The main objective of the report is to analyze the current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory process in Romania, and provide recommendations for improving the system in order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of inventory development in compliance with United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) and European Union (EU) requirements, including emissions forecasting provisions. This report describes the GHG inventory process and its history, analyzes the legal framework, documents and information provisions, and flows related to making the inventory together with identifying the potential adjustments for improvement, assess reporting entities and correlation mechanisms to economic dynamics, in terms of completeness, coherence, response time constant to changes in the number of companies' impact on data reporting, and provides recommendations on the possibility to improve the inventory-making process in order to meet the requirements of emission projections. The report is organized into seven sections as follows: section one provides a general introduction to GHG inventories. Section two examines the processes and procedures used in the present GHG inventory system in Romania and the alignment of this system with international frameworks including the framework for the development of environmental statistics (FDES) and the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) schematic framework. Section three elaborates the challenges with the existing greenhouse inventory process including data gaps and weaknesses in the statistical infrastructure. Section four looks at the international and national legal requirements for greenhouse gas inventories. Section five provides analysis on the flow of information and the specific verification points to ensure data consistency and coherence. Section six provides a number of recommendations and concludes in section seven with a summary of key recommendations.
E-waste is a generic term comprising all electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) that have been disposed of by their original users, and includes everything from large household appliances, such as refrigerators, microwave ovens, television sets, and computers, to hand-held digital apparatuses, cell phones and toys. E-waste is today the fastest growing sector of the municipal solid waste stream and currently comprises more than 5% of its total flow, which is equivalent to 20-50 million tones a year worldwide. These enormous quantities in combination with the fact that e-waste contains a wide range of hazardous compounds have turned e-waste into a global environmental issue. When the e-waste is taken care of, either in general waste processes or in recycling processes, these hazardous compounds may be released and thereby become a threat to humans and the environment. In addition, in some processes used, new hazardous compounds, such as dioxins, may be formed as the original e-waste components are degraded. Consequently, to avoid serious impacts on human health and the environment it is crucial to ensure that e-waste is properly taken care of, all the way from collection and handling through recycling and disposal. However, e-waste also contains several valuable components, such as precious metals and various plastics that may be profitable to extract during the end-of-life treatment processes. This adds an economical incentive to process e-waste adequately. The best option, both from an environmental and a recovery efficiency point of view, is unquestionably to recycle the e-waste in modern recycling facilities using state-of–the–art technologies with efficient emission control systems. However, due to insufficient legislation and recycling collection systems in many countries, this option is seldom practiced, when seen on a global scale. Instead a large part of the e-waste generated in the world is sent, mostly illegally, to developing countries such as, China, India, Nigeria and Ghana, where the ewaste is disassembled by poor people using rudimentary methods, in the hunt for valuable materials. Another large fraction of the e-waste generated in the world is treated as general municipal solid waste, and is thus incinerated in waste incineration facilities or just put on landfills. Only a minor fraction (around 10%) is treated in recycling facilities adapted for its purpose. Even if all end-of-life treatment processes creates emissions of hazardous compounds, that may have negative impacts on human health and the environment, some processes are worse than others. This report summarizes and compares the hazards and risks that may arise in different processes. The compounds of concern are several and include organic as well as inorganic compounds. The organic compounds include various brominated flame retardants, brominated and chlorinated dioxins (PCDD/Fs and PBDD/Fs), brominated and chlorinated benzenes and phenols, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and naphthalenes (PCNs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), nonylphenol, organophosphorus flame retardants, phthalate esters and freons. The inorganic compounds include antimony, arsenic, asbestos, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, tin, yttrium, and zinc. Some are of concern because they are very toxic and other mainly because they are very abundant in e-waste. There are also some more discrete chemicals present in ewaste that may be of concern. These are liquid crystals from liquid crystal displays (LCDs), toner dust from toner cartridges and nanonparticles from various products. The components and materials that are of most concern are: printed circuit boards (PC-boards), batteries, cathode ray tubes (CRTs), LCDs, plastics, PCB-containing capacitors, equipment containing freons, toner cartridges and various mercury containing components. Most risks arise during the uncontrolled e-waste recycling activities that occur in developing countries, and are results of the rudimentary methods used. These include manual disassembly and sorting; heating and acid leaching of printed circuit boards (PC-boards); shredding, melting and extrusion of plastics; open burning of plastic coated wires and other components; and sweeping and collection of toners from toner cartridges. These activities are mostly carried out directly on the ground in open air or in poorly ventilated workshops, and involve minimal emission control systems and personal protection for the workers. Humans and the environment in the areas where this is carried out may therefore be highly exposed to the emissions generated. The recycling workers and the local residents are particularly exposed via dust generated during dismantling and shredding processes, and fumes and smoke generated during acid digestion processes and various high temperature processes, such as open burnings and heating, melting, and extrusion processes. The environment is mainly contaminated from the open burning processes and through leakage from dumped residues of various recycling activities, e.g. stripped cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and PC-boards, spent acids from the digestion processes and residual ashes. The compounds of most concern during these activities vary depending on the material being recycled and the methods used. However, on the whole, lead seems to be particularly problematic among the metals, and dioxins (chlorinated and brominated) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) among the organic compounds. These compounds are all very toxic and may potentially be emitted in large amounts during rudimentary e-waste recycling activities. Lead and PBDEs because they both are highly abundant in e-waste, and dioxins because the formation conditions many times are ideal in the processes used. As a consequence, extremely high levels (in some cases the highest ever measured) of these compounds have been measured in environmental as well as human samples collected in areas where uncontrolled e-waste recycling is taking place. These have also been connected to various negative health effects observed among the people in these areas. Regarding the dioxins, it seems like the brominated and the mixed brominated/chlorinated congeners contribute to the total dioxin-like toxicity to at least the same extent as the purely chlorinated congeners, which is important to remember as most monitoring campaigns only include analyses of chlorinated dioxins. Furthermore, there are convincing evidences that the emissions from the uncontrolled e-waste recycling industry are contributing significantly to the regional as well as the global pollution for some compounds. Risks also arise when e-waste is treated as general municipal solid waste. During incineration, a wide variety of hazardous compounds may be emitted to the atmosphere via the smoke and exhaust gases, both in gaseous form and bound to particles. The compounds emitted may be those that were present in the original waste, but probably more important are those compounds that may be formed during the incineration processes, e.g. PCDD/Fs and PBDD/Fs. This is because the e-waste, being a complex fuel, may function as precursors for many different compounds in thermal processes. In fact, the conditions for dioxin formation are many times ideal when e-waste is incinerated, which is partly due to the presence of PVC-plastics and BFRs as dioxin precursors and partly due to the presence of copper and antimony as very potent catalysts in the transformation reactions. In modern incineration facilities the emission of these and other compounds may be minimized by process optimization and flue gas treatment systems. However, during open burning of e-waste, as occurs in many developing countries, the emissions may be substantial. Besides dioxins, a number of other pollutants are emitted in large quantities, e.g. PAHs, various chlorinated and brominated compounds and several metals, including lead, copper, antimony, zinc, tin, arsenic, nickel, chromium, cadmium, barium and beryllium. In addition to the atmospheric emissions, hazardous compounds may leak from the residual ashes to the ground and to aquifers in the surroundings. However, this has so far been scarcely investigated. During landfilling, hazardous compounds may leak to the surrounding environments, including nearby surface water and groundwater reservoirs, and also evaporate to the atmosphere. Leakage may occur for most compounds in the waste due to the long time spans involved, but of particular concern are the leakage of lead and various other metals, as well as PBDEs and phthalate plasticizers. Evaporation mainly occurs for volatile compounds, of which mercury and its methylated derivatives are of most concern. The extent of leakage and evaporation from a landfill depends on the properties of the contaminants in question, but also on the design of the landfill (i.e. if it is open or sealed), the properties of the material being stored (e.g. type of waste, if it has been pre-treated in some way etc.), and on various environmental factors (such as the ambient temperature and pH and humic content in the infiltrating water). Recycling under controlled conditions that are carried out in facilities adapted for its purpose is much better from a risk perspective point of view, both for the recycling workers, the local residents, and for the environment. However, risks may occur during these activities as well. For the workers, the largest risk is to be exposed to dust during dismantling, shredding and separation of the e-waste as well as during the subsequent pyrometallurgical processes. In addition, workers may be exposed to volatile compounds, such as mercury, that may be accidentally released during breakage of components in which these compounds are encapsulated. For the environment and the general population, the largest risks arises during the pyrometallurgical processes and during other high temperature processes, such as those used during plastic recycling and incineration of residual waste (justified in the recycling industry as energy recovery). During these, substantial amounts of PCDD/Fs and PBDD/Fs as well as other chlorinated and brominated compounds may be emitted, and in case of the pyrometallurgical processes, a wide range of metals (similar to the once emitted from uncontrolled processes) may also be emitted. Even if these emissions should be possible to minimize by using optimized processes together with modern dust containment and flue gas treatment systems, existing emission data indicate that this is not always satisfactorily done. Significant levels of several compounds have thus been found in and around some of these facilities. From this, it can be concluded that there is no completely safe end-of-life process available to deal with the e-waste of today. Controlled recycling is much better than uncontrolled recycling, incineration or landfilling, but hazards and risks will occur in all cases. This is simply a consequence of the multitude of hazardous compounds that are present in e-waste. To reduce the risks further, cleaner products containing less hazardous compounds have to be produced. Furthermore, to solve the e-waste problem in a wider perspective, the quantities of e-waste generated have to be reduced. Besides by decreasing the consumption, products with greater life-spans that are safer and easier to repair, upgrade and recycle have to be developed. The ultimate goal must be to ensure that the quantities of e-waste generated are minimized, and that the e-waste which does arise is recycled and disposed of in the best achievable manner to minimize impacts on human health and the environment.
