BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Evaluation of externalities. The corporate ecological footprint: MC3 methodology and application
Ingrid Mateo Mantecón Departamento de Economía,Universidad de Cantabria
This communication presents an analysis of the main results of the calculation of the ecological footprint and carbon footprint (or CO2 emissions into the atmosphere) produced by the economic activity of a Port Authority of the North Coast of Spain, using a compound financial accounts method (MC3). Furthermore, the results will be compared with those obtained for Gijón Port Authority in 2006. For the Spanish port authorities, environmental protection and sustainable development are a commitment and part of their strategic actions. Some eco-efficiency indicators for the companies under analysis are also calculated,compared and analyzed.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Social Preferences about Climate Change: Evidence from Spain
Prof. Maria Loureiro
Associate Professor at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Spain faces a complex situation regarding its climate change policies. On the one hand, greenhouse gas emissions have shown an important increase since 1990, being far from the Kyoto commitments. On the other hand, Spain is likely to suffer important impacts from climate change. However, there has been a rather limited application of corrective policies, particularly in the field of energy prices. Indeed, although Spanish citizens generally show a large concern towards climate change, price increases in energy goods have been traditionally opposed. In this paper we try to offer an explanation to this phenomenon, and a possible hint for future policies in the field, by showing how Spanish households strongly favour the application of energy programs that makes electricity and car fuels more expensive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The article presents the basic results from the application of a contingent valuation survey that provides information on households’ willingness to pay and attitudes regarding different alternatives to reduce greenhouse gases.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Iberian forests against global change: projected impacts and adaptation mechanisms
Prof. Miguel A. Zavala
Director CIFOR-INIA
Global Change is one of the main threats for the maintenance of biological diversity and key ecosystem services. In Spain, land use transformations and climate change are two main drivers of Global Change. During the 1990-2000 period, land use changes have driven an important reconfiguration of forest areas, including a slightly decrease in forest surface and an increase in fragmentation (OSE, 2007). Aside from this, changes in phenology and species distribution have also been documented and are caused by climate change (Peñuelas y Boada 2003). Forecasting the future, a drastic decrease in potential forest occupation area is predicted, especially for mountainous species, together with a progressive decrease in productivity in middle and South Iberian peninsula (OSE 2007; Benito Garzón et al. 2008), Bioclimatic models provide a first approach to the study of species under a changing climate, but they avoid key biological mechanisms such as local adaptation, plasticity or the species dispersal capabilities. First, forest species can have an intra-specific genetic variability, as a consequence of their movements since last glaciations (Hampe y Petit, 2005). Therefore, preliminary results show how local adaptation can derive into important intra-specific divergences in the forest species response to climate change. Equally, in distribution models, the species dispersal capability provides more realistic estimations for the species distribution. Stochastic plot occupation models (SPOM) parameterized with more than 70,000 observation points from the second and third National Forestry Inventories (IFN) (which differ in a temporal gap of approximately 10 years) suggest that fragmentation bears to a significant decrease in the number of species as related to species distribution model results. However, it also shows that specific dispersion paths are related to an increase in the community resilience (Montoya et al. 2008). Finally, we discuss the relevance of conservation and restoration strategies in ecosystems as key policies that can lead to counteract the effects of global change effects (Rey Benayas et al., 2009). Particularly, the development of models that allow us to add critical thresholds to the resilience of communities with the aim of assuring the restoration success and optimizing conservation strategies.
Cafe Cientifico: Biodiversidad, que es y por qué conservarla
Cafe Científico
"Biodiversidad, que es y por qué conservarla"
Dra. Elena Ojea
En esta tertulia los investigadores hablarán sobre qué es la biodiversidad como concepto y cuáles son sus componentes; desde las grandes especies y ecosistemas como elefantes y desiertos, a comunidades casi desconocidas pero imprescindibles para la vida como las bacterias intestinales.
Trataremos los motivos que históricamente se han argüido para su conservación y puesta en valor, y como estos han ido cambiando con el tiempo y descubriremos por qué el mantenimiento de una sociedad como la nuestra depende directa e indirectamente de la biodiverisdad y qué efecto tendría perder una u otra especie aparentemente insignificante.
KLIMAGUNE CONFERENCES 2011
Klimagune Conferences
"Workshop 2011: Multidisciplinary views of Climate Change"
The Klimagune Conferences initiative involves a series of lectures through which the aim is to incorporate multidisciplinary insights and viewpoints into the debate on Climate Change, thereby helping to create a society that is more and better informed regarding the collective venture of social and economic development from a sustainable perspective.
