Sustainability: Carrying Capacity & Consumption
June 13, 2009
Carrying Capacity & Ecological Footprints
U.S.: Hold Steady.
If we don't stabilize population growth, life as we know it is unlikely to continue. With so many of us burning fossil fuels, gobbling up renewable resources, and generating toxic trash, our life support ecosystems are threatened.
In the central North Pacific Ocean gyre, swirling plastic fragments now outweigh plankton 46 to one. CO2 in the atmosphere is higher today than anytime in the past 650,000 years. Nearly one in four mammals is threatened with extinction, and worse - one in three amphibians and a quarter of all conifers. In many parts of the world, including the High Plains of North America, human water use exceeds annual average water replenishment; by 2025 1.8 billion people will be living in regions with absolute water scarcity, according to the UN. Unsustainable farming practices cause the destruction and abandonment of almost 30 million acres of arable land each year.
The number of humans is still increasing by 1.18% per year, or 80 million annually, the equivalent of nearly two Sudans, or three and a half Taiwans. Even though China is only growing by 0.5% annually, it is still growing by eight million people each year. The US, with a 1% population grow rate, increases by more than 2.9 million people annually,
the equivalent of almost four new San Franciscos.
Many argue that a decrease in human numbers would lead to a fiscal catastrophe, seeing that, in the last 200 years,
unprecedented economic growth has been accompanied by an equally unprecedented increase in world population. During the 1800s and 1900s, up to half of world economic growth was likely due to population growth; Georgetown University environmental historian John McNeill explains: "A big part of economic growth to date consists of population growth.
More hands, more work, more things produced."
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of economic success or failure, is the number of people multiplied by per capita income. Slow population growth, and economic growth will likely slow as well unless advances in productivity and spending increase at rates high enough to make up the difference. This perhaps explains why population policy is not a popular issue.
Instead We should be looking at per capita GDP, which corrects for population growth. While Japan's economy has been touted as 'bad', based on its national GDP it has actually enjoyed the biggest gain in average income among the big three rich economies. GDP is 'bad' only because its population is shrinking. Population decline may slow economic growth on a nationwide basis, "but it would not necessarily reduce per capita wealth or, indeed, per capita growth."
Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute, suggests "an orderly and relatively slow reduction in population, and not a chaotic plunge in our numbers as a result of war, disease, a breakdown in healthcare systems, or natural catastrophe." What is necessary is to match low death rates with low birthrates.
Daniel O'Neill of the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy says: "t this point in history, having too many people, or too high a level of consumption, is much more likely to result in the end of economic progress, via ecological collapse, than having too few." The costs of economic growth in the U.S. began to exceed the benefits sometime in the late 1970s.
An economic "slowdown" that results from slowing and eliminating population growth is distinctly different from that caused by a credit crunch or the messy bursting of a speculative bubble. While it's true there will be fewer mouths to feed, there will also be fewer pairs of hands needing employment. In many poorer nations, having more children means increasing the supply of labor, and lowering wages.
Unfortunately,'GDP' does not differentiate between costs and benefits and we end up spending more money to fix the problems caused by population growth. The costs of mitigating the stress imposed by a ballooning population on roads, schools, parks, agricultural land, air and water quality, government services, and ecosystems add to the total pool of a country's economic transactions.
“Sure, population decline will slow down aggregate demand. On the other hand, it's going to increase the amount of resources per capita," Daly says.
While reducing population growth in an orderly fashion promises more economic good than ill, it will bring about social and economic challenges that even proponents of shrinking the population do not dismiss lightly. Of particular concern are the challenges associated with reducing the number of working age people relative to retirees.
If we have fewer people, we will be spared the problems caused by overpopulation, save on natural resources, and in the long run be more able to provide for the social security of our aging population.
June 09, 2009
Earth Island Journal
New York Times Population Debate.
The New York Times is publishing a series of articles on the impact immigrants are having on American institutions, with the first article focusing on educating new immigrants.
It appears The New York Times is attempting to separate the population issue from US immigration and make them into two unrelated issues.
Any discussion of immigration into the US already the world's third most populous nation, is incomplete without addressing its impact on domestic population growth and sustainability.
On average, over 1 million foreign born people are granted permanent residence status each year. By adding 133 million people, the US is set to add into its borders the equivalent of all the current citizens of Mexico and Canada combined by 2050. This will result in:
US population sky-rocketing by over 130 million people.
Demand for the ground-water, open-space and farm-land dramatically surging.
Wages for lower-skilled, less-educated Americans plummeting as excess service labor swamps the market.
Roads, schools, subways and grocery stores becoming even more crowded.
Representative democracy weakening as each elected official serves a drastically inflated constituency.
If Congress were to set immigration policy to allow for 300,000 people to be invited into the nation per year US population would be 80 million less than is it currently projected to be at mid-century.
Karen Gaia says: just as every family should be able to set its size according to its social and economic limitations, so should a nation be able to limit its size by governing its borders. Up to now the US has been a rich nation, but the strain on its resources (and that on other countries it takes from) is beginning to show. Its footprint is far larger than the country's size itself.
March 17, 2009
Bill Ryerson
Australia: A Climate of Change at Lake Macquarie.
Lake Macquarie residents are becoming aware of climate change issues and the underlying causes. The council was "taking a lead role in planning for sea-level rise due to climate change" and had committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There were signs of people changing their behaviour to help the environment.
People were buying smaller cars. 161,535 vehicles were registered in Lake Macquarie, a 2.25% increase on the previous year.
The rate of native vegetation clearing had been "substantially reduced" to 58 hectares.
But Lake Macquarie's population is expected to grow by 60,000 to 70,000 people in the next 25 years and will create demand for 36,500 new dwellings.
An expanding population means an increase in the consumption of resources. Residential electricity use in the city had decreased by 3.9% in 2007-08 compared with the previous year, but business electricity use had increased by 1.8%.
December 26, 2008
Newcastle Herald
Peak Population.
Liberals are less-than-fond of Big Oil's profit margins, so we point out the need for alternative energy. Then we frame it as an environmental problem. But it is also an economic, a social, and a foreign policy problem. Our energy crisis is being talked about by both presidential candidates. Which is a lot more time than they're giving to the population crisis.
Global population could increase to 12 billion by 2050. Most growth is in developing countries. The closest thing to population reform coming from the right is, "If the world's brown people would stop having so many babies, there'd be no crisis." On the left, if we ease poverty and increase education in developing countries, the global population will even itself out.
The growing number of people inhabiting the Earth is everybody's problem. Based on solid evidence, there is a direct relationship between lower standards of living and larger family size. Yet there is no guarantee that addressing quality-of-living issues will solve the population problem.
We are faced with a crisis because we are using up more resources than the planet can produce. The most basic resources are growing scarce, food, potable water, wood. A population that keeps growing will eventually overwhelm the planet. As impoverished nations achieve prosperity, their consumption grows. A two-pronged solution is needed: reduced consumption and staved population growth.
Once again, the birth-to-death ratio in this country has reached replacement level. A child born in a first-world country uses more resources and emits more carbon than a child born in a developing country.
One of the obstacles to enacting international policies to curtail the population explosion is that, until recently, there is no consensus that the present global population is a problem. Many countries encourage family growth through tax incentives and other policies. Population control is met with vehement opposition. They are the human desire to live the way we wish, consequences be damned. The only way to counteract this desire is to make it less profitable to have children.
If food, healthcare, and education are provided, subsidizing procreation won't be necessary. This will increase the quality of life for families without punishing parents or promoting family growth.
We need to make birth control more widely available worldwide.
The association between the tyrannical and the humanitarian motivations of limiting population bolsters the need for transparent and public worldwide policies. We may still be allowed a weaning period. Energy costs will rise. The poor will bear the burden, But innovation will balloon, and the dividends of increased innovation will grow.
A lack of forethought in energy policy almost destroyed the planet, and still might. How much more difficult will it be, to make the argument that the choice to have a child is no longer a decision that can be made freely?
Karen Gaia says: the author does not seem to understand the value of voluntary family planning. U.S. women voluntarily limited their family size to replacement level, from 4 to 2 children in 20 years. With reproductive health care, women's education and self esteem, and available contraception, it can easily be done.
August 12, 2008
Utne Reader
Did You Know?.
*The 8 warmest years have occurred in the last decade.
*For seven of the last eight years, the world has consumed more grain than it produced. One fifth of the U.S. grain is being turned into fuel ethanol.
*One third of reptile, amphibian, and fish species are threatened with extinction.
*Grain yields increased half as fast in the 1990s as in the 1960s.
*Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa today is lower than in the late 1980s.
*Today's reserves of lead, tin, and copper could be depleted within the next 25 years if their extraction expands at current rates.
*Nearly half of the global military budget of $1.2 trillion is spent by the US.
*South Korea recycles 77% of its paper products.
*Conservation agriculture is practiced on more than 100 million hectares around the world
*Four years after London introduced a fee on motor vehicles entering the city center, car traffic had fallen by 36% while bicycle trips increased by 49%.
*The world produces 110 million bicycles a year, but an annual production of 49 million cars.
*Fish farming is the fastest growing source of animal protein worldwide, increasing 7% each year since 1995.
*World soybean production has quadrupled since 1977.
*Coal use in Germany has dropped 37% since 1990; in the UK it has fallen by 43%.
*Solar cell production is doubling every two years.
*Electricity used for lighting can be cut by 65% through switching to compact fluorescents.
Follow the link to more fascinating data and charts on global trends.
June 14, 2008
Earth Policy Institute, Plan B 3.0
US Wisconsin: A Shift to a New Ethics?.
Wisconsin legislators embraced an ethics built on preserving and sustaining the earth's system of living things.
We thought we had the right to use all the resources of the earth to serve our human growth. We possessed the right to equality, free speech, to work for pay and so on. We believed we had the right to expand our material possessions, our property and the number of children we brought into the world.
Our ethics held that the earth's resources were infinite and our ability to grow and increase was also infinite. But now we see a shift. Environmental ethics moves us away from the human-centered ethics of limitlessness and realizes that, in fact, our planet is finite. This scarcity of the earth's resources limits the rights and privileges of its human inhabitants. Protecting the environment must come before the limitless rights and needs of the human population. When humans act to protect and renew the resources of the Earth, they act in the most morally and ethically responsible way possible. When they act for their own growth and expansion, they tend to deplete and destroy the environment. The victims of planetary degradation will be our species - or at least the major civilizations, which will collapse from the loss of clean water, air and fertile land.
The environment has veto power over a human-centered ethics of expansion, growth and consumption. Making the environmental principle the centerpiece of our cultural ethics will face resistance from the human rights-and-freedom ethics we have embraced for so long. We cannot expand and grow forever. And a scarce Earth will place limits on our freedom, rights and needs.
Our civic leaders must assess the benefits and costs to humans and to the environment when they consider expanding freeways, public transportation systems, building coal-burning power plants, putting wind turbines on farm land. The environmental principle must be considered first.
June 08, 2008
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Sustainability of the World’s Outputs of Food, Wood and Freshwater for Human Consumption.
This article discusses in great detail the sustainabilities of the world's outputs of food, wood and freshwater. It also considers that sustainability is mainly culture-dependent. The article divides the world into 3 sections, the developing world, the older portions of the developed world, and the newer portions of the developed world. These three regions view sustainability issues in far different ways and for far different reasons. It also ddiscusses in great detail the developments that are responsible for the rapid increase in global food production over the past 4-5 decades. It reviews the need for and the actual reductions in population growth and some of the modern contraceptive methods.
Anyone interested in any of these subjects should click on the headline link and read the full article.
May 08, 2008
Bruce Sundquist's webpage
Return of the Population Timebomb.
Only since 1800 has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.
Our environmental impact is the product of population size and the average person's consumption.
Today's climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce our numbers and per person consumption.
An common assertion: If everyone on Earth consumed less, we wouldn't have exceeded carrying capacity. It's a simple notion: reduce per person consumption and end our environmental problems. And it sidesteps population size and growth, a subject of much concern in the 1960s and 1970s but taboo today.
Why taboo? Pressure from social justice activists who insist in recent decades that any focus on numbers violates the right of women to manage their fertility.
Humane, successful population programmes in countries as varied as Thailand, Iran, and Mexico contradict that assumption.
Nevertheless, the criticism has cowed environmentalists and NGOs which once championed the population cause, influencing policy, pushing the subject off the agenda, or shifting the emphasis solely to "reproductive health" without the numbers.
Most environmentalists now suggest a reduction in individual consumption is all we need to solve our ecological problems.
Measuring consumption as the use of biologically productive land and sea, data shows a global maximum sustainable footprint, at today's population, of just under 1.8 global hectares per person. Currently, we're a bit over 2.2gha, overshooting Earth's limits by about 25%.
What if we converged on Mexico's level of per capita consumption? Resource use would plummet in developed countries while rising in many of the poorest. But it wouldn't get us to 1.8gha. At 2.6gha, Mexico's footprint is 32% too high. A drop to the level of Botswana or Uzbekistan would put us in the right range.
But that's not low enough. We'd next have to compensate for UN projections of 40% more humans by the middle of the century. That would mean shrinking the global footprint to under 1.3gha, roughly the level of Guatemala or Nigeria.
The GFN authors point out their data is conservative, underestimating problems such as aquifer depletion and our impacts on other species. In response, the Redefining Progress group publishes an alternative footprint measure which has humanity not at 25%, but at 39% overshoot. But that too, the authors concede, is an underestimate.
While in overshoot, moreover, we erode carrying capacity. There are limits to how much we can reduce per-person use of land, water, and other resources. A purposeful drop on the part of industrialised countries to consumption levels comparable to those of the poorest areas in the world is not only wholly unrealistic but, at today's population size, would not end our environmental woes. Our sheer numbers prevent it.
We have no alternative but to return our attention to population, the other factor in the equation. We must aim for population stabilisation followed by a decline in human numbers worldwide.
We have to provide easy access to family planning options while educating parents in the benefits of smaller families and family planning. We should educate and empower girls and women to give them options and help free them to make decisions concerning family size. And we should end government incentives for larger families. We must do these things internationally and vigorously, with a keen eye toward numbers, monitoring results and making adjustments accordingly.
The stakes are too high to waste time evading the issue. Doing so is intellectually dishonest and a setup for global tragedy. It's time environmentalists ended the silence on population.
Ralph says: At last someone has the courage to say what should be on every politician's blotter tomorrow morning.
May 05, 2008
Guardian - comment by John Feeney
US California: More Mouths to Feed Means Less Land to Feed Them On.
Agricultural experts have warned that California's farmland is threatened by population growth. Farmers and ranchers have expressed the concern for decades.
Unfortunately, warnings have not slowed the pace at which croplands and soils are being eaten up by development. The state's farmlands are shrinking because the millions added to our population are competing with farmers for water and for the land that is best at producing food. California has long been America's leading agricultural state, generating over $30 billion a year in revenues. California cultivates more than 350 crops. The cash value of crops grown in the great Central Valley is probably unrivalled by any other comparably-sized area on earth. Unfortunately, the urbanization is accelerating. In California, productive farmlands are succumbing and are being split up into unproductive rural ranchettes or hobby farms.
Between 1990 and 2004, rapid population growth has been driving this trend.
More than 60% of the 538,000 acres developed in California was agricultural land. In the most important agricultural areas like the Central Valley, a higher portion, nearly three-quarters of the area, developed was farmland. By 2050, if the state's population projections come to pass, and if current trends continue, an additional 2.1 million acres would be urbanized. These are the lands that with the proper stewardship could produce food virtually in perpetuity. Like the non-renewable energy resources we have squandered in recent decades, this loss will come back to haunt us in a future.
Food prices are mounting globally with the addition of 70-80 million more mouths to feed every year, diversion of food crops into biofuels production, increasing consumption of meat (which uses far more land to grow the crops fed to livestock), and rising energy prices.
If California is to be part of the solution, unsustainable population growth must be checked. Since virtually all present and projected growth is from immigration and higher average immigrant fertility, these must be reduced.
If we don't, then one day California will struggle just to feed its own citizens, no less the nation and the world.
April 2008
Leon Kolankiewicz - CAPS
Could Resources Become a Limit to Global Growth?.
Surging food and energy prices are new reasons to re-think the relationship between resources and growth. There is a real wolf nearby, in the form of resource degradation and rapidly growing population.
When oil prices rose in the 1970s, this created incentives to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles, for most of the 1980s and 1990s, energy and food became more abundant. Technological progress stayed ahead of population growth and resource depletion. However, economic incentives cannot keep the wolf at bay indefinitely.
Resource prices have surpassed record levels and per-capita food availability has started to decline. Despite demographic transition to low fertility in East Asia, Europe, and North America, current population growth rates would still triple world population to over 20 billion in about 90 years. The question is whether population growth will fall due to declines in fertility or whether epidemics, malnutrition, and violent conflict will carry out the adjustment, aided by global warming.
Residents of China and India are unlikely to buy many SUVs, and economic incentives will push them in more environmentally friendly directions. If China were the model, I would be optimistic about the future. Fertility there has declined to about replacement level. China is poised to move where people demand better environmental quality as incomes rise.
The dismal picture is in Africa. Per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa fell between 1980 and 2005, despite improvements in technology made available in that period. Population growth remains very high and infectious disease, malnutrition, and violent conflict have become more entrenched and could spill over into other regions. Water provides an important example of resource scarcity. If the people of Los Angeles faced higher water prices, we would see households switch away from green grass.
A second set of issues concerns population growth in poor nations. Population growth helps to create new markets. Unfortunately, population growth in the developing world is unlikely to trigger such an innovation.
Market-based prices cannot do everything, largely because of non-priced third party effects. An electric utility using coal to produce electricity contributes to global warming and other pollution problems. This effect is not priced.
Decisions to have large numbers of children may also impose negative externalities on others. Some would like to limit growth in order to mitigate the production of greenhouse gases. But they are vague about the details. Which people should not be born? Whose income should decline in order to achieve their noble goal?
California is likely to implement a cap and trade program which will effectively create a new market in the "right to pollute." Effective regulation has helped to offset the quantity of economic activity. But in general, I wonder whether government is up to the task of limiting the costs of growth on a global scale.