Aquest treball a fi de Màster, conté l'inventari d'emissions de diòxid de carboni, òxids de nitrogen, òxids de sofre, monòxid de carboni i hidrocarburs totals i combustible consumit, dels vols que parteixen des de l'aeroport internacional El Dorada en Bogotà Colòmbia durant els anys 2009 a 2019 d'acord a lo establer per al document EMEP/EEA air pollutant emission inventory guidebook 2019, específicament el volum 1.A.3. a Aviation, addicionalment es va realitzar una projecció del consum de combustible i emissions de diòxid de carboni fins l'any 2050 d'acord a cinc escenaris plantejats pel Comitè de Protecció Ambiental pertanyent a l'Organització Internacional d'Aviació Civil. La informació que s'ha utilitzat per a l'inventari d'emissions, va se la base de dades tràfic per equip de la Aeronàutica Civil, aquesta base de dades conté el registre d'operacions de tots els aeroports de Colòmbia, tan de vols comercials com privats a diferents nacionals i internacionals. Cada base de dades pot contenir més d'un milió d'observacions anuals dels registres aeris colombians i per poder fer l'inventari d'emissions, va ser necessari fer una desagregació de les dades i una agrupació de les variables rellevants utilitzant els software lliure RStudio. Els resultats del inventari d'emissions són reportats per a vols nacionals i internacionals de manera separada, tal com ho estableix la metodologia de la guia. La informació obtinguda del inventari d'emissions, va ser utilitzada com a línia base per a la projecció de tendències de les emissions de diòxid de carboni i consum de combustible fins l'any 2050 per cinc escenaris diferents, tenint en compte diferents pronòstics del creixement de la operació aèria colombiana i establint metes anuals d'estalvi de combustible i eficiència operacional, les quals són claus per aconseguir la reducció de les emissions de diòxid de carboni. El principal gas emès d'acord al inventari d'emissions és el diòxid de carboni, durant els anys 2009 a 2019 es van emetre 25689 kt de CO2, seguidament de 121 kt de NOX, 28 kt de CO, 16 kt de SOX i 7,3 kt de HC, els vols internacionals van emetre el 74% del total del diòxid de carboni, a pesar que el nombre de vols és inferior respecte als vols a destins nacionals. Les emissions de diòxid de carboni tenen una correlació positiva de 0,99 amb el consum de combustible i la distància recorreguda de les aeronaus. Els avions amb destins internacionals recorren majors distàncies que els avions amb destins nacionals, per lo tant, les seves emissions de CO2 son més altes. Els destins turístics a Colòmbia i les capitals de Departament, són els trajectes que més CO2 emeten, en quant destins internacionals, els trajectes a Bogotà-Miami, Bogotà-Mèxic D.F. són els que més emissions de CO2 presenten. En quant a les tendències de les emissions de CO2, es van realitzar d'acord a cinc escenaris, l'escenari 1 o escenari base, mostra les emissions de diòxid de carboni fins al 2050 quan l'operació aèria no realitza millores operacionals o de eficiència de combustible i per altra banda, l'escenari 5 o escenari optimista te metes ambicioses per aconseguir una alta eficiència en el combustible i millores operacionals. Els escenaris 2 i 3 són els que millor poden predir el comportament que tindrà les emissions de CO2, degut a que les metes proposades són les implementades actualment per una línia aèria colombiana i no suposen grans inversions econòmiques o modificacions considerables en l'operació. Aquest inventari conté les emissions generals per vols privats i comercials de transport de passatgers, carga i correspondència realitzats des del aeroport el Dorado, i inclouen destins a aeroports principals, però també aeròdroms i pistes d'aterratge privades, les emissions són calculades per al trajecte realitzat per cada aeronau, des de la porta de la sortida d'abordatge de passatgers a l'aeroport d'origen, fins al punt d'arribada on s'apaga motors a l'aeroport de destí, però no inclou les emissions generades per les operacions auxiliars com la càrrega de combustible, transport per pistes de passatgers en autobusos o manteniment de les aeronaus, així com tampoc les emissions generades per l'aviació militar o vols d'helicòpters, ja que aquestes emissions s'han de reportar per separat mitjançant un altra metodologia. ; This Master's thesis contains the inventory of emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, total hydrocarbons and fuel consumed, of the flights that departed from the El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá Colombia during years 2009 to 2019 according with the document EMEP / EEA air pollutant emission inventory guidebook 2019, specifically volume 1.A.3.a Aviation, additionally a projection of fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions was made until 2050 according to five scenarios established by the Environmental Protection Committee belonging to the International Civil Aviation Organization. The information that was used for the emissions inventory was the traffic database by the Aeronautica Civil, this database contains the operation records of all Colombian airports, both commercial and private flights to national destinations and international. Each database contains more than one million observations per year from the Colombian air registers and in order to make the emissions inventory, it was necessary to disaggregate the data and group the relevant variables using RStudio software. The results of the emissions inventory are reported for national and international flights separately, as stated in the guide's methodology. The information obtained from the emissions inventory was used as a baseline for the projection of trends in carbon dioxide emissions and fuel consumption until 2050 for five different scenarios, taking into account different forecasts of the growth of the Colombian air operation. and establishing annual goals for fuel savings and operational efficiency, which are key to achieving the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. The main gas emitted according to the emissions inventory is carbon dioxide, during the years 2009 to 2019 25689 ktCO2 were emitted, followed by 121 ktNOx, 28 ktCO, 16 ktSOx and 7.3 ktHC, international flights emitted 74% of total carbon dioxide, although that the number of flights is lower compared to flights to domestic destinations. Carbon dioxide emissions have a positive correlation of 0.99 with fuel consumption and distance traveled by aircraft. Airplanes with international destinations travel longer distances than airplanes with national destinations, therefore, their CO2 emissions are higher. The tourist destinations in Colombia and the capitals of the Department are the routes that emit the most CO2, in terms of international destinations, the routes to Bogotá-Miami, Bogotá-Madrid and Bogotá-México D.F. they are the ones with the most CO2 emissions. Regarding CO2 emission trends, they were carried out according to five scenarios, scenario 1 or baseline scenario, shows carbon dioxide emissions until 2050 when the air operation does not make operational or fuel efficiency improvements and Moreover, scenario 5 or optimistic scenario has ambitious goals to achieve high fuel efficiency and improved operations. Scenarios 2 and 3 are the ones that can best predict the behavior that CO2 emissions will have, since the proposed goals are those currently implemented by an airline in Colombia and do not involve large economic investments or considerable modifications in the operation. This inventory contains the emissions generated by private and commercial flights for the transport of passengers, cargo and correspondence made from El Dorado airport, and include destinations to major airports, but also private airfields and airstrips, emissions are calculated for the journey made for each aircraft, from the departure gate for passenger boarding at the origin airport, to the arrival point where the aircraft turns off the engines at the destination airport, but does not include emissions generated by auxiliary operations such as fuel loading, transportation by passenger lanes in buses or aircraft maintenance, as well as emissions generated by military aviation or helicopter flights, since these emissions must be reported separately using another methodology Keywords: Atmospheric emissions, aviation, emission trends, scenarios, emissions ; Este trabajo de fin de Máster, contiene el inventario de emisiones de dióxido de carbono, óxidos de nitrógeno, óxidos de azufre, monóxido de carbono e hidrocarburos totales y combustible consumido, de los vuelos que partieron desde el aeropuerto internacional El Dorado en Bogotá Colombia durante los años 2009 a 2019 de acuerdo a lo establecido por el documento EMEP/EEA air pollutant emission inventory guidebook 2019, específicamente el volumen 1.A.3.a Aviation, adicionalmente se realizó una proyección del consumo de combustible y emisiones de dióxido de carbono hasta el año 2050 de acuerdo a cinco escenarios planteados por el Comité de Protección Ambiental perteneciente a la Organización Internacional de la Aviación Civil. La información que se utilizó para el inventario de emisiones, fue la base de datos tráfico por equipo de la Aeronautica Civil, esta base de datos contiene los registro de operaciones de todos los aeropuertos de Colombia, tanto de vuelos comerciales como privados a destinos nacionales e internacionales. Cada base de datos puede contener más de un millón de observaciones anuales de los registros aéreos colombianos y para poder hacer el inventario de emisiones, fue necesario hacer una desagregación de los datos y una agrupación de las variables relevantes utilizando el software libre RStudio. Los resultados del inventario de emisiones son reportados para vuelos nacionales e internacionales de forma separada, tal como lo establece la metodología de la guía. La información obtenida del inventario de emisiones, fue utilizada como linea base para la proyección de tendencias de las emisiones de dióxido de carbono y consumo de combustible hasta el año 2050 para cinco escenarios diferentes, teniendo en cuenta diferentes pronósticos del crecimiento de la operación aérea colombiana y estableciendo metas anuales de ahorro de combustible y eficiencia operacional, las cuales son claves para lograr la reducción de las emisiónes de dióxido de carbono. El principal gas emitido de acuerdo al inventario de emisiones es el dióxido de carbono, durante los años 2009 a 2019 se emitieron 25689 kt de CO2, seguido de 121 kt de NOx, 28 kt de CO, 16 kt de SOx y 7,3 kt de HC, los vuelos internacionales emitieron el 74% del total del dióxido de carbono, pese a que el número de vuelos es inferior con respecto a los vuelos a destinos nacionales. Las emisiones de dióxido de carbono tienen una correlación positiva de 0,99 con el consumo de combustible y la distancia recorrida de las aeronaves. Los aviones con destinos internacionales recorren mayores distancias que los aviones con destinos nacionales, por lo tanto, sus emisiones de CO2 son más altas. Los destinos turísticos en Colombia y las capitales de Departamento, son los trayectos que más CO2 emiten, en cuanto a destinos internacionales, los trayectos a Bogotá-Miami, Bogotá-Madrid y Bogotá-México D.F. son los que más emisiones de CO2 presentan. En cuanto a las tendencias de las emisiones de CO2, se realizaron de acuerdo a cinco escenarios, el escenario 1 o escenario base, muestra las emisiones de dióxido de carbono hasta el 2050 cuando la operación aérea no realiza mejoras operacionales o de eficiencia de combustible y por otra parte, el escenario 5 o escenario optimista tiene metas ambiciosas para lograr un alta eficiencia en el combustible y mejoras operaciones. Los escenarios 2 y 3 son los que mejor pueden predecir el comportamiento que tendrán las emisiones de CO2, debido a que las metas propuestas son las implementadas actualmente por una aerolínea en Colombia y no suponen grandes inversiones económicas o modificaciones considerables en la operación. Este inventario contiene las emisiones generadas por vuelos privados y comerciales de transporte de pasajeros, carga y correspondencia realizados desde el aeropuerto el Dorado, e incluyen destinos a aeropuertos principales, pero también aeródromos y pistas de aterrizaje privadas, las emisiones son calculadadas para el trayecto realizado por cada aeronave, desde la puerta de salida de abordaje de pasajeros en el aeropuerto de origen, hasta el punto de llegada donde apaga motores la aeronave en el aeropuerto de destino, pero no incluye las emisiones generadas por las operaciones auxiliares como cargue de combustible, transporte por pistas de pasajeros en autobuses o mantenimiento de las aeronaves, así como tampoco las emisiones generadas por la aviación militar o vuelos de helicópteros, ya que estas emisiones se deben reportar por separado mediante otra metodología.