The purpose of these lectures is to help create a Basque society that is better informed and more aware of Climate Change through the contributions made from complementary standpoints by leading experts who pursue their work in this field.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Flexibility in Engineering Design: Creating Value in Technological Enterprises Using Flexibility to Exploit Uncertainties
Richard de Neufville
Prof. of Engineering Systems and of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Aggregative Environmental Games
Prof. Richard Cornes
Professor of Economics and F H Gruen Chair in Economics, Research School of Economics, Australian National University
At the heart of the subdiscipline of environmental economics is a judgement, shared by this author, that even in the absence of the other standard sources of "market failure", a decentralized market equilibrium is likely to be inefficient as a consequence of various externalities, or spillovers, that are generated by production and consumption activities. These links, that are not mediated through the system of voluntary exchange, and may be variously categorized as pollution, congestion, resource depletion, over-exploitation, have quantitatively significant implications for human welfare. The tasks of environmental economists include the attempts to quantify these externalities, explore their role in generating inefficient equilibria, and to suggest implementable mechanisms that overcome, or at least mitigate, the inefficiency. This paper is concerned with the issue of how best to analyze situations involving reciprocal externalities. I consider two basic models, and various extensions of those models. The first - the voluntary pure public good contribution model - captures the essential features of situations involving positive, or beneficial, reciprocal externalities. The second - the open access resource model, or the tragedy of the commons - captures the essential features of situations involving negative, or detrimental, reciprocal externalities.
BC3 Seminar: Synergy between organic waste management by composting and agronomy to reduce greenhouse gases emissions
Prof.Raul Moral
Catedrático Edafología y Química Agrícola - Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche
The general topic of this seminar is around the role of organic waste management by composting as a key tool to balance the emission of agricultural GHG and as a way to restore fertility of the soils and enhance C sinks in Mediterranean soils. Exploring the potential role in intensive agriculture of substitution of perlite and peat substrates by high quality compost will be presented as an example of case study.
KLIMAGUNE 2011
Workshop 2011: Addressing Climate Change through Adaptation
The second edition of the Klimagune Workshop is to be held on Friday, 6 May, at the Euskalduna Conference Centre in Bilbao, under the heading: “Addressing Climate Change through Adaptation”. The event will consist of a plenary session and three work sessions that will focus on the Marine & Coastal Environment (‘Kresala’), the Land Environment (‘Garoa’) and the Urban Environment (‘Hiria’).
The common denominator underpinning the contributions made to this Workshop is Adapting to Climate Change.
The Plenary Session will introduce a Keynote Speaker of considerable international renown, namely, Prof. Klaus Hasselmann, the highly respected German physicist and mathematician, founder of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and author of the fingerprinting method, which allows distinguishing between natural climate variability and the disturbance caused by the increase in greenhouse gases.
Prof. Hasselmann will deliver the speech “The challenge of Climatic Change”.
Klimagune Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on Climate Change, open to all the agents in the Basque Science and Technology Network. The aim of this initiative is to share knowledge, projects and developments in terms of scientific advancements, based on the creation of synergies and possible frameworks for cooperation between the various research groups, organisations and institutions that address this matter. The first edition was held in May 2010 under the heading, “Klimagune 2010: Updating Climate Change Research in the Basque Country” and was attended by over 100 delegates from the Basque science network.
Following the suggestions made by those attending the first edition of the Klimagune Workshop in 2010, a scientific committee has been set up for this year’s Klimagune Workshop 2011 with a view to including those aspects required to imbue this new initiative with a multi-disciplinary and participatory approach.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Looking into the future of water and agriculture
Dr. Ana Iglesias
Department of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
This presentation analyses the broad question of how climate change science may provide some insights about the future for agriculture. It presents and defends three assertions aimed at exploring the future of agriculture in a changing climate. (1) Understanding the uncertain impacts of climate change is useful for facing agricultural challenges. (2) Understanding and reducing vulnerability does not demand accurate predictions of the impacts of climate change. (3) It is politically difficult to justify vulnerability reduction on economic grounds. Pressures on land and water resources are expected to intensify the existing risks in low latitude areas and in regions with current water scarcity, and create new opportunities in some northern temperate areas. We show that global change is a major source of uncertainty for today’s vulnerable societies and that adaptation to uncertain conditions is a challenge as climate change comes in conjunction with high development pressure, increasing populations, water management that is already facing conflicts and agricultural systems that are often not adapted (any more) to local conditions. These two aspects are evaluated across world regions to synthesise the reasons for concern for agriculture and provide some thoughts on policy development.
