Category Archives: Research & Measures

notes on scientific data and analysis techniques

Research & Measures, Scientific theory, What to do

How full is a “Glass Half Hidden”?

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The worst part of “A Glass Half Hidden” is the clear chance of discovering “An Iceberg of Risks” missing from the view.

Scope 1, 2, & 3 only count the impacts of the primary technology chains that businesses rely on to operate, and ignore the usually much larger impacts of the many chains of business services consumed too.   That’s the iceberg of hidden responsibilities of business cause, being ignored due to using an unscientific method of measurement, i.e. counting only the impacts you see, and not accounting for the one unseen (what Scope 4 finally does).    So there’s also a hidden iceberg of bigger than expected changes in plan to take care of too… that we’ve been unaware of needing for having a sustainable economy.    It explains why our efforts so far still result in the economy degrading of the earth ever faster as we delay making meaningful change.   The job doesn’t change, just how directly we’re able to address it.

What’s really hidden is that it’s our money that is directly paying for all the economy’s impacts, making us financially responsible.  Now we also really need to know the total bill.   Having a habit of not looking at what our money was used to pay for, we’ve been lulled asleep by the way money launders all the information on what our money pays for to deliver what the economy provides.

(see also What’s Scope 4, and… Why all the tiers?? for examples and full analysis)

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It is indeed a little ‘strange’ that a very basic scientific principle of measurement, that every scientist knows quite well already, would be overlooked in defining the world’s units of measure for saving the planet.

Scientific ways to measure things, need to measure the whole thing.  

Sustainability metrics very largely don’t so that, lacking a scientific way to determine the scale of hidden impacts, the method for measuring economic impacts defaulted to the ancient practice of just counting what you have direct information on.    The reality is that the great majority of business impacts actually don’t c come from what is most visible, but from widely distributed uses of the economy that businesses have no records of, paid for by employing all sorts of business services.   The problem is that whether you know about them or not, the risk exposure to serious emerging economic liabilities…  is exactly the same.

Here’s a new graphic to help picture the problem.  It helps to shift from thinking about counting the energy “uses” a business and its suppliers operate with (i.e. traceable for Scope 1,2 or 3, and so on the visible side of the “glass half hidden”), to thinking about the energy uses its revenues are “paying for“, but often don’t have records of (Scope 4, on the hidden side).  It’s the total of energy uses paid for that make a business both financially responsible and directly exposed to the emerging economic risks of physically causing economic liabilities and the harms done.   It’s a serious major overlooked sustainability business risk.    If 80% of the CO2 produced by uses of business revenue actually come from its services, and not its technology,

…it’s all the same to the investor exposed to the risks for the business as a whole.

For risk exposure it’s essential to measure the total impacts on the earth a business is financially responsible for, as that’s where the risk comes from.    Just choosing not to count all the ones your revenue goes to pay for moves the risks to the hidden side of the “glass half-hidden”… but still leaves you just as exposed to the very substantial economic risks of business devaluation many see ahead. Continue reading How full is a “Glass Half Hidden”? →

For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, Transformation, What to do

Sustainable Cities: Caring for the Greater Commons

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“Sustainable Cities” is the topic to being the upcoming Open Working Group 7 on SDG’s, Jan 6-10 2014, in the UN’s marathon effort to decide “what we should do with the earth”.   Our cities, as brilliant as places of creativity as they are, find themselves “in a fishy stream…”  See also the final World SDG proposal on the global application of the general principle, that we all are responsible for our shares of the abuses of the economy as a whole … in proportion to our owning, investing in and using it. 

The World SDG uses a method of calculation for any person’s or business’s share of world GDP, for estimating their total share of  responsibility for world economic impacts as “users” called “Scope-4 Accounting“.  The legal view of responsibility is different from “cause and effect” in that, legally, both the people paying for, benefiting from or authorizing a tort harm may all be held as equally responsible as the person actually doing the harm, as familiar for hiring others to commit a crime. 

