of key steps such as : the quantification (or modeling) of the sources of uncertainty, possibly involving an inverse approach ; their propagation through a pre-existing physical-industrial model; the ranking of importance or sensitivity analysis and sometimes a subsequent optimisation step. It aims at giving a consistent and industrially-realistic framework for practical mathematical modeling, assumingly restricted to quantitative and quantifiable uncertainty, and illustrated on three typical examples. Axes of further research proving critical for the environmental or industrial issues are outlined: the information challenges posed by uncertainty modeling in the context of data scarcity, and the corresponding calibration and inverse probabilistic techniques, bound to be developed to best value industrial or environmental monitoring and data acquisition systems under uncertainty; the numerical challenges entailing considerable development of high-performance computing in the field; the acceptability challenges in the context of the precautionary principle. editor@sapiens-journal.org (E. de Rocquigny) Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://sapiens.revues.org/index782.html Mercury cycling and human health concerns in remote ecosystems in the Americas http://sapiens.revues.org/index766.html Fish constitutes a praised—and sometimes irreplaceable—component of the daily diet for numerous communities throughout the Americas. These populations can be exposed to mercury (Hg)—ubiquitous in fish flesh—to levels potentially harmful to their health. Mercury is subjected to various chemical transformations once released to the environment. From diffuse loading on land and waters to accumulation in the aquatic food web, this paper draws a general picture of the main processes influencing the Hg cycle in different ecozones. Contrarily to other pollutants, the amount of Hg found in fish tissues is not clearly related to the extent of Hg loading in a given ecosystem. In the Arctic, the sudden stripping of gaseous elemental Hg from the atmosphere—known as the Hg depletion events—and its subsequent transformation into methylmercury (MeHg) seems to be one of the driving force behind Hg accumulation in freshwater aquatic organisms and marine mammals. In boreal environments, numerous watershed-based processes influence the transport and methylation of Hg deposited from atmospheric source and selectively control the amount of MeHg transferred from source to fish. In the tropics, small-scale gold mining operations have induced the release of considerable amount of Hg to the environment. However, the extensive deforestation of the tropical forest and the subsequent erosion and lixiviation of land-deposited Hg down to tropical rivers appears to have a greater impact on the observed wide-scale fish Hg contamination. Mercury accumulation in remote ecosystems do represent a significant and complex environmental issue, considering: (a) the high levels of Hg monitored in fish and marine mammals flesh; (b) the large-scale occurrence of such worrying Hg bioaccumulation patterns; (c) the extensive use of aquatic resources by numerous remote communities; (d) the fact that this issue shall persist at least on the mid-term, even if strong measures are taken to lessen Hg anthropogenic loadings to the global atmosphere. Although there are no simple answers to the potential threats to human health caused by Hg accumulation, several political actions to lessen human exposure to Hg are possible and are discussed here.editor@sapiens-journal.org (René Canuel, Marc Lucotte et Sylvie Boucher de Grosbois) Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://sapiens.revues.org/index766.html Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis http://sapiens.revues.org/index747.html The on-going financial crisis results not from a cyclical or managerial failure, but from a structural one: more than 96 other major banking crises occurred over the past 20 years, and these crashes have happened under very different regulatory systems and at different stages of economic development. So far, conventional solutions are being applied—nationalization of the problem assets (as in the original Paulson bailout) or nationalization of the banks (as in Europe). These solutions only deal with the symptoms and not the systemic cause of today’s banking crisis. Similarly, the financial re-regulation that will be on everybody’s political agenda will, at best, reduce the frequency of such crises, but not avoid their re-occurrence. Better solutions are urgently needed because the last breakdown of this magnitude, the Great Depression of the 1930s, ended up in a wave of fascism and World War II. In this paper, we describe a recent conceptual breakthrough—based on the functioning of balanced ecosystems— that shows that all complex systems, including our monetary and financial ones, become structurally unstable whenever efficiency is overemphasized at the expense of diversity, interconnectivity and the crucial resilience they provide. The surprising insight from a systemic perspective is that sustainable vitality involves diversifying the types of currencies and institutions and introducing new ones that are designed specifically to increase the availability of money in its prime function as a medium of exchange, rather than for savings or speculation. Additionally, these currencies are expressly designed to link unused resources with unmet needs within a community, region or country. These currencies are know as complementary because they do not replace the conventional national money, but rather, operate in parallel with it. We propose that a systemic understanding and technical solution are now available that would ensure that such crashes become a phenomenon of the past. The most effective way for governments to support such a strategy of a more diverse and sustainable monetary ecology would be to accept a well-designed, robust complementary currency in partial payment of taxes during a period when banks are not in a position to fully finance the real economy. The choice of a complementary currency reflects both a technical issue (robustness and resilience against fraud) and a political one (what type of programs are desirable to support). A good candidate for consideration would be a professionally run business-to-business (B2B) complementary currency based on the model of the WIR system. This currency has been successfully operational for 75 years in Switzerland, involving a quarter of all the businesses in that country. Formal econometric analysis has proven that the WIR acts as a significant counter-cyclical stabilizing factor that explains the proverbial long-standing stability of the Swiss economy.