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Science alone will not save us

But there is concern that a government desire to protect science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects by ringfencing funding could, in the long term, affect the ability of these teams to conduct research.

For Professor Paul Wellings, chairman-elect of the 1994 group of smaller research-intensive universities, it is a question of getting together what he calls a “dream team”, comprising not just scientists, but researchers from the social sciences and humanities, to deal with the nightmare scenario recently conjured by the government’s chief scientist, John Beddington, in which the world is gripped by a “perfect storm” of war, starvation and mass migration.

Coming up with answers

For Wellings, it is not enough simply to rely on science and technology to come up with the answers we need. Looking at individuals’ behaviour and getting them to change that is, he argues, as important as new technology.

While not opposed to ringfencing per se, he argues for a more nuanced approach, with support maintained for social sciences and humanities. The 1994 group estimates that the ringfencing of funding for Stem subjects during the 2008 research assessment exercise (RAE)cost its institutions 20p in the pound per researcher.

“If we were asked as institutions to help solve major global challenges, and asked what is the ‘dream team’ that we would want to field for doing that,” says Wellings, “as soon as you start to put that together, there are engineers, technocrats and very often people in the humanities and the social sciences.”

At the sharp end of what he is talking about are people such as Sarah Curtis, a geographer heading a group of Durham University academics working with engineers from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University on a project to discover how storms, floods and heatwaves caused by climate change might affect the elderly and how infrastructure can be tailored to cope.

“Multidisciplinary work helps engineers and scientists, as well as the professional carers, tackle extreme weather events in the future and keep services running,” Curtis says. “They also need to understand from the people receiving those services what’s important to them and that’s where the social science perspective comes in – really being able to interpret events and problems from different social perspectives.

“The social science perspective isn’t just about individual behaviour, but helps us to think about the way that people work and interact together. I would argue that what’s important to people and how they tackle problems is not just down to individual characteristics but also to the social circumstances they’re in.”

She is concerned about an over-reliance on Stem subjects to provide solutions to climate change. “This isn’t just about sharing academic knowledge, but also the public debate as well, because in all honesty I don’t think that natural scientists have all the answers to the problems we’re facing over climate change and neither do I think that social scientists have the solutions. So we are going to have to negotiate across these different points of view if we are going to move forward.”

Wellings, a population ecologist, says there is a pool of expertise within the 1994 group, with its strength in social science and humanities. He would like to see it drawn upon when it comes to tackling environmental issues. “If we don’t get a grip on climate change we are going to see the world’s largest diaspora, when a huge area of sub-Saharan Africa will be forced into absolute water shortage. At that point 300 million people could walk off the land and towards Europe. There are a family of issues that, if we get them badly wrong, will produce a perfect storm within about 40 to 50 years around some of those big picture issues.

“So who are the people who understand the culture of these areas and the management of diaspora? By and large, it’s not scientists but social scientists and humanities people.”

He points to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a member of the 1994 group. “I don’t know what the future of geopolitics is, but I do know that in the future we are going to have to turn to people such as those at Soas, who are experts in languages and anthropology from that part of the world. It will be an inevitable response that we will need a world-class centre of excellence of the sort that we already have there.”

In the meantime, Wellings, who is also vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, fears there will be less money for academics to engage in speculative research in social sciences and humanities.

“You can have a pretty shrewd guess there will be substantially less money going back into those departments than there was before,” he says. “And so over the next 18 months you will see a sharp diminution in research activity. Some of that will be a reduction in the number of projects that are being run and some of it will be in the support to postgraduates.

“Less money will cause colleagues to be more entrepreneurial and in the short run they will be more market-facing, or recruit more international students, but it won’t maintain research capacity and that is the thing that will be eroded. The intellectual need for there to be multidisciplinary research will not go away and that will put tremendous pressure on universities to ensure that the financial resources are there.”

Wellings, who sits on the board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, is calling for more transparency when it comes to the new funding mechanism that will replace the RAE, the Research Excellence Framework – in particular, in the funding of Stem subjects relative to social sciences and humanities. “In the future, there will have to be transparency about what the likelihood is of resource in each area,” he says.

A wider research base

Diane Berry, Reading University’s pro vice-chancellor for research, echoes this argument. “It is clearly important to protect funding for Stem subjects and medicine. However, we cannot afford to conceive our science base too narrowly – we must protect our wider research base.

“This is because addressing current and future global challenges depends on the successful interplay of all subjects. Furthermore, the boundaries between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities are becoming increasingly fluid as research at the frontiers of knowledge becomes increasingly inter- and multidisciplinary.”

