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Climate as resource and challenge: international cooperation in the UNESCO Arid Zone Programme
Abstract
Perceptions of climatic challenges have changed significantly during the twentieth century. In recent decades, the question of global climate change received more attention than regional climatic challenges and the problems of arid regions. Historians have shown that persistent misconceptions and a lack of understanding of arid zones rooted in misguided colonial ideologies were propagated by United Nations (UN) initiatives such as the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Arid Zone Programme. Alarmist narratives of progressive desertification proliferated and put the blame on destructive local practices such as deforestation and overgrazing. This article investigates UNESCO’s interests in natural resources (section 1) and takes a closer look at the development and scientific elements of the Arid Zone Programme (sections 2 and 3). It argues that the Arid Zone Programme offered an effective framework that helped develop and spread new interdisciplinary research approaches to improve knowledge about arid zones. The myth of progressing desertification and misguided colonial expertise characterized much of its political rhetoric, but not its scientific work, which reflected balanced and more critical appraisals of out-dated colonial expertise. In its conclusion, the article suggests that broader contexts need to be taken into account to understand a resurgence of alarmist narratives of desertification such as shifting interests in climatology from local climatic issues to the global atmospheric circulation and a neglect of the climatology of arid zones.
... In 1951, prior to the creation of the AAS, one of the biggest scientific activities initiated by UNESCO was the Arid Zone Programme, which evolved into the Arid Lands Major Project in 1956 and lasted until 1964 (Heymann, 2020). The focus on arid lands was timely, as concern about drought, desertification and famine in several countries coincided (see Ratcliffe & Huxley, 1947, for an Australian example). ...
... The Guide Book was edited by Bertram Thomas Dickson of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and was published in 1957 (Dickson, 1957). The Arid Zone Programme paved the way for a new collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to common challenges, including the causes of climatic change (Heymann, 2020). ...
The International Biological Program (IBP: 1964-1974) was initiated by the International Council of Scientific Unions (now the International Science Council, ISC) to promote the worldwide study of production on land, in freshwaters and in the seas, the potentialities and uses of new and existing natural resources, and human adaptability to changing conditions. The IBP was the first of a series of global initiatives created to promote international collaboration around big environmental science questions since the Second World War. We present a brief review of its international context, and then describe the operations and outcome of the IBP in Australia based largely on the personal experience of Raymond L. Specht (RLS), who was convenor of the Australian PCT section: productivity of terrestrial communities; production processes; and conservation of terrestrial communities. Despite the absence of any dedicated funding for the IBP in Australia, RLS was able to bring a team of interdisciplinary researchers to The University of Queensland and provide them with state-of-the art research facilities. This was the focus for many national and international exchanges, and several important outcomes. RLS, with the support of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS), enabled the first national survey of the conservation status of plant communities (a target of the IBP for each country) and developed it into an objective assessment long after the IBP itself had ended, laying the foundations for a comprehensive, adequate and representative national reserve system. Much more could have been produced if adequate funding had been provided for the program, reducing the reliance on the commitment and enthusiasm of individual researchers.
... Deterministic view of habitability also continued to flourish in relation to arid regions, where turn of the twentieth century imperial scientists' preoccupation with desiccation morphed into political and economic concern over anthropogenic "desertification" (D. K. Davis, 2016a;Heymann, 2020). Growing especially during the 1930s, these concerns were codified in the second half of the twentieth century by institutions like the UNESCO Arid Zone Programme and the World Bank, with Davis showing how these programs carried the legacies of colonial thinking on habitability in policies "that have often systematically damaged dryland environments and marginalized large numbers of indigenous peoples, many of whom had been using the land sustainably" (D. ...
The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report warns in stark terms that many long inhabited parts of the world are now on course to become uninhabitable. As astronomers continue to search the universe for new habitable planets, it is equally essential to historicize the consequences of changing habitability on this one. This article reviews how scholars have engaged with the widely noted but rarely theorized categories of “habitability” and “uninhabitability.” While tracing longer imperial genealogies, the primary focus is on notions of habitability in relation to European global empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their postcolonial legacies. The article traces three key themes in the literature: that habitability was inherently limited, and beyond those limits allegedly lay uninhabitability; that habitability was differential and that certain places were habitable for some groups but not others (but that this might be changed by technological interventions); and finally, that the limits of habitability were not static, but could change for both better and worse. Here the links between colonialism and ideas of acclimatization, terraforming, “improvement,” deliberate uninhabitability, and an “Anthropocene” have all been central to the literature. These have often been closely associated with insidious forms of environmental determinism, which are taking on new forms in an age of crisis (especially in narratives around climate and migration). By drawing together previously disparate literatures, this article ultimately calls on scholars to embrace habitability studies more widely, and to expand on their interdisciplinary potential for communicating the societal consequences of a changing climate.
This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge
... The UNESCO program was an exception, however. The climatological research culture it represented lost significance and support after World War II (Heymann, 2019b). The Cold War era and its politics of science strongly privileged other directions and ambitions. ...
Abstract This commentary provides a critical account of Earth system modeling history. It argues that Earth system modeling is not simply a domain of science but also a form of politics. Earth system science carries the ideas and social and cultural norms of the peculiar historical eras in which it emerged and grew. Systems thinking and a strong belief in the power of modeling have its roots in the early Cold War era. When the Cold War era gave way to a time characterized by economic stagnation, social unrest, and rising environmentalism, climate science absorbed the new cultural trend of environmental concern, while retaining an optimism and enthusiasm in the modeling paradigm. The post‐1990s era reveals particularly clearly the political power that climate scientists unleashed. The modeling paradigm assumed hegemonic status, seized economic and social processes, and created not only scientific knowledge but also conceptions of political management of the Earth. The modeling paradigm, once a scientific strategy largely in the hands of scientists, has turned into a political agent in its own right, beyond the full control of the scientific community.
CSIRO’s research in the arid zone was initiated after World War 2 when a strong push to develop the sparsely populated and isolated region of northern Australia was promoted as being in the national interest. This impetus had social and political origins but implementation depended on scientific insights into regional ‘potential’, which was couched at the time in terms of agronomic and pastoral use. Ray Perry was a key figure in early land resource surveys of the region and later a key motivator for, and supporter of, research in the arid and semi-arid rangelands of Australia. His commitment was fundamental to the establishment of CSIRO’s Central Australian Laboratory. Pastoral land use and improving the land for that purpose were the primary concerns when CSIRO’s presence in Alice Springs was established in 1953. From an initial focus on ‘making the desert bloom’, in particular making the vast spinifex grasslands more ‘useful’, the focus of research shifted to maintaining the productivity of country preferred by cattle and establishing methods for monitoring its health. It was not until the 1970s that Aboriginal and conservation land management appeared in the laboratory’s research agenda, somewhat intermittently, in response to important social and political changes in the wider Australian community.
The post-war era of the 1940s is known for the birth of global governance, a time when Western nations united in efforts to reconstruct the war-torn world and reflected on the role of science in society. History and philosophy of science (HPS) was one of the early projects that emerged out of the war years. Diana (Ding) Dyason who headed the first HPS department in the southern hemisphere is honoured by this annual lecture, the text of which constitutes this article. Thomas Kuhn’s influential lecture in Oxford in 1961 inspired her work on the history of scientific entanglement with social concerns, and the directions of HPS at the University of Melbourne. Post-war reconstruction was both a local and a national project for every nation, very much in the air in the 1940s, and influential until the 1970s. The Australasian Association of Scientific Workers (AASW) brought together scientists too old to serve, or, in reserved occupations, to undertake their own ‘war effort’ on the question of: ‘What comes next?’ AASW held a planning conference in Sydney in 1944 to ‘formulate a policy on the organisation of science necessary to meet the demands of post-war Australia’. They set out to consider the role of the ‘the scientific method’ in the welfare of society. In particular, they recognised their existing international scientific networks and connections could become valuable for post-war collaborations between different sciences and different nations of benefit to Australia and the world. The idea of ‘the environment’ was one of many that emerged internationally in these ‘world-minded’ times, an idea that focused on the management of nature for the benefit of people using the scientific method. National Parks were a crucial discussion point, bringing together amateur naturalists and professional environmental managers of all sorts in discussions about landscape planning along with international comparative work on reserving places for wild animals and plants. This Dyason Lecture explores the emergence of ‘integrated science’, of science in the service of society, that later included natural resource management, big science, environmental science, earth systems science and climate science. It begins with the tragedy of the ‘dirty thirties’, when soil was in the air, and the scientific response to concerns about feeding the world.
