HDGC LUNCHTIME SEMINARS

2003

January 15, 2003, Patrick Williams, National Program Officer, World Wildlife Fund, "The IMP Structural Adjustment Program and Environmental Degradation in Guyana: An Examination of the Forestry and Mining Sectors." This presentation intends to examine some of the major environmental impacts of SAP on Guyana by focusing particularly on the forestry and mining sectors. The paper will be divided into four main sections. It will commence with a brief introduction on the economic situation in Guyana, mainly to put into context the SAP and its elements as they are discussed in relation to the mining and forestry sectors. The second section will look at the major environmental issues that appear to emanate from the implementation of the SAP while the third section will examine the various responses to the issues highlighted. The paper will then conclude with some observations and possible suggestions to confront the environmental situation.

January 22, 2003, George Loewenstein, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-SDS "(Mis)prediciting Adaptation to Adverse Outcomes." Many studies have found that non-patients asked to predict the quality of life associated with chronic medical conditions provide lower ratings than patients provide of their own quality of life. I will present results from a series of studies designed to understand the cause of this discrepancy.

January 31, 2003, Gary Yohe, Prof. of Economics, Wesleyan University, and Camille Parmesan, Asst. Prof, Integrative Biology, University, of Texas-Austin, "A Globally Coherent Fingerprint of Climate Change Impacts Across Natural Systems." Causal attribution of recent biological trends to climate change is complicated because non-climatic influences dominate local, short-term biological changes. Any underlying signal from climate change is likely to be revealed by analyses that seek systematic trends across diverse species and geographic regions; however, debates within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reveal several definitions of a 'systematic trend'. Here, we explore these differences, apply diverse analyses to more than 1,700 species, and show that recent biological trends match climate change predictions. Global meta-analyses documented significant range shifts averaging 6.1 km per decade towards the poles (or meters per decade upward), and significant mean advancement of spring events by 2.3 days per decade. We define a diagnostic fingerprint of temporal and spatial 'sign-switching' responses uniquely predicted by twentieth century climate trends. Among appropriate long-term/large-scale/multi-species data sets, this diagnostic fingerprint was found for 279 species. This suite of analyses generates 'very high confidence' (as laid down by the IPCC) that climate change is already affecting living systems.

February 5, 2003, Nick Shorr, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC, "Older High School Students and Anthropogenic Environmental. Degradation: Preliminary Findings and Policy Implications." Semi-structured interviews with 44 HS juniors and seniors in the greater Pittsburgh area focused on a sequence of three questions: What things that people are doing to nature most bother/worry you? What are the most important causes for these environmental concerns? What are the most effective ways to seriously reduce/improve them? I frame this policy-relevant summary of our findings within three contexts: why civic understanding of environmental issues remains critical to the substantive mitigation of anthropogenic environmental degradation; why the relation between knowledge and efficacy are central to that understanding; and why older HS students are a particularly important population with whom to explore these relations and understandings.
The policy-relevant responses suggest a population with considerable variation both in the displayed strength of environmental concern and displayed extent of environmental knowledge, but with a structure of concern different than that assumed in the risk literature, and a view of mitigation priorities and responsibility different than that of much environmental policy. After briefly summarizing some of the key cultural models (including overextensions and lacunae) expressed in this sample, I focus on these differences in concern structure and mitigation priority, and the policy implications they suggest.
Following Kempton et al (1995), verbatim responses from interviews are being mined for use as prompts in a survey, to be conducted this spring in regional high schools.

February 12, 2003, Minh Ha-Duong, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC "Bounding Analysis Applied to Lung Cancer Risk." For cancers with more than one risk factor, the sum of estimated numbers of cancers attributed to the individual factors may exceed the total number of cases observed. In this study we bound the fraction of lung cancer occurrences not attributed to specific well-studied causes, in order to keep estimates of the less well delimited risks consistent with those of known risks. Available data and expert judgment are used to attribute portions of the observed lung cancer incidence to known causes such as smoking, residential radon and asbestos exposure, to describe the uncertainty surrounding these estimates, and quantify the interaction between pollutants. An upper bound on the residual risk is inferred using a coherence constraint on the total number of deaths and the principle of maximum unspecificity, a concept from the field of imprecise probabilities.

February 19, 2003, Asmerom Gilau, PhD. Candidate, Asmerom will talk about his home, Eritrean experience -opportunities and challenges, in environmental policy, awareness, management and impact assessment, energy, and climate change -particularly limitations faced in climate scenarios Global Circulation Models in constructing climate scenarios etc… and ask how those that failed could have been performed for best results. All interested can access the first national communications of Eritrea from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) website, http://unfccc.int/text/resource/docs/natc/erinc1.pdf.

February 26, 2003, David Keith, EPP/HDGC Faculty "Does Use of Large-Scale Wind Power Change the Climate?"

March 7, 2003, Prof. Ian Sue Wing, CAS Geography, Boston University "Induced Technical Change and the Cost of Climate Policy." This paper investigates the potential for a carbon tax to induce R&D, and for the consequent induced technical change (ITC) to lower the macroeconomic cost of abating carbon emissions. ITC is modeled within a general equilibrium simulation of the U.S. economy by the effects of emissions restrictions on the level and composition of aggregate R&D, the accumulation of the stock of knowledge, and the industry-level reallocation and substitution of intangible services derived therefrom. Contrary to other authors, I find that ITC's impact is large, positive and dominated by the latter "substitution effect", which mitigates most of the deadweight loss of the tax.

March 14, 2003, Prof. Justin Williams, Geography and Environmental Engineering, John Hopkins "Decision Models for the Selection and Design of Nature Reserves." A variety of decision models have been formulated for efficiently selecting nature reserve sites in order to protect species or other conservation features. Fortunately, most reserve selection models do not take into account the spatial aspects of reserves, such as shape and connectivity. The selected sites are likely to be scattered and without spatial coherence, which can compromise both the ecological success and the practical feasibility of reserves. In response, decision modelers have begun formulating reserve design models that control spatial attributes. We review the spatial attributes that are thought to be important in reserve design, as well as, reserve design models that have appeared in the recent literature. Modeling issues, computational issues, and the tradeoffs among competing objectives are discussed. Unexplored areas of reserve design modeling are identified. Ultimately, an argument is made for the development of models capture the dynamic interdependence of sites and species populations, and thus incorporate the reasons why spatial attributes are important.

March 19, 2003, Prof. Ed Rubin, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Center for Energy and Environmental "Carbon Sequestration and Hydrogen Economy."

March 26, 2003, Professors Carlo Jaeger and Richard Klein, Social Systems Department, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research "Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies for Europe."

April 2, 2003, Conrad Steenkamp, Post-Doc Researcher, Carnegie-Mellon, EPP-HDGC "A Short History of the Great Limpopo and an Outline of the Trans-boundary Protected Areas (TBPA) Research Initiative: Key Issues in Park Development." This presentation will detail and explain the Trans-frontier Protected Areas Research Initiative launched by the Center and the SAVANA-network in southern Africa, the research partnership between social and physical scientists, the research objectives and the specific research projects being launched. The objective of the presentation will be to look for synergies between the Initiative and other CMU research activities.

April 7, 2003, J. Jason West, PhD, AAAS Environmental Fellow, Environmental Protection Agency, will give a talk "Studies in Air Pollutant and Greenhouse Gas Control in Mexico City." Air pollution in Mexico City is an important problem overlapping with other environment and development goals, where scientific knowledge is uncertain. Non-methane hydrocarbon (NMHC) emissions are commonly underestimated and this underestimate is important for modeling ozone sensitivity. Ratios of total NMHC/NOX and CO/NOX in morning measurements are found to be greater than these ratios in the official emissions inventory, by factors of two to three. When applying the CIT three-dimensional photochemical airshed model to the IMADA measurement campaign of March 1997, the model significantly underestimates measurements of both total NMHCs and of CO when using the official emissions. A best fit to the measurements is found when increasing CO emissions by a factor of two and NMHC emissions by a factor of three. Using these corrections, the model produces good estimates of ozone and of NOX, with average normalized biases over six days of 3% and 32% respectively. Although confidence in the appropriate correction is low, the agreement of two independent methods increases our confidence. Modeled ozone peaks that occur early in the day are found to be sensitive to changes in NMHC emissions, while later peaks are NOX-sensitive.
I will also present results of the "Co-control of urban air pollutants and greenhouse gases in Mexico City," conducted at the National Institute of Ecology in Mexico. Existing studies of emissions reduction measures PROAIRE (the air quality plan for Mexico City) and separate greenhouse gas (GHG) studies are used to construct a harmonized database of options. Linear Programming (LP) is applied to analyze least-cost strategies for meeting co-control targets for multiple pollutants. We estimate that if PROAIRE measures are implemented as planned, they will reduce 3.1% of the 2010 metropolitan CO2 emissions, in addition to substantial local air pollutant reductions. Applying the LP, PROAIRE emissions reductions can be met at a 20% lower cost, using only the PROAIRE measures. When adding CO2 emissions reductions targets to PROAIRE targets, the most cost-effective solutions use PROAIRE measures for the majority of local pollutant reductions, and GHG measures for additional CO2 control. Because of synergies, there are benefits to jointly planning urban-global co-control, but we estimate that for Mexico City these benefits are often small.

