Conference reports

World modelling

goes global

Staff at the Systems Analysis Research Unit of the UK Departments of the

Environment and Transport, led by P.C. Roberts, have built a model of the

world economic system and its natural resources.’ In September 1976, the

modelling work of SARU was presented to a symposium at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. SARU’s work

on world modelling has so far received little exposure in the UK. Accordingly,

the British National Committee for IIASA arranged for a one-day public

presentation of SARU’s modelling work at the Royal Society, London, on 3

October 1977.

The only paper issued for this meeting was the SARU report referred to above, but the emphasis of the day was on seeing the SARU work in the context of vvorld modelling studies as they are developing in various countries. Procedure at the meeting was to have a series of presentations from members of SARU, each followed by a general discussion.

Sir Kingsley Dunham, Chairman of the British National Committee for the IIASA, opened the proceedings as the morning Chairman, and a brief ‘state- of-the-art’ presentation was given by D.J. Ovens, Under Secretary at the Department of the Environment. Ovens stressed that SARU’s function was not forecasting, but rather predicting what would happen if a number of assumptions about the future were postulated, policies were chosen and followed up. and that these held good.

He referred to the earlier publication, Future World Trends,’ which had devoted much attention to the problems of population growth and world food needs, as well as energy needs and pollution aspects. Restraints on our future were economic and political - not physical. How could the necessary capital, etc, be made available, and where would it be needed? Increasing energy costs made feeding the world difficult, but this was not an insuperable problem. Ovens thinks these views are still correct, and could now be argued more convincingly than two years ago. He believed there has been a move away

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from concern with physical resource limits. He believed ‘technology plus the market’ could help us cope adequately with possible physical shortages in the future. He concluded by stressing the importance of the world food problem, and thought the key relationship was between food and world population - ‘they will come into balance, but the great question is how?’

A number of people from the floor queried this apparent retreat from concern about physical limits. Peter Roberts, however, replied that SARU were concerned with finite limits of resources, but the food situation seemed to loom even more serious, and they had to have priorities. Since Limits to Growth by Meadows overplayed the physical resource limits aspect, it seems the pendulum is now swinging away from it.

Peter Roberts gave an excellent, but all too rapid, review of the state of world modelling in a session chaired by Dr Holdgate (Director-General of Research, Department of the Environment, and a member of the British National Committee of IIASA). The Club of Rome model3 clearly departed in its prognosis from the Forrester and Meadows doom prophecies. An element of hope about the long-term future had crept in, and there is much normative material in their book. But it is a complex model which few people can understand! The world is disaggregated into ten regions on a virtually geopolitical basis,

although each country can identify itself in the model and (in principle) do something about its future, since there is no sign of a world government in the offing . . .

World models have now emerged from Austria, the Netherlands and Argentina. The Austrian one is goal- driven, normative not descriptive, which the International Labour Office in Geneva have attempted to use. The Dutch model is the first one to come from an economist, and is essentially descriptive, being an economist’s description of what the world is likely to do. Very recently, IIASA have heard of two more models, from the United Nations and Japan. But four more are in the making. The Russians are becoming very interested in this work, and even the Lutheran church is attempting a model, which is said to include values. So the whole area of world modelling is moving rapidly -too fast, said Peter Roberts, to enable him to give a proper state-of-play report.

The UK is a participant in the OECD Interfutures Project, a three-year study started in 1976 and ‘designed to examine the harmonious development of advanced industrial societies in relation to the developing countries’. It is noteworthy that the Interfutures project team have decided to use SARU’s model for some of their scenario generation. The SARU model is economically very consistent, and so is useful to, for instance, the OECD. The meeting challenged the adoption of neoclassical economics as the basis of a world model - not all the world is operating on such a system. It was pointed out that there was so much laissez-faire in the model, and yet we are virtually living in a planned world! Peter Roberts said they had considered this basic problem at some length - it did worry them. But he maintained that one could probably ‘plug in’ a different economic system, and still use their model . .

SARU was questioned about the way they had ranked their priorities. It was maintained that IIASA put energy resources high, and food lower down. However, SARU had reversed these priorities and it was questioned whether the UK government would really be interested in seeing energy resources put low down the priorities scale.