Major resources such as forests and agricultural land are under threat, as are the air and water. Possibly the biggest threat is a catastrophic rise in sea level caused by global warming.
Fertility reduction is the biggest challenge. Chinese-style state-imposed fertility control will not be acceptable elsewhere, but female education and female control over reproductive decisions are very positive forces.
If natural resources grow scarce, we will adjust and in the long run, new substitutes will be introduced.
Karen Gaia says: Instead of a population of 20 billion in 90 years, the U.N. predicts a leveling-off of 9-11 billion in 50 years. As for sufficient, timely substitutes for natural resources, that takes a lot of faith. Take water or soil for example.
March 24, 2008
Wall Street Journal
Australia: The S Word is Sustainability.
Rapid population growth means, the future of our society, our economy and our environment; the structure of our cities, their energy and water sources the imminent peaking of world oil supplies; our use of finite resources like gas and coal; and the way we dispose of those resources.
Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield by an estimated 25%. We are setting the stage for decline and collapse.
With some exceptions, policy makers have been guilty of allowing sustainability to be cast as a peculiarly environmental issue. Sustainability is the ultimate whole of government - indeed, whole of society - issue.
Sustainability must be the foundation upon which we build economic strength and natural resilience.
It must be central to our planning, thinking and acting as we seek to live in harmony with the planet.
Global warming is a symptom of the problem of living unsustainably. Consuming fossil fuels without considering the waste is a sustainability issue.
The rate of increase in greenhouse concentrations is unprecedented in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Human induced global catastrophe as it should be known, might be the clarion call that heralds another threat caused by our careless consumption of fossil fuels.
A growing group of voices predict that between 2006 and 2020 the world will pass a point after which we will never have as much oil at our disposal as we did the day before.
November 2006 is the possible peak of production, with the world's daily average in that month of 85.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of oil and condensates not having been exceeded in the 14 months since.
Crude has been consistently trading between US$100 and US$102 a barrel and we now stand on the threshold of an upswing in global oil prices that will have a significant impact on the economy of the world and for which we are seriously unprepared.
What both peak oil and climate change will impose upon us is a requirement to use less energy. We will need to live closer to work, schools and shops and public transport.
We have the capacity with existing technology and intellect to adopt more sustainable policies and practices to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control through greater use of renewable energy sources and to reduce our reliance on oil.
The challenge is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed.
In an energy-constrained world dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's time we spoke of population.
The rampaging monster is over-population. In its presence, sustainability is a fragile theoretical thing.
People are ready to grasp the argument that the unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our planet. Population maldistribution increases the stress on available resources and heightens the need for more stringent sustainable living practices, such as water restrictions.
Developed countries have the double whammy of increasing populations and rampant consumerism.
It's one thing to provide the necessities of life… quite another to provide the trimmings demanded by affluence.
In the 21st century, the human race must confront the reality that in the closed system that is planet earth, there are limits to growth.
No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical limits of the world's resources.
What we need above all is smart growth. .. Growth that is low carbon. .. Growth that is low pollution. .. Growth that is resource neutral.
We need growth that adds to the natural capital, instead of destroying it.
March 12, 2008
Sunshine Coast Daily
Global Inaction: We’d better get motivated now to confront climate change; our leaders are not going to do it for us.
The global response to global warming has been inaction. And while a poll shows that 71% of Americans think warming is a problem, most of us continue with our lives as usual.
Why are we so passive in the face of such profound changes for the worse in our environment?
By the year 2100, those changes will include a sea level rise of 5 to 10 feet; a 30% drop in crop yields; hundreds of millions of climate refugees; erratic and more severe weather; frequent forest fires; potable water shortages; a roughly 30% rate of global species extinction, and a hostile world.
With a better understanding of our reluctance to act, we'll be motivated to undertake the changes required for sustainability.
Global warming's harm is in the future, and we tend to ignore future harm. Warming is in evidence today, but so far only amounts to one degree C. Now we must insure ourselves against the very high likelihood that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions will be massively disruptive.
We have to stop polluting. Dilution is not the solution, because it fails when the volume or toxicity of pollutants increase.
The huge volume of carbon dioxide is a pollutant, but it's ignored because it's invisible and odorless. Now, it is our single most serious problem.
Rising carbon dioxide correlates with rising temperature, and rising temperatures will cause a multitude of problems. The science has some uncertainty, but so does all science.
By the time we have precise knowledge of the rate and consequences of warming, it will be too late. If we wait, significant warming will be inevitable and irreversible.
So far, if drought reduces some food we want, we simply pay more to bring some in from elsewhere. But more than 1 billion people in the world live on $2 a day or less, and have no cushion against the ill effects of warming. Soon, even our wealth will prove inadequate. A 2003 Pentagon study predicted widespread chaos based on just one of the global warming consequences.
Our wealth temporarily insulates us from an urgent and chaotic reality.
We have to save ourselves — we have no effective leaders.
We have no assurance that alternative, non-polluting energy sources can replace our current energy use, or even large parts of it. It seems unlikely that we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as needed.
No one knows how much non-emitting energy we can develop, because that depends mostly on new or improved technologies. But the reduction will change our lives, because we are highly dependent on cheap and plentiful fossil fuel energy.
At some point quite a while ago, growth became unsustainable. But our cultural worship of growth irrationally persisted.
March 09, 2008
The Register-Guard
Humanity is Consuming Over 20 Per Cent More Natural Resources Each Year Than the Earth Can Produce.
The report in the WWF's (World Wide Fund for Nature) periodic update on the state of the world's ecosystems said humanity is now consuming over 20% more natural resources each year than the earth can produce. This leads to the destruction of ecological assets, on which the world's economy depends. The report shows that humanity's Ecological Footprint grew by 150% between 1961 and 2000.
During the same period, the report shows a 40% decline in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species population. Ten years after the UN Rio conference in 1992, the Footprint in the 27 wealthiest countries increased by 8% per person, while in the middle and low income countries, it shrank by 8% per person.
Consumption of fossil fuels increased by almost 700% between 1961 and 2001. But the planet is unable to absorb the resulting carbon-dioxide emissions that degrade the earth's ozone layer.
We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate.
The biggest culprit is the US. Although it has only 4.5% of the world's population, it consumes more than 29% of the world's annual output of renewable resources. The US has been urging developing countries to adopt sustainable development, but there is no sign of the US adopting such policies.
With more than 120 million vehicles on its roads the US is also the biggest culprit when it comes to generating carbon-dioxide emissions.
The global community has set targets for sustainability and biodiversity conservation. At the 2004 meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, governments agreed to set targets for creating networks of protected areas.
All 191 member states of the UN have signed up to support the MDGs, which not only address the root causes of environmental degradation but include a specific goal on environmental sustainability.
Some might argue that governments are wasting their time talking. The fact is that governments today are no further to achieving the MDGs than they were seven years ago.
Populations of terrestrial, freshwater and marine species fell on an average by 40% between 1970 and 2000. Destruction of natural habitats, pollution, overfishing and the introduction of non-native animals, often drive out indigenous species.
Trawlers and dredgers wreak destruction across the seabed, crushing entire ecosystems of corals, algae and crustaceans as they go. But will governments take heed? Or will they continue to look the other way? The forest species declined by about 15%, the marine species 35%, while the freshwater species dropped 55% over the 30-year period.
The earth has about 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space, after all unproductive areas are discounted. Divided between the current estimated global population of 6.4 billion, this total equates to 1.78 hectares per person.
When the world's population was slightly less than 6 billion, the Ecological Footprint of the world's average consumer was 2.3 hectares, or 20% above the earth's capacity of 1.90 hectares per person versus 1.78 hectares per person today. In other words, humanity now exceeds the planet's capacity to sustain its consumption of renewable resources.
March 08, 2008
The News
U.K.: The Elephant in the Room.
We must change our basic way of living; it will either be made on our own initiative in a planned way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the laws of nature.
First, we must accept the idea that sustainable means for a long time.
The Government of the UK defines it as: ‘Sustainable communities are places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.'
This means that the resources have to be renewable through natural processes and entirely recycled if they are not renewable. If the population exceeds the carrying capacity, the death rate will increase until the population numbers are stable. Using these criteria it is obvious that the current human population is not sustainable.
In the discussions taking place, population is a word we dare not speak. Population is the elephant in the room.
It is obvious that something has increased the world's carrying capacity in the last 150 years. That something is oil.
Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource and not sustainable. If oil is not sustainable, then the added carrying capacity the oil has provided is unsustainable. Carrying capacity has been added to the world in direct proportion to the use of oil, and if our oil supply declines, the carrying capacity of the world will automatically fall with it.
Our population today is at least five times what it was before oil came on the scene. Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. We are in fantasy land if we think that we can continue to support the number of people that we do now without the full input of oil and its related products.
We have become so dependent on those fuels, that there is no way we can sustain ourselves at this population density and level of technology without them. Population redistribution provides no long-term solution to environmental sustainability, total population numbers need to decrease worldwide.
Extremes of temperature and climate, combined with weather-related disruptions, would severely reduce the size of the country's population carrying capacity.
With population continuing to grow, urbanisation eating up farmland, and more of our remaining agricultural land likely to be used for energy crops, food production will be squeezed.
The systems that produce the world's food supply are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. In addition, fossil fuels are essential in the construction and the repair of equipment and infrastructure needed to facilitate this industry. Almost every human endeavour from transportation, to manufacturing, to electricity to plastics, and especially food production is intertwined with oil and natural gas supplies. As each individual recycles more of his or her own waste, success is undermined by the constantly increasing numbers of people who create waste.
But how much land would be needed to provide all our electricity. It depends how much wind power can be constructed offshore. For wind power to supply all-electric homes at today's rates of consumption, for today's 60 million people, several counties would need to be covered with wind turbines.
The total amount of water used in UK is modest because agriculture can be carried on mostly without irrigation.
The UK Government attaches importance to lowering water use because of increasing water constraints: rivers reduced to a trickle for several months, reservoir levels dropping, water tables continuing to drop. The large increases in the UK population experienced during the last five years makes it even more important to try to push per person consumption downwards.
Half a million new homes are planned in the South East alone.
The UK is one of the most densely populated and built up countries in the EU and some English regions are already close to reaching the limits of their capacity to take further development without serious damage to the environment or quality of life.
Along with every measure for reducing per person use of water, we should address the problem of population.
All these problems are symptoms of the growth in the human population, currently surging through 6.6 billion people worldwide. The consequences are already clear without policies to reduce world population, efforts to save our environment cannot succeed.
The uncomfortable truth is that the impact on Earth's biosphere of a projected 9 billion people living at a desired higher standard of living in 2050 would be fatal for the planet in terms of greenhouse gas emissions alone.
Given the fact that our world's carrying capacity is supported by oil, and that the oil is about to start going away, it seems that a population decline is inevitable. Populations in serious overshoot always decline, though actually, it's a bit worse than that. The population may actually fall to a lower level than was sustainable before the overshoot.
We are getting obvious signals from our environment that all is not well. Because we are now a global species with a global civilization, continuing growth of our numbers depends on the continuing growth of our civilization. There must be a sufficient level of food, shelter, energy and medical care available. All these factors will be put at risk globally within the next two decades due to the loss of oil. Food production and distribution will be hampered or impossible, and local agriculture will prove very difficult in some places. Other countries like those at the bottom of the list of developing nations will simply be too poor to compete against the developed world for the resources needed for survival. Populations will fall as a result.
The facts remain: there aren't enough resources to bring the whole world up to the industrial level of the developed world and the developed world is unlikely to consent to their own voluntary impoverishment in favour of industrializing the less developed world, and attempting such an approach would increase rather than reduce global ecological devastation.
The human race has only one or perhaps two generations to rescue itself. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution can divert our attention. If the present growth in world population continues, the limits to growth will be reached within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
As for man, there is little reason to think that he can, in the long run, escape the fate of other creatures.
March 06, 2008
CounterCurrents.org
UK Unable to Sustain Population, Says Study.
The UK is over-populated and could support only 17 million people if it had to provide for the current 60 million from its own resources. If global population growth continues the world could be at war over resources in less than 50 years and calls on governments to advocate smaller families and increased use of contraception.
Government targets to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 will have little impact on the UK's sustainability because of the rate of population growth.
The number of people living in the UK is expected to hit 65 million within 10 years, and top 70 million by 2031.
Even if Britain was carbon neutral, it could only sustainably support 40 million people. To live sustainably, British people would have to lead simpler lives, similar to people in China, Paraguay, Algeria and Botswana.
The world was living within its ecological means until the 1980s when populations began to grow rapidly.
By 2050, it will be using up the equivalent of nearly two Earths each year and the UK's overpopulation threatens the environment and people's quality of life.
We need a national population policy.
February 18, 2008
Telegraph
U.S.: Envisioning a Sustainable Chesapeake.
It's been most inspiring to see discussions begin to address the future of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay.
They prompt us to ask: "What does a sustainable Chesapeake really mean?"
My vision is built upon a balanced, vibrant ecosystem teeming with fish, shellfish, underwater grasses and clear, healthy waters. But to be truly sustainable, the Chesapeake ecosystem needs to exist while also supporting the region's human population.
Creating a sustainable Chesapeake will not be easy. But as we look around the state, we're seeing more and more positive steps being taken.
Recently, the Maryland Commission on Climate Change made recommendations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and conserving energy throughout the state. These actions will require that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by more than 25% within the next 12 years.
An initiative was introduced that will seek to instill a sense of environmental stewardship among the 28,000 students graduating each year. It will also foster research and prepare the new "green" workforce.
By changing our own actions, each of us has the ability to reduce our impact on the bay and the planet.
As long as the region's population continues to grow, and we develop lands faster than needed to accommodate that growth, we make it more difficult to maintain the sustainability equation.
We have struggled more than 20 years to reduce the amount of pollution flowing into the bay and we are still far from where we need to be. Another 10, 20 or 30 years of pollution-fighting efforts will still not be enough. Bay restoration efforts will be needed in perpetuity.
We need to manage for sustainability by remaining aware of what will cross our path in the future.
Karen Gaia says: The way things are going, we will be forced to reduce our greenhouse gases because we have passed peak oil, meaning our consumption of oil will be reduced.
February 17, 2008
Annapolis Capital
The Hidden Holocaust -- Our Civilizational Crisis, Part 3.
This global system is driven purely by profit, efficiency, growth, and monopoly. It is destructive of all life, nature, and even itself.
It is now generating multiple crises across the world that threaten to converge unless we take drastic action now.
These crises have four key themes: Climate catastrophe, peak oil, food scarcity, and economic instability.
The C02 emissions from the industries are the main engine of global warming. Scientists have found no evidence that solar energy is correlated with rising temperatures. According to the IPCC's first report, by 2100 the average global temperature could rise by 6.4C, leading to ecological alterations that would make life throughout most of the Earth impossible.
Another crisis emerging is the energy crisis, primarily oil. The basic rules for the discovery, estimation and production of petroleum reserves were laid down by Dr. M. King Hubbert who pointed out that as petroleum is a finite resource, its production must inevitably pass through three key stages. Production reaches a peak which cannot be surpassed which occurs at the point when 50% of total reserves are depleted.
Production declines at an increasing rate, until the resource is completely depleted.
Rising oil prices and reports of declining oil production corroborate the conclusion that the peak has occurred, or will do, within the start of the 21st century. The convergence of climate change and peak oil threaten to undermine global food security over the next few years. The effects of this are already being felt.
A study predicted that if global warming continues, drought that already threatens the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth before 2100, and extreme drought will affect a third of the planet. The world-scale drought would undermine the ability to grow food, have a safe sanitation system, and the availability of water, pushing millions of people over the precipice.
We are already pushing the limits on world food production. The Earth is running out of fertile land, and food production will soon be unable to keep up with population growth.
Every year in the US, more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging.
Without oil, modern agriculture dies, and so then will our ability to mass-produce food.
Economic meltdown, the gap between rich and poor nations doubled between 1960 and 1989.
Of the 4 billion people who live in developing countries, about 1.3 billion have no access to clean drinking water. A fifth of all children receive an insufficient intake of calories and proteins. Around 2 billion people suffer from anaemia, 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. The CEPR conducted a study of economic growth for 1980 to 2005. The results are shocking. The majority of the world's economies have been retarded. These 25 years have exhibited a decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades in growth, life expectancy, infant mortality and education.
The global economic system is inherently unstable, and tends toward the generation of periodic crises. It is vulnerable to collapse.
In mid-2006, Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, warned that the world "has done little to prepare itself for what could well be the next crisis." A key trigger could be the housing market, the use of home loans to squeeze cash out of equity, permitting consumers to spend beyond their means.
This spending spree has to come to an end. If it comes to an end suddenly, then we have our recession. The US economy is close to the edge. We need a civilizational paradigm shift. A whole new vision of life itself to replace the dead, broken materialistic vision associated with the concurrent global imperial system. The good news is that the civilizational paradigm shift is not only happening its seeds have already been planted.
This system is now generating multiple crises across the world that over the next 20 years threaten to converge in an unprecedented and unimaginable way, unless we take drastic action now.
These crises can be categorized broadly into four key themes:
1. Climate Catastrophe
Industrial civilization derives all its energy from the burning of fossil fuels, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The C02 emissions from the industries that drive our economies, our societies, that sustain our infrastructures, are the main engine of global warming in the last few decades. This doesn't mean that all climate change ever is due to human-induced C02. Scientists know that there are many other factors involved in climate change, such as solar activity, as well as periodic changes in the Earth's orbit. But they have overwhelmingly confirmed that these are not the primary factors currently driving global warming. The primary factor is C02 emissions induced by human activities.
The origins of climate change are no longer a matter of serious scientific debate. Early in 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported the findings of a three-year study projecting the rise in temperatures due to global warming, by 600 scientists from 40 countries, peer-reviewed by 600 more meteorologists. The report confirmed that human-induced global warming is "unequivocally" happening, and that the probability that climate change was due to human C02 emissions is over 90%.