David Delpy, the chief executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, says: “Obviously, there needs to be a balance between arts and science funding. Both are important. However, there remains a shortage in physical sciences and engineering graduates. We agree that when it comes to priority areas such as climate change a cross-disciplinary approach is vital if we are to be successful.” Delpy points to the Research Council UK’s Living With Environmental Change programme as an example of how the seven research councils are working together “to try and solve major problems that face society”.

“Increasingly,” says Berry, “success in markets, which many people might assume to be dominated by technological advances, depends just as much on factors such as design, economics, branding and consumer understanding.

“Similarly, effectively tackling some of the most significant health and environmental challenges will depend just as much on changing people’s behaviour as on advances in medicine, physics, or chemistry.”

19 May, 2009

Leaders of 40 largest cities meet to tackle climate change

The issue of how cities “find a way to continue to thrive and prosper while reducing greenhouse gas emissions is one of the central questions in the whole struggle,” Clinton told a press conference.

He said his initiative focuses on creating “communities that can both provide a greater quality of life and generate more clean energy than they use”.

Half the world’s population lived in cities last year, and that figure is expected to grow to 70 per cent by 2050, said Clinton, citing UN statistics.

They occupy just 2 per cent of the world’s land mass yet are responsible for more than two-thirds of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Mayor David Miller of Toronto, who chairs this year’s summit, said he was confident it could find balanced ways to combat climate change.

“We will be able to demonstrate not only how you can fight greenhouse gas emissions but how you can also build green sustainable neighbourhoods, create green jobs and contribute back to the fight against climate change,” Miller said.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-Hoon said the South Korean capital would develop a pilot residential and industrial district that would use 20 per cent less energy than the national average and cut carbon emissions by more than 40 per cent.

Oh said new technologies and renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic, solar and geothermal energy would be used to fulfil the commitment.

London Mayor Boris Johnson said the British capital was committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2025, and pointed to retrofitting – the installation of lagging – in large numbers of public buildings as key.

Sustainable farm research ‘ under threat’

“I don’t believe [the closure of LWA] has been thought through,” said Dr Williams, who is head of the Natural Resources Commission of New South Wales.

LWA was set up in 1990 to integrate public good research into farming research.

At a cost of $13 million a year, it oversees and funds research programs including those on dryland salinity, pesticide contamination and nutrient run-off.

“It’s about working out how to farm and retain the elements that support that farming into the future – the nutrients, the water, the vegetation, the soil organisms,” Dr Williams said.

To date, he says, food production had led to land and water degradation because it failed to integrate ecological principles into farming.

“The focus had been on the paddock,” he said.

“Agricultural science unfortunately has not connected well to the rest of the landscape.”

Lack of integration

Dr Williams says LWA brokers collaborations between researchers from many different disciplines to work out the best way to farm.

“[For example] when you produce food and you take water out of rivers, then river knowledge and the way catchments work are fundamental to that food production,” Dr Williams, a former chief of land and water research at CSIRO, said.

DR Williams says research agencies like CSIRO are not generally good at integrating agricultural and ecological knowledge in a way that can be used by farmers and others managing the land.

“If you’re in research you’ll get rewarded and promoted from publishing in the literature, but there’s not a lot of credit for being a broker and a facilitator,” he said.

More investment needed

Former LWA chief executive Dr Andrew Campbell says the organisation has developed valuable expertise and systems for identifying key research questions, targeting investment and managing research collaborations.

He says these include research databases, search engines, evaluation systems, risk-management systems, contracting processes and collaborative agreements.

“To throw all that away would be tragic,” Dr Campbell said.

“It will finish off costing way more money in the future to try and rebuild them from scratch.”

Dr Campbell says more, not less, investment is needed into how to farm in a way that conserves land, water, energy, carbon, soil and biodiversity.

“They are the things that will determine the future of Australian agriculture,” he said.

And he says when resources are scarce, it is important to have a funding body removed from the relatively narrow views of specific research groups.

Peter Cornish, a professor of agriculture at the University of Western Sydney, agrees LWA’s role was unique.

“LWA really brought together the right people with a vision and with the capacity to develop really important cross-commodity, cross-sectoral programs,” said Professor Cornish, who specialises in land and water research.

“In terms of land and water resource management in Australia, I saw [LWA] as the peak coordinating body,” he adds.

“I think [its abolition is] a tragedy for the Australian landscape

The Australian Academy of Science has also called for the capabilities of LWA to be preserved.

Labor the big loser in Green chaos theory

Labor has only itself to blame. Former Labor premier Alan Carpenter promised he would change WA Labor – but the fingerprints of his disgraced predecessor Brian Burke were all over the place, even on Cabinet submissions.

