Natural Resources in the Global Economy – Debate 3.

In this series of debates, The Royal Academy of Engineering is tackling some of the most pressing challenges that the world currently faces in relation to the demand and supply of natural resources. The series brings together engineers, industry leaders, economists and policy makers to debate the various aspects of these challenges and to explore the possible solutions on a global scale. The debates also provide participants with an opportunity to influence policy: key messages emerging from the series will be captured in a report to policy makers and will form the basis of future Academy work in this area.

The motion to be addressed in this third debate is:

This House believes that when water is in short supply, engineers should prioritise human needs over environmental concerns.
In 2010, the United Nations declared access to clean, safe drinking water a human right. For numerous governments and NGOs in drought-stricken regions, meeting the basic water needs of human populations is the number one priority. However, meeting those needs can cause serious damage to biodiversity and ecosystem services that can in turn affect global water security. Should engineering solutions in areas under water stress focus on providing water to human beings, or should the environmental effects of their interventions be given equal prominence?

Chair:

Professor Sir William Wakeham FREng, Senior Vice-President and Honorary
International Secretary of the Royal Academy of Engineering

Speakers will include:

Trevor Bishop, Head of Water Resources at the Environment Agency
Dr Sue Cavill, Associate of the Water, Engineering and Development Centre
Professor Chris Binnie FREng, Independent Consultant and water specialist
Dr Jean Venables CBE FREng, Director of Crane Environmental
Programme:

6:00pm Registration and refreshments
6:30pm Debate
8:00pm Drinks Reception
9:00pm Close

Venue:

The British Academy
10-11 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AH

RSVP:

To reserve a place at this debate please contact Holly Wright on international@raeng.org.uk or 020 7766 0612

The Marine Reserves Coalition will be hosting a meeting entitled ‘PROTECTING UK WATERS AND BEYOND – LEARNING FROM THE MPA PROCESS IN NEW ZEALAND’.

The talks will take place on the 7th December 2011 at 1800 in the Huxley Lecture Theatre at ZSL and all are welcome, so please feel free to pass this invite on to anyone you think would be interested.

There will be three presentations followed by a discussion session:

MPAs – The NZ perspective: Jonathan Gardner (NZ-UK Link Foundation Visiting Professorship, Victoria University of Wellington)
MPAs – The UK perspective: Sue Wells (Project Manager, Balanced Seas)
MPAs – The big picture: Dan Laffoley (Senior Advisor, Marine Science and Conservation, Global Marine and Polar Programme, IUCN)

After the talks there will be an informal wine reception with canapés from 2000-2130.

Places for this evening event are limited to 100, and will be on a first come, first served basis, so please arrive promptly.

Contact Elisabeth Whitebread for further information.

Oliver Pescott, current BES Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, has published a POSTnote on ‘Natural Flood Management’. This will be available shortly on the BES website.

Flood risk management today uses a range of approaches to reduce risk, including structural works, such as hard flood defences, and non-structural approaches, such as improving flood warning systems and land-use planning. The restoration, alteration and use of natural landscape features are also receiving attention as potentially cost-effective ways of reducing flood risk that can provide other environmental benefits, such as water quality improvements or carbon storage.

The POSTnote will be launched formally in Parliament on Tuesday 17th January, from 4 – 6pm. The event will be chaired by Anne Macintosh MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Flood Protection and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. Presentations from a number of speakers will discuss key issues in Natural Flood Management:

– Martin Whiting, Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management, Rivers & Coastal Group Chair
- Dr Neil McIntyre, Reader in Surface Water Hydrology, Imperial College London
- Dr Paul Quinn, Senior Lecturer in Catchment Hydrology, Newcastle University
- Dr Wendy Kenyon, Senior Researcher, James Hutton Institute (Land and Natural Resource Use Research)

To register your interest in attending, please email postevents@parliament.uk or call 020 7219 8377.

A conference at the University of Leicester in April next year will set out to explore this question, examining the importance of birds in the functioning of ecosystems.

