Tag Archives: ecological footprint

November 2014 in Review

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At the end of October, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give November posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • There is mounting evidence that the world economy is slowing, financial corporations are still engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, and overall investment may be dropping. Financial authorities are trying to respond through financial means, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future. (-2)
  • Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook. It’s true that the tobacco companies ultimately were called to account, but not until millions of lives were lost. Will it be billions this time? (-2)
  • Glenn Beck has gone even further off his rocker, producing a video suggesting the U.N. is going to ration food and burn old people alive while playing vaguely middle eastern music. One negative point because some people out there might not laugh. (-1)
  • The new IPCC report predicts generally negative effects of climate change on crops and fisheries. The good news is it doesn’t seem to predict catastrophic collapse, but we need to remember that the food supply needs to grow substantially in the coming decades, not just hold steady, so any headwinds making that more difficult are potentially threatening. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • A lot is known about how to grow healthy trees in the most urbanized environments. But only a few cities really take advantage of this readily available knowledge. (+0)
  • As manufacturing becomes increasingly high-tech, automation vs. employment is emerging as a big theme for the future. The balance may swing back and forth over time, but in the long term I think automation has to win. New wealth will be created, but the question is how broadly it will be shared. The question is not just an economic one – it depends on the kind of social and political systems people will live under in various places. This might be why the field of economics was originally called “political economy”. So I’m putting this in the positive column but giving it no points because the jury is out. (+0)
  • Google is working on nanobots that can swim around in your blood and give an early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. (+1)
  • Economic slowing is probably the main reason why oil prices are way down. Increased supply capacity from the U.S. also probably plays a role, although there are dissenting voices how long that is going to last. I find it hard to say whether cheaper oil is good or bad. I tend to think it is just meaningless noise on the longer time scale, but you won’t hear me complain if it brings down the price of transportation and groceries for a year or two. (+0)
  • Millennials aren’t buying cars in large numbers. I don’t believe for a second that this means they are less materialistic than past generations, but I think a shift in consumption from cars to almost anything else is a net gain for sustainability. (+2)
  • I discovered the FRAGSTATS package for comprehensive spatial analysis of ecosystems and habitats. This gives us quantitative tools to design green webs that work well for both people and wildlife. Bringing land back into our economic framework in an explicit way might also help. (+1)
  • “Perennial polyculture” gardens may be able to provide food year round on small urban footprints in temperate climates. (+1)
  • A vision for smart, sustainable infrastructure involves walkable communities, closing water and material loops, and using energy wisely. Pretty much the same points I made in my book, which I don’t actively promote on this site;) (+1)

Hope for the Future Index (end of October 2014): -2

change during November 2014: -6 + 6 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (end of November 2014): -2 + 0 = -2

habitat loss and animal welfare

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Brian Czech makes the point that habitat loss causes a lot of animal suffering. I think this is almost certainly true, and sad. He mostly blames urbanization. I want to argue with that, because a compact, well-designed city should have a relatively small ecological footprint per person living in it, compared to people spread out over a more rural landscape. For example, the Amish way of farming actually is a big contributor to the water pollution destroying the Chesapeake Bay. If there are going to be 7 billion of us, or 10 billion, we can’t all live like the Amish or it would be an ecological disaster. Of course, it is true that the relatively low-impact lifestyle in the city is supported by an enormous rural base of agriculture, forestry, fishing, resource extraction, mining, and manufacturing that has a huge and growing ecological footprint. It’s possible to envision a world where we eventually turn the corner and manage to grow in quality without growing our physical footprint. But we are far from that, and natural ecosystems are certainly the big losers whether or not we are actually on the verge of destroying ourselves.

“Living Planet Report”

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WWF has released a new edition of their “Living Planet Report”. I like this report, for one thing, because it has kept the idea of ecological footprint alive. Ecological footprint was originally developed, or at least widely publicized, in this book in the 90s:

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth

Ecological footprint may be the most intuitive way of explaining the idea that humanity is overdrawing the Earth’s resources. The new report puts the ecological footprint at 1.5, meaning 1.5 Earth’s would be required to support our current level of natural resource consumption and waste production indefinitely. To understand how this is possible, imagine you are lucky enough that your parents put a massive trust fund in your name the day you are born. Being born on the Earth is like this. If you are smart, you can live your entire life on the interest, and so can your children and children’s children, as long as they are as smart as you. If you are dumb, you can live an extravagant lifestyle for some period of time, maybe a long time, but eventually it will catch up to you. An ecological footprint of 1.5 suggests that humanity is using up about 1.5 times the amount of natural capital each year that the Earth can support in the long term. Natural capital is the obvious things like fossil fuels and fish, but also less tangible things like fertile soils and the ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products.

The accuracy of Wackernagel’s methods can be endlessly debated, and have been, but the WWF report also has a reader-friendly summary of more recent academic work on “planetary boundaries”. These look at carbon emissions, loads of nitrogen pollution, crop land as a percent of ice-free land, and humanity’s appropriation of primary productivity, among other things. And generally, I think they converge on a pretty similar conclusion that we are living beyond our means and eventually we are going to pay. Normally I try not to shamelessly promote my book, but for my book I made what I think is a pretty cool and useful graphic, which I am sharing below.

planetary_boundaries

Summary of Ecological Footprint and Planetary Boundary Literature

And just in case you think I might be making this stuff up, here are my references:

Rockstrom, J. et al., 2009. Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society 14, 32.

