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Tag: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

  • Capitalist reforms in China led to higher extreme poverty

    Capitalist reforms in China led to higher extreme poverty

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    Newswise — It is widely believed that China’s socialist economy had relatively high rates of extreme poverty, while the capitalist reforms of the 1980s and 1990s delivered rapid progress, with extreme poverty declining from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018.

    This belief has been challenged by a research project carried out by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) in collaboration with Macquarie University in Australia and Maastrich University in the Netherlands. The researchers point out that the data used to make these claims relies on the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of $1.90 per day (2011 PPP). However, the World Bank’s method has come under sustained critique in recent years, as it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs, which varies across countries and over time, even when measured in PPP terms.

    To correct for this, researchers Jason Hickel of ICTA-UAB, Dylan Sullivan of Macquarie University and Michail Moatson of Maastricht University reviewed evidence on the share of the population unable to afford a basic subsistence basket – data which was recently published by the OECD. The researchers show that from 1981 to 1990, when many of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, China’s extreme poverty rate was only around 5.6%, substantially lower than in capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time: 51 per cent in India, 36.5 percent in Indonesia, and 29.5 per cent in Brazil. This is because China’s system of price controls and subsidies for food and housing kept the cost of basic needs low relative to economy-wide prices, and relative to working-class incomes.

    The researchers found that China’s relatively strong performance on basic-needs poverty during the socialist period is consistent with its performance on a range of social indicators, including life expectancy, infant mortality, death rate from malnutrition and poor sanitation, mean years of schooling, and access to electricity.

    Moreover, researchers found that extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent in 1995, as the privatisation of China’s public provisioning systems caused the price of essential goods to increase. While access to basic needs recovered during the 2000s, rough estimates for 2018 suggest that the extreme poverty rate remains at roughly the same level as during the 1980s.

    The study’s lead author, Sullivan, explained that “this research has important implications for policymakers and the development sector. Our findings suggest that socialist policies of public provisioning, subsidies, and price controls can be effective at reducing or preventing extreme poverty. Meanwhile, market-based policies and privatisation may threaten people’s ability to meet basic needs.”

    This research also suggests that rapid economic growth and improvements in aggregate income – as important as these may be in many contexts – cannot be relied upon to reduce extreme poverty. China’s experience during the 1990s suggests that economic growth may occur simultaneously with rising poverty under conditions of privatisation and commodification. According to Hickel, “when it comes to reducing extreme poverty in low-income countries, improving people’s access to public services and social guarantees is at least as important as increasing productive capacity”.

    The authors point out that, according to the cost-of-basic-needs data they review, the world’s governments failed to achieve the first Millenium Development Goal – i.e., to reduce by half the share of people in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015. Moatsos said that “this represents a failure of global economic governance and suggests that new policy approaches are needed in order to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere”.

    Sullivan D., Moatsos, M., & Hickel, J. Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation? New Political Economy. (2023) https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087

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  • Nature conservation needs to incorporate the human approach

    Nature conservation needs to incorporate the human approach

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    Newswise — An international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) stresses the need to apply a biocultural approach in nature conservation programs.

    When deciding which aspects of nature to protect, conservationists have largely relied on ecological criteria that define the vulnerability and resilience of species. However, there is a growing call to broaden conservation criteria to include human aspects as well.

    A new article led by ICREA Professor at ICTA-UAB Victoria Reyes-García and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) argues that new biocultural approaches are needed to introduce means to connect humans and other components of nature in order to achieve nature stewardship.

    “The focus on ecological criteria alone has failed to halt our biodiversity crisis,” says Victoria Reyes-García, who explains that “this has also created unintended injustices on Indigenous peoples and local communities worldwide.

    According to the researchers, the purely ecological approach, sans humans, risks perpetuating existing inequalities. For example, while proposals to safeguard 30-50% of the planet against extraction or development is sound conservation math, such proposals “face opposition”, on the grounds that they might increase the negative social impacts of conservation actions and pose immediate risks for people whose livelihoods directly depend on nature”, they say.

    “Conservation is designed to reduce or remove human impacts on species to give some breathing room to those species to recover,” noted Ben Halpern, coauthor on the study and Director of UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS). “However, if taking those actions limits opportunities for people to engage with the species that define their culture and their values, the conservation will have no sticking power and can actually harm those cultures and people.”

    To help implement this biocultural approach, the research team compiled the most comprehensive list thus far of culturally important species: 385 wild species (mostly plants) that have a recognized role in supporting cultural identity, as they are generally the basis for religious, spiritual and social cohesion, and provide a common sense of place, purpose and belonging.

    The list of species is part of a proposed framework and metric — a “biocultural status” — that combines information on the biological as well as the cultural conservation status of different components of nature.

    “We realized that prevailing classifications based on how vulnerable species are did not consider any of their cultural importance to people,” says Sandra Díaz, a researcher at CONICET and the National University of Córdoba. “Without the acknowledgement and protection of local, special relationships to nature that sustain some populations — often Indigenous — we risk losing an important dimension of conservation,” she adds.

