Burning carbon to save the Arctic – climate change tourism

As part of their portfolio of scientific ecotourism holidays Earthwatch have recently started offering a range of climate change research trips. It is not clear whether they have really thought through the logic of this venture.

For the last thirty years or so, Earthwatch have been pioneering a particular model of scientific research. Scientists working in the field in exotic far flung places or concentrating on charismatic species approach (or are approached) by the organisation offering opportunities for fee-paying ‘volunteers’ to fly out and join their programmes. Their clients get involved in the research process, they get to witness science in action, get close to wild places and animals and have a novel travel experience. This model of scientific ecotourism has been very successful. Earthwatch now sponsor nearly 150 projects, some of which have been running for several decades and they have provided useful data on threatened species. Many volunteers come back and make these trips their annual holidays.

With the recent ‘climate turn’ in the ethical preoccupations of wealthy Western liberals, Earthwatch have sought to develop a range of climate change research holidays. If ‘biodiversity’ was the ethical watchword of the greens in the nineties, climate change and carbon are fast becoming the must-know, must-care-abouts of the ethically conscious. These projects have proved very successful and many are booked out until the end of next year.

Modelling water

In the second week of training for the flood risk project we learnt how to model the passage of a river through a landscape. Using a sophisticated piece of software we were able to play around with different parameters that changed the shape and flow of the river. Playing god in silicon we flooded and saved a virtual valley.

Complex computer models lie at the heart of flood risk mapping in the UK. They are central to efforts to predict future inundations, to decisions on where to site defences and, perhaps most controversially, as to whether or not your house is eligible for insurance. There are a number of different models on the market, which have been developed by academics and consultants and there is a fair degree of competition between them.

In an extended series of sessions, Stuart Lane – the hydrologist on the team – introduced us social scientists to the mathematics of hydrological modelling. We learnt how to turn fluxes of water into equations, comprising Greek symbols and other elegant hieroglyphics. We worked our way through Newton’s laws and were regaled with the specific material properties of H₂O. Standing on the shoulders of past hydrological heroes (and heroines) we formulated differential equations that claimed to simulate the conservation of mass and momentum, that accounted for turbulence in a body of water and acknowledged the effects of the roughness of a river’s channel.

Water appears to be a fundamentally complex material that has different dynamics over three dimensions and through a variety of spatial and temporal scales. The secret to modelling is to simplify this complexity. The model we used reduced three dimensions to one and lumped the range of variables that effect the roughness of a channel into the ‘Manning’s coefficient’ – a constant devised by an Irish water engineer at the end of the nineteenth century.    

It is useful to understand models as conceptual representations of reality. The Greek and hieroglyphics can be understood as an hypothesis of how the landscape works – like a photograph or painting, they depict the modeller’s view of the form and dynamics of a place. However, unlike a painting, the representations they embody can be tested empirically. To test a model you need to compare its predictions against data gathered from the field on river form and dynamics and past flood events. If the data match what is predicted then you can have some confidence in the model, if not then you need to re-examine your equations.

Poorism

Poorism – an elision of ‘poor’ and ‘tourism’ – refers to a model of tourism where wealthy and well-meaning individuals travel to poor areas, generally in the developed world, to witness poverty, vice and deprivation in the flesh. It has a long history but has recently been packaged up and commodified by companies offering volunteering holidays and ‘humanitarian tours’.

Humanitarian travel has a long history. Monks like Saint Columba, who founded the religious community on Iona, travelled long distances to bring their faith and compassion to other countries. In latter years colonial missionaries set out for Africa to minister to the people, brining schools and hospitals (as well as infectious diseases) to far flung places. Such trips were hard, uncomfortable and often dangerous. While it would be foolish to describe them as tourists, they were undoubtedly affected by the allure of distance and far away places.

This humanitarian imperative for far away travel appears to be in good health in the 21^st century. Missionaries are still active and increasing numbers of secular volunteers and highly trained and often poorly-paid aid workers set off each year to try and help relieve those affected by warfare, drought, disease and natural disasters. In spite of the dubious consequences of many of their interventions, it is difficult to fault their commitment.

However, the recent expansion, cheapening and democratisation of air travel has spawned a new mode of encountering the impoverished other. Over the last ten years it has become fashionable and even necessary for future career development to undertake a short period of volunteering in the developed world. Middle class students fresh out of school or university take ‘gap years’ to teach English, help orphans, build houses or care for charismatic animals. Generally speaking these adventures take the form of six months in a poor but politically stable, formally colonised country in the developing world. Travellers work for a bit on an organised project and then take time to backpack around their host country.