When Carpenter pulled an early election, the long-suffering people of WA took the opportunity to install hastily-recalled Liberal veteran Colin Barnett and, in the aftermath of his victory, the rats are deserting the Labor ship.

Even in Freo, Labor candidate Peter Tagliaferri, a popular former mayor who Labor cajoled into the candidacy, could not turn the anti-ALP tide which swept Green candidate Adele Carles into the seat with 54 to 45 per cent of the vote.

Her win marks the Greens’ first ever primary-vote victory over Labor in any state or federal election. It signals mayhem for Labor.

Carles avoided any mention of the Greens’ loopier and more dangerous policies. She worked hard to portray the nihilist party as a respectable community organisation without the ratbaggery usually associated with Green politics.

The Greens showed themselves to be the mothers of reinvention.

But what is good for inner-urban Freo’s fashion-friendly residents is, unfortunately, death for the rest of the nation. Green policies don’t travel well.

The Greens, who display their environmentalist credentials by inhabiting seats most removed from the Elysian gloaming they claim to crave, would, through their anti-industrial policies, send Australia into penury at a rate that would make Pol Pot envious. We’d be at Year Zero in seconds.

For Greens, read Reds. As in the colour of the bottom line once the debts their anti-business and whacko social policies would shackle Australians with.

Veteran Labor strategist and parliamentary secretary Bob McMullan tried to pass off the Fremantle loss as a one-off.

Even if this is remotely true, it is a one-off of Labor’s own making.

MP-elect Carles credits concerns about global warming for her victory and there has been no greater promoter of hysteria over the climate change issue than the ALP, ably assisted by its media arm, the ABC.

The Greens, like the ALP, would destroy the Australian economy in the cause of supporting bad science and constantly altering modelling even though it is acknowledged that nothing Australians do would have the slightest effect on global climate change.

While many in the ALP find global warming a convenient prop to their stupendous moral vanity, the Greens see it as a quasi-religious cause.

Labor is now faced with the job of defusing the time bomb it has created.

It has to consider the very real prospect that, should it be foolish enough to push for a double dissolution of both House of Parliament, the ALP’s own frenzied propaganda on climate could hand the Greens a Senate majority.

Delightfully, this would happen even as a number of scientists are back-peddling on their forecasts of sea level increases and rising temperatures.

Forget polar bears. Labor’s inner-urban MPs would be endangered. Those who will drown first if the political tide rises against Labor in its city seats will be Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, who held Melbourne at the last federal election by less than 5 per cent, Sydney (held by Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek), Fremantle (held by backbencher Melissa Parke) and Grayndler (held by Transport Minister Anthony Albanese).

They will want the ALP to start talking to the conservatives about tactics quickly before the next federal election to give them more options, but they may find the unthinkable has already happened.

It may be that the Greens will be there first, looking for deals with the Coalition while Labor is still wondering why it was betrayed by its “bedmate”.
(In the first edition version of this article, an error was made nominating Bob McMullan as Maxine McKew’s husband. She is Labor figure Bob Hogg’s partner.)

Investors in retreat after schemes fail

As administrators began work with the board on restructuring the business, other players in the MIS sector were quick to distance themselves from investment models pushed by Great Southern.

They fear investors will react to the collapse of the two biggest players by steering clear of sector trusts to seek more secure investment options.

“We’re at pains to differentiate ourselves from those companies that are currently having problems,” Gunns Plantations manager Ian Blanden said yesterday.

“Our model is different in that we have a diverse range of income streams. We are not wholly reliant upon MIS. It would be unfortunate if people believed that all MISs are bad or simply won’t work.”

Mr Blanden said Gunns had not had any fallout from Great Southern’s demise but “any negativity in any industry is not a good thing for that industry”.

“I don’t think it will spell the demise of the MIS industry, at all,” he said.

Based on figures from investment research house Australian Agribusiness Group over the past five years, the MIS industry has raised about $5 billion.

Since the demise of Timbercorp and Great Southern, the remaining key players are Gunns, ITC, Wilmont, Macquarie Bank and Tropical Forestry Services.

Great Southern’s critics say the model was wholly reliant on continuing income from the sales of MIS, in the face of the global financial turmoil, drought and the federal Government’s tax-break changes.

“It’s the business model, not that MIS model that’s the problem,” said an industry source.

“They had few, if any, alternative sources of income streams.”

ITC chief Vince Erasmus cited its “multiple revenue streams” as a key point of difference.

“We don’t rely on the profits we make from MIS alone,” Mr Erasmus said. “Obviously we are worried about investor sentiment … but our model is very different to theirs,” Mr Erasmus added, although highlighting that up to 35 per cent of the harvest came back to ITC, giving it a strong cash-flow position.

He described the MIS model as “sound” but conceded there was an issue around funding MIS growth in the present climate.

