World's scientists urge immediate action toward building a sustainable future
By Nathan Johnson
The runaway success of US former vice president Albert Gore's film and book 'An Inconvenient Truth' and his subsequent winning of the Nobel Prize have certainly made a huge impact in terms of bringing some hard science into living rooms and auditoriums worldwide; but the scientific community — itself responsible for discovering such facts and often 'inconvenient' truths — is no longer engaged in a debate about whether the planet faces new and profound dangers, but is focused now instead of what must be done right now to avert the worst imaginable outcomes for life on planet Earth.
Several of the world's top scientists gathered in Budapest on November 8-9 for the third World Science Forum to discuss these very issues, and a main thread to emerge during the event was that world leaders and policymakers need to make a significant shift away from short-term gains (whether as individual consumers or single nation states) in order to promote long-term environmental stability and economic justice worldwide.
Timo Makela, a consumption and waste specialist and the European Commission's DG Environment director, warns that population growth, coupled with more consumptive lifestyles outside of the United States and the European Union, could lead to a six-fold increase in consumption worldwide by 2050. One particularly urgent problem is worldwide disposal of electronic waste. Makela points out that 15 million cars are sent each year to the scrap heap, as are 100 million mobile telephones. The world's annual electronic waste would, in fact, cover an area the size of Budapest in a layer of debris one metre thick, according to the specialist.
Makela is encouraged, however, that eco-industries now account for 2.1 percent of the EU's total GNP, and that recycling efforts are playing an important role in this expanding economic sector. He adds, however, that research needs to be "robust and bold" if we are to meet today's and tomorrow's environmental challenges.
Taking risks
Speaking of robust and bold proposals, Ecuador's ambassador to Hungary, Juan Salazar Sancisi, wants people to take seriously his country's truly unique and potentially trendsetting proposal; namely, that his country be paid to 'not' exploit some of its natural resources.
By presidential decree, Ecuador declared in January 2007 that a 1.87 million hectare 'intangible zone' in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon be off limits to both logging and oil extraction. The intangible zone overlaps the country's Yasuni National Park, but oil extraction has been allowed in the past despite declared national park status. Aside from drilling and logging resulting in environmental damage to the delicate ecosystem, these industries have come into frequent contact, often violently, with members of two indigenous tribes (the Tageri and Taromenane) who choose to live in voluntary isolation from modern society. Thus the creation of an intangible zone is an effort to protect not only Ecuador's environment, but also to maintain a rich ethnic diversity.
Sancisi explained that oil accounted for an average of 40 percent of Ecuador's total exports from 1972 to 2006. This figure, however, rose in 2006 to 60 percent. Increased dependency on oil exports for national income will undoubtedly jeopardise the 18 percent of Ecuador's land that currently enjoys protected status, the ambassador claims, which is why he hopes that an international mechanism will be put in place to provide a proposed 50 percent in compensation to Ecuador for not tapping its oil reserves. As things stand now, Ecuadorians have the option of donating money of their own toward the fulfilment of this goal, but the real challenge will be to convince foreign governments that agreeing to such a proposal is the right thing to do. Sancisi asks, quite reasonably, why countries that consume fewer resources and cause less pollution per capita (Ecuador accounts for 1 percent of the world's emissions) should be forced to suffer the consequences of activities from the world's top polluters.
Acquired habits
Addressing the interaction of scientific development with official policy, Laszlo Miklos, Slovakia's former minister for environment, and now UNESCO professor for sustainable development, stresses that science needs to be "well ahead of politics" but "not so far ahead" that policymakers fail completely to grasp important knowledge. Research teams, he says, need good interpreters and translators in order to communicate the latest scientific developments; and the same is true for policymakers sharing this knowledge within their own circles.
Another problem, according to Miklos, is that sustainable development as a concept lacks, at this point, scientific validity. Developing a translatable 'inter-science' language for sustainable development will require unprecedented levels of cross-sectoral cooperation. Physical and biological branches will have to link with economics, politics and, ultimately, the social sciences to take the necessary steps forward. "We need research, education, new methods and cooperation," said Miklos, "but of course we also need good people."
Dennis Meadows, US-based emeritus director for policy and social science research. Meadows has been putting the same thought-provoking question to audiences for years: "In the next few decades, human population is likely to do one of three things: one, it will continue to rise as it has been doing; two, it will level off to a point of near zero-growth/zero-decline; or, three, it will at some point begin to drop precipitously. What do you think will happen?" Two or three decades earlier Meadows believed that population would continue to grow. Why, then, does he now believe that population will at some point relatively soon begin to decline precipitously? "We simply are not in a sustainable situation," he says.
