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| November 2015: The Doce River in Brazil flooded with toxic lama after a dam owned by Brazilian Vale SA and Australian BHP Billiton Ltd burst. Photograph: Fred Loureiro/AFP/Getty Images |
Globalisation and trade have enabled too many countries to overshoot their capacities and run ‘ecological deficits’ with other nations
By William E Rees
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.
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.
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.
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