Chad Monfreda

Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, water, and shelter to more than six billion people. Global croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas have expanded in recent decades, accompanied by large increases in energy, water, and fertilizer consumption, along with considerable losses of biodiversity. Such changes in land use have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet's resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and ameliorate infectious diseases. We face the challenge of managing trade-offs between immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of the biosphere to provide goods and services in the long term.

In the coming years, continued population growth, rising incomes, increasing meat and dairy consumption and expanding biofuel use will place unprecedented demands on the world's agriculture and natural resources. Can we meet society's growing food needs while reducing agriculture's environmental harm? Here, an international team of environmental and agricultural scientists uses new geospatial data and models to identify four strategies that could double food production while reducing environmental impacts. First, halt agricultural expansion. Second, close 'yield gaps' on underperforming lands. Third, increase cropping efficiency. And finally, we need to change our diets and shift crop production away from livestock feed, bioenergy crops and other non-food applications. Increasing population and consumption are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently degrading land, water, biodiversity and climate on a global scale. To meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, food production must grow substantially while, at the same time, agriculture’s environmental footprint must shrink dramatically. Here we analyse solutions to this dilemma, showing that tremendous progress could be made by halting agricultural expansion, closing ‘yield gaps’ on underperforming lands, increasing cropping efficiency, shifting diets and reducing waste. Together, these strategies could double food production while greatly reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture.

Agricultural activities have dramatically altered our planet's land surface. To understand the extent and spatial distribution of these changes, we have developed a new global data set of croplands and pastures circa 2000 by combining agricultural inventory data and satellite‐derived land cover data. The agricultural inventory data, with much greater spatial detail than previously available, is used to train a land cover classification data set obtained by merging two different satellite‐derived products (Boston University's MODIS‐derived land cover product and the GLC2000 data set). Our data are presented at 5 min (∼10 km) spatial resolution in longitude by longitude, have greater accuracy than previously available, and for the first time include statistical confidence intervals on the estimates. According to the data, there were 15.0 (90% confidence range of 12.2–17.1) million km 2 of cropland (12% of the Earth's ice‐free land surface) and 28.0 (90% confidence range of 23.6–30.0) million km 2 of pasture (22%) in the year 2000.

Croplands cover ∼15 million km 2 of the planet and provide the bulk of the food and fiber essential to human well‐being. Most global land cover data sets from satellites group croplands into just a few categories, thereby excluding information that is critical for answering key questions ranging from biodiversity conservation to food security to biogeochemical cycling. Information about agricultural land use practices like crop selection, yield, and fertilizer use is even more limited. Here we present land use data sets created by combining national, state, and county level census statistics with a recently updated global data set of croplands on a 5 min by 5 min (∼10 km by 10 km) latitude‐longitude grid. The resulting land use data sets depict circa the year 2000 the area (harvested) and yield of 175 distinct crops of the world. We aggregate these individual crop maps to produce novel maps of 11 major crop groups, crop net primary production, and four physiologically based crop types: annuals/perennials, herbaceous/shrubs/trees, C 3 /C 4 , and leguminous/nonleguminous.

Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.

The protection of natural capital, including its ability to renew or regenerate itself, represents a core aspect of sustainability. Hence, reliable measures of the supply of, and human demand on, natural capital are indispensable for tracking progress, setting targets and driving policies for sustainability. This paper presents the latest iteration of such a measure: the Ecological Footprint. After explaining the assumptions and choice of data sources on which the accounts are built, this paper presents how the newest version of these accounts has become more consistent, reliable and detailed by using more comprehensive data sources, calculating and comparing yields more consistently, distinguishing more sharply between primary and secondary production, and using procedures to identify and eliminate potential errors. As a result, this method can now provide more meaningful comparisons among nations’ final consumption, or their economic production, and help to analyze the Ecological Footprint embodied in trade. With the higher level of detail, the accounts can generate sectoral assessments of an economy or, as shown in a complementary paper in this series, time trends of all these aspects.

