Urban Metabolism – The Political Ecology of Energy and ...conference.ifas.ufl.edu/aces10/Presentations/Additional ppts to pdf... · STEPHANIE PINCETL INSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

S T E P H A N I E P I N C E T L I N S T I T U T E O F T H E

E N V I R O N M E N T A N D S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y

U C L A

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 systems   Availability 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

  Energy   Materials   Water   Nutrients   Waste

  Demography, socioeconomic, education

  GDP and community fiscal measures

  Employment   Health   Community quality

Measures of Urban Metabolism

Land Use Transportation

  Land use regs   Densities   Age of housing   Finance and lending   Taxation   Impacts on hinterlands

  Endangered species   Soils, water, fauna and

flora

  Materials and goods movement

  Roads and transit   Fuels   Agriculture

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 dependencies   Many social, institutional rules, conventions, habits and

policies underlie energy and resource use   These 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 lands   Gasoline taxes   Mortgage lending and banking policies   Depreciation allowances   Endangered Species Act   Corporate 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 1970s   But 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