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Fishing in a fishy stream…

 “Sustainable Cities” started with Caring for our Cities as Commons
Neglecting The upstream burden of their wealth and the World as Their Greater Commons

Statement:

A scientifically better way to measure the true scale of economic footprints is as fractions of the whole.  It’s easy and accurate for scale, treating fractions of world GDP as shares of world resource use and impacts too(1).  Cities thrive as hubs of creativity and growing concentrations of wealth, cells within a greater whole. Without self-restraint, growing parts can become cancers on the whole, profiting by conquering others, not by caring for their world.  A city’s limit is then exhausting their world, as done by ancient Rome, the Mayans and others.

New York City with ~1/10th of one percent of the world’s population has a $1,350 billion/yr GDP, ~2% share of world GDP, so causing ~2% of world economic resource demands and impacts, with its plan for real repeated doubling of all three. Wealth earned on New York’s 13 sq mi uses the products of ~380,000 mi2 of farm land around the world, ~2% of the world’s, with resource pressure causing ~2% of the world’s 1,460 mi2 of deforestation. Its services produce~2% of the world’s CO2, ~141,750 million lbs/yr, ~170,000 lbs. per NYC resident.

The question is, what would make New York and other cities turn from consuming to caring for the world they generate their wealth from(2)?   Now each World Capital, as islands of high GDP, is growing its impacts on the world by growing amounts each year, as if as innocently as living by a lazy stream grabbing floating bags of money going by now and then..                Jessie Henshaw

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Jessie is an environmental and human systems scientist quite familiar with defining units of measure. She’s been doing advanced research on emergent organization in nature and economic systems for over 30 years. The scientific basis for this measurement method is a peer reviewed research paper

1)“Getting the incentives right requires redefining the units of measure”.

2) “Ideal Model: Steering money to what matters”

 

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, Scientific theory, Transformation, What to do

Getting the incentives right requires redefining the units of measure

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This is a post for the UN’s Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals “Informal meeting on measuring progress” on the new science needed for achieving the SDG’s, “getting the incentives right” as many observers have noted as essential.   In part, it requires “New Units of Measure”   because there is “Something Very Wrong with our way of measuring impacts”

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The Need to redefine our Units for Measure and how to begin

Getting the incentives right:

To be effective in getting the results we want, we need to get the incentives right, a matter of understanding both how people make decisions and how the economic system works and would respond.   That involves knowing how to measure what decision makers want to know about.  For investment decisions, for changing how we use the earth one thing they’d want to know is their possible future liabilities for making the wrong decisions. That illusive goal is now much  closer to being solved, with this major improvement in the measure of the impacts of businesses.  The traditional way to measure impacts was to count up what you could trace, and this study showed that what we can trace is most often only a small part, basically because what was being left out was the impacts on the environment caused by the resource demands resulting from the revenue businesses generate as their main purpose, having to date only been counting the impacts of intended operations.   This discusses a comprehensive approach to quantifying them.    JLH

Statement to OWG 6:

Prepared statement For 9:00 AM Major Group Meeting of 12/12/13 on Means of implementation (science and technology, knowledge-sharing and capacity building)  —  “The mismatch between measured impacts and responsibilities”.    Also delivered from the floor at OWG-6.1 the Informal Meeting on Measuring Progress” on Tuesday 12/17/13

Statement: Because sustainability metrics for businesses are just for the impacts of business operating technology, the environmental impacts of the people who operate the business, their employees and those of all the kinds of service providers businesses use to operate, don’t get counted.   Businesses and economists, thinking of money systems not environmental ones, may not see a reason to treat businesses as physical systems and count all their impacts, but you know for sure nature does.   So it’s very common for businesses and consumers to actually be directly responsible for much larger scale environmental impacts than they are told.    Of course the reason we’re measuring impact is for steering a redesign of our economy for the future of the earth, and it would actually be better to get it right.   Using metrics very often in error by 80% or more is really unacceptable as it voids the purpose of measurement in general, but you talk to people and they don’t want to change, sometimes mentioning the inconvenience.    Don’t you think we’d do better to think of the “inconvenience” to the investors who have been trusting us, who we are presently giving false guidance to for what to invest in? Continue reading Getting the incentives right requires redefining the units of measure →

For teachers, Natural systems, Research & Measures

A “Commons“ is…

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A “Commons“

….Is a place, where

An organic culture

defines and makes its home

  • as its defensible and public space
  • for its communities of participants

serving as a “hive” for its internal relationships

  • usually as inclusive and equitable interconnections
  • (everyone to everyone)

serving as a “hub” for its external relationships

  • with its local niche of  ecological partners
  • with its open environment
  • (exploratory connections)
  • with and networks of remote exclusive connections
  • (one to one)

As its “Niche” in the world and “living space”.