The professor shares three key "insights" crucial to the understanding of building a sustainable future. The first is that the knowledge needed for sustainable development is in the social sphere, and not in new technologies. "Cultural change is what's needed," says Meadows. "We already have the knowledge." The second insight is that change needs to happen soon. "We don't have 30-40 years," he warns. The third insight is that no tools — no matter how innovative or potentially effective — will work if governments and economic schemes continue to be programmed for short-term growth.
Meadows also points to a difference between 'easy' and 'hard' problems. Hard problems, for example, demand solutions that, despite being fundamentally correct, prove detrimental in the short-term; thus it is easy to understand why politicians caught up in election cycles seldom take this kind of approach.
Wolfgang Sachs, senior scientist at the Wuppertal Institute and a deeply influential figure in Europe's green and ecological movements, believes that science badly needs the humanities in order to affect the great conceptual changes that will be necessary for a sustainable future. He points out that the words 'ownership,' 'production' and 'consumption' stress the meeting of individual needs, while 'access,' 'provision' and 'use' are terms with far greater social resonance. He also suggests that we need to reconsider our notions of speed, slowness and space if we are to grow toward 'cosmopolitanism' and begin to see the world as a community of people, not as a battleground for competing interests and rival nation states.
Descriptive-quantitative sciences are valuable or course, Sachs argues, but they also tend to have too pervasive an influence, largely because "people tend to see numbers as an indicator of truth." One product of purely descriptive science that has had harmful consequences, according to the German scientist, is cost-benefit analysis; in other words, when the goal of a given formula is to come up with a purely numerical outcome, other intangibles (human and animal life, for example) tend to be inadequately considered or overlooked completely. "What really counts in life can't be counted," Sachs quotes from another German scientist of some renown, Albert Einstein.
Running on fumes
Also from the Wuppertal Institute, Stefan Bringezu is an expert in material flows and waste management. Bringezu says that one of the EU's main long-term (over 25 years) resource strategy objectives is to decouple GDP from resource use, and in turn to decouple resource use from environmental impacts. He states that raw consumption numbers are significantly lower than numbers reflecting the actual extraction of resources related to consumption. For example, per capita European consumption is 20 tonnes per year, while per capita resource extraction for what is consumed amounts to 50 tonnes per year. Total resource extraction could actually grow by a factor of four by 2050, Bringezu cautions, underlining his concern that extraction is leading to "continuous and irreversible changing of the Earth's surface."
Brigezu also argues that biomass and agrofuels are not ideal alternatives. "Growing global demand cannot be counteracted by merely shifting from minerals to biomass without reducing levels of consumption," he says. Some factors to consider, according to Bringezu, are: switching land use from food crop production to fuel crop production (even in countries where large swathes of the population lack enough to eat); loss of species diversity (due largely to monoculture farming); and actually increasing greenhouse gases (due to clearing of forests, savannahs, etc.). The Wuppertal scientist points out that the amount of grain needed to produce 60 litres of fuel could feed one individual for an entire year.
Ashok Koshla is founder and president of New Delhi-based Development Alternatives, an enterprise that has moved beyond rhetoric and is actually producing materials for sustainable living. Koshla, appalled by the world's economic disparities, points out that roughly 60 percent of the world's people "lead pretty miserable lives." He adds that 1.3 billion people are without clean drinking water, and that this figure is likely an underestimate. He juxtaposes this sad fact with the claim that, on average, 20 tonnes of earth is removed to produce a 20-ounce gold ring.
Acknowledging that there are "limits to growth," Koshla stresses that social justice, livelihoods, basic needs and environmental safety are all of equal importance in any sustainable development strategy. He posits three fundamental choices facing humanity. The first is business-as-usual/copycat approach, which involves no real change of approach and has disastrous consequences but is nonetheless favoured by global corporations and is a generally "easy sell." A second option is the factoring/piggyback approach, which involves improving the efficiency of certain products by, say, a factor of four, and is the wealth-growing strategy of choice for individual nations. While this approach is a significant improvement over the former, it still falls well short of the third and optimum alternative — the systemic change/leapfrog approach, which if successful can actually reverse man's impact on an already overburdened planet.
Koshla believes that by correctly harnessing the potential of animals, plants, fungi, algae and bacteria, man has the potential to increase product and resource effectiveness by even up to a factor of 50. The evidence now appears overwhelming that everyone on the planet must aspire to meeting such goals.
