World Views and Sustainable Development

The National Planning Policy Framework document is a great piece of political compromise at the heart of which is the term ‘sustainable development’, a term of great creative ambiguity – it means whatever you want it to. The interpretation you put onto the term partly depends on your world view, specifically what you think of the environment and how fragile or robust it is.

In the figure the bottom right hand corner represents individuals who think the environment is very fragile, maybe even in a delicate balance which we humans can easily upset to produce catastrophic and irreversible changes. Move to the top right corner and this represents individuals who think the environment is fragile but not so fragile that we can not change things a bit, within acceptable limits. Once these limits are exceeded then problems will occur but as long as we work within these limits there should be no problem. Move to the bottom left and you have individuals who believe that the environment is pretty robust, it tends to survive whatever we do to it, so if there are limits they are quite a long, long, long way off. Whilst the top left represents individuals who just go with the flow accepting it doesn’t really matter what they think they can not do anything about the environment anyway.

A simple caricature I know but does this get at the nub of the problem with the term ‘sustainable development’ . Each world view can make sense of the phrase in its own terms. An individualist can view the environment as being able to cope with a lot of change and so can focus on the ‘development’ part of the phrase, whilst an egalitarian will focus on the ‘sustainable’ part of the phrase as they are concerned with not disrupting the balance of the environment. A local authority might view itself as hierarchist, ensuring that change happens but within well defined and scientific proven limits.

Problem is do we know what the limits are? The original definition of ‘sustainable development’ in the Brundtland Commission report in 1987 recognised that there were limits to sustainable development but these limits were not fixed.

‘The concept of sustainable development does imply limits – not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organisation on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities’. (World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, page 8, 1987).

According to the figure some people will be concerned to find these limits, others will assume that the limits are so far away it doesn’t affect them and what they do. Partly your attitude or world view will depend on how you see yourself in society. The vertical axis is labelled ‘Grid’, this is concerned with how far you see your choices defined by society. Very individualistic individuals will see themselves as completely unconstrained and so able to do whatever they like. Following the rules and procedures to the letter puts you high up on the axis. The horizontal axis is labelled ‘Group’, this refers to the level of cohesion or solidarity there is amongst a group. Low group cohesion will tend to produce individuals who act for themselves, whilst high group cohesion will produce individuals with a sense of responsible to the group. Where would you place all the potential stakeholders involved in using and implementing the National Planning Policy Framework? Where would you put yourself? Do you think that affects how you understand ‘sustainable development’?

Schwarz and Thompson (1990) discuss the above type of figure in relation to environmental issues (amongst other things) in Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology and Social Class (1990)



Whilst Mary Douglas originally developed these figures in her analysis of cultural theory.



The Brundtland Commission reported in 'Our Common Future' in 1987

Sustaining Vagueness: Planning and Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development is the central pillar of the new National Planning Policy Framework. Judging from the positive various commentaries from business leaders, planners, conservation organisations and just about anyone else asked on recent news programmes, everyone is happy with this focus. Groups normally at loggerheads with each other seem content that the new document suits their purposes. How can this be?
The document itself does not really help much in explaining this strange contentment. The Ministerial foreword states that ‘Sustainable means ensuring that better lives for ourselves don’t mean worse lives for future generations’, whilst ‘Development means growth’ and ‘Sustainable development is about change for the better…’ Any clearer now about what the term means?
On page two the five guiding principles of sustainable development found within the UK Sustainable Development Strategy Securing the Future are reiterated. They are ‘living within the planet’s environmental limits; ensuring a strong, healthy and just society; achieving a sustainable economy; promoting good governance; and using sound science responsibly’. Any clearer now?

