Scenarios

On Friday I attended an excellent workshop organised by the University of Cambridge Centre for Sustainable Development to progress some scenario work they are doing for Grosvenor Estates on energy management in the property and development sectors to 2050. They currently have four scenarios mapped out:
- Steady Progress (sort-of business as usual but with stronger green values)
- Comfort withoiut concern (climate change? What climate change?)
- Growing Divide (an apocolyptic future of social inequality and unrest)
- Transformational change (the really green option).
These are arranged about two axes concerning values oriented (or not) towards the collective good and the cost/availability of energy.
Developing these scenarios was great fun but I was reminded again how such scenario work depends on the immediate reactions of those present to quite specific questions, questions which they might not have spent much time thinking about. The process assumes that wisdom will arise from the input of many voices at these workshops. In CLUES we are trying to tackle this issue by using scenarios that have already been developed by such processes of engagement but quantifying them and adding detail through a careful process of interrogation over time, looking at the interconnections and complexities. This will hopefully mean that the narratives of the scenarios will have been tested out by the modelling process and be more robust. The scenario work within CLUES starts in Easter 2011.

Yvonne Rydin

Raising the cost of energy and carbon is regressive and difficult to compensate

I went yesterday to Professor Ian Gough’s talk at the LSE on the potential tensions between climate change policy and more traditional (welfare state) policies: Climate Mitigation Policies, Distributive Justice and Social Policies. He is working on a two year ESRC grant which looks at climate change and social policy, trying to rethink the political economy of the welfare state. I found his talk extremely interesting and very relevant to our work – he focused on trajectories to 2050 in the context of government’s current targets (34% reduction in gas emissions by 2020), looking at both private (from households) and public (from welfare services such as NHS and education) contributions as well as direct (coming from production or direct consumption of energy) and indirect (coming from embodied energy) CO2 emissions.

After setting out some general facts, predictions and dilemmas, he concentrated on the UK and its ambitious targets for carbon cuts in the 2008 Climate Change Act. He then posed two questions. First, he asked whether the necessary climate mitigation policies threaten state funding for traditional social policies. The current answer to this question was ‘no’: climate mitigation was to be achieved using ‘mandated market’ mechanisms and the direct impact on public finances was tiny. Second, he asked what the likely distributive consequences of climate mitigation programmes were. The evidence to date was clear that the impact was to be regressive and that it was difficult to compensate low income losers. However, all analysis thus far has concentrated on households’ direct emissions stemming from fuel, electricity and petrol, which account for only 20% of the total. He then presented new analysis of all emissions, including those embodied in the consumption of food, consumables, private services, public services and imported goods. The analysis showed that income was the main driver, with household type and employment status also significant. Again, however, emissions per pound of income were regressive, falling as income rose. Thus all conceivable programmes to raise the cost of energy and carbon were to be regressive and difficult to compensate.

Finally, he considered two alternative policies: personal carbon allowances and a big programme of ‘eco-social investment’. These appeared to be the only viable alternatives. However, they have their limitations, would challenge traditional social policy goals and engender severe fiscal competition with the traditional welfare state.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

Michael Rann, Premier of South Australia sets out low carbon vision

During his visit to London, Michael Rann gave a public lecture to UCL students and staff and also a talk to Australian business interests in London. He presented a fascinating eco-modernist vision for how South Australia could support its local economy while contributing to a low carbon future. Part of this concerned extensive investment in renewable energy generation - particularly wind and solar but also 'hot rocks' or geothermal - together with distribution to other states. The aim is for South Australia to be the renewable energy hub for eastern seaboard of Australia. Already over 50% of the country's installed wind power capacity is in the state. This is in addition to a target for 33% of the state's power needs coming from renewables by 2020. The other half of the strategy is based on mining, particularly uranium mining. This interprets 'low carbon' as including nuclear power. There are massive uranium reserves in South Australia: 40% of the worlds known recoverable reserves. The strategy sees the exploitation of these reserves making an important contribution to decarbonising China, who is keen to import uranium for its nuclear power programme. The pair of talks spoke to an energetic and coherent energy/economic development vision for South Australia but also reminded me of the inevitable tensions and conflicts in the environmental agenda. Nuclear energy and uranium mining remain controversial. They raise a host of issues about land rights, local degradation, safe transit and waste disposal. So are all eco-modernist agendas necessarily environmentally friendly?

Yvonne Rydin

CLUES briefing article published

CLUES briefing article published

An useful summary of the project has been just published as a Briefing paper in the Urban Design and Planning Journal. The briefing sets out the focus and approach of the project and the key research questions that it will address. Do you want to find out more? Why don’t you check http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/article/10.1680/udap.2010.163.4.149?