ABSTRACT Aim As the demands for food, feed and fuel increase in coming decades, society will be pressed to increase agricultural production – whether by increasing yields on already cultivated lands or by cultivating currently natural areas – or to change current crop consumption patterns. In this analysis, we consider where yields might be increased on existing croplands, and how crop yields are constrained by biophysical (e.g. climate) versus management factors. Location This study was conducted at the global scale. Methods Using spatial datasets, we compare yield patterns for the 18 most dominant crops within regions of similar climate. We use this comparison to evaluate the potential yield obtainable for each crop in different climates around the world. We then compare the actual yields currently being achieved for each crop with their ‘climatic potential yield’ to estimate the ‘yield gap’. Results We present spatial datasets of both the climatic potential yields and yield gap patterns for 18 crops around the year 2000. These datasets depict the regions of the world that meet their climatic potential, and highlight places where yields might potentially be raised. Most often, low yield gaps are concentrated in developed countries or in regions with relatively high‐input agriculture. Main conclusions While biophysical factors like climate are key drivers of global crop yield patterns, controlling for them demonstrates that there are still considerable ranges in yields attributable to other factors, like land management practices. With conventional practices, bringing crop yields up to their climatic potential would probably require more chemical, nutrient and water inputs. These intensive land management practices can adversely affect ecosystem goods and services, and in turn human welfare. Until society develops more sustainable high‐yielding cropping practices, the trade‐offs between increased crop productivity and social and ecological factors need to be made explicit when future food scenarios are formulated.

Biofuels from land-rich tropical countries may help displace foreign petroleum imports for many industrialized nations, providing a possible solution to the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. But concern is mounting that crop-based biofuels will increase net greenhouse gas emissions if feedstocks are produced by expanding agricultural lands. Here we quantify the 'carbon payback time' for a range of biofuel crop expansion pathways in the tropics. We use a new, geographically detailed database of crop locations and yields, along with updated vegetation and soil biomass estimates, to provide carbon payback estimates that are more regionally specific than those in previous studies. Using this cropland database, we also estimate carbon payback times under different scenarios of future crop yields, biofuel technologies, and petroleum sources. Under current conditions, the expansion of biofuels into productive tropical ecosystems will always lead to net carbon emissions for decades to centuries, while expanding into degraded or already cultivated land will provide almost immediate carbon savings. Future crop yield improvements and technology advances, coupled with unconventional petroleum supplies, will increase biofuel carbon offsets, but clearing carbon-rich land still requires several decades or more for carbon payback. No foreseeable changes in agricultural or energy technology will be able to achieve meaningful carbon benefits if crop-based biofuels are produced at the expense of tropical forests.

Expanding croplands to meet the needs of a growing population, changing diets, and biofuel production comes at the cost of reduced carbon stocks in natural vegetation and soils. Here, we present a spatially explicit global analysis of tradeoffs between carbon stocks and current crop yields. The difference among regions is striking. For example, for each unit of land cleared, the tropics lose nearly two times as much carbon (∼120 tons·ha −1 vs. ∼63 tons·ha −1 ) and produce less than one-half the annual crop yield compared with temperate regions (1.71 tons·ha −1 ·y −1 vs. 3.84 tons·ha −1 ·y −1 ). Therefore, newly cleared land in the tropics releases nearly 3 tons of carbon for every 1 ton of annual crop yield compared with a similar area cleared in the temperate zone. By factoring crop yield into the analysis, we specify the tradeoff between carbon stocks and crops for all areas where crops are currently grown and thereby, substantially enhance the spatial resolution relative to previous regional estimates. Particularly in the tropics, emphasis should be placed on increasing yields on existing croplands rather than clearing new lands. Our high-resolution approach can be used to determine the net effect of local land use decisions.