It will also explore the cultural services that birds provide and consider how Government and non-Governmental organisations are engaging with this new approach in policy. Debating the philosophical and practical problems surrounding the ecosystem services approach will be a key feature of the conference, as well as finding new opportunities for bird conservation. It will cover the following topics:
• The provisioning, regulating and supporting ecosystem services provided by birds, avian functional ecology and relationships between bird diversity and ecosystem functioning;
• The cultural significance of birds and how this is valued;
• How Governments, policymakers and conservation organisations around the world are responding to and implementing the ecosystem services approach;
• Management strategies, tradeoffs and the consequences for traditional species based and practical
management.

The conference scope will be international, with a focus on how to integrate ecosystem service science with practical bird conservation into policy. It is aimed at academics, research and conservationorganisations as well as statutory government agencies and those engaged in policy, advocacy and conservation management.

Further information and details on how to register.

Registration is now open for this two day conference in April 2012, organised by the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) and Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). The programme and a word version of the booking form is attached. Further details are available on the conference website (http://www.sac.ac.uk/sacsepaconf) including a brief overview of each of the four Keynote Speakers.

Monday 28 November 2011, 19:00, The Book Club, Shoreditch

From the team behind Science Question Time, we bring you the nerdiest quiz of the year. Think you know your biochemistry from your badgers, and neutrinos from your nuclei? Or just want to relive your old sciencey school days? Then grab some friends, come down to The Book Club, and show us what you’re made of.

Helped by some special guests, we’ll be dredging up the year’s breakthroughs and blunders in science – taking in its highs and lows in the media, as well as use and abuse in politics.

There’ll be prizes for the geekiest costumes, nerdiest names, and brainiest teams. Confirmed guest round hosts so far include Pallab Ghosh (Science and Politics), Aleks Krotoski (Technology), Adam Rutherford (Sci-Fi), Alex Bellos (Maths) and Louise Crane (Pictures).

Entry is just £4, and teams can be up to 6 people. Any profits will go directly to support CaSE’s science and engineering advocacy. Buy your tickets here (you can enter as a team or we will sort it out on the night)!

Brought to you by James Lush at the Biochemical Society, Imran Khan and Beck Smith at the Campaign for Science and Engineering, and Dr Alice Bell.

Sign up here!

Full listing at the new Science Policy Talking Post blog: http://sciencepolicytalkingpost.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/the-year-in-science-xmas-quiz/

The Cambridge Conservation Forum’s (CCF) Annual Symposium will take place on January 5th 2012 in Cambridge.
Tickets are on sale now.

There will be a broad range of speakers at this event, covering international items -‘Rio+ 20 – why is it important for biodiversity conservation’ to on the ground and local projects for example, ‘Nature Improvement Areas’ and ‘The work of Tiger Protection and Conservation Unit in Sumatra’.

Find out more at www.cambridgeconservationforum.org.uk.

16:50, Wednesday 23 November 2011, The Geological Society

The Carbon Capture and Storage industry in the UK is thought by many to have the potential to become as large as the North Sea oil and gas industry has been over the past 40 years. If this can be achieved, it will be a major contribution to meeting our carbon emissions targets, and could generate significant value for the economy. Is this ambition realistic? What are the scientific, technical, regulatory, economic, political and social challenges?

The Geological Society, together with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, is holding a joint two-day research conference on Carbon Capture and Storage on 22-23 November, bringing together geoscientists and reservoir engineers to discuss scientific and technical challenges, uncertainties and opportunities for CO2 storage.

The conference will conclude with a panel debate, at which the conference delegates will be joined by an invited audience of those from government, industry, regulators, NGOs and others involved in planning and policy-making. A distinguished panel will lead a discussion of the policy-making, regulatory, economic and social context for CCS, and the
broader implications of the issues discussed over the previous two days, chaired by conference convenor Professor Jon Gluyas. The panellists are:

Dr David Reiner (Senior Lecturer in Technology Policy, Judge Business
School, University of Cambridge)

Professor Richard Macrory (Professor of Environmental Law, University
College London)

Mr Mervyn Wright (Technical Lead, CCS Demonstration Project, Department
of Energy and Climate Change)

Dr Bryan Lovell (Senior Researcher, University of Cambridge / President
of the Geological Society)

Registration will be from 16:15 on Wednesday 23 November. The discussion will run from 16:50 to 18:00, and will be followed by a drinks reception.

