Pressemitteilung der Beratungsstelle für Nachhaltige Entwicklung und Change Management:
Sozial-ökologische Wende braucht ein neues Verständnis von Wachstum, Fortschritt und Erfolg
Beratungsstelle für Nachhaltige Entwicklung: „Der ideellen Wertschöpfung mehr Gewicht geben!“
Die Politik hat das Ziel ausgegeben, eine sozial-ökologische Wende herbeizuführen. Doch während die meisten Parteien lediglich für ein privates und unternehmerisches Umdenken in Sachen „Klimaschutz“ werben, bleibt das Ziel des ständigen Wirtschaftswachstums im kapitalistischen, marktwirtschaftlichen und neoliberalen Sinn erhalten. Dabei sei gerade die Verhaftung im „Höher, Schneller, Weiter“ das eigentliche Problem in der Umsetzung von ressourcenschonendem Handeln, wie der Leiter der Beratungsstelle für Nachhaltige Entwicklung und Change Management, Dennis Riehle (Konstanz), in einer aktuellen Aussendung unterstreicht: „Wenn wir weiterhin auf ein reines ‚Mehr‘ in Produktion und Industrie setzen und das Ergebnis allein anhand der Zahlen des Bruttoinlandsproduktes messen, können wir keine echten Reformen zugunsten eines umweltbewussten Agierens verwirklichen.
Ethisch und moralisch ist es schon seit langem sehr bedenklich, dass wir Fortschritt allein am monetären Umsatz festmachen. Denn es bräuchte nicht nur ein quantitatives, sondern vor allem ein qualitatives Verständnis von Weiterentwicklung, das unsere Perspektive und Blickwinkel verändert“, so Riehle. Wenn wir allein auf Gewinne und Profit aus sind, werden wir die Erde weiter ausbeuten. Welthandel und Mammon haben uns verblendet und über die Verhältnisse leben lassen. Daher braucht es nun eine Stärkung der ideellen Wertschöpfung. Nicht allein die Geldzeichen dürfen für ein Vorankommen der Gradmesser sein“, erläutert der 37-jährige Journalist vom Bodensee, der in Philosophie zertifiziert ist.
„Viel eher muss das BIP von morgen ein Brutto-Ökologie-Sozial-Produkt (BÖSP) sein, das Kraft und Stärke inländischer Wirtschaft am Potenzial dessen bemisst, wie nachhaltig Unternehmen ihre Umsätze generieren und Haushalte konsumieren. Den Gewinnen müssen Kosten gegenübergestellt werden. Von Profiten werden sodann die Schäden subtrahiert, die durch die Produktion an Umwelt und dem Sozialsystem entstanden sind. Betriebe müssen all jene Aufwendungen, die zukünftige Generationen für die Beseitigung und spätere Kompensierung von Zerstörungen, welche heutige Prozesse anrichten, in ihre Bilanz negativ aufnehmen. Nur so kann erreicht werden, dass die Sensibilität und Aufmerksamkeit für das Ausmaß der rücksichtslosen Gängelung unseres Globus stärker ins Bewusstsein rückt.
Unsere Zivilisation hat sich diesem zwanghaften Druck des dauernden Wachstums und einer Dominanz der Vermehrung unterworfen. Es braucht nun endlich eine Einsicht über die Endlichkeit von Grundlagen und deutlich mehr Ansporn für Innovation statt Expansion. Besonders das heutige Wissen darum, dass Wohlstand auch ohne großflächige Ausnutzung der Schöpfung möglich und machbar ist, muss uns in die ethische Verantwortung nehmen, im Zweifel wirtschaftlich rote Zahlen hinzunehmen, wenn im Gegensatz dazu unser ökologischer Kontostand ins Plus umschwenkt. Wir müssen nicht pauschal und prinzipiell verzichten, sondern nur anders haushalten. Wir können von denen lernen, die überall dort leben, wo unser Lebensstandard zu Armut und existenzieller Not führt, und erkennen: Zufriedenes Dasein lässt sich mit Geld nicht erreichen, sondern ausschließlich durch eine Versöhnung mit der Natur“, erklärt Riehle.
Die Beratungsstelle für Nachhaltige Entwicklung ist kostenlos unter www.beratung-riehle.de erreichbar.