Running, S.W., 2012. A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere. Science 337, 1458–1459. doi:10.1126/science.1227620

Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees, 1996. Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth, New catalyst bioregional series. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC ; Philadelphia, PA.

 

growth, sustainability, and employment

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This article in Ecological Economics looks at economic growth, sustainability, and employment together:

Two empirical correlations are studied: one between economic growth and environmental impacts, and the other between the lack of economic growth and unemployment. It is demonstrated that, at a global level, economic growth is strongly correlated with environmental impacts, and barriers to fast decoupling are large and numerous. On the other hand, low or negative growth is highly correlated with increasing unemployment in most market economies, and strategies to change this lead to difficult questions and tradeoffs. The coexistence of these two correlations – which have rarely been studied together in the literature on “green growth”, “degrowth” and “a-growth” – justifies ambivalence about growth. To make key environmental goals compatible with full employment, the decoupling of environmental impacts from economic output has to be accompanied by a reduction of dependence on growth. In particular, strategies to tackle unemployment without the need for growth, several of which are studied in this article, need much more attention in research and policy.

I get it – growth and employment are often looked at together in the mainstream economic literature, obviously. Employment is pretty important to living standards and social/political stability. Sustainability and growth are often looked at together in the sustainability literature (which is “mainstream” to some, but not really to most economists). There is an obvious tradeoff between the two as long as our economy devours large amounts of natural resources and produces enormous amounts of waste and pollution. The idea of “decoupling” is that each unit of growth gets slightly greener and cleaner over time. But unfortunately, that process does not seem to be nearly fast enough to prevent eventual collapse. Damage to natural ecosystems is increasing and will eventually threaten the ecosystem services that our human civilization depends on. That is the trend we are on. The only two ways out are to slow growth or to accelerate the decoupling process. This article seems to focus on the former. My opinion is that this path is politically impossible unless it is precipitated by some serious crisis, which we can’t just sit around and wait for because it could cause enormous pain and suffering. So the latter option is the only hope. It is hard but entirely possible if enough people understand the situation and dedicate their efforts to make it happen.

Robert Shiller on the new normal

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Here’s Robert Shiller in Project Syndicate talking about the “new normal” of slow economic growth:

There is a name for the despair that has been driving discontent – and not only in Russia and Ukraine – since the financial crisis. That name is the “new normal,” referring to long-term diminished prospects for economic growth, a term popularized by Bill Gross, a founder of bond giant PIMCO.

The despair felt after 1937 led to the emergence of similar new terms then, too. “Secular stagnation,” referring to long-term economic malaise, is one example. The word secular comes from the Latin saeculum, meaning a generation or a century. The word stagnation suggests a swamp, implying a breeding ground for virulent dangers. In the late 1930s, people were also worrying about discontent in Europe, which had already powered the rise of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

The other term that suddenly became prominent around 1937 was “underconsumptionism” – the theory that fearful people may want to save too much for difficult times ahead. Moreover, the amount of saving that people desire exceeds the available investment opportunities. As a result, the desire to save will not add to aggregate saving to start new businesses, construct and sell new buildings, and so forth. Though investors may bid up prices of existing capital assets, their attempts to save only slow down the economy.

“Secular stagnation” and “underconsumptionism” are terms that betray an underlying pessimism, which, by discouraging spending, not only reinforces a weak economy, but also generates anger, intolerance, and a potential for violence.

So this is the old “animal spirits” argument. There is almost never commentary from economists or financiers about the possibility of ecological limits having something to do with this. There are two ways ecological limits could manifest themselves. One is by making us gradually poorer through high prices of food, energy, and various raw materials. That could happen slowly and gradually, be obscured by the ups and downs of business/credit cycles and geopolitics, and not be obvious until it is too late. We could theoretically innovate our way out of the problem, but there might be a downward spiral where as we get poorer and poorer, we devote less effort to innovation and more to making ends meet. The second way ecological limits could manifest themselves would be through a sudden, catastrophic tipping point or climate shift. This would be a point where supplies of food, energy, water, and critical raw materials get so tight they cause a catastrophic breakdown of the systems of civilization, rather than just high prices. Of course, if you are poor enough, high prices and system breakdown have roughly the same consequences for you and your family. If you are rich enough, you can withstand the former just fine, but not the latter.

National Geographic “Greendex”

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National Geographic has developed an index that tracks the green-ness of consumer behavior worldwide.

“Greendex 2012: Consumer Choice and the Environment—A Worldwide Tracking Survey” measures consumer behavior in areas relating to housing, transportation, food, and consumer goods. Greendex 2012 ranks average consumers in 17 countries according to the environmental impact of their consumption patterns and is the only survey of its kind.

