Why are natural environments often degraded in the name of economic progress even when this invites disaster, and how can this be overcome?

This was one of discussion questions of the Disasters and Ecosystems MOOC.

Actually the answer is simple. The formula for successful environmental degradation consists of 2 variables - overpopulation and capitalism.

When there are a lot of people - most of them a poor, uneducated and hungry. When you are hungry you will do everything to become less hungry today even if it can potentially lead to negative consequences tomorrow, which you may not even foresee if you are uneducated.

Humans are good in adaptation. When the adaptation is strong enough it leads to abuse (for example, if you are well adopted at the stock market you start abusing it to increase your profit even if it will cost dearly to the other stakeholders - people value their own well-being much more than the other's and of course much more than the well-being of environment especially when they know that their own impact seems negligible compared to impact of the entire population).  When you live in condition of free market of capitalistic world - you are your only hope for not being hungry (or being more wealthy) now. And as you know from the economic theory - the capitalist economy needs a constant grows of consumption and production - so you need more and more resources to just sustain the economy. In conditions of capitalist market people value today's profit much more than losses of tomorrow.

You see - the capitalist economy needs people to consume more and more; more people - more consumption; more people - more poverty and lack of education; more hungry uneducated people people - more people willing to do anything to survive now and don't even bother themselves about the future.

Overpopulation and a consumption society (created by capitalist economy) inter-stimulate each other and destroy the environment for the today's profits or food and doesn't care much of the consequences of tomorrow because most are either uneducated or doesn't care at all plus you have to live through today to face consequences of your actions tomorrow (a day-by-day living).

Obviously there are 3 steps to improve the situation:

• Decrease the population.
• Educate people.
• Create new sustainable economy model that would equally value tomorrow's losses and today's profits, and would not rely on constantly increasing consumption.

Disasters: Myth or the Reality?

I enrolled a MOOC titled "Disasters and Ecosystems: Resilience in a Changing Climate" which is organised by the UNEP (and other organisations... which names I'm going to learn by heart cause they have like 2 minutes of credits after each lecture O_o ). Not that I know nothing about disasters, risks or climate change (I'm a geographer and ecologist after all), but I was curious about the product that was made by organisation of this class.

The third video (and first video that is not an introduction) they teach us about the disasters; differences between hazard and disaster; and risks. Well... the thing they told, the graphs they showed - that what inspired the title of this post.

Terminology

Here see some definitions they use.

Disaster. When they say "disaster" they mean "natural disaster" that was enhanced by human [mismanagement].

Risk - a potential losses due to disasters.

Hazard - A dangerous phenomenon, substance, human activity or condition that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage.

Exposure - People, property, systems, or other elements present in hazard zones that are thereby subject to potential losses.

Vulnerability - the characteristics and circumstances of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard

Fails

The risk

They presented a "great" formula for (a disaster) risk evaluation that they use in the UN:

Risk = Hazard * Exposure * Vulnerability

where: Exposure = People * ExposureTime

Vulnarability - succeptability to hazard.

Well these characteristics do correspond to the risk, but the formula is stupid! I already wrote about that: Risk = Probability * Damage. And this formula actually corresponds to the definition they give (see Terminology section). We can't get a monetary outcome from their formula. We can't get numeric numeric output out of that formula at all: can you multiply flood by people? Can you???!!!

A Disaster with Disasters

The fail with the risk evaluation is a common mistake, but the fail with disaster - that is what really cool!

Take a look at this plot (which is from reading materials from the course):

What can you conclude from this plot? That the world is doing to hell and we all will fall to disaster? Let's look closer. The exposure is growing faster for poorer countries (and it is the only conclusion they make in lecture)... but the total number of people exposed (and for each type of countries) seems to be the almost unchanged! Interesting... This means (see the definition for the exposure) that there are just a 150% increase of property value in the dangerous area of the poorer countries (and 25% for the richest) on a span of 30 years. Does this graph shows us only the economic grows? I think it does... (reminds me of my previous post).

