Wednesday, January 26, 2005
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Alarm at new climate warning apart from intrinsic interest - thousands of different runs of variants of a model come put with increases from 2 to 11 degrees centigrade - this is also a distributed computing project. Raises prospect of various other approaches being used to involve large numbers of people in modelling, to run very large models, or to run multiple variants of a model - and more sophisticated things too, satellite modelling and so on.
NIC - 2020 Project This is the CIA's National Intelligence Council's report on global 2020. Earlier reports are available, and there's a model to play with and use to build scenarios (Barry Hughes' model - fiddle with various basic paramewters by country, region...) . Yet to try this (at home).
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
EnvisionTools.com - Creators of QUEST: These modest people - "We are the industry leaders in stakeholder engagement, scenario planning and realizing sustainability." - seem to be doing good work with a Scenario tool called QUEST. I came upon refs to its use in vancouver, but the first application to pop up on google is Seattle.
"Can you imagine Seattle metropolitan planning being so fun that
everyone would flock to become involved? An innovative game is
transforming regional planning and it could be headed for Seattle.
Envision Sustainability Tools of Vancouver, B.C., has developed Quest,
a computer game that allows people to create and visualize future
scenarios for their region. The game is loaded with data on the region
and runs sophisticated computer models developed at the University of
British Columbia that look 40 years into the future and see the results of
alternative choices.
"Quest has been applied to regions on four continents. Working in cities
in developed countries like the U.S., Canada, England, Australia and
New Zealand to developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Envision has found a
great deal of common ground as regions struggle to deal with sustainability...."
"Can you imagine Seattle metropolitan planning being so fun that
everyone would flock to become involved? An innovative game is
transforming regional planning and it could be headed for Seattle.
Envision Sustainability Tools of Vancouver, B.C., has developed Quest,
a computer game that allows people to create and visualize future
scenarios for their region. The game is loaded with data on the region
and runs sophisticated computer models developed at the University of
British Columbia that look 40 years into the future and see the results of
alternative choices.
"Quest has been applied to regions on four continents. Working in cities
in developed countries like the U.S., Canada, England, Australia and
New Zealand to developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Envision has found a
great deal of common ground as regions struggle to deal with sustainability...."
Sustainability Now resources on sustainability - found while looking for Canadian experience with software to support citizen involvement in sustainability planning. More coming on that.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Scenarios for Sustainability: " Scenarios - stories of the future that inform decision-making today - are tools for policy making. Because sustainability explicitly requires a long-term perspective, scenarios are a natural choice for decision-makers at all levels interested in sustainability issues.
To encourage the use of scenarios and to promote the exploration of sustainable futures, this site provides practical procedures and tools for designing and building scenarios for sustainable development, with a special focus on free tools and open standards. It also offers links to data sources and other information."
To encourage the use of scenarios and to promote the exploration of sustainable futures, this site provides practical procedures and tools for designing and building scenarios for sustainable development, with a special focus on free tools and open standards. It also offers links to data sources and other information."
Article ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS : AN EMERGING IMPERATIVE - from Science july 2001-- Clark et al. 293 (5530): 657
"Planning and decision-making can be improved by access to reliable forecasts of ecosystem state, ecosystem services, and natural capital. Availability of new data sets, together with progress in computation and statistics, will increase our ability to forecast ecosystem change. An agenda that would lead toward a capacity to produce, evaluate, and communicate forecasts of critical ecosystem services requires a process that engages scientists and decision-makers. Interdisciplinary linkages are necessary because of the climate and societal controls on ecosystems, the feedbacks involving social change, and the decision-making relevance of forecasts..."
"Planning and decision-making can be improved by access to reliable forecasts of ecosystem state, ecosystem services, and natural capital. Availability of new data sets, together with progress in computation and statistics, will increase our ability to forecast ecosystem change. An agenda that would lead toward a capacity to produce, evaluate, and communicate forecasts of critical ecosystem services requires a process that engages scientists and decision-makers. Interdisciplinary linkages are necessary because of the climate and societal controls on ecosystems, the feedbacks involving social change, and the decision-making relevance of forecasts..."
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
Lots of material to review and comment on, including report on ecosystems and human welfare, and a SCENARIOS ASSESSMENT.
Lots of material to review and comment on, including report on ecosystems and human welfare, and a SCENARIOS ASSESSMENT.
GEO: GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK: UNEP site, with lots downloadable here including:
**Change and Challenge:A State of the Environment Briefing for the Global Environment Facility.
**Global Environmental Outlook: User Profile and Impact Study
**SWOT Analysis and Evaluation of the GEO Process from the Perspective of GEO Collaborating Centres,
**GEO-3 Scenarios 2002-2032: Quantification and Analysis of Environmental Impacts
**Change and Challenge:A State of the Environment Briefing for the Global Environment Facility.
**Global Environmental Outlook: User Profile and Impact Study
**SWOT Analysis and Evaluation of the GEO Process from the Perspective of GEO Collaborating Centres,
**GEO-3 Scenarios 2002-2032: Quantification and Analysis of Environmental Impacts
Monday, January 10, 2005
Club of Amsterdam - Shaping Your Future in the Knowledge Society
Journal of the CoA. Some useful materail. The conference (up a page or so) also looks interesting.
Journal of the CoA. Some useful materail. The conference (up a page or so) also looks interesting.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
World Network of Religious Futurists -> future of religion Found this while looking for the philosophical writings of Olaf Stapledon. And found from the news here that W W Wagar had died. Shame. Also that "Foresight 2004: leading from the future" was a conference on "people of faith" meeting tomorrow's needs. Surely I'm not alone in thinking that "faith" and "spirituality" are appropriated too exclusively by the "religious"?
Swiss Re Public Web Site
Swiss insurers on future risk and uncertainty-
"This publication goes beyond the discussion of individual future risks and shows that it is possible both to understand and consciously configure the risk landscape. The work does not promise any ready-made solutions...we must learn first how to deal both with the many challenges dictated by the ever accelerating rate of change and the new and different risks associated with it. Being prepared to face up to many unanswered and in some cases unsettling questions will also point us towards solutions. For whatever the face of the future, tackling it will take courage."
Swiss insurers on future risk and uncertainty-
"This publication goes beyond the discussion of individual future risks and shows that it is possible both to understand and consciously configure the risk landscape. The work does not promise any ready-made solutions...we must learn first how to deal both with the many challenges dictated by the ever accelerating rate of change and the new and different risks associated with it. Being prepared to face up to many unanswered and in some cases unsettling questions will also point us towards solutions. For whatever the face of the future, tackling it will take courage."
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
The New Yorker: The Critics: Books
Review of Jared Diamond's THE VANISHING - why societies implode. If its anything like as good as GUNS GERMS AND STEEL its essential reading. But Diamond doesnt seem to be too keen on the idea of external natural catastophes - like the Minoans and probably some S American extinctions.
Diamond's argument in a nutshell:" When it comes to historical collapses,
five groups of interacting factors have been especially important:
the damage that people have inflicted on their environment;
climate change; enemies;
changes in friendly trading partners;
and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts.
That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case.
Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined,
but whose relative importance varies from case to case."
Review of Jared Diamond's THE VANISHING - why societies implode. If its anything like as good as GUNS GERMS AND STEEL its essential reading. But Diamond doesnt seem to be too keen on the idea of external natural catastophes - like the Minoans and probably some S American extinctions.
Diamond's argument in a nutshell:" When it comes to historical collapses,
five groups of interacting factors have been especially important:
the damage that people have inflicted on their environment;
climate change; enemies;
changes in friendly trading partners;
and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts.
That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case.
Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined,
but whose relative importance varies from case to case."
Saturday, January 01, 2005
NWO - NWO Themes: opportunities for Dutch science
I found this page by chasing fown a very interesting paper on Socitechnical scenarios - this is about energy transitions. NWO is the Dutch Organisation for Scientific research, and the page here has links to projects under various themes - some more futuristic than others:
* Cultural Heritage
* Ethical and Social Aspects of Research and Innovation
* Shifts in Governance
* Cognition and Behaviour
* Fundamentals of Life Processes
* System Earth
* Digitalisation and Information Technology
* Nano-Sciences
* Emerging Technologies
I found this page by chasing fown a very interesting paper on Socitechnical scenarios - this is about energy transitions. NWO is the Dutch Organisation for Scientific research, and the page here has links to projects under various themes - some more futuristic than others:
* Cultural Heritage
* Ethical and Social Aspects of Research and Innovation
* Shifts in Governance
* Cognition and Behaviour
* Fundamentals of Life Processes
* System Earth
* Digitalisation and Information Technology
* Nano-Sciences
* Emerging Technologies
