The world leading political scientist and authority on global environmental governance, Professor Oran Young, recently gave a talk in the Stockholm Seminars. This Sunday March 11th he will be interviewed in the Think Globally radio show heard every Sunday evening at 19:00 on THS Radio 95.3 MHz in Stockholm, and on K103.1 in Gothenburg at 16:00. It is also available through an extensive archive of past programs at: www.thinkgloballyradio.org

Just as Professor Young's talk in the Stockholm Seminars  the interview will circle around the institutions and international regimes for governing environmental issues, which are crucial for sustainability, but vary widely in their effectiveness. Professor Young shares his insights from decades of research on the factors that influence whether international regimes, from ozone depletion to climate change and many others, ultimately succeed or fail in their mission to protect the environment.

Professor Young is the author of more than 20 books. His most recent book is "Institutional Dynamics: Emergent Patterns in International Environmental Governance".

The video of the seminar he gave in Stockholm March 7 will soon be available at the Stockholm Resilience Centre's webpage.

Joern Fischer, a colleague from Leuphana University, has a thought-provoking post over at Ideas4Sustainability

"I am tired of people highlighting that “we have come a long way”. No we haven’t. We have absolutely failed to address the fundamentally important challenges that underpin our societies: our addiction to ever more material growth and limitless comfort at all times. How, based on such values, will we ever reach sustainability, including global social justice? We are failing, not doing well."

Joern joins the growing ranks of scientists that call for transformative change across ALL levels of society. Science can't solve the challenges we are facing alone.

"Unless we manage to get organised, we’ll count for nothing. Fragmentation within academia is one of our biggest (self-created) enemies. So many “sustainability experts” now truly believe that we must go beyond the pragmatic, and beyond the low-hanging fruit, and question fundamentally how we can best achieve ‘transformative change’. Our challenge must be to communicate this to (and discuss it with) the rest of society — those of us who believe that real change is needed must find ways to bring this about."

A few weeks ago Moody's rating agency "warned" that the UK was on a "negative outlook". In other words, it stood a 30% chance of losing its AAA credit rating. Credit Rating Agencies (CRA's) provide a simple and readily understandable system that allows any investor to invest in international securities with which they are not directly familiar. Where corporate and government bonds are concerned, this system has proved reliable and enabled investors to diversify their portfolios. However, the metrics used are simply based on the judgement of the agencies themselves in determining what public and private information should be considered in giving a rating. Much criticism has been aimed at these powerful global players, especially the Big Three - S&P, Moody's and Fitch. The critics say, not only did the agencies fail to spot 2008's financial crisis, they put some fuel under it by awarding AAA ratings to the very packages of toxic mortgages that took the roof off the world economy. Not just that. They still had Lehman Brothers, AIG and Washington Mutual on investment grade ratings until September 15 2008. All that from organisations which also failed to spot Enron.

An interesting piece over at the Green Economy Coalition, however, asks what would happen if the metrics used by market organizations such as the Big Three CRA's were designed to capture a company or nations progress towards achieving equity and human wellbeing, while not exceeding the boundaries of the natural capital that provide wellbeing.

"Metrics and ratings are powerful tools. They drive behaviour and they describe our understanding of success. So, what if credit rating agencies such as Moody’s were guided by bigger global goals that underpin economic resilience – namely, our planet’s ecological limits and the need to provide a better quality of life for all?  What if they started to grade the creditworthiness of companies and national economies by environmental and societal indicators rather than just financial metrics? And, what if those national ratings were informed by the progress that businesses, and indeed consumers, were making towards those same environmental and societal goals? What if all of our metrics of 'success', from local to global, were geared to measure our progress towards achieving a better quality of life for all within the ecological limits of the planet?"

We're in the final stretch before the Rio +20 conference. With 116 days left, every week is seeing the release of important summary reports to be used as background material and "negotiation muscle" by different organizations and fora during the conference in Brazil. A month ago saw the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Global Sustainability publish its final report 'Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing'. The report is highly influenced by the talks during the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability and the scientific work behind it.

The report is proof of how high resilience theory has permeated the ranks of policy-makers. It contains an entire section on "building resilience" and urges governments to develop and implement policies to “manage the economic and social impacts of transition and enhance resilience — in particular through targeted social protection programmes and policies and by scaling up humanitarian capacities to deal with increasing environmental stress and potential shocks". It repeatedly refers to the Stockholm symposium and research on planetary boundaries, and calls for better interchange between scientists and policymakers.

"We must define, through science, what scientists refer to as 'planetary boundaries', 'environmental thresholds' and 'tipping points'" the report said

This week also saw the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) hold its 12th special session in Nairobi, Kenya. One of the outputs was the report 'Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act', prepared by laureates of the Blue Planet Prize, known unofficially as the Nobel prize for the environment.

One of the key messages of the report was a call to replace gross domestic product (GDP) as a sole measure of a nation's economic wealth with more inclusive indicators that would consider the impact of economic growth on human wellbeing and environmental condition.