Hydrological politics

I have just completed the first week’s training for a fascinating new research project that is looking into ‘knowledge controversies’ in flood risk modelling. The project is being led by three professors from Oxford, Newcastle and Durham and will be looking at case studies in Yorkshire and Sussex. 

The science of hydrology lies at the heart of the politics and practices of flood risk modelling. It is a mature science dedicated to understanding the movement of water around the entire hydrological cycle. We social scientists were given an intensive crash course on the various components of this cycle by Stuart Lane, a passionate hydrologist with the rare skill of being able to communicate complex concepts to an inexpert audience.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stuart’s intro gave me a whole new way of looking at the landscape and tuning into its dynamics. Standing beside the River Arun in West Sussex, he brought the river and its catchment to life. He framed the system as an interwoven set of fluid fluxes obeying their own spatial and temporal rhythms. Pulses of rain falling upstream are conveyed down towards the sea, drawn by the force of gravity. On their way down their passage is attenuated – or held up – to varying degrees by the material landscape. Pulses from different tributaries meet and combine into a complex melody of fluid flows.

Back in the seminar room we learnt about the politics of hydrology and the disputes and controversies it both engenders and is called to resolve. In the ancient and intensively worked landscapes that characterise much of the UK, few rain drops pass to the sea without encountering some form of human intervention. People have been managing rivers for millennia – as sources of food and water; for navigation, drainage and irrigation; and, most importantly in the case of this project, to avoid flooding. The river systems in which most of us dwell are now intensively managed to apportion and costs and benefits of riverside living.

In these hybrid landscapes, hydrologists have replaced ancient sages and water diviners as the designated providers of the knowledge required to conduct the passage of water. They have developed sophisticated theoretical and numerical models of hydrological dynamics, which have made them central to the politics and economics of land management – there is both money and power in water if you know what it is going to do.

Generally speaking flooding is a natural process. Many of the areas we currently expect to live dry in would normally spend some time of the year under water if it weren’t for different human interventions. These come at a range of scales – from the drains that convert marsh into habitable land to the concrete levees and barriers that stop rivers from following their normal drift across and out over their flood plains. In different ways these technologies accelerate the conveyance of water through areas at risk and, in so doing, channel problems downstream.

Set against this hard engineering approach there is alternative paradigm of flood management practice growing that seeks to make space for water, designing ‘spongy’ landscapes with space to attenuate excess flows. Unpopulated and marginal areas can be set-aside to receive surges of water, providing storage that accommodates water that would otherwise flood downstream. This is still a marginal approach but it is one that is receiving increasing attention from various circles – including those interested in re-wilding landscapes, as well as those desiring more difficult and inventive engineering challenges.

In short, the politics of managing flooding lies in deciding how the rhythms of water should be conducted through a landscape. In an unregulated system those people with resources upstream could both retain and reject water as they desire, shifting whatever is excess down the valley. Those with money and land downstream can then barricade themselves in with concrete and steel funnels, passing the buck further on to those areas less able defend themselves.

Fortunately, we live in social democracy whose political ecology is less brutal. Instead, there exists a complex political assemblage of different interest groups jostling for their respective interests. Farmers argue for both better drainage and for the security of their most fertile land on the flood plain. Meanwhile, urban dwellers wish to keep their kitchens dry and to ensure their house can be insured. Debates over what to protect thrash out relative risk and the value of different areas and assets.

The problem for hydrologists is that the systems they study, model and try and predict are incredibly complex – they incorporate the intersecting dynamics of vegetation, weather patterns, agriculture and tides, to name but a few. These are processes that are very difficult to tune into and measure. Data is often scant, at the wrong scale or surrogate. If you speak to hydrologists in the lab or field they are full of uncertainty and are modest about what they know and can predict. However, the needs of policy-makers, businesses and pressure groups force them to produce definite knowledge. In their published accounts, much of their uncertainty is erased, buried behind confidence intervals and paramaterisation.

The project that I am part of is seeking to rescue this uncertainty and thus to open up the practices of hydrology, and in particular hydrological modelling to tease out the conditions under which knowledge is produced and decisions are made. It aims to explore different ways of witnessing the forms of environmental expertise that circulate in affected communities. It takes both the creativity and the uncertainty of hydrology to explore a different from of environmental politics.