List: (I will separately send a courtesy note to Dr. Hicks and possibly
others.)
1. I believe that the CDR technologies (and especially biochar) are
going to advance because of sustainability issues and more on the basis of
social science understandings rather than the hard sciences. And I prefer
quantitative to qualitative descriptions. Accordingly, I recommend a short (2
1/3 pp, 12 cites) article in the April 1 issue of Science: “Engage key social
concepts for sustainability - Social indicators, both mature and emerging, are
underused” By Christina C. Hicks +16 others
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/352/6281/38.full.pdf
<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/352/6281/38.full.pdf>]
2. The first paragraph (removing two cites, emphasizing one phrase)
reads: “With humans altering climate processes, biogeochemical cycles, and
ecosystem functions, governments and societies confront the challenge of
shaping a sustainable future for people and nature. Policies and practices to
address these challenges must draw on social sciences, along with natural
sciences and engineering. Although various social science approaches can enable
and assess progress toward sustainability, debate about such concrete
engagement is outpacing actual use. To catalyze uptake, we identify seven key
social concepts that are largely absent from many efforts to pursue
sustainability goals. We present existing and emerging well-tested indicators
and propose priority areas for conceptual and methodological development.
[RWL: The “seven key social concepts” are next broken into a group of
four: 1. Well-being, 2. Values, 3. Agency, and 4. Inequality - with a
paragraph on each (and a helpful table). These are followed by a group of
three, each also with a single paragraph: 5. Power, 6. Culture, 7.
Injustice. Mostly there is only a single cite for each of these seven social
concepts. There is no mention of the usual Geo/CDR comparators, such as
technological readiness, magnitude of impact, costs, risks, safety, etc. Most
of these seven concepts show multiple subdivisions - there are dozens of
possible numerical indicators identified in total.
3. The final paragraph reads (with numerical additions added for
emphasis on the way the paper is organized) “Progress has been made toward
development of some indicators, and in many instances, relevant data and
expertise exist within national and international, official and unofficial
statistics bureaus (e.g., national censuses, representative surveys, and
polling reports). Further work is needed to understand and communicate
desirable directions of change. Reasonable consensus exists that it is
desirable to increase wellbeing (#1) and agency (#3) and to reduce inequality
(#4), injustice (#7), and imbalances of power (#5). In contrast, although
extreme values are detrimental to sustainability goals, there is no desirable
direction of change for values (#2) or culture (#6). Instead, these concepts
facilitate understandings of how sustainability goals manifest and how policies
can be crafted. Although critical gaps remain with concepts in need of
indicator development, quantitative indicators are alone insufficient for
understanding these concepts. Complementary, qualitative, and reflexive
assessments will remain critical for development, implementation, and
interpretation of robust measurement systems. “
[RWL: Here’s hoping these 17 authors or some similar group of social
scientists can organize to provide numerical indicator values for the 6-8
different CDR approaches and the smaller number of SRM approaches. It would
be interesting to see if there is much different from the mitigation and
adaptation climate/sustainability technologies. Note the final paragraph’s
emphasis on policy.
Ron
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