"Governments should recognise the serious limitations of GDP as a measure of economic growth and complement it with measures of the five forms of capital, built (produced); natural; human; social; and institutional/financial capital. One challenge facing many countries is how to manage natural resources in order to contribute to poverty alleviation while maintaining the ecological life support system." the report said.

SciDev.net has a great new Spotlight feature on "Ocean science for sustainable development". The reasons for protecting the worlds oceans are numerous, and have been highlighted in past posts here at sdupdate.Our track record of protecting these ecosystems has been dismal, although glimmers of hope make us (very carefully) optimistic for the future

For poor, developing nations with large human communities relying on healthy oceans for their survival, creating the conditions for succesful science-based management is critical. This means having reliable data (that is well balanced between science and traditional local knowledge) on which to base sound policy decisions. Challenges include building the capacity to both generate and interpret such data.

The SciDev Spotlight feature presents a number of articles highlighting the challenges faced in generating the robust scientific data that form the bedrock to effective management of marine resources, with a particular emphasis on the Pacific region.

New global estimation of biodiversity benefits and ecosystem services finds flows valued at $1 trillion USD per year to poor communities.

Many of Nature's services are literally priceless – we cannot live without them and they have no known substitutes. But pricing these services can focus attention on the importance of healthy ecosystems for sustained development and poverty alleviation.

Now a study published recently in the journal BioScience shows that protecting the land of highest priority for biodiversity conservation also delivers significant, ecosystem services and income to the world's most impoverished people.

The scientists assessed a broad range of ecosystem services, from local benefits including crop pollination, foods, medicines, and clean, fresh water, to global benefits such as climate regulation.

The focus of the new study was whether the world's top conservation priorities (less than a quarter of Earth's land surface) directly support the world's poorest people, who generally struggle to survive on less than one dollar a day.

Last month’s UN climate conference in Durban (the COP-17) achieved very little progress in tackling climate change. What came out of the meeting was the pretty hollow "Durban Platform for Enhanced Action" - a roadmap that commits parties to reach a binding legal framework for reducing greenhouse emissions by 2015. Pushing the problem a few years ahead in time, in essence.

With regards to one of the greatest causes of environmental and climate change -  agriculture -  the "Enhanced Action" document only agreed to "exchange views on it (agriculture"). A first burning question then is why is agriculture ignored in these climate conferences? A second question is how do we combine the discourses, and attain future security in the face of climate change.

In an article published last Friday in Science, top agricultural scientists have outlined how the research world can develop the knowledge needed to support inclusion of agriculture and food security in climate change policies, and get agriculture at the top of the climate agenda. The analysis, What Next for Agriculture After Durban?, was co-authored by a group that includes members of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, chaired by Sir John Beddington; many of the recommendations are informed by the Commission’s seven key actions for Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change released in November.

Hope all readers have had a good Christmas vacation. Sorry for the long(-ish) break, but its been nice to plug out for awhile. As a nice, easy first post of 2012, we have some really interesting stuff on Ecosystem Services over at the Solutions Journal. First there is a nice article by Jennifer Allan and colleagues (including Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom) on institutions to manage ecosystem services. Another article by Rudolf de Groot, Robert Constanza and colleagues focuses on the Ecosystem Service Partnership and its work in the Baviaanskloof Mega Reserve in South Africa:

"The Mega Reserve is a World Heritage site and nature reserve and includes private and community land. Over several decades, areas across the reserve have been subjected to severe ecological degradation, largely a result of regional overgrazing by domestic livestock, large-scale crop irrigation, and invasive species. The impacts include riverbank erosion, a lowering of the groundwater table, and a decline of water supply to the downstream nature reserve. This loss of natural capital and decline of derived ecosystem services is causing great socioeconomic strain on the area and its people."

Finally, there is a very interesting interview with Walter Reid, the director of the Conservation and Science Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He directed the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Unsurprisingly, he is disappointed with the progress made since the release of the MA:

"We haven’t made much progress. There have been individual successes: carbon farming in Australia, Brazil’s progress in reducing deforestation over the last decade, logging bans in Thailand and China, and the rebuilding of fisheries in a number of countries. But, in the aggregate, I don’t believe that the trend of degradation has been reversed for any of the individual ecosystem services that were being degraded in 2000."

He makes the point that more work on Ecosystem Service is needed on relevant scales for decisions makers, i.e national or sub-national levels:

"The biggest lesson was, not surprisingly, that ecosystem services are most relevant to decision makers at a landscape scale. Even though the global risks and threats are most compelling at the global scale and in the aggregate, it is not at the global scale that we can do much about the problem. In the Millennium Assessment, we sought to address this by carrying out a multiscale assessment with some global elements and some subglobal assessments, but this still didn’t provide decision makers at the scale of a state or county with the sort of actionable information that they needed. What’s really needed in the long run is for much more work to be done to provide ecosystem service information at these more local scales and then to periodically roll it up so we understand the global consequences and trends."

All in all, some very interesting reading.