The London Times reported on a study from Nature as follows:
"Scientists have examined various proxies of solar energy output over the past 1,000 years and have found no evidence that they are correlated with today's rising temperatures. Satellite observations over the past 30 years have also turned up nothing. ‘The solar contribution to warming . . . is negligible,' the researchers wrote in the journal Nature."
At 6c : "Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive."
Growing evidence suggests that the IPCC projections are extremely conservative, and that the climate crisis is rapidly growing out of control. According to Dr David Wasdell, a climate expert and an accredited reviewer of the IPCC report, the final report was watered down by Western government officials before release to make its findings appear less catastrophic. Dr Wasdell told the New Scientist (8 March 2007) that early drafts of the report prepared by scientists in April 2006 contained "many references to the potential for climate to change faster than expected because of ‘positive feedbacks' in the climate system. Most of these references were absent from the final version."
The following IPCC report, however, distilling the research of 2,500 climate scientists, released in November 2007 only confirms that the original projection was too optimistic. To avoid heating the globe by the minimum possible, an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the world's spiraling growth in greenhouse gas emissions must end no later than 2015, and must start to drop quickly after that peak. By 2050, carbon dioxide and other atmospheric polluting gases must be reduced by 50 to 85%, according to the estimates. But even this is already too late. "We may have already overshot that target," said David Karoly, one member of the core team that wrote the report. Current emissions already are nearing the limit required in 2015 to limit the warming to 2 degrees Celsius, he added in a media interview from Valencia.
But Western governments have known about this danger for years. At the June 2005 UK government conference on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" at the Met Office in Exeter, scientists reported an emerging consensus that global warming must remain "below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided," which means ensuring that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stays below 400 parts per million. Beyond this level, dangerous and runaway climate change is likely to be irreversible.
About two weeks after the government conference warned of this minimum threshold, the Independent commissioned an investigation by Keith Shine, head of the meteorology department at the University of Reading. Using the latest available figures (for 2004), Professor Shine calculated that "the C02 equivalent concentration, largely unnoticed by the scientific and political communities, has now risen beyond this threshold." Accounting for the effects of methane and nitrous oxide, he found that the equivalent concentration of C02 is now 425ppm and fast rising, guaranteeing that the global mean temperature will rise by 2 degrees. Consequently, some of the worst predicted effects of global warming, such as the destruction of ecosystems and increased hunger and water shortages for billions of people in the South, may well be unavoidable.
When asked about the implications, Tom Burke, a former government environment adviser, told the Independent: "The passing of this threshold is of the most enormous significance. It means we have actually entered a new era -- the era of dangerous climate change. We have passed the point where we can be confident of staying below the 2 degree rise set as the threshold for danger. What this tells us is that we have already reached the point where our children can no longer count on a safe climate."
According to the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) the percentage of Earth's land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, from about 10-15% to 30%, largely due to rising temperatures. Widespread drying occurred over much of Europe and Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. Global warming is not only melting the Arctic, it is melting the glaciers that feed Asia's largest rivers -- the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow. Because glaciers are a natural storage system, releasing water during hot arid periods, the shrinking ice sheets could aggravate water imbalances, causing flooding as the melting accelerates, followed by a reduction in river flows. This problem is only decades, possibly even years away, resulting in hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who have water, being short of it, most likely in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than 1 billion people in Asia could face water shortages, and by 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people. Some climate models show sub-saharan Africa drying out by 2050.
2. Peak oil
There is yet another crisis emerging, which is also linked to our addiction to burning fossil fuels. That is the energy crisis. Today, the most prominent energy source is, of course, conventional oil. Here in the UK, from where I'm now writing, 90% of our energy comes from conventional oil, gas and coal, but primarily oil. Without these energy supplies, civilized life in the UK would simply collapse. Transportation, agriculture, modern medicine, national defence, water distribution, and the production of even basic technologies would be impossible. This formula applies across the board, throughout western industrial civilization.
One of the most authoritative studies so far on peak oil and its timing was conducted by Dr. Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, leading oil industry experts concluded in a report for the government that "the mid-point of ultimate conventional oil production would be reached by year 2000 and that decline would soon begin." They also projected that "production post-peak would halve about every 25 years, an exponential decline of 2.5 to 2.9% per annum."
This conclusion is based as it is on performance data from thousands of oil fields in 65 countries, including data on "virtually all discoveries, on production history by country, field, and company as well as key details of geology and geophysical surveys." A review of the research by senior industry geologists in Petroleum Review indicated, apart from minor disagreement over the scope of remaining reserves, "general acceptance of the substance of their arguments; that the bulk of remaining discovery will be in ever smaller fields within established provinces."
Rapidly rising oil prices and growing reports of declining oil production corroborate the conclusion that the peak has already occurred, or will do, well within the dawn of the 21st century. London's Petroleum Review published a study toward the end of 2004 concluding that in Indonesia, Gabon, and fifteen other oil-rich nations supplying about 30% of the world's daily crude, oil production is declining by 5% a year -- double the rate of decline a year prior to the report. Chris Skrebowski reported in early 2005 that production in conventional oil reserves are already declining at about 4-6% a year worldwide, including 18 large oil-producing countries, and 32 smaller ones. Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India are due to peak in the next few years.
According to an official report published by British Petroleum late last year, we have about 30 years before we peak. This is supposed to be an ‘optimistic' assessment. Apart from the fact that this is hardly good news, it is a clearly politicized claim from an oil industry fighting to sustain its credibility as the Oil Age nears its demise. Colin Campbell, himself a former senior BP geologist, argues that the data shows we have less than 4 years; and in the meantime, former US government energy adviser Matt Simmons argues that we have most likely peaked years ago, but won't know for sure until we start feeling the crunch within a few years.
3. Food scarcity
The convergence of these two global crises, climate change and peak oil, threaten to undermine global food security over the next few years. The effects of this are already being felt.
At the British Association's Festival of Science in Dublin in September 2005, US and UK scientists working at the Hadley Centre described how shifts in rain patterns and temperatures due to global warming could lead to a further 50 million people going hungry by conservative estimates. "If we accept that broadly 500 million people are at risk today, we expect that to increase by about 10 percent by the middle part of this century."
Then toward the end of 2006, a study by Met Office's Hadley Centre funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, predicted that if global warming continues, drought that already threatens the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth before 2100, and extreme drought making agriculture impossible will affect a third of the planet. The world-scale drought would undermine the ability to grow food, the ability to have a safe sanitation system, and the availability of water, pushing millions of people already struggling in conditions of dire deprivation over the precipice.
The grim truth is that we are already pushing the limits on world food production within the existing structure of modern corporate agriculture. According to new maps released in December 2005 by scientists at the Centre for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Navin Ramankutty, "Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops." The maps thus show that the Earth is "rapidly running out of fertile land" and that "food production will soon be unable to keep up with global population growth."
World food prediction probably peaked shortly before the new millennium. Lester Brown, a former international agricultural policy advisor for the US government who went on to found the World Watch Institute and Earth Policy Institute, reports that since world grain consumption has exceeded production since 2000, such that 2003 saw a deficit of 105 million tones. On that basis, Brown predicts a global grain deficit within the next few years. In 2003 he noted that "World grain harvests have fallen for four consecutive years and world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 30 years." This is partly why world grain prices are steadily rising.
This is not centrally about population, but about modern intensive agricultural methods as practiced by the globalized corporate food industry, which are simply unsustainable. US structural geologist Dave Allen Pfeiffer points out that while it takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil, in soil made susceptible by modern agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65% each year. Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from US agricultural soils every year. Every year in the US, more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging.
Already, populations in the South are suffering from the grim reality of these crises. Near the end of last year, The Guardian reported:
"Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products. Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years."
Peak food will be exacerbated beyond all proportion in the context of peak oil. Modern intensive agriculture that produces most of our food, is industrialized, mechanized. It needs oil. Without oil, modern agriculture dies, and so then will our ability to mass-produce food.
4. Economic meltdown
According to the United Nations Development Programme, the gap between rich and poor nations doubled between 1960 and 1989. The rewards of globalization are increasingly "spread unequally and inequitably -- concentrating power and wealth in a select group of people, nations and corporations, marginalizing the others."
Successive UN Human Development reports give us the broad contours of the manner in which this system inflicts protracted death-by-deprivation on the majority of the world's population. Of the 4 billion people who live in developing countries, almost a third -- about 1.3 billion people -- have no access to clean drinking water. A fifth of all children in the world receive an insufficient intake of calories and proteins. Around 2 billion people -- a third of the human race -- suffer from anaemia. 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Thirty million people die of hunger every year, half of whom, UNICEF estimates, are children. Over 840 million suffer from chronic malnutrition, almost a sixth of the population. Three billion people -- that is half the world population -- are forced to survive on less than two dollars a day. Of the 6 billion people in the world, only 500 million live in comfort -- that is approximately one-twelfth of the world population. This leaves a massive 5.5 billion people living in need -- over five-sixth of the population.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, DC found, in a comprehensive study of economic growth and other indicators for the period between 1980 and 2005, that the vast majority of the world's economies have been systematically retarded, exhibiting an empirically incontrovertible decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960-1980] in growth, life expectancy, infant mortality and education.
But the global economic system is not merely inherently unjust and unequal but also inherently unstable, and tends toward the generation of periodic crises, and as events of the last few months have shown, it is increasingly vulnerable to collapse. Financial institutions, corporate investors and even mainstream economists have been aware of the dangers for several years before the recent crisis that erupted from the depths of fault lines in the housing market. In March 2006, an unprecedented IMF report Safeguarding Financial Stability criticized the twin strategies of deregulation and liberalization, the staple policies of the global economy, as "the potential for fragility, instability, systemic risk, and adverse economic consequences." Deregulation has caused "national financial systems [to] become increasingly vulnerable to increased systemic risk and to a growing number of financial crises."
In mid-2006, Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, warned that the world "has done little to prepare itself for what could well be the next crisis." UC Berkeley economist professor Brad DeLong in March 2007 argued that a global economic recession was in motion, principally due to three factors:
"1) A Federal Reserve that finds itself with less inflation-fighting credibility than it thought it had; 2) upward pressure on inflation from rising energy and, perhaps, import prices; and 3) millions of middle-class homeowners who for too long have treated their houses as gigantic ATMs, using home equity loans and refinancing to generate extra spending money."
A key trigger could be the housing market -- the unprecedented use of home loans to squeeze cash out of equity, permitting middle-class consumers to spend well beyond their means. "Someday this spending spree has to come to an end. If it comes to an end suddenly, at a time when the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates a little too much, then we have our recession . . . Make no mistake about it: The US economy is close to the edge . . . What can be done to head off the danger? Unfortunately, very little. The bag of macroeconomic tricks is empty." [
In July 2006 Dr. David Martin, in a speech at the Arlington Institute, warned his listeners that a collapse of the global banking system could be imminent as of January 2008, and that it would start with the housing crisis.
The war forward . . . ?
What we need now is a civilizational paradigm shift. Not just a new economics, or new politics, or new social vision. We need a whole new vision of life itself to replace the dead, broken materialistic vision associated with the concurrent global imperial system. The good news is that the civilizational paradigm shift is not only happening now as I write -- its seeds have already been planted.
January 06, 2008
Online Journal
Niger: Population Explosion Threatens Development Gains.
If Nigeriens remain uninformed about family planning and keep reproducing at the current rate the population will more than quadruple by 2050, imposing unmanageable demands on the economy, social services and the environment. The current rate of population growth is 3.3% every year. If that growth continues, there will be 56 million people in Niger by 2050, compared to 13.5 million today. In 1960, it was just 1.7 million.
The average number of children per mother is 7.1. Women said they would like nine and men said 12, but some families said 40 or 50 children. It a society that encourages procreation.
Just 5% of Nigeriens use family planning and contraception. People aren't informed about the negative consequences of having so many children.
The 85% of Nigeriens who rely on rain-fed, subsistence agriculture to feed themselves are going to be hardest hit as millions more people compete for the same amount of farmland to grow food.
The Sahel has recently been identified as one of the regions most likely to be adversely affected by climate change.
The increase in the population will continue to accentuate the cereal production and wood-for-fuel deficits which started in the 1980s. Niger's population will quickly overtake the government's ability to provide health, education, jobs and even water points, tasks that it is already failing at today.
94% of Nigeriens live on 35% of the land. The most populated areas are along the southern border with Burkina Faso and Mali.
The Maradi region holds 20% of the population, 2,235,748 people, living on 3.3% of the country's land.
Niger's desert and mountain north accounts for 53% of Niger's territory but only 3 percent of the population, 321,639 people.
Niger plans this year to curb population growth which the INS says would reduce the population in 2050 to 33.3 million, still almost three times its current level.
The government wants the number practising family planning to increase from to 15% or 20% by 2015. The INS says 20% of women claim to want it.
The plan calls for information campaigns to educate religious leaders and women about the availability and importance of family planning.
Currently, every second girl is married and likely to be procreating before the age of 15. Raising the marriage age to 18 would take up to four years off a woman's reproductive life.
By 2015 population growth should have slowed to 2.5% and the average number of children per woman should be five.
Diadi Boureima, deputy representative of the UN Fund for Population Affairs (UNFPA) in Niger, said the task was a critical one.
If the demographics continue, Niger cannot develop. All the resources the country has will be going into social services and nothing will be left for investing in the economy. The government is acting accordingly.
December 11, 2007
UN Integrated Regional Information Network
Sustainable Development is Need of the Time.
The idea of sustainable development grew from environmental movements in earlier decades and was defined in 1987 as: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
When you think of the world as a system, you understand that air pollution from North America affects air quality in Asia, and that pesticides sprayed in Argentina could harm fish stocks off the coast of Australia.
You start to realise that the decisions our grandparents made about how to farm the land continue to affect agricultural practice today.
We understand that quality of life is a system, too. What if you are poor and don't have access to education? It's good to have a secure income, but what if the air in your part of the world is unclean? And it's good to have freedom of religious expression, but what if you can't feed your family?
The concept of sustainable development helps us understand ourselves and our world. The problems we face are complex and serious, and we can't address them in the same way we created them.
Sustainable development highlights sustainability as the idea of environmental, economic and social progress and equity, all within the limits of the world's natural resources.
Sustainable development calls for improving the quality of life for all of the world's people without increasing the use of our natural resources beyond the Earth's carrying capacity. The efforts to build a truly sustainable way of life require the integration of action in three key areas:
Interlinked, global economic systems demand an integrated approach to foster responsible long-term growth while ensuring that no nation or community is left behind.
To conserve our environment and natural resources for future generations, economically viable solutions must be developed to reduce resource consumption, stop pollution and conserve natural habitats.
Throughout the world, people require jobs, food, education, energy, health care, water, and sanitation. The world community must ensure that the cultural and social diversity, and the rights of workers, are respected, and that all members of society are empowered to play a role in determining their futures.
The record on sustainability so far appears to have been quite poor. Sustainable development is an urgent issue, though political will has been slow-paced. There are 1.3 billion without access to clean water. About half of humanity lack access to adequate sanitation and living on less than 2 dollars a day.
In practicing sustainable development over the long-term one will:
-- Not diminish the quality of the present environment.
-- Not reduce the availability of renewable resources.
-- Take into consideration the value of non-renewable resources to future generations.
-- Not compromise the ability of other species or future generations to meet their needs.
December 08, 2007
The Daily Star
World Atlas of Sustainable Development- Feed Your Head.
So far, we have only one usable planet. The "science dudes" are trying to discover if there are any planets out there that are suitable for humans to live on. This has not produced results. In our solar system everything appears to be too hot, too cold, or have no atmosphere. This leaves us to face the fact that the 6.5 billion humans on this rocky sphere are dependent on the natural resources that exist on our planet. Unfortunately, we are using those resources in an unsustainable way right now. Within 100 years, we will have to feed, clothe, and provide electricity and transportation and water to, around 10 billion humans.
* The worldwide catch of fish is now 6 times what it was 50 years ago. Catches are beginning to decline as fish populations sink.
* 850 million humans go hungry; 220 million are children.
* 1 in 5 humans have no access to clean drinking water.
* By 2050, 85% of all humans will live in developing countries.
* One third of the world's visible land is affected by desertification, the degradation of productive but fragile lands which have insufficient rainfall and has been damaged by unsustainable development.
* During the next 100 years that global temperature averages will rise from 2 to 6 degrees C, resulting in coastal flooding and an increase in droughts. We are using resources 30% faster than the ability of those resources to renew themselves. Many people whose knowledge of the environmental challenges seems to date from 1960.
December 06, 2007
Gather.com
Is the Planet Full Yet?.
Of the top 50 things to save the planet, to have fewer people is only Number 18. The current population of 6.6 billion people is predicted to rocket to 9.7 billion in the next 40 years. Yet there is a conspicuous silence about the topic of sustainable family planning.
Population growth is one of the factors which determines our impact on the Earth's ecosystem and therefore we should talk frankly about it. Population growth could wipe out any gains we make reducing the amount we consume. It has to be a part of the discussion and not ignored as some form of sacred taboo.
Friends of the Earth do not campaign on the matter of population, claiming the big issue is resource use. But Green Party Caroline Lucas MEP disagrees. "There's a direct relation between the emissions we produce and how many of us there are."
The idea of controlling the population may be distasteful but on a planet with finite resources and an exponentially growing number of people something, has to give. At present we are not able to feed the world's population adequately, yet we produce enough food to do so. That is a failure of our current structures. With the world's population set to rise significantly over the next century, if we can't cope now, how are we going to cope then?
By encouraging high levels of immigration we are fuelling the problem because when people come here they are, going to start living our unsustainable lifestyle, too."
The South East Plan proposes a further 11,000 homes should be built in Brighton and Hove by 2026, the result is likely to be severe pressure on our natural resources, such as water. Can a city hemmed in by the sea and South Downs accommodate any more without compromising quality of life and the future of the South Downs National Park?
According to the UN, there are 78 million people added to the world every year, yet there are 200 million women who want to control their fertility but have no safe and effective access to contraceptive services.
We need a major investment in family planning so women can choose their family size.
