Risk Assessment, Risk Management, and a Sustainable Biosphere

Risk Assessment, Risk Management, and a Sustainable Biosphere

We’re gonna have to kick off this one with a manifesto. Because all the people with all the easy answers about “sustainability” are really starting to piss me off. All we have to do is count carbon, or price nonmarkets, or get the polluter to pay, or… . Blahblahblahblahblahblahblah.

From the ecosystem perspective, there is in fact an “easy answer”. It is that the ecosystem doesn’t give a rat’s ass what’s in it. The living components reflect the physics and chemistry, and vice versa. We know from research into the extremes of life that pretty much the hottest, coldest, driest, wettest, most toxic, most intensely difficult environments are gonna have life in them. It’s just not going to be “life” that is a high-quality environment for human beings. And THAT’S the fundamental problem of “sustainability”. It’s a quality-of-life problem. Squarely in the category of issues that are inherently complicated, difficult, and matters of judgment. Which is to say: without easy (or simple, or univariate, or objective) answers.

We’ll come back to this repeatedly because it’s important. The Carvaka of ancient India, materialist counterweight to the caste-and-transcendence-driven mainstream Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist philosophies, believed that we only get one shot at heaven or hell, and it’s our time on earth. That’s it. No afterlife, no postponed happiness, no deal to be made with god, God, or gods. Either we build a little more heaven into life, or a little more hell, but it’s our choice and we have to do it now. This may be the ultimate philosophical foundation for thinking about a sustainable biosphere.

Thus the following manifesto.

“Sustainability,” as I remind students at the start of every course, is the single most important aspect of human life.  Everything else—everything—is contingent on us having a future as a species.  Absent sustainability, nothing else matters.  Absent sustainability, the game of existence proceeds without us.

It is not a game we are guaranteed to win, or even have a seat at the table. Malthus and Darwin showed how convoluted was our path to the casino. Jared Diamond pointed out how easy it is to let our focus drift from the cards in play, and the consequences of doing so. Stephen Jay Gould gave us the cold reality that even if we’re good, we can still lose big-time.

The actuarial capital that is the currency of life on earth is, like money on a poker table, finite.  A specific pot of resources is distributed among component pools. In a poker game, the sum is apportioned among each player’s stake, the ante, the pot, and any side bets. In the course of an evening’s game, the component pools expand and contract but the total in play is a universal constraint. It is the quintessential zero-sum game.

As is human management of the biosphere. Until recently, the environmental assessment and management process seemed more akin to an open system, with matter, energy and money input from other endeavors, and the results defining the forward interface of “humanity” and the “ecosystem”. But it was a grand illusion. For one thing, we tended to discount everyday wear and tear and even more drastic environmental impacts from the list of things we considered “management”. After all, we didn’t plan those things, and we didn’t account for the investments that drove them. But “management” it was (and is), unfortunately by default rather than design. For another, we didn’t appreciate the holistic nature of the biosphere and the intricately hierarchical connections within and among global ecologic, social, and economic enterprises.

When the field of systems ecology was at its peak--from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s—“development” was something human society did to the ecosystem, and “economics” was the tool we used to do it. Environmental and social amenities were perceived as add-ons that reduced economic returns. But times have changed. Planning and preparation for internationally-funded developments now encompass environmental, social, and economic sustainability as integral components of a single whole. Far from being financial negatives, sustainability planning lets capital investment flow and increases value and return. We have kicked the zero-sum aspect of development projects up several notches in the systems hierarchy. No longer is investment in environment taking resources from economic and social outcomes. Now, environment, social, and economic components are integral to the finite pool of development resources. We allocate to the best of wholly-integrated projects, and the residual zero-sum is the integrated global resource pool from which we select each allocation.

Similar principles pertain to other activities affecting the environment. Manufacturing, mineral and water extraction, transportation, communication, and associated infrastructure are crafted by weaving connected environmental, social, and economic threads from common skeins. To our credit as human society, we have to some degree gotten past the need to argue over whether or not sustainability is part of a project. Now, arguments are more likely over what, how, when, and where sustainability is built-in.

But an important step remains. That is for us to understand and act on the basis of a zero-sum pool of resources that pertains to all the diverse environmental management decisions we make as a global society. We have to think objectively, prioritize effectively, and consider before reacting. And we have to acknowledge that however remote and independent two different actions seem, they are in fact connected in important ways. 

For example, many publicly traded transnational energy and petrochemicals companies issue reports describing citizenship, sustainability, and “green” aspects of business. Exigencies of the present day are such that long-term operations in the developing world cannot be conducted on a fast turnaround, low-overhead basis. In Africa, one company (let’s call it “XYZ Inc.” since this research was done from public sources without their acknowledgement or permission) now invests in permanent public health, medical, education, transportation, environmental, and social infrastructure and support systems in the communities in which it operates. It is not cynical to point out that altruism is not the primary objective of this for-profit exercise of capital investment. The company depends on healthy, skilled, content, competitively productive workers for its operations. It takes considerable community investment to get them.

But that investment is contingent. The zero-sum resource pool at the highest levels of the biosphere hierarchy includes private and public sector capital, and the linkages among environmental, social, and economic elements pertain across all categories. What this means in simple terms is that risk assessors and risk managers must get it right. Let’s consider a scenario in which XYZ Inc., despite state-of-the-art engineering controls and a deep commitment to health and safety, suffers a release of a feedstock chemical to a nearby waterway. The waterway is a tidal estuary in an urban setting, the chemical is a moderately toxic and moderately bioaccumulative compound called HHH (“hypohexagonalhalomine”?) and a considerable quantity of it is now in the sediments. Risk assessors project a high probability of ecosystem recovery if HHH concentrations are reduced to an average of 100 ppm by mass in the sediment, risk managers design a cleanup to that concentration at a cost of $1 million.

That $1 million is a sound investment in overall environmental sustainability based on the risk assessment findings. If, however, the cleanup is based not on the risk assessment, but on a nondegradation or zero-residual standard on aesthetic grounds, or to a much lower concentration threshold based on hypothetical toxicological concerns not supported by scientific evidence, XYZ Inc. might double, treble, or quadruple the cleanup expense (with no risk-reduction return on the increased investment). As a practical matter of real-world outcomes, the zero-residual and hypothetical risk-based remediation scenarios implicitly rank low-risk levels of HHH in estuarine sediments as worthy of investment at the expense of public health and education at the upstream end of the XYZ Inc. global footprint.

And, because XYZ Inc. products are widely available at retail, that global footprint belongs to all of us. We are all “the polluter”, just as we are all the consumers who drive XYZ Inc. to seek raw materials in Africa. Human society today is knitted together by communications, transportation, and financial linkages, and those linkages extend to all aspects of the ecosystem and thus the biosphere. It is not “precautionary” to assume that one factor in isolation, say HHH contamination in estuarine sediments, warrants management beyond that driven by rational scientific and engineering analysis. A properly applied precautionary principle allocates management resources based on objective evaluation to yield the greatest net positive outcome from the universe of potential activities clamoring for our attention. It is not as simple to think or say as a categorical, one-parameter-at-a-time statement of a “precautionary principle.” But the fact is that the biosphere is not simple. Our management decisions must deal with that reality.