Bangladesh is one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. Situated in the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna (GBM) rivers, the country is exposed to a range of river and rainwater flood hazards due to climate variability, the timing, location, and extent of which depend on precipitation in the entire GBM basin. The Government of Bangladesh is fully committed to global climate-change advocacy and action, having already invested heavily in adaptation measures and policies. In recent decades, the government has invested more than US$10 billion to protect its population and assets in the floodplains. Given the uncertain magnitude and timing of the added risks from climate change, it is essential to identify the costs of climate proofing Bangladesh's critical infrastructure from intensified monsoon floods and cyclonic storm surges. Previously, few if any detailed studies have been developed on the costs of climate-proofing the country's infrastructure assets from inland monsoon floods and cyclones. Most analytical work to date has been confined to case studies, with relatively limited sets of locations, impacts, and adaptation measures. This study aims to fill that knowledge gap by providing detailed vulnerable population estimates and estimates of the incremental costs of asset adaptation out to the year 2050. It is part of a larger World Bank-supported study, entitled Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change (EACC), funded by the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
This country note for Armenia is part of a series of country briefs that summarize information relevant to climate change and agriculture for three pilot countries in the Southern Caucasus Region, with a particular focus on climate and crop projections, adaptation options, policy development and institutional involvement. The note series has been developed to provide a baseline of knowledge on climate change and agriculture for the countries participating in the regional program on reducing vulnerability to climate change in Southern Caucasus Agricultural systems. This note for Armenia was shared with the government and other agricultural sector stakeholders and used as an engagement tool for a national awareness raising and consultation workshop, held in Yerevan in April 2012. Feedback and comments on the note from this consultation process have been incorporated into this updated version in collaboration with the Armenian Ministry of Agriculture.
This report synthesizes the findings for the energy sector of a broader study, the Brazil low carbon study, which was undertaken by the World Bank in its initiative to support Brazil's integrated effort towards reducing national and global emissions of greenhouse gases while promoting long term development. The main aim of the study is to examine the potential for abating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in Brazil in the energy area and to assess the relative costs of doing so for the time frame 2010-2030. Basically the study seeks to demonstrate by how much, by when and at what cost Brazil could reduce its GHG energy sector emissions. Given its special features, the fuel use and emissions of greenhouse gases in the transportation sector are dealt with in another report of this project. In addition the study aims to provide information for the Brazilian government to enable it to develop a long-term strategy (2030) for reducing carbon in the energy area (except the transport sector) and, more specifically, to provide the technical input needed for evaluating the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions produced by the key economic sectors. In short, the study seeks to identify the different options and opportunities that could justify possible international resources being allocated to Brazil. The teams involved in the study needed first to focus on the proposed mitigation and carbon sequestering options and then, after identifying these proposals, to focus on existing barriers to the successful deployment of these options and suggest a set of public policies which could be mobilized to overcome them. The study also provides estimates of the scale of investments and operating costs likely to be involved, as well as a mitigation cost curve.
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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace
This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.
A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')
My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.
In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.
Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.
The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.
Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.
My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.
Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.
Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.
My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.
Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.
In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.
As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.
Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.
I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.
When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.
I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.
One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.
I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.
This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.
Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.
The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.
Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?
Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.
The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.
This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.
The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.
Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?
Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).
This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.
But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.
Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).
For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.
What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.
You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?
The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.
While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.
By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort. There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.
Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.
You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?
When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.
Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.
Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.
When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.
Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.
An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.
Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.
Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?
Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.
Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.
A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.
My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.
But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.
Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.
Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?
The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.
Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.
Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.
My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?
American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.
The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.
Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.
The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.
It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.
Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'
Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.
Related links
Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)
This report presents a concise review of the major environmental and natural resources issues at the global and national level over the coming two decades. The environmental issues reviewed include air pollution and deterioration of air quality, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, water quality, scarcity and access, land and soil degradation, deforestation and forest degradation, natural disaster, loss of biodiversity and protected areas, and governance and institutions for environmental and natural resource management. Besides providing an environment outlook, the report tackles the issue of monitoring also from the supply side. It identifies the relevant data and indicator sets available at the global level and country level to capture the global and locally relevant environmental issues with the underlying objective of pinpointing at data gaps. It concludes with a set of recommendations for moving forward on the monitoring agenda. Overall, the threats from climate change caused by Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, biodiversity loss, water pollution and scarcity as well as pressure on land as well as worsening ocean's state and biodiversity have to be taken under close observation in the period over the next 20 years. The environment challenges that the world faces are not trivial and some of them require immediate action. Action, in turn, requires reliable and accurate information. The second part of the report looks at information from the supply side. It identifies the relevant data and indicator sets available at the global level and country level to capture the global and locally relevant environmental issues with the underlying objective of informing and advising decision making and to identify the data gaps.
Against the backdrop of agreement that global coordinated action is needed to prevent dangerous climate change, individual countries are thinking through the implications of climate action for their economies and people. The rest of the report is organized along the following lines. The next section provides background on Poland's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Then section B sets out Poland's existing carbon abatement targets and key policy challenges related to GHG mitigation. The next section summarizes the innovative methodological approach used by the report. Section D discusses the methods and implications of constructing business-as-usual or reference scenarios. Section E provides the major findings from the first model, the engineering approach, on the costs of measures aimed at GHG mitigation for Poland. Section F explains how these findings are expanded and revised by incorporation into the first macroeconomic model. Section G provides an analysis of the economic impact through 2020 of mitigation measures within the constraints of European Union (EU) policy arrangements. Section H examines the energy sector and how Section E's findings are enhanced by optimization of the structure of the energy sector. Section I takes a first look at the challenges of energy efficiency. Section J provides additional analysis of the transport sector. The last section provides some notes on additional issues and further work.
This strategic framework serves to guide and support the operational response of the World Bank Group (WBG) to new development challenges posed by global climate change. Unabated, climate change threatens to reverse hard-earned development gains. The poorest countries and communities will suffer the earliest and the most. Yet they depend on actions by other nations, developed and developing. While climate change is an added cost and risk to development, a well-designed and implemented global climate policy can also bring new economic opportunities to developing countries. Climate change demands unprecedented global cooperation involving a concerted action by countries at different development stages supported by "measurable, reportable, and verifiable" transfer of finance and technology to developing countries. Trust of developing countries in equity and fairness of a global climate policy and neutrality of the supporting institutions is critical for such cooperation to succeed. Difficulties with mobilizing resources for achieving the millennium development goals and with agreeing on global agricultural trade underscore the political challenges. The framework will help the WBG maintain the effectiveness of its core mission of supporting growth and poverty reduction. While recognizing added costs and risks of climate change and an evolving global climate policy. The WBG top priority will be to build collaborative relations with developing country partners and provide them customized demand-driven support through its various instruments from financing to technical assistance to constructive advocacy. It will give considerable attention to strengthening resilience of economies and communities to increasing climate risks and adaptation. The operational focus will be on improving knowledge and capacity, including learning by doing. The framework will guide operational programs of WBG entities to support actions whose benefits to developing countries are robust under significant uncertainties about future climate policies and impacts-actions that have "no regrets."