Nation-level Ecological Footprint accounts are currently produced for more than 150 nations, with multiple calculations available for some nations. The data sets that result from these national assessments typically serve as the basis for Footprint calculations at smaller scales, including those for regions, cities, businesses, and individuals. Global Footprint Network's National Footprint Accounts, supported and used by more than 70 major organizations worldwide, contain the most widely used national accounting methodology today. The National Footprint Accounts calculations are undergoing continuous improvement as better data becomes available and new methodologies are developed. In this paper, a community of active Ecological Footprint practitioners and users propose key research priorities for improving national Ecological Footprint accounting. For each of the proposed improvements, we briefly review relevant literature, summarize the current state of debate, and suggest approaches for further development. The research agenda will serve as a reference for a large scale, international research program devoted to furthering the development of national Ecological Footprint accounting methodology.

This study addresses the conceptual challenges that emerge when calculating Ecological Footprint time series. Building on core concerns arising from the various existing Footprint time series at the national and global scale, this paper discusses conceptual and methodological implications, and suggests improvements for enhancing the clarity, validity and reliability of Ecological Footprint results. Unlike static accounts, time series show trends that allow researchers to test the noise in the data. Also, time series offer the opportunity to examine results and question interpretations, a fertile ground for comparing methodological alternatives. This paper addresses two conceptual issues that determine method design: the specific meaning and measurement challenges of ecological overshoot; and the range of research questions that can be addressed with productivity-adjusted hectares versus actual hectares. The conclusions from this discussion build the groundwork for showcasing time series for three countries.

This paper presents methodological advances for calculating Ecological Footprints in time series, and applies them to Austria, the Philippines, and South Korea for the time period from 1961 to 1999. Two different methodological approaches are taken: (1) The latest evolution of the conventional Ecological Footprint method expressed in 'global hectares', or normalized hectares with global average bioproductivity; (2) an 'actual land-use' approach that calculates the physical area occupied for each country's socio-economic metabolism. The national assessments presented in this paper apply dynamic equivalence and yield factors, which are recalculated for each year. The paper also proposes new methods to deal with grassland yields and discusses problems in defining bioproductive area. The results, reflecting consumption figures, show that the rapid industrialization in South Korea resulted in a steep increase in its Ecological Footprint, whereas Austria's Footprint, which was already large in 1961, grew only slowly throughout the analyzed period. The paper also presents a sectoral Ecological Footprint analysis that compares human demand on forests in the Philippines to its export of forest products. Following a discussion of these challenges, this paper proceeds to showcase time series for Austria, the Philippines, and South Korea both to compare the Footprint analysis results to those of previous methods and to illustrate its analytical capacity.

Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) and the ecological footprint (EF) are two aggregate measures to assess human societies’ draw on nature. Both relate socio-economic metabolism to land use and are designed to provide insights about the sustainability of society–nature interaction. Despite these similarities, there are differences between the two concepts. This paper compares the research questions driving each approach, examines how well they manage to answer their respective questions, and discusses the utility of the results for assessing regional or global sustainability. EF appraises the total bioproductive area needed to sustain a defined society's activities, wherever these areas are located on Earth. In doing so, it accounts for three functions of ecosystems used by humans—resource supply, waste absorption, and space occupied for human infrastructure. EF is useful to identify how this demand is distributed between different groups of people. In contrast, HANPP identifies the intensity with which humans use these three functions within a defined land area. HANPP maps the intensity of societal use of ecosystems in a spatially explicit manner. In contrast to EF, HANPP does not calculate the aggregate demand of a society's consumption patterns on the global biosphere. While EF evaluates the exclusive use of a society's utilization of bioproductive area, HANPP maps the intensity of this use (‘human domination’) in specific regions.

STEM PhDs increasingly contribute to commercial science, such as patenting. We analyze faculty’s role in training STEM PhD students as new inventors on patents at leading research universities, emphasizing the drivers of gender differences. We ...STEM PhDs are a critical source of human capital in the economy, contributing to commercial as well as academic science. We examine whether STEM PhD students become new inventors (file their first patent) during their doctoral training at the top 25 U.S. ...