Both governments and the private sector urgently require better estimates of the likely incidence of extreme weather events, their impacts on food crop production and the potential consequent social and economic losses. Current assessments of climate change impacts on agriculture mostly focus on average crop yield vulnerability to climate and adaptation scenarios. Also, although new-generation climate models have improved and there has been an exponential increase in available data, the uncertainties in their projections over years and decades, and at regional and local scale, have not decreased. We need to understand and quantify the non-stationary, annual and decadal climate impacts using simple and communicable risk metrics that will help public and private stakeholders manage the hazards to food security. Here we present an 'end-to-end' methodological construct based on weather indices and machine learning that integrates current understanding of the various interacting systems of climate, crops and the economy to determine short- to long-term risk estimates of crop production loss, in different climate and adaptation scenarios. For provinces north and south of the Yangtze River in China, we have found that risk profiles for crop yields that translate climate into economic variability follow marked regional patterns, shaped by drivers of continental-scale climate. We conclude that to be cost-effective, region-specific policies have to be tailored to optimally combine different categories of risk management instruments.
Many assumptions have been made about the nature and character of desertification in West Africa. This paper examines the history of this issue, reviews the current state of our knowledge concerning the meteorological aspects of desertification, and presents the results of a select group of analyses related to this question. The common notion of desertification is of an advancing "desert," a generally irreversible anthropogenic process. This process has been linked to increased surface albedo, increased dust generation, and reduced productivity of the land. This study demonstrates that there has been no progressive change of either the Saharan boundary or vegetation cover in the Sahel during the last 16 years, nor has there been a systematic reduction of "productivity" as assessed by the water-use efficiency of the vegetation cover. While it also showed little change in surface albedo during the years analyzed, this study suggests that a change in albedo of up to 0.10% since the 1950s is conceivable.
This chapter explores the history of a global governance institution, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from its nineteenth-century origins through the beginnings of a planetary meteorological observing network, the WMO's World Weather Watch (WWW), in the 1960s. This history illustrates a profoundly important transition from voluntarist internationalism, based on shared interests, to quasiobligatory globalism, based on a more permanent shared infrastructure. The WMO and the WWW thus represent infrastructural globalism, by which "the world" as a whole is produced and maintained (as both object of knowledge and unified arena of human action) through global infrastructures.
The United Nations Technical Assistance Administration (TAA) was the world organization’s main body for development advice throughout the 1950s. In technical assistance, the UN found a global mission at a time when its peace and security functions seemed ineffective. Technical assistance experts preached the need for less developed countries to plan and modernize. This process has been studied with regard to American modernization theory, but the important role of the UN as an autonomous diplomatic actor has been less visible. The UN was a relatively acceptable source of technical assistance for many governments. Among them was Indonesia, which welcomed UN help for its State Planning Bureau. TAA aid to the Planning Bureau advanced the interests of both organizations but both failed to institutionalize themselves enough to survive the decade. Both, however, left important legacies: the TAA for UN development thinking, and the Planning Bureau for the Indonesian developmentalist state.
Constructing Climate. From Classical Climatology to Modern Climate Research
Both climate researchers and historians of climate science have conceived climate as a stable and well defined category. This
article argues that such a conception is flawed. In the course of the 19th and 20th century the very concept of climate changed
considerably. Scientists came up with different definitions and concepts of climate, which implied different understandings,
interests, and research approaches. Understanding climate shifted from a timeless, spatial concept at the end of the 19th
century to a spaceless, temporal concept at the end of the 20th. Climatologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries considered
climate as a set of atmospheric characteristics associated with specific places or regions. In this context, while the weather
was subject to change, climate remained largely stable. Of particular interest was the impact of climate on human beings and
the environment. In modern climate research at the close of the 20th century, the concept of climate lost its temporal stability.
