Transcript PIER Urban Metabolism Roadmap

Urban Metabolism – The Political
Ecology of Energy and Ecosystems
STEPHANIE PINCETL
INSTITUTE OF THE
ENVIRONMENT AND
SUSTAINABILITY
UCLA
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
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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
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By sector
By region and microclimate
By socio-economic and demographic characteristics
By land use type
By policy drivers
Measures of Urban Metabolism
Traditional
Expanded
 Energy
 Demography,
 Materials
 Water
 Nutrients
 Waste
socioeconomic, education
 GDP and community
fiscal measures
 Employment
 Health
 Community quality
Including
Land Use
Transportation
 Land use regs
 Materials and goods
 Densities
movement
 Roads and transit
 Fuels
 Agriculture
 Age of housing
 Finance and lending
 Taxation
 Impacts on hinterlands
 Endangered species
 Soils, water, fauna and
flora
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
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 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
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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
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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