In the Sixties and Seventies, population was a key issue for all the major campaign groups. Oxfam published a paper entitled World Population: The Biggest Problem Of All. But in 2007, to call for such frank discussion runs too great a risk of upsetting the other values environmentalists identify with: human rights, gender equality, race, immigration and, above all, individual choice.
We've got to stop being paralysed by the sensitivities the population question naturally taps into and recognise there are actually valid ways to address it which could bring great benefits.
The decisions we make relating to family issues, must be left up to individuals, but devoting resources to reproductive health and family planning services brings genuine win-wins in terms of community development and women's rights, as well as smaller populations.
Scratch the surface of any environmental problem and it reveals population growth, and the way we live our lives, as the root cause. The need for a population policy has never been more urgent. While governments see big populations as an indicator of economic strength, the population problem will lead to environmental catastrophe.
November 26, 2007
The Argus website
Wake Up About Overpopulation.
Any individual will encounter terms such as carrying capacity, limiting factors and exponential growth. Yet few implement the concept of sustainability.
Until people question the existence, of the global environmental crisis, the population stabilization and reduction initiative will remain little more than a lobby largely ignored by politicians.
The US has been unable to serve as an example. Any way of life that is unlike our own, is a threat and must promptly be democratized, modernized and westernized.
The symptoms of a society that is straining under its own weight are all there, yet we've successfully managed to evade the issue by misdiagnosing, and offering temporary solutions to the problem. While the United States birth rate has decreased, our lenient immigration policies continue to increase our population. Experts predict that the United States population, if left unchecked, is expected to double in 70 years to a total of 540 million people.
We must begin our public discourse when consensus is met; sacrifices will have to be made, for democracy can only deal with the ever-changing present while relegating responsibility for the future to the few who care to take it upon themselves.
An average U.S. citizen consumes 50 times more goods and services than a Chinese citizen and approximately twice as many as a Western European.
Only recently, during spikes in gas prices, has the engineers' task turned to designing automobiles and engines which reduce consumption and emissions.
Our challenge is to stir the minds and hearts of our fellow Americans so that they may awaken to this reality, directing this change for the better before it is snatched from us.
November 13, 2007
College of New Jersey Signal
City Planning Will Determine Pace of Global Warming: UN-Habitat Chief.
The way in which the world's growing cities were planned and managed would largely determine the pace of global warming. The urbanization of poverty was now the biggest development challenge. With half the world's population residing in cities, and one billion slum dwellers living in life-threatening conditions, 2007 marked a turning point in history. Cities were responsible for 75% of energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The opportunity to reduce the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change should be a priority alongside improving the living conditions of the most vulnerable populations. Policymakers, planners, must place cities and urban issues at the forefront of sustainable development.
Several speakers indicated that climate change had devastated the lives of millions and natural disasters had set back development efforts. There was need for the international community to support developing countries by providing them with the tools to cope with global warming effects and also to bolster their economies to build a sustainable future.
The Kyoto Protocol must be carried out to the needs of developing countries. Just as important was disaster preparedness and response. The 2004 Asian tsunami had proved that early warning systems were vital and in order to boost those efforts, Thailand had contributed $10 million to the Fund for Tsunami Early Warning Arrangements in the Indian Ocean and South-east Asia.
Thailand had taken steps towards sustainability, and the philosophy of a “sufficiency economy” had been integrated into its policies. That had already promoted sustainable agricultural practices to ensure food security for farmers, persuade locals to conserve forests, and promote sustainable energy development.
Ethiopia's delegate said a more concerted effort was needed in Africa to push developing countries towards sustainable development and to avert climate-change crises. Too many obstacles stood in the way of sustainability, including conflict, insufficient investment, limited market access opportunities, supply- side constraints and unsustainable debt burdens. Ecuador's representative pointed to the Hyogo Framework for Action and the work of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction as tools that could translate words into action.
Japan's representative stressed the importance of concerted action in support of vulnerable countries, particularly small island developing States and least developed countries.
Karen Gaia says: Thailand has a good chance at sustainability because it did something about it's population growth many years ago. Africa has a long way to go before catching up with Thailand.
October 31, 2007
Media Newswire
U.S.;: Honey, We Shrunk the Planet.
The physical Earth is increasingly becoming what the human species makes of it.
Environmental disasters are almost always human disasters. Satellite pictures of Burma over the past three years have recorded the extermination of over 3,000 villages displacing half a million people. The main culprit is the hunger for oil and gas, backed by the murderous local military junta.
The bottom line, is we're living beyond our means. Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature are in decline worldwide. We can't count on the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations.
Change is not linear, and sudden shifts sometimes remake the world in the blink of an eye. We know we're approaching mysterious thresholds that mark the tipping points of ecological regime change, and we may have already crossed some. The closer we get to each threshold, the less it takes to push the system over the edge. Resilience does not mean just bouncing back to business-as-usual. It means assuring the very ability to get back.
Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Think decentralized power grids, more localized food systems, and the Internet.
The heart of resilience is diversity. Damaged ecosystems rebound to health when they have sufficient diversity.
Resilience resides in enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire. Empower local communities to solve their own problems.
The Dutch mobilized around total environmental quality recovery in 25 years. But the process kicked in only after business took the lead. They had a surprising proposal: Have government set the standards, and let business figure out how to achieve them. Together they developed a twenty-five-year plan, as well as annual plans that report on progress and challenges. If business fails to meet the specific voluntary goals, government will intervene with mandatory controls. To guarantee transparency and accountability, the government funded environmental NGOs as watchdogs to transmit their findings to the media and the public.
We have a golden opportunity to regenerate our waning economy and correct environmental degradation and rampant social injustices. Our declining public health and educational systems rank among the lowest in developed countries. The reinvention of a green economy can begin to solve our economic and social ills simultaneously. We can create abundant jobs, prosperity, equity and hope. Our new declaration of independence is from fossil fuels and imperial entanglements. In the absence of federal leadership, large numbers of cities and states are banding together to lead these kinds of changes. Political boundaries are also morphing. A historic convergence of the environmental and social justice movements is crystallizing in the shared recognition that taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Meanwhile, there are mounting numbers of conservatives, stepping up under the banner of conserving the Earth for their grandchildren.
We need to reclaim our government from the corporate shadow government. It will keep trying to hijack systemic changes that threaten its short-term profits, vested interests and power. We need the separation of corporations and the state.
A successful U.S. Green Plan depends on our doing all this--together, with respect, justice and dignity for all people and the circle of life.
October 19, 2007
Huffington Post
The Nature of the New World.
We are entering a new world where the collisions between our demands and the earth's capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, the seemingly isolated events will determine our future.
Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines are not politically negotiable.
Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic.
Our situation today is more challenging because we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, shrinking oil supplies. Although these destructive trends have been evident for some time, not one has been reversed at the global level.
The world is in what ecologists call an "overshoot-and-collapse" mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20%. The gap, growing by 1% or so a year, is now much wider. We are setting the stage for decline and collapse.
When agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1% of the total. Today, this group accounts for 98% of the earth's total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2% for the wild portion, including all the deer, wild beasts, elephants, birds, and so forth.
For example, as the environmental resources of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today's population of fewer than 4,000.
Even as the global population is climbing and the economy's environmental support systems are deteriorating, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce high-yielding biofuel crops. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.
Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.
If recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.
October 02, 2007
Earth Policy Institute
Green Family Values: Sex and the Environment-World Population Day.
World Population Day was established by the UN in 1989 when the Earth's population reached five billion. Almost 20 years later, we have reached over 6.6 billion with approximately 77 million people added each year. When will we not be able to support our population or have we reached this point?
As the century begins, natural resources are under increasing pressure, water shortages, soil exhaustion, loss of forests, air and water pollution, and degradation of coastlines afflict many areas. Developed economies consume resources faster than they can regenerate. Developing countries with rapid population growth face the need to improve living standards. As we exploit nature to meet present needs, are we destroying resources for the future?
There are so many issues involving global population growth. We may not feel the effects in the US yet, but if we look to developing countries and the natural resources available, it is easy to become alarmed. If we want a livable future, we must increase our sustainabilty, as well as stabilize the human population. We must slow this growth to enable us to address sustainability and preserve a high standard of living for all people. Voluntary family planning should be supported, including eliminating the Global Gag Rule. Even though the US population grows mostly due to immigration, there are families in this country with eight or nine children. However, 99% of population growth does occurs in developing countries. Family planning education that targets both men and women, as well as aid should be a priority as we look to stabilize population growth.
Karen Gaia says: with the human population at 6.6 billion, it will be impossible to attain a high standard of living for all people. Let us settle for a standard of living more like that of Cuba, which is the most sustainable counry in the world. Cuba has free health care, free education, adequately feeds its people, and even sends doctors and nurses to help people in developing countries.
July 11, 2007
Green Options blog
New Sustainability Measure Shows Utahns Have a Big Eco-footprint.
The Utah Population and Environment Coalition calculated that it takes about 9.9 global hectares to support each Utahn, while Utah lands provide 8.9 global hectares.
"It's important to start this discussion about choices for our future," said one of the researchers.
"We hope this will be a community discussion and that Utah will take a leadership role. The average Utahn's share of that consumption has grown along with the state's population. In 1990, the population was 1.7 million and the state's overall footprint was 15.2 million global hectares, compared with 23.8 in 2003, when the population had reached 2.4 million.
The population growth put such a great demand on resources that now we consume more than the land can supply on a sustainable basis. The state now has a deficit of about 2.4 million hectares.
Americans are resource hogs compared to the rest of the world. It would take five earths to sustain everyone if people worldwide had the same eco-footprint as Utahns.
June 28, 2007
The Salt Lake Tribune
When is Hawaii's 'Carrying Capacity' Maxed Out?.
It would seem logical to determine what is the carrying capacity of our Hawaiian islands. There are water conservation advisories on a regular basis. Our sewer system is in need of constant repair. Flooding is common. Road rage is rampant. All boats have a finite carrying capacity. I submit so do islands and what is the carrying capacity of Hawaii?
The criterion for determining whether a region is overpopulated is not land area, but carrying capacity.
That refers to the number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural social, cultural and economic environment for present and future generations.
The carrying capacity is not fixed. It can be altered by improved technology, but mostly it is changed for the worse by population increase.
As the environment is degraded, carrying capacity shrinks, leaving the environment unable to support even the number of people who could formerly have lived in the area.
The average "ecological footprint" on the mainland is about 12 acres, an area far greater than that taken up by one's residence and place of school or work and the Hawaiian footprint is larger.
June 25, 2007
Hawaii Reporter
Natural Resource Depletion Costs Ghana $520 Million Annually.
Research reveals that the degradation of agricultural soils, forests and Savannah woodlands, coastal fisheries, wildlife resources, and Lake Volta's environment are estimated to cost Ghana at least $520 million annually.
The majority of the estimated costs of environmental degradation comes from forests, to represent 5% of GDP.
Ghana's natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate. More than 50% of the original forest has been converted to agricultural land by slash- and-burn. Despite cocoa land expansion, productivity has declined because of soil erosion.
Fish, timber, and non- timber forest product stocks are decreasing. As a result, coastal towns have begun to experience severe water shortages. Hydropower is dropping, and bilharzia has spread around the Volta Lake region.
Wildlife populations and biodiversity are in serous decline and many species face extinction. These depletions might lower Ghana's GDP growth in the near future.
Poor forest management and soil degradation result in huge economic losses. The degradation of Lake Volta increases the costs and reduces the quality of both water and power.
The prospects for economic development and poverty reduction in Ghana are dependent on natural resources.
Rural households rely on natural resources for their livelihoods, fisheries, and wildlife provide protein in Ghanaian diets. Urban economic activities depend on reliable hydroelectric power.
About half of Ghana's GDP derived from agriculture and livestock, forestry and wood processing and were related to the natural resources.
Ghana's natural resources are over exploited and continue to decline. Inappropriate crop production, mining and the wood industry are adversely affecting forests and savannah. Ongoing soil erosion and a decline in fertility undermine food and agricultural production.
A stronger policy dialogue must etablish a framework to provide sustainable management practices for Ghana's natural resources.
The government must improve local community involvement in natural resource and environmental management.
Also stimulate investments in wildlife, farming, ecotourism, tree plantations, and sustainable land management.
Karen Gaia says: Another article that misses the link to overpopulation. Again, here is the unwritten assumption that women want to have a lot of children and risk dying in childbirth. Ralph says: Why not reduce the population? Oh!! Sorry, must not talk about that.
June 20, 2007
Statesman
US Arizona;: Technology Can Help Sustain Desert Living.
The decade long drought in Arizona may turn into a 1930s-style Dust Bowl. Night-time temperatures may keep on rising. Freeway construction may never relieve the traffic.
More frequent hurricanes traumatize the Gulf Coast. Climbing gas prices threaten our nation's mobility. Conversion of corn into ethanol causes the cost of foodstuffs to skyrocket. New diseases like bird flu spread across the globe.
The sustainability of our lifestyle suddenly seems at risk. Societies are confronted by limits that they did not worry about before.
In the spirit of optimism, Arizona organizations are working together to understand the challenges of sustainability and possible remedies.
The Global Institute of Sustainability, or GIOS, researches rapid urbanization, which uses Greater Phoenix as its main laboratory.
ASU receives millions of federal, state and industry dollars to study how cities grow. Among the major questions being addressed are:
How does the expansion of metro Phoenix affect the Sonoran Desert ecosystem?
How do commercial and government managers make decisions about water allocation?
How can changes in construction materials reduce the urban heat island effect?
How might information-sharing technology allow the police departments to more quickly identify criminals?
How can "green" energy technologies reduce a city's reliance on vulnerable, distant fuel sources?
Where does the Valley's air pollution come from?
These questions may seem diverse, but can be solved only through an interdisciplinary approach. Their solutions offer new business opportunities by creating "sustainable technologies."
June 09, 2007
Arizona Republic
Toward a Green Economy.
The 2005 Millennium Assessment (MA) found that 83% of the planet's natural systems are in serious decline. Adding to this are the pressures of population growth and increasing consumption.
Global population is expected to soar 9 billion by 2050. Even though we crossed the point of sustainable use of natural resources in the mid-1980s, many of the 2.4 billion people living in China and India are striving to approach the materialistic lifestyle of the average North American.
Humanity needs a new approach to managing the assets upon which we all depend. Farming and forestry is about maximizing production, but has to start maximizing the ecological goods and service those ecosystems offer. Funds to pay for such services should come from taxes on polluters, including a carbon tax, cap and trade. In Ecuador, a Water Conservation Fund (FONAG) collects user fees from those who benefit from the water in the Condor Bioreserves and uses these funds to support watershed management projects. In Brazil, states allocate some revenues help support protected areas for forests and other resources. With deforestation threatening the Panama Canal, insurance and shipping companies are helping finance a major reforestation effort.
There is a vital need to create new institutions to protect natural capital at the local level.
On a larger scale Biomes are ecosystems with similar climate, soils, plants, and animals. The MA identifies 15 biomes and a stewardship council for each would maximize ecosystem protection and human welfare within a biome.
There is also a need to create a Commission that would communicate the fact that healthy ecosystem services are fundamental to reducing poverty and achieving economic development. A new forum has been recommended by the U.N. that would include heads of state from countries at different levels of economic development and cultures and deal with environmental and social as well as economic issues.
There are likely one to two million grassroots organizations around the world working toward ecological sustainability. It's unknown if people will rise to this enormous challenge. Voting and choosing environmentally-friendly products is not nearly enough. Only collective action will produce the substantial changes that are needed.
May 31, 2007
IPS News
Plan B Budget for Restoring the Earth - Part Three.
To save civilization means restructuring the economy, restoring natural support systems, eradicating poverty, and stabilizing population. We have the resources to do this and the US has the resources to lead this effort. Rich countries are so rich - and the poor so poor - that a few tenths of 1% of GNP from the rich ones over the coming decades could ensure that the basic needs of health and education are met for all impoverished children. It is not possible to put a price tag on the changes needed to move our civilization onto a path that will sustain economic progress. We need to restructure the energy economy to renewable sources of energy. The funding to achieve universal primary education in the developing countries is estimated at $12 billion per year. Funding an adult literacy program based on volunteers will take $4 billion annually. Providing for basic health care in developing countries is estimated at $33 billion. The funding to provide reproductive health care and family planning services to all women in developing countries is less than $7 billion a year.
Providing the 9.5 billion condoms needed to control the spread of HIV in the developing world and Eastern Europe requires $2 billion for condoms and $1.7 billion for AIDS prevention education and condom distribution. School lunch programs to the 44 poorest countries is $6 billion. $4 billion per year would cover the cost of assistance to preschool children and pregnant women. The cost of reaching basic goals comes to $68 billion a year.
A poverty eradication effort that is not accompanied by an earth restoration effort is doomed to fail. Reforesting the earth will cost $6 billion annually. Protecting and restoring rangeland will require $9 billion, restoring fisheries will cost $13 billion, and stabilizing water tables will require $10 billion annually. Protecting biological diversity and conserving soil on cropland, account for over half of the earth restoration annual outlay, $93 billion of additional expenditures per year.
We can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our modern economy collapse, or we can move onto a path, that will sustain economic progress.
It is hard to find the words to convey the gravity of our situation and the momentous nature of the decision we are about to make. No one can argue that we do not have the resources to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and protect the earth's natural resource base. Shifting one sixth of the world military budget to the budget would be more than adequate to move the world onto a path that would sustain progress.
This economic restructuring depends on tax restructuring, on getting the market to be ecologically honest. The benchmark of political leadership will be whether or not leaders succeed in restructuring the tax system. This is the key to stabilize climate and to make the transition to the post-petroleum world.
The challenge is to build a global society that is environmentally sustainable.
Karen Gaia says: I respect the Earth Policy institute, but do not share their confidence that there will be enough food to go around after all the restoration and stabilization of water tables. What is to prevent the continuous draw upon the world's resources from again depleting them? And how can this restoration be accomplished while we still rely on fossil fuels which are depleting?
April 17, 2007
Earth Policy Institute
The Next Added 100 Million Americans, Part 28.
