Last week, I wrote about the bureaucratisation of the environment; the web of international bodies, meetings, targets and initiatives which threatens to divert more and more resources into one more giant box-ticking exercise. I make no apology for returning to a similar theme this week. With Rio+20 just around the corner, calls for action from interest groups (themselves often an integral part of the whole bloated process) will be coming thick and fast.
This week, it’s the turn of the international science establishment to have its say. One hundred and five science academies, from the Royal Society in the UK to those in developing countries including Bolivia, Mozambique and Afghanistan, have come together under the umbrella of the IAP, the global network of science academies, to issue a widely-reported Statement on Population and Consumption. In this, they ‘call on the world’s leaders to take decisive action’. Of what’s happened over the last 20 years, they say ‘ While progress has been made in some areas, the challenge of finding a path to global sustainability has not been met and the consequences of failure are now clearer and increasingly pressing.’
The underlying argument that increasing population puts more demand on resources and can make poverty reduction in the least-developed countries more difficult is really self-evident. But what is far more debatable is how to approach the challenges. Fortunately, the IAP do not propose coercive action, such as the Chinese ‘one child’ policy, which will have largely-unforeseen demographic consequences for the country, despite the undoubted reduction of resource demand it led to. That women and girls should be educated and have access to contraception, as they propose, seems obvious to those of us in the industrialised world.
Their concerns about population seem to be to some extent justified, although they do talk about most projections forecasting a rise to ‘between 8 and 11 billion by 2050’ when the generally-accepted figure from the UN is a peak of about 9 billion by then. Higher projections in the past have routinely been revised downwards, so including the 8-11 billion range looks a bit like scaremongering.
But the statement is very definitely about consumption as well as population and it is here that a ‘we know what’s best for you’ attitude takes over. For example, the IAP recommends that national and international policy and decision makers act:
· To make global consumption sustainable; to reduce levels of damaging types of consumption and develop more sustainable alternatives. Action is critically needed in higher-income countries...
· To encourage modes of development that do not repeat mistakes made in the past by today’s developed countries but which allow low-income countries to “leap frog” to sustainable patterns of consumption.
There is a general pessimism evident which conflicts with much of the real progress seen by so many people around the world in the last half century (see the previous newsletter for comments about the assumption of fixed boundaries and resource limits). The basic premise seems to be that if the approach so far hasn’t worked for everyone, a completely new model is now needed, not just for developing countries but also for the industrialised world. This isn’t science, it’s politics, and fairly revolutionary politics at that.
How else do international policymakers ‘encourage modes of development which do not repeat mistakes made in the past by today’s developed countries’ without top-down planning? And certainly how else would citizens of today’s prosperous countries be persuaded to change their lifestyles? Not surprisingly, it seems that the EU and US governments have vetoed inclusion of robust wording on the topic (a promise to ‘change unsustainable consumption and production patterns’) from the draft agreement being hammered out in Rio ahead of the big event. Instead, the agreement so far is to ‘commit to systematically consider population trends and projections in our national, rural and urban development strategies and policies.’ (For more on these issues, see Scientists urge Rio moves on population and consumption.)
On the other hand, developing country governments seem to have concluded that population growth is indeed a challenge for them, and that talk of reducing that growth is not simply a strategy for the industrialised world to avoid the question of consumption. Poor countries would love to get richer and, if economic growth does not have to be shared so many ways, that process could happen more quickly. Since they currently have much lower per capita consumption than Europe and the USA, they are unlikely to come under too much international pressure to slow their growth, whether or not it is regarded as ‘sustainable’. Embracing the sustainable development agenda is unlikely to do them any harm.
But, as with emissions reduction policy, it is the developed world which has the most to lose. In democratic economies with free(ish) markets, few people will willingly compromise their existing lifestyles. If greening the economy simply means more use of biomass as an industrial raw material, and a greater use of low-carbon electricity or heat, that’s probably broadly acceptable if the cost of living stays roughly the same. However, most people would be likely to resist changes such as reduced meat-eating, less personal travel or expensive, unreliable power supplies, and it’s easy to interpret ‘reducing levels of damaging types of consumption’ in this way.
So, whatever the well-intentioned but misguided debating in Rio results in (perhaps nothing too radical, judging by the lack of agreement so far), it seems unlikely that the centralised planning necessary for its implementation would be put in place. The crisis in the EU shows how difficult international cooperation is, even for close neighbours with a shared agenda; global governance would be many times worse. The most likely outcome is that efforts of the environmental, political and scientific establishments will have been wasted. Perhaps we should all be thankful for that.
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