Here are the results of the ecological footprint calculations in units of “number of Earths”. The index currently stands at 1.75 and is increasing.
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Living Planet Report 2022
WWF’s Living Planet Report is out. They mean this at least in part as a report card on the UN’s “Decade on Biodiversity”, and the grade is a failing one. A few things caught my eye:
- They have a discussion of “connectivity conservation”, which is intended to reduce fragmentation by connecting protected areas.
- They determined there is an average 69% global decline in abundance of monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2018. The situation in the tropics is much worse than this average.
- Populations of corals and sharks in particular are crashing.
- The “Amazon as we know it” may cease to exist in less than a decade.
- They give an update on the global ecological footprint from the “National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2022 edition”. Maybe I’ll have a more detailed look at this another day. The value they give is in hectares per person and I find it hard to interpret given that the population is not constant. They seem most interested in showing that people in more developed countries are using more than their fair share of the planet’s “biocapacity”. Previously, I understood the unit to be the number of planet Earths needed to sustain humanity’s current level of consumption and waste production long-term. A value less than 1 would be sustainable long term, while a value greater than 1 indicates a drawdown of natural capital, creating a debt that will eventually come due.
numbers on vegetarianism in the UK
Our World in Data articles are always interesting to look at, partly just to see how they visualize data. We also know (at at least I think it is clear) that eating less meat is a key way to reduce our species’ ecological footprint. In the UK, which is probably a reasonable indicator for a range of Anglo-American and European countries, meat eating has declined over time and younger people tend to eat less meat. Around 80% of retirees eat a traditional amount of meat, but only about 50% of young adults (18-24) do.
Limits to Growth Re-revisited
Someone revisits Limits to Growth every now and then. This author says the world is tracking the most pessimistic scenarios examined in the original model, and that stagnation or collapse in the next decade is a real possibility. The attempt at a silver lining – there is a chance that it might not be too late to do something.
Living Planet Report
This year’s Living Planet Report paints a bleak picture of ongoing ecological collapse. I think this is an organization that has some incentive to be on the bleak side of average, but still I tend to buy into the message. The alarm is sounding, but not reaching the general public or our political leaders. People just don’t understand this like they do the simplistic concept of carbon emissions, and of course even that we are failing to address in an adequate way. What’s the elevator pitch for why it matters, even for people who don’t value or have much emotional connection with nature? In a word, it’s the food, stupids.
“jaw dropping” reduction in global fertility rate
A study in Lancet says the data are starting to show large reductions in global fertility rates, which are likely to lead to declining population growth and then a declining population as the century wears on.
The global TFR in the reference scenario was forecasted to be 1·66 (95% UI 1·33–2·08) in 2100. In the reference scenario, the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100. The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India (1·09 billion [0·72–1·71], Nigeria (791 million [594–1056]), China (732 million [456–1499]), the USA (336 million [248–456]), and Pakistan (248 million [151–427]). Findings also suggest a shifting age structure in many parts of the world, with 2·37 billion (1·91–2·87) individuals older than 65 years and 1·70 billion (1·11–2·81) individuals younger than 20 years, forecasted globally in 2100. By 2050, 151 countries were forecasted to have a TFR lower than the replacement level (TFR <2·1), and 183 were forecasted to have a TFR lower than replacement by 2100. 23 countries in the reference scenario, including Japan, Thailand, and Spain, were forecasted to have population declines greater than 50% from 2017 to 2100; China’s population was forecasted to decline by 48·0% (−6·1 to 68·4). China was forecasted to become the largest economy by 2035 but in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098.
Lancet
In my time living, working and traveling in Southeast Asia, I saw firsthand that at least some highly educated women are choosing to prioritize career over marriage and children. That pattern may be taking hold on a larger scale as larger countries move from middle income to higher income. Opportunities and choices for women are a good thing, of course, but there are some concerns about who will do the work and pay the taxes in such a world. We’re fretting about the effects of automation on employment, but if the work force is going to shrink anyway, and the jobs that do remain are going to require more education and skills, it seems like there is an opportunity to try to pair the pace of automation to the pace of natural work force reduction. The solutions are nothing new – we need to invest in childcare, education, training, research and development, unemployment insurance, and strong pension systems. We may need stronger measures to share the wealth, like a universal endowment at birth or a universal basic income.