Aggressive renewable energy policies have helped the biofuels industry grow at a rate few could have predicted. However, while discourse on the energy balance and environmental impacts of agricultural biofuel feedstocks are common, the potential they hold for additional production has received considerably less attention. Here we present a new biofuel yield analysis based on the best available global agricultural census data. These new data give us the first opportunity to consider geographically-specific patterns of biofuel feedstock production in different regions, across global, continental, national and sub-national scales. Compared to earlier biofuel yield tables, our global results show overestimates of biofuel yields by ∼100% or more for many crops. To encourage the use of regionally-specific data for future biofuel studies, we calculated complete results for 20 feedstock crops for 238 countries, states, territories and protectorates.

In their Policy Forum “The biodiversity and ecosystem services science-policy interface” (4 March, p. [1139][1]), C. Perrings et al. frame the new Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a body responsible primarily for assessment. They consistently base their elaboration of the work of IPBES on the experiences of past assessments (such as the Millennium Assessment, the Global Biodiversity Outlook, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and interpret the Busan outcome [recommendations made by a 2010 intergovernmental conference ([ 1 ][2])] solely through the lens of how scientific knowledge is assessed. We believe that the blueprint suitability of previous assessments for the IPBES process is very limited. Strengthening the (mainly global-scale) scientific knowledge base behind assessments is important, but the goals of IPBES should be expanded. First, we should move beyond conventional scientific knowledge assessments that legitimize, almost exclusively, only peer-reviewed material. Knowledge established across all scales (especially the knowledge of local and indigenous peoples) and validated in multiple ways must be eligible for inclusion in IPBES processes. Changes in biodiversity are first experienced locally and thus many forms of local expertise have particular relevance for biodiversity issues ([ 2 ][3]). Second, we should link IPBES assessment results to decision-making at multiple spatial scales (including tackling biodiversity loss at the grassroots level). Both of these goals require all aspects of capacity-building, including empowerment of different kinds of actors, to be reflected in the structural design of IPBES. To achieve this much broader set of objectives as laid out in the Busan outcome, including the explicit incorporation of local and indigenous knowledge, the IPBES structure should knit together existing multiscale networks ([ 3 ][4]) of scientific, policy, and stakeholder communities. 1. [↵][5] United Nations Environment Programme, “Busan Outcome,” Busan, Korea, 7 to 11 June 2010 ([www.unep.org/pdf/SMT\_Agenda\_Item\_5-Busan\_Outcome.pdf][6]). 2. [↵][7] 1. W. Reid et al. , Eds., Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems: Concepts and Applications in Ecosystems (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2006). 3. [↵][8] Leipzig Workshop Recommendations for a Knowledge-Policy Interface for Biodiversity Governance, 4 October 2006 ([www.ufz.de/data/leipzig\_recom\_final4614.pdf][9]). [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6021/1139.full [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #ref-2 [4]: #ref-3 [5]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [6]: http://www.unep.org/pdf/SMT_Agenda_Item_5-Busan_Outcome.pdf [7]: #xref-ref-2-1 View reference 2 in text [8]: #xref-ref-3-1 View reference 3 in text [9]: http://www.ufz.de/data/leipzig_recom_final4614.pdf

Urban resilience to climate change scholarship has increasingly focused on increasing its salience for existing decision making processes. At the same time, large inequalities in vulnerability to climate change mirror inequalities in the social power of different urban residents. Existing approaches have improved epistemological pluralism and reflexivity in knowledge systems research, yet remain hotly contested by urban communities. Conceptual gaps have become evident on how knowledge systems research addresses highly unequal forms of decision-making largely responsible for the problems that resilience research now paradoxically seeks to address. Because of these dynamics, knowledge systems research continues to grapple with the fundamental and politically charged question of what constitutes 'knowledge,' in urban systems. Drawing upon our own experiences as resilience researchers and a select review of literature on the philosophy and politics of knowledge production, we offer the concept of 'experiential pluralism,' defined as the acknowledgement of the inherent validity of individual and collective experiences in framing knowledge needs despite their seeming contradictions, to explore how knowledge systems may address issues of social alienation prevalent in cities. We offer concrete examples of how such a shift makes ethics explicit in research, places greater emphasis on relationship building, and place based creativity in addressing urban climate resilience challenges. In closing, we discuss the role of addressing alienation through experiential pluralism in order to create more democratic modes of urban governance.