Instead, climate change has become a core feature of the understanding of climate and a focus of research interests. Climate
has also lost its immediate association with specific geographical places and become global. The interest is now focused on
the impact of human beings on climate. The paper attempts to investigate these conceptual shifts and their origins and impacts
in order to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the history of climate research.
That intergovernmental organizations do not operate effectively has long been apparent. Why they fail to do so has puzzled observers, as has the lack of a satisfying explanation of how these institutions actually do work. Using the concept of "engaging," James P. Sewell investigates the development of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The concept of engaging-becoming involved or more involved in a continuing international relationship-permits the author to focus on levels and timing of participation as well as on the participants' motives. Drawing on extensive interviews and on published and unpublished material, his study traces UNESCO's formation and evolution from 1941 to 1972. He considers different forms of engagement, conditions of their effectiveness, and the important role played by political leaders. The concept of engaging provides new insight into several significant questions. How and with what domestic consequences do actors respond to the challenges of an international organization? Why and how do executive managers induce closer engagement in their institutions? Professor Sewell's innovative approach is applicable to the study of all types of intergovernmental organizations.
Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts -- a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands -- which constitute about 41% of the earth’s landmass -- are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world’s magnificent drylands.
This article analyses the shifting rationales for scientific collaboration in the work of the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the science sector in Africa from the late colonial period through to the era of capacity building. Focusing on the late colonial period and the post-independence decades of “national science” in Africa, it analyses UNESCO’s role in science policy, engineering training, and natural resources research. It demonstrates that in the era of national science UNESCO’s activities were couched in the language of independence: developing capacities in the sciences was regarded as the key to obtaining “scientific independence” to match the recently obtained political independence. This marked a significant change from the 1950s when UNESCO based its operations in Africa on collaborations with the European colonial powers. The article argues that the link between scientific independence and political self-determination gave way as UNESCO rebranded scientific capacity-building activities as efforts in the pursuit of an unclearly-defined common good.
A comprehensive review of dryland climates and their relationship to the physical environment, hydrology, and inhabitants. Chapters are divided into four major sections on background meteorology and climatology; the nature of dryland climates in relation to precipitation and hydrology; the climatology and climate dynamics of the major dryland regions on each continent; and an extensive review of long-term climate variability in the world's drylands. It includes key topics such as vegetation, geomorphology, desertification, micro-habitats, and adaptation to dryland environments. This interdisciplinary volume provides an extensive review of the primary literature (covering over 2500 references) and the conventional and satellite datasets that form key research tools for dryland climatology. Illustrated with over 100 photographs, it presents a unique view of dryland climates for a broad spectrum of researchers, environmental professionals and advanced students in climatology, meteorology, geography, environment science, earth system science, ecology, hydrology and geomorphology.
After World War II, German‐American climatologist Helmut Landsberg sought to realize his war‐time vision for an American ‘climatological renaissance.’ Given the dramatic degradation of European science during the war, he believed that the United States offered the best hope to strengthen and reformulate what he considered to be the stale tradition of conceiving climatology as a geographical discipline. Inhabiting high‐level positions within the American geophysical establishment after the war, his primary goal was to develop the tools and resources to analyze and interpret the overwhelming amounts of data that had been amassed over the centuries while, simultaneously, making climatology relevant to American life. However, there were limits. As someone who had invested his professional life in making climatology a useful discipline, Landsberg grew increasingly concerned that public debates about climate threatened his vision for a climatological renaissance. During the last two decades of his life, he became fixated on maintaining his ideal that climatology was not a glamorous discipline, and objected vehemently to those who sought to counter what he considered to be its true character. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e442. doi: 10.1002/wcc.442
This article is categorized under:
• Climate, History, Society, Culture > Thought Leaders
Definition. If we consider climate as the statistical collective of individual conditions of weather, we can define applied climatology as the scientific analysis of this collective in the light of a useful application for an operational purpose. The term weather includes all atmospheric events and the observation of individual weather elements as single series synoptically or otherwise combined. The term operational is also broadly interpreted as any useful endeavor, such as industrial, manufacturing, agricultural, or technological pursuits.