April 9, 2003, Hadi Dowlatabadi, CRC Professor, University of British Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon, Adjunct Faculty, will give a presentation entitled "Towards An Adaptive Regulatory Framework." When facing new non-marginal regulations policy makers are ignorant of appropriate goals and industry about how best to respond. This leads to debates using poor models and inappropriate evidence, procedural delays, poor target setting and ideologically chosen instruments. We can do better.

April 16, 2003, Francisco Veloso, Visiting Assistant Professor "Brazilian Software: Alternative Pates To Build A World-Class Industry." The Brazilian software industry has been experiencing double-digit growth rates throughout the past decade. In 2001, the Brazilian software market was the world's 7th larger, comparable in size to the Indian or the Chinese. Despite the important growth pattern and relevance for the Brazilian economy, the software industry has mostly focused on the domestic market. This is a very different situation from what is currently being discussed as the success cases in the context of developing and industrializing countries, the so-called three I's. India, Ireland and Israel, which have been establishing their international reputation based on exports. This paper looks at how the Brazilian software industry is trying to build its capabilities based on the domestic market. First, it explores how the strong reliance on the local market has stifled the development of the industry in a number of dimensions and distorted its perception of the international market on what concerns the capabilities of the local industry. Then, it discusses how, in some areas, Brazilian software firms have been able to use the local market as a lever to develop capabilities that position them among world leaders. A roader objective is to help understand how countries aiming to use the software industry to leverage economic growth may look at the appeal and the perils of looking internally vs. externally as the appropriate driver for the development of the industry.

April 22, 2003, Prof. Robert Thornton, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Witswatersrand "Traditional Healers, Bio-medical Practice and Sexuality: Prospects and Barriers to Co-operation." This presentation will review, The Project: Traditional healers and medical doctors' responses to HIV/AIDS and potential for co-operation.

April 23, 2003, Prof. Robert Thornton, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Witswatersrand "Environment and Land in Bushbuckridge, South Africa." This talk will focus on a new book entitled 'Human Rights and the Environment: Conflicts and Norms in the Globalizing World', edited by Lyuba Zarsky, Earthscan Publications, 2002 (www.earthscan.co.uk), specifically Chapter 10, entitled "Environment and Land in Bushbuckridge, South Africa", pp. 219-240. The presentation will explain the Bushbuckridge environment and potentials for conflict and the politics of land claims and the environment.

April 25, 2003, Stuart Marks, Independent Scholar and Consultant "Community-based Wildlife Management in Southern Africa." Two locally constructed narratives from Zambia describe the actors and activities centered around two wildlife events. These stories- of a poached elephant and of a legally sanctioned harvest of hippos- suggest some of the local social/political and technical contingencies inherent in CBWM. The local details of these processes are rarely visible to outsiders, yet they are significant crafting CBWM initiatives to local circumstances. The paper advocates the necessity for examining many of the assumptions and universalistic claims for CBWM together with the need to understand social differences, diverse institutions, and environmental processes.

April 30, 2003, Minh Ha Duong, EPP, Visiting Research Fellow "Possible Global Warming Futures, An Imprecise Probability Approach." This presentation first discusses precaution when one does not have probabilities, and information is instead represented by a set of probabilities. This allows to exhibit a risk-neutral rational precautionary decision-making criteria, and to present possibility distributions, a notion introduced in Economics by Shackle in 1954.
These tools from imprecise probabilities theory are then used to assess a
possibility distribution of global warming in 2100. This numerical assessment is based on model results from the IPCC (SRES 2002) database and on the fusion of expert opinions from the Keith-Morgan (1995) elicitation survey. In this study experts judgment are fusioned without the independence assumption. The opinion of experts that exhibit a relatively much lower uncertainty than their peers is discounted.
Having this possibility distribution about global warming in 2100, next I examine how to communicate the information simply to policymakers. To solve the existing IPCC controversy about climate change scenarios, it is necessary to bridge the gap between forecasts and scenarios. To this end I propose to use possibility levels to describe imprecise information about futures. Using mathematically sound principles, I derive the following conclusion: the least surprising global warming by 2100 is 2.4 degree C, but this is no more probable than either the low or high figure of 1.1 and 4.0 degrees warming.

May 1, 2003, Prof. Rattan Lal, Director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, School of Natural Resources, Ohio State University "Assessing the Societal Value of Soil Carbon Sequestration." The increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2 from 288 ppm in 1750 to 367 ppm in 2000 is attributed to two anthropogenic activities. Fossil fuel combustion has contributed about 270 + 30 Pg (Pg = petagram = 1 billion ton) and land use about 136 + 55 Pg since 1850. Of the emissions from land use change, 78 + 12 Pg is from soil carbon pool. Most agricultural soils have lost between 30 and 60% of their original pool of organic carbon, amounting to 30 to 40 Mg C/ha by plowing, low input agriculture etc. The magnitude of soil C loss is exacerbated by soil degradation caused by erosion, salinization, compaction etc. Some of the depleted C can be sequestered through restoration of degraded soils, and adoption of recommended management practices are rates ranging from 50 to 1000 kg C/ha/y. The potential of soil C sequestration in all soils of the U.S. is about 330 Tg (Tg = teragram = million ton) per year. However, soil C sequestration requires nutrients (N, P, S etc.) and other carbon-based input. Carbon is only one of several building blocks of humus. For example, conversion of 10,000 kg of carbon from crop residues into humus requires about 830 kg of N, 200 kg of P and 143 kg of S. In corollary, shifting cultivators who do not use fertilizers and other off-farm input mine soil nutrients (N, P, K, S) and in the process emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There are also hidden costs of fertilizers (0.86 kg C/kg of N) and pesticides (4 to 5 kg C/kg of pesticides). In addition to improving crop yields on site, soil C sequestration decreases soil erosion, sedimentation, and risks of water pollution. Thus, any societal value of soil C for trading purposes must take all these factors into consideration.

May 22, 2003, Peter Rogers, Lecturer, Environmental Studies, Bates College "Political Ecology and Methodology for Protected Areas Research in Eastern and Southern Africa" This talk provides a snapshot of a research project's methodology while it is still in the process of being created and refined. The talk examines the theoretical concerns of the project, political ecology and governmentality, and argues for the real world importance of the topics of wildlife conservation and protected area management in sub-Saharan Africa. It provides the project's governmentality-influence research questions which focus on the "how" of resource use and management. The comparative case study methodology of the project is explained, and the Serengeti-Mara area of Eastern Africa and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park of Southern Africa are briefly described. These two cases are conceptualized as protected area complexes composed of both direct and indirect elements/units of observation. Operationalization of the project's research questions and theoretical issues is one of the most important items explored in this paper. The role of databases and computer-assisted qualitative analysis is next considered. The paper concludes by discussing debates of the theoretical position in the contemporary political ecology literature and arguing for a recognition of the key role of ecological factors in political ecology.

September 3, 2003, Benoit Morel, Senior Lecturer, CMU/EPP "How option theory can be used for technological risk management and decision under high uncertainty."