*Chapter 2 of the forthcoming book Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy, edited by Thomas W. Hertel, Steven Rose, and Richard S.J. Tol

*Chapter 2 of the forthcoming book "Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy," edited by Thomas W. Hertel, Steven Rose, and Richard S.J. Tol

The developing country comparison bars in figure 3 on page 6 of the original article have been revised as shown in the PDF.

The Emerge event, held in Tempe, AZ in March 2012, brought together a range of scientists, artists, futurists, engineers and students in order to experiment with innovative methods for thinking about the future. These methodological techniques were tested through nine workshops, each of which made use of a different format; Emerge as a whole, then, offered an opportunity to study a diverse set of future-oriented engagement practices. We conducted an event ethnography, in which a team of 11 researchers collaboratively developed accounts of the practices at play within Emerge and its workshops. In this article we discuss findings from this ethnography, using our data both to describe the techniques used within Emerge and to analyse key patterns which occurred around those techniques. As we close we reflect on the implications of these findings for practice, suggesting ways in which our results can help hone the tools and techniques of future studies.

Global environmental knowledge underwrites the authority of international institutions charged with managing climate change, biodiversity loss and other looming environmental problems. While numerous studies show how global knowledge gains authority at a macro-scale, few examine the everyday practices that establish authority in concrete settings. Investigating such day-to-day practices is important because concrete institutional settings may offer opportunities for resisting, affirming, or transforming global environmental knowledge and the policies it supports. As part of an ‘event ethnography’ conducted at the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress (WCC) in Barcelona in 2008, this paper looks in detail at one important site in a high-level international study on ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB). The WCC was a site where the TEEB organisers convened three fields of knowledge-economics, ecological and biodiversity sciences, and indigenous knowledge-in an attempt to secure authority for the economic valuation of ecosystems and biodiversity. Through three vignettes, this paper investigates the differential engagement of the three knowledge communities; how these engagements reveal the processes by which global knowledge is constructed; and the political ramifications of those constructions.

Croplands cover ~15 million km2 of the planet and provide the bulk of the food and fiber essential to human well-being. Most global land-cover datasets from satellites group croplands into just a few categories, thereby excluding information that is critical for answering key questions ranging from biodiversity conservation to food security to biogeochemical cycling. Information about agricultural land-use practices like crop selection, yield, and fertilizer use is even more limited. Here we present land-use datasets created by combining national-, state-, and county-level census statistics with a recently updated global dataset of croplands on a 5 minute by 5 minute (~10 km by 10 km) latitude-longitude grid. The resulting land-use datasets depict circa the year 2000 the area (harvested) and yield of 175 distinct crops of the world.

Conserving biodiversity while meeting the food, feed, and fuel needs of a growing human population with changing dietary preference is one of our society’s grand challenges. Expansion and intensification that have accelerated since the 1960s has doubled crop production in many areas, but unfortunately, has come at a cost to the environment. This article summarizes the scope of agriculture, its effect on biodiversity, and strategies for feeding the world while maintaining biodiversity.