Bodenerosion durch Wasser ist ein ubiquitäres Problem, dass sowohl die landwirtschaftliche Produktivität vermindert, Bodenfunktionen einschränkt und auch in anderen Umweltkompartimenten schädliche Auswirkungen haben kann. Oberflächengewässer sind durch die mit Bodenerosion einhergehende Belastung durch Sediment, sedimentgebundenen und gelösten Nährstoffen sowie anderen Schadstoffen besonders betroffen. Das Wissen über Erosionsprozesse und Sedimentfrachten hat daher große Bedeutung für den Schutz der Güter Boden und Wasser und darüber hinaus eine ökonomische Bedeutung. Generell kann innerhalb eines Hanges oder Einzugsgebietes von einer Zone der Erosion, des Transports und der Sedimentation ausgegangen werden. Jedoch führen Abflussbildungsprozesse und rauhigkeits- bzw. topographiebeeinflusste Abflusskonzentration zu einer individuellen Differenzierung. Räumliche und zeitliche Prozessdiskontinuitäten oder Konnektivitäten und Schwellenwerte modifizieren die Erosions- und Sedimentaustragssituation in einem Einzugsgebiet darüber hinaus. Die Landschaftstrukturelemente Relief und Boden kontrollieren demnach über die Bodenfeuchtedifferenzierung im entscheidenden Maße die Abflussbildung und Sedimentfracht in einem Einzugsgebiet. Obwohl in den gemäßigten und kühlen Klimaregionen ein großer Teil der Abflussbildung im Winter stattfindet und von Bodenfrost sowie Schneeschmelzen geprägt sein kann, ist über die Prozesse und die Größe der Sediment- und Nährstoffausträge bei solchen winterlichen Randbedingungen nur wenig bekannt. Systematische Untersuchungen existieren vor allem für Norwegen und Russland. Dieses Defizit spiegelt sich auch in den vorhandenen Modellansätzen zur Abbildung der Bodenerosion und der Abschätzung von Sedimentausträgen aus Einzugsgebieten wider. Zum einen werden in der Regel weder Schneedeckenaufbau bzw. -schmelze noch die Veränderungen des Bodenwasserflusses bei Bodenfrost berücksichtigt. Zum anderen werden die Erosivität des Schneeschmelzabflusses und die Beeinflussungen der Bodenerodibilität, z.B. durch Frost-Tau Zyklen, nicht hinreichend wiedergegeben. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es daher, auf der Analyse von Daten aus einem deutschen und einem russischen Untersuchungseinzugsgebiet aufbauend, die wichtigsten Prozesse und Größen der Abflussbildung und Stoffausträge bei winterlichen Rahmenbedingungen zu charakterisieren und in einem Modellsystem umzusetzen. Die weitergehende Anwendung dieses Modellsystems dient der Interpretation räumlicher Heterogenitäten und zeitlicher Variabilitäten sowie der Auswirkungen von klimatischen- und Landnutzungsänderungen auf den Sedimentaustrag der beiden Untersuchungseinzugsgebiete. Das 1.44 km² große Einzugsgebiet Schäfertal liegt im östlichen Unterharz. Über den Grauwacken und Tonschiefern haben sich aus einem periglazialen Decklagenkomplex Braun- und Parabraunerden entwickelt, die ackerbaulich mit einer Wintergetreide-Raps Fruchtfolge genutzt werden. In der Tiefenlinie dominieren hydromorph überprägte Böden mit Wiesennutzung. Das Klima weist bei einer Jahresmitteltemperatur von 6.8°C und 680 mm Jahresniederschlagssumme eine geringe kontinentale Überprägung auf. Neben langjährigen umfangreichen hydro-meteorologischen Messungen finden seit mehreren Jahren Untersuchungen zum Sediment- und Nährstoffautrag statt. Eine regelmäßige zweiwöchentliche Beprobung des Abflusses am Gebietsauslass wird durch eine automatisierte Hochwasserprobenahme vor allem bei Schneeschmelzen ergänzt. Neben der Sedimentkonzentration werden unter anderem Phosphor und gelöster organischer Kohlenstoff nach Standardmethoden bestimmt. Auch im russischen Zielgebiet Lubazhinkha liegt das Hauptaugenmerk auf der Charakterisierung der Abflussbildung und der Stoffausträge bei den jährlich auftretenden Schneeschmelzen. Das Einzugsgebiet liegt ungefähr 100 km südlich von Moskau im Übergangsbereich der südlichen Taiga zur Waldsteppe. Die insgesamt 18.8 km² werden zur Hälfte landwirtschaftlich und zu einem Drittel forstwirtschaftlich genutzt. Die aktuelle räumliche Differenzierung der Nutzung in diesem Gebiet wird durch die reliefbedingte Kappung und hydromorphe Überprägung der vorherrschenden grauen Waldböden bestimmt. Das Klima und die Hydrologie sind durch Schneedeckenaufbau und –schmelze, bei einer Jahresdurchschnittstemperatur von 4.4°C und einer Jahresniederschlagsmenge von 560 mm, geprägt. Zur Erfassung des Stoffaustrags werden Hochwasserprobenahmen am Gebietsauslass sowie an den beiden wichtigsten Zuflüssen genommen und neben Sediment- und Nährstoffkonzentrationen weitere physikalische und chemische Parameter bestimmt. Die Auswertung der Daten des Schäfertals zeigen für den Untersuchungszeitraum eine deutliche Dominanz der Hochwasserereignisse, die durch Schneeschmelzen hervorgerufen werden. Einzugsgebietsbedingungen mit gefrorenem Boden führen zu einer Modifizierung der Abflussentwicklung vor allem im ansteigenden Teil des gemessenen Hydrographen durch Auftreten von schnellen oberflächen- oder oberflächennahen Abflüssen. Der Spitzenabfluss bei den acht zur Interpretation herangezogenen Hochwasserereignissen variiert zwischen 30 und 270 l s-1, bei Abflussmengen von 1-50 mm. Die am Gebietsauslass ermittelten maximalen Sedimentkonzentrationen liegen für die beiden Ereignisse ohne gefrorenen Boden bei unter 650 mg l-1 und damit deutlich unter den bis zu 6000 mg l-1 bei teilweise oder ganz gefrorenen Böden im Schäfertal. Lediglich bei einem Ereignis mit Niederschlag und ungefrorenem Boden treten hohe Sedimentkonzentrationen auf, die auf Gerinnepflegemaßnahmen und dadurch leichte Mobilisierbarkeit von Material zurückzuführen sind. Dementsprechend schwanken die Sedimentfrachten der Einzelereignisse und erreichen bis zu 17 t. Die wichtigste Steuergröße ist dabei die Ausbildung erosiven Abflusses auf den Hängen durch eine Verminderung der hydraulischen Leitfähigkeit bei gefrorenen Böden. Der Vergleich der Sedimentkonzentrationen der Hochwasserereignisse mit der zweiwöchentlichen Grundbeprobung verdeutlicht, ebenso wie Hysteresekurven der Einzelereignisse, die unterschiedlichen Dynamiken der Austragssituationen. Während die durch Bodenfrost geprägten Ereignisse ein gegen den Uhrzeigersinn verlaufendes Abfluss-Sedimentkonzentrationsverhältnis aufweisen, das auf eine Sedimentquelle auf den Hängen hinweist, sind die Hysteresekurven bei nicht gefrorenen Böden im Uhrzeigersinn orientiert. Eine Sedimentherkunft in Gerinnenähe oder den Gerinneböschungen selbst ist daher wahrscheinlich. Diese Annahmen werden auch durch eine differenzierte Phosphoranreicherungsrate im ausgetragenen Sediment bestätigt. Darüber hinaus kann teilweise eine ereignisinterne Dynamik beobachtet werden, die auf zeitliche Variabilität in der Abflussbildung und damit zusammenhängend, eine räumliche Heterogenität der Sedimentquellen belegt. Während im Untersuchungsgebiet Schäfertal ein mehrmaliges Auftreten von Schneeschmelzen innerhalb eines Winters möglich ist, kommt es im russischen Einzugsgebiet zu einem regelmäßigen Schneedeckenaufbau über den Winter hinweg und einer Schneeschmelze in der Regel im März oder in der ersten Aprilhälfte. Die Auswertung mehrjähriger Datenreihen belegt die Bedeutung der Schneeschmelze für die Abflussbildung und den Sedimentaustrag aus dem Untersuchungsgebiet Lubazhinkha. Für die drei zur Interpretation herangezogenen Schneeschmelzen liegt die Sedimentfracht zwischen 50 und 630 t bei deutlichen Unterschieden in den hydrologischen Rahmenbedingungen. Die ereignisbezogene Sedimentfracht von mindestens 0.3 t ha-1 liegt zwar über der für das Schäfertal ermittelten, befindet sich aber im Bereich der Werte, die in anderen Studien bei vergleichbaren Böden und Nutzungsformen bestimmt wurden. Eine detaillierte Analyse der Messwerte der Schneeschmelze im Jahr 2003 belegt eine Dynamik innerhalb dieses Einzelereignisses. Bei Sedimentkonzentrationen im Abfluss am Gebietsauslass von 6 bis 540 mg l-1 kommt es zu einer Sedimentfracht von ungefähr 190 t. Während die maximalen Konzentrationen von Sediment und Phosphor mit der Spitze des Abflusses einhergehen, liegt für DOC eine Verzögerung vor, die durch eine langsamere Schneeschmelze und Mobilisierung von DOC aus dem humusreichen Oberboden der Waldflächen ausgelöst wird. Eine Differenzierung der Abflusskomponenten ermöglicht eine weitergehende Interpretation der ereignisinternen Dynamik der Stoffquellen und Eintragspfade. Bei geringen Abflussmengen (< 2,5 mm d-1) findet ein Stoffeintrag überwiegend in gelöster Form über die Bodenwasserpassage und langsame Abflusskomponenten in den Vorfluter statt. Bei höheren Abflussmengen dominieren schnelle Abflusskomponenten bzw. Oberflächenabfluss, der zeitlich dynamisch unterschiedliche Stoffquellen mobilisiert. Neben diesen ereignisinternen treten interanuelle Variabilitäten auf, die durch witterungsbedingte Faktoren bestimmt werden. Wie im Schäfertal spielt auch im Lubazhinkhaeinzugsgebiet die Ausbildung von Bodenfrost und damit verbundene Veränderung der Infiltrationseigenschaften der Böden eine große Rolle. Das Schneewasseräquivalent, die Schneeschmelzdynamik und Bodenfrosteigenschaften, z.B. Eindringtiefe, sind die wichtigsten Steuergrößen. Die Variabilität dieser Randbedingungen führt zu einer hohen interannuellen Differenzierung der Abflussbildung und der Sedimentausträge. Für die Schneeschmelze 2004 kann so bei überdurchschnittlich hohen Wintertemperaturen und nur teilweise gefrorenen Böden sowie geringem Schneewasseräquivalent eine geringe Sedimentfracht ermittelt werden. Darüber hinaus verdeutlichen die Hysteresekurven der Sedimentkonzentrationen Unterschiede in der Sedimentquelle für die Einzeljahre, die von den oben genannten Rahmenbedingungen abhängen. Auf der Basis des Monitoring lassen sich für beide Einzugsgebiete die wichtigen abflussbildenden Prozesse charakterisieren und Einflussgrößen erfassen. Dem Bodenfrost und der Schneeschmelzdynamik kommen dabei übergeordnete Bedeutung zu. In beiden Gebieten werden bei winterlichen Rahmenbedingungen erhebliche Mengen an Sediment und Nährstoffen ausgetragen. Die Interpretation physikalischer bzw. chemischer Parameter des Abflusses ermöglicht darüber hinaus auch Aussagen über die zeitliche Variabilität und räumliche Heterogenität der Sedimentherkunftsräume. Aus den Erkenntnissen der Einzugsgebietsbeobachtung ergeben sich für einen Modellansatz verschiedenen Anforderungen, die vor allem die räumlich differenzierte Darstellung des Einflusses von Bodenfrost auf den Bodenwasserhaushalt sowie die Bodenerosion durch oberflächlich abfließendes Schneeschmelzwasser betreffen. Die Grundlage für das Modellsystem "IWAN" (Integrated Winter erosion And Nutrient