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Leserpost von Elfriede Pietsch:
Ich erinnere mich an den Vorschlag der Münchner Rück und weiterer Versichrungskonzerne, in Nordafrika große Solarfelder anzulegen und den Strom nach Europa zu transportieren. Wäre viel besser als die Windräder und Wärmepumpen! Es würden dort Arbeitsplätze geschaffen. Leider wurde der arabische Frühling eingeführt. Wirtschaftlich hätte man das Problem auch beheben können, schreibe ich einfach mal.
Viele Grüße
Elfriede Pietsch
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Am 7. Juni 2023 ist Martin Schlumpf von Gernot Danowski im Radio Kontrafunk über Fragen der Kernenergie interviewt worden. Hier geht es zur entsprechenden Sendung. Das Interview startet bei 25:50.
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New study compares human contributions to Mississippi River Delta land loss, hints at solutions
Research from scientists at Louisiana State University and Indiana University reveals new information about the role humans have played in large-scale land loss in the Mississippi River Delta—crucial information in determining solutions to the crisis.
The study published today in Nature Sustainability compares the impacts of different human actions on land loss and explains historical trends. Until now, scientists have been unsure about which human-related factors are the most consequential, and why the most rapid land loss in the Mississippi River Delta occurred between the 1960s and 1990s and since has slowed down.
“What we found was really surprising,” said Doug Edmonds, lead author on the study and an associate professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. “It is tempting to link the land loss crisis to dam building in the Mississippi River Basin—after all, dams have reduced the sediment in the Mississippi River substantially. But in the end, building levees and extracting subsurface resources have created more land loss.”
The current Mississippi River Delta formed over the past 7,000 years through sediment deposition from the river near the Gulf Coast. But due to human efforts to harness the river and protect communities, sediment accumulation is no longer sufficient to sustain the delta. As a result, coastal Louisiana has lost about 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s, according to the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
The study found that only about 20% of the land loss is due to dam building, while levee building and extracting subsurface resources, such as oil and gas, each account for about 40% of the Mississippi River Delta land loss. The study also suggests the most rapid land loss and the recent deceleration might be related to the reduction of subsurface resource extraction.
To conduct their study, researchers re-created the land loss for an area in the Mississippi River Delta called the Barataria Basin. They used a model that describes the sediment budget, which is the balance between sediment flowing in and out of a coastal system. Using that model, they quantified the impact that building dams and levees and extracting subsurface resources had on land loss.
LSU leaders on the study were Robert R. Twilley, professor of oceanography and coastal sciences and interim vice president of research and economic development; Samuel J. Bentley, professor and the Billy and Ann Harrison Chair in Sedimentary Geology; and Kehui Xu, director of the LSU Coastal Studies Institute and James P. Morgan Distinguished Professor of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences along with LSU Civil & Environmental Engineering alumnus Christopher G. Siverd, who is a coastal engineer at Moffatt & Nichol.
“This study emphasizes the importance of doing a broad systems analysis of complex problems, so we really can have confidence in the solutions we’re proposing to reverse land loss and protect our land and people,” Twilley said. “There’s a possibility river diversions might have more impact in building wetlands than we anticipated.”
The 2023 Coastal Master Plan for Louisiana prioritizes restoring the processes that naturally build land in the delta. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, which is the largest coastal land restoration project in Louisiana at more than $2 billion, will release sediment and water from the Mississippi River into the adjacent Barataria Basin.
“Our work suggests the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion is the right tool for the job to counter land loss due to subsidence and sea level rise,” Bentley said. “Overall, this study offers perhaps a rosier outlook than some other analyses on our ability to engineer with nature to reverse land loss.”
As resource extraction has decreased in recent years, the relative impact of levees on Louisiana coastal land loss is trending higher. That impact, however, could potentially be offset by sediment diversions.
“Findings strongly suggest the Mid-Barataria sediment diversion and other sediment diversions along the Mississippi River will provide long-term land-building capability and reduce future land loss in southeast Louisiana,” Siverd said.
Paper: Douglas Edmonds, Land loss due to human-altered sediment budget in the Mississippi River Delta, Nature Sustainability (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-023-01081-0. www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01081-0
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Cynthia McCormick Hibbert, Northeastern University:
Using AI to unlock the mystery of El Nino’s impact on droughts and floods
For centuries, fishermen in Peru have noticed a connection between warmer than usual ocean waters—what is now known as the El Niño phenomenon—and droughts and floods on land.