September 10, 2003, Geroge Loewenstein, Professor, CMU/SDS and Daylian Cain, PhD Student, GSIA."The Dirt on Coming Clean: Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest" Conflicts of interest can lead experts to give biased and corrupt advice. Although disclosure has been proposed as a potential solution to this, we show that disclosure can have perverse effects, and might even increase bias. Disclosure may increase bias because it leads advisors to feel morally licensed and strategically encouraged to exaggerate their advice even further from the truth. Proper use of the disclosure depends on understanding how that which is disclosed, as well as the disclosure itself, might bias advice. Because people lack this understanding, disclosure can fail to solve the problems created by conflicts of interest, and in fact may even make matters worse.

September 17, 2003 - SPYROS PANDIS, PROF, CMU - CHEME/EPP "Atmospheric Particulate Matter: From the Source to the Receptor"
Atmospheric chemistry occurs within a fabric of complicated atmospheric dynamics and physics. This interplay often results in nonlinear and often counterintuitive changes of the system when anthropogenic emissions change. Atmospheric particulate matter is one of the most fascinating components of this system. Atmospheric particles can cause health problems, visibility reduction, contribute to acidic deposition and material damage, but also are a major player in the energy balance of the planet. A major goal of our research has been to gain a predictive understanding of the physical and chemical processes that govern the dynamics, size, and chemical composition of atmospheric aerosols and to link the sources of the particles with their ambient concentrations at the air pollution receptor. This presentation discusses some of the results of the Pittsburgh Particulate Matter Supersite looking at air pollution in Pittsburgh and the Northeastern US. We will review the air quality in Pittsburgh, quantify what fraction of the pollutants is locally produced or imported from other areas, identify the contributions of specific sources using some state-of-the-art measurement techniques, and then look at the effectiveness of various control strategies.

September 24, 2003 - RAHUL TONGIA, SYSTEM SCIENTIST, ISRI "Information Technology and Power Distribution/Consumption"
In this talk, I will present on the potential and role of information technology (IT) for the power sector. Specifically, I will examine the interaction of IT with power distribution and consumption -- setting aside issues of IT usage at the pool (transmission) level. I present a brief overview of the technology, desired services, and current status, and highlight some issues. Beyond automatic meter reading (AMR), I consider IT capabilities for control, operations, and new services. Extending real-time control to the appliance level might have dramatic impact on power system stability and costs. According to one estimate, reducing the peak load by a few percent can reduce the costs of electricity by over 20%. While many of the new technologies are gaining commercialization, integrated solutions are not widespread. In this environment, I present a preliminary analysis of the potential of such technologies for developing countries. Here, given they often lack what is traditional equipment in the West (like automatic reclosers, capacitor banks, Universal metering etc.) there might be an opportunity for leapfrogging. In addition, I introduce a new idea (preliminary thoughts only!) on the directionality of information flow for power distribution management.

October 1, 2003 - DAVID HUGHES, ASST PROF, RUTGERS - HUMAN ECOLO/SOC SCIENCES "When Tourists Cross Boundaries and Peasants Don’t: Scale-Making and Exclusion in the Great Limpopo"
Abstract: Southern African conservation restricts the mobility of black peasants and enhances the mobility of white tourists. Nowhere is this inequality more evident than in plans for a vast, transboundary conservation area known as the Great Limpopo. The scheme would open borders for animals and visitors while confining smallholders to small locales. How have well-meaning conservationists come to promote such a biased, structurally racist set of ideas? Disguising this bias, the Great Limpopo relies upon convoluted assumptions regarding space and time. For space, supporters of the Great Limpopo have elaborated two scales for planning and social intervention. The scheme conjures a Cape-to-Cairo bioregion and landscape of leisure, the African scale for tourists. For peasants, the same planners – especially in Zimbabwe - have crafted an intensive, place-based model of development. White tourists will expand across the African continent whereas black smallholders should involute in “communities.” Yet, within its geographical scale, each group will gain in freedom and power. This false of sense of equality extends from space to time. Southern African bioregional thinking looks to the future, imagining wildlife ranges and and profitable hotels where neither currently exists. In anticipation of unseen growth, policy-makers open borders for the tourist trade. Meanwhile, the same planners ignore the obvious peasant future of growing populations. Assuming stasis, planners close boundaries and enclose the landscape. Such untenable notions have already been overtaken by events, especially in Zimbabwe, where tourists are now afraid to travel and para-military bands destroy fences. It is time to rethink transboundary conservation in the Great Limpopo and elsewhere.

October 8, 2003 ROBERT NICHOLS, FLOOD HAZARD RESEARCH CENTRE, MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY "Some global impacts of sea-level rise: A case study of flooding"
Analysis of the response to climate change and sea-level rise requires a link from climate change science to the resulting impacts and their policy implications. This paper explores the impacts of sea-level rise, particularly increased coastal flooding due to storm surges. In particular, it asks the simple question “how much will projected global sea-level rise exacerbate coastal flood problems, if ignored?” This is an important question to the intergovernmental process considering climate change. Further many countries presently ignore sea-level rise in long-term coastal planning, even though global sea levels are presently slowly rising. Using the model of Nicholls et al. (1999), the analysis considers the flood impacts of sea-level rise on consistent sets of scenarios of global-mean sea-level rise, subsidence (where appropriate), coastal population change (usually increase), and flood defence standards (derived from GDP/capita). Two of the protection scenarios consider the possible upgrade of flood defences, but no allowance for global-mean sea-level rise is allowed to ensure consistency with the question being investigated. This model has been validated against national- and regional-scale assessments indicating that the relative results are reasonable, and the absolute results are of the right order of magnitude. The scenarios that are used include the IS92a world and the SRES emission scenarios. Some consideration of possible stabilisation pathways will also be made. The model estimates that 10 million people experienced flooding annually in 1990. It also predicts that the incidence of flooding will change without sea-level rise due to changes to the other three factors. These results suggest that sea-level rise could be significant problem if it is ignored, although the uncertainties are very large. The policy implications will be considered.

October 15, 2003 - NICK SHORR, POST-DOC FELLOW, EPP:HDGC
"WHAT GOOD IS FEELING BAD? Negative emotions and environmental concern among Pittsburgh teenagers"
ABSTRACT: This talk locates a conceptual convergence between two bodies of research and theory: environmental psychology and ‘emotion and appraisal’; generates one general and two specific hypotheses from this convergence; and tests these hypotheses on data from a survey of Pittsburgh teenagers. According to ‘emotion and appraisal’ theorists in psychology, negative emotions arise when a situation is perceived as threatening or damaging to the self or what it holds dear. This suggests a simple, general hypothesis: that the total reported intensity of negative emotions when thinking about a personally troubling environmental concern should correlate with other measures of the strength of that concern. Two more specific hypotheses are based on distinctions between specific negative emotions, understood as based on different appraisals of the situation and that prepare the self for divergent responses to it. These preparations can alternately spur us to change a situation that troubles us; to learn more about it; to ignore it; or to abandon difficult-to-protect objects of affection and affiliation. Environmental psychologists have identified two broad sets of factors as reliable contributors to active environmental concern: perceived personal efficacy in contributing to mitigation; and two types of knowledge, that of the negative impacts of current behavior and that of alternative, mitigating behaviors. Both of these sets of factors map onto appraisals and coping processes that distinguish negative emotions from one another. Research has supported the idea that anger and its related emotions are more conducive to feeling efficacious (i.e. that one can do something about a perceived trouble) than are sadness and fear and their close relatives. However, research has also found that angry emotions often lead to a greater foreclosure of systematic inquiry than do sad emotions, suggesting a second hypothesis that angry subjects would be less inclined to learn the details of causality or mitigation. Following semi-structured interviews with 45 high school students, we designed and administered a survey to 458 high school students regarding the environmental problems that were of greatest personal concern to them. As part of the survey, we asked subjects to report the presence and intensity of nine negative emotions they experienced when thinking about their most personally troubling environmental concern. We then measured the correlations between these self-reported emotional intensities and a) self-reports and assessed measures of perceived efficacy; and b) measures of knowledge considered most relevant by environmental concern theorists. Findings offer mixed support for the two hypotheses and suggest that the frequently reported combinations of sadness and anger may serve to reduce their liabilities for efficacy and systematic inquiry respectively. I end by suggesting some ways that further investigation into the negative emotional dimensions of civic concerns may be useful in encouraging and developing a more engaged citizenry.