 … for example

A “body”   is a commons for its cells

  • But bodies are organized differently than their cells, each needing to be part of a different culture

A “town”   is a commons for its villagers

  • But every town develops from its unique circumstance, so the usual patterns associated with the words are really questions about the individual thing

A “nest”     is a commons for its family or swarm

  • Living things need to sleep, and make secure places where they can “tune out” at night, to reemerge refreshed.
  • and so too the organizations of a commons, that come to a rest at night, to awake refreshed by the reflections of rest.

The Earth   is a commons for life Continue reading A “Commons“ is… →

For teachers, Natural systems, Research & Measures, Scientific theory, Stories & Experiences

Tricky Reading – the Indicator & the Context

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From a conversation on the Commons Abundance Network.

 

Of course I agree a lot is solved by having it clear what you are using the word “growth” to refer to.   But it’s easier to figure out we *should* be clear about what is being referred to than to really do it.   It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating some “positive indicator” as the system, some changing number that “sounds nice” in name, to end up promoting something not knowing what the real situation is at all.

That’s exactly how the BAU approach to consuming the planet ever faster got off track, using a trusted set of indicators and not paying the least attention to how their meanings were changing radically over time.   So, that philosophy’s “mistake” was not paying attention to the whole system it was applying its values to.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating some “positive indicator”
as “the system”

False priorities develop are all over the place that way.  Giving relief wherever there is pain and suffering, for example, ignores that injecting artificial supports just skews the indicator.  It changes the ability of people to care for themselves in the wrong way, giving them dependencies rather than independence, and directly causes their own local cultures to become useless to them and decay.

to help you watch where you're going...

Continue reading Tricky Reading – the Indicator & the Context →

Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, Transformation, What to do

UN Development Goals… leave out Common Needs

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Report I. (below) 18 June – Comment to UN organizers of Final Report on MDG’s in dialog with Major Groups –  MDG solutions are not designed to hold, because the goals were defined as performance metrics not cultural growth and development.  JLH

Report II. (above) Comment to UN President, Member State Delegates and UN SDG agencies, on the UN Sustainable Development Goal Progress Reports of UN Agency and Stakeholder Groups – UN Development Goals… Leave out the common needs for a world that works as a whole:

  1. UN High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons, Report on the Post-2015 Development Agenda – May 2013
  2. UN Development Group: The Global Conversation Begins –  Emerging views for an new Development Agenda – June 2013
  3. United Nations NGO and Civil Society Stakeholder Forum Initial Stocking Taking Analysis of the SDGs eInventory – June 2013
  4. United Nations Global Compact: Report on UN Post-2015 Development Agenda
  5. Sustainable Development Solutions Network An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development – June 6 2013

by: Jessie Henshaw UN representative of Institute for Planetary Synthesis (IPS) & Science Adviser on natural systems to the NGO Commons Cluster – PDF copy (See related problem/solution discussions linked below)

 

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1 Jul 13 – Report II.

Left out are the deep common interests we ALL share, a secure world working together as a whole.

The progress reports on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals display an inspired cultural image of the future, but tragically omit the most important practical necessities of sustainability. Over time the discussion has drifted, toward being only about sustaining ideal economic development, quite overlooking the conflicting critical tasks of sustaining the Earth. It’s been thrilling to observe the process of dream weaving online, and in the many meetings I’ve attended at the UN.   There’s clearly been a massive response from the global social networks, and an eagerness to build a new vision for our future. The vision we see forming is highly impractical though.   For me, as a natural systems scientist who understands the implications, it has been extremely painful to watch as the discussion proceeded, with the critically important steps of sustainability being consistently left out.