But making accurate hydrologic predictions about El Niño’s impact on regional weather patterns—and even understanding the complex El Niño phenomenon itself—has stymied climate scientists for decades.
It was believed making the connection required developing an incredibly complex physics model, one involving hard-to-measure flows between ocean and atmosphere and between atmosphere and land, says Auroop Ganguly, co-director of Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute.
In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, Ganguly and three co-authors showed that using machine learning to crunch existing data can yield explainable insights about the impact of El Niño on the world’s great river systems—the Ganges, Congo and Amazon—and ultimately, regional weather patterns.
Treasure troves of data
Climate scientists have collected a vast amount of data, based on both observation and models, related to weather patterns, ocean temperatures from across the globe, flood levels, droughts and other climate phenomena, Ganguly says.
Up to now, the treasure trove of data has not been fully exploited, he says, adding that it has sometimes been stored in separate climate science silos.
But new developments in machine or deep learning make it possible to use servers with high computing power to harness the immense stores of data to develop predictive algorithms, Ganguly says.
“This explainable deep learning is new,” he says. “We can say that here is how sea surface temperature correlates to itself and influences river flow. And we learn that from the past. That was not in the realm of feasibility before.”
Deep learning can discover what is essentially a long-distance connection between sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific, where El Niño or La Nina intermittently occurs, and what that implies for river flows across the world, says Ganguly. who is also the lead for Climate-AI at the Institute for Experiential AI.
Deep learning to tackle society’s big challenges
“The power of these approaches is in the ability to extract this information from the vast ocean—pun intended!—of data, rather than through oversimplified indices of this complex phenomenon,” he says.
Think of being able to assess what is happening by connecting ocean temperatures to cloud development to precipitation affecting rivers, in different parts of the world, says co-author Yumin Liu of Amazon, who worked on the study as a Northeastern Ph.D. student.
“Now people realize they can mutually benefit by connecting the machine learning community and the climate community,” he says.
The forthcoming information would be able to help stakeholders better prepare for floods, droughts and other climate events that affect lives, homes, industry, transportation and food production.
“Developing and adapting machine learning methods to address societal grand challenges is an urgent need of our age,” says co-author Jennifer Dy, Northeastern electrical and computer engineering professor.
“This paper is an interesting demonstration of how data sciences, specifically deep learning and complex network constructs, can fill gaps in our predictive understanding about hydroclimates,” says co-author Kate Duffy, who worked on the study as a Ph.D. student in Northeastern’s Sustainability and Data Science Lab.
Developing predictive models
Temperature is relatively easy to measure, though massive amounts of data are needed to keep track of temperatures across the planet’s wide expanse of oceans.
Precipitation is more difficult to measure, because precipitation systems “can be somewhat random and evolve very rapidly,” according to NASA. The deep learning model allows scientists to leverage both types of information to develop a potentially predictive model, the scientists say.
Duffy says the paper also shows that improvements in earth systems models can also improve software systems, called couplers, that connect large model components such as ocean, atmospheric and land models, and facilitate better feedback and information flow. One example of such a coupler is the Energy Exascale Earth System Model.
“What the paper suggests is that in the future it could be important to examine the possibility that gaps in the science of coupling can be addressed by developing what are called hybrid physics-AI approaches, where, for example, numerical models and partial differential equation based systems can be at least partly connected via machine learning,” Ganguly says.
Improving information flows
Dy, who is director of experiential AI postdoc education, says Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI plans to work on developing “generalizable and trustworthy solutions” combining global climate models with customized machine learning.
Being able to predict information about river flows from sea surface temperature maps may appear to be a niche solution, says Ganguly, a Northeastern College of Engineering distinguished professor.
“However, it allows incredible opportunities to open up,” he says.
The research shows how data-driven methods can enable improved climate-informed water resources projections, says Duffy, who recently stepped down as a NASA scientist to launch her own startup in AI-based satellite remote sensing with a NASA SBIR grant.
The intriguing possibility, according to Ganguly and Dy, is that this opens up the development of hybrid-AI systems for more effective coupling of model components within earth systems and global climate models.
Paper: Yumin Liu et al, Explainable deep learning for insights in El Niño and river flows, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-35968-5