In the days of sailing ships, sailors used to leave goats on islands to ensure fresh meat on return trips. But the animals bred faster than the sailors could eat them, and goats ate the vegetation and starved. They also screwed up the environment so that native species couldn't survive. A report blames humans for increased temperatures, melting glaciers and rising seas, they burn fossil fuels at 82 million barrels daily which does no include millions of tons of coal, natural gas and wood being burned every day by 6.6 billion humans.
We've had virtually free energy in the form of fossil fuels. Climate change is a sign that we are exceeding the number of people Earth can sustain. Some, however, point to increased agricultural production and medical advances that fend off disease.
Earth's carrying capacity is thought to be four to five billion people. We have 6.6 billion today and grow by 240,000 every 24 hours. Half of the world's population has little access to medicine, electricity, safe water and reliable food supplies.
You might have 50 billion, but the quality of life might not be pleasing. The US possesses resources to sustain less than half of its current population of 300 million. Americans who make up 5% of the world's population, use 25% of its resources and cast a large footprint.
If all 6 billion people were to share the world's resources equally, Americans would have to reduce consumption by 80% for each of us. Carrying capacity and footprint are tied to the global economy, which has quadrupled since the world's population doubled.
That leads to a fear that slowing population growth might not ultimately curb greenhouse gas production if more people achieve Western lifestyles. China is opening an average of one coal-fired power plant a week to meet electricity demand. Everyone in China wants their own apartment and their own car. People ask how many people the Earth can sustain. That depends on whether you want to live like an Indian or an American.
Farmers worldwide grow about two billion tons of grain a year. Each American consumes 1,760 pounds annually, mainly because of the grains used to feed farm animals. If everyone on the planet consumed that much grain, earth would support about 2.5 billion people. But in India, people consume about 440 pounds each. If everyone else in the world did likewise, the world's grain would support about 10 billion people.
Growing one ton of grain requires 1,000 tons of water which is short in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. As water flows from agriculture to support growing urban populations, more grain must be imported.
Soybeans are increasingly in demand for biodiesel. And ethanol production now vies with food for corn. By 2008, half of the U.S. corn crop will go to ethanol.
70% of all corn comes from the U.S. If we grow fuel plants that would require setting aside lots of land to produce ethanol. We don't have enough land worldwide to meet those demands. Humans are drawing on capital rather than interest, and once that is exhausted, they will find Mother Nature reluctant to make a loan.
We must take action and prevent a horrible overpopulation future for our children by taking action today. We can bring about population stabilization gracefully or nature will do it brutally.
April 06, 2007
NewsByUs.com
Capitalism and the Consequences of Biofuels.
Biofuel refers to fuels derived from recently living organisms, today mostly in the form of ethanol from plants such as sugar cane, soybeans, and oil palm. Biofuels often use more energy to produce than they contribute. Scientists hope that biofuels can replace much gasoline used today. Because the carbon in biofuels comes from CO2 that is taken out of the atmosphere by the living plants, some scientists argue that biofuels could contribute less to global warming than fossil fuels. And, biofuels could be grown year after year.
Others are saying that they require the use of fertilizers, which increase CO2, replace other plant life, deplete the soil, and are water intensive.
The use of biofuels has led to horrific consequences for the people of the world and the environment.
89% of the world's resources are absorbed by the advanced countries. Imperialism has produced a wasteful and destructive pattern of economic activity and industrial development.
This will continue to mean that the growing of crops for fuel, mostly for export to Europe, Japan and the US, is being done on large-scale plantations in the third world. Ancient forests are being cut down, threatening extinction for many species. Reduction of greenhouse gases is lost when carbon-capturing forests are cut down. In Malaysia, the production of palm oil for biodiesel is a major industry. The development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87% of deforestation. In Sumatra and Borneo, 4 million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia.
Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers.
Hundreds of thousands of small-scale peasant farmers are being displaced by soybeans expansion. Many more stand to lose their land under the biofuels stampede. The expanding cropland planted to yellow corn for ethanol has reduced the supply of white corn for tortillas in Mexico, sending prices up 400%.
For investors in alternatives to oil and gas, the driving force has been the belief that whoever develops the next great energy sources will enjoy the spoils that will make the gains from creating the next Amazon.com or Google seem puny.
In the development of biofuels this means that they do not pay attention to long-term effects. The economy is broken up into competing units of capitalist control and ownership over the means of production. And each unit is fundamentally concerned with itself and its expansion and its profit. The economy, the constructed and natural environment, and society cannot be dealt with as a social whole under capitalism.
Ralph says: From practical experience in several countries including the old Soviet Union, I can assure our readers that socialism does not work either. Perhaps a benevolent universal dictatorsip is the only solution. In WW2 when food became scarce, rationing was willingly accepted. But will the citizens of the more advanced countries accept ethanol rationing so that more food can be sent to the poorer countries with continuing population growth??
March 30, 2007
Revolution Newspaper - East Bay
Massive Diversion of U.S. Grain to Fuel Cars.
Corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising. The use of corn as the feedstock for fuel ethanol is creating consequences throughout the global food chain.
In Mexico, the price of tortillas is up by 60% percent. Angry Mexicans have forced the government to institute price controls on tortillas.
Food prices are also rising in China, India, and the US, 40% of the world's people. Vast quantities of corn are consumed indirectly in meat, milk, and eggs in both China and the US.
In China, pork prices were up 20% above a year earlier, eggs were up 16%. In India, the food price index in 2007 was 10% higher than a year earlier. The price of wheat has jumped 11%.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the wholesale price of chicken in 2007 will be 10% higher than in 2006, the price of eggs will be up 21%, and milk 14%, and this is only the beginning.
As more and more fuel ethanol distilleries are built, world grain prices are starting to move up toward their oil-equivalent value. In this new economy, if the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will move it into the energy economy. Some 16 of the 2006 U.S. harvest was used to produce ethanol. With 80 or so ethanol distilleries under construction, nearly a third of the 2008 grain harvest will be going to ethanol.
Since the United States is the leading exporter of grain, what happens to the U.S. grain crop affects the entire world. The world's breadbasket is fast becoming the U.S. fuel tank.
The UN lists 34 countries as needing emergency food assistance. Food aid programs have fixed budgets.
Protests in response to rising food prices could lead to political instability that would add to the list of failed and failing states. President Bush set a production goal for 2017 of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels. Given the difficulties in producing cellulosic ethanol at a competitive cost and the mounting public opposition to liquefied coal, most of the fuel to meet this goal might have to come from grain. This could leave little grain to meet U.S. needs, much less those of the countries that import grain.
The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as higher food prices drop their consumption below the survival level.
In 2007, 18,000 children are dying every day from hunger and malnutrition. There are alternatives. A rise in fuel efficiency standards of 20% over the next decade would save as much oil as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol.
One option is plug-in hybrids. Adding a second storage battery to a gas-electric hybrid car along with a plug-in capacity allows most short-distance driving to be done with electricity. If this was accompanied by thousands of wind farms that could feed cheap electricity into the grid, then cars could run largely on electricity for the equivalent cost of $1 per gallon gasoline.
Toyota, Nissan, and GM, have announced plans to bring plug-in hybrid cars to market. It is time to decide whether to continue with subsidizing more grain-based distilleries or to encourage a shift to more fuel-efficient cars. The choice is between a future of rising world food prices, spreading hunger, and growing political instability, or one of stable food prices, sharply reduced dependence on oil, and much lower carbon emissions.
Karen Gaia says: No mention of there being too many people and too many people with large appetites for energy. Time to conserve energy. Move closer to your work and shopping. Move where you can walk or bicycle to whereever you need to go. Go from a multi-car family to a one car family and save money on gas, car insurance, and the car itself. And let's get away from globalization and back to bioregionlism. Take the farms away from the corporations and let the local people go back to farming. And give women access to ways to keep their family size small.
March 21, 2007
Earth Policy News
Are Politicians Avoiding the Real Reasons for Climate Change?.
According to the World Land Trust, politicians and environmentalists are not confronting the real reasons for climate change. "It is only when we confront the real issue that is driving the whole energy issue that we can hope to prevent the total chaos that is likely to result over the next few decades. And that is far too many people exist on this planet."
The population, with its ever increasing demands on the world's resources, is totally unsustainable. The developed world is only able to sustain its own use of resources by exploiting the less developed parts of the world, such as China, India and other parts of Asia. As they catch up, more and more resources will be consumed, particularly energy and water. Intensification of farming in the developed world has temporarily alleviated food shortages, but devastated wildlife, with millions of acres now barren of wild animals and plants, even migrant birds suffer.
Since the World Land Trust was created in 1989, more organizations are seeing the importance of preserving what little is left. It's not a huge amount, but by targeting key areas, perhaps something will survive for future generation when human populations are brought under control."
Meanwhile politicians try to convince us that a bit of recycling, and a more energy efficient light bulb will save the planet. They ignore the fact that every extra million human beings means huge amounts of oil, food and other resources are needed. Every Briton consumes more than a peasant farmer in Central Africa. In addition to wrecking the British countryside, Britons are also responsible for depleting the resources of many other parts of the world. In the past the problem has been resolved by war, famine and disease. All three loom close, and we are, still re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, with the iceberg in full view.
March 14, 2007
World Land Trust
Too Many People, Not Enough Earth; Scientists Debate How Much Population the World Can Sustain .
In the days of sailing ships, sailors left goats on islands to ensure fresh meat on return trips. It worked. The animals bred fast and ate all the vegetation and began to starve. The goats also screwed up the environment so that native species couldn't survive. The lesson of the goats applies to humans and this is how how our "island" has suffered.
There is air and water pollution, falling water tables, climate change and rampant extinction of wild plants and animals. Climate change is a sign that we are exceeding the number of people Earth can sustain.
Every year, 91 million humans are born in excess of those who die. That's 1 billion people every 11 years.
Right now, Earth's carrying capacity is in the range of 4 to 5 billion people. There are 6.5 billion of us.
Half of the world's population has little access to medicine, electricity, safe water and reliable food supplies.
If the 1.3 million residents of Franklin County had to live on the resources the county could provide, only about 100,000 would live here.
We're oblivious to that because we import the vast majority of our needs.
The US has the resources to sustain less than half of its current population of 300 million. Americans, who make up 5% of the world's population and use 25% of its resources. If all 6 billion people were to share the world's resources equally, Americans would have to reduce consumption by 80%.
There is a fear that slowing population growth might not curb greenhouse gas production if more people achieve Western lifestyles. China is opening one coal-fired power plant a week to meet electricity demand. Everyone in China wants their own apartment and their own car. People ask how many people the Earth can sustain. It depends on whether you want to live like an Indian or an American.
Each American consumes an average of 1,760 pounds annually, mainly because of the grains used to feed farm animals. If everyone on the planet consumed that much grain, Earth would support about 2.5 billion people.
In India, people consume about 440 pounds each. If everyone else in the world did likewise, the world's grain would support about 10 billion people.
Growing 1 ton of grain requires 1,000 tons of water.
There already are water shortages and, as water is diverted from agriculture to support growing urban populations, more grain must be imported.
Soybeans are increasingly in demand for biodiesel and ethanol now vies with food for corn. By 2008, half of the U.S. corn crop will go to ethanol. What happens to U.S. corn crops affects a lot of countries. This competition for energy and food will change the landscape.
If we replace our reliance on fossil fuels and instead grow fuel plants, that would require setting aside lots of land to produce ethanol and we don't have enough land worldwide to meet those demands.
Demand for food, fuel and materials already consumes more trees and crops than are being grown worldwide.
February 13, 2007
Columbus Dispatch
Too Many People, Not Enough Earth.
In the days of sailing ships, sailors used to leave goats on islands for fresh meat on return trips. The animals bred fast, ate all the vegetation and began to starve. They also screwed up the environment so that native species couldn't survive. The lesson of the goats applies to humans and point out how our "island" has suffered.
There is pollution, falling water tables, climate change and extinction of wild plants and animals. We've created this problem because we've had virtually free energy in the form of fossil fuels.
Climate change is a sign that we are exceeding the number of people Earth can sustain.
Every year, at least 91 million humans are born in excess of those who die.
Earth's carrying capacity is thought to be somewhere in the range of 4 billion to 5 billion people.
There are 6.5 billion of us. No one is sure what the magic number is. You might have 50 billion, but the quality of life might not be pleasing.
If the 1.3 million residents of Franklin County had to live on the resources the county could provide, only about 100,000 would live here.
We happily import the vast majority of our needs.
The US has the resources to sustain less than half of its current population of 300 million. Americans, who make up 5% of the world's population, use 25% of its resources.
If all 6 billion people were to share the world's resources equally, Americans would have to reduce consumption by 80% for each of us. Carrying capacity is tied to the global economy, which has quadrupled since the world's population doubled.
That leads to a fear that slowing population growth might not curb greenhouse gas production if more people achieve Western lifestyles. People ask how many people the Earth can sustain. It depends on whether you want to live like an Indian or an American.
For example, farmers worldwide grow about 2 billion tons of grain every year. Each American consumes an average of 1,760 pounds annually, mainly because of the grains used to feed farm animals. If everyone on the planet consumed that much grain, Brown said, Earth would support about 2.5 billion people.
In India, people consume about 440 pounds each. If everyone else in the world did likewise, the world's grain would support about 10 billion people.
Growing 1 ton of grain requires 1,000 tons of water.
There are water shortages in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. As water is diverted from agriculture to support growing urban populations.
Soybeans are in demand for biodiesel and ethanol production vies with food for corn. By 2008, half of the U.S. corn crop may go to ethanol.
70% of all corn imports in the world come from the U.S. This competition for energy and food will change the landscape.
We don't have enough land worldwide to meet those demands for food, fuel and materials that already consumes more trees and crops than are being grown worldwide.
Humans are drawing on capital rather than interest, and once that is exhausted, they will find Mother Nature reluctant to make a loan.
February 13, 2007
The Columbus Dispatch
Human Ecological Footprint to Grow 34% by 2015, Finds Study.
A modeling program known as STIRPAT empirically assessed factors that drive adverse environmental impacts and projected the 'ecological footprint' for 2015 for all countries with at least one million people. This a measurement of the stress placed on the environment by demands for resources to meet the need for food, housing, transportation, consumer goods and services. Ecological intensity is an impact multiplier, with a value of 1 indicating average intensity, less than one below average and greater than one greater than average.
Increases in population and affluence will expand human impact on the environment by over one-third. To mitigate this impact, countries would need to increase their efficiency of use of about 2% per year. Most of the impact will result from growth of consumption in China and India.
China would need to improve its efficiency by about 2.9% per year, and India by about 2.2% to offset the projected growth. The projected increases for China and India are 37% of the total global increase in footprint. In contrast, Russia is expected to see a 25% drop by 2015. "The impact of the US alone constitutes 17.5% of global environmental impact in 2015, as opposed to just over 20% at present.
The US has an ecological footprint 1.4 times as large as would be expected, based on its population size, level of affluence, land area, and latitude alone.
It is estimated that Earth has some 11.4 billion productive hectares, the human footprint of 2015 will increase to 1.6 planets. It is unlikely that technological advancements will be able to offset this growth rate, though the authors concede that concerted international effort could make it possible; "energy efficiencies of national economies have improved by as much as 5% per year in some cases."
February 09, 2007
Mongabay.com
India Aims to End Poverty by 2040.
India's Finance Minister said poverty could be wiped out by 2040, due to India's economic growth.
But he said that 25% of all Indians, or more than 250 million people, were living in poverty, on less than $1 a day.
The rapid economic growth in India could have widened the gap between the richest and the poorest.
But those at the bottom of the pyramid have seen improvement in their lives. More should be done to combat low life expectancy and high mortality rates.
India has become a world economic power, with growth over the past three years averaging 8%. Based on purchasing power, it is now the world's fourth largest economy.
However, income per head in India is $720 a year.
Karen Gaia says: oil-based economies are not sustainable. Over-pumping of water from aquifers to grow crops for an ever-growing population is not sustainable.
February 06, 2007
BBC News
UA Researcher Argues Sustainability is Sound, Smart Business Practice..
When corporations serve the world's 4 billion poor with affordable products that have low environmental impact, those businesses achieve sustainability. Sustainability is about reducing costs and developing new markets.
Many people think sustainability means only environmental regulation, but some leaders understand that sustainability increases efficiency and reduces waste and costs. It includes attention to product and package development, material sourcing, product formulation, material reuse, and efficient transportation networks. Multinational corporations must adopt sustainable practices to serve the 4 billion people worldwide who have per capita annual incomes of less than $1,500. This population has great needs and demand for products and services, but cannot afford expensive products. By participating in sustainability, corporations will be able to tap into this market with simple and affordable products. By using old methods, there are not enough materials in the world to serve everyone. This demand will be captured by companies that create innovative and efficient products. The green slogan 'reduce, reuse, recycle' is one method to stretch resources and reduce costs."
Sustainability includes financial, environmental and cultural components. The cultural component to sustainability is often overlooked. Technologically superior products may be rejected because they are too expensive or not packaged in a manner that is culturally sensitive.
The Indian subsidiary of Unilever developed an affordable detergent packaged in individual sachets that were less expensive and easier to use based on how Indian villagers wash clothes, resulting in a dramatic increase in revenues and profits. The villagers found value in the new packages.
A critical part of the sustainability means changing or improving products to reduce costs, increase safety or limit their effect on the environment. S.C. Johnson removed more than 1.8 million pounds of volatile compounds from Windex glass cleaner. The change gave the product 30%t more cleaning power and lowered its environmental impact.
Karen Gaia says: consumers can help by exercising purchasing power: stay informed and make wise, sustainable choices when buying.
January 30, 2007
NewsWise.com
Scotland;: North-east Global Footprint Project Leads to Action on Environmental Impact.
The North-east Scotland Global Footprint Reduction Report will be unveiled to mark the completion of research into the region's effect on the environment.
Data on energy use, transport, buildings, food habits, waste management and water use have been sent to the Stockholm Environment Institute's centre in York, which has provided a detailed picture of the North-east's environmental “footprint”.
Scientists have calculated that if everyone in the world were to live the North-east lifestyle, we would need three Planet Earths. People in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire are consuming more resources than the Scottish average.