Continue reading UN Development Goals… leave out Common Needs →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, What to do

“Active Learning” more than goals… For SDG’s we need to Rethink

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This is a copy of a requested comment on the UN NGO Major Group’s recommendations for the UN Post2015 Sustainable development goals, being developed by the UN Open Working Group (OWG) of member country representatives, guided by the UN’s consultants and representatives of civil society groups around the world.   It’s a really exciting thing to be part of…


Comments on draft NGO SDG framework Post 2015
on the SD Knowledge Platform site

I represented the NGO Commons Cluster at the major groups HLPF meeting, 1st OWG meeting and CIVICUS meetings at the UN in the past month.   I’m a natural systems scientist, and for decades have studied a type of physics for understanding why systems like economies are sometimes smoothly self-managing and then sometimes spin out of control.   I’m also active in CAUN.  For reference to what we are learning about how to apply commons principles to the SDG’s, see our 1) proposal for the UN to adopt the commons approach and our 2) draft “Ideal Model” for a global commons approach and for engaging civil society in solving SD problems.  These proposals were reposted to Post2015.org #1 & #2.

We have a lot of rethinking to do:
My main comment could go after pp #1:

A lot of rethinking is apparently needed, as current sustainability efforts are being ineffective, need to be brought into question and new direction found. There’s clear evidence of many kinds that after 40 years of mounting efforts there has been little appreciable effect on the course of the economy’s ever swelling strain on the earth’s resources and living systems. The one exception is unintentional, the current slowing rate of increasing impacts due to the slowing of world economic growth. That’s only from the failure of economic recoveries following the 2008 financial collapse.

So it appears, essentially, that **we don’t know what we’re doing yet**, and so need to take a more active learning approach rather than focus the effort at expanding on current methods, that now seem unproven. Promising new directions like a rejuvenated “commons approach” for facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration on common interests, are only just being explored. But we believe some way needs to be found to use the active engagement of civil society’s resources central to the world’s SDG framework, and to bridge the silos of thinking now keeping our solutions from changing our problem.

[the following notes would help with turning “needing to rethink” into an “active learning approach” for finding new direction. It comes from email comments on the evolving “commons approach”.] Continue reading “Active Learning” more than goals… For SDG’s we need to Rethink →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Popular, Research & Measures

Sustainability = growing profit then steady profit

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Posts on the UN NGO Week 4 Sustainability dialog for “WorldWeWant2015“ – Post II references Post I below it, and is in reply to Alison Doig, working with Christian Aid, Green Alliance, WWF, Greenpeace and RSPB to understand the nature of the relation between environmental sustainability, quoted at the bottom.  Alison lays out a set of simple but broad principles for sustainability, a preview of a longer paper, but missing key issues for working with the natural phases of developmental processes for environmental transformations.  jlh

See also Jan 2014 OWG7 proposed World SDG incorporating this principle and others

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Post II  Jessie Henshaw Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 1:00 pm

Alison,    Your approach seems quite sensible, but to be missing one of the key controlling variables for all these objectives.   That’s whether the improvements you seek are “by an accumulation of larger steps” or “by an accumulation of smaller steps”.   An accumulation of smaller steps is probably sustainable, and an accumulation of larger steps is necessary to get any process of change started, but quite unsustainable, is the interesting rub.

This distinction is also quite missing from the whole discussion, always has been actually, so you’re not to be faulted for overlooking it.   Still, it does in fact control whether any of the things we hope will be sustainable actually will be.   I’m a systems physicist and this is the subject I study, both how all sorts of development processes need to begin and end, and how easy it is for people to overlook the whole subject.  I’d very much like to work with you if you see how to build any of this into your report in progress.

As a matter of change over time, start-up development always needs to be divergent and expansive, a series of ever bigger steps, and maturing development always needs to be converging and self-limited, a series of ever smaller steps.  In-between the physical momentum of change builds and decays.