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Sally Goerner, Bernard Lietaer et Robert Ulanowicz) Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0200 http://sapiens.revues.org/index747.html The continuous field view of representing forest geographically: from cartographic representation towards improved management planning http://sapiens.revues.org/index734.html Enhanced vizualization leads to better forest management solutions. This paper discusses the application of numerical remote sensing and geographic information systems to forest inventory. Natural phenomena usually exhibit both continuous and discrete behaviour. Discrete models have been used since the inception of aerial photography, long before the introduction of mathematical statistics, computers or remote sensing but today, forest attributes can also be described as continuous surfaces. This paper briefly presents the uses and limitations of a popular non-parametric estimator (the k-nearest neighbour): it improves visual representation, and provides a better input for GIS based modelling, thus facilitating natural resource inventory and management planning. However, in many countries, the operational forest management planning approaches still require some discretisation of continuous surfaces into areal units, corresponding to virtual –or dynamic- forest compartments.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Gintautas Mozgeris) Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://sapiens.revues.org/index734.html Methods for visual quality assessment of a digital terrain model http://sapiens.revues.org/index738.html A Digital Terrain Model (DTM) is a continuous representation of a ground surface landform that is commonly used to produce topographic maps. DTMs are created by integrating data obtained from a wide range of techniques including remote sensing and land surveying. Quality assessment of data is a critical parameter for DTM production and it relies heavily on statistical methods. In contrast, visual methods are generally neglected despite their potential for improving DTM quality. In this paper, several enhanced visual techniques for quality assessment are described and illustrated with areas and datasets selected from Slovenia and the planet Mars. Four classes of visual methods are defined: visualisations according to spatial analytical operations based on one or multiple datasets; visualisations according to spatial statistical analysis; non-spatial visualisations; and other visualisation techniques/other algorithms. The four classes generate different outputs: the first two produce thematic maps, while the third is used for non-spatial visualisation. The fourth class gathers other possible visualisations and algorithms. It is suggested that applying visual methods in addition to the more objective statistical methods would result in a more efficient improvement of the quality.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Tomaz Podobnikar) Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://sapiens.revues.org/index738.html Integrated Coastal Zone Management: four entrenched illusions http://sapiens.revues.org/index198.html The considerable efforts undertaken on all continents to carry out field experiments and refine the concept of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) have resulted in its adoption as the key paradigm for the sustainable development of coastal areas. Having reached a first phase of maturity, ICZM should now be challenged by critical assessments if it is to advance both theoretically and operationally. In this perspective, our paper highlights four deep-rooted illusions: the illusion that round table discussions can solve any problem, the coastal manager myth, the community illusion and the positivist illusion. It is argued that these illusions result from unproved conceptual over-simplifications and lead to a naive conception of action that often impedes ICZM implementation.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Raphaël Billé) Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://sapiens.revues.org/index198.html The Transformative value of Ecological Pragmatism. An Introduction to the Work of Bryan G. Norton http://sapiens.revues.org/index88.html In the space of only a few years, Bryan Norton has become one of the essential actors of environmental ethics through his launching of what has become one of its dominant trends: environmental pragmatism. Environmental pragmatism refuses to take a stance in the dispute between the defenders of anthropocentrist ethics and the supporters of nonanthropocentrist ethics. Instead, Norton prefers to distinguish between "strong anthropocentrism" and "weak-or extended-anthropocentrism” and develops the idea that only the latter is capable of not under-estimating the diversity of instrumental values that humans may derive from the natural world. The practical difference between these two kinds of theories is considerable.editor@sapiens-journal.org (Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa) Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100 http://sapiens.revues.org/index88.html