load model) stellt das hydrologische Modell WASIM ETH Ver. 2 und das Stoffhaushaltsmodell AGNPS 5.0 dar. Die Verknüpfung dieser beiden auf Rasterzellen aufbauenden Modelle ermöglicht die Nutzung von kontinuierlichen, räumlich differenzierten Informationen zum Oberflächenabfluss für die Abschätzung der Bodenerosion. Durch diese Schnittstelle wird die sehr hohe Parametersensitivität des SCS-CN Verfahrens in AGNPS durch geringere Einzelsensitivitäten verschiedener Parameter des Bodenwasserhaushaltes in WASIM ersetzt und gleichzeitig eine plausible, prozessbasierte räumliche Abflussbildung berechnet. Durch die Implementierung eines Moduls zur Abschätzung der Bodentemperatur in WASIM ist zusätzlich die Grundlage für eine weitergehende Verbesserung der Abflussbildung bei winterlichen Randbedingungen gelegt. Durch das Modul wird die Oberbodentemperatur aus Werten der Lufttemperatur unter Einbeziehung der Exposition und der Landnutzung auf der Basis einer Polynomanpassung abgeschätzt. Bei einer modellierten Schneedecke von mehr als 5 mm Schneewasseräquivalent wird die berechnete Bodentemperatur des Vortages übernommen. Bei Bodentemperaturen unter dem Gefrierpunkt wird darüber hinaus die gesättigte hydraulische Leitfähigkeit des Bodens auf Null herabgesetzt, so dass im Zuge der Schneeschmelze zunächst das noch freie Porenvolumen aufgefüllt wird und danach Oberflächenabflussbildung beginnt. Für das Schäfertal liegt die Güte der Anpassung der Bodentemperatur bei Korrelationskoeffizienten von 0.62 bis 0.81 und für das Lubazhinkhaeinzugsgebiet bei Werten von 0.82 bis 0.91. Die räumlich und zeitlich differenzierte Oberflächenabflussinformation dient als Grundlage einer neu entwickelten Berechnung der Rillenerosion bei Schneeschmelzen, die den dafür nicht geeigneten empirischen Ansatz in AGNPS ersetzt. Basierend auf der Grundannahme eines dreieckigen, nicht durch Frost in der Eintiefung beeinträchtigten Rillenprofils und, da wassergesättigt, nichtkohesiver Bodeneigenschaften wird für jede Rasterzelle eine Rille simuliert. Die Erodibilität des Bodens wird als Funktion von Wurzelparametern und des Durchmessers der wasserstabilen Aggregate erfasst. Die Scherkraft des Schneeschmelzeabflusses in der Rille wird in Abhängigkeit von der Oberflächenrauhigkeit und dem Aggregatdurchmesser betrachtet und darauf aufbauend in einem Impulsstromansatz die erodierte Bodenmenge berechnet. In Verbindung mit dem durch das modifizierte WASIM berechneten und gerouteten Oberflächenabfluss ergibt sich so ein räumlich differenziertes Bild der Bodenerosion. Das Modellsystem IWAN beinhaltet neben der Erosionsberechnung ein eingabefenstergesteuertes Menü zur Datenkonvertierung und zum Prä- sowie Postprozessing. Die Ergebnisse der Anwendung des Modellsystems für die beiden Einzugsgebiete belegen, dass sowohl die entscheidenden Prozesse der Abflussbildung als auch des Sedimentaustrags wiedergegeben werden. Für das Schäfertal wurde für die Kalibrierungsjahre 1994 bis 1995 eine Modellierungsgüte von R2 0.94 bzw. 0.91 erzielt. Mit Ausnahmen der Schneeschmelze im Jahr 1996 werden die Episoden hohen Abflusses in den Jahren 1996 bis 2003 mit dem kalibrierten Parametersatz gut wiedergegeben und das witterungsbedingte Trockenfallen im Sommer zufriedenstellend dargestellt. Auf dieser Basis wird für die experimentell erfassten und diskutierten Schneeschmelzereignisse das Gesamtabflussvolumen dieser Ereignisse mit hoher Güte abgebildet. Die räumlich differenziert berechnete Bodenfeuchte und Bodenfrostvorkommen bedingen einen variablen Anteil des Oberflächenabflusses am Gesamtabfluss. Für das Schneeschmelzerosionsmodul hat das Abflussvolumen ebenso wie die Hangneigung und Abflusslänge eine positive Sensitivität. Aufgrund von Parameterkombinationen und nichtlineare Algorithmen kann es jedoch vor allem für die Wurzelparameter und den Manning Koeffizienten zu differenzierten Sensitivitätsentwicklungen kommen. Für die Simulation der Erosion im Schäfertal wurde daher zunächst auf einen Parametersatz zurückgegriffen, der auf der Basis von Erosionsparzellenversuchen kalibriert wurde. Die Mittelwerte der berechneten Erosion liegen zwischen 0.0006 und 0.96 t ha-1 für die sechs gemessenen Einzelereignisse im Schäfertal. Die Medianwerte und hohen Standardabweichungen belegen jedoch, dass insgesamt Zellen mit geringen Erosionswerten überwiegen. Die Ereignisse mit gefrorenen Böden weisen eine signifikant höhere Erosion auf. Unterschiede in der Erosion treten bei gleichen Gesamtabflussvolumen wie z.B. bei den Ereignissen vom 20.01.2001 und 26.02.2002 durch differenzierte Abflusskonzentration auf dem nord- bzw. südexponierten Hang auf. Neben einer Überprüfung der Plausibilität der berechneten Werte, werden die räumlichen Verteilungsmuster durch Geländeaufnahmen bestätigt. Die Anpassung der berechneten Sedimentfracht an die gemessenen Werte erfolgte durch die Kalibrierung des Manning Koeffizienten für ein Ereignis. Die simulierte Sedimentfracht ist in einigen Hangfußbereichen aufgrund der Abflussakkumulation besonders hoch und erreicht für den Gebietsauslass Werte zwischen 0.0 und 13.84 t. Mit der Ausnahme des Ereignisses vom 26.02.2002 ist die Sedimentfracht leicht unterschätzt, so dass sich in der Summe für die drei Winterhalbjahre 2001 bis 2003 ein Gesamtfehler von 11 t ergibt. Die Differenz zwischen der simulierten und beobachteten Sedimentfracht ist für den 26.12.2002 am größten. Als mögliche Ursache für die Abweichungen der berechneten zu den gemessenen Werten, wird die zeitliche Variabilität und räumliche Heterogenität der Oberflächenrauhigkeit, vor allem in Hinblick auf Bodenbearbeitung und Bodenfrosteinflüssen, diskutiert. Die generelle Verteilung der Sedimentquellen, Transportwege und Übertrittstellen vom Hang ins Gewässer stimmt mit Geländebeobachtungen überein. Eine quantitative Überprüfung der räumlichen Ergebnisse auf der Einzelereignisebene ist für das Schäfertal jedoch nicht möglich. Für das Lubazhinkhaeinzugsgebiet können zwei Parametersätze für das Kalibrierungsjahr 2004 identifiziert werde, die eine zufriedenstellende Modellierungsgüte für das hydrologische Modell erreichen. Obwohl einer dieser Parametersätze die Schneeschmelzsituationen und Maximalabflüsse gut darstellt, sind die Areale mit Oberflächenabflussbildung innerhalb des Einzugsgebietes nicht plausibel verteilt. Im Gegensatz dazu werden die lateralen Wasserflüsse und damit die prozessbestimmende Bodenfeuchteverteilung durch den anderen Parametersatz besser abgebildet. Es kommt jedoch zu einer Überschätzung der Spitzenabflüsse der Schneeschmelzhochwasser für die Validierungsjahre 2003 und 2005. Die auf der Basis der Messwerte erkannten Unterschiede zwischen den Einzeljahren werden ebenso dargestellt wie die differenzierte Abflussbildung innerhalb einer Schneeschmelzsituation. Neben Oberflächenabflussbildung auf den flachen Kuppenbereichen und auf Sättigungsflächen in den Talböden, wird auch die beobachtete verzögerte Abflussbildung unter Wald durch das Modell berücksichtigt. Bei zehn Tagen mit Oberflächenabfluss innerhalb der drei Schneeschmelzen 2003 bis 2005 mit Oberflächenabflussvolumen von 0.3 bis 24.1 mm d-1 werden durch das Modellsystem IWAN Erosionssummen von 10 bis 280 t d-1 simuliert. Bei einem variablen Flächenanteil von ca. 5 bis 46 % des Gesamtgebietes, auf dem Erosion stattfindet, bewegen sich die Werte der effektiven Erosion bei 0.1 bis 0.32 t ha-1 für die Einzeltage und 0.44 bis 0.92 t ha-1 für die mehrtägigen Schneeschmelzen. Die am Gebietsauslass simulierte Sedimentfracht liegt zwischen 6.7 und 365.8 t pro Tag und summiert sich auf 246.2 t für die Schneeschmelze 2003. Im Jahr 2004 werden 99.9 t und im Jahr 2005 sogar 757.9 t Austrag simuliert. Für das Kalibrierungsjahr 2004 kommt es zu einer Überschätzung der Sedimentfracht im Vergleich zur gemessenen von lediglich 10 t bzw. 12%. Für die Schneeschmelze im Jahr 2003 liegt die Abweichung mit diesem Parametersatz bei -9 %. Für das Jahr 2005 fällt die Berechnung mit einem Fehler von 33 % nicht so gut aus. Insgesamt führen Schneeschmelztage mit geringer simulierter Erosionsmenge zu einer zusätzlichen Mobilisierung von Sediment aus dem Gerinne und umgekehrt, hohe Erosionsmengen zu einer Deposition von Material auf den Wald- und Grünlandflächen und im Gerinne selbst. Hohe Sedimentfrachten werden daher vor allem für die Talflanken und die kerbtalähnlichen Talanfänge berechnet. Durch die räumliche Differenzierung der Abfluss- und Erosionsprozesse kommt es zu signifikanten Unterschieden bei der berechneten Sedimentfracht für die beiden Teileinzugsgebiete. Bei Schneeschmelztagen mit Abflussbildung unter Wald wird aufgrund des höheren Waldanteils im Lubazhinkhateilgebiet eine höhere Sedimentmenge ausgetragen. Die Unterschiede im Gerinneverhalten und zwischen den Teileinzugsgebieten verdeutlichen die insgesamt hohe Prozessrepräsentanz der Modellergebnisse. Das Modellsystem IWAN bildet für beide Einzugsgebiete mit hoher Plausibilität die räumliche und zeitliche Dynamik der Oberflächenabflussbildung während der Schneeschmelze und die damit verbundenen Erosionsprozesse ab. Der Modellansatz stellt somit eine Möglichkeit zwischen Modellergebnisaggregierung für den Gebietsauslass und aufwendiger Geländebeobachtung bzw. –messungen dar. Die prozessbeschreibende Modellierung mit zufriedenstellender Güte sowohl für das Schäfertal als auch für das Lubazhinkhaeinzugsgebiet stellt die Grundlage für die Berechnung von Klima- oder Landnutzungsszenarien dar. Eine Auswertung der bestehenden langjährigen Datenreihe aus dem Schäfertal bestätigt zunächst den allgemeinen Trend zur Erwärmung vor allem im Winterhalbjahr. Demgegenüber lässt der instrumentenbedingte Fehler bei der Niederschlagmessung keine Ableitung eines Trends aus den vorhandenen Daten zu. Aus der meteorologischen Datenreihe des Schäfertals wurden insgesamt 13 Jahre mit definierter Abweichung von +2.5 bis -2.5 °C und fünfmal +0.5 °C von der durchschnittlichen Winterlufttemperatur (Jd 330-90) gegenüber dem langjährigen Wintermittel ausgewählt. Im Gegensatz zu Wettergeneratoren werden dadurch eine Kombinationen aus Lufttemperatur und Niederschlag erfasst, die typischen Witterungssituationen entsprechen. Die Niederschlagssummen für den Winterzeitraum dieser Szenariojahre liegen zwischen -45 % und + 75 % gegenüber den langjährigen Mittelwerten. Die Modellergebnisse belegen die große Bedeutung der Witterungssituationen für die Abflussbildung in der Art, dass eine erhöhte Niederschlagsumme nicht zwingend auch eine überdurchschnittliche Abflussmenge hervorruft. Schneedeckendynamik und Bodenfrost sind die prägenden Elemente. Die Anzahl der Schneetage und die Dauer einer Schneeperiode liegt bei