October 22, 2003 - LESTER LAVE, CMU Professor, Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor of Economics and Finance Professor, GSIA/EPP

"Should the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards Be Raised?"
Environmental and energy efficiency advocates want to increase
the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. The fuel economy of the average new consumer vehicle sold has declines since 1981. Last summer, the Senate voted down a proposal to increase the standard for the average car and light truck from the current 24 mpg to 36 mpg. The Bush administration has increased the light truck standard 15% over 5 years. American car makers vigorously oppose a CAFE increase. Several economists have argued that increasing CAFE would have costs far greater than benefits. A National Academy of Sciences panel found net benefits for a small CAFE increase. We wade into this fight, throw out the chaff, and conclude that CAFE has a role to play. The first best policy would be a significant increase in gasoline taxes and increase in CAFE. If gasoline tax increases are impossible, there is still a case for increasing CAFE.

October 29, 2003 - DR. DAVID GROSSMAN, ECOLOGIST/CONSULTANT, DAVID GROSSMAN & ASSOCIATES
"Overview of the natural and human dimensions of the GLCA: Current status and key issues."
Background: Dr Grossman has been directly involved in the development of management plans for the Limpopo, Banhine and Zinave National Parks in Mozambique, and the Makuleke Region of the Kruger National Park, in South Africa. All these areas form part of the envisaged Greater Limpopo Conservation Area. His paper provides an experienced practitioner’s perspective on the planning and implementation of this transfrontier park.

November 5, 2003 - PETER ADAMS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, CMU:ECE
"Ultrafine particles and climate change"
Changes in cloud reflectivity result from increased numbers of airborne particles, and are one of the most uncertain climate forcings. Climate models need to know the number concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), the subset of particles that can nucleate cloud droplets, to estimate better the magnitude of this forcing. The traditional approach has been to use empirical correlations between aerosol mass and CCN, which is convenient but obscures important physical processes that control the behavior of airborne particles. This research shows that ultrafine particles (defined as particles with diameters less than 100 nm) have an unexpectedly high impact on CCN number concentrations. Because of their negligible mass, however, the effect of these particles has been ignored by the "traditional approach". For the same reason, the existing particulate matter regulations (formulated in terms of mass loadings)have resulted in little attention to understanding the sources of ultrafine particles (direct emissions during combustion and in-situ formation).

November 12, 2003 - FRANCISCO VELOSO, VISITING PROFESSOR, CMU:EPP
"Process Management Practices and Performance: Early results from an investigation of ISO 9000 adoption in the automotive components sector"
Process management practices (such as the adoption of the ISO 9000 standard) are expected to be associated with improvements in efficiency, reduced waste, improved yields, faster times to market for new products, and improved quality in products leading to improved customer satisfaction, higher revenues, and ultimately, improved profits. Such techniques are expected to achieve such benefits by removing non-value-added or wasted steps, more tightly streamling the handoffs and connections between processes across the organization, and using measures of customer satisfaction to guide improvements. However, although efficiency improvements have been demonstrated with the application of process management techniques, studies of profit performance have been equivocal. One reason may be that as everyone in an industry adopts, it becomes harder for the additional user to attain a competitive advantage. Another reason is that such effects are likely to be moderated by firm characteristics. This project aims at studying how firm performance is influenced by the nature of the firm's technological capabilities and its behavior towards adoption of process management techniques. It draws on a longitudinal panel of firms in one industry where the adoption of such practices has become ubiquitous, the automotive supplier sector.

November 19, 2003 - MICHAEL GRUBB, IMPERIAL COLLEGE, LONDON
DEPTARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
"Technology's the answer - but what was the question? - analytic and transatlantic divides in responding to climate change."
Developing low carbon technologies is now recognized as a key element in responding to climate change, but there remain deep divisions about what this really means and implies. The talk will compare engineering, R&D-oriented conceptions of technical change with economic, demand-led views, and their diverse policy implications. The talk will conclude with looking at how these different approaches are reflected in the transatlantic political divide on responding to the issue.

December 3, 2003 - W. NEIL ADGER, TYNDALL CENTRE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA, NORWICH, UK
"Justice in Adaptation to Climate Change"
Abstract: Adaptation to climate change presents dilemmas of fairness, justice and equity to the international community. They include those of the responsibility of developed countries to assist developing countries in adapting to changing climate and the implications of adaptation for the
vulnerable and the marginalised. I argue that adaptation involves both distributive and Procedural justice: the former focusing on the incidence of consequences of adaptive responses and the latter on how decisions on adaptation are made. All choices of appropriate adaptive responses have consequences that can promote equity or, alternatively, exacerbate
vulnerability. Some principles of justice are more appropriate than others. I show that principles of justice depend on the nature of adaptation decisions and the evolving international discourse on adaptation, as manifest through the institutions of international treaties and negotiations. The imperative to facilitate adaptation of the most vulnerable implies a maximin principle of justice. Simple equality, desert, and utilitarian principles are subservient to this imperative. The
implications of this ranking are that international, national and everyday adaptation decisions, to be sustainable and fair, need to focus on reducing vulnerability.

December 5, 2003 - FELIX DAYO, PhD, TRIPLE-E-SYSTEMS, LAGOS, NIGERIA AND MAX HENRION, PhD, LUMINA DECISION SYSTEMS, LOS GATOS, CA "Integrated Assessment of Global Change in West Africa: Towards a model of climate, water, and agriculture." West Africa includes some of the poorest countries on Earth, with the least resources to respond effectively to climate change. Declining rainfall in recent decades, along with desertification, are already major challenges to agriculture which is mainly rain-fed. Several options, however, could help conserve water and improve agricultural yields, offering major benefits whatever future climate changes may bring. These options include expanded drip irrigation and adoption of a variety of farming methods to improve soil fertility and food production without major reliance on industrial fertilizers. Consequent increases in soil organic carbon in arable lands could increase soil fertility while simultaneously sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Felix Dayo and Max Henrion, both EPP PhDs, will report on the first phase integrated assessment model in Analytica, designed to explore and quantify these issues and their interrelationships. This work is the initial result of the Workshop on the Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Global Change on Agricultural Productivity and Water Availability in West Africa, held at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile Ife, Nigeria on 7-10th October 2003, organized by Felix Dayo with support from the Carnegie Mellon Center for the Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change. The working group includes scientists and government representatives in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal.

December 10, 2003 - RICHARD H. MOSS PhD., DIRECTOR, CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE PROGRAM OFFICE "Making Climate Science Relevant to Decisionmaking" Précis: By many estimates, the US Government’s investment in climate change science is on the order of $3-4 Billion annually. Given the size of the investment and the importance of the issue, it is vital that the scientific information that is produced be useful to practical decisionmaking on a wide range of issues. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program coordinates and integrates research conducted or sponsored by 13 agencies/departments of the Federal government. A major thrust of the program is providing decision support resources to support public debate, to evaluate national policy options, and to inform ongoing management of climate-sensitive sectors and resources. The presentation will provide an overview of the decision support effort of the CCSP and raise several current program challenges as CCSP moves from planning to more active implementation efforts.

2002

January 16, 2002, Mojdeh Keykhah, Oxford University
"The Shape of Uncertainty: Implications for Global Change Decision-Making."
Catastrophe risk has long been associated with scenarios of global environmental change, including step changes in ecosystem vulnerability and the increased incidence of weather hazards. It is also a category of risk business by insurance companies worldwide, and their coverage serves to support and underpin many critical economic sectors. How do insurance companies make decisions under catastrophe risk? What are the implications for assessments and decision-making studies of global change?

January 23, 2002, Minh Ha Duong, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC and David Keith, EPP-HDGC
"Climate Strategy With CO2 Capture From the Air." It is physically possible to capture CO2 directly from air and immobilize it in geological structures. Air capture differs from conventional mitigation in three key aspects. First, it removes emissions from any part of the economy equally, so its price absolutely caps the cost of mitigation. Second, it permits reduction in concentrations faster than the natural carbon cycle: irreversibility is partly alleviated. Third, because it is less coupled with the energy system, its scaleability may be better than other clean energy technologies.
On one hand, these advantages limit the total cost of a worst-case climate scenario. In an optimal sequential decision framework, the consequence is to decrease the need for precautionary short-term abatement. On the other hand, it is generally assumed that marginal cost of carbon capture and sequestration decreases with time, while marginal climate change damage increases. This implies that the final policy target will be to return atmospheric greenhouse gases concentration to pre-industrial levels. This indeed is consistent with the UNFCCC wording and with the historical experience of global ozone policy.