Agricultural activities have dramatically altered our planet’s land cover. To understand the extent and spatial distribution of these changes, we have developed a new global data set of croplands and pastures ca. 2000 by combining national and sub-national agricultural inventory data and satellite-derived land cover data. The agricultural inventory data, with much greater spatial detail than previously available, is used to train a land cover classification data set obtained by merging two different satellite-derived products. By utilizing the agreement and disagreement between Boston University’s MODIS global land cover product and the GLC2000 data set, we are able to predict the spatial pattern of agricultural land better than by using either data set alone. We present a new global 5 min (~10 km) resolution cropland and pasture dataset for the Year 2000 that is of greater accuracy than previously available, and for the first time, statistical confidence intervals on these estimates.

Substantial global changes in energy production and use are occurring at present and will continue to occur for decades to come, with widespread ramifications for the distribution of wealth and power and humanity’s social and environmental future. This raises important ethical considerations that should be addressed in the education of engineers, whose research and practice will assuredly involve energy to some degree. The Energy Ethics in Science and Engineering Education Project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, sought to enhance attention to and projects in energy ethics in graduate research education concerning energy. The partners, the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society (CEES) at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), conducted a number of research, educational, and outreach activities to develop a foundational intellectual basis for understanding the ethics of energy transitions, to provide opportunities for students to learn about energy ethics, and to disseminate ideas and materials broadly. Evaluation results indicate the project has been successful in engaging students in various formats; additionally the project has illuminated a number of fundamental ideas about the interrelationships among energy, ethics, and society.

A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and The Politics of Global Warming . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . xxvii + 518 pages ISBN 978-0262013925 , $32.95 hardcover . Paul N. Edwards . 2010 . According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2010 ranks as the hottest year since instrumental temperature records began one-and-a-half centuries ago. Scientists predict far greater changes in the century to come. But how, amid a welter of skeptical counter-claims, can we take statements about the climate as fact? Some argue that historical data are flawed. Others think historical data are solid, but that predictive models count for little more than unfounded abstractions. Paul Edwards, author of A Vast Machine, sets such skepticism to rest in his sweeping history of climate science. Edwards's definitive account describes how scientists and diplomats, bureaucrats and engineers have, over the centuries, transformed scattered tools and techniques for knowing the local weather into today's massively powerful machinery for knowing the global climate. Edwards writes with an enthusiasm that comes from years spent sifting through the rise and inner workings of climate science. Readers should not expect an extended commentary on international climate policy or a treatise on all components of climate science. Rather, A Vast Machine presents the original account of one who has toured the institutions, models, and instruments that make the atmospheric sciences a reliable—if never fully certain—source of knowledge. The book's nearly 450 pages focus on how the historical temperature record has come to be, and how models of the global climate system work. Most importantly, it brings these two discussions together to demonstrate how measurements and models have become inseparable within what Edwards terms a “global knowledge infrastructure.” This infrastructure, he argues, is not only a reliable source ofknowledge but is the only way that science could ever know a system so big, complex, and dynamic as the global climate. A Vast Machine strings together with remarkable fluidity 17th century British astronomy, the Crimean War, ENIAC, Cold War geopolitics, radiosondes, perturbed model physics, and 21st century weblogs. The result is a compelling account of how political and scientific institutions, observation networks, and scientific practice evolved together over several centuries to culminate in the global knowledge infrastructure we have today. The first five of fifteen chapters discuss the separate tracks of weather forecasting and climatology before 1945, and introduce a number of core concepts developed in the rest of the book. The most significant of these concepts is friction—the idea that material, political, and social resistances both obstruct and call forth scientific and political strategies for generating knowledge. The middle five chapters chart how computer models helped to reunify climatology and weather forecasting between 1945 and 1980. These chapters also elaborate on friction and a number of other inventive concepts to explain how technical and institutional efforts transformed the piecemeal international collaborations that existed before World War II into the quasi-obligatory global institutions that exist today. Chapters 12–13 carry climate science from 1980 to the present by delving further into the challenges for reconstructing historical data and discussing the scientific techniques of data reanalysis and parameterization. The final two chapters close the book by tying the history of computer simulations to the emergence of atmospheric politics, and probing the structure of climate change controversies and consensus. Although it gives an admirable account of the most significant scientific and political developments around global measurements and models, no single book could cover the entirety of such a vast terrain. A Vast Machine leaves several areas underserved, including a notable but admitted gap on regions outside the United States. Perhaps less forgiving, however, to those hoping for insights into broader questions of culture and society, will be its silence on the role political culture plays in building public trust (or skepticism) in international expert institutions. A focus on what is inside climate science's global knowledge infrastructure also leaves little said about what that infrastructure leaves out. A more critical account might, for instance, ask, why has climate science paid scant attention to adaptation relative to the large sums spent simulating the fundaments of atmospheric chemistry and physics? Or what are the cultural and political implications of a global science increasingly removed from the ways people experience and give meaning to local weather in their daily lives? A Vast Machine nevertheless is an impressive synthesis that will offer something for everyone with even a passing interest in climate science and politics. Edwards makes a tailored reading easy, yet readers will benefit most by taking in the full scope of the story to appreciate his wider vision of climate science as the vanguard of an emerging set of global knowledge infrastructures. Ultimately, this book provides a strikingly unique and perceptive resource for thinking through the nature of knowledge infrastructures and their role in the science, politics, and policy making of global society. In the coming decades such infrastructures may very well come to shape the way society thinks not only aboutclimate, but also epidemics, economics, energy, and other looming global challenges.