Now to the most delicious part. Take a look at this two graphs from the lecture readings:

Deaths dynamics

Damage dynamics

This is interesting. Despite the population growth and all that questionable "climate change" staff people die less (in total numbers), see fig. 1, but the damage increases, see fig. 2. Did they take inflation into account for the damage graph? Do not know... I think they didn't, otherwise they would use "discounted damage" term instead of just "damage" and would indicate the base year. So the second graph seems to demonstrate inflation and may be the economic grows.

Clearly disasters are not that disastrous. Despite the new on the TV on the subject the nature's wrath even enhanced by human is less and less dangerous for human lives. The pockets are to suffer: the storm in port wrecking the humble fisherman's boat or a trawler - that's the difference.

Conclusion

From these graphs I can conclude one thing - it is safer to live now than in the past, a disaster should not be feared as a deadly havoc. To my mind the disaster nowadays is entirely economic issue. See, if we loose less people and (maybe) more money - we should just develop more advanced insurance techniques to cover economic damage and relax. The disasters should just be studied as phenomena to develop cheap early warning systems, let the property be destroyed (just cover the losses with insurance) and additional employment to be created (rebuilding).

This is my conclusion form the graphs I showed here: disasters are an ancient myth! Just buy insurance! LOL

About Corruption and Economical Health of Countries

There is a quite interesting article about the corruption level in EU countries was published at BBC recentely. Of course the map is the most interesting part. 

The thing that I totally noticed in the very first moment of observing it, is that the countries with the highest corruption level have the lowest credit ratings (see this interactive map).

When will all these bastards understand that corruption hurts everyone?

Universal Ecolabeling: an "eco-Black-Spot" concept

Nowadays  more and more people cares about environmental-friendly goods. Ecolabeling is often used to distinguish such goods from regular goods. 

But there are several issues:

• there are a lot of ecolabels, provided by different organisations with different standards so quality of the given ecolabel usually is uncertain;
• ecolabels are difficult to recognize: if you unaware about given ecolabel and know nothing about authority, that gave it - you are likely to miss the point that this is ecolabel, or even you can be tricked by companies with some green-coloured sign with a word "eco", this leads us to the following point -
• often they can't be trusted - companies like to place their own labels that states that product is friendly to environment to attract customers, but these labels are just a trick and has nothing to do with reality.

So I would like to propose another approach. Do you remember BP re-branding after  Deepwater Horizon explosion and infamous oil spill? I hope you do. What if we will oblige companies to put negative labels on the products which production causes significant threat to environment?! - A universal "eco-Black-Spot" for environment abusers!

Pros: 

• we won't need external sertification organisation to confirm that this company deserves an eco-Black-Spot - an environmental agencies already have the necessary information;
• nobody will forge eco-Black-Spot for their goods;
• forged (self-made) "ecolabels" will instantly fail being alongside with the eco-Black-Spot.
• companies will try to wipe out an eco-Black-Spot from their products by actual contribution for preservation of the environment.

Cons:

• m-m-m... I don't see any. Do you?

And what about design of the eco-Black-Spot? I believe it will be convenient to use something like this:

or this:

About Environmental Risk Assessment

There was a scientific seminar dedicated to environmental risks assessment in the scientific-research centre where I work. A speaker was awfully ignorant in subject unfortunately. As a person who is experienced in environmental risk assessment (see my posts about risks and a particular methodology) I was afraid that I will be the one to ask the speaker (quite an old man) some inconvenient question about formulas he used, but luckily he was ashamed by someone else.

During the discussion the question of monetary aspect of the risk and damage to environment was raised: whether it is possible to use money as the measure of risks that only applicable to environment itself. In other words: is it rational to use money when assessing possible damage to solely ecosystem (there are no money in ecosystem by itself), and how to perform such assessment?

What do YOU think? I wasn't able to find an appropriate answer at that moment, but now I believe I have a point. My answer is YES, we can use money to assess risks and damage dealt to ecosystem only.

Firstly the assessment is made by humans and for humans. And humans understand monetised value more easily. The approach that I want to propose is about assessment of money that have to be spent to recover ecosystem to exact the same state it was prior to caused or possible damage. Just imagine how much money one have to spent for recreating and reintroduction of just one extinguished species (a tasmanian wolf for example). Here you are a monetised damage to environment.

Another approach I have in mind is about evaluation of risks via relative live value of species (which can be easily monetised too). Lets use this formula for evaluation of life of individual of a given species: V=(1/N)*P, where V - relative value, N - population of the given species (or given areal of species), P - total population of the human beings. We will have a relative value as 1 for humans and 1*(P/N) for a given species. For example for a tiger we will have its relative individual value about 1 076 900! Literally, if we have a choice whether to save 1 million people or a single tiger, the tiger must be saved - not a million of people!!!

And we can monetise this value by multiplication on the average value of the single human life (you can play a bit with numbers given here).

So the damage to ecosystem may be assessed via loss of number of individuals of species that live in a given ecosystem and we are able to easily evaluate a relative value of the individuals of the each species, and it can be easyly monetised.

How to update BIOS for free if you don't have a CPU

In the situation when you need to update BIOS to let your new CPU work and you (and your friends) do not have another CPU that would be able to start the system, you have to pay for service to so called "experts". In my case prices varied from 20 to 50 Euro... for this 5-minuets work O_o. New CPUs have the same price...

Solution is quite simple actually. You just have to buy new suitable CPU ;-) I've purchased the cheapest model for 25 Euro, used it for a 5 minuets to update BIOS and then just returned it in the perfect condition to the warranty department of the shop where I've bought it. Now I have BIOS updated and my 25 Euro back. The only expenditures were for the public transportation - about 1 Euro.

About GDP flaws

Here you can find some short and clear insights about GDP flaws in prosperity measuring and about The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) implementation instead.

• GDP TREATS CRIME, DIVORCE AND NATURAL DISASTERS AS ECONOMIC GAIN
• GDP IGNORES THE NON-MARKET ECONOMY OF HOUSEHOLD AND COMMUNITY
• GDP TREATS THE DEPLETION OF NATURAL CAPITAL AS INCOME
• GDP INCREASES WITH POLLUTING ACTIVITIES AND THEN AGAIN WITH CLEAN-UPS
• GDP TAKES NO ACCOUNT OF INCOME DISTRIBUTION
• GDP IGNORES THE DRAWBACKS OF LIVING ON FOREIGN ASSETS

Public data, GDP and Google

There is interesting information source of public data, created by google. It is quite useful 'cause now you don't have to waste time for downloading data and creation of a graph - google already did it. You just have to customize visualisation for your goals.

GDP per capita (current US$) - World Bank

While in Finland I'm trying to find out interesting facts about country that was too small for me to pay attention to it when I was in Russia. One such fact is that economy of Finland had a serious impact with USSR collapse. You can see it on the graph above. Thanks to trade with Soviet Union GDP per capita in Finland grown fast and was higher than in US in 1990 and then was a sharpen fell for 3 years. Only in 2007 Finland managed to overcome US with this parameter again - it took 17 years.

Now let's look at graph below. There is GDP per capita too, but from another source - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Graph for US is pretty much the same, but for Finland and Russia it is quite different. Finland does not best US and impact from USSR destroying is less significant, and numbers for recent years for Russia looks more promising than on previous graph. Looks like OECD failed (or didn't wanted to) to recalculate numbers properly. So you should pay attention to sources and units for data you use.

GDP per capita - OECD Factbook 2009

Hope Google will add more public data soon and develop additional export, import and visualization options like in FactBook eXplorer for example;-)