February 6, 2002, George Loewenstein, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Social and Decision Sciences
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Two Sides of Inter-temporal Choice."
This paper was presented at the Nobel Symposium on Behavioral and Experimental Economics in Stockholm.

February 20, 2002, Gary Yohe, Wesleyan University, Economics
"Indicators for Social and Economic Coping Capacity - Moving Toward a Working Definition of Adaptive Capacity." This paper offers a practically motivated method for evaluating systems' abilities to handle external stress. The method is designed to assess the potential contributions of various adaptation options to improving systems' coping capacities by focusing attention directly on the underlying determinants of adaptive capacity. The method should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate diverse applications whose contexts are location specific and path dependent without imposing the straightjacket constraints of a "one size fits all" cookbook approach. Nonetheless, the method should produce unit-less indicators that can be employed to judge the relative vulnerabilities of diverse systems to multiple stresses and to their potential interactions. An artificial application is employed to describe the development of the method and to illustrate how it might be applied. Some empirical evidence is offered to underscore the significance of the determinants of adaptive capacity in determining vulnerability; these are the determinants upon which the method is constructed. The method is, finally, applied directly to expert judgments of six different adaptations that could reduce vulnerability in the Netherlands to increased flooding along the Rhine River.

February 27, 2002, John Soluri, Carnegie Mellon, History Department
"Strange Fruit: Banana Breeding Programs and the Contradictions of Commodification."
The export banana trade in the Americas was built on a very narrow genetic base; a single variety -- the Gros Michel-- was virtually the only banana variety sold in U.S. markets for 70 years. Gros Michel produced large bunches of fruit that shipped well and had pleasing aesthetic qualities. However, it also proved to be highly susceptible to a number of pathogens including Panama disease and Sigatoka. The dynamics created by the spread of these two diseases during the first half of the twentieth century accelerated rates of deforestation, destabilized rural livelihoods, increased health risks for farm workers, and cut into company profit margins. As one banana breeder has remarked, "no crop better illustrates the dangers inherent in monoclone cultivation."
The Panama disease epidemic prompted both the British colonial government and the United Fruit Company to establish breeding programs during the 1920s with the shared goal of developing an export banana with resistance to Panama disease. However, creating a hybrid capable of thriving both in tropical production zones and on U.S. consumer markets proved to be a difficult task. In fact, when banana growers in the Caribbean and Central America began to replace the Gros Michel with disease-resistant varieties during the 1950s, they did not plant hybrids; instead the industry planted "land races" from Southeast Asia whose development stretched back over many centuries. The story of export banana breeding then, reveals one of the central contradictions of twentieth-century agriculture: mass-production processes tended to reduce biological diversity at local and regional levels even as they depended upon a "global" pool of genetic resources to maintain themselves.
The history of export banana breeding raises a number of policy questions related to the conservation of crop diversity in tropical landscapes shaped by local and global change processes.

March 6, 2002, Keith Florig, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC
"Scientific and Political Processes in EMF Risk Management."
Attention to possible health impacts of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from power-frequencies to microwaves has waxed and waned for many years. This presentation will discuss some of the forces affecting that attention, including media interest cycles, growing use of EMF-producing devices, new epidemiologic findings, regulatory budgets, and political action by special interests. In the EMF environmental policy domain, efforts to apply a weak version of the precautionary principle have succeeded in some areas. Overall, however, if stricter EMF risk regulation is ever to emerge from the protracted competition and chaos created by these forces, a highly persuasive set of bio-effects studies would be needed, along with a coalition of supportive organizations with substantial resources and staying power.

March 13, 2002, Hadi Dowlatabadi, UBC University Fellow and EPP-HDGC Adjunct Faculty
"An Indicator for Human Development." The goal here is to devise an indicator for development. This indicator is being sought in addition to more conventional measures of water infrastructure in a region and the region's formal measures of economic performance. Defining such a metric can take many approaches, such as a focus on institutions for human cooperation and resource management. I have adopted a different path in order avoid the challenge of formal vs. informal institutions and also to try to get to the heart of the question rather than play at its periphery. In doing so, I may have become too much of a functionalist, but that is the bias in my training and how I frame problems. Here are the basic challenges inherent in defining an indicator of Human Dimensions of Development, as I see them: 1) What is meant by "human dimensions"? 2) What are the ways in which this can be measured? 3) Where are the measures most useful? In the text that follows, I offer a first attempt at an answer. I welcome critiques of both the framing and the answer.

March 18, 2002, Malik Amin Aslam, Executive Director, ENVORK
"Clean Development Mechanism Under the Kyoto Protocol: Is There a Future Role for the Market Instrument?"
The presentation commences by tracing the birth and evolution of the Clean Development Mechanism within the context of the North~South climate negotiations process. The potential of the CDM to deliver on its stated promise for sustainable development in the South is then investigated with a particular focus on the opportunity for appropriate technology transfer.
This is followed by an elaboration of the climate negotiations scenario after the US withdrawal from Kyoto and the, subsequent, political compromise reached at Bonn by the rest of the world. The implications of these developments are explored for the CDM to deduce whether there is a future role to be played by this market-based instrument within the climate change arena.

March 27, 2002, Conrad Steenkamp, Post-Doc HDGC
"The Makuleke Agreement: A South African Case Study of Co-Management and Conflict in Conservation." The paper deals with the co-management regime set in place over the northern-most section of the Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa, as a result of a land claim by the Makuleke tribe of the Limpopo Province.
The "Makuleke Agreement" set a precedent for the resolution of conflicts between conservation and human rights objectives in the South African context, but also has international relevance. Actual implementation of the agreement, however, proved to be a rocky road in which the difficulties inherent in co-management regimes became very apparent.
The paper will deal with the following issues: 1) the participatory approach in conservation (so called Community-based Natural Resource Management); 2) the contents of the Makuleke Agreement and how it was negotiated; 3) conflicts experienced in the course of implementing the agreement; 4) the emerging critique of CBNRM.

March 28, 2002, Dr. Felix B. Dayo, Managing Director/CEO, Triple "E" Systems Associates Limited, Goodwill House, Lagos, Nigeria
"Core Research and Capacity Building on Climate Change in West Africa: An Adjunct Faculty Program." The presentation will highlight the components of a Climate Change program that is currently being put together. The program consists of two parts. First is the core research on Climate Change, which focuses on four theme areas: 1) Study of Vulnerability & Adaptation to Climate Change in West Africa; 2) Development of a Framework for Technology Needs Assessment for Climate Change in West Africa; 3) Evaluation of the Role of CDM in Promoting Sustainable Industrial Development in West Africa; 4) Modeling of the Financial Implication of the Kyoto Protocol in the West African Sub-Region.
The second theme of the program is capacity building for climate change activities in the West African Sub-Region. This will cover focused seminars and workshops in the sub-region and at international meetings to disseminate results and to build the capacity of practitioners from the sub-region. A focal component of the capacity building aspect is the training at MS and PhD levels as well as Post Doctoral exposures at EPP for selected candidates from and outside the sub-region.
The presentation will be concluded with a discussion of the methodological framework that will be utilized inn developing the TNA framework.

April 10, 2002, Prof. Richard Tol, Hamburg University and Vrije Universiteit
"Emission Abatement Versus Development As Strategies to Reduce Vulnerability to Climate Change: An Application of Fund". Poorer countries are generally believed to be more vulnerable to climate change than richer countries because poorer countries are more exposed and have less adaptive capacity. This suggests that, in principle, there are two ways of reducing vulnerability to climate change: economic growth and greenhouse gas emission reduction. Using a complex climate change impact model, in which development is an important determinant of vulnerability, the hypothesis is tested whether development aid is more effective in reducing vulnerability than is emission abatement. The hypothesis is rejected in all cases, except for one important one. In general, investing a dollar in emission reduction reduces impacts further than investing that dollar in general development aid. However, this is not the case for vector-borne infectious diseases (malaria) and for regions where such diseases dominate total climate change impacts (Africa). In this case, more climate-change-induced disease is avoided by stimulating development than by reducing emissions.

April 17, 2002, Joseph Arvai, The Ohio State University, Environmental Communication Analysis & Research for Policy Working Group, School of Natural Resources, "Science and Human Values: Decision Focused Approaches for Addressing Complex Environmental Problems." Both researchers and practitioners advocate public participation as a means of helping to improve decisions and overcome the persistent divisiveness and conflict that are common in many environmental management contexts. Unfortunately, relatively few studies have been conducted to help identify what components might be helpful as part of public participation processes that work to foster better informed and more widely supported environmental decisions. Two experiments were recently conducted to help fill this gap. The first involved the test of a test of a strategy to improve the quality of public input by combining themes from risk communication with the prescriptive decision process of value-focused thinking. The second compared science-based and structured, values-based treatments of information as a means of informing choices about the cleanup of contaminated sites. Results and conclusions from both studies will be discussed.

April 24, 2002, David Victor, Stanford University, Director, The Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, "Electric Power Reform in the Real World." There is a well-rehearsed theory about the reasons for reforming electric power markets and the best policies for achieving such reform. The reasons focus on efficiency and investment; the policies focus on corporatization, privatization, de-integration, and creation of independent regulators to oversee competitive markets. In the real world, especially perhaps in the developing world, the reasons are often quite different and the policies--even when implemented according to the book--seem to fail. This talk will explore the reasons for the disconnect and present some early results from a comparative study that will explore these issues in 5 countries.

May 1, 2002, Nick Shorr, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC, "The Possibilities and Challenges of Conscious Consumption: Beyond the Virtual World". Perhaps we do not fully appreciate how strange the modern consumer has been in the context of human experience: how profoundly naïve we all are regarding the sources and impacts of our goods, like children whose parents bring home gifts from some mysterious place! If the growth of trade over the past centuries has increased the distance between consumption and production and with it consumer ignorance of production and its effects, then globalization of the past decades has increased the rates of growth of distance and ignorance. Conscious Consumption may be defined as consumer interest in learning the ecological and social consequences of a products life cycle and in including this knowledge into our purchasing decisions. It is a striving towards responsibility, towards adulthood. Here, I will attempt to: 1) convey a sense of the place of the conscious consumption frontier in human experience; 2) encourage enthusiasm at the emerging possibilities of this frontier (as evidenced in the recent growth of ecolabeling and ethical investment?); 3) outline some of the ways that this frontier might improve the landscapes in which environmental engineers and policy makers work; 4) encourage an appreciation for the complex challenges of this frontier and a skepticism towards the quality and quantity of the information currently available; 5) propose strategic policy recommendations to expedite effective movement into this frontier.

May 8, 2002, Christina Fong, Carnegie Mellon, SDS, "Fairness, Incentives and Salience in the Demand for Redistribution". In this talk, I overview some of my published, recently completed, and in-progress research on behavioral motives for redistribution. My goal is to simultaneously present the pertinent findings and illustrate the mixture of empirical and theoretical tools that I use in this interdisciplinary research in public economics. Empirical research has uncovered four important behavioral factors that affect either attitudes to or actual expenditures on redistribution: beliefs about the causes of income, racial group loyalty, social proximity to the poor, and generosity that is not conditioned on the characteristics, work activities, or group membership of the recipients. However, I have found that these effects are not universal. An important problem is to uncover when these variables take effect and why. I present some current research, in which I use data and theory together to suggest a possible condition for the salience of beliefs about why the poor are poor in decisions over optimal redistribution.

May 15, 2002, Ken Strzepek, University of Colorado-Boulder, "Indices for Sustainable Resource Management: Some Generic Thoughts and An Application to Water Resources Management". There are almost as many approaches to quantifying indicators for sustainable development as definitions of Sustainability. This paper will look at some of the broader issues, present an "Index Taxonomy" and then apply that taxonomy to the area of Sustainable Water Resources Management. Lesson learned (primarily Human Dimensions) from leading the Indicator Development Unit of the United Nation's World Water Assessment Program will be shared.

May 22, 2002, Nick Pidgeon, Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk in the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, "Public Trust and Risk Policy in Great Britain after BSE: Some Evidence and Institutional Challenges". The talk argues that risk perception and acceptability is as much an issue of trust in scientific and regulatory institutions as it is a matter of 'public understanding of science or risk'. This moves the locus of risk communication away from mere one-way provision of information, to encompass two-way mechanisms for wider forms of dialogue between scientists, policy makers and the many and varied social groups which make up our society today. In Britain the BSE 'mad cow' crisis, and the ensuing Phillips inquiry into BSE, has led to recommendations for greater openness in government handling and communication of risk information, and forms a backdrop to a number of institutional and participatory innovations taking place in risk regulation and public policy. The talk argues that openness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for trust. It draws upon illustrative empirical data from a range of recent mixed-methods studies looking at public trust in health and safety regulation and also perceptions of the handling of the foot and mouth crisis, to illustrate some of the complexities of people's understandings of risk and 'trust'. Implications for policy and research are discussed.

July 10, 2002, Stephen C. Peck, President, Fleche, "Optimal Environmental Research Strategies Include Two Precautionary Principles." In recent years there has been a good deal of attention paid to the Precautionary Principle and its application in environmental decision-making. While there have been many papers written it has been hard to operationalize the principle. I believe that it is most useful to address the issue in the following way. There is usually a large amount of scientific uncertainty associated with questions of environmental protection. In many cases the best thing to do is to obtain a deeper understanding and collect more data so that a well informed decision whether or not to control emissions may be made. However there are two situations where this strategy is not optimal. One is where there is general agreement that there is a moderate to high probability that the environmental emission is harmful. In this case it may be best to neglect research and choose the policy of "Control" for emissions. This situation may be thought of as an (environmental) Precautionary Principle. Alternatively there may be general agreement that the environmental emission has a low probability of harm. Now it is best to neglect research and choose the policy of "No Control". This situation may be considered a (control cost) Precautionary Principle. The approach that we adopt in this paper is as follows. We imagine a Policymaker deciding whether to impose controls on emissions or to run the risk of allowing emissions to continue and possibly do harm. The Policymaker holds certain prior beliefs about the emissions' dangers. Before the control decision takes place, a Researcher, knowing of the Policymaker's decision problem, determines, given his own prior beliefs about the riskiness of the emissions, how precise a research program to conduct recognizing that any such program will yield only imperfect information about the danger of the emissions, but nevertheless, the more is spent on the research, the more precise the information is likely to be. The Researcher expects to update his own and the Policymaker's prior probability distributions of the riskiness of the emissions. Bayesian statistical methods are used to update prior probabilities with experimental data (characterized by likelihood functions) and thus to arrive at posterior probability distributions (Lindley).

September 4,2002, Prof. Fran McMichael, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty, "Uncertainty in Input-Output Calculations."

September 11, 2002, Prof. Benoit Morel, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Physics faculty. "September 11: One Year Later." In the spirit of the celebrations planned for September 11, this talk will be designed to facilitate a collective assessment of where we stand. It will be an attempt to identify what we have learned about terrorism and the challenge it represents to our society. Could our response have been better? If yes, how and in what sense? How should we look at the future and prepare for it?

September 18, 2002, Lester Lave, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Graduate School of Industrial Administration faculty. "Bio Ethanol: Achieving Energy Independence & Sustainability." Producing ethanol from biomass could power all US cars and light trucks, ending the need to import petroleum and providing a completely sustainable fuel. The several advantages of bio-ethanol can be achieved at two costs: The first cost is an additional $100-150 billion per year and the use of 300-500 million acres to grow grasses and trees.

September 25, 2002, Prof. John E. J. Gallacher, University of Wales Medical College, Epidemiology, Statistics, and Public Health, "The Epidemiologic Failure of Risk Perception Research." John E. J. Gallacher teaches in the department of Epidemiology, Statistics, and Public Health-Environmental Epidemiology. ESPH is the integration of the Department of Medical Computing and Statistics and Public Health. The department's research strategy focuses on environmental epidemiology. Areas of research include environmental health, infectious diseases, and health services.

