GlobeGlance Harmonizing Environmental and Developmental Goals

The World Summit on Sustainable Development is the third event in a row. The first was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. In its wake, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was founded in Nairobi, and several UN agencies made some moves towards an ecological significance of their programmes. Ten years later, a meeting to assess progress since Stockholm was held but ended in disappointment.

Continuing deterioration of the environment was reported chiefly in developing countries. As a consequence, the World Commission on Environment and Development was created to study the reasons for that lamentable state of affairs, and Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norwegian Prime Minister, was appointed Chairperson. After three years of intensive work, the Commission published in 1987 its report, “Our Common Future”, which was submitted for discussion at the UN General Assembly that year. As a result, the United Nations decided to convene another conference, this time on environment and development, which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.

The Rio “Earth Summit”, the second in a series of UN conferences, had three major results: the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Agenda 21, which was seen by many observers as a prescription leading to, if properly applied, sustainable development, a term already found in the Brundtland Report. Five years later, the General Assembly held a special session in New York, with a view to look back on and assess the progress made since Rio.

Once again the assessment was rather depressing from the point of view of the environment, thus the United Nations again decided to hold another major conference - the World Summit on Sustainable Development - in Johannesburg, South Africa in August/September 2002.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that UN conferences and reports have not been able to slow down, let alone stop or revert, the destructive trends. To be sure, pollution control has made major progress in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but then pollution is no longer the main ecological concern.

Global warming seems to go on unmitigated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1 fears that the added greenhouse effect might lead to a rise in average temperatures by some 2°C to 5.8°C during the twenty-first century. This could theoretically have disastrous effects on world agriculture and potentially on the global sea-water table. If we want to halt this trend, it would be wise to stabilize carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations at pre-industrial or less ambitious 1990 levels. This, however, would mean reducing worldwide CO2 emissions by at least 50 per cent. Development aspirations, however, point rather at a doubling of CO2 emissions.

Biodiversity losses have hardly slowed down; some 50 plant or animal species are said to become extinct every day! The major cause seems to be land conversion for civilizational use. One way of measuring this land use was given by William Rees and Matthis Wackernagel2 as the “ecological footprint”. It represents the direct and indirect land use for living, farming, clothing, transport, industry, recreation, energy, etc.

The OECD countries have typical per capita footprints sized 4 hectares, which leaves most of them too small to accommodate all of their footprints. They, therefore, have to export much of those to less populated and less area-demanding countries. To accommodate 6 billion OECD-type footprints, we would need at least two earth planets. As there is only one, we should reduce these footprints by at least a factor of two, under the plausible assumption that developing countries have equivalent rights and aspirations regarding wealth and well-being. Both trends and challenges have a massive bearing on Agenda 21 and the perspectives of sustainable development. If we need to reduce both CO2 emissions and ecological footprints by at least a factor of two, while simultaneously aspiring at least to double worldwide wealth, it seems we would be confronted with the need to perform at least four times more efficiently with the use of natural resources.

Fortunately, this goal is not as outlandish as it may sound at first. Amory and Hunter Lovins have co-authored a book with me, “Factor Four”,3 which features fifty examples of a fourfold resource productivity. Automobiles can do 150 miles per gallon; cooling systems can do with 25 per cent of today’s typical electricity consumption; and buildings can be designed for close to zero external energy input.

Farm produce can be made with one quarter of the typical European energy inputs; materials can be saved by large factors using re-manufacturing techniques; and water can be used four times more efficiently than today in many industrial, agricultural and private uses. In addition, energy and materials used can be ecologically optimized, as is already happening in several countries. Renewable sources of energy are a booming industry in many European countries, and materials can be selected to be perfectly recyclable. Prices for the use of environmentally scarce resources should be increased gradually so as to create an incentive for introducing “factor-four technologies”. An ecological tax reform or tradeable permits for resource use should be seen as chief candidates for instruments leading to that goal, which can be designed in a socially and economically acceptable way. Tax-caused price increases can be tied to the pace of progress in average resource productivity.

Aggressive strategies to increase resource productivity may show the way for a true harmonization of environmental and developmental goals, thus ending the ecological frustrations we have experienced since the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

Notes:
1 IPCC Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Cambridge University Press.

2 William Rees and Matthis Wackernagel. 1994. Ecological Footprints and Appropriated Carrying Capacity. In A.M. Jannson et al, Eds., Investing in Natural Capital. Washington: Island Press.

3 Ernst von Weizsaecker, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins. 1997. Factor Four. Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. London: Earthscan. Available in all UN languages except Arabic. In the United States, an equivalent book is available: Paul Hawken, A. and H. Lovins. 2000. Natural Capitalism.