Boru Douthwaite

Technological Change as Driver and Response

Two parts

Technological change as both driver and response

What Basin Teams should know?

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Technological change is both driver and response

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Before… and after the project.(Photograph by Olivier Joffre)

Mr. Nguyen Hoang BenAp Lung Chim, Xa Dinh Thanh, Dong Hai.

CRESMIL impact in Vietnam, showing what is possible

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9Xiaowan Dam, China

Technological change as a global driver?

Technological change happens everywhere

Lever of riches

Mokyr –defining feature of successful civilizations (China, Europe)

Technological changes that count as global drivers

Information revolution

Brainstorming ......

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What drives technology change in agriculture?

1 kWhr costs 10 cents

1 person can work continuously at 30 W

33 hrs to earn 10 cents?

Substituting fossil for human power drives TC in ag

US agriculture uses 45 times more energy than traditional agriculture

Doubling or trebling of energy costs won’t reverse the trend

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Trends versus drivers

Dramatic weather events

Food crisis threaten global security

Impending water wars

Fossil fuels running out

Rising political power of ‘developing nations’

Saving forests makes money

Faith traditions support stewardship

Younger generations demand action

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Technological responses in basins with global relevance

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Brainstorm

Global drivers Demographic, social, economic

Climate change and environmental

Political and institutional

Basins

What basin teams should know

How technological change happens

How research can be used as a lever of technological change

What basin responses / trends (i.e., aggregate behavioural change) have global relevance

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How technological change happens

An emergent property

Of multitude interaction between people going through individual and social learning cycles

An evolutionary process

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Research as lever of technological change

Manage research process to make beneficial emergence more likely

The levers Novelty

Selection

Interaction

Motivation

Reducing uncertainty

Work with partners in spotting early emergence, stabilize and amplify

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Reducing uncertainty

Technically, impossible to predict emergence in complex systems (the equations don’t exist; ones we have sensitive

to small errors in parameterization)

“Uncertainty keeps increasing with the more research money they put in” Pioneer climate scientist Manabe

But ...

Simple predictions possible

Model to better understand the present, system fragilities (tundra), possible future scenarios

Learn from innovation histories, innovation research

Uncertainty leads to polarization17

Basin responses with global relevance

We have the list ...

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