Global Environmental Change Understanding the Human Dimensions (1992) / Chapter Skim
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3 Human Causes of Global Change
3 Human Causes of Global Change
Pages 44-100
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From page 44... ...
We conclude by stating some principles that follow from current knowledge and some implications for research. IDENTIFYING THE MAJOR PROXIMATE CAUSES The important proximate human causes of global change are those with enough impact to significantly alter properties of the global environment of potential concern to humanity.
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From page 45... ...
A TREE-STRUCTURED ACCOUNTING SYSTEM A useful accounting system for the human causes of global change has a tree structure in which properties of the global environment are linked to the major human activities that alter them, and in which the activities are divided in turn into their constituent parts or influences. Such an accounting system is helpful for social science because, by beginning with variables known to be important to global environmental change, it anchors the study of human activities to the natural environment and imposes a criterion of impact on the consideration of research directions isee also Clark, 19881.
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From page 46... ...
For instance, carbon dioxide is emitted by respiration of animals and plants, burning of biomass, burning of fossil fuels, and so forth. If each limb of the tree represents human contributions to global emissions of a greenhouse gas, the branches off the limbs can represent the major anthropogenic sources of a gas, that is, the major categories of human activity that release it.
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From page 47... ...
Cloba1 warming potential is allected by the diOeIent atmospbeIic bletimes of greenbonse gases before breakdown, so that the relative importance of gases for global warming depends on the future date to ~bicb effects are estimated. In Addison, cbemica1 reactions in the atmospbere convert some radiationally inactive compounds into greenhouse gases over time.
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From page 48... ...
For instance, automobile fuel consumption can be analyzed as the product of number of automobiles, average fuel efficiency of automobiles, and miles driven per automobile; the determinants of each of these factors can be studied separately. Researchers might then investigate the social factors that affect change in the number of automobiles and their typical life span, such as household income, household size, number employed per household, and availability of public transportation.
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From page 49... ...
HUMAN CAUSES OF GLOBAL CHANGE / 49 lyre an activity such as automobile fuel consumption, and the most useful approach is not obvious a priori. The task of making such accounts, even for a single tree, Is enormous.
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From page 50... ...
TABLE 3-5 Estimated Composite Relative Contributions of Human Activities to Creenbouse WaIming CaseslRelative ContributioDin peIcentJ Achy CO: CH. CECs N:0 Other Iota Possilfueluse 42 3 1.5 46.5 CPC use 25 25 Biomass burn 13 1 1 15 Paddy rice 3 3 Cattle 3 3 Nitrogen fertilization 2 2 Landfills 1 1 Other 1.5 4 S.S Total 55 11 25 6 4 101 Source: Compiled from Tables3-1,3-2,and3-3.
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From page 51... ...
The more detailed, U.S.-centered accounting in Table 3-4 shows why much more detailed analysis is warranted for explaining the purchase and use of automobiles and light trucks with different levels of energy efficiency {per it_ Fossil Fuel ~ CFCs .46 - ~nrir~lllillre _ _~P ~ .08 Landfills Over ! .06 FIGURE 3-1 A tree-structured representation of relative contributions of human activities in the late 1980s to greenhouse warming.
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From page 52... ...
Social science knowledge is needed to choose accounting procedures to suit specific analytic purposes. Whatever accounting system is used, social scientists conducting research on the human causes of global change should focus their attention on factors that are significant contributors to an important global environmental change.
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From page 53... ...
This section presents three rather detailed cases of human action with high impact on important global environmental changes to explore what lies behind the proximate causes. Taken together, the cases illustrate human causes that operate through both industrial and land-use activities and in both developing and devel
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From page 54... ...
In the section that follows, we discuss the interrelationships among the driving forces at a mor theoretical level. THE AMERICAN REFRIGERATION INDUSTRY In 1985, the head of the British Antarctic Survey, Joseph Farman, reported that his team had discovered a heretofore unobserved atmospheric phenomenon: a sudden springtime thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica, allowing ultraviolet radiation to reach the ground much more intensely than was ordinarily the case {Farman et al., 19851.
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From page 55... ...
