Environmental Behavioral Sciences Seminar

Satellite Nilometers: Egypt and Bali
For 47 centuries, Nilometers spaced along the length of the Nile enabled  local farming communities to allocate irrigation flows so accurately that taxes were often assessed before the crops went into the ground. In Bali, for 8 centuries irrigation flows into rice paddies have been  managed  by local water user groups called subaks. Today, some  subaks will soon inscribe metal plaques by their water temples:

Letter to the Future
For centuries, subaks have grown rice to feed Bali’s people. We now know that flooded paddies emit methane gas, which harms the Earth’s climate. By shortening the time our fields are flooded, we can reduce methane emissions and limit the runoff of fertilizer that damages our coral reefs. We know what needs to be done. Only you will know if we succeeded.

Methane emissions and outflows of fertilizer to the reefs are both invisible to farmers. For them to become manageable,  the equivalent of Nilometers are needed. We are developing satellite surveillance that can accurately distinguish flooded fields, which emit  76.8 g/m2/season of methane, from  intermittently flooded fields which emit 80% less. With these “satellite Nilometers”, our Balinese NGO is assisting the subaks to realize their goals by providing incentives for their farmers to adopt intermittent irrigation, using a largely automated system of remote sensing to monitor, report, and verify adoption. Eventually, these incentives and the fully scaled project will be supported by the sale of carbon offsets on international markets. This system will realign the economic incentives of the subaks and a global set of individuals and groups desiring to reduce their emissions with the appropriate social imperatives, resulting in a polycentric, scalable, bottom-up solution to the tragedy of the global commons in this, and potentially other, applications. 

Biography
J. Stephen Lansing is an external professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, and  emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. From 2015 to 2019 he was Founding Director of the Complexity Institute and Professor in the Asian School of Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research on Balinese water temples was the basis for Bali’s UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape in 2012. His 2007 book  Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali was  the focus of an exhibition  by a team of architects, artists and researchers from ETH Zurich at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2019, which will be updated for  the Venice Architecture Bienalle in 2025. His most recent book is Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press 2019). Presently he is working with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Nature Conservancy to assist nomadic hunter-gatherers in Borneo, and with Balinese colleagues to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies.