Sunday, November 20, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
Climate Vulnerability
The global north is at lower risk of global warming impacts and is better placed to cope, than the global south; but globalization means we are all affected. When the world's nations convene in Durban in November in the latest attempt to inch towards a global deal to tackle climate change; one fundamental principle will, as ever, underlie the negotiations.
It is the contention that while rich, industrialized nations caused climate change through past carbon emissions; it is the developing world that is bearing the brunt. It follows from that, developing nations say, that the rich nations must therefore pay to enable the developing nations to both develop cleanly and adapt to the impacts of global warming.
The point is starkly illustrated in a new map of climate vulnerability (above): the rich global north has low vulnerability, the poor global south has high vulnerability. The map (produced by risk analysts Maplecroft) combines measures of the risk of climate change impacts - such as storms, floods, and droughts - with the social and financial ability of both communities and governments to cope.
But it is not until you go all the way down to 103 on the list, out of 193 nations, that you encounter the first major developed nation: Greece. The first 102 nations are all developing ones. Italy is next, at 124, and like Greece ranks relatively highly due to the risk of drought. The UK is at 178 and the country on Earth least vulnerable to climate change, according to Maplecroft, is Iceland.
The vulnerability index has been calculated down to a resolution of 25 square kilometers; and Beldon says at this scale the vulnerability of the developing world's fast growing cities becomes clear: "A lot of big cities have developed in exposed areas such as flood plains, and in developing economies they don't have the capacity to adapt."
Of the world's 20 fastest growing cities, six are classified as 'extreme risk' by Maplecroft; including Calcutta in India, Manila in the Philippines, Jakarta in Indonesia and Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia also features. A further 10 are rated as 'high risk' including Guangdong, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Karachi and Lagos.
China, the world's workshop, sits almost exactly halfway in the vulnerability index at 98 out of 193. That's appropriate, as China now sits awkwardly between the nations getting rich on carbon emissions and those suffering from its effects. And that's the other major contention that will underpin the UN climate talks in Durban.
It is the contention that while rich, industrialized nations caused climate change through past carbon emissions; it is the developing world that is bearing the brunt. It follows from that, developing nations say, that the rich nations must therefore pay to enable the developing nations to both develop cleanly and adapt to the impacts of global warming.
The point is starkly illustrated in a new map of climate vulnerability (above): the rich global north has low vulnerability, the poor global south has high vulnerability. The map (produced by risk analysts Maplecroft) combines measures of the risk of climate change impacts - such as storms, floods, and droughts - with the social and financial ability of both communities and governments to cope.
But it is not until you go all the way down to 103 on the list, out of 193 nations, that you encounter the first major developed nation: Greece. The first 102 nations are all developing ones. Italy is next, at 124, and like Greece ranks relatively highly due to the risk of drought. The UK is at 178 and the country on Earth least vulnerable to climate change, according to Maplecroft, is Iceland.
The vulnerability index has been calculated down to a resolution of 25 square kilometers; and Beldon says at this scale the vulnerability of the developing world's fast growing cities becomes clear: "A lot of big cities have developed in exposed areas such as flood plains, and in developing economies they don't have the capacity to adapt."
Of the world's 20 fastest growing cities, six are classified as 'extreme risk' by Maplecroft; including Calcutta in India, Manila in the Philippines, Jakarta in Indonesia and Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia also features. A further 10 are rated as 'high risk' including Guangdong, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Karachi and Lagos.
China, the world's workshop, sits almost exactly halfway in the vulnerability index at 98 out of 193. That's appropriate, as China now sits awkwardly between the nations getting rich on carbon emissions and those suffering from its effects. And that's the other major contention that will underpin the UN climate talks in Durban.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Creativity Bias
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it? Research to be published reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people. The studies' findings include:
· Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
· People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical - tried and true.
· Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
· Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea. For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe, equipped with nanotechnology, which adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters.
To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias - the kind to which people may not want to admit, such as racism. Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as "vomit," "poison" and "agony." This bias caused subjects to reject ideas for new products that were novel and high quality.
The findings imply a deep irony. Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity; perhaps when we need it most. The existence, and nature, of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements; even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas, to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.
· Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
· People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical - tried and true.
· Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
· Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea. For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe, equipped with nanotechnology, which adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters.
To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias - the kind to which people may not want to admit, such as racism. Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as "vomit," "poison" and "agony." This bias caused subjects to reject ideas for new products that were novel and high quality.
The findings imply a deep irony. Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity; perhaps when we need it most. The existence, and nature, of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements; even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas, to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Gaming Sustainability
Collaboration, urgent optimism, committed focus - these are the skills and qualities needed in humans to solve sustainability’s biggest challenges and, as it turns out, also the most minor of missions belonging to Azeroth in the online video game “World of Warcraft.”
While game worlds such as Azeroth may be fictional, the real abilities of its eleven-million-plus community to band together and solve a relentless onslaught of problems are beginning to attract a growing number of researchers interested in how online games might be changing human behavior. But, what does this mean for sustainability? A small number of games recently created to engage players in earthly environments - worlds that lack sufficient supplies of water, oil and food - point to an inherent power online games have in the discourse of sustainability: virtual reality or, in sustainability’s case, virtual futurity.
In her 2010 TED Talk about the power of games to solve real-world problems, Jane McGonigal, a game designer, researcher and author of “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” says that if humans want to survive another century on Earth, we will need to start playing more games. In other words, if the role of sustainability is to plan for the future, then researchers like McGonigal believe that playing games - and designing specially tailored games for us to play -will help us better experience and co-design that future.
Having a hard time envisioning what an oil shortage would be like? Well, there’s a game for that. Created in 2007, in part by McGonigal, “World Without Oil” is a game that challenges its players to survive an oil shortage. The aim of the game is to blur the line between the real world and a virtual one where oil has become scarce. “The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil,” McGonigal says.
The game forces players to think about how their everyday actions are connected to a complex web of processes. In a world without oil, gamers are able to see firsthand scarcity’s rippling effects: impacts from the oil shortage extend beyond figuring out how to get to work and into more dicey areas such as food supply, where food transportation is affected by oil scarcity. The 1,700 gamers who signed up to play “World Without Oil” left in their wake blog posts, video posts and photos documenting their adventures and how their experiences have translated to their real-world lives.
In another game created by McGonigal at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research center specializing in long-term forecasting, “SuperStruct” engaged 8,000 gamers over an eight-week period to come up with solutions to sustain human life on Earth. Under the fictional premise that humans had only 23 years left to live, the game’s players came up with 500 solutions for the human species to endure. When did games become so serious? Decades after the term “serious game” came into use, the Serious Game Initiative formed in 2002 to encourage the production of games that do more than entertain, but rather are intended to address issues with major policy or management implications.
It wasn’t until last year, though, that games began to really earn some cultural capital. In 2010, McGonigal’s “Evoke“ - a social network game to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to urgent social problems” - was commissioned by the World Bank Institute. And most recently, the academic journal Nature published its first paper co-authored by an online gaming community.
Studies show that gamers play for a variety of reasons and that “escapism” and “entertainment” often rank lower on the list than one might expect. Typically, there is not a lot of fun involved in scarcity and behavioral modification, two of sustainability’s greatest - and linked - challenges. Changing one’s mind and routines is no easy feat. It’s also notoriously easy for us as humans to shrug off the complexity and weight of our decisions, especially if we can’t see what is at stake. An inability to conceptualize scarcity might be as threatening as scarcity itself.
The future is hard to predict. And while the power of games as a social platform remains unclear, it’s easy to see that alternate game worlds will increasingly affect how humans participate and interact in the real world. How humans choose to respond to the development of virtual worlds could very well affect our chances of achieving an epic win in the real one.
A massive multiplayer game where thousands of people play at any time, “World of Warcraft” requires at least five to 20 players for a single challenge. Why? James Gee, a professor at Arizona State University studying situated learning in games, says it’s because the problems in “World of Warcraft” are too complex for just one person to take on. “It’s an extremely complicated world,” Gee says. “Essentially, this game is controlling hundreds of variables that interact with each other statistically to give the outcomes of the decisions you make.”
While game worlds such as Azeroth may be fictional, the real abilities of its eleven-million-plus community to band together and solve a relentless onslaught of problems are beginning to attract a growing number of researchers interested in how online games might be changing human behavior. But, what does this mean for sustainability? A small number of games recently created to engage players in earthly environments - worlds that lack sufficient supplies of water, oil and food - point to an inherent power online games have in the discourse of sustainability: virtual reality or, in sustainability’s case, virtual futurity.
In her 2010 TED Talk about the power of games to solve real-world problems, Jane McGonigal, a game designer, researcher and author of “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” says that if humans want to survive another century on Earth, we will need to start playing more games. In other words, if the role of sustainability is to plan for the future, then researchers like McGonigal believe that playing games - and designing specially tailored games for us to play -will help us better experience and co-design that future.
Having a hard time envisioning what an oil shortage would be like? Well, there’s a game for that. Created in 2007, in part by McGonigal, “World Without Oil” is a game that challenges its players to survive an oil shortage. The aim of the game is to blur the line between the real world and a virtual one where oil has become scarce. “The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil,” McGonigal says.
The game forces players to think about how their everyday actions are connected to a complex web of processes. In a world without oil, gamers are able to see firsthand scarcity’s rippling effects: impacts from the oil shortage extend beyond figuring out how to get to work and into more dicey areas such as food supply, where food transportation is affected by oil scarcity. The 1,700 gamers who signed up to play “World Without Oil” left in their wake blog posts, video posts and photos documenting their adventures and how their experiences have translated to their real-world lives.
In another game created by McGonigal at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research center specializing in long-term forecasting, “SuperStruct” engaged 8,000 gamers over an eight-week period to come up with solutions to sustain human life on Earth. Under the fictional premise that humans had only 23 years left to live, the game’s players came up with 500 solutions for the human species to endure. When did games become so serious? Decades after the term “serious game” came into use, the Serious Game Initiative formed in 2002 to encourage the production of games that do more than entertain, but rather are intended to address issues with major policy or management implications.
It wasn’t until last year, though, that games began to really earn some cultural capital. In 2010, McGonigal’s “Evoke“ - a social network game to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to urgent social problems” - was commissioned by the World Bank Institute. And most recently, the academic journal Nature published its first paper co-authored by an online gaming community.
Studies show that gamers play for a variety of reasons and that “escapism” and “entertainment” often rank lower on the list than one might expect. Typically, there is not a lot of fun involved in scarcity and behavioral modification, two of sustainability’s greatest - and linked - challenges. Changing one’s mind and routines is no easy feat. It’s also notoriously easy for us as humans to shrug off the complexity and weight of our decisions, especially if we can’t see what is at stake. An inability to conceptualize scarcity might be as threatening as scarcity itself.
The future is hard to predict. And while the power of games as a social platform remains unclear, it’s easy to see that alternate game worlds will increasingly affect how humans participate and interact in the real world. How humans choose to respond to the development of virtual worlds could very well affect our chances of achieving an epic win in the real one.
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