CB BureauAt the moment, there is something akin to a mix of the
real and the mystical in general perceptions about the earth’s myriad
sustainability and environment issues. There is glamour even, thanks to Kyoto,
Copenhagen, Cancun, and the ‘will do, won’t do’ suspense scenarios.
For most of us on the other side of governance,
helplessness has been the dominant emotion for a long time. Lack of clarity on
the issues involved represented another state of feeling. For some of us trying
to make sense of the daily barrage of statistics and doomsday snippets,
dizziness of thinking made up the balance of emotions.
As an unyielding champion of the need for clarity on
earth’s myriad sustainability and environment issues, I have for a while now
felt the need to bring together the issues to their most elementary and
relevant level – and even more importantly, on a single page. The chief reason
being: action must necessarily and simultaneously happen on multiple fronts and
at the individual level, and that can happen only with absolute clarity. With
or without global/regional climate conferences, there are very good reasons to
go hyper on the related issues of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘low carbon’.
- The
world population is growing by about 80 million a year. As articulated by
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), after growing very slowly for most
of human history, the world’s population more than doubled in the last
half century to reach 6 billion in late 1999. By 2006 it had reached 6.7
billion. According to the 2008 revision, it is projected to reach 7
billion early in 2012 and surpass 9 billion people by 2050.
How will this growing population
be fed? How will this growing population travel? How will land and energy resources
be utilized to accommodate the bulge? - One
of the key findings of the UNFPA report: Population growth remains
concentrated in the populous countries. During 2010-2050, nine countries
are expected to account for half of the world’s projected population
increase: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the United States of
America, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Republic of
Tanzania, China and Bangladesh, listed according to the size of their
contribution to global population growth. - Apparently,
the human race grows less food than it eats”already. In an article in Energy Bulletinpublished in 2006, Gwynne Dyer had raised the alert that ‘we will have to
find food for the equivalent of another India and another China in the
next fifty years.’ He further pointed out that ‘the world’s food stocks
have shrunk by half since 1999.’ - World
food stock will be captive to a confluence of supply and demand factors
that are here to stay. On the supply side, these include the early effects
of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places,
and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for
biofuels and cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population,
and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly mobile
meat-eaters grows. A more complicated issue is the use of crops to make
biofuels, which are often heavily subsidized. A major factor in rising
corn prices globally is that many farmers in the United States are now
selling their corn to make subsidized ethanol. - In an article
published by the Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), an independent
research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada, Philip
McMichael wrote: ‘A rising class of one billion new consumers is emerging
in twenty “middle income” countries with an aggregate spending capacity,
in purchasing power parity terms, to match that of the U.S. This group
includes new members of the OECD – South Korea, Mexico, Turkey, and
Poland, in addition to China and India (with 40 per cent of this total) ”
and the symbols of their affluence are car ownership and meat consumption.
These two commodities combine – through rising demand for agrofuels and
feed crops – to exacerbate food price inflation, as their mutual
competition for land has the perverse effect of rendering each crop more
lucrative, at the same time as they displace land used for food crops.’