Paragraph 7 on the same page states that there are three dimensions to sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. The economic role focuses on building a strong, responsive and competitive economy which will ensure that land of the right type in the right places if available at the right time to support growth and innovation. The social role is to support strong, vibrant and healthy communities by providing housing to support the needs of the current and future generations. Is it a bit clearer now – is that what you thought sustainable development meant?
I will look at the planning document in more detail in another blog but one of the key problems and the reason why everyone seems so happy is that the term ‘sustainable development’ is so vague and flexible that everyone reads into the term what they want to. An excellent article by Robert Kates, Thomas Parris and Anthony Leiserowitz (2005) discusses this problem in detail. Since the initial brief definition by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, the term sustainable development has become hijacked, interpreted, reinterpreted and so imprecise that anyone or any group dealing with the environment can shape the term to mean whatever they hope it means. The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as: ‘ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

This definition has what Kates et al. call a ‘creative ambiguity’, a great term for vagueness. Kates et al., identify that there are three distinct things that can be developed within the term; people, economy and society. Each has a different time scale associated with its development and each places a different emphasis, depending on who is talking, on the ‘sustainable’ part or ’development’ part of 'sustianbel development'.

Kates et al. also suggest that ‘sustainable development’ can be defined in terms of what each group seeks to achieve. There are goals – what we seek to achieve. There are indicators – what we use to measure the achievement of these goals. There are the values that underlie these goals and then there is what we actually do, the practice of sustainable development. I may be naïve but my guess is that business groups and environmental organisations may share the term ‘sustainable development’ but the goals and values that drive them are different as are the indicators they would use to assess the success of sustainable development. The use of such a creatively ambiguous term as ‘sustainable development’ may be politically useful to achieve consensus but will become a minefield for implementation.


Some useful texts on sustianble development are below:




The origin of the term can be found in the Brundtland Commission report 'Our Common Future':

Icelandic Volcano: How Much Ash Is Dangerous?

Figure 1 Image ash plume from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano

I hate flying. No that is not quite true: I hate the thought of crashing, of a massive heavy metal object plummeting 30-odd thousand feet to the ground with me in it. I do fly though, I have to for work and for holidays, so I may not be the person you most want to sit next to on a plane. Having just made it back from a second year field class in Malta when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted ejecting ash to between 20,000 and 30,000 feet, you can imagine I watched the news with great interest.

Aside from hearing news of the second year Berlin fieldclass who had to trek across Europe to the Belgium coast to get back, my interest was caught by the debate, carried out with more than a hint of repressed anger, between the Meteorological Office, the Civil Aviation Authority, the government and airlines. The Met Office view is outlined through their press releases (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/volcano.html) whilst the BBC archives provide details of the chronology and debate, at least the public aspect of it (http://search.bbc.co.uk/search?go=toolbar&uri=%2F&q=icelandic+volcano and hunt around for something of interest).


Figure 2 Map of extent of ash cloud impact. Source: Metetorlogical Office

The particular angle I was interested in, however, was how this diverse set of actors came together because of a specific geophysical event and how what was viewed as ‘safe’ changed as the travel chaos unfolded at airport across Europe. Eyjafjallajökull itself could be seen as an actor in its own right with its own spatial extent, temporal behaviour and characteristics such as size and shape of ash particles released. The other actors in the drama, the Met Office, the CAA, the government and the airlines were all entwined in a complex web of relationships that focused on the definition of what was a safe level of ash for flights.

The definition of safe level was central to everything that happened in late April and early May 2010. Having never had such a massive eruption with a set of meteorological conditions that pushed the ash plume over the major flight paths across most of Europe the organisation assigned responsibility for safety fell back on the ‘safe’ position of stating a of stating a zero tolerance level (a little ash was allowed in the standard threshold of a concentration of 200 microgrammes per cubic meter), no ash you could fly, any ash (above standard threshold) you couldn’t. Given the damage that ash plumes had caused for aircraft engines in the past this seemed a ‘safe’ position.