Then there’s environmental impact. Malthus aside, without policy changes the effects of a population that is becoming more affluent and consuming more will probably outweigh the effects of a shrinking human population. We can’t just keep paving the world, pumping the groundwater, massively altering the oceans and atmosphere, driving more and eating more meat forever and expect it not to catch up to us.
More from Less by Andrew McAfee
More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next is a new(ish) entry in the decoupling/dematerialization debate. The argument is that we (i.e. the United States) are gradually using fewer natural resources and producing less pollution each year while still growing our economy and quality of life.
This is the point in the post where I have to admit I am reviewing a book I haven’t read. I read the description of the book on Amazon, and this review in Foreign Policy. I would imagine that an MIT scientist (the author, Andrew McAfee) would get the math right. I would imagine he probably understands the difference between stocks and flows. But the general public, and even well- but narrowly educated people typically do not. First we have to decrease the rate at which our footprint is growing, which it sounds like this book might make a case that we have. That is good. But our footprint is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely, and still growing. Second, we have to start shrinking our footprint. I don’t think we have, and I am not sure this book makes that case. It is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely. Third, we have to shrink it to a level that can sustain our way of life indefinitely. We have to complete these three steps in order, and complete them all before it is too late to save our civilization and our planet’s ecosystems in roughly their current state. It’s unfair because I am literally judging the book by its cover, but it sounds like it makes a case that we might have completed only the first step.
The Foreign Policy article argues that it doesn’t even make that compelling case because it ignores trade and external impacts. In other words, the environmental impact of our domestic consumption and economic activities is happening in developing countries, plus the oceans and atmosphere. It’s surprising to me if he made that obvious a mistake, but again, I would have to read the book to find out. It is unlikely my employer and family and need for some minimal amount of physical rest will afford me an opportunity to do that soon. So if you read it, let me know what you find out!
debt as a measure of natural capital depletion?
This sprawling article in Ecological Economics talks about human civilization as a “superorganism” that exists only to dissipate energy, fouling its environment in the process. What I found somewhat interesting was the links it tries to make between natural capital depletion and financial debt.
Simultaneously, we get daily reminders the global economy isn’t working as it used to (Stokes, 2017) such as rising wealth and income inequality, heavy reliance on debt and government guarantees, populist political movements, increasing apathy, tension and violence, and ecological decay. To avoid facing the consequences of our biophysical reality, we’re now obtaining growth in increasingly unsustainable ways. The developed world is using finance to enable the extraction of things we couldn’t otherwise afford to extract to produce things we otherwise couldn’t afford to consume.
Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
I’m not sure this article has a coherent story to tell, but I find it interesting to think what kind of indicators we might be able to look at to tell if an ecological reckoning might be around the corner. The prices of food and energy certainly come to mind. Financial debt, if it is indeed a measure of how much our expectations of the future are out of line with our capacity to innovate and to produce the energy and other materials and find the waste sinks we need to keep going. But there is clearly a lot of noise and short-term fluctuations in all these signals that might make it difficult or impossible to come up with any kind of useful predictive index.
aging populations – a good thing?
This article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution argues that aging populations can actually be a good thing for the environment and the human economy, and that the challenges they pose are overblown and manageable.
August 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
- Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
- The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.
Most hopeful stories:
- There are some new ideas for adjusting GDP to account for natural capital and ecosystem services. There are also ideas to better account for “intangible products” like software in GDP. And R&D is a good investment that the U.S. could do more of.
- While the U.S. uses a few less straws and pats itself on the back, there are serious ideas in other countries for tackling the root problem of packaging.
- Vancouver has successfully combined green street and complete street concepts. The American Society of Landscape Architects has also compiled some helpful resources on this topic.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- Google Lens can identify a plant or animal from its picture, and the subway body scanners from Total Recall are now real.
- There are some neat high-tech camp stoves out there that can burn almost anything with very little smoke and even charge electronic devices.
- I found a good article about making box plots in R.