ITC has assured clients it has a “healthy balance sheet, strong cash flow and we’re not going to be in trouble”.

A spokesman for Macquarie said the bank still saw MIS as an important investment, but in most of its portfolios MIS was only a small part.

“MIS should only make up a small part of investors portfolios,” the spokesman said.

AAG boss Marcus Elgin expected the MIS industry to undergo a repositioning, with a “a substantial flight to proving its security and stability”, meaning greater connection between the investment and land ownership.

Great Southern administrator Ferrier Hodgson was yesterday still piecing together what went wrong, ahead of the first creditors meeting next week.

Another criticism of the company’s model was that investors had the rights only to the income stream. In other models, such as Macquarie’s, investors own the land and trees, providing greater security.

Federal Agriculture Minister Tony Burke said yesterday: “I remain concerned about the impact on the industry and jobs.

“I met with representatives of the forestry sector this morning and discussed the potential impact on jobs, investment and rural communities.

“I will be seeking a briefing on Great Southern from the administrators.” Mr Burke added.

Great Southern non-executive chairman David Griffins, who described the banks’ reaction as disappointing, said it was hard to say if the MIS model was dead but it was being “severely tested”.

“I guess time will tell whether its got a role to play in future investments,” he said.

In criticising the banks’ reaction, he said Great Southern thought it had the right plan.

“We were hoping and expecting the banks to support that,” Mr Griffins said.

“It’s disappointing that wasn’t the case.

“We thought we were in a position to execute a plan that would have delivered value and I think that value is still there and well handled could still be realised.”

The group’s bank exposure is believed to be about $700 million. It understood it has two banking syndicate facilities, the biggest being a $350 million facility through the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Mizuhu Bank and CBA-owned BankWest.

ANZ’s exposure is about $170 million.

Separately, about 7000 small investors in Great Southern managed investment schemes have a separate loan with Bendigo Adelaide Bank of about $500 million.

It is understood obligations of those borrowers remain unchanged by the collapse.

Economy and the environment:growing pains

That is the big and controversial question posed in an excellent new report from one of the government’s own advisory groups, the Sustainable Development Commission. For a bunch of Whitehall insiders even to title a report Prosperity Without Growth? is brave and possibly foolhardy – especially amid a bitter recession when growth is sorely needed. But by the same token, a crash this big must make us reflect on how we ended up in this mess – or else run the risk of repeating it. And in the UK, the obsession with growth shares the blame. As chancellor, Gordon Brown was proud of his economic record. In budget speeches he would rattle off GDP numbers, sounding like a rather smug road drill. Yet the sources of this British growth were dangerously narrow. In the dying days of the great boom, in early 2007, finance and business services accounted for almost half of it. The headline numbers were indeed splendid; but there was to be a terrible twist in the tale.

To be fair, Mr Brown was only giving the voters what they apparently wanted. For decades, GDP growth has been associated with prosperity and national success. Yet GDP is merely a calculation of all the marketable goods and services an economy produces. It takes no account of where the income comes from or how it is shared out, rendering it a flawed yardstick of progress or wellbeing. Cleaning up another Exxon Valdez would increase GDP – but it is a boost we would be better off without.

The environment is often the biggest casualty of our reckless pursuit of growth. Industrialising countries swap agrarian poverty for congestion, pollution and natural degradation so that, as the economist Jayati Ghosh notes, soil quality in India has dropped 30% in the last 10 years. Over in the rich world, we fret over carbon emissions and global warming. The solution, say optimists, is green growth; but that appears ever more optimistic. Rather than use this crisis to shift towards a low-carbon economy, politicians prefer safety-pin solutions: an auto bailout here, a VAT cut there.

In any case, placing all our chips on decarbonisation is risky. To be in with a fighting chance of keeping global warming down to 2C – while still growing both population and GDP at current rates – there would need to be a 21-fold drop in the carbon content of a unit of economic output by 2050. To achieve that at the same time as allowing developing countries to get out of poverty would require a 130-fold improvement in carbon use. Technology and emissions trading on their own cannot pull that off in time.

All of which could leave Europeans and Americans with little option but to ease off the economic accelerator, even while Africans and Asians keep developing. Instead of working feverishly while accumulating and consuming ever more, we could live at a slower pace and have more time for socialising and interests. Economists have touched on these ideas before, but never developed them. When greens talk approvingly about a “steady-state economy” they are swiping a phrase from John Stuart Mill. Even Keynes, back in fashion as the godfather of consumption policies, talked beguilingly of a go-slow future in which “we shall once more value ends above means”. Such debates must be revisited while there is still time; or we may find ourselves staging them in the shadow of an ecological cataclysm.