Figure 3 British Airways engine after a run in with a volcanic ash plume in 1982. Image: Eric Moody, British Airways

But how did the CAA know this. Advice is provided by VAAC (Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres – see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1004/10041901 for an outline of the global warning system and its history). But how do they know? There may have been 80 incidents since 1982 but the Icelandic eruption was something different because of the geophysical conditions, a continuous stream of ash and meteorological conditions that meant it affected European airspace. The other actors in the network, once the duration of the hazard became clearer, did not passively sit there and accept the CAA advice and the Met Office evidence. BA, for example, undertook a ‘test’ flight through the ash cloud and, emerging safely the other side, declared they felt there was no danger. Likewise, as travel chaos grew, the airlines questioned the evidence upon which the advice was based. The focus of their attention was the use of modelling rather than monitoring to predict ash cloud movement. Despite using such modelling techniques to predict weather patterns that airline use, the ash cloud models were heavily criticised for not matching the reality the uninstrumented ‘test’ flights of the airlines showed.

The definition of ‘safe’, a fixed thing you might think, became a subject of negotiation within the network based on the interest of each of the actors. The details of the zoning of the ash cloud can be found at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/volcano/forecasts.html. Black zones have 20 times the standard threshold ash concentration (concentrations of over 4,000 microgrammes per cubic metre), grey zones have concentrations between 10 and 20 times the standard threshold (concentrations of 2,000-4,000 microgrammes per cubic metre). The standard threshold of concentrations of 200 microgrammes per cubic metre was used to define the edge of red zones. Each zone had associated with a it an additional definition – red zones stated the concentration was as used in official VAAC products. To operate in grey zones airlines had to present the CAA with a safety case that included the agreement of their aircraft and engine manufacturers. Black zone were stated to be zones where the required tolerances of engine manufacturers were exceeded.

So is ‘safe’ a fixed term, something that is unaltered by circumstances, by context? The above summary would suggest not. ‘Safe’ levels of ash became a term that could be defined, redefined and negotiated between the actors. Scientific evidence, which you may think could decide the issue, was itself open to debate and discussion. In my next blog about the ash cloud I will look at this negotiation of evidence in more detail

Environmental Geography - why?

This blog will, I hope, help people to understand what Environmental geography is and why it is an important way of looking at the world.

I am a Principal Lecturer in Geography at the University of Portsmouth and in 2009 I, with my colleagues, started an undergraduate degree course in BSc and BA in Environmental Geography. Three of us, myself, Brian Baily and Julia Brown, researched the market and felt that what we believed to be the important aspects of environmental geography were not being taught in other courses of the same name (or if they were it wasn’t immediately clear from course outlines). We feel that environmental geography should encompass both physical and human geography and act as a means of integrating and melding the two substantive fields of traditional geography. I could go on about how environmental geography provides an interface, a means of bridging the arts and sciences, but really this view of geography has been a key focus of the geography since it developed as a university level subject back in the 1887 with Halford Mackinder at Oxford (date of his ‘On the scope and methods of geography’ paper delivered at the Royal Geographical Society, RGS. He was appointed Reader in Geography at Oxford within six months of this paper).

Aside from the academic pursuit of the subject, we feel that taking an informed ‘environmental’ perspective on the various issues and problems confronting people on a global and local basis can help in understanding the context of these problems, how they are themselves constructed and, dare we believe, even provide possible solutions to these issues. The last suggestion may be a forlorn hope but at least if you appreciate why an issue is so complex it may help in trying to understand how different interests have such difficulty trying to solve a problem. All three of us have a particular view or stance on environmental issues; we are not politically neutral and would be wary of any one who claims otherwise. This does not mean, however, that we do not try to comprehend why others approach, understand or even identify environmental issues differently from ourselves – this is all part of environmental geography.

We feel that it is important to understand both the physical and human processes that underlie environmental geography, that drive environmental change and stability but it is not enough just to understand each part in isolation. The two must be brought together and the difficulties and complexities of that assimilation of different knowledges recognised. Above all understanding the environment is as much about politics as it is about science – a key element we felt was not explicitly developed or at the forefront in the course outlines we saw. You can collect all the data about climate change that you want, you can validate the science but if no-one acts upon it then ‘scientific objectivity’ means very little. Understanding how different systems of knowledge merge and interact is a key feature of understanding the production of environmental geography.