Dressed beef, which was cheaper than fresh beef for a variety of reasons, soon took the country by storm, driving many wholesale butchers out of business and giving the Chicago packing companies immense economic power. The packers initially relied on complicated ice storage and delivery networks, cutting and storing millions of tons of winter ice along the railroad routes that delivered beef from Chicago to urban customers throughout the East.
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From page 56... ...
Although European countries were slower to adopt these technologies, they too eventually followed suit. No less importantly, the nontoxicity of Freon made it possible for refrigeration technology to be applied to the ambient cooling of buildings, so that air conditioning came to be an ever more important market for the gas.
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From page 57... ...
From Florida to Texas to southern California, the massive influx of new residents depended in no small measure on the ability of buildings to protect their occupants from summer heat. Air conditioning became a fact of life in such places, so much so that it is hard to imagine urban life in the Sun Belt without it.
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From page 58... ...
And that suggests some of the less reassuring lessons of this story. Refrigeration and air conditioning have today become so embedded in the American way of life, and in the ways of life of many people the world over, that it is hard to imagine modern food supplies and urban life styles without them.
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From page 59... ...
The invention of CFCs started a process that led to building practices and patterns of human settlement with two unexpected and long-term effects on the global environment: a built-in demand for CFCs and a built-in demand for energy, not only for space cooling but also for transportation to and between the new dispersed, warm-climate population centers. A quick fix for the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer might encourage the spread of the American pattern of energy-intensive settlement.
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From page 60... ...
The rapid increase in Chinese coal consumption from 62 million tons {Mt) in 1952 to 812 Mt in 1985-can be traced to industriaTization, electrification, and population growth {Xi et al., 19891.
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From page 61... ...
Thus, energy use is the product of population, per capita economic output, and energy intensity that is, energy use per unit of output. Chinese energy use in 1987 was 435 percent of what it was in 1965, while population was 147 percent, ONP per capita 305 percent, and GNP 97 percent of 1965 levels: 4.35 Elms = 1.47 P~965 x 3.05 GNP/P~965 x 0.97 E/GNP~965 {data from World Bank, 1989:Tables 1 and 51.
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From page 62... ...
62 / GI OBAl E~IRONMENTA~ CHANGE favors heavy industry on ideological grounds. The government, which determines production by directive rather than allowing it to respond to demand, is said to continue to command steel production, despite huge surpluses Emil, l9Sg, and personal com .
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From page 63... ...
In the United States, 85 percent of coal is burned to generate electric power, at an average efficiency of 36 percent. By contrast, 22 percent of Chinese coal is converted to electric power, with an overall efficiency of only 29-31 percent {Kinzelbach, 1989; Xi et al., 19891.
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From page 64... ...
Between 1965 and 1987, Chinese coal use and CO2 emissions increased at the same rate as total economic output. If both continue to increase at the recent historic rate of 4 percent per year, the Chinese contribution to global CO2 emissions will quadruple in less than 40 years and surpass that of the United States, presuming that the latter also follows recent trends.
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From page 65... ...
The future of China's energy use can be analyzed in the terms of the accounting equation: population growth, economic development, and changes in energy intensity or productivity. A fourth factor shifts from fossil fuels to other energy sources is unlikely to have much influence in China for several decades unless there is a major international effort to promote such shifts.
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From page 66... ...
In sum, the Chinese contribution to global climate change depends on the interactions of technology with social factors, including population growth, economic development, policy, and
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From page 67... ...
The future of Chinese energy demand also depends on changes in the structure of the Chinese economy and of consumer demand. Careful comparative studies of the social determinants of energy intensity and changes in energy intensity at the level of nation-states are critical for understanding and projecting China's future contribution to the greenhouse effect.
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From page 68... ...
· 1 1 ~. 1 Diversity is vulnerable to drying of the regional climate, because evapotranspiration from the forest generates about half the rainfall in the Amazon Basin ~ Salati and Vose, 19841.2 Deforestation can damage biological diversity by contributing to both global and regional climate change, especially if the result is a drier climate in the Amazon Basin.
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From page 69... ...
It was strongly influenced by national policies and supported by international development agencies, which encouraged migration and land clearing through landtitling arrangements, provided a publicly financed infrastructure of roads, and established credit and tax incentives to benefit ranching. Given these institutional conditions and the presence of abundant, accessible, and relatively cheap land in the Amazon, individual actors made rational economic choices that furthered their own best interests and helped create a system with its own economic and social momentum that continues deforestation even after state incentives have been removed.