negativen Temperaturabweichungen deutlich über den Szenarien mit positiver Abweichung. Insgesamt zeigen die Ergebnisse der hydrologischen Simulation für die Szenarien, dass sowohl eine starke Abweichung nach oben oder unten vom bisherigen Durchschnitt vermehrt zu Oberflächenabflussbildung führt. Die Erosionssummen der Szenariotage mit Oberflächenabfluss variieren zwischen 4 und 141 t d-1 und stehen aufgrund des nicht veränderten Parametersatzes in direkter Abhängigkeit zum Abflussvolumen. Die berechneten Erosionssummen für Situationen ohne Bodenfrost fallen generell geringer aus, befinden sich aber wie auch die Ereignisse mit Bodenfrost im Wertebereich der Referenzereignisse. Im Bereich der Referenzereignisse liegen auch die Sedimentfrachten mit 0.03 bis 13.15 t d-1. Eine erhöhte Variabilität ist zu erwarten, wenn die Veränderungen der Vegetationsperioden und der Fruchtfolgen in den Modellansatz aufgenommen würden. Eine Betrachtung der Erosionsummen und Sedimentfrachten nicht auf Basis von Tageswerten sondern von Schneeschmelzereignissen zeigt deutlich, dass die Klimaszenarien mit hohen Abweichungen von den Normwerten auch erhöhte Gesamtstoffausträge verursachen. Im russischen Lubazhinkhaeinzugsgebiet führen die Transformationsprozesse im Landwirtschaftssektor zu tiefgreifenden Änderungen der Landnutzung. Auf einer Analyse der Entwicklung in den letzten 15 Jahren aufbauend, kann für das Gebiet von einer deutlichen Modifikation im Verhältnis Grünland, Acker und Wald ausgegangen werden. Diese Dynamik spiegelt sich in den fünf Szenarien wider, die flächenspezifische Änderungen vorsehen. Die Variationen reichen von einem Szenario, in dem ein ausländischer Investor die landwirtschaftliche Nutzfläche auf alle geeigneten Böden ausdehnt, über eine Ausdehnung der Waldflächen in einem laufenden staatlichen Waldschutzprogramm bis hin zum Aufbau kleinbäuerlicher Strukturen und lokale Vermarktung der Produkte durch sich entwickelnden Tourismus. Die Gesamtabflussmenge der Szenarien liegt zwischen 276.4 und 293.3 mm für die Simulationsperiode 2003 bis 2005. In Abhängigkeit vom Waldflächenanteil und der damit verbundenen Evapotranspiration treten im Vergleich zum Ist-Zustands des Referenzszenarios nur geringe positive oder negative Abweichungen auf. Im Unterschied dazu treten bei der Betrachtung der Oberflächabflussentwicklung für die drei Schneeschmelzperioden relativ große Abweichungen bis zu über 20 mm auf. Diese Unterschiede sind am deutlichsten in den durch Bodenfrost und hohes Schneewasseräquivalent ausgezeichneten Jahre 2003 und 2005 für das Szenario mit dem größten Waldflächen- und Grünlandanteil. Mit wenigen Ausnahmen führen die Szenarien zu einer Erhöhung der simulierten Sedimentfracht am Gebietsauslass. Die Ergebnisse belegen darüber hinaus, dass eine Verminderung der Erosion auf den Hängen allein nicht zu einer Frachtreduzierung führen muss, da bei geringer Sedimentbelastung im Gerinne Material aufgenommen werden kann. Ein flächenspezifischer Vergleich zweier Szenarien belegt die Bedeutung der Verortung der Nutzungsänderungen innerhalb des Einzugsgebietes und der damit einhergehenden Konnektivität von abflussbildenden Arealen und Erosionsflächen zum Gerinne hin. Die Szenarioergebnisse weisen auf die steigende Bedeutung von Extremereignissen hin, die im Zuge des Klimawandels zu erwarten sind. Ebenso wird die Verknüpfung von Hang- und Gerinneprozessen als Attribut eines Einzugsgebietes unterstrichen, das bei Managementmaßnahmen beachtet werden muss. Insgesamt belegen die Ergebnisse für beide Untersuchungsgebiete, dass das Modellsystem IWAN nach einer Kabibrierung erfolgreich zur Abschätzung von möglichen zukünftigen Sedimentquellen und Sedimentausträgen eingesetzt werden kann. Weitergehender Forschungsbedarf besteht in der Frage der Übertragbarkeit des Monitoringansatzes in Naturräume mit anderen, zum Teil komplexeren hydrologischen Einzugsgebietsreaktionen und darauf aufbauenden Stoffausträgen und Austragspfaden. Darüber hinaus kann im Modellsystem IWAN eine Verbesserung durch eine Berechnung der Rillenausbildung auf dem Hang sowie eine Modifikation der Sedimenttransportberechnung erzielt werden. Bei einer Übertragung auf andere Einzugsgebiete sollte eine umfassende Sensitivitätsanalyse und Ergebnisunsicherheitsbetrachtung vor allem in Hinblick auf die Kopplung von Teilmodellen innerhalb des Modellsystems erfolgen.:Gliederung Gliederung V Liste der Abbildungen VII Liste der Tabellen XII 1 Einleitung und Fragestellung 3 1.1 Bodenerosion und Sedimentfracht in Einzugsgebieten 3 1.1.1 Abflussbildung, Bodenerosion und Sedimentaustrag 3 1.1.2 Winterliche Situationen 5 1.2 Modellierungsansätze 13 1.2.1 Modelle und Modellkopplungen 13 1.2.2 Probleme der Modellanwendung 17 1.3 Wissensdefizite und Zielstellung 23 2 Untersuchungsgebiete und Methoden 25 2.1 Schäfertal 25 2.1.1 Naturraum 25 2.1.2 Methoden 28 2.2 Lubazhinkha 31 2.2.1 Naturraum 31 2.2.2 Methoden 36 2.3 Datenverarbeitung 38 3 Ergebnisse und Diskussion des Monitorings in den Einzugsgebieten 41 3.1 Schäfertal 41 3.1.1 Abflussbildung 41 3.1.2 Stoffausträge bei Hochwasserereignissen 45 3.2 Lubazhinkha 54 3.2.1 Bedeutung der Schneeschmelze für den Stoffaustrag 54 3.2.2 Stoffdynamik während der Schneeschmelze 57 4 Modellentwicklung 69 4.1 Zielstellungen der Modellmodifikation und -entwicklung 69 4.2 WASIM-AGNPS 70 4.2.1 Wasserhaushaltsmodell WASIM 70 4.2.2 Stofftransportmodell AGNPS 72 4.2.3 Schnittstelle WASIM-AGNPS 74 4.3 Modifikation von WASIM für winterliche Abflussbildung 76 4.3.1 Grundlagen 76 4.3.2 Datenerhebung 77 4.3.3 Sensorauswahl 77 4.3.4 Ergebnisse 79 4.3.5 Empirisches Modell 82 4.3.6 Bodentemperaturteilmodul 83 4.3.7 Anpassung mit Daten aus dem Einzugsgebiet Lubazhinkha 85 4.4 Schneeschmelzerosionsmodell (SMEM) 87 4.4.1 Rillenprofil 87 4.4.2 Bodenerosion 90 4.4.3 Technische Umsetzung 96 4.5 Modellsystem IWAN 97 4.5.1 Schnittstelle SMEM-AGNPS 97 4.5.2 Graphische Benutzeroberfläche 99 5 Modellergebnisse und Diskussion 105 5.1 Schäfertal 105 5.1.1 Bodentemperatur 105 5.1.2 Hydrologie 108 5.1.3 Schneeschmelzerosion 113 5.1.4 Sedimentfracht 120 5.2 Lubazhinkha 126 5.2.1 Hydrologie 126 5.2.2 Schneeschmelzerosion 133 5.2.3 Sedimentfracht 137 6 Szenariorechnungen 143 6.1 Klimaszenarien Schäfertal 143 6.1.1 Szenarienauswahl 143 6.1.2 Modellergebnisse und Diskussion 148 6.2 Landnutzungsszenarien Lubazhinkha 158 6.2.1 Szenarienauswahl 158 6.2.2 Modellergebnisse und Diskussion 163 7 Schlussfolgerungen 169 7.1 Einzugsgebiete 169 7.2 Modellsystem IWAN 172 7.3 Szenarien 176 7.4 Forschungsbedarf 178 8 Zusammenfassung 179 9 Summary 189 10 Literatur 199 Appendix 207 Abkürzungen Modellübersicht Quellcode (VBA) ; Soil erosion by water is a ubiquitous problem that impairs the agricultural productivity, diminishes soil functionality and may harmfully affect neighbouring environmental compartments. Surface waters are especially affected by the sediment, sediment bounded and soluble nutrients as well as pollutants mobilised by soil erosion. The knowledge about erosion processes and sediment loads is of high relevance for the protection of the soil and water and has moreover an economic dimension. Generally, a slope or catchment can be divided into three zones: erosion, transport and sedimentation. However, runoff generating processes and roughness or topography triggered runoff concentration lead to an individual differentiation. Furthermore, spatial and temporal discontinuities of processes or connectivities and thresholds modify the erosion and sediment characteristics. Relief and soil as structural elements of a catchment control accordingly the soil moisture differentiation and in an essential way the runoff generation and sediment load. In temperate and cold climates an important portion of runoff is generated in winter and can be affected by soil frost and snowmelt. However, only little knowledge exists about the processes and dimension of sediment and nutrient emissions under these wintry conditions. Systematic research exists particularly in Russia and Norway. The related deficits are also reflected in existing model approaches to estimate soil erosion and sediment fields from catchments. On the one hand neither the snow development or snow melt nor the modification of the soil water flow in case of frozen soil is considered. On the other hand the erosivity of the snow melt runoff and the modification of the soil erodibility through, for example frost-thaw cycles, is adequately reflected. It is the main focus of the presented work to identify, by analysing data from a German and a Russian catchment, the dominant processes and triggers of runoff generation and diffuse pollution under winter conditions. The results are implemented into a model system which is utilised to analyse spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of processes and to estimate the effects of climate and land use change on sediment loads in the two target areas. The 1.44 km² catchment Schaefertal is located in the eastern lower Harz Mountains approx. 150 km SW of Berlin, Germany. Cambisols and Luvisolos have developed from periglacial slope deposits on greywacke and argillaceous shale. These slopes are utilised agriculturally with a crop rotation of mainly winter grain and canola. The thalweg is dominated by hydromorphic soils and pasture. The climate is slightly continental with an annual average temperature of 6.8°C and 680 mm total annual precipitation. In addition to long-time hydro-meteorological measurements, since several years research into sediment and nutrient emissions is conducted. A routine biweekly sampling of the runoff at the catchment outlet is supplemented by automatic high flow sampling especially during snow melt flows. Besides suspended sediment concentration, phosphorus species and dissolved organic carbon are sampled and analysed following standard methods. Also in the Russian catchment Lubazhinkha the main focus is the characterisation of runoff generation and sediment/nutrient transport during snowmelt events. The catchment is located about 100 km south of Moscow, Russia in the transition zone from southern Taiga to forest steppe. The area of 18.8 km² is utilised half by agriculture and one third by forestry. The recent spatial differentiation of this land use is triggered by the relief determined erosive shortening and hydromorphic characteristics of the dominant grey forest soils. Climate and hydrology are dominated by snow cover accumulation and snow melt; annual average temperature is 4.4°C and the annual precipitation sum is 560 mm. High flow samples are taken at the catchment outlet behind a small dam and at the two most important tributaries