The blog will cover a whole range of topics and I hope to upload new content on a fairly regular basis – once a week at least – or two if work interferes! I will divide the blog, initially at least, into History of Environmental Thought, Monitoring the Environment, Environmental Hazards, Environment and Society, Environmental News. I do not, however want to be too rigid in how the blog develops – feedback is welcome and essential for me to gauge if there is anyone out there reading this and, if so, what really interests them.

This blog will, I hope, build up into a useful resource for students undertaking geography GCSE, A level and undergraduates as well as informing anyone who is interested in environmental issues in general. The geographic perspective may provide something new to your thinking or it may not, but at least I hope it is useful.

Environmental Disasters

We remember disasters. Pictures stream across our television screen, graphic images of the misery of death and the chaos of destruction. Hundreds, even thousands of people die, their agony captured and rerun in digital formats across the Web. Scientists tell us what happened and why, politicians bemoan the lack of warning and the poor die. Boxing Day 2004, Katrina 2005, Haiti 2010 – just dates and places but there is an immediate recognition of what they refer to.

How can we study these events and, importantly how can we understand and prevent them? This is a set of questions that has long been a staple part of academic study and it has a distinctly geographical dimension. There are three main approaches to trying to understand hazards and disasters: the dominant, the developmental and the complex. They could be seen chronologically, with the last being more sophisticated than the first or they could just be seen as different ways of looking at the same thing. A key thing to bear in mind is that there is usually a distinction between a hazard and a disaster. A hazard is the potential or possibility for damage or harm; the vulnerability for a loss. Disaster in contrast is the realisation of that potential.

The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 were destructive by any measure you care to use. Death tolls of over 200,000 almost outstrip comprehension. Whole cities levelled, communities ripped apart, national economics shattered. How could we study such events? The dominant approach (or behavioural paradigm according to Smith and Petley, 2009) takes what many would call as a very rational, scientific view of a disaster. A disaster is the result of an extreme geophysical event. The geophysical causes the problem and it is often seen as a matter of luck or not if people are harmed. Studying how people behave before and during a disaster, understanding their rational decision making and where they are irrational is the basis for developing management tools for organising populations. Civil authorities tend to view such events as distinct and discrete breaks with normality; times of crisis for which special plans, actions and laws (or lack of liberties) are needed.

In addition, understanding detailed scientific analysis of the geophysical processes that produce extreme geophysical events provides the information for attempting to predict the location and timing of such events. Of course such detailed study requires extensive and often expensive monitoring systems as well as well integrated early warning systems and a civil authority able to rationally plan for what to do with a population once the sirens sound. Such an approach could be called a ‘technological fix’ approach to disasters. Leave it to the experts and everyone might be saved.

How does this view play out in reality? Let’s take FEMA’s webpages on the National Earthqauke Reduction Programme (NEHRP) as an example (www.fema.gov/plan/prevent/earthquake/nehrp.shtm or www.nerhp.gov for the NEHRP webpages). The opening statement highlights the dominance of the dominant view of disasters.

‘The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) seeks to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States through both basic and directed research and implementation activities in the fields of earthquake science and engineering.’
Reading the Strategic Plan for the National Earthquakes Hazards Reduction Programme (Fiscal Years 2009-2013) (http://www.nehrp.gov/pdf/strategic_plan_2008.pdf) there are three key goals –

A: Improve understanding of earthquake processes and impacts;
B: Develop cost-effective measures to reduce earthquake impacts on individuals, the built environment, and society-at-large;
C: Improve the earthquake resilience of communities nationwide.