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From page 70... ...
Land Tenure Rights For centuries, it has been the legal practice to grant rights of possession to whoever deforests a piece of Brazilian land. Rights of ownership soon follow {Fearnside, 19891.
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From page 71... ...
Beef production demands even less work per unit output and, with the help of modern technology and fossil-fuel energy for clearing forests, can be much more extensive than shifting cultivation. Fattening cattle on grass requires little labor or expenditure on fencing and corrals, and no weeding.
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From page 72... ...
The Role of Population Growth It is easy to see Brazil's average population growth of 2.8 percent in the 1970s as the source of land hunger and migration, raising the Amazon population by 6.3 percent annually {Browder, 19881. However, the period witnessed stronger movements of population from the already settled hinterIand to cities, combined with considerable natural increase in urban areas.
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From page 73... ...
he 4 ~co ~4 to .
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From page 74... ...
The potential for a future of less-extensive forest use in the Amazon Basin relates in part to land distribution. Inequality of land holdings in Brazil has increased greatly over the last few decades, with 70 percent of Brazilian farmers now landless and 81 percent of the farmland held by just 4.5 percent of the population Shipyard, 19901.
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From page 75... ...
EXPLAINING THE PROXIMATE CAUSES: SOCIAL DRIVING FORCES The examples above illustrate how the proximate causes of global environmental change result from a complex of social, political, economic, technological, and cultural variables, sometimes referred to as driving forces. They also show that studies of driving forces and their relationships have been and can be done National Research Council, l990b; Turner, 19891.
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From page 76... ...
We also outline some of the key unanswered but researchable questions regarding these driving forces. POPULATION GROWTH Of all the possible driving forces of environmental change, none has such a rich history in Western thinking as population growth.
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From page 77... ...
Others have suggested that these population increases are also associated with increasing global environmental change tWhitmore et al., 19911. Since World War II, concern with rapid population growth has motivated the U.S.
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From page 78... ...
As a result, it is difficult to assess just how important population may be as a driving force. For example, in 1986 a National Research Council study committee composed of economists and demographers concluded that slower population growth might assist less-developed countries in developing policies and institutions to protect the environment, but could find little empirical work on the link between population growth and environmental degradation {National Research Council, 19861.
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From page 79... ...
Assuming United Nations and World Bank projections for world population to double to about 10 billion in about 50 years, with 90 percent or more of that growth occurring in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and assuming that per capita income grows 2.5 percent and 1.5 percent annually in the developing and developed countries, respectively {a low projection, in both cases, by standards of the last several decades! , global economic output would quadruple between 1990 and 2040.
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From page 80... ...
Economic growth also depletes the stock of nonrenewable natural resources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and metallic minerals and, in some cases, the stock of renewable resources as well, as when the rate of soil erosion exceeds the rate of restoration of soil and nutrients. Environmental degradation follows when extraction disturbs land or biota and when resource use generates wastes.
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From page 81... ...
It seems that past some point, consumers use their economic resources to purchase well-being that is decreasingly dependent on material goods See Inglehart, 19901. If the historic pattern holds, future economic growth in the Towincome developing countries will be materials and energy intensive for quite some time before a transition to a service economy sets in.
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From page 82... ...
Research Needis The effects of economic development on the proximate causes of global change appear to be contingent, among other things, on
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From page 83... ...
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE Technological change affects the global environment in three ways. First, it leads to new ways to discover and exploit natural resources.
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From page 84... ...
For example, the environmental effects of refrigeration technology Took much different now than they would have looked In an analysis done in the 1950s. Research Needs As with other human influences on the global environment, the effects of technology are likely to be contingent on the other driving forces.
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From page 85... ...
~ ~ ~ ~ v A~ - ,^ ~ ~ , a, ~ ~ . ~ ~ _ ~ , _ _ = , ~ ~ different kinds of environmental effects: POLITICAL-ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS It seems reasonable that the social institutions that control the exchange of goods and services and that structure the decisions of large human groups should have a strong influence on the effects of human activity on the global environment.
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From page 86... ...
