Urban Metabolism – The Political Ecology of Energy and Ecosystems

1. Urban Metabolism – The Political Ecology of Energy and Ecosystems Stephanie Pincetl Institute of the Environment and Sustainability UCLA

2. The World has Changed. . .Challenges of a Human Engineered Urbanizing Earth Population growth GDP expansion of more than 20X Global materials use increased 8-fold Up to 83% of the global terrestrial biosphere is considered to be under direct human influence Reliance on non-renewable energy sources and water too Materials use per capita doubled from 4.6 to 10.3 t/cap/yr (1900 – 2005) Mineral fractions growing at a rapid pace Biomass use slowing But, Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production is between 30 – 58% globally

3. There has never been anything like the 20th century • Main driver of human induced environmental change is the growing social or industrial metabolism (an industrial sociometabolic regime) • Yet we are still lacking biophysical indicators such as • primary energy supply, • emissions, • the use of specific substances • Comprehensive account of global materials extraction • Materials flows

4. The Built Environment Our built environment is a large in-use repository or stock humans have accumulated Humans use approximately 60 billion tons of material every year, or the equivalent of the natural production of all plants on earth Urban metabolism studies are the quantification of the flows into cities or communities (electrons, water, wood, air, other materials, food. . .) flows out as pollution, other waste or losses in the form of heat and distribution losses (absorbed by ecosystems), plus what has remained inside.

5. Brussels, Belgium early 1970s. Souce: Duvigneaud and Denayeyer-De Smet 1977

6. The Centrality of Energy Energy is at the heart of human systems Availability of and cheap access to fossil fuels of high-energy density and new and efficient technologies to convert primary energy into useful work allows for emergence of mass production and consumption and high level of energy and material use Large infrastructures (buildings, roads, power grids, petrochemical complexes) And a concomitant complex and path dependent economy, built environment, agriculture and consumption system

7. Place and Energy Systems • Urban areas concentrate the use of energy and materials • Need to identify and to quantify current energy flows and sinks in communities • By sector • By region and microclimate • By socio-economic and demographic characteristics • By land use type • By policy drivers

9. Measures of Urban Metabolism Traditional Expanded Energy Materials Water Nutrients Waste Demography, socioeconomic, education GDP and community fiscal measures Employment Health Community quality

10. Including Land Use Transportation • Land use regs • Densities • Age of housing • Finance and lending • Taxation • Impacts on hinterlands • Endangered species • Soils, water, fauna and flora Materials and goods movement Roads and transit Fuels Agriculture

11. What UM can reveal • Appropriation of ecosystems and their functions • Surface and groundwater • Timber and minerals • Fossil fuels • Ocean resources • And the sink capacities of ecosystems • Air pollution • Water pollution • Soil contamination • In quantities, location of resources

13. Ecosystem Services In an expanded sense, an urban metabolism is fundamentally an artifact of the ways in which we enroll nature in our productive processes Hence urban metabolism analysis draws attention to this reliance by identifying, quantifying and explaining the energy flows (including the resources) and the waste sinks Fundamentally emerges from ecological concerns about systems and the second law of thermodynamics

14. Energy and resources foundational – and invisible to contemporary systems Systemic nature of energy system: it is imbricated into each aspect of contemporary communities – a system that is interactive, interdependent and mutually constitutive with social systems Deep path dependencies Many social, institutional rules, conventions, habits and policies underlie energy and resource use These need to be revealed, examined and explained to be able to change the drivers of existing energy and resource use

15. Question then turns to why and how • Institutions set the rules of the game in a society: they structure • Human interactions – political, social, cultural and economic • They structure our resource dependencies and implicitly weight them – e.g. toward fossil fuels since they were cheap and abundant • Part of Urban Metabolism must be to identify these rules of the game

16. Some Examples • Federal water policy • Colorado River Compact • Central Valley Project Improvement Act • Minerals policies and pricing on federal lands • Gasoline taxes • Mortgage lending and banking policies • Depreciation allowances • Endangered Species Act • Corporate laws

17. A systemic approach needs new methods and partners Poor accounting of energy inputs and waste in our urban systems today, therefore planning for the future is planning in the void Just as climate change science itself was a challenging interdisciplinary synthesis, urban metabolism – a systems approach -- demonstrates much of the same characteristics of different metrics, different epistemologies and concerns Making a difference will require dedication to integration and examining the system – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

18. A Return to Systems Thinking and Analysis • Systems thinking had a run in the 1970s • But 1980’s to the rise of sustainability thinking devalued integrated approaches • Too complex • Not needed • Resurgence of ideas of economic man (the whole is just the aggregation of individual decisions Global processes like climate change have focused again on necessity for cross-disciplinary, integrated analyses to find solutions – back to systems

19. Thanks thanks thanks • California State Energy Commission PIER Program • Roadmap collaborators • Paul Bunje • Mike Chester • Chris Kennedy • Dean Misczynski • Chris Nelson • Diane Pataki