Catalina Turcu, UCL

UCL Public Lecture

Last week I gave a lecture in the UCL Public Lecture series under the title 'Energising the City' in which I presented the argument for tackling energy consumption and carbon emissions at the urban level and considered some visualisations of what a low energy, low carbon city might look like. These drew on the scenarios in the Foresight report 'Powering Our Lives', which we are developing within the CLUES project. I also tried to convey the essence of the co-evolution framework with its view of technological development and innovation as inherently inter-linked with cultural change, economic frameworks and governance dynamics. The videoing of the lecture broke down unfortunately but the slides with an audio commentary (about 25 mins) is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/UCLLHL?feature=mhum#p/c/02FB95682C65FD62/9/IE_Ye4y653I

 

Yvonne Rydin

Energy Minister Visits Sussex

The Minister of State for Energy, Charles Hendry MP, visited my research group (the Sussex Energy Group) at the University of Sussex on Monday. My colleague Adrian Smith and I have posted some reflections on his Q&A session with staff and students on the Grassroots Innovations blog - with a particular emphasis on the roles of local communities in the UK energy transition.

A Relu/SUE workshop, London (27 Oct 2010)

I went yesterday to a workshop organised by Relu (Rural Economy and Land Use Programme) and EPSRC (SUE Programme) on crossing the divide between 'urban and rural research'. The day focused on the interdisciplinarity and research practice that both programmes embarked upon and had an interesting networking section around lunchtime where questions were asked on specific projects summarised by A2 posters. The CLUES poster earned a great deal of interest from both the Relu and SUE research communities - interestingly, many Relu teams thought that our topic is worth investigating in a rural context too. So, watch out this space! or...bear this in mind when you start thinking about your next proposal! Three projects are worth investigating further by CLUES:

1. ReVISIONS SUE2 (led by Cambridge University) models scenarios to 2050 around three main areas: Planning/Policy, Economic growth (or not!) and Infrastructure/ Technology. This project started in 2008 and is due to complete in March 2012.
2. Urban Futures SUE1 (led by Pr Chris Rogers at Manchester University) developed four scenarios called Policy Reform, Market Forces, Fortress World and New Sustainability Paradigm.
3. IDCOP SUE1(led by Southampton University) focused on the refurbishment of the urban existing stock (mainly in multi-occupancy and medium to high rise buildings) in terms of energy efficiency and technology innovation.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

EPSRC Sustainable Urban Environments - the four new projects

Yesterday the four new projects funded under the EPSRC SUE3 programme were brought together to discuss synergies. They are all highly interdisciplinary projects and will raise interesting issues about how this can be made to work successfully. In addition to CLUES, the other three projects are:
STEP-CHANGE - a transport-focussed project bringing together qualitative longtitudinal research on a specific cohort of households with mathematical modelling on travel patterns; this hopes to crack the problem of how behavioural change occurs. CLUES is also planning to marry some modelling work with qualitative research (in our case, via case studies).
RETROFIT 2050 - a project using Foresight and scenario techniques together with GIS modelling at the regional scale to look at energy, waste and water.  CLUES is also developing scenarios so we hope to collaborate on this aspect.
SECURE - a project looking at the integration of transport, energy and ecosystems at the regional scale with modelling at three time points: 2011, 2016 and 2050. In the energy area, they will be scaling up from existing intiatives in a technique similar to the CLUES approach.
The four teams plan to stay in touch and share lessons on their interdisciplinary research, both methodologically and in terms of findings. There was also some initial discussion of multi/inter/transdisciplinarity and reference to the work of Julie Thompson Klein, which could prove useful.
Yvonne Rydin, UCL

Europe in the new energy world order

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

I went to one of the public lectures at the LSE the other day. The lecture was part of the LSE European Institute and APCO Worldwide Perspectives on Europe Series and was given by Lykke Friis, Danish Minister for Climate and Energy and Minister for Gender Equality. Ms Friis, a charismatic and young minister delivered a speech about the emergence of energy politics from low to high European politics and Europe's chances to prosper in this new energy world.

The cold war era was characterised by a bipolarity based on ideologies and nuclear arms. The post cold war era will increasingly be defined by energy. Power and economic welfare will depend on a country's or region's access to the world's decreasing fossil fuels or the development of renewable energy. In this new ‘energy world order’, Europe is split between ‘fast movers’, countries like the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Denmark and UK which are at the forefront of the  climate change agenda, and ‘slow movers’, countries from the Eastern and Central Europe which are more interested in the energy security agenda.

Ms Friis thought that the political discourse should focus on energy security rather the climate change mitigation as the new common European goal, and Europe should limit its over-reliance on coal and oil and aim to become fossil fuel independent by 2050. She thought that a potential policy response at European level could be a combination of working together towards a global deal of putting a price on carbon and ‘green’ technology such as, for example, the Super Grid System (a common European energy infrastructure) which would push down prices on renewable energy and make it available across more countries and various climates.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

Welcome to the CLUES blog!

The CLUES project officially began on 1st October 2010. As you can see from our profile, we are an inter-disciplinary team from the disciplines of planning, architecture, construction studies, engineering, economics and social psychology. We are seeking to tackle the issue of the decentralisation of energy systems down to the urban level - everything from local demand management schemes, to district heating installations, to bio-mass CHP (combined heat and power). We will be reporting our research process and findings on our main project website (in process of construction). But in this blog we aim to share our experiences of undertaking interdisciplinary research and we hope this will be of wider interest to the research community. Catalina Turcu (CLUES Research Associate) and I will be off to EPSRC and ESRC sponsored events on the Sustainable Urban Environments and Rural Economy and Land Use research programmes over the next two days. Back soon with some thoughts from these events.
Yvonne Rydin, UCL