The top-scoring consumers of 2012 are in the developing economies of India, China, and Brazil, in descending order. Those in emerging economies continue to round out the top tier of the Greendex ranking, while the lowest scores are all earned by consumers in industrialized countries. American consumers’ behavior still ranks as the least sustainable of all countries surveyed since the inception of the study, followed by Canadian, Japanese, and French consumers.

Meanwhile, consumers in developing countries with the highest Greendex scores are the most likely to agree that they “feel guilty about the impact [they] have on the environment,” despite having the lightest footprint as individuals. The research finds a positive relationship between the extent to which people feel guilty about their impact and the Greendex scores of average consumers in the same countries. Consumers with low Greendex scores, i.e., those demonstrating the least sustainable behavior as consumers, are least likely to feel guilty about the implications of their choices for the environment.

I don’t doubt the validity of their conclusion that the average person in China, India, and Brazil has a much lower environmental impact than the average person in Canada, Japan, France, and the United States. I am surprised though by their finding that people in developing countries express more guilt about their own personal ecological footprints. That is not my impression based on some time living and working in Asia. The small, unscientific sample of people I have interacted with are definitely concerned about air and water pollution, for health and safety reasons, and if they belong to a generation that still remembers the land they tend to feel some sadness about urbanization. But concern about health and safety is not the same thing as guilt. People are demanding cleaner air, water, and food for themselves and their families, but that doesn’t mean they are thinking much about their impact on the environment for the environment’s sake. It’s a great story to tell that as these billions of people catch up in wealth and spending to their more industrialized, urbanized neighbors, they will do so without adopting those neighbors much larger ecological footprint. I want to believe it, but I don’t believe that is the path we are on.

 

my favorite non-fiction books

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Somebody asked me recently for a list of my favorite non-fiction books. It was tough to come up with a short list, but I came up with one based on two criteria – they had to have a significant effect on my mental model of the world, and more importantly they had to be a thoroughly enjoyable read. So, understanding that not everyone has the same taste in books and would love the books I love, here are some of my all-time favorites in no particular order:

How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor Library of Science)

 

Endogenous technological and population change under increasing water scarcity

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This article in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (which is open access) is a great simulation-based study of how natural resource scarcity, the economy and technological change interact. First, they take an economic production function and add water to it as a factor of production. Then, they simultaneously allow population growth, increasing water scarcity, and technological innovation. Technological innovation is driven by scarcity, the level of investment the society chooses to make in innovation activities, and an assumed success rate. To invest more in innovation activities, the society has to save more, which means incomes have to decline in the short term.

So, this model answers the criticism economists often make that other models have ignored the effects of scarcity on innovation. With reasonable inputs the simulation always ends in declining water consumption, declining incomes, and eventually declining population. They relate this to real case studies from Australia where drought did drive innovation (for example drip irrigation), but ultimately it was not enough – agricultural output declined, incomes declined, and eventually population declined (they didn’t die of thirst, they just moved away).

12 “sustainable” countries

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This post from Alternet says we should admire the following 12 countries for their sustainable policies:

  1. Iceland
  2. Switzerland
  3. Costa Rica
  4. Sweden
  5. Luxembourg
  6. Germany
  7. Cuba
  8. Colombia
  9. Singapore
  10. France
  11. Norway
  12. Finland

Now all these countries definitely have progressive policies that other countries can learn from. But with the possible exceptions of Costa Rica, Cuba, and Colombia, all these countries have a lot of heavy industry and finance. They have large carbon emissions. They have replaced a lot of their original natural habitat with ecologically sterile urban development and factory farming. They house corporate headquarters and investors that exploit natural resources and export urbanization and heavy industry abroad. It simply won’t work to take these best-of-business-as-usual, relatively-low-footprint models and copy them in developing countries on a much larger scale. The resulting footprint will still be much too large, and lead to collapse. So what we need to do is take bits and pieces of what they do well, but come up with a completely new, truly sustainable model.

Integrating the planetary boundaries and global catastrophic risk paradigms

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I think this article in Ecological Economics gets at a very important idea. There are planetary boundaries we are at risk of exceeding, most obviously the ability of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb and hold greenhouse gas emissions before reaching some catastrophic tipping point. Then there are catastrophic risks that come out of left field every once in a while, like war, plague, accidents, and asteroid strikes. Since our attention span and ability to respond seems to be severely limited, we really need to understand which of these risks are the most likely and the most consequential, so we know where to focus our efforts.

Planetary boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risk (GCR) have emerged in recent years as important paradigms for understanding and addressing global threats to humanity and the environment. This article compares the PBs and GCR paradigms and integrates them into a unified PBs-GCR conceptual framework, which we call Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN). PBs emphasizes global environmental threats, whereas GCR emphasizes threats to human civilization. Both paradigms rate their global threats as top priorities for humanity but lack precision on key aspects of the impacts of the threats. Our integrated BRIHN framework combines elements from both paradigms’ treatments of uncertainty and impacts. The BRIHN framework offers PBs a means of handling human impacts and offers GCR a theoretically precise definition of global catastrophe. The BRIHN framework also offers a concise stage for telling a stylized version of the story of humanity and nature co-evolving from the distant past to the present to multiple possible futures. The BRIHN framework is illustrated using the case of disruptions to the global phosphorus biogeochemical cycle.