The average Scot would need 5.37 hectares of land and sea but the average shire resident would need 5.64 hectares and the average Aberdonian 5.8 hectares.
If the Earth's resources were spread evenly each person would have just 1.8 hectares.
Ecological footprinting is an important tool that will allow us to measure our policies and plans against their potential environmental impact. Aberdeenshire Council made a commitment last year and a variety of work is being done which supports its aims. The results of the Global Footprint Project allow us to assess the region's effect.
The research data is now being developed into a computer software programme, which will be used to influence the decision-making of Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Councils. Items include: energy efficiency for existing homes and buildings; new construction to be the highest environmental standards; alternative, sustainable energy sources; provide affordable, accessible public transport; create communities where workplaces and shopping are nearby.
Aberdeen will ensure that building refurbishment and new development will be energy efficient and sustainable communities will be created.
Aberdeenshire is working on a carbon management programme to cut carbon emissions. Pupils and teachers at nine schools in the region have also been calculating how their activities affect the environment. This is a precursor to an overall Scotland Global Footprint Project, which will be launched by the rest of the country's 32 local authorities.
January 29, 2007
Aberdeen City Council website (Scotland)
Book Review: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail Or Succeed.
A book "How Societies choose to fail or succeed" by
Jared Diamond scrutinizes a large number of societies--past and present--to assess their sustainability. Examples of societies that have failed include Easter Island, the Anasazi, Societies facing environmental, population, and political problems are Rwanda, Australia, and China. Diamond makes controlled comparisons: contrasting two or more societies while holding constant as many variables as possible.
For example, the island of Hispaniola is composed of two societies: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, while the Dominican Republic has a booming economy. Only 1% of Haiti is forested, in contrast to 28% of the Dominican Republic. Because its trees are gone, Haiti lacks building materials and has suffered extensive soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, sediment loads in rivers, loss of watershed protection, and decreased rainfall.
Factors contributing to societal collapse include deforestation and habitat destruction, soil erosion, salinization, soil fertility loss, poor water management, overhunting, overfishing, introduction of non-indigenous animal species, and human population growth. In addition we face world-wide pollution and global warming. Even though the US is successful, we are engaged in the same destructive processes that have contributed to the collapse of numerous societies in the past.
Diamond believes that these problems must be reversed in the next 50 years if our civilization is to survive. It will depend on governments moving beyond short-term political gains to successful long-term planning. It will also depend on people and businesses to to force responsible political action.
January 24, 2007
Robson Valley Times
Cuba Leads in Sustainable Development.
Cuba is the only country in the world with sustainable development, and registered a 12.5% increase in its GDP during the last 12 months. In 2007, Cuba will assign 22.6% of its GDP for public health and education. Spending for health, education, culture, sports, security and social assistance represent 69% of the 2007 budget.
The progress of countries toward sustainable development can be assessed using the UN Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of well-being, and the ecological footprint as a measure of demand on the biosphere. As world population grows, less biocapacity is available per person. In 2003, Asia-Pacific and Africa regions were using less than world average per person, while the European Union countries and North America had crossed the threshold for high human development. Only Cuba qualified for sustainable development.
The Havana government has organized a socialist society with a high level of literacy, education, long life expectancy, low infant mortality and low energy consumption.
It is the world's leader in organic agriculture, and is making contributions to medical research, not to mention that Cuban doctors are serving the people in poor developing countries. Cuba has developed a considerable research capability.
Castro declared: Humanity is going through difficult times, plus a non-stop consumption process typical of the globalized imperialist system.
January 07, 2007
Canadian Dimension
Asia-Pacific Environment At Boiling Point.
Asian and Pacific societies are living beyond their ecological means, and if they are to continue expansion, will have to shift towards 'green growth' patterns. Problems include a population density 1.5 times the global average, the lowest freshwater per capita, a biologically productive area per capita that is less than 60% of the global average, and arable and crop land per capita less than 80% the global average.
Meanwhile polluting industries are growing more rapidly in developing countries, agro-industry is chemical, energy, and water-intensive and lifestyles are becoming increasingly waste and energy intensive.
Natural forests are retreating, water extraction rates are unsustainable in 16 countries and irrigation systems are inefficient and poorly maintained. The long term sustainability of the water supply is threatened by climate change, which may cause long-term reductions in water flows from glacier melt.
More economic growth is inevitable, and countries must meet the development challenges.
Countries in South Asia will face the toughest issues in coming decades as population growth, changing water regimes and climates, and rising demand for energy, water and other necessities all come to a head.
Pollution control is becoming more effective and market forces are pushing firms towards greater resource efficiency. As incomes increase consumption patterns become less environmentally sustainable.
December 23, 2006
Scoop Independent News
Switzerland;: Natural Resources Still Being Wasted.
A report shows that Switzerland's ecological footprint is equivalent to 4.7 hectares per person.
Worldwide there are only 1.8 hectares available per person, meaning the Swiss are using other people's resources. The current global average is 2.2 hectares.
Industrialised nations use on average three times more resources than they should be allowed to.
If you look at figures, there is no way you can say the Swiss are contributing to sustainable development.
The Swiss public and the authorities are slowly accepting the idea of sustainable development.
The problem is that they do not worry about the global environment and problems like CO2 levels or global warming.
While environmental conditions are no longer worsening in Switzerland, the Swiss are contributing to problems abroad when they travel or through investments in the global economy.
Energy efficiency has improved in the production of goods and services, but failed to slow increased consumption as workers become more mobile.
One of the biggest concerns is land use and the current construction boom.
We should freeze building zones at current levels and increase construction density to halt urban sprawl and reduce energy consumption for transport.
The state may have to intervene, balancing individual rights with the need to ensure the long-term viability of resources.
December 16, 2006
Swissinfo/Swiss Radio International
China is Reaching Its Environmental Limits.
For the first time,it seems that China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn't radically change to greener, more sustainable modes, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.
For three decades China's economy has grown at 10% per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for waste. China may be approaching a sudden stop: When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.
China's leaders understand the crisis, but their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. Political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth.
But China can't grow now and clean up later. The China Daily reported that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land - one-tenth of the country's total arable land - is polluted, posing a "grave threat" to China's food safety. More than half its rivers are polluted, which is why less than 9% of "drinkable water" meets government standards. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage.
Chinese officials fear that if they move to environmental cleanup, "China will not be such a low-cost producer and that will affect jobs." But green companies are always more efficient, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. Shanghai is trying to expand by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. But you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and one wonders what will happen to all the green plans when all the trucks and consumers start rushing in.
November 15, 2006
New York Times*
Canadians No. 4 in Using Up Earth.
Canada ranks fourth when it comes to gobbling up resources, according to the Living Planet Report, released in Beijing by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The United Arab Emirates, the United States and Finland are ahead of Canada. People are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.
Humans are consuming resources far beyond Earth's capacity to support them. If this continues, humanity will be using two planets' worth of natural resources by 2050. One impact is evident: Total global populations of mammals, reptiles, fish and birds have dropped by nearly a third since 1970.
The footprint of a country includes cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds to produce food, fibre and timber this consumes, to absorb the wastes emitted in generating the energy it uses, and to provide space for its infrastructure. On average, every person on Earth needs 2.2 hectares, but the planet has only 1.8 hectares of capacity per person. The American lifestyle requires 9.6 hectares and combined with its 294 million population it is the biggest drain on Earth's resources.
China's 1.3 billion people give it a massive total impact, and rapid economic development is swelling its footprint.
The average Canadian's lifestyle requires 7.6 hectares. Afghanistan, just 0.1 of a hectare. Blessed with a small population, and a wealth of resources, Canadians still consume less than their environment offers.
Canada has been headed in the wrong direction for quite a while. For example, over-fishing has decimated Atlantic cod. In southern Alberta, development is fueling demand for water while climate change shrinks the supply. The mountain pine beetle is destroying much of treed B.C. and threatens to invade central Canada's boreal forest.
Nearly half the human footprint globally, and even more in Canada, comes from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
Most wildlife population losses have been in the tropical and subtropical forests, grasslands and oceans.
The Earth has enough resources to sustain all species only if humans reduce their average footprint to one hectare.
Sustainability depends on action now, when even strong measures to curb emissions and slow population growth would take decades.
October 25, 2006
The Star
Ecological Footprints: Enormous Challenges.
An individual, a community, or a nation needs a precise area of land to provide resources and absorb the wastes generated. The available productive area is 1.9 hectares per person but the average requirement has crossed 2.3 hectares and we would need 1.5 Earths to live sustainably.
All human activity has an impact on the planet. Ecological Footprint (EF) is one of the effective tools for measuring our impact on the resources of the Earth. It is the amount of productive land area required to sustain the human being. It is the bio-productive area required to produce the resources we consume and assimilate the wastes we generate. So, EF is a measure of the 'load' imposed by a given population. The value for this measure for London City is 120 times more than the area of the city. The largest EF belongs to the citizens of the US, at approximately 10 hectares. This means that 5 Earths are required if the consumption rate globally is that of the Americans. Currently, humanity's EF is more than the Earth's capacity. We are using about a third more than nature can regenerate. The challenge of sustainability is to find ways to create fulfilling lives while reducing our impact on the Earth. Dramatically more efficient use of resources and cyclical systems are necessary. EF is is useful for evaluating and comparing the total environmental impact of activities and can be calculated for countries, businesses, households, individuals, and most recently, educational institutions. The indicators for calculating EF include nature of food consumption and diet, expenses for transport, household goods, household energy, household services, and some other general issues. There are different equations and models developed to calculate the EF. Contributing to lessening the EF is the need of today's time. It is established that a person who walks or takes public transportation has a smaller EF than someone who commutes fifty miles in a sport utility vehicle that gets 15 miles to the gallon. A vegetarian has a smaller EF than someone who has steak every night. A family of 4 living in a 3000 square foot energy efficient house has a smaller EF than a family of two living in a 4000 square foot, poorly insulated house. Locally-grown food has a much smaller EF. EF can be reduced if someone becomes vegetarian, uses public transportation or cycles and walks, reduces air travel, lessens the consumptions of clothes and footwear, stationeries, computers, reduces the electricity and cooking gas expenses, reduces firewood use at home and replaces it with alternative and renewable energy sources.
June 26, 2006
Gorkhapatra (Nepal)
U.S.: Senate Immigration Bill Would Allow 100 Million New Legal Immigrants Over the Next Twenty Years.
If enacted, the Comprehensive Immigration Act would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years, allowing an estimated 103 million to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years. The bill grants amnesty to some 10 million illegal immigrants but no attention has been given to the fact that the bill would quintuple the rate of legal immigration into the US, raising the inflow of legal immigrants from around one million per year to over five million per year. The law would add an extra 84 million legal immigrants to the population.
The maximum number that could legally enter would be almost 200 million over twenty years, over 180 million more than current law permits.
The three legal statuses that a legal immigrant might hold:
1. Temporary Status: Persons enter the U.S. temporarily and are required to leave after a period of time.
2. Near-Permanent, Convertible Status: Persons enter the U.S. are given the opportunity to convert to legal permanent residence after a few years.
3. Legal Permanent Residence (LPR): Persons have the right to remain in the United States for their entire lives. After five years, they have the right to become citizens. Immigrants in convertible or LPR status have the right to bring spouses and minor children into the country. They will be granted permanent residence with the primary immigrant and may become citizens. After naturalizing, an immigrant has the right to bring his parents into the U.S. as permanent residents. There are no limits on the number of spouses, dependent children, and parents of naturalized citizens that may be brought into the country. The siblings and adult children with their families of legal permanent residents are given preference in future admission. Four provisions would result in an explosive increase in legal immigration:
1) Amnesty and citizenship to 85% of the current 11.9 million illegal immigrants, 2) The New 'Temporary Guest Worker' Program, 3)Additional Permanent Visas for Siblings, Adult Children, and their Families, and 4) Additional Permanent Employment Visas.
Those in the U.S. for five years or more would be granted immediate amnesty. Those in the country between two and five years could travel to one of 16 ports of entry, where they would receive amnesty and lawful work permits. In total, the bill would grant amnesty to 85% of the illegal immigrant population, 10 million individuals.
After amnesty, illegal immigrants would spend six years before attaining LPR status. After five years in LPR status, they would have the opportunity to become naturalized citizens. There would be no numeric limit on the number of illegal immigrants, spouses, and dependents receiving LPR status. Under the New Temporary Guest Worker Program: nearly all guest workers would have the right to become permanent residents and citizens.
Foreign workers could enter the U.S. as guest workers if they have a job offer from a U.S. employer. Guest workers would be allowed to remain in the U.S. for six years. However, in the fourth year, the guest worker could ask for LPR status and would receive it if he or she has learned English or is enrolled in an English class. There are no numeric limits on the number of guest workers who could receive LPR status. Then the guest worker could remain in the country permanently and could become a U.S. citizen and vote in U.S. elections after just five years.
The spouses and minor children of guest workers would also be permitted to immigrate to the U.S. Five years after obtaining LPR status, these spouses could become naturalized citizens with no limit on the number of spouses and children who could immigrate under the guest worker program. In the first year, 325,000 visas would be given out, but if employer demand for guest workers is high, that number could be boosted by an extra 65,000 in the next year. If employer demand continues to be high, the number of visas could be raised by up to 20% in each year.
This allows the number of immigrants to climb steeply. If the H-2C cap were increased by 20% each year, within twenty years the annual inflow of workers would reach 12 million and 70 million guest workers would enter the U.S. over the next two decades and none would be required to leave. The guest worker program is an open door based on the demands of U.S. business. It is an open border provision.
The permanent entry of non-immediate relatives such as brothers, sisters, and adult children is currently subject to a cap of 480,000 per year minus the number of immediate relatives admitted in the prior year. This bill eliminates the deduction for immediate relatives from the cap and increases the number of non-immediate relatives who could attain LPR status by 254,000 per year.
The U.S. currently issues around 140,000 employment-based visas each year. Now the U.S. would issue 450,000 employment-based green cards per year between 2007 and 2016. After 2016, the number would fall to 290,000 per year. This means that some 990,000 persons per year would be granted LPR status until 2016 and, after that, 638,000 per year.
Assumptions made for the estimates in this paper include: *In the current employment-based visa program, 1.2 dependents enter for each incoming worker. The ratio of incoming spouses and children to amnesty recipients is assumed to be only 0.6.
* Parents of naturalized citizens make up 8% of all new legal immigrants. This paper assumes that half of all adult immigrants will naturalize after five years and 30% of the parents of these naturalized citizens will immigrate in the three years after their childrens naturalization.
* This paper assumes that the number of immigrants in the guest worker program would increase at a more moderate rate of 10% per year. Alternative estimates for 20% and 0% growth are also presented.
Today roughly 950,000 persons receive permanent residence visas each year. Over 20 years, the inflow of immigrants through this channel would be 19 million under existing law. The bill would grant amnesty to roughly 10 million illegal immigrants. The number of family-sponsored visas for secondary family members, such as adult brothers and sisters, is currently limited to 480,000 per year minus the number of visas given to immediate family members (spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens). The bill allows the total quota on secondary family members to be 480,000 without deductions for immediate family members. The net increase would be around 254,000 per year, or 5.1 million over 20 years. Total annual immigration under this provision is likely to be 450,000 workers plus 540,000 family members annually. The net increase above current law over 20 years would be around 13.5 million persons. The guest worker would allow 325,000 persons to participate in the first year. This number could rise by 65,000 in the next year and then by 20% per year. The total inflow of workers under this program would be 20 million over 20 years. Guest workers could bring their spouses and children to the U.S. as permanent residents; the added number would be 24 million over 20 years. Illegal immigrants who received amnesty could bring their spouses and children into the U.S. with the opportunity for full citizenship. The number would be at least six million. Naturalized citizens would have an unlimited right to bring their parents into the U.S. as legal permanent residents. Over twenty years, the number of parents would be around five million. Overall, the bill would allow some 103 million persons to legally immigrate over the next twenty years. The net inflow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. population is around 700,000 per year. Legal immigration would exceed five million per year, seven times the rate of the current illegal immigration flow.
The figure of 103 million new legal immigrants is based on the assumption that immigration under the guest worker program would grow at 10% per year. If guest-worker immigration grows at the maximum rate, 20% per year, the total number of new immigrants coming to the U.S. over the next twenty years would be 193 million. If immigration under the program did not increase at all for two decades but remained fixed at the initial level of 325,000 per year, total legal immigration under CIRA would be 72 million over twenty years, or more than three times the level that would occur under current law.
Between 1870 and 1920, the U.S. experienced a massive flow of immigration. During this period, foreign born persons hovered between 13% and 15% of the population. In 1924, Congress reduced future immigration. By 1970, foreign born persons had fallen to 5%.
The foreign born now comprise around 12% of the population. However, if this bill was enacted, and 100 million new immigrants entered the country over the next twenty years, foreign born persons would rise to over one quarter of the U.S. population. If enacted, this would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years. The bill would give amnesty to 10 million illegal immigrants and quintuple the rate of legal immigration into the U.S. Under the bill, the annual inflow of immigrants with the option of becoming legal permanent residents would rise from the current level of one million per year to more than five million per year. Within a few years, the annual inflow of new immigrants would exceed one percent of the current U.S. population. This would be the highest immigration rate in U.S. history.
Within 20 years, some 103 million new immigrants would enter the U.S. This number is about one-third of the current U.S. population. All of these immigrants would be permanent residents with the right to become citizens and vote in U.S. elections. CIRA would transform the United States socially, economically, and politically. Within two decades, the character of the nation would differ dramatically from what exists today.
Karen Gaia says: The article does not even mention the impacts to the environment and what about the impact of a doubling of the U.S. population upon the carrying capacity of this planet? Ralph says: It is time that we arrived at a sensible limit to the number of people our country can support. Then limit the population to that figure.
May 15, 2006
Heritage Foundation
Africa: Battle to Save Earth Will Be Fought in the Cities.