Within these goals there are a number of objectives but each can be seen to be using language associated with the dominant paradigm. For goal A, for example, objective 1 is ‘advance understanding of earthquake phenomena and generation processes’, basically do fundamental science into the geophysical phenomenon. Even when people and society are considered as in objective 3, it is viewing actions as being amendable to study using similar rational methods as those used for the geophysical phenomenon. Likewise for goal B, the objectives talk about developing tools for assessing loss and risk, implying that everything can be allocated a number, a quantity for comparison. Even goal C is couched in these terms. Objectives 11 and 12, for example, seek to promote or support the implementation of public and private standards in building codes and policies, whilst objective 10 focuses on developing more comprehensive risk scenarios for planning actions, presumably at an appropriate organisational level.

Seeing disasters as driven by the geophysical event, as crisis that need crisis management responses and as understandable via scientific analysis and usually via quantification of impacts is not necessarily wrong. It is vital to know what the geophysical event is and how it varies. It is vital to understand how buildings behave in earthquakes and build accordingly. But are people simply rational entities that will be told what to do by authorities? Is it simply a case of knowing more and telling everyone – will this reduce disasters?

In my next blog will explain how people’s behaviour has been studied and how rational decision making is incorporated into this dominant paradigm.

Environmental Geography -the key questions

Geography is often said to supply the ‘where’ bit of the set of questions ‘how, what, where and why?’ This blog views geography much as another environmental geography blogger does (http://environmentalgeography.blogspot.com/). In this blog geography asks the questions – where is it, why there and so what? This blog adds a bit more. Geography asks what is it, where is it and why there and not somewhere else and then so what? Geography looks at both the static questions of what and where as well as the more dynamic questions about why and so what. By combining these, the static and the dynamic, you get an understanding of not only what is going on but also why.

OK so in English what does that mean? Take a pollution incident. The first question is what is it? What is the pollutant? The next question is where is it? Which bit of the environment is it in and is that important? A release of sulphur dioxide from coal fires would produce a stream of gas in an urban area. Where it is important as the sulphur dioxide could affect human health if concentrations rose high enough. Likewise if a specific meteorological condition occurred, such as a blocking high pressure system, then smoke and sulphur dioxide could remain in the urban area and concentrations build up to such an extent that some people have difficulty breathing whilst others collapse and die. This is not a random example as Londoner over 60 would know. The Great Smog or Big Smoke of Friday 5th to Tuesday 9th December 1952 was the result of the interaction and coincidence of large releases of smoke and sulphur dioxide from low quality coal from power stations and domestic fires and the presence of an anticyclone over London from 4th December. The resulting temperature inversion over London effectively trapped the pollution.

Figure 1: Nelson's coloumn nearly hidden in the Great Smog

The last question is why there and not somewhere else. Pollution wasn’t uncommon in 1950s London. Low quality coal, cheap fuel in post-war Britian, had been used before; power stations were not new inventions. Likewise, anticyclones are not an unusually weather phenomenon. So the question is why there and why then? The preceding days had been cold; more coal was being burnt than usual. Diesel fumes added to the usual mix as relatively new buses took over from the recently defunct tram system. Mix in the pollution from industrial Europe that had blown across the Channel in the days before and the amount of pollution was higher than usual and not a breathe of wind to disturb the stillness of the brown shroud of pollution and all the elements come together to explain the why.

Figure 2: Carrying on inthe Great Smog

The why doesn’t necessarily stop there. You could ask why was cheap coal needed? Why was the tram network removed? Why didn’t authorities predict the dramatic health problems the smog would produce – an estimated 12,000 people in the following weeks and months, mostly young, old and people with pre-exiting respiratory problems?

Figure 3: Deaths due to the Great Smog (source for image -Wikipedia)

You could also then explore the so what question. What was the significance of the Great Smog – in other words does it matter? At a micro scale every life lost dramatically answers the so what question. The individuals are not just numbers but people who had families, jobs an existence beyond the point they became in a historic graph. At a national scale, the so what is answered by the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1958, a direct outcome of the havoc caused by this pollution incident.