STEPHANIE PINCETL INSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY UCLA Urban Metabolism – The Political Ecology of Energy and Ecosystems.

STEPHANIE PINCETLINSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND

SUSTAINABILITYUCLA

Urban Metabolism – The Political Ecology of Energy and Ecosystems

The World has Changed. . .Challenges of a Human Engineered Urbanizing

Earth

Population growth GDP expansion of

more than 20X Global materials use

increased 8-fold Up to 83% of the

global terrestrial biosphere is considered to be under direct human influence

Reliance on non-renewable energy sources and water too

Materials use per capita doubled from 4.6 to 10.3 t/cap/yr (1900 – 2005)

Mineral fractions growing at a rapid pace

Biomass use slowing But, Human

Appropriation of Net Primary Production is between 30 – 58% globally

There has never been anything like the 20th century

Main driver of human induced environmental change is the growing social or industrial metabolism (an industrial sociometabolic regime)

Yet we are still lacking biophysical indicators such as primary energy supply, emissions, the use of specific substances Comprehensive account of global materials extraction

Materials flows

The Built Environment

Our built environment is a large in-use repository or stock humans have accumulated

Humans use approximately 60 billion tons of material every year, or the equivalent of the natural production of all plants on earth

Urban metabolism studies are the quantification of the flows into cities or communities (electrons, water, wood, air, other materials, food. . .) flows out as pollution, other waste or losses in the form of heat and distribution losses (absorbed by ecosystems), plus what has remained inside.

Brussels, Belgium early 1970s. Souce: Duvigneaud and Denayeyer-De Smet 1977

The Centrality of Energy

Energy is at the heart of human systemsAvailability of and cheap access to fossil fuels of

high-energy density and new and efficient technologies to convert primary energy into useful work allows for emergence of mass production and consumption and high level of energy and material use

Large infrastructures (buildings, roads, power grids, petrochemical complexes)

And a concomitant complex and path dependent economy, built environment, agriculture and consumption system

Place and Energy Systems

Urban areas concentrate the use of energy and materials

Need to identify and to quantify current energy flows and sinks in communities

By sector By region and microclimate By socio-economic and demographic characteristics By land use type By policy drivers

Traditional Expanded

EnergyMaterialsWaterNutrients Waste

Demography, socioeconomic, education

GDP and community fiscal measures

EmploymentHealthCommunity quality

Measures of Urban Metabolism

Land Use Transportation

Land use regsDensitiesAge of housingFinance and lendingTaxationImpacts on hinterlands

Endangered species Soils, water, fauna and

flora

Materials and goods movement

Roads and transitFuelsAgriculture

Including

What UM can reveal

Appropriation of ecosystems and their functions

Surface and groundwater Timber and minerals Fossil fuels Ocean resources And the sink capacities of ecosystems

Air pollution Water pollution Soil contamination

In quantities, location of resources

Ecosystem Services

In an expanded sense, an urban metabolism is fundamentally an artifact of the ways in which we enroll nature in our productive processes

Hence urban metabolism analysis draws attention to this reliance by identifying, quantifying and explaining the energy flows (including the resources) and the waste sinks

Fundamentally emerges from ecological concerns about systems and the second law of thermodynamics

Energy and resources foundational – and invisible to contemporary systems

Systemic nature of energy system: it is imbricated into each aspect of contemporary communities – a system that is interactive, interdependent and mutually constitutive with social systems

Deep path dependenciesMany social, institutional rules, conventions, habits

and policies underlie energy and resource useThese need to be revealed, examined and explained

to be able to change the drivers of existing energy and resource use

Question then turns to why and how

Institutions set the rules of the game in a society: they structure Human interactions – political, social, cultural and

economic They structure our resource dependencies and

implicitly weight them – e.g. toward fossil fuels since they were cheap and abundant

Part of Urban Metabolism must be to identify these rules of the game

Some Examples

Federal water policy Colorado River Compact Central Valley Project Improvement Act

Minerals policies and pricing on federal landsGasoline taxesMortgage lending and banking policiesDepreciation allowancesEndangered Species ActCorporate laws

A systemic approach needs new methods and partners

Poor accounting of energy inputs and waste in our urban systems today, therefore planning for the future is planning in the void

Just as climate change science itself was a challenging interdisciplinary synthesis, urban metabolism – a systems approach -- demonstrates much of the same characteristics of different metrics, different epistemologies and concerns

Making a difference will require dedication to integration and examining the system – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

A Return to Systems Thinking and Analysis

Systems thinking had a run in the 1970sBut 1980’s to the rise of sustainability

thinking devalued integrated approaches Too complex Not needed Resurgence of ideas of economic man (the whole is

just the aggregation of individual decisions

Global processes like climate change have focused again on necessity for cross-disciplinary, integrated analyses to find solutions – back to systems

Thanks thanks thanks

California State Energy Commission PIER Program

Roadmap collaborators Paul Bunje Mike Chester Chris Kennedy Dean Misczynski Chris Nelson Diane Pataki