to characterise mobilisation processes and the sediment and nutrient concentrations. The interpretation of data from the Schaefertal demonstrate for the period of investigation the importance of high flow situations that are caused by snow melt. Catchment conditions characterised by frozen soils lead to a modification of the measured hydrograph, especially through the occurrence of fast surface or near-surface components. The peak flow of the eight high flow events which are employed for interpretation vary between 30 and 270 l s-1, with total runoff volumes in a range from 1 to 50 mm. The sediment concentrations that are observed at the catchment outlet are below 650 mg l-1 for the two events without frozen soil and therewith distinct below the maximum of around 6000 mg l-1 for events with frozen or partly frozen soil conditions. Solely, one event with rainfall on unfrozen soil is characterised by high sediment concentration which is caused by channel maintenances and easy mobilisation of material from the channel banks. According to this, the sediment yields vary for the single events and achieve up to 17 t. The most important trigger is the generation of erosive surface runoff on the slopes by reduction of the hydraulic conductivity of the frozen soils. The comparison of the sediment concentrations of high flow events and the biweekly sampling as well as hysteresis curves of the single events clarify the differing dynamics of sediment export situations. The soil frost affected events show an anti-clockwise direction of the discharge-sediment relationship which points to a sediment source on the slope, whereas the hysteresis curves of unfrozen soil conditions are oriented clockwise. For these events a sediment source near the channel or the channel bank is probable. These assumptions are also supported by a differentiated phosphorus enrichment ratio in the exported sediment. Furthermore, a dynamic in the progress of the single events can be observed which is caused by the temporal variability of the runoff generation and confirms the related spatial heterogeneity of sediment sources. Contrary to the Schaefertal with several snow melt events per year, in the Russian catchment the snow cover is accumulated over the entire winter and one snow melt flood occurs in March or during the first half of April. The interpretation of multiannual data document the importance of the spring snow melts for the runoff generation and sediment export from the catchment Lubazhinkha. The sediment yield of three observed snow melt events varies between 50 and 630 t in dependency on the hydrological conditions. The event related sediment load of at least 0.3 t ha-1 is above the values that were measured in the Schaefertal but in the range of other studies with comparable soils and land use. Detailed analyses of the measurements of the snow melt in spring 2003 document the dynamic within one event. A sediment concentration at the catchment outlet from 6 to 540 mg l-1 led to a total event sediment yield of 190 t. The maximum concentrations of sediment and phosphorus peak with the discharge. In contrast, the concentration of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is delayed compared to the runoff peak due to the slow snow melt development under forest stands and mobilisation of DOC from the organic rich topsoil of these forest areas. A differentiation of runoff components allows a further interpretation of event specific dynamic of sediment sources and transport pathways. In case of low discharge (< 2.5 mm d-1) the material transfer is dominated by dissolved forms and enters the channel passing the soil as slow runoff. Fast runoff components or surface runoff dominate situations with higher amounts of discharge in which sediment and nutrient sources are mobilised with temporal dynamic. Besides this event internal dynamic inter-annual variability exists that is a result of weather conditions in the specific winter. Similar to the Schaefertal, the development of frozen soils and the related modification of infiltration characteristics of the soils play an important role in the Lubazhinkha catchment. Other important triggers are snow water equivalent, snow melt dynamic and specific soil frost characteristics, i.e. depth of penetration. The variability of these boundary conditions led to a high inter-annual differentiation of runoff generation and sediment loads. Thus, for the snowmelt 2004 with above average winter air temperatures and only partly frozen soils, as well as low snow water equivalent, a comparable low sediment load was observed. In addition, the hysteresis curves of the discharge-sediment concentration relationship indicate differences in the sediment sources for the single snow melt events which are in dependency of the abovementioned factors. For both catchments the established monitoring system and selected parameters provide an insight into runoff generating processes and relevant triggers. Occurrences of soil frost and snow melt dynamics are most important factors. Wintry conditions led to high sediment and nutrient yields in both catchments. The interpretation of physical and chemical parameters of discharge allows the identification of spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of sediment source areas. Several demands for a model approach arise from these findings of catchment monitoring which are especially related to the spatial differentiated estimation of surface runoff generating areas and soil erosion through snow melt water. The basis for the model system "IWAN" (Integrated Winter erosion And Nutrient load model) is the hydrological model WASIM ETH Ver.2 and the nutrient load model AGNPS 5.0. The linking of these two raster-based models facilitates the utilisation of continuous, spatial differentiated information for surface runoff to estimate soil erosion. By this, the high parameter sensitivity of the SCS-CN approach in AGNPS is replaced with sensitivities distributed among different parameters of the soil water calculation in WASIM and the concurrent calculation of a plausible process based spatial differentiated runoff generation. The implementation of a module to estimate the soil temperature forms the basis for an improved calculation of soil water flows and runoff generation under winter conditions. This module calculates the topsoil temperature based on values of air temperature and considers exposition and land use. The calculated soil temperature of the previous day is assumed in case of a snow cover of more than 5 mm water equivalent. The saturated hydraulic conductivity of the soil is set to zero if the calculated soil temperature drops below freezing and surface runoff begins after the water free soil pore volume is filled up. The goodness of fit for the Schaefertal shows a correlation coefficient of 0.62 to 0.81 and for the Lubazhinkha catchment values in a range between 0.82 and 0.91. The spatial and temporal differentiated information of surface runoff is fundamental to a new developed calculation of rill erosion during snow melt situations which replaces the empirical erosion estimation of AGNPS. One rill for each raster cell is simulated on the assumption of a non-cohesive soil through water saturation and that soil frost does not hinder the deepening of the triangular rill profile. The soil erodibilty is a function of root parameters and diameter of water stable aggregates. The erosivity of the snow melt runoff in the rill is calculated in dependency of surface roughness and soil aggregate diameter. A spatial differentiated estimation of soil erosion is possible in combination with the routed surface runoff from the modified WASIM. In addition to the erosion estimation, the model system IWAN comprises a user interface for data conversion as well as pre- and post-processing options. The results of the model system application for both catchments demonstrate that the dominant processes of runoff generation as well as sediment loss are matched. For the Schaefertal a modelling agreement of r² equalling 0.94 and 0.91 is realised for the year of calibration 1994 and the year of validation 1995, respectively. With the exception of 1996 all periods of high flow and the falling dry of the channel in summer from 1996 until 2003 are represented satisfactorily with the calibrated set of parameters. On this basis, the total runoff volume of the observed and above discussed snow melt events has been modelled with a high degree of accuracy. The spatially differentiated calculation of soil moisture and soil frost occurrence results in a variable fraction of surface runoff on the total runoff for these events. Runoff volume, slope and flow length show positive sensitivities in the new snow melt erosion module. However, parameter combinations and non-linear algorithms, especially for root parameters and the Manning coefficient, may lead to more complex sensitivity properties. Thus, the simulation of soil erosion in the Schaefertal was first conducted with a set of parameters that was calibrated with results of erosion plot experiments. The average values of calculated erosion vary between 0.0006 and 0.96 t ha-1 for the six events from the Schaefertal. However, the median values and high standard deviations prove that most of the cells have low erosion values. The results for events with frozen soils are characterised by significant higher values of erosion. Despite similar total runoff volume i.e. of the events from 20.01.2001 and 26.02.2002 differences occur because of distinctions in runoff concentration on the north and south exposed slope. The spatial results are positively compared to field mapping in addition to a plausibility control of the calculated values. The adjustment of the calculated values for sediment load against the observations is done with calibration of the Manning coefficient for one randomly selected event. The sediment load in some footslope areas caused by runoff concentration is especially high and in the range of 0.0 to 13.84 t for single events. The event sediment yield is generally underestimated with the exception of the event on 26.02.2002. The total absolute error for the three winter seasons is 11 t. The difference between simulated and observed sediment load is highest for the 26.12.2002. This distinction may originate in the temporal variability and spatial heterogeneity of surface roughness against the background of soil frost influences and tillage operations. The general distribution of modelled sediment sources, transport pathways and connecting points to the channel are confirmed by field observations. However, a quantification