“Interlinkages between Societies and Ecosystems – Examples from Europe”
Prof. Helmut Haberl, Institute for Social Ecology, Vienna, Austria
View the accompanying Powerpoint presentation (12.8 MB).
Yale University has worked with me and my colleagues at the Institute for Social Ecology
at Alpen-Adria University in Vienna for many years. Our focus is the study of interlinkages between societies and ecosystems. One of the tools we use in our work is integrated socio-ecological modeling – which involves stakeholders in a participatory exercise to help them understand how humans impact the ecological resources in a particular system through their land-use decisions. We take a long-term socio-ecological research (LTSER) approach, which is relevant to you here as you work on establishing Hawai‘i Island as a long-term socio-ecological research site.
To explain the kind of work we do, I will use an example from Steyr, an area in central Austria. As far back as the 1600s there were no trees on the mountains of Steyr due to the fact that 15% of all the iron in Europe was produced there. The trees were cut down to produce energy for the iron mines and to transport the ore down our rivers, so that the entire area was deforested by 1600. If we look at the same area in the year 1900, we can see that there were still a lot of open spaces, and comparatively less forest than 300 years earlier. But when we look at this same area today, we see that the mountainsides are reforesting rapidly now.
Until recently, when we considered whether economic growth is good for the environment, we relied on tools like the Kuznet’s Curve. This model has been used by the World Bank under the assumption that environmental problems are transitory and will be corrected as people realize the innate value of the environment.
What we have found is that the real world is more complex than this. By the year 2000, the gross domestic product (GDP) of Austria had increased 20 times from its 1830 level, our fossil fuel use was 120 times higher than in 1830, our carbon emissions were 34.8 times higher, and our total energy use was more than five times what it was in 1830.
In order to understand what is happening, we must factor in human societies and their impacts on ecosystems. We must also seek to understand how human societies drive and are impacted by global environmental changes.
When we look at population growth in Austria alongside of GDP, we see that our population doubled in the 19th century, a transition that was primarily due to the industrial revolution.
Similarly our GDP skyrocketed after World War II. This can be attributed to an energy transition starting in about 1950. As our oil, gas, hydropower, and biomass use increased, this corresponded with spectacular increases in grain yields driven by industrial inputs and by nitrogen fertilizers, which are also fossil fuel based.
From 1950 to 2000, the acreage of our farmlands decreased by 15%, while the acreage of our forests increased by more than 10%. But what were the costs of this? If we look at this issue in terms of the energy return on our investment in agriculture – in other words if we consider agriculture as an activity that is supposed to return energy to society – in 1830 the energy invested in farming was human labor and the energy return was 6 joules. If we consider the situation in the year 2000, we see that we were investing more energy into agriculture than we were getting out of that activity.
The only reason this could happen is that we had relatively inexpensive external energy sources. Industrial society runs not on local energy, but on area-independent energy, in which the dominant energy source is fossil fuels. This abundant external energy allows agricultural yield increases, as well as labor efficiency increases. In 1830, 80% of the Austrian people worked so the country could feed itself; today 2% of our country’s manpower works to feed our people. We need less farmland area today, and so our forests are growing back.
The big difference is that our people didn’t import energy in 1830, whereas today we have very few internal energy flows. Now we rely on imported inputs to produce a large volume of exports, and most of the nitrogen flows through our system, meaning that we are dependent on large-scale imports of artificial fertilizer.
There is also a large scale separation between production processes, which are heavily concentrated in certain “farming” areas, from the consumption centers. So our system relies on truck transport of products from the farms to the urban centers where it is consumed – another example of how we are dependent on fossil fuel energy.
In 1830, Austria relied on small scale, self sustaining agricultural systems with a mix of forest, grassland, and arable land to feed a relatively small population which sustained itself. In 2000, agriculture in our country is heavily subsidized. We have high inputs of fuel and money flows and high output systems which are no longer energy efficient. We see the same thing happening in other industrialized countries across Europe.
This kind of globalization externalizes the environmental impacts from all of the national systems in the form of carbon emissions.
The picture of carbon flows in Europe is the same picture you see in the Mauna Loa study – our carbon flows are increasing.
What this boils down to is that our local problems were solved at the expense of creating global issues – as a result of the industrial revolution. In 1830, local processes sustained a local population. With today’s area independent energy inputs, we have generated global sustainability problems, problems which can lead to global collapse. When we consider that two-thirds of the world’s population is in the midst of an industrial transition, we see similarities in the systems everywhere which are not sustainable. The bottom line is that globalization of our industrial metabolism is not sustainable, running the risk that climate change, post-peak oil, and biodiversity loss will be the result if the planet proceeds on its current course.
Our Institute of Social Ecology has developed a modeling framework that helps us to understand interactions between land-use, external conditions (such as government subsidies and politics), human actors, material flows, and outputs such as gas emissions, finances, and/or land-use changes. We have created software modules to model different scenarios and we have successfully tested these modules with the community as participants.
By varying factors such as the number of households, the number of commuters, the number of farms, the acreage of grasslands, or the volume of greenhouse gas emissions, our models can help us to see what would happen if, for example, we cooperated more across our communities. We find that in general our systems work a lot better with cooperation. Our model even allows us to map out land-use changes that can occur as a result of such cooperation among neighboring communities. Our vision is that this model can provide us with a significantly complex understanding of overlapping systems that is so important as we seek to build more sustainable communities in the long term.
Our model allows all sectors of the community to become involved in the planning process, including sociologists, economists, planners, and biologists. This participatory approach is really engaging as it allows us to examine many variables. By including factors like increasing farm income; for example, we found more people will stay home and work part-time to support their farms rather than commuting to employment in urban centers. This kind of modeling empowers people to understand the impacts of their decisions on the human community and also to speak up enthusiastically as a community for what they want to see happen in the future.