RESOURCES POLICY March 1978

Conference reports

were questioning the value of investing human resources in world modelling work. But whether we agree or not, this field of activity is definitely growing.

To be fair, energy does figure in SARU’s work, in a limiting sense, in a number of ways - eg pollution aspects (especially thermal pollution). The SARU report states that it would be prudent to call a halt to the growth in energy dissipation while thermal emissions were still only a small fraction of the solar flux (lo/o, say, might be the limit). Again, the report claims that the model’s ability ‘to reproduce substitution effects is a notable feat and adds to the degree of credibility which it should be accorded’. But it cautions that ‘it would be unwise to use its logistic relation directly as a modelling tool for energy substitutions in the future as other factors can intervene’. (For instance, high discount rates militate against the introduction of long-term projects, and this can disrupt the resource substitution mechanism.)

Finally, the report quotes Dunham: ‘The solution of the energy problem is

fundamental; given energy, most other

necessary materials can be got, or recycled’. SARU states, ‘we can get the materials we need provided we are prepared to meet the cost in capital, labour and energy . . . resources are, in fact, a function of costs . as we consume lower grade ores the necessary allocation of resources to the mineral and energy sectors must increase. This means that there are less goods [going to be] available for consumption but this does not necessarily entail depression of standards of living below subsistence level’.

The meeting responded well to Peter Roberts’ view that futures studies should all be about ‘rates’ - the rate at which we should develop/invest in nuclear power, the rate at which new technologies should be pressed forward with, the rate at which new resources should be employed. We tend to be too concerned with static rather than dynamic aspects and the future.

At the end of the day, some people

Professor Fred Roberts

Resources consultant

Bainbridge, Leyburn

North Yorkshire, UK

’ Sarum 76 - Global Modeling Project. Research Report 19, Departments of the Environment and Transport, 2 Marsham Street, SW1 P 3EB. 1977. See also P.C. Roberts, ‘SARUM 76 -A global modelling project’, Futures, Vol 9. No 1, February 1977,pp3-16. * Future World Trends. HMSO, London, 1976. 3 M. Mesarovitch and E. Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point - The 2nd report to the Club of Rome, E.P. Dutton and Co I&Readers Digest Press, New York, 1974.

Aluminium recovery

On 1 November 1977 over 30 representatives of private and government

resource recovery programmes were invited to Richmond, Virginia, USA, for an

intensive briefing on the state of the art of aluminium recovery from municipal

and commercial wastes. The seminar was one of a series organized by the

National Center for Resource Recovery (NCRR) in cooperation with industry

groups. Reynolds Aluminium, the USA’s second largest aluminium producer,

cosponsored and hosted the meeting.

Because aluminium is generally the most profitable component of waste streams, and because it is cheaper to recycle aluminium than produce it from ore, both municipal recyclers and the aluminium industry have devoted intensive efforts toward improving the efficiency of aluminium recovery from wastes. Reynolds’ spokespersons expressed strong optimism for the future of aluminium recovery and recycling. They cited dramatic rates of recovery in disposed aluminium beverage cans and other forms. According to Reynolds, the aluminium industry now recycles 25% of all aluminium containers produced in the USA.

NCRR representatives reported on the limited amount of data available on. the ‘aluminium magnet’, an eddy- current device often seen as the best hope for producing high yields of aluminium from mixed waste streams. The magnet is working, it seems, but much more operating experience is needed to optimize its performance. Heavy media systems, perhaps the best technology for large-scale waste processing, are in need of much more development. The ‘slide’ developed by Raytheon Corporation, using permanent magnets mounted under an aluminium sheet to induce eddy currents in aluminium materials passed

over them and so preferentially direct the flow of aluminium waste materials, holds promise.

Included in the seminar was a tour of Reynolds’ modern recycling research laboratory. Among the recovery devices being developed and tested in the laboratory is a novel device which separates metallic materials from non- metallic wastes through tack welding of metal wastes on to a roller, while discarding non-metallics.

The seminar delineated the critical role that aluminium plays in the economics of high technology waste recovery systems. If aluminium continues to enter the waste stream at present volumes, economic success of such systems seems possible. If the aluminium content falls. high technology waste recovery economics will suffer markedly.

Arthur Purcell

Technical Information Project

Washington, DC, USA

RESOURCES POLICY March 1978 71