of the spatial model results on the basis of the observed single events is not possible. For the Lubazhinkha catchment two sets of hydrological parameters are identified for the year of calibration 2004 which achieve satisfying results in comparison to the observed discharge. Although one of these set of parameters performed better in reproducing the peak flows of the snow melt situations, the spatial distribution of surface runoff generating areas was not plausible. Contrary, the second set of parameters characterises the lateral water flows and thus the important spatial soil moisture distribution in a more realistic way. However, the snow melt peak flows for the years of validation 2003 and 2005 are overestimated. The difference between the years, which was identified on the basis of the interpretation of the observations, is matched as well as the dynamic of runoff generation. Surface runoff generation on the flat interfluves areas and saturated areas in valley bottoms are modelled satisfactorily as well as the delayed runoff generation under forest stands. The model system simulates erosion sums of 10 to 280 t d-1 for a total of ten days with surface runoff in a range of 0.3 to 24.1 mm d-1 in the entire modelling period of three years. Considering the variable area of 5 to 46 % on which erosion takes place, the values of effective erosion vary between 0.1 and 0.32 t ha-1 for single days and between 0.44 to 0.92 t ha-1 for multi-day snow melts. The simulated sediment load at the catchment outlet range from 6.7 to 365.8 t per day and sums up to 246.2 t for the snow melt 2003. For the year 2004 99.9 t and for 2005 757.9 t are calculated. In comparison to the observations for the calibration year 2004, the sediment load is overestimated by 10 t or 12 %. The deviation for 2003 is -9 %, with the same set of parameters. The result for 2005 is with an error of 33 % not as good as in the two other years. Overall, the days of snow melt with a low amount of erosion cause additional mobilisation of sediment from the channel banks and contrary, high amount of erosion on the slopes result in deposition processes on the forest and pasture areas near in the valley bottom and in the channel itself. Thus, high sediment loads are estimated for the bottom slopes and the small V-shaped first order valleys. The sediment loads for the two sub-catchments differ significantly because of the spatially differentiated processes of runoff generation and soil erosion. For the days with runoff generation in forest areas higher sediment yields are calculated for the Lubazhinkha-subcatchment which is characterised by a higher degree of forested areas. Differences in slope-channel interaction and variations between the two subcatchments illustrated the overall high process relevance of the model results. The model system IWAN estimates for the Schaefertal and the Lubazhinkha catchment the spatial and temporal dynamics of surface runoff generation and the related erosion processes during snow melt episodes with high plausibility. The model approach demonstrates an option between model result aggregation at the catchment outlet and intensive spatial field observation and measurement within a catchment. The satisfactory modelling of processes for the Schaefertal, as well as for the Lubazhinkha catchment, forms the basis for the calculation of climate and land use scenarios. An analysis of the existing long-term dataset from the Schaefertal approves the general trend of warming, especially in the winter half year. Contrary, the instrument error for rainfall measurements disallows an identification of a trend in the present data. A total of 13 years with defined deviation of +2.5 to -2.5 °C and five years with a deviation of +0.5 °C from the average air temperature in winter (Jd 330-90) were selected from the data set. In contrast to the utilisation of weather generators, this selection provides a dataset with a combination of air temperature and rainfall/snow that is in accordance with typical atmospheric situations. The amount of rainfall for the winter period of the scenario years deviates -45 % to +75 % from the long term average of winter. The model results substantiate the role of weather situations such that an increased amount of rainfall does not automatically result in above-average runoff. Snow cover dynamics and soil frost occurrence are the controlling factors. The number of days with snow and the duration of each snow period are significant higher for scenarios with negative temperature deviation compared to the scenarios with positive deviation. Overall the results of the hydrological calculation of the scenarios show that extreme positive and negative deviations lead to increased surface runoff probability. The sums of erosion for single days with surface runoff varies between 4 to 141 t d-1 and are in direct relation to runoff volume due to the unchanged set of parameters. Generally the calculated sums of erosion for situations without soil frost are lower than with soil frost, but both types are in the range of values of the measured and modelled reference events. Also the calculated sediment yields from 0.03 to 13.15 t d-1 for the scenario days are in the range of the measurements. A higher variability could be expected when considering modifications to vegetation period or crop rotations. An interpretation of erosion and sediment yield on the basis of snow melt periods clarifies those scenarios with extreme deviations also tend to higher sediment export from the catchment. Transformation processes in the agricultural sector of Russia trigger fundamental changes in land use. Based on an analysis of the development of the past 15 years for the Lubazhinkha catchment a significant modification of the pasture, arable land and forest areas is probable in the future. This dynamic is reflected in five scenarios with area-specific changes in land use distribution. The variations range from scenarios with a foreign investor who extends the arable land to all suitable soils in the catchment, an expansion of forest areas in the frame of a governmental forest protection program to the development of small family farms with local market structures because of tourism. The calculated total runoff for the scenarios varies between 276.4 and 293.3 mm for the entire simulation period 2003 to 2005. Small positive or negative deviations occur compared to the as-is state in relation to the variable forest area and combined evapotranspiration. Contrary, the surface runoff shows large deviations of more than 20 mm for the three snow melt periods. These differences are pronounced for the scenario with highest portion of forest and pasture area in the years 2003 and 2005 that are characterised by soil frost and high water equivalent in snow. With only few exceptions the scenarios lead to an increase in simulated sediment yield at the catchment outlet. Moreover, the results document that a decrease of erosion on the slopes does not consequently result in a yield reduction. In the case of low sediment input from the slopes additional material from the channel bed and banks may attribute significantly to the sediment loading. An area specific comparison of two scenarios clarifies the importance of localisation of land use changes and the according connectivity of surface runoff areas and erosion areas to the channel. The scenarios document the increasing importance of extreme events that can be expected due to climate change. Additionally, the link of slope and channel processes, as attribute of a catchment, has to be considered in planning of management measures. The results prove for both catchments that the model system IWAN can be applied for estimating future potential sediment sources and sediment yield after successful calibration. Further research is needed in the question of transferability of the monitoring approach to other environments with a different, more complex hydrological catchment reaction and linked sediment sources and transport mechanisms. The model system IWAN can be improved by a dynamic calculation of rill network generation on the slope and a modification of the sediment transport algorithms. The transfer of the model system to other catchments has to be accompanied by a comprehensive sensitivity and uncertainty analysis especially respecting the model chain within IWAN.:Gliederung Gliederung V Liste der Abbildungen VII Liste der Tabellen XII 1 Einleitung und Fragestellung 3 1.1 Bodenerosion und Sedimentfracht in Einzugsgebieten 3 1.1.1 Abflussbildung, Bodenerosion und Sedimentaustrag 3 1.1.2 Winterliche Situationen 5 1.2 Modellierungsansätze 13 1.2.1 Modelle und Modellkopplungen 13 1.2.2 Probleme der Modellanwendung 17 1.3 Wissensdefizite und Zielstellung 23 2 Untersuchungsgebiete und Methoden 25 2.1 Schäfertal 25 2.1.1 Naturraum 25 2.1.2 Methoden 28 2.2 Lubazhinkha 31 2.2.1 Naturraum 31 2.2.2 Methoden 36 2.3 Datenverarbeitung 38 3 Ergebnisse und Diskussion des Monitorings in den Einzugsgebieten 41 3.1 Schäfertal 41 3.1.1 Abflussbildung 41 3.1.2 Stoffausträge bei Hochwasserereignissen 45 3.2 Lubazhinkha 54 3.2.1 Bedeutung der Schneeschmelze für den Stoffaustrag 54 3.2.2 Stoffdynamik während der Schneeschmelze 57 4 Modellentwicklung 69 4.1 Zielstellungen der Modellmodifikation und -entwicklung 69 4.2 WASIM-AGNPS 70 4.2.1 Wasserhaushaltsmodell WASIM 70 4.2.2 Stofftransportmodell AGNPS 72 4.2.3 Schnittstelle WASIM-AGNPS 74 4.3 Modifikation von WASIM für winterliche Abflussbildung 76 4.3.1 Grundlagen 76 4.3.2 Datenerhebung 77 4.3.3 Sensorauswahl 77 4.3.4 Ergebnisse 79 4.3.5 Empirisches Modell 82 4.3.6 Bodentemperaturteilmodul 83 4.3.7 Anpassung mit Daten aus dem Einzugsgebiet Lubazhinkha 85 4.4 Schneeschmelzerosionsmodell (SMEM) 87 4.4.1 Rillenprofil 87 4.4.2 Bodenerosion 90 4.4.3 Technische Umsetzung 96 4.5 Modellsystem IWAN 97 4.5.1 Schnittstelle SMEM-AGNPS 97 4.5.2 Graphische Benutzeroberfläche 99 5 Modellergebnisse und Diskussion 105 5.1 Schäfertal 105 5.1.1 Bodentemperatur 105 5.1.2 Hydrologie 108 5.1.3 Schneeschmelzerosion 113 5.1.4 Sedimentfracht 120 5.2 Lubazhinkha 126 5.2.1 Hydrologie 126 5.2.2 Schneeschmelzerosion 133 5.2.3 Sedimentfracht 137 6 Szenariorechnungen 143 6.1 Klimaszenarien Schäfertal 143 6.1.1 Szenarienauswahl 143 6.1.2 Modellergebnisse und Diskussion 148 6.2 Landnutzungsszenarien Lubazhinkha 158 6.2.1 Szenarienauswahl 158 6.2.2 Modellergebnisse und Diskussion 163 7 Schlussfolgerungen 169 7.1 Einzugsgebiete 169 7.2 Modellsystem IWAN 172 7.3 Szenarien 176 7.4 Forschungsbedarf 178 8 Zusammenfassung 179 9 Summary 189 10 Literatur 199 Appendix 207 Abkürzungen Modellübersicht Quellcode (VBA)