The natural succession of development phases

For the  “three dimensions of sustainability”, social, economic, and environmental, it applies to all three. Continue reading Sustainability = growing profit then steady profit →

Natural Economy, Policy discussion, Research & Measures

Why we’d need 8 Whole Earths by 2100

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We’ve largely used up or maximized our use of the good quality sources on earth, for lots of our critical resource needs.  It’s evident in their systematically rising prices, for one thing, but also in our rapidly declining rates of discovering new reserves, for half a century now!   We’ve “eaten the good stuff”, and still plan to find more and grow the economy as before.

a fact

So, not that you couldn’t use your shopping and profits for values far greater than just having more, of course,

BUT, to prosper by increasing our wealth as we have been,

It seems like it'd be a real joy! Just catch them with your radiant smile.

 

we need to

*Double* our total previous use of natural resources
three more times this century !

(like being the sorcerer’s apprentice)

It’s a detail overlooked by the world’s mainstream economists, and apparently nearly all the critics too.   Our present economic plans are to keep prospering as we did over the past two centuries.  That necessitates continuing to double of our resource uses every ~33 years in the future, then, or magical change only dreamed of.

It’s really ALL our long term professional economic modeling, all our long term environmental rehabilitation planning, such as responding to climate change, as well as all our long term government, finance and business plans, that “just assume” continued growing resource use as before.  Just to make the point clear,… our long term plan is not only to “make bricks without straw” but also to project making bricks without water or clay!

Why it not adds up to our really needing 8 whole earths by the end of the century has to do with the sneaky mathematical properties of doubling… sneaking up on our brains. In each doubling period everything changes as much as throughout all its prior history.   The oddest and most sneaky of all aspects of it, of course, is that this dilemma is quite real…

Even if we could find 7 more earths worth of resources as good as what we started with, it would actually end up just make our problems worse.   “Enjoying them” would then reasonably be expected to involve 7 times the impacts we’ve had on the beauty and sustainability of the earth too…!!   It also exposes the  madness of our well meaning hope to rely on growth to pay for reversing climate change!

These problems add to the evidence that the fundamental in-feasibility of our long term growth plan has avoided most everyone’s attention.   It’s not just “unlikely” that we’d keep finding many times the total amount of natural resources we’ve consumed before,… and that using them would have no effect.

You might as well be looking for an endless line of magical frogs to kiss.

Continue reading Why we’d need 8 Whole Earths by 2100 →

For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Policy discussion, Research & Measures, Transformation, What to do

It’s the student that creates the education

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Posts to the UN NGO Thematic Consultation on Education on how to measure and improve education for the Post2015 UN development goals.   My series of three comments focus on the tools a student needs to create their own educations… NOT on measuring the productive value of their educations for business.  We did that already, and overdid it.   It would do both students and society a great deal more good to look at the basic competencies offered, to see if students are getting the tools they need for exploring the world, like having competence in math, reading, and understanding ‘relationships’.

Productivity is often the assumed purpose of education, but has produced an unsustainable spoiling and depletion of the earth’s resources, now straining all its human and natural ecological systems.   So it’s our students who need the tools for guiding their own educations, to take us out of that dilemma created by the poor learning of their parents.

Schools and teachers should mainly be judged by their own peer and served communities, only measuring achievement in core competencies, and create a new core competency in “relationships“. Understanding relationships is a new essential competency for living in a world thrown into disarray by rapidly changing relationships of all kinds, caused by our prior vast misunderstanding the relationships between ourselves and the earth.

 

What he needs is the tools not the answers...

World We Want 2015 – Thematic Consultation – Education

Quality of Learning – Week 2 Questions

1.       1. How should learning outcomes be measured and how can measurement of learning improve education quality?

2. What would be your recommendations to address and improve the quality of education in the post MDG framework?

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I. E-Discussion TWO: Week 2 – Quality of Learning
JLH Tue, January 15, 2013 at 06:11 pm

1. Based on my understanding of quality of learning, the indicators used to measure learning outcomes should be:

  1. … kept simple.  We should only use unambiguous measures giving confidence in what is being measured, like “numeracy”, “literacy”,  “understanding relationships”, “understanding design”, i.e. rudimentary life skills. Continue reading It’s the student that creates the education →