This is a serious limitation because, for environmental resources such as the stratospheric ozone layer, the only markets are imperfect. Some analysts trace the roots of environmental problems to the system of free-enterprise competition that underlies markets {e.g., Schnaiberg, 1980~.
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From page 87... ...
The critique of capitalism can be criticized for relying on a giobal, highly generalizing contrast between capitalist market economies and precapitalist, subsistence, socially undifferentiated groups that presumably maintain a delicate balance with the natural environment. It does not account for the fact that noncapitaTist societies without private property may perpetuate large-scale environmental abuses, as in the case of the drying of the Aral Sea for irrigation purposes in the Soviet Union iMe~vedev, 1990)
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From page 88... ...
A range of other factors in addition to dependency must be considered to account for the variety of resource use patterns in the Third World. The state is a major institution affecting global environmental change because state actions modify economic institutions and affect a wide range of human actions, including those with global environmental impacts.
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From page 89... ...
c, pricing systems and regulatory approaches in operation around the world, marketlike approaches not in use but potentially usable, and various mixtures lo determine their effects on global environmental variables as a function of where and when they are used, and on which human activities. Theoretical work ciassifying and analyzing the varieties of market imperfection could also make great contributions to understanding if directed toward the kinds of market imperfection characteristic of global environmental resources.
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From page 90... ...
Along a similar line, DunIap and Catton have argued that a "dominant social paradigm" that sets human beings apart from nature encourages environmentally destructive behavior but that a "new environmental paradigm" that considers humanity as part of a delicate balance of nature is emerging IDunIap and Van Liere, 197S, 1984; Catton, 1980; Catton and Duniap, 19801. Other writers claim that a change in environmental ethics is necessary to prevent global environmental disaster te.g., Stone, 1987; Sagoff, l9ggl.
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From page 91... ...
On the side of human response, however, at least some sense of the autonomy of attitudes and beliefs is implicit in every analysis that offers explicit recommendations for action. Research Needs As with the other driving forces, the most interesting questions for research concern the ways in which the central variableshere, cultural and psychological ones interact with other driving forces to produce the proximate causes of global change.
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From page 92... ...
THE PROXIMATE CAUSES Research on the human causes of global environmental change should be directed at important proximate sources. It is critical to develop reasonably accurate assessments of the relative impact of different classes of human activity as proximate causes of gIobal change.
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From page 93... ...
SOCIAL DRIVING FORCES Understanding human causes of environmental change will require developing new interdisciplinary teams and will take lead time to build the necessary understanding. Listed below are some central considerations for guiding research.
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From page 94... ...
The forces that cause environmental chance can also be affected by it. it A, Population growth is a good example of feedbacks between human actions and the global environment.
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From page 95... ...
More is generally known about the causes of population growth, economic development, technological change, government policies, and attitudes and culture the driving forces of global changethan about their interrelationships and environmental effects. This is so because study of the driving forces is supported by organized subdisciplines or interdisciplinary fields in social science, such as population studies, development studies, and policy analysis, whereas an interdisciplinary environmental social science-a field that examines the environmental effects of the driving forces is not yet organized.
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From page 96... ...
. For example, the world oil market is a global system in that changes in oil production anywhere reverberate through the system and may have global environmental impacts, for example, by changing the rate of consumption of of!
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From page 97... ...
Such studies can "unpack" broad concepts, such as technological change, economic growth, and population growth, that are frequently offered as explanations of how human activities cause global change. Comparative studies offer the best way to get inside the broad conc!
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From page 98... ...
Such cases need to be collected so they can be studied systematically and testable hypotheses derived about what kinds of innovations are likely to acquire the social momentum that produces long-lasting and increasing effects on the global environment, such as has resulted from CFC technology or from the Brazilian development strategy used in the Amazon Basin. Theory is particularly weak for this purpose.
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From page 99... ...
Linking tinge scales is also critical to the global change agenda. Abe question is thin Wbicb social changes' occurring on the time scale of months to years' are likely to persist or be a~apldied over time to the extent that they will be significant to the global environment on ~ scale of decades to centuries?
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From page 100... ...
100 / GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE within its area. Species with wide ranges are unlikely to be extinguished by habitat destruction within their range, but such destruction is likely to eliminate entirely the habitats of some of the species in the area with smaller ranges.
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