The battle to save the environment will be won or lost in its cities, calims Klaus Töpfer, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, who sketched a picture of a world population living way beyond the ability of the planet to sustain its consumption of resources and generation of waste. We are overusing our natural capital and the solutions must be linked to our cities. "Energy use has increased 16 times, water use has increased nine times, fish catches have increased 40 times, all in the space of one lifetime," Töpfer said. It is in cities that there is a high consumption of resources and generation of pollution. The presence of slums were indicative of cities that were dysfunctional. It had been shown that the world's people were consuming natural resources at a faster rate than the planet could sustain. Cities have to accept that biodiversity must be conserved alongside urban expansion.
February 28, 2006
Cape Times
Is it Ethical to Have Children?.
Increasingly, having kids throws up sustainability angst in the developed world. While 'mother earth' moniker might give the impression that she is waiting with open arms to welcome our offspring, we know we're pushing it. Europeans use three times their fair share of land and resources to sustain their lifestyles, while Americans push this up to five times. We are duty bound to weigh up the biological clocks against increasing environmental degradation and over-population. The global population is predicted to expand to 9bn by 2050 yet the answer to combating global poverty lies in having fewer children. Eminent scientists have called for urgent discussion on population management. The world cannot sustain a burgeoning global population, even with lifestyle alterations which mitigate pressure on shelter, food and water. However, you can take heart from new calculations from the University of Bucharest, which suggest that the earth could sustain 200,000 times the amount of people housed already. However, it would be very unpleasant, due to an almighty fight over essential life-sustaining resources. New parents would seem to have a vested interest in supporting renewable energy, local food and water and energy conservation.
January 22, 2006
The Observer
Flunks Traffic Test.
Southern California residents are experiencing increased delays in traffic and a decline in their quality of life. For the first time, traffic mobility in Southern California earned a flunking grade. Travelers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties are spending about 55 hours a year stuck in traffic. Commuters in Los Angeles and Orange counties topped the nation's urban areas with an average delay of 93 hours during peak periods. Congestion on the region's roads and highways costs about $12 billion annually. Traffic mobility earned a failing grade because of planning inadequately for population growth and new-home construction. Regional leaders took advantage of the failing grade to pitch support for Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposed multibillion-dollar state infrastructure bond. The regional planning council is made up of six counties that collectively have 187 cities and a population of 18 million. Southern California has the highest housing-cost burdens for owners and renters and the highest poverty rates in the country.
January 22, 2006
California Association of Governments
China Pays Huge Price for Its Peaceful Rising.
China's peaceful rise is phenomenal and the envy of many in the world. The country's economy in 2005 could become the fourth largest in the world. But the achievement is costly, in social and environmental terms. The gap between rich and poor is widening and the deterioration of the environment is threatening the country's economic development. China's measurement of a country's income inequality has doubled in the past 20 years. Mainland China's increased GDP in 2005 will make the inequality worse. The mainland's city vs countryside income ratio could be as high as 6:1. Mainland China ranks 90th in the UNDP's 131-nation human-development index and leads the world in creating one of the most unequal societies in history. The cost to the environment is even greater. Public accidents have caused more than one million casualties each year, and economic losses of 650 billion yuan (US$80 billion). In 2004, these accidents killed 210,000 people and injured another 1.75 million. In the mining sector, mainland China has the world's worst record. In the past month, accidents claimed more than 300 lives. From 2001 to 2004, accidents in China's coal mines claimed 6,282 lives a year. Chemical spills and toxic emissions keep contaminating the water and air. Last month a metal factory near Hong Kong leaked cancer-causing cadmium into the Bei River. This month, a fertilizer plant in Sichuan dumped 600 tons of sulfuric acid into the Qijiang River. These problems, plus income inequalities, could trigger social unrest.
January 15, 2006
China Post
Can Our Planet Support the Rise of China and India?.
Two of Washington's environmental think tanks warn that the economic boom in China and India could present one of the world's gravest threats to the environment. The two countries have 2.5 billion people, or nearly 40% of the world's population. China eats up one-third of the world's rice, over one-quarter of the world's steel and nearly half of its cement. The Earth cannot supply these countries' rising demands for energy, food, and raw materials. The use of oil has doubled in India since 1992, while China has becoming the world's second largest importer in 2004. Prices worldwide have soared as India and China scooped up shares in oil companies. The US is still the greatest burner of oil, using 25% of global annual supplies and producing 25% of carbon. The average US citizen requires about 9.7 hectares to provide resources and space for waste, 205% of what the country can provide. That figure is only 1.6 hectares for the average Chinese, or 201% of the country's capacity, and 0.8 hectares for the average Indian, or 210% of the country's capacity. Both India and China have programs to use renewable energies. India now aims to raise its share of renewable energies to 20% to 25%. China and India are signatories of the Kyoto Protocol, but as developing nations they are exempted from cutting their emissions. China has taken voluntary measures which have had a very positive impact.
January 14, 2006
Taipei Times
They Want to Make Children Extinct.
Les Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the planet. Whereever humans live, not much else lives and human activities are damaging the biosphere. More people means more damage. So no people at all be best for the planet, Knight claims. The UN estimates that the human population, currently at 6.5 billion, is well on its way to 9.1 billion in 2050. Estimates place a sustainable population in which most people are able to enjoy their lives at between one billion and two billion. The growing population is wreaking havoc on the Earth's systems and setting up civilisation for a hard fall. Regardless of the merits of reducing the population to nil - as Knight advocates - it's pretty clear that the world could do without any additional people. A single new American born in the 1990s will be responsible, over his or her life, for 22m lbs of liquid waste and 2.2m lbs each of solid waste and atmospheric waste. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4000 barrels of oil, 1.5m lbs of minerals and 62,000 lbs of animal products that will entail the slaughter of 2000 animals. In many ways, the idea of reducing the world's population is as much about human quality of life as it is about the health of the planet. Childbearing is irresponsible, is selfish, when so many aren't getting the love and attention they deserve. Knight says there's a taboo against talking about population control that has resulted in many environmental groups either not addressing population or doing so inadequately. In light of the number of species becoming extinct because of our increase, and the tens of thousands of children dying every day from preventable causes, there's just no good reason to have a child. Having a child is an endorsement of the idea that it's possible to have a sustainable ecosystem that includes humans - that it's possible to find a way out of the mess we've created. The reasons not to breed can only illuminate the gulf between reason and emotion. However, even Knight, in his oddly cheery brand of pessimism, thinks that the drive to breed may be insurmountable. Statistics for global warming, population growth, food production and pollution add up to a pretty gloomy picture for the future.
December 06, 2005
Herald, The (UK)
NGO Stresses Eco-friendly Lifestyle.
A survey indicates that the area of land and water required to support a population at its current standard of living for an average Korean, stood at 3.56 hectares this year. This is nearly double the globally available 1.8 hectares per person to supply all human resource consumption and waste production in the earth’s productive areas, meaning mankind would need at least one more planet to live on should everyone follow the lifestyle of Koreans. The concept of ecological footprints is a measurement of environmental stress, that estimates the area of the Earth’s productive land and water required to support a defined economy or human population at a specified standard of living. Industrialized economies require far more land than they have, which impacts the resources in other countries. The ecological footprint of the average Korean is at a lower level than most, but more than double the average of the rest of the world. However, the lifestyle of Koreans has become more environmentally sustainable as compared to 2003. An increased number of people are putting more effort into reducing waste and using more energy-efficient products. The increasing number of Koreans living in apartments and multi-household residences has reduced their environmental impact. To improve the sustainability Green Korean United recommended using public transport to work or carpooling, buying locally grown foods and goods to reduce transportation, reducing water consumption, reducing and recycling trash, and reducing packaging.
December 2005
Korea Times
Opinion: a Growing Threat We Can't Ignore.
by Ray Warner .. On Hwy. 169, the northbound lanes turn into parking lots that pollute the air and waste thousands of hours and gasoline. The problem is increasing population density. The carrying capacity of any region is the population it can sustain over the long haul without environmental degradation. Experts have agreed that Earth's carrying capacity is about 2.5 billion people, a point passed some 65 years ago. And we're rapidly closing in on a global-population three times that large. Some renewable resources have ceased to renew themselves, for example, most of the ocean's species have been overfished, to the point of collapsed breeding stocks. Growing population is the most dire threat to civilization. But it's too easy to ignore if one chooses to be in denial. In view of the devastating cost of exceeding carrying capacity, why do so many public figures advocate further population increases? Probably they believe that "economic growth follows population growth." The clich' "smart growth" is an oxymoron when the growth is beyond carrying capacity. Religious leaders are population boosters when they fight against the availability and use of contraception. We have politicians who declare that abortion is the most pernicious practice in the world today, and then by arbitrary decision guarantee a surge in abortions. For four years Congress has approved $34 million needed to pay UNFPA, and each year the administration has withdrawn the appropriation. The U.N. estimates that the result has been 800,000 additional abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths, 77,000 infant deaths, and some 2 million unwanted pregnancies. Contraception must be provided worldwide at low or no cost with comprehensive sex education. We must put an end to illegal immigration and stop importing large groups of people. We can stabilize population by methods that are straightforward and humane. Or we can let nature take over and use famine, pestilence and war, all already in vigorous action. The choice is ours.
November 08, 2005
Star Tribune (US)
Livability Isn't Sustainability.
Rrural-urban migration has swelled the population of the world’s cities 50% to three billion and is expected to add another 2.2 billion by 2030. Most of this growth will take place in the poorest cities. How sustainable are the world’s cities, both rich and poor? Some argue that people come to cities to better themselves and slums are a transitional phase that will be eliminated by economic growth. Once people get rich enough to care about air and water quality, they’ll deal with it. Can economic growth and technological fill all the potholes on the road to sustainability? On the simplest level, something is sustainable if it can safely remain in its present state indefinitely. But how can we determine whether or not a society is overusing its critical ecosystems? By using ecological-footprint analysis (EFA) that estimates the area of average land and water ecosystems required, to supply the resources consumed, and assimilate the wastes produced, by any specified population. The residents of the world’s rich cities require five to 10 hectares of productive ecosystem per capita compared to half-hectare needed by the poorest. EFA shows that although modern urbanites may reside in cities, the ecosystems that support their lifestyles may be in other countries half a world away. Most of the pollution generated by China’s factory cities is attributable to consumption by people living in high-income cities. This is no small problem. The average human eco-footprint is 2.2 hectares, but there are only 1.8 hectares of productive land and water ecosystems remaining per person on Earth. North American standards would require four additional Earthlike planets! No lifestyle is sustainable if it could not safely be shared by all members of the human family. Until we have made progress toward reducing our average eco-footprint from almost 7 to 1.8 hectares, our “most livable” city will remain one of the least sustainable on Earth.
November 02, 2005
George Straight website
New Measure of Wealth Accounts for Resource Depletion, Environmental Damage.
Accounting for resource depletion and population growth, shows that net savings per person are negative in the world's most impoverished countries. Current indicators used to guide development decisions such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ignore depletion of resources and damage to the environment. The World Bank offers new estimates including capital, natural resources, and the value of human skills, which show that many of the poorest countries are not on a sustainable path. Including the value of natural resources and our social capital in accounting is a vital step to achieve economic growth that is equitable and sustainable. The publication ranks countries according to total wealth, highlighting the 10 wealthiest and the 10 poorest countries. Switzerland heads the list of the top-ten performers, the other nine being European countries, the US and Japan. Sub-Saharan Africa dominates the bottom-10, with Ethiopia the lowest in total wealth. If their net saving rate is negative then this is a signal that the development path is not sustainable. There are exceptions, a new The World Bank has a new publication, Where is the Wealth of Nations? It says that, accounting for the actual value of natural resources, including resource depletion and population growth, net savings per person are negative in the world's most impoverished countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mauritania has improved its prospects through better management of fisheries, while Botswana has used diamond resources to finance schooling, health care, and infrastructure. In Botswana, the government makes provision to ensure that mineral revenues are invested rather than consumed through government expenditures. It maintains a mineral revenue fund which can finance future investments and buffer the government budget from swings in diamond prices. This has permitted Botswana to avoid the 'resource curse' that has afflicted many oil producers. Decision makers in developing countries are faced with difficult choices regarding the exploitation of natural resources and the environmental impacts of development, but they are leaving out the natural resources and intangible capital such as knowledge and skills. This publication challenges common assumptions about how nations generate their wealth. This snapshot of wealth for 120 countries aims to understand the links between the ability of a country to develop and the level and composition of wealth. The value of minerals, energy, forests, cropland, pastureland, and protected areas is a higher share of total wealth in low-income countries than produced capital, 26% to 16%. If we can't control the deconstruction of natural systems, then we will jeopardize our efforts to make lasting, progress on improving the standard of living of the world's poorest people. The indicators can guide countries toward a sustainable path.
September 28, 2005
Mongabay.com
US Louisina: With Fishing Industry Wiped Out at Midseason, Forecast Is Bleak.
Hurricane Katrina crashed onto Louisiana's only populated barrier island. What the wind failed to destroy, the storm surge washed away. The extent of the damage on Louisiana's $2.7-billion fishing industry is becoming clearer. Officials say the long-term outlook is bleak. It is estimated that it will take 18 months to get commercial fishing running. But it may not be worth it for some fishermen who must invest as much as $1 million for a shrimp boat. "Before the storm, I'd barely make it," said Rene Vegas, who owns the Bridgeside Marina. "Now it will be so much worse." Normally shrimpers find other work after the season ends in December. This region supplies about 30% of this nation's seafood. Commercial fishing employs 27,000 people in Louisiana and supports a robust shipping and boat-making industry, which also has been destroyed. With many boats wrecked, fishermen won't be able to make their way to the Gulf Coast. Shrimpers lack ice and buyers to sell to. The freshwater and seawater areas are tainted with raw sewage, spilled chemicals and toxic substances. State law dictates that water quality standards be met before oysters are harvested. Because the industry relies on clean water and wetlands to maintain habitat, efforts to restore Louisiana's fisheries are likely to be problematic. Even offshore fish and crustaceans use coastal marshes as nurseries. Louisiana's coastal wetlands are the fastest-disappearing land mass on Earth and officials estimate entire barrier islands and much of the land in the marsh areas were lost. Grand Isle is accessible by four-wheel-drive vehicles, firetrucks are providing with water via hoses strung across the causeway. Boats are under homes, across roads, and upside-down on top of cars.
September 11, 2005
Los Angeles Times
33 Years Later: the Limits to Growth .
Dennis Meadows, the co-author of “The Limits to Growth”, which the Club of Rome issued in 1972 to spark the sustainability debate, says the Club of Rome was right in saying what it did. And since we have done nothing to address the concerns raised in the 1972 report, we have less time than before to take corrective action.
The global population has grown from around 3.5 billion in 1972, to more than 6 billion today. Industrial production has gone from an index of about 180 in 1963 to more than 400. The index of world metals use has gone up more than 50%. The concentration of carbon dioxide has gone up increasing in 30 years by as much as in the previous 220. Mankind’s "global ecological footprint" has gone from a sustainability level of about 90% of the earth’s capacity, to 120%. We are beyond the sustainability point. We have not realised that we have crossed the sustainability limit because we are drawing down on nature’s bank balance and that cannot go on indefinitely. We have already used up half that grace period. The challenge now is the population must stop growing, and we must change our consumption, because we cannot continue to make today’s claims on the environment. India wants to get our income levels up from $600 per capita to at least $2,000, at which level there is no absolute poverty left. If you factor in what that will mean for energy and other non-renewable resources, it seems pretty obvious that what we have already seen in the markets for oil and iron ore are a foretaste of what is to come. Oil may already have reached the level of peak production, and what that means for the global economy is frightening. Does that mean that India and China should not aspire to what the developed economies have delivered by way of standards of living? It seems an unfair question when the west is unwilling to change its consumption habits. If neither happens, and even if some technological fixes can buy us some time, the message is straightforward. Things cannot go on as before.
August 14, 2005
Business Standard (India)
U.K.: Fears of Overdevelopment Explosion .
Haringey Council's high-density housing policy is unsustainable according to the secretary of the Haringey Federation of Residents Associations (HFRA). Documents reveal the Greater London Authority (GLA) has been pressuring the council to adopt a target of 19,370 new homes by 2016, an increase of 40,000. However, it has been revealed the GLA had concluded there was a "potential capacity" of only 8,640 homes. Haringey Council's executive member for housing, said they were concerned about overdevelopment, but must comply with the London Plan. The figure of 8,600 dwellings relates to a period of 10 years and the figure of 19,370 relates to the 20-year target. The executive decided to amend the draft to propose tripling Haringey's current maximum densities, set in 1998, to 1,100 habitable rooms per hectare. Islington has a maximum of 450 hrh and Camden of 617 hrh. Residents' organisations have been challenging many of the proposed policies and call on the council to abandon unsustainable policies which have been rejected by the surrounding boroughs.
July 27, 2005
Muswell Hill Journal
Europe is Losing the Fight for Sustainability .
In a report from WWF, Europe 2005: The Ecological Footprint, the EU is using resources at twice the rate the world can renew them. Tony Long, director of policy for WWF Europe, said: "Over 30 years ago the report Limits to Growth created an international controversy suggesting that the human economy would soon exceed the Earth's carrying capacity, leading to a decrease in industrial output and a decline in well-being in the mid 21st century. In 2005 overshoot is no longer a hypothesis but a reality." While the continent's population makes up 7% of the world's total, Europeans use 17% of its capacity. Human demands on the Earth's resources began to outstrip the ability to meet them some time around 1986 and the situation has got gradually worse as populations and economies grow. Humanity's annual demand for resources is now exceeding Earth's capacity by more than 20%. The report measures the land area needed to produce food, fibre and energy, absorb waste and provide space for infrastructure. There is a trend for more affluent nations to make a larger footprint and consume more per head. Globally the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Kuwait top the chart, while Thailand, the Dominican Republic and Namibia make the smallest recorded footprints. The Scandinavians do not come out well, with Swedes having the largest footprint in Europe - followed by the Finnish, Danish and Norwegians. The Eastern European member states all perform well, with the exception of Estonia and the Czech Republic. Germany has the largest European footprint as a nation, followed by France and the UK - not with a big per capita footprint; their large populations hike up their impact. The report concludes by looking at ways of living more sustainably. It suggests protecting soils from erosion and researching more efficient agriculture, improving the efficiency of manufacturing, reducing the goods and services consumed per person and reducing the global population. All over Europe there was a need for political commitment, vision and leadership. Also the need for more coordination between different levels of government and more needed to be done to bring environmental policy into the mainstream.