Uncertainty over the role of applied climatologists and the hard-to-track intellectual extent of the field have clouded understanding of the importance of applied climatology. These factors also make defining the field’s history complex and challenging. Assessment of the past and the potential of applied climatology requires unraveling the definition of applied climatology. In fact, this investigation of the history of applied climatology has been a study of the evolving definition of an ever-changing field.
No Enchanted Palace traces the origins and early development of the United Nations, one of the most influential yet perhaps least understood organizations active in the world today. Acclaimed historian Mark Mazower forces us to set aside the popular myth that the UN miraculously rose from the ashes of World War II as the guardian of a new and peaceful global order, offering instead a strikingly original interpretation of the UN's ideological roots, early history, and changing role in world affairs. Mazower brings the founding of the UN brilliantly to life. He shows how the UN's creators envisioned a world organization that would protect the interests of empire, yet how this imperial vision was decisively reshaped by the postwar reaffirmation of national sovereignty and the unanticipated rise of India and other former colonial powers. This is a story told through the clash of personalities, such as South African statesman Jan Smuts, who saw in the UN a means to protect the old imperial and racial order; Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman, Jewish intellectuals at odds over how the UN should combat genocide and other atrocities; and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, who helped transform the UN from an instrument of empire into a forum for ending it. A much-needed historical reappraisal of the early development of this vital world institution, No Enchanted Palace reveals how the UN outgrew its origins and has exhibited an extraordinary flexibility that has enabled it to endure to the present day.
Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today. International organizations such as the United Nations frequently invoke these inaccurate stories to justify environmental conservation and development projects in the arid and semiarid lands in North Africa and around the Mediterranean basin. Recent research in arid lands ecology and new paleoecological evidence, however, do not support many claims of deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification in this region. Diana K. Davis's pioneering analysis reveals the critical influence of French scientists and administrators who established much of the purported scientific basis of these stories during the colonial period in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, illustrating the key role of environmental narratives in imperial expansion. The processes set in place by the use of this narrative not only systematically disadvantaged the majority of North Africans but also led to profound changes in the landscape, some of which produced the land degradation that continues to plague the Maghreb today. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome exposes many of the political, economic, and ideological goals of the French colonial project in these arid lands and the resulting definition of desertification that continues to inform global environmental and development projects. The first book on the environmental history of the Maghreb, this volume reframes much conventional thinking about the North African environment. Davis's book is essential reading for those interested in global environmental history.
Although Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus's concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home. Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement's most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women's movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the "New Right."
Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these skeptics: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations—even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument—becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world’s climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere—to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.
As a contribution to the United Nation's "Development Decade" of the 1960s, the UN FAO and UNESCO collaborated to produce a Soil Map of the World. Because of soil's privileged place in mid-twentieth century conservationist thought and its material characteristics, which were extraordinarily resistant to standardized classification, analysis of this project reveals with particular clarity how scientists made knowledge about the global environment in the international community. Producing credible global environmental knowledge required a worldwide network of disciplined observers, but soil scientists understood the Soil Map of the World as a means to produce this transnational community of experts. At a scale of 1:5 million, the units of the map applied to no place in particular; it was a heuristic device. The legend, which presented a new international classification system, was the critical accomplishment because it promised to unify diverse national soil science communities in a single discipline. The rigorously empirical descriptions of soil categories reveal the interplay of the cosmopolitan values of scientific internationalism with the nationalist tensions of the Cold War and decolonization.
The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire.Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policiesin the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practicesemerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.