Knowledge and Environmental Policy: Re-Imagining the Boundaries of Science and Politics . Cambridge, MA : MIT Press . xv + 260 pages . ISBN 978-0262514378 , $23.00, paper . William Ascher, Toddi Steelman, and Robert Healy . 2010 . Knowledge is often held to be a way to bring order to the unruly process of making environmental policy. But what if the process of making and using knowledge is just as fraught and tangled as the policy process it promises to tame? How would policy makers sift sound from unsound science, or decide when the science on their desks speaks fully to the issues at hand? In Knowledge and Environmental Policy, WilliamAscher, Toddi Steelman, and Robert Healy raise just such questions. They charge that policy institutions are built on simplistic and outdated assumptions ill-equipped to handle the complexities of environmental knowledge. The result, they argue, is a system where dysfunction permeates the relationship between knowledge and policy making. To address this problem, Ascher, Steelman, and Healy develop a systematic framework to diagnose why knowledge failures occur and propose new ways to structure knowledge into the policy process that better serve the common good. Knowledge and Environmental Policy offers three important twists to the typical take on knowledge in policy analysis. First, the book sees the common notion of knowledge as an input into the policy process as far too blunt to do justice to its dynamic relationship with decision making. By replacing the simple notion of knowledge as an input with their more sophisticated three-step process of knowledge generation, transmission, and use, the authors place the complexities of the knowledge process front and center. Second, the text draws on the rich literature of science and technology studies (STS) to conceive of formal science as a subset of knowledge that extends to local environmental knowledge and knowledge of public preferences as well. Third, the book recognizes that policy making asks many things of knowledge beyond factual input. The authors distill these needs into eight criteria that different kinds of knowledge meet more or less well in different decision-making contexts: comprehensiveness, selectivity, dependability, relevance, timeliness, efficiency, openness, and creativity. The early chapters ground the text and depict the growing number of actors who have the motivation, means, and ability to claim knowledge about environmental problems. Chapters 2 and 3 show that decision-making routines, rules, and regulations, however, privilege the generation, transmission, and use of benefit–cost analysis and other narrow forms of expertise. This bias tends to exclude potentially valuable contributions from practitioners, local people, qualitative sciences, and the general public. The authors diagnose a variety of failures that result from this exclusion in each of the three stages of the knowledge process, such as a lack of public input, an inability to cope with complexity, and a tendency for scientists to downplay uncertainty. Chapter 4 expands the framework to show that decision making not only shapes knowledge generation, transmission, and use, but that knowledge, in turn, shapes the process of decision making. Here, the diagnosis centers on the political failures that result when biases in the knowledge process allow certain actors to capture policy by shifting it into select arenas and privileging particular knowledge holders over others. The book's last and longest chapter concludes with a suite of insights and recommendations for restructuring the relationship between knowledge and policy. Having diagnosed the various problems that arise during the knowledge process and its impact on decision making, the authors see two possible paths forward. One would shore up the existing structure with sounder science, tighter evidentiary standards, fewer dissenting voices and, in general, higher and better walls between science and policy. This, to no surprise, is also the path they conclude to be brittle at best and, at worst, profoundly undemocratic. The other path would recognize knowledge's inevitably political character. To re-imagine what this would mean in practice, the authors offer eight specific recommendations. Chief among these is a call for “knowledge hybrid” collaborations between scientists and nonscientists to be instituted through all stages of the knowledge process. At the same time, they recognize the value of formal science and recommend renewed efforts to defend the integrity of federal research against political manipulation. One of the book's main limitations is its predominantly U.S. focus. Although its lessons will carry to other Western liberal democracies, they may gain less purchase in either international or developing country contexts. In the end, however, Knowledge and Environmental Policy hits its targets. Scientists, practitioners, and decision makers will discover an insightful and clearly written guide to reconceptualize their work, and academics will find a sturdy bridge between policy analysis and STS. The book's core caution against the unreflective privileging of quantitative, predictive science is one that STS scholars will recognize, but its novel framework offers an important advance in the conversation among all scholars working at the interface of knowledge, politics, and policy making.