We very much hope you will be able to join us for this debate. If you wish to attend, please email policy@geolsoc.org.uk, stating your name and job title/preferred affiliation. There is no charge for attending the debate.

(Places at the conference itself are still available – full details and registration are at www.geolsoc.org.uk/ccs_nov2011.)

How can you predict whether a policy you develop will actually work? This was the question addressed by a public lecture at the London School of Economics yesterday evening, delivered by Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE and at the University of California, San Diego.

Prof. Cartwright questioned how you can know whether a policy that is successful in one location will work in another. She suggested that in fact, based on success in one place you cannot assume that it will: “getting policy right is hard, but it is harder if you only rely on one tool”.

Prof. Cartwright criticised the enthusiasm of some economists to champion the significance of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to assess the efficacy of policies. As in RCTs for a medical intervention, policy treatments are assigned to some of a sample group and not to others, with the randomisation minimising any significant background or location differences between the controls. This allows a policy-maker to conclude that a significant improvement in the ‘treated’ group is due to the success of the policy intervention.

The mistake that enthusiastic policy developers then make is, Professor Cartwright suggested, to infer from the success of the policy in one location that the policy must then produce the desired outcome more widely. Several assumptions underlie this: that in the inital ‘treated’ policy population the policy had the causal effect due to ‘causal principle X’; ;that in the target population the policy will also have the desired effect due to this causal principle, and; that the support factors needed for successful policy implementation are in place in both populations.

Professor Cartwright demonstrated that causal principles have a number of problems, making it less than clear that a policy successful in one location will be successful in another. The first problem was described as ‘fragility’: the idea that a causal problem can easily be broken by pushing this too hard. One example of this is the relationship between employment and inflation. Inflation and rising prices will lead to reduced unemployment as businesses expand production. If a government tries to reduce unemployment by manipulating inflation however, businesses will not create jobs because they are aware that inflation is caused by government measures, not market forces. The second problem is one of ‘locality’, with causes dependent on local situations and particular conditions.

Professor Cartwright illustrated the problems of ‘fragility’ and ‘locality’ by an example; that of a child nutrition policy in Tamil Nadu, India, that provided mothers with nutritional advice and with supplementary baby food. An RCT proved that this could improve child nutrition. The conclusion was therefore that “mothers given better nutritional knowledge improve their child’s nutrition (when also given supplementary baby food)”.

However, when implemented in Bangladesh this policy did not work. Men in Bangladesh procure food for the household and in many extended families Mothers-in-law control food distribution between family members. Therefore in this case mothers were not able to influence their children’s nutrition. The causal principle underpinning the policy should in fact have been: “Better nutritional knowledge improves child nutrition when given to those who a) control what food is procured; b) control what food gets dispersed and c) hold the child’s interests as central to performing A and B”.

This example demonstrates that causal principles often have to be expressed in an abstract way if they are to be applied to any situation which differs from the original situation under test. The causal principle can be characterised as a rule which (very probably) holds true. It is vital to understand how the supporting factors in the new situation differ from that under test in order to make sure that the causal principle applies in a range of cases.

With thanks for this information to Evelyn Underwood, Policy Analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy</a.

A day-long opportunity, on 16th November 2011, to take part in activities coordinated by researchers in the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme: contribute to the planning of the rural/urban fringe, tell us what the uplands mean to you, measure environmental inequalities in the countryside, test your knowledge of risks in the food chain and more…

This conference will provide an opportunity to:

– Debate major questions about the future of the UK countryside
– Learn about innovation in science, methodology and practice from the Relu programme
– Participate in real-life science

Info at http://www.relu.ac.uk/conference/index.htm