Techno-industrial society is in dangerous ecological overshoot – the human ecological footprint is at least 60% larger than the planet can support sustainably. The global economy is using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate, filling waste sinks beyond nature’s capacity to assimilate. (Even climate change is a waste management problem – carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight of industrial economies.)
Despite the accumulating evidence of impending crisis, the world community seems incapable of responding effectively. This situation is clearly unsustainable and, if present trends continue, is likely to lead – in this century – to runaway climate change, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilised existence.
The proximate drivers are excess economic production and consumption, and over-population – human impact on the ecosphere is a product of population multiplied by average per capita consumption – exacerbated by an increasingly global compound myth of perpetual economic growth propelled by continuous technological progress. While there is evidence of some decoupling of economic production from nature, this is often an artefact of faulty accounting and trade (eg, wealthy countries are offshoring their ecological impacts onto poorer countries). Overall, economic throughput (energy and material consumption and waste production) is increasing with population and GDP growth [pdf]. Consequently, carbon dioxide is accumulating at an accelerating rate in the atmosphere and 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.
There is widespread support for the notion of clean production and consumption but in present circumstances, this must soon translate into less production and consumption by fewer people. It complicates matters that modern society remains dependent on abundant cheap energy still mostly supplied by carbon-based fuels. Despite rapid technological advances and falling costs, it is still not clear that renewable energy alternatives, including wind and photovoltaic electricity, can replace fossil fuels in such major uses as transportation and space/water heating in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, in the absence of effective carbon sequestration technologies, reducing fossil fuel use remains essential to avoiding catastrophic climate change. Resolving this energy-climate conundrum will require major conservation efforts, the prioritising of essential non-substitutable uses of fossil fuels and the banning of frivolous ones.
At the same time, this is a world of chronic gross social inequity that erodes population health and social cohesion. According to Oxfam, the world’s richest eight billionaires possess the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the human family. More generally, the richest quintile of humanity takes home about 70% of global income [pdf] compared with just 2% by the poorest fifth of the population.
Higher incomes enable citizens of high-income countries to consume, on average, several times their equitable share of global biocapacity, while denizens of poor countries are unable to claim a fair allocation of Earth’s bounty. This situation is egregiously unjust, socially destabilising and ecologically precarious.
The major social implications of these realities should be self-evident. In a rational world, the global community ( the UN, the World Bank, the IMF) would cease promoting material growth as the primary solution to both north-south inequity and chronic poverty within nations. On a finite planet already in overshoot it is not biophysically possible to raise the material standards of the poor to those of the rich sustainably– in other words, without destroying the ecosphere, undermining life-support functions and precipitating the collapse of global society.
The reasoning is simple. Because they facilitate growth and (over)consumption, globalisation and trade have enabled many densely-populated high-income countries (most western European nations and Japan) to greatly exceed their domestic carrying capacities. These nations live mostly on imported biocapacity – they are running “ecological deficit” with other nations and the global commons. Not every country can be a net importer of bioresources: the development path worn by first-world nations cannot be followed by developing countries. (Note that the bloated eco-footprints of many high-income countries make them effectively more over-populated than poorer countries with nominally higher population densities.) In particular, it is irresponsible for the governments of high-income countries to treat economic growth as the panacea for all that ails them.
The evidence argues instead that the global community should cooperate on redistribution – on devising methods to share the benefits of development more equitably. Unsustainability is a collective problem that requires collective solutions. Contrary to politicians’ assertions, there is an unavoidable conflict between material economic growth and the environment. The larger the human enterprise, the more diminished the ecosphere. Homo sapiens have competitively displaced countless other species from their habitats and food resources. From only 1% 10,000 years ago, humans and their domestic livestock had grown to comprise over 97% of Earth’s mammalian biomass [pdf] by 2000. This number may be closer to 98.5% in 2017.
The goal should be to enhance the material wellbeing of developing countries and the poor while simultaneously reducing both aggregate material throughput and world population. Ensuring an economically secure and ecologically stable environment for all requires:
• That rich nations consume less to free up the ecological space needed for justifiable consumption increases in poorer countries.
• That the world implement a universal population management plan designed to reduce the total human population to a level that can be supported indefinitely at a more-than-satisfactory average material standard. This is what it means to live sustainably within the means of nature.
Fortunately, planned degrowth toward a quasi steady-state economy [pdf] is technically possible, would benefit the poor and could be achieved while improving the overall quality of life, even in high-income countries. Considering the human suffering that would be avoided and the number of non-human species that would be preserved, it is also a morally compelling strategy.
Obviously, the foregoing diagnosis is anathema to the prevailing growth ethic, the belief that wellbeing is a linear function of income and political correctness pertaining to population policy. Many will therefore object on grounds that the foregoing prescription is politically unfeasible and can never be implemented.
They may well be correct. The problem is that what is politically feasible is often ecologically irrelevant. Effective sustainability policy must be consistent with available scientific evidence; alternative facts are mere self-delusion. Failure to implement a global sustainability plan that addresses excess consumption and over-population while ensuring greater social equity may well be fatal to the human prospect. Indeed, adherence to any variant of the status quo promises a future of uncontrollable climate change, plummeting biodiversity, civil disorder, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars. Under the circumstances, opponents of the present prescription have an obligation to propose an alternative plan that similarly promises ecological stability, economic security, social equity and improved population health to future generations.
William E Rees is a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. He originated and co-developed ecological footprint analysis, which is described in the book Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact On the Earth.
This blog was first published on the Millenium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere website.