October 2, 2002, Barry Chernoff, University of Chicago, Department of Zoology Field Museum of Natural History, " The Panatanal and Paraguay Aquatic Ecosystems: Biodiversity, Ecology and Economics of Sustainable Use." South America has the richest aquatic flora and fauna of any continent on the planet. In addition to the time of isolation of South America from the other continents, part of the reason that South America is so species rich may be the large proportion of the continent that is occupied by rivers or other water bodies. The Amazon, Paraguay and Orinoco basins comprise three of the five largest river basins in the world in terms of length and volume of water-flow. As an example using fishes, there are more than 9000 species of freshwater fishes in South America, which is approximately equal to the number of birds and 1.8 times the number of mammals in the world.
The Paraguay River basin is the second largest in South America covering more than 1,100,000 km2 over its 2,550 km course. The Paraguay River is one of only two rivers in the world that has its headwaters in the tropics and its mouth in the temperate zone. This has a critical implication for the conservation of the tropical species inhabiting the basin. Though many have assumed that the Paraguay and Amazon faunas are recently separated, the existence of ancient fossil fishes that are closely related to extant species indicates that many of the species-lineages currently inhabiting the Paraguay River basin are ancient (>30,000,000 million years).
The Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands containing more than 365,000 km2 in the upper Paraguay River basin of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. The Pantanal is home to thousands of species of plants and animals. The Pantanal provides critical nursery grounds for many species of fishes and critical refuge or sanctuary for migratory birds, black caiman, deer, and jaguars. Yet the species that inhabit both the Pantanal and other parts of the Paraguay River are extensively and increasingly threatened due to deforestation and habitat conversion associated with agriculture and cattle ranching. The largest threat of all, including to sustainable cattle ranching and agriculture involves the Hidrovia Project that would potentially, straighten and channelize the Paraguay River and ultimately connect it to the Amazon drainage.
Studies of the community structure of the Pantanal and the Paraguay River argue strongly for the establishment of corridors and some protected areas. This approach would protect the commercial- and sports fishes with the added benefit of protecting more than 90% of the aquatic biodiversity. The plan would lead to not only sustainable use of the Pantanal and Paraguay Rivers but would also provide a currently underexploited fishery in Paraguay to help meet future world needs for protein (i.e., a food bank). The economics of sustainable use are presented in relationship to a number of the costs of non-sustainable development in the Paraguay River drainage.

October 16, 2002, Robert Margolis, Carnegie Mellon, Center for Study and Improvement of Regulation, "Experience Curves and Solar Photovoltaic Technology Policy." There is an extensive literature on learning by doing, learning by using and experience curves, going back to the 1960s. More recently there has been a growing body of literature on the potential role of learning in bringing the cost of new energy technologies in general and photovoltaic technologies in particular down to competitive levels. A number of analysts have used historical data on PV module production and prices to estimate a PV industry-wide experience curve. The resulting progress ratios vary from 0.68 to 0.84, i.e., historically PV module prices ($/Wp) have decreased in the range of 16% to 32% for each doubling of (cumulative) production. These authors argue that there has been a history of significant learning in the PV industry. Typically they go on to use progress ratios to estimate the size of the "learning" subsidy required to make PV technology widely cost-competitive in the energy marketplace. The estimated "buy-down" cost ranges from $120 million to $100 billion. Such a wide-range of estimates raises a number of questions about how analysts have been using experience curves to think prospectively about PV technology development.
In this seminar I will examine the use of experience curves for formulating photovoltaic technology policy. First, I will provide a brief overview of experience curves in general and some background information on PV technology. Second, I will discuss the application of experience curves to PV technology. Third, I will identify five key factors that help to explain the wide variation in "buy down" cost estimates, and will argue that analysts need to pay careful attention to these factors when using experience curves to think prospectively. And finally, I will discuss directions for future research.

October 23, 2002, Joel Smith, Stratus Consulting, Inc. Environmental and Energy Research, "Estimating Global Damages from Climate Change." In addressing the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, an important question is how the marginal benefits, or avoided damages, associated with controlling climate vary with particular levels of mitigation. A few studies have attempted to answer this question by using a common metric, typically dollars, to express all damages from climate change. (There are other ways to estimate marginal impacts, including identifying unique and vulnerable systems threatened by climate change, examining risk from extreme weather events, and identifying thresholds for triggering state changes in the global climate system, such as shutdown of thermohaline circulation.) While studies that aggregate damages from climate change in terms of a single metric provide useful insight about how marginal impacts change, especially at higher levels of climate change, there are a number of concerns with such studies.
In addressing the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, an important question is how the marginal benefits, or avoided damages, associated with controlling climate vary with particular levels of mitigation. A few studies have attempted to answer this question by using a common metric, typically dollars, to express all damages from climate change. (There are other ways to estimate marginal impacts, including identifying unique and vulnerable systems threatened by climate change, examining risk from extreme weather events, and identifying thresholds for triggering state changes in the global climate system, such as shutdown of thermohaline circulation.) While studies that aggregate damages from climate change in terms of a single metric provide useful insight about how marginal impacts change, especially at higher levels of climate change, there are a number of concerns with such studies.

October 30, 2002, Gary Yohe, Wesleyan University, along with Kris Ebi, EPRI, "Approaching Adaptation: Parallels and Contrasts Between the Climate and Health Communities." Public health prevention and climate change adaptation share the goal of increasing the ability of nations, communities and individuals to cope effectively and efficiently with challenges and changes. Public health researcher approach from the perspective of protecting and enhancing the health and well-being of individuals and communities. Climate researchers approach adaptation from a perspective that can trace its roots to the natural hazards community.

November 6, 2002, David Gerard, Carnegie-Mellon, EPP and Lester Lave, Carnegie-Mellon, GSIA/EPP/CEIC, "Technology-Forcing Automobile Emissions Provisions of the 1970 Clean Air Act: Forcing Invention or Innovation?" The 1970 Clean Air Amendments required 90 percent reductions in the emissions of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides for 1975 and 1976 model year vehicles. These are known as technology-forcing regulations, because the standards exceed what could be met with known technologies, and consequently generated significant pressure not only on automakers, but also on the EPA, Congress, and the courts. Although the statutory deadlines were not met in a timely fashion, US manufacturers developed two marquee technologies - the catalytic converter (oxidizing catalysts) to reduce HC and CO, and the three-way catalyst to simultaneously reduce HC, CO, and NOx. Ford and GM began widespread installation of oxidizing catalysts in 1975, and most US autos were equipped with the devices by 1977. The widespread diffusion of a three-way catalyst had to wait until 1981. Even so, US producers continued to struggle to keep CO and NOx emissions low. Indeed, US automakers did not meet the standards set in the 1970 statute until 1993.
In this paper we seek to learn about the dynamics of the technology-forcing regulations by examining the regulatory process that unfolded between 1971 and 1981. We begin by reviewing the economic theory of technology-forcing regulations, and the factors that could lead firms to increase or reduce their R&D into emissions control technologies. Next, we use this theory to inform our two case studies. First, we look at EPA's successful effort to force the development and installation of the catalytic converter. Next, we investigate possible reasons why the three-way catalyst was so slow to develop. We conducted interviews with a number of the principal stakeholders from the automakers, the EPA, and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to augment the considerable body of evidence published histories, court decisions, and economic analyses related to the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments. Finally, we offer some tentative conclusions about technology-forcing regulations lessons from our case study. Specifically, we find that regulatory pressure is more likely to be effective when regulators are technologically sophisticated and are attempting to force improvements in a known technology. In contrast, regulatory pressure is likely to be much less effective if the regulators are uncertain about which technology to force or the emissions control requires sophisticated new technology to work. Overall, the technology-forcing process is fraught with uncertainty, and is particularly vulnerable to unforeseen complications.

November 15, 2002, Drs. Talaue Mcmanus and Keene Meltzoff, University of Miami, "Initiative for Adaptive Management: Reframing A Shared Vision." We will discuss our coastal fieldwork experiences in various parts of the world, and how these have led to our current goal: to establish an adaptive framework through which local coastal populations become active stewards of tropical artisanal fisheries. We will describe how we aim to facilitate mutual learning with partners at the grassroots in creating the visualization and mapping of local knowledge. This will include thinking about AM's midterm and long term goals of conflict resolution and development of a common information network of globally shared participant-observation experiences.