- Using
output from the 23 global climate models contributing to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 scientific
synthesis, David S Battisti, University of Washington, and Rosamond L
Naylor, Stanford University, presented their Program
on Food Security and the Environment – showing that it is highly
likely (greater than 90 per cent chance) that growing season temperatures
by the end of the 21st century will exceed even the most extreme seasonal
temperatures recorded from 1900 to 2006 for most of the tropics and
subtropics. Presently, there are more than 3 billion people living in the
tropics and subtropics, many of whom live on under $2 per day and depend
primarily on agriculture for their livelihoods. With growing season
temperatures rising beyond historical bounds, the inevitable question
arises: Will people in these regions have sufficient access to food to
meet population- and income-driven growth in demand in the future, and
thus to achieve food security? - With
growing season temperatures in excess of the hottest years on record for
many countries, the stress on crops and livestock will become global in
character. It will be extremely difficult to balance food deficits in one
part of the world with food surpluses in another, unless major adaptation
investments are made soon to develop crop varieties that are tolerant to
heat and heat-induced water stress and irrigation systems suitable for
diverse agro-ecosystems. - The
2010 Living Planet Report – produced by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
in partnership with Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Global
Footprint Network (GFN) – states that in less than 40 years the world has
lost 30 per cent of its biodiversity. In tropical countries, the loss was
an alarming 60 per cent of the original flora and fauna. The report
establishes that humanity’s Ecological Footprint (how much land and water
area a human population requires to produce the resource it consumes and
to absorb its wastes, using prevailing technology) has more than doubled
since 1966. In 2007, the most recent year for which data are available,
humanity used the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support its activities. - Even
with modest UN projections for population growth, consumption and climate
change, by 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two Earths to absorb
carbon dioxide waste and keep up with natural resource consumption. - According
to Worldometers
data, in 2006
there were 49,886,549 passenger cars produced in the world, with an
increase of 6.45 per cent over the previous year. The increase for 2007
(54,920,317) was more modest, and 2008 (52,940,559) showed a decline. The
growing use of internal combustion vehicles, especially in urban areas,
will further increase congestion, raise the demand for oil, worsen air
pollution, and increase emissions of a variety of greenhouse gases,
including methane, ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and CO2. - In a
discussion paper, Transport Outlook 2008, by Joint Transport Research
Centre of the OECD and the International Transport Forum, in the ‘business
as usual’ scenario, CO2 emissions from the transport sector are expected
to grow by 120 per cent by 2050, compared to 2000 levels. Emissions from
light-duty vehicles grow more slowly, but will still be 90 per cent higher
in 2050 than in 2000. The drivers of light-duty vehicle emissions are: the
size of the car stock, the intensity with which vehicles are used, and the
carbon intensity of the energy sources used. The growth of the total stock
is the key driver of increased emission levels, with global ownership
levels rising threefold from 669.3 million vehicles in 2000 to 2029.9
million in 2050. This expansion, in turn, is the consequence of increased
ownership rates that occur mainly in emerging economies. - The
demand for cars is not going to abate and this will have a huge impact on
our energy needs and carbon emissions. A massive investment in hybrid cars
and differential road tax to create a market for ecofriendly cars are
examples of measures that will have to be put firmly in place. Designing a
new generation of resource-efficient, environment-friendly vehicles is one
of the most challenging technological problems facing the industrialized
world. - The
Association for the Study of Peak Oil believes that world production of
conventional oil is already declining. In the short term, total oil
production will be sustained by oil from deep water and the northern polar
region, supplemented by gas condensates. But the overall peak is probably
only about five years away. Most of our transport planning is still based
on the implicit assumption that we will always have cheap petroleum fuels. - A
report, Waste and Climate Change: Global Trends and Strategy Framework,
prepared by the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP)
International Environmental Technology Centre based in Japan, examines the
contribution the waste sector can make in the fight against climate change
and suggests a strategy for increasing this contribution. The waste
management sector is contributing 3-5 per cent of global manmade
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, equal to around the current emissions from
international aviation and shipping, according to some estimates. The
waste sector is in a strong position to move from being an emissions
source to being a major emissions saver, in part by harvesting the methane
from rubbish tips for fuel and electricity generation. - The
above-mentioned report lists three main areas in which GHG savings can be
made in the waste sector: i) reducing the amount of primary materials used
in manufacturing through waste avoidance and material recovery through
recycling; ii) producing energy from waste to replace energy from fossil
fuels; and iii) storing carbon in landfills and through the application of
compost to soils. - According
to the recent Emissions Gap Report, presented in advance of the UN Climate
Change Conference in Cancun by UNEP and researchers from 25 modelling
centres, a best-case scenario would see emissions fall to around 49
gigatonnes (Gt) of C02 equivalent, if the 2009 Copenhagen pledges are
fully implemented. Scientists estimate that emissions need to be as low as
44 Gt in 10 years’ time to stand a good chance of keeping a 21st-century
temperature rise to under 2�C.
Sustainable development is defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development). The Living Planet Report reiterates that humanity
is currently consuming renewable resources at a faster rate than ecosystems can
regenerate them and continuing to release more CO2 than ecosystems can absorb.
What will the future hold? And what actions can be taken to end the ecological
overshoot?
There is more than
idle hope in the thought that where there are self-imposed limits, great
inventions follow”out of necessity. Shall we stretch our imaginations and
inventiveness to their extreme limits, then?