In the aftermath of World War II, many internationalists diagnosed the fundamental cause of international conflict as humanity’s failure to realize the ideals of a world community grounded in global political institutions and common values. To prevent an apocalyptic third world war, internationalists affiliated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) identified two ways science could engineer a peaceful and prosperous world community: “technologically, by changing the material conditions of life, work and production; and intellectually, by changing the way in which men think.” Grounded in archival research in four countries, “Patterns of Science” explores both strategies through studies of Unesco’s environmental and social sciences programs. Environmental scientists emphasized the need to balance nature’s books by adapting the pattern of natural resources exploitation to the requirements of global population growth. They conceived of scientifically guided development as a moral equivalent of war that could unite an international army for the conquest of nature. Social scientists stressed the importance of reforming parochial cultural patterns to construct “the defences of peace in the minds of men.” By facilitating intercultural understanding, social scientists would help nations realize the ideal of “unity in diversity.” The goal of both strategies was to produce objective global knowledge that would make the world scale real—“in the minds of men” as well as for politicians and planners. “Patterns of Science” reveals how internationalist scientists attempted to navigate the politics of the cold war, decolonization, and bureaucratic rivalries through case studies that demonstrate the interaction of international, national, and local scales. These cases range from the Los Angeles School District’s implementation of a “Unesco program” during the height of McCarthyism to the establishment of a university chair of race relations in Southern Rhodesia, and from an arid lands research program that pitted “men against the desert” to the production of a Soil Map of the World. Although often mired in controversy or dismissed as naïve, Unesco’s work produced an international community of experts and global social and environmental knowledge that proved crucial to the emerging imperative for sustainable development in the early 1970s.
In the early decades of the 20th century, rocket science wasn¿¿t considered the brainy endeavor it is now. Far from it: Simply expressing an interest in the field was enough to provoke ridicule. Becoming a rocket scientist was enough to get you ostracized from whatever field you were in before. Frank Malina didn't care. Overcoming incredible institutional resistance and rather daunting technical and financial odds, the engineer, while still a grad student at Caltech in the mid-1930s, started up a research program that would lay the foundations for U.S. rocket and missile development. During the run-up to World War II, that work took on new significance. By the war's end, Malina had become the top American rocket expert and had cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which today is one of the world's premier space research organizations. And yet, you've probably never heard of him. Most histories of the U.S. space program treat Malina and his group as a footnote. They say the real work started only after the war, with the arrival of Wernher von Braun, Hitler's chief rocket scientist. Without the German's genius,the story goes, U.S. extraterrestrial explorations would never have gone so far so fast.
Relationships between local and global scales deserve more attention than they have received in the global change research enterprise to date. This paper examines how and why scale matters, drawing on six basic arguments; examines the current state of the top-down global change research paradigm to evaluate the fit across relevant scale domains between global structure and local agency; and reviews current research efforts to better link the local and global scales of attention and action.
This paper examines the question of land surface-atmosphere interactions in the West African Sahel and their role in the interannual variability of rainfall. In the Sahel, mean rainfall decreased by 25-40% between 1931-1960 and 1968-1997 every year in the 1950s was wet, and nearly every year since 1970 has been anomalously dry. Thus the intensity and multiyear persistence of drought conditions are unusual and perhaps unique features of Sahel climate. This article presents arguments for the role of land surface feedback in producing these features and reviews research relevant to land surface processes in the region, such as results from the 1992 Hydrologic Atmospheric Pilot Experiment (HAPEX)-Sahel experiment and recent studies on aerosols and on the issue of desertification in the region, a factor implicated by some as a cause of the changes in rainfall. Included also is a summary of evidence of feedback on meteorological processes, presented from both model results and observations. The reviewed studies demonstrate numerous ways in which the state of the land surface can influence interactions with the atmosphere. Surface hydrology essentially acts to delay and prolong the effects of meteorological drought. Each evaporative component of the surface water balance has its own timescale, with the presence of vegetation affecting the process both by delaying and prolonging the return of soil moisture to the atmosphere but at the same time accelerating the process through the evaporation of canopy-intercepted water. Hence the vegetation structure, including rooting depth, can modulate the land-atmosphere interaction. Such processes take on particular significance in the Sahel, where there is a high degree of recycling of atmospheric moisture and where the meteorological processes from the scale of boundary layer development to mesoscale disturbance generation are strongly influenced by moisture. Simple models of these feedback processes and their various timescales have demonstrated that the net feedback to the atmosphere is positive for both wet and dry surface anomalies. Hence the role of the surface is to reinforce meteorologically induced changes. Recovery from the dry state is slower than from the wet state, suggesting that dry conditions would tend to persist longer, as is actually observed in the Sahel. These simple models suggest that the surface hydrology locks the system into a drought mode that persists for several years, until the system randomly slips into a persistent wet mode. The hypothesis that desertification in the Sahel might likewise be responsible for the persistent drought is found to be untenable. Rather than a progressive encroachment of the desert onto the savanna, the vegetation cover responds dramatically to interannual fluctuations in rainfall. There is little evidence of large-scale denudation of soils, increase in surface albedo, or reduction of the productivity of the land, although degradation has probably occurred in some areas. There has, however, been a steady buildup of dust in the region over the last half a century. Significant radiative effects of the dust have been demonstrated; therefore the dust has probably influenced large-scale climate. The buildup is probably mainly a result of changes in the land surface that accompanied the shift to drier conditions, but it may have been exacerbated by anthropogenic factors. Complex general circulation models nearly universally underscore the importance of feedback processes in the region. Although it has not been unequivocally demonstrated that the rainfall regime of the Sahel is modulated by surface processes, there is recent observational evidence that this is case.
In Morocco the crisis narrative of desertification has been invoked for decades to facilitate and justify policy and legal changes that have systematically disadvantaged pastoralists and damaged the environment. The existing data from southern Morocco, however, do not support the claims of widespread desertification due to overgrazing or other pastoral activities. Furthermore, many anti-desertification and range improvement projects in southern Morocco have not succeeded. In an effort to rethink desertification and range ecology in Morocco, this paper presents an overview of the indigenous knowledge of range ecology among the Aarib, a group of camel pastoralists in southern Morocco, and compares it to the “expert” knowledge of Moroccan range managers. It suggests that this expert knowledge is based on questionable evidence and that it has been privileged over local knowledge primarily for political, economic and administrative reasons. The discrepancies between expert and indigenous knowledges of range ecology presented here underscore the need to reconsider range ecology in Morocco, taking indigenous ecological knowledge into account. Doing so may point the way to more successful development and conservation projects which are more environmentally appropriate and socially just. Not doing so will likely exacerbate environmental degradation in the region.
Ideas and knowledge about climate have changed considerably in history. Ancient philosophers like Hippocrates and Aristotle shaped the understandings of climate, which remained very influential until well into the eighteenth century. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century gave rise to new ways of systematic instrument‐based observation of and increased public interest in weather and climate. These developments led to a mechanistic understanding and a reductionist physical description of climate in the twentieth century, eventually in the form of a complex earth system. Furthermore, different understandings of climate co‐existed in many periods of time. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries specific scientific concepts of climate (a geographical understanding of climate in climatology until about the mid‐twentieth century and a physical understanding of climate in climate science in the second half of the twentieth century) gained superior social credibility and cultural dominance. The understanding of climate involved more than the accumulation of scientific knowledge. It was rooted in social processes and cultural interests, which shaped different ideas of climate in different communities of actors and different historical times. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge
From 1957 to 1966, UNESCO engaged in a decade-long project aimed at improving cultural relations, a project that generated transnational discourse over representations of East and West. The international climate of this period was characterized not only by decolonization and Cold War tensions but also by activism that amplified diverse and increasingly strong Asian and Arab voices in intergovernmental fora. Composing nearly half of UNESCO's membership by the mid 1950s, these states' demands for greater agency in the international sphere garnered considerable attention following the Bandung Conference (1955), which rekindled longstanding fears of imminent if not perpetual East-West conflict and also precipitated the call for UNESCO to facilitate interchange around Eastern and Western cultural values. By examining UNESCO textbook exchanges, this article illustrates the regionally distinct representations of Asia and Europe that emerged in the postcolonial context. It reflects regional sensitivities as well as cooperative and sometimes startlingly optimistic positions, which are viewed from a perspective that prioritizes cultural relations as a distinctive framework of transnational analysis informed yet not determined by Cold War paradigms. Through this exploration of intergovernmental efforts to engage states in dialogue on cultural identities in the midst of redefinition and rising ambiguity about the meaning of East and West, this work contributes to a growing body of research on international cultural relations in the 1950s and 1960s.
