Global Environmental Outlook 6: a critique of its opening sentence

The 6th Global Environmental Outlook has been released. This is the most important written product of the United Nations Environment Programme, appearing approximately at 5 year intervals.

The opening sentence of the executive summary of the first chapter reads:

"Providing a decent life and well-being for nearly 10 billion people by 2050, without further compromising the ecological limits of our planet and its benefits, is one of the most serious challenges and responsibilities humanity has ever faced.” 

The part I have highlighted in pink is powerful.

However, the part in red is at best confusing and at worst logically false, and either way it conveys (no doubt unintentionally) complacency.

What do the authors mean by "compromising"?  One definition I found was "expediently accepting standards that are lower than is desirable"; e.g. we were not prepared to compromise on safety."

A possible alternative to "compromising" (in this sentence) is "approaching", or "transgressing". But the idea that human activities will not further (or additionally) approach - or come closer to - the ecological limits is sadly misconceived. Ongoing damage to natural capital is inevitable, given that population is rising and the poor have a lot of catching up to do in terms of per capita resource consumption. Even if we do not collectively breach limits, we will certainly come closer to them.

Alternatively, but more far-fetched, is the idea that the authors intend to convey that humans might alter the limits. Technically, if humans had far greater knowledge and technological capacity, they might be able to do this, such as changing the planetary boundaries - but most people rightly would think that is hubris, especially by 2050.

After working on this blog (for well over an hour!) I think the authors probably intended "compromising" to mean "approaching" or "transgressing". 

Another weakness of this opening sentence is that it does not mention the word "social". There are also social limits, such as were reached, only yesterday, when  the Sudanese President was overthrown, in part because of increasing civil unrest due to reduced prosperity in part due to falling oil revenues - even though, officially, per person income in Sudan is suppose to be increasing.

So, the sentence would be clearer if written as:  "Providing a decent life and well-being for nearly 10 billion people by 2100, without pushing demands on ecological and social capacity beyond irreversible thresholds, thus triggering immense harm to human health and well-being on a planetary scale, is an immensely difficult challenge.” (Key changes italicised).

Note that I changed 2050 to 2100. It will be difficult to avoid these thresholds, on a global scale, by 2050, but perhaps not "immensely" so. It is possible that the buffers that separate us from those limits are wider than we currently appreciate, even though an increasing number of cases of "regional overload" are occurring, such as those described in the Global Report on Food Crises 2019. By 2050 we will definitely come closer to these limits, but we may nor critically exceed them - if we are lucky and work hard. But the challenge to avoid such limits by 2100, even if we greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, will be much harder, as climate change is but one aspect of the many challenges that civilization faces.

Good intentions on the deck of the Human Titanic

I just read an excellent open access article by Rachel Waters, published in the first issue of The Ecological Citizen, called "Rethinking the United Nations' concept of sustainability".

I write for the UN Environment Programme's forthcoming report "Global Environmental Outlook 6: Healthy Planet Healthy People". I absolutely concur with the main points of this paper, which are:

1. The word "sustainability" is a global catchphrase, touted by myriad businesses and institutions, in an era of accelerating climate change and deadly multi-dimensional crises.

2. When the United Nations (UN) debuted its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the document referenced the word ‘sustainable’ more than 20 times within its stated goals to tackle everything from poverty and hunger to biodiversity decline and climate change.

3. Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, points out that to eradicate poverty using free market capitalism, the global economy would need to expand to 5 times its present size (Hickel, 2015). This estimate does not take into account the need to leave a fair share of Earth for other species.

4. Therein lies the greatest contradiction within the SDGs: In a world whose economies thrive largely on industries which drill, deforest and pollute, how can the SDGs simultaneously hold nations to the goal of poverty eradication while requesting they do so ‘sustainably’, when there’s nothing sustainable about the engines of growth?

5. Mankind cannot save the Earth and itself while churning out relentless economic "growth" (as I pointed out on this essay inspired by Kenneth Boulding, called "Increasing Unease on Spaceship Earth"). This contradiction is often masked by the language of sustainability, rendering it little more than a flimsy bridge between the disconnected concepts of mankind and nature, and the developed world and the developing.

6. This disconnect lies at the core of neoliberal thinking, which also contaminates the UN. This worldview has for centuries created an artificial divide between the ‘natural world’ and humanity.

7. Extractive capitalism has long lacked constraining ideas of interconnectedness. It has impregnated a view that nature’s bounty is virtually boundless, a free resource to be tapped at will to meet human wants, wishes and demands. As these demands have grown and the resources have fell – as "new poverties of water, air, land, climate and biodiversity" emerge – the word ‘sustainability’ has been slapped on as a Band-Aid.

8. This binary has never been effectively challenged. Even as scientists, activists and Indigenous peoples protest against it governments, businesses and the UN fail to operate from a sufficient stance of interconnectedness.

7. The 2014 Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) (to which I contributed) illustrates an urgent case for changing how we interact with the planet within the global capitalist system. Closer inspection reveals cognitive dissonance that mask the dire consequences of our current trajectory. The IPCC notes that global warming above 2°C  (3.6°F) will have detrimental impacts for “disadvantaged people and communities”.