Determining changes in the composition of cell populations is made possible by technologies like single-cell transcriptomics, CyTOF, and microbiome sequencing. However, existing methods for differential abundance do not model some ...Cellular omics such as single-cell genomics, proteomics, and microbiomics allow the characterization of tissue and microbial community composition, which can be compared between conditions to identify biological drivers. This strategy has been critical to ...

Ce document presente le contexte, les activites passees et presentes de l'initiative IMoSEB (International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity). Le processus consultatif etait un processus exploratoire, large et pluridisciplinaire faisant intervenir un grand nombre de parties prenantes et dote d'une importante audience mediatique et politique. Son objectif etait de creer une reelle valeur ajoutee en prenant pleinement en compte ce qui existait deja. Cette demarche a ete souvent appreciee par ses participants pour son originalite, son ouverture, son orientation inclusive et participative. Lance par la Conference de Paris Biodiversite: Science et Gouvernance en 2005, le processus consultatif vers un IMoSEB a debute officiellement en fevrier 2006 avec la tenue de la premiere reunion du Comite de pilotage International (CPI), la designation d'un Comite Executif (CE) et par l'etablissement d'un plan d'action en deux phases: (i) La commande d'etude de cas sur l'Interface Science-Politique; et (ii) l'organisation de consultations regionales et ciblees effectuees en 2007 sur les six continents, impliquant plus de 300 personnes de 70 pays differents et 40 organisations regionales et internationales. Le CPI s'est reuni pour une seconde fois en Novembre 2007 a Montpellier, France pour formuler des recommandations pour un IMoSEB en accord avec les resultats de la consultation. Tous les participants ont convenu que si une nouvelle structure devait etre etabli, celle-ci aurait une composante intergouvernementale, avoir une credibilite scientifique, une legitimite et une pertinence politique et qu'elle devrait s'appuyer sur les reseaux de scientifique et detenteurs de connaissances existants et qu'elle devrait repondre aux besoins identifiees pendant la consultation. Les participants ont aussi recommande que soient assurees des relations proches avec les initiatives en cours telles que la strategie globale de poursuite de l'Evaluation du Millenaire (MA) et organisees une reunion sous l'auspice de l'UNEP en 2008 pour continuer les actions engagees. Une premiere reunion commune IMoSEB - MA Renforcer l'Interface Science - Politique sur la Biodiversite et les services ecosystemiques a eu lieu en mars 2008 pour developper une telle approche commune. (Resume d'auteur)