Recent ecological research has questioned the scientific validity of a number of environmental disaster scenarios, particularly those centred on the causal linkages between deforestation and desertification and intensified flooding. This essay explores the progression of theoretical models and empirical research linked to the understanding of the capacity of forested systems to regulate the hydrological regimes of a given area. Drawing upon writings of American and Indian foresters, I suggest that a diversity of viewpoints with regard to the climatic and protective capabilities of forests, expressed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries gradually gave way to a more unified - and highly alarmist - 'desiccationist' discourse by the middle of the 20th century. This position has been sustained within much of the popular press as well as in the publications of numerous conservation agencies, despite being based on models of forest functioning discredited in the ecological literature since the 1920s. This essay documents this transformation, and explores some of the factors that may have helped in the production of this powerful and lasting discourse on degradation.
The pursuit of nature conservation was central to the scientific section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from the outset. In order to build a network of expertise and practice, UNESCO supported the establishment of a non-governmental organisation, the fledgling International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN). This small core of non-governmental actors found itself thrown into the arena of global politics and was forced out of its conservation niche. In August 1949, UNESCO and IUPN jointly convened a global conference on ecology and education. The genesis and progress of this conference highlighted the growing prominence of environmental issues and the increasing reciprocity between these issues and questions of nutrition, development and health in the immediate post-war era.
It is suggested that the high albedo of a desert contributes to a net radiative heat loss relative to its surroundings and that the resultant horizontal temperature gradients induce a frictionally controlled circulation which imports heat aloft and maintains thermal equilibrium through sinking motion and adiabatic compression. In the subtropics this sinking motion is superimposed on the descending branch of the mean Hadley circulation but is more intense. Thus the desert feeds back upon itself in an important manner.
If one takes into account the biosphere, this feedback mechanism could conceivably lead to instabilities or metastabilities in desert border regions. It is argued that a reduction of vegetation, with consequent increase in albedo, in the Sahel region at the southern margin of the Sahara would cause sinking motion, additional drying, and would therefore perpetuate the arid conditions. Numerical integrations with the general circulation model of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies appear to substantiate this hypothesis. Increasing the albedo north of the ITCZ from 14% to 35% had the effect of shifting the ITCZ several degrees of latitude south and decreasing the rainfall in the Sahel about 40% during the rainy season.
The United Nations Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources was held in August and September 1949. More than seven hundred scientists, technicians and administrators from fifty countries came together at Lake Success. They had before them for discussion some five hundred and fifty papers applying science and technology to the problem of resource use. How–they asked–could waste of vital resources be prevented? Would critical shortages of essential materials lead inevitably to a lowering of the standard of life? By what methods could a wise use of natural resources make possible the support of the world's increasing population on a higher standard of living?
Since my first field surveys in Western Asia (1956) I have been involved in many missions to Asia, Africa and the Americas which were organized by national or international academic institutions. During these missions I have found my life work: the comparative study of the foggara oasis of the arid zone of the old continent. The main case studies outlined in this paper were carried out in North Africa, Western Asia and China. In 1962, at the UNESCO Crete Symposium, I had an excellent opportunity to receive critical advice for my topics from distinguished dryland scientists.
Although the foggara system is globally distributed, we recognize the imbalance of quality through these case studies. For example in Iran, several case studies were carried out by western scholars in the 1950s but the subject was given little attention from Iranian authorities. Because of the rapid growth of the urban population, Iranians began to change their water system from traditional hydro-technology, such as the qanat system, to modern pumping wells. However, in the last ten years, they have recognized the positive contribution of traditional technology from the point of energy-saving aspects and sustainability of the system. The main topics for combating desertification designated by UNCCD include the usefulness of traditional technology. UNESCO together with the Iranian government supported the establishment of the International Qanat Research Center in Yazd in 2005, and in 2004 the European Commission started a three-year project on foggara in North Africa. This paper explains the changes occurring in foggara oases in the last fifty years based on my field studies.