Note, very confusingly, however, that the IPCC temperature baseline is uncertain (see discussion here) and not always consistent with that generally reported, such as the Paris climate agreement. The agriculture chapter, for example, uses a baseline warming of that in the late 20th century.

8. Waters argues out that the IPCC's use of language such as that climate change will harm “disadvantaged people and communities” isolates the impact of climate refugees and ecological destabilization from the rest of the world (the first and second "clastes"), distancing one from the other and potentially affecting policy and practice within so-called ‘advantaged’ societies. I would add that many comparatively affluent people will point out the suffering of the poor as a way of demonstrating their own level of compassion - but that not many such people are interested in reducing their own quality of life. The approach of most UN documents to poverty follows the poverty of the Pareto Principle; that is if I have 100 units and give you one unit, then while you gain, I lose. Therefore it's better to grow the economy, so that you gain one and I also gain something - which is likely to deepen inequality.

9. Waters also points out the reliance, almost magical thinking that relies on carbon capture and environmental ‘restoration’ in the face of accelerating extraction. She says that this reinforces the concept of man outside of nature and ignores the fact that the cost of natural goods is rising owing to scarcity and environmental externalities.

10. Like Herman Daly (see "A further critique of growth economics" (free version at www.sfu.ca/~poitras/Daly_Economic.pdf), she points out that we are stuck with these price hikes, whether we like it or not.

11. She says, in our interconnected world, there is no containment of ‘advantaged’ and ‘disadvantaged’, nor is there any harmony between relentless economic growth and planetary limits.

12. Humans are only a small part of nature; we cannot realistically extricate ourselves from each other or from nature, or adapt it to meet our demands, and "we should be ethically compelled to reduce our negative impacts as a species on the rest of the planet, as it has a right to thrive independent of the benefit that we derive from it."

13. The UN has the power of normative ideas, conveyed through the language of its documents. The UN must tackle its cognitive dissonance ("dualistic thinking") before it can ponder and help bring about sustainable development.

In summary, the SDGs may reflect good intentions on the deck of the Human Titanic, but they are nowhere near sufficiently courageous. Those with power, reinforced and rewarded by neoliberalism (such as President Trump and Prime Minister Turnbull), are content for environmental brinkmanship to intensify.

There is a discussion of a range of Earth-centred issues with the Ecocentric Alliance’s email group: see www.ecocentricalliance.org/#ju

The curious silence about “eco-social" tipping points

This is adapted from a section of "Sounding the Alarm: Health in the Anthropocene" (Butler, C. D. (2016).  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13: 665; doi:610.3390/ijerph13070665.)

There is an increasing literature about environmental (or ecological) tipping points and it is intuitively obvious to some that sufficient environmental change will inevitably induce, or be accompanied by, large-scale social change. However, despite this intuitive attraction, there is comparatively little recent scientific literature on this subject, particularly in association with the Anthropocene, Earth system science, Planetary Boundaries, and Limits to Growth, though it is implicit. For example, the subtitle of the Planetary Boundaries articles is a “safe operating space” not for the Earth system, but for “humanity”.

If the environment changes sufficiently, can society remain largely unaffected?

This reticence appears in part be a reaction against “environmental determinism”, the largely shunned idea, first formulated in the 18th century, that many social and historical phenomena are influenced (even “controlled”) by environmental factors and changes. It is thus important to stress that social changes in response to major environmental shifts are not inevitable, but may occur. The concept is of importance if Limits to Growth and Planetary Boundaries are valid, because it means, beyond thresholds, such changes increase the risk to society, to health and, especially, to those who are poor  and vulnerable.

Extreme interpretations in the other direction (i.e., that environmental determinants are irrelevant to human well-being) not only violate the precautionary principle but appear ideological. But, of course, relationships are not simple, nor always inevitable. Eco-social tipping points may exist, but they can be avoided.

The rest is not adapted, and is previously unpublished:

Chinese sensitivities

There is a second reason for tabooing this idea. Curiously, it too relates to environmental determinism. When I was working (in 2015) on the health section of the Regional Assessment for the Asia Pacific, for the United Nations Environment Programme's Environmental Outlook, a reviewer asked me to mention how social inequalities contribute to poor health. In response, I inserted about two short sentences, with some examples from the Asia Pacific  - for example the discrimination faced by Indigenous people in Australia, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Buddhist and Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, the dalits in India, and the Tibetans and Uighurs in China. But, this did not survive in the published report. A subsequent reviewer, who (unsurprisingly) was Chinese, censored this, claiming the report should only consider environmental determinants. In other words, this reviewer was saying, the physical environment should not be considered as interacting with society.

This is absurd; only has to think of the umbrage the Chinese have taken following Donald Trump's phone conversation with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. Almost all disputes, including wars, concern at their heart, tangible (environmental) factors, such as money, land, water and food. Yet, this link with physical factors is often downplayed and sometimes frankly denied.

The existence of the concept of eco-social tipping points (eg in Syria, Yemen, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan) is important, because it thus follows that there are limits to physical growth, and that humans need to co-operate, on a global scale, if we are to survive as an advanced civilization.