    “When the human cultures that use and value an animal or plant species are lost, a whole body of values, of knowledge about that species is lost too, even if the organism itself does not go extinct. Our relationship with the natural world becomes impoverished,” notes Diaz.

    Conversely, according to the authors, recognizing the connections between people and nature and incorporating them into decision-making could enable actions based on both ecological conservation priorities and cultural values, while aligning with local priorities. The study’s focus on culturally important species could pave the way for mechanisms to enable the adoption of biocultural approaches, which has so far proven difficult.

    The paper comes at a timely moment, as the Convention on Biological Diversity prepares for the next set of biodiversity goals such as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

    “As the conservation community increasingly seeks to include diverse worldviews, knowledge and values in nature management and restoration, the framework and metric proposed here offer a concrete mechanism that combines local perspectives on which species are culturally important, with scientific assessments of the biological and cultural status of those species,” Reyes-García says. “Together, they provide an actionable way to guide decisions and operationalize global actions oriented to enhance place-based practices, such as those of Indigenous people, that have supported the conservation of social-ecological systems over the long term.” To sustain culturally important species, according to the authors, society will need a more complete list of these species’ conservation status, and ultimately, direct greater support to the cultures that value them.

    According to co-author Rodrigo Cámara-Leret of the University of Zurich, one of the most important messages in this study is that conservation assessments have largely overlooked species that matter to local cultures, underscoring a big communication gap between local people and the academic community, and even between the natural and social sciences.

    “To close this communication gap and foster more equitable conservation, we need to promote more long-term engagement with local communities to develop and maintain truly collaborative conservation partnerships,” he says. “For this to happen, there are growing calls for academic institutions to recalibrate how they judge impact, and for donor agencies to step up to the challenge of supporting longer research projects that take time, but which are highly effective in knowledge generation and promoting biocultural conservation.”

    ICTA-UABs strategic research program, promoted within the framework of the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence 2020-2023, granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, is structured around 5 interrelated Societal Challenges, focused on Oceans. Land. Cities, Consumption and Policies. Investigating these Societal Challenges is critical to envision a transition towards a sustainable Earth. This research is part of the Societal Challenges Land and Policy.

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  • Microplastics deposited on the seafloor triple in 20 years

    Microplastics deposited on the seafloor triple in 20 years

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    Newswise — The total amount of microplastics deposited on the bottom of oceans has tripled in the past two decades with a progression that corresponds to the type and volume of consumption of plastic products by society. This is the main conclusion of a study developed by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of the Built Environment of Aalborg University (AAU-BUILD), which provides the first high-resolution reconstruction of microplastic pollution from sediments obtained in the northwestern Mediterranean Sea.

    Despite the seafloor being considered the final sink for microplastics floating on the sea surface, the historical evolution of this pollution source in the sediment compartment, and particularly the sequestration and burial rate of smaller microplastics on the ocean floor, is unknown.

    This new study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T), shows that microplastics are retained unaltered in marine sediments, and that the microplastic mass sequestered in the seafloor mimics the global plastic production from 1965 to 2016. “Specifically, the results show that, since 2000, the amount of plastic particles deposited on the seafloor has tripled and that, far from decreasing, the accumulation has not stopped growing mimicking the production and global use of these materials,” explains ICTA-UAB researcher Laura Simon-Sánchez.

    Researchers explains that the sediments analysed have remained unaltered on the seafloor since they were deposited decades ago. “This has allowed us to see how, since the 1980s, but especially in the past two decades, the accumulation of polyethylene and polypropylene particles from packaging, bottles and food films has increased, as well as polyester from synthetic fibres in clothing fabrics,” explains Michael Grelaud, ICTA-UAB researcher. The amount of these three types of particles reaches 1.5mg per kilogram of sediment collected, with polypropylene being the most abundant, followed by polyethylene and polyester. Despite awareness campaigns on the need to reduce single-use plastic, data from annual marine sediment records show that we are still far from achieving this. Policies at the global level in this regard could contribute to improving this serious problem.

    Although smaller microplastics are very abundant in the environment, constraints in analytical methods have limited robust evidence on the levels of small microplastics in previous studies targeting marine sediment. In this study they were characterised by applying state-of-the-art imaging to quantify particles down to 11 µm in size.

    The degradation status of the buried particles was investigated, and it was found that, once trapped in the seafloor, they no longer degrade, either due to lack of erosion, oxygen, or light. “The process of fragmentation takes place mostly in the beach sediments, on the sea surface or in the water column. Once deposited, degradation is minimal, so plastics from the 1960s remain on the seabed, leaving the signature of human pollution there,” says Patrizia Ziveri, ICREA professor at ICTA-UAB.

    The investigated sediment core was collected in November 2019, on board the oceanographic vessel Sarmiento de Gamboa, in an expedition that went from Barcelona to the coast of the Ebro Delta, in Tarragona, Spain. The research group selected the western Mediterranean Sea as a study area, in particular the Ebro Delta, because rivers are recognized as hotspots for several pollutants, including microplastics. In addition, the influx of sediment from the Ebro River provides higher sedimentation rates than in the open ocean.

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