November 20, 2002, Dr. Athanasios Nenes, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, "Aerosol Indirect Effect: The Elusive Component of Climate Change." The effects of aerosols on clouds are recognized as one of the largest sources of uncertainty in assessments of anthropogenic climate change. This uncertainty arises from the sheer complexity of aerosol-cloud processes, and from the wide range of length scales involved in cloud-aerosol interactions. We will discuss the importance and challenges of resolving aerosol chemical composition, and present recent advancements in developing a general aerosol-cloud relationship based on first principles modeling. Furthermore, we will discuss the current state of instrumentation used in studying aerosol-cloud interactions.

December 4, 2002, Ragnar Lofstedt, director, Risk Management, Kings College, "The Evolving Risk Management Field in Europe: Some Insights and Speculations." The EU has been concerned about better regulation. Regulatory simplification seen as a prerequisite for EU enlargement (1985) Edinburgh 1992 summit better regulation seen as a priority, however, not much has happened. This is now changing. Commission concerned about two areas in particular: (1) Better regulatory preparation need to be as rigorous as possible based on a minimum standards of public consultation and draw in expertise need to be coherent. (2) Regulation needs to be implemented in the member state countries: No uniform implementation; Growing problem of compliance; Rules implemented slowly; Regulations are too elaborate (and many poorly conceived); Laws are not based on consensus; Laws are made too flexible (especially the case of directives); Many unrealistic; Little consultation with affected parties; Some unfair (Swedish woodcock hunting season); Overwhelm national institutions: hence some ignored and others adopted in a nationalistic way.

December 11, 2002, Sarosh Talukdar, Carnegie Mellon ECE Faculty, "The Trouble with Electricity Markets." Electricity markets can affect our lives as profoundly as computers, bridges and airplanes. But markets are designed less carefully. The SMD (standard market design) proposed by FERC is the latest example of insufficient care.
I will compare markets to other engineered artifacts, point out the deficiencies in the market-design process, and suggest some remedies, specifically, the use of software agents for testing and verification. (The emergent behaviors of simple agents can be extremely complex, and it may be possible harness this complexity for the study of market dynamics.)

December 18, 2002, Neil Leary, Start, Science Director, AIACC, "Vulnerability of People, Places and Systems to Environmental Change." The consequences of environmental change are not uniform. They differ for different people, places and times. This is the clear picture that emerges from studies of the impacts of global environmental change as well as observations of the distribution of impacts of natural hazards, the incidence of hunger and famine, the problems of land use and land cover change, and the spread and toll of HIV/AIDS and reemerging infectious diseases. The responses to the ensuing risks will also differ, and should differ, for different people, places and times.

2001

HDGC LUNCH TIME SEMINAR SERIES

January 16, 2001, Paul Rutter, Green Operations Technology, British Petroleum-Amoco, United Kingdom Division
This is an informal, non-technical talk about BP's Lower Carbon Growth Strategy with some examples of what BP is doing on hydrogen, solar and gas etc. This might stimulate some questions, criticisms etc., which will be welcomed and explored in discussion. The evolution of BP's position on climate policy will also be discussed.

January 18, 2001, Scott Farrow, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Center for the Study and Improvement of Regulation
"Merging Risk Assessment and Real Options: A Proposal for a Quantitative Approach to the Precautionary Principle." Outside of economics, risk assessment is a growing presence in the evaluation of environmental and public health risk. However, economists' core approach to such assessment and management, benefit-cost analysis, often fails in practice to implement a transparent role for uncertainty. Concurrently, environmental advocates are proposing a new management criterion based on a vaguely framed "Precautionary Principle." This presentation will structure and demonstrate how risk assessment techniques and decision-making criteria under uncertainty and irreversibility can be combined. The result is to augment standard benefit-cost techniques and define a "precautionary" threshold for action compared to standard economic approaches.

February 1, 2001, Minh Ha Duong, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC and Centre Internationale de Recherche sur L'Environment et le Development (CIRED) France
"Transparency and Control in Engineering Integrated Assessment Models." This paper discusses transparency and control in integrated assessment models from a software engineering point of view. License agreements of selected climate change analysis models MERGE, IMAGE, DICE and MARKAL are reviewed to see how they fit conventional scientific practices and modern open-source software development. We discuss why the GPL should not apply. We identify standardizing data files formats as a key to further improvements.

February 8, 2001, Ed Rubin, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-Center for Energy and Environmental Studies
"Multi-Pollutant Emission Control of Electric Power Plants." Electric power plants are a major source of the air pollutants associated with health and ecological damages, and of the greenhouse gases linked to global climate change. Historically, power plants have reduced air pollutant emissions on a piecemeal basis in response to new regulations for individual pollutants (mainly particulate matter, SO2, and NOx). Now there is growing interest in a broader multi-pollutant perspective that would simultaneously address criteria air pollutants, air toxins, and greenhouse gases. SO2, NOx, mercury, and CO2 are the main targets of current policy proposals. This talk will review the technological options for reducing these emissions at electric power plants. It will draw upon ongoing research at CMU to illustrate some of the ways in which the effectiveness and cost of multi-pollutant controls are affected by the choice of emission control strategies for air pollutants and greenhouse gases. A good understanding of these interactions is critical for sound policy analysis.

February 22, 2001, Wes Cohen, Carnegie Mellon, EPP- Social and Decision Sciences
"Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (and Not)." Our survey shows that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead-time advantages, and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities. Of these mechanisms, patents tend to be the least emphasized by firms in the majority of manufacturing industries, and secrecy and lead-time tend to be emphasized most heavily. We also find that firms patent for reasons that often extend beyond directly profiting from a patented innovation through either its commercialization or licensing. In addition to the prevention of copying, the most prominent motives for patenting include the prevention of rivals from patenting related inventions ("i.e., "patent blocking"), the use of patents in negotiations, and the prevention of suits. Firms commonly patent for different reasons in "discrete" product industries, such as chemicals, versus "complex" product industries, such as telecommunications equipment or semiconductors. In the former, firms appear to use their patents commonly to block the development of substitutes by rivals, and in the latter, firms are more likely to use patents to force rivals into negotiations. Policy implications are discussed.

March 1, 2001, Henry Willis, Carnegie Mellon, EPP-HDGC
"It's Not Easy Thinking Green: Public Perceptions of Ecological Risks." What factors are important in perceptions of threats to the natural environment? Although there has been a great deal of research on perceptions of health and safety risks, only a small handful of studies have addressed environmental risks, and none have attempted to characterize environmental risks for risk-ranking purposes. In a series of studies, we (a) generated a set of attributes for characterizing environmental risks; (b) assessed the relevance of these attributes to a risk-ranking task; (c) analyzed the relationships among a subset of these attributes using multiple analytic techniques; (d) analyzed the relationships between the resulting risk dimensions and judgments of overall risk, acceptability, and the need for additional regulation; and (e) compared insights gained from the aggregate sample to those gained at the individual level.

March 8, 2001, Scott Matthews, Carnegie Mellon, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Green Design Initiative
"Economic and Environmental Implications of Online Retailing: A Case Study of Book Publishing." The advent of the Internet and e-commerce has brought a new way of marketing and selling many products, including books. The system-wide impacts of this shift in retail methods on cost and the environment are still unclear. While reductions in inventories and returns provide significant environmental savings, some of the major concerns of the new e-commerce business model are the energy and packaging materials used by the logistics networks for product fulfillment and delivery. In this paper, we analyze the different logistics networks and assess the environmental and cost impacts of different delivery systems. We find that the definition of analysis system boundaries and input assumptions determines the overall assessment of economic and environmental impacts of e-commerce for book retailing. With a return (remainder) rate of 35% for best-selling books, e-commerce logistics are less costly and create lower environmental impacts, especially if private auto travel for shopping is included. Without book returns, costs are comparable.

March 15, 2001, Rahul Tongia, Carnegie Mellon, EPP
"Telecom and Data Networks in India: The Other Infrastructure." This talk will talk about the present state of data networking in India, and Carnegie Mellon's involvement. I will present a brief overview of the history, as well as some possible future directions. While India had a monopolistic telecom provider (the govern