June 21, 2005
EDIE
Human Consumption Straining Earth's Resources.
The Director general of the International Centre for Environment at the University of the West Indies, says human demands are straining the earth's resources. Agriculture is a main driver of environmental damage and accounts for 70% of our fresh water use and nearly 40% of land uses are food demands. The worldwide cattle population generated 94 million tons of methane gas annually, 20% more damaging than carbon dioxide. The scientist said that while the world's poor sought the lifestyle of the US citizen, it is unknown if the earth could sustain the demands. If every resident of China were to acquire the average standard of living of the US, we would need another four earths. Jamaica contributes little to global degradation, but, there is much to do to correct environmental damage, the resuscitation of the dying corals, preservation of the biodiversity, reduction of smog, rehabilitation of mined out lands, halting the depletion of the soil's fertility and eliminating the threats to children exposed to lead batteries. A fundamental element of the sustainability of the environment is energy generation. It is unlikely that these alternative energies can be produced on a global scale. The supply situation with oil is fraught with problems, and fossil fuel combustion seems pretty certain to lead to global warming. Worldwide there will be increased usage of renewables, which generally, are more environmentally benign than the combustibles, but are unlikely to fill the global demand for energy. Such considerations are partly the reason for the resurgence of interest in nuclear power and several countries in Europe and Asia supplement energy needs with nuclear power. France generates 7% of its electricity with nuclear power; Belgium 60%; Sweden 42%; Switzerland 39%; Spain 37%, the United Kingston 21%; and the US 20%. Nuclear energy is the only global alternative to oil when you consider the increasing cost of oil.
It takes energy to get the uranium out of the ground.
June 21, 2005
Jamaca Observer
Ethiopia's food security challenges are multi-faceted and require a multi-sectoral approach, but the root cause is the runaway population growth. Demographic pressure, aggravating environmental degradation and economic malaise, creates a dangerous situation to the country's citizens. Ethiopia's population is growing at 3% annually and expected to reach 100 million within 15 years. 44% is living under the poverty line while 44 million under the age of 24 are entering their reproductive ages. Population growth adds two million new mouths to feed every year. The agricultural sector is unable to carry the population growth, suffering from erosion, deforestation and loss of nutrients. At the current rate of deforestation of over 75,000 hectares per year, the country will be completely deforested in less than 20 years. Failure to implement the country's population policy is among the major problems. Had the policy been implemented, Ethiopia would have made progress in reducing the rate of population growth, increasing its chance to attain food self-sufficiency.
June 20, 2005
BBC Monitoring International Reports
Europe Living Beyond Eocological Means.
Conservationists warn that the European Union and its Member States urgently need to put more emphasis on the planet's finite resources. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has published a report showing that the twenty-five EU members have run up an environmental deficit of 220% of their biological capacity and now rely on the resources of the rest of the world. Reducing European pressure on nature is essential for Europe's prosperity and as a leader for sustainable development. The report compares people's use of nature with nature's ability to regenerate. With 7% of the world population, the EU uses 17% of the world resources. EU countries with the highest demand are Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, and France, using three to four times the worldwide average per person. Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland have the lowest but use about twice the average amount. If the EU wants to be competitive it is time to build an economy that decouples economic growth from resource consumption. This could be done by giving higher priority to investments in ecosystems, developing systems to ensure the sustainability of product and resource use. The group recommends moving from fossil fuel to renewable energy. Other measures include eliminating subsidies that have adverse social, economic and environmental effects. The longer European leaders ignore the environmental deficit, the more expensive the investment required to correct it and the greater the risk that critical ecosystems will be eroded beyond the point at which they can easily recover.
June 2005
Press Esc
California Looks Ahead, and Doesn't Like What It Sees.
California gained 539,000 residents last year and is on track to reach 46 million residents by 2030, an increase of 13 million from 2000. Within the next 25 years, a quarter of all Americans will be residing in California, Texas and Florida. With the Department of Finance estimating that the state's population has reached 36.8 million, California is home to one of every eight Americans. Today, many politicians and scholars wonder whether California's population has become so huge and complex that it is beyond human manipulation. A statewide survey found that only 12% of respondents had confidence that the state government could plan effectively for the expected influx of newcomers. Complicating the planning for the new growth, is where it is occurring. The statistics show that the fastest-growing counties are away from the coast, as residents settle in places that are cheaper but also removed from many services. Leading is Riverside County, which reaches to the Arizona border, followed by Placer County, northeast of Sacramento, and Imperial County, along the Mexican and Arizona borders. The Central Valley agricultural counties of Madera, Tuolumne and Kern rank next. If the trends continue, studies suggest a quarter of the region's farmland could be lost to housing by the middle of this century. In his weekly radio address Mr. Schwarzenegger said that our cities are bursting at the seams, too many roads are congested and projects that should be in construction are still on the shelf and it's time for California to build again in the cities and the counties and everywhere across our state. Republicans want the state to grow and are often pro-development but oppose new taxes and government spending. Democrats support new taxes and government spending, but oppose bigger highways, for example, on the grounds that they encourage urban sprawl. Proposition 13 restricted property taxes, the state budget is in deficit, and Mr. Schwarzenegger has pledged not to raise income and other taxes. Planners say growth will occur no matter how hard some Democrats try to control it or some Republicans wait for market forces to accommodate it. Planning needs to take place recognizing that we're not going to see large projects, or large sums of money, from the federal government. An association of local governments recently completed a plan for the metropolitan region including situations for traffic, housing density and open space in 2050, when the region is projected to have added 1.7 million people. The plan emphasizes compact developments near mass transit and is projected to save $8 billion in costs for freeways, utilities and other infrastructure. This is entirely voluntary and some communities have already opted out. People just want better services.
When is a public dialogue on "carrying capacity" going to begin?
May 29, 2005
New York Times*
China Overtakes US as Top Consumer.
Growing at a rapid rate, China has taken the lion's share in the consumption of grain, meat, coal and steel, and loses out to the U.S. only in oil. China's use of fertilizer is double that of the U.S. while with television sets, refrigerators and cellular phones - it is way ahead. China trails the U.S. in automobiles and will soon overtake the U.S. in the use of personal computers. China is an emerging economic superpower. China leads in the consumption of wheat and rice, and trails the U.S. only in corn use. China's 2004 intake of 64 million tonnes of meat is above the 38 million tonnes consumed in the United States. China's steel usage is now more than twice that of the U.S. 258 million tonnes to 104 million tonnes in 2003. U.S. oil consumption is triple that of China's but use in China has more than doubled. China's appetite for raw materials is driving up prices and shipping rates. The U.S. has a massive trade deficit with the China and is dependent on Chinese capital to underwrite its debt. If China decided to divert this capital elsewhere, the US economy will be in trouble. As Chinese incomes rise, use of foodstuffs, energy, raw materials, and sales of consumer goods are continuing to climb. China's per capita annual income of 5,300 dollars is one seventh the 38,000 dollars in the United States. One of the bigger concerns is that China's growth takes a toll on the environment. China's grain production has stagnated, due to expansion of deserts and the loss of irrigation water. China was putting enormous pressure on its own natural resource base.
February 17, 2005
China Daily
Population and Sustainability.
Population change bears on sustainability and the possibilities of resource exhaustion are often exaggerated, but so too are the levels of substitutability between natural and other forms of capital. The degradation of environmental services is often exacerbated by population growth. The critical issue in is effective governing to restrain demand and safeguard supply. Uncertainties in environmental systems should give pause to expectations that a decline in human numbers will usher in ecological restoration. A series of population expansions since the industrial era is attributable to lowered mortality from nutritional improvements, the spread of medical and public health services, and advances in education and income. Population growth slows and eventually halts completing the pattern known as the demographic transition. Worldwide, UN projections foresee world population increasing from its 2005 level of 6.5 billion to a peak of about 9 billion. Very low fertility will lead to declines in population size. The lagged onset and uneven pace of the transitions across regions generate regional differences in population characteristics at any given time. Gains in well-being would come from halting of population growth, and lower population/resource ratios, and a continuing increase in productivity. With a focus on capital, labour, and technology, models yield steady-state growth paths in which output expands indefinitely along with capital and labour. Renewable resources would simply add another factor of production. Non-renewable resources would be inconsistent with any steady-state outcome that entailed positive population growth. While the actual role of population and resources in economic development is an empirical issue, a lot of the debate on the matter has been based on exercises little more complicated than these. Positive feedbacks from a larger population stimulate inventiveness, production, and investment and favor indefinite continuation of at least moderate population growth, leading both to economic prosperity and to expanded numbers of people. Past worries about population growth have been linked to the idea that the world is running out of some critical natural resource. Mostly, such claims have turned out to be overstated as they they neglect the scope for societal adaptation through technological and social change. As put in a 1986 report "even if slower population growth does delay the time at which a particular stage of resource depletion is reached,…it has no necessary or even probable effect on the number of people who will live under a particular stage of resource depletion. But that judgment is too dismissive of the supply problem. Depleting a resource such as a fishery or an aquifer, or degrading land through erosion or salination may be a population-related effect. Environmental services encompass climate regulation, pollination, soil formation and retention, nutrient cycling, and direct environmental effects on well-being through recreation and aesthetic enjoyment. People's numbers, but also their proclivities to consume and their exploitative abilities, can all be factors in degrading environmental services.
The full article defines these and other relevant factors in great detail.
2005
Population Council
Yemen: First Census in 10 Years Under Way.
More than 23,000 data-collectors have set out with data books to every household in the country to count the population, in Yemen's first census in 10 years. The results will be used as the basis for social policy, new schools, hospitals and other facilities. The country has been preparing for the last two and a half years, updating the 1994 census and developing an electronic network. A sample of households will partake in a detailed survey, providing economic status, car-ownership, literacy and other matters but religion or ethnicity cannot be solicited. The census should catch illegal immigrants and nomadic people. While the government is largely funding the census, there have been grants from foreign donors. The importance of the census is being promoted through a radio and TV campaign. Over half the population is illiterate, so the data-collectors are interviewing every household. The data will be processed using the latest technology. The population in 1994 was found to be 15,831,757, but is now thought to be more than 20 million. The census is expected to show an even higher population growth. Yemen's president stressed the urgency of bringing the population growth under control. He called to task conservatives calling them extremists who insist on labelling family planning as a taboo, and warned that the growing population is exhausting the country's meagre natural resources, especially water.
December 22, 2004
IRIN News (UN)
Pakistan: Population Growth Rate Still High at 1.9%.
Pakistan has a high population growth rate of 1.9% per annum and Pakistanis make up 2.5% of the world’s population. The total fertility rate has declined from 4.8 children per woman in 2000 to 4.1 in 2003-2004. This rate is well above 2.1, the long-term target of the population. Pakistan has to reduce its population growth to a sustainable level, while benefiting from its growing labour force by investing in capital development. The adverse impact of high population growth is compounded by the neglect of health and education, keeping the productivity low. While it appears to have made a breakthrough in declining fertility and population growth, these changes are modest and sustained efforts are required to further reduce population growth. The overall population policy is to achieve stabilization by 2020. This would be possible by creating awareness of the consequence of rapid population growth and reducing the fertility rate. It will take several decades stabilize the country’s population and Pakistan’s population will increase significantly in the coming decades
November 06, 2004
Daily Times (Pakistan)
China Mulls Overhaul of Family Planning Policy; Anxious to Avoid Future Problems Arising From Its Strict One-child Policy, it is Studying Proposals to Scrap the Rule .
China is worried that the limits on family size could generate social unrest and undermine economic development. One proposal recommends scrapping the rule restricting families to one child and instead implement a two-child policy. The proposal envisions launching the policy in the country's eastern provinces which have the lowest birth rates. The government appointed a task force that is tapping 250 experts to study the impact on economic development. Experts say that relaxing birth limits will not reignite a population explosion. Lower fertility rates are credited with raising living standards and economic overhauls. A Chinese woman today will have fewer than two children, compared with six in 1970. The UN estimates that by 2040, people 60 and over will make up 28% of the population, up from 11% now. Males are likely to face difficulties finding partners. China had 117 boys born for every 100 girls, above the normal worldwide ratio of about 105 to 100.
China may be living on borrowed time. Both water and oil are becoming scarcer - per capita, and soil and deforestation may never be recoverable.
October 05, 2004
Straits Times
Jobs and People on the Move.
Economists argue that migration and offshoring benefit economies, as efficiency is increased. Manufacturing industries in the rich countries have for decades been whittled away by low-cost foreign competition. More recently the offshoring of work has raised the possibility that new swathes of the economy will become internationally tradeable. This seems likely to supplant migration, taking work to the workers. There are jobs that cannot be done overseas, and many foreign-born workers in cities with large amounts of immigration, work in services where proximity to the customer is required. The information technology and business services sector have functions that can be performed miles away. Offshoring and migration soared during the technology boom and the US trebled its visa programme for skilled workers, while countries that lagged behind in attracting foreign IT workers, scrambled to catch up. Immigrants tend to be younger and have higher birth rates: the faster growth of the US population, which is a significant cause of its higher economic growth, is caused by higher immigration. For continental Europe, struggling with state pension and benefit systems, the attraction of youth into the workforce paying taxes is hard to overestimate. But expecting immigration to solve the pension systems problems is wishful thinking. In the US, migration would have to increase by 30% a year to stabilise the ratio of working-age to general population. In Japan, immigration would have to increase by 700% a year. The political backlash against large-scale immigration suggests that the trend of confining immigration to skilled workers will continue, supplanted by illegal immigrants for low-paid service jobs. The advantage of offshoring is that wages abroad can be lower and the division between offshoring and migration will depend on the technology of the jobs and the political constraints on governments. The US has seen a stronger backlash against offshoring than immigration, while European nations experienced the opposite. Restrictions on study and work visas since the attacks of September 11 have constricted skilled immigration in the US which may shift the balance. The onward march of integrated global economy and the shrinking cost of transport and communications will probably ensure that migration and offshoring continue apace. In the meantime, disgruntled workers and nativists complain that "foreigners are taking our jobs", facing competition from those who are prepared to accept lower wages and worse working conditions.
Again, growing the economy is only a solution until limited resources run out. Creating more goods for more consumers is like a giant Ponzi scheme. In addition, many of the workers who are being displaced are the very Baby Boomers who will demand a pension when they retire.
September 27, 2004
Economist
A Voracious Earth - Some Regions - Especially in Asia - Are Overusing Their Renewable Resources .
A swath of Asia from India to China leaves the biggest human footprint as it gobbles up 80% of the plant resources it produces, says Taylor Ricketts, director of the Conservation Science Program at the World Wildlife Fund. A recent study on ecological imbalances has drawn a map which shows mankind's ecological footprint for each square mile of Earth's inhabited zones, which defies conventional wisdom about consumption, and illustrates the effect of population density. The study adds up all the sun energy converted to organic carbon by plants each year and calls it "net primary production" or NPP - about 56 billion tons worth. Subtract the portion that human beings use in materials from cotton in clothes to wood in homes to in a bowl of cereal. The world's 6.3 billion people appropriate up to a third of the world's NPP. This sounds sustainable, but disguises geographical imbalances. For example, most of Siberia uses 0% of its local NPP. North America uses 23%, less than the world average. North Americans eat 5.4 tons of carbon per year compared with 1.2 tons for residents of south central Asia. But that part of Asia is more populous and more densely packed and consumes 1.6 billion tons of NPP per year or 80% of the carbon of that area. If developing nations boost consumption to match industrialized countries, overall appropriation of NPP would rise 75% and is already happening. More than 1 billion people in developing and transitional nations have become wealthy enough to consume like Americans. They own one-fifth of the world's automobiles and by 2010, could own a third and the environmental costs of automobiles are huge. Worldwide, the average human footprint is 2.28 hectares (5.4 acres), but Earth only has a biocapacity of 1.9 hectare per person that leaves a 0.38 hectare deficit per person. In China, it is 0.5 hectares. China's population is a major part of 1.1 billion new consumers with purchasing power of more than $6 trillion. They will buy 800 million cars by 2010 and use a quarter of all electricity. More efficient technologies could be adopted, electric-car technology for instance. A scholar acknowledges models of human consumption are useful, but they are often wrong in the long run. When you run a snapshot in a straight line way, it will present an unsustainable conclusion. A century ago New England had been denuded of trees, which were burned for heat. Today, New England has been reforested. By cutting its use of natural gas and diesel and increased recycling, Santa Monica in California US shrank its ecological footprint by 5.7% to 20.9 acres per person over 10 years but unless that happens more broadly, humanity's footfall will get heavier. In 2000, the US used about 23% of the world's energy. The US has one quarter of all the cars in the world. And much of its consumption affects other regions through imports cutting Indonesian forests, for instance. Humanity has a chance to save itself, because population growth has moderated. Economists and ecologists are working to gauge the costs of consumption accurately. A $2 gallon of gasoline is really $6 because it carries $4 of environmental costs.
September 02, 2004
Christian Science Monitor
N. Korea Killing Forests, Waterways, U.N. Finds.
North Korea's forests are depleted, rivers and streams filled with runoff and coal energy has created urban air pollution. The evaluation by the U.N. last year was delayed until a delegation from the North signed an agreement to protect the environment. The UN acknowledged a paucity of data on which to base reliable assessments. The forests have fallen victim to its fast-growing population of more than 24 million and natural disasters and efforts to convert forests to farmland. A dozen factories discharge 39,200 cubic yards of waste each day into the Taedong River. Investment is needed in the country's water purification systems. The reliance on coal to general power and heat homes has created urban air pollution. The North has depended on outside help to feed its people since 1995 and is struggling to become self-sufficient with continuing poor crop yields due to natural disasters, the overuse of chemicals and shortages of fertilizer, farm machinery and oil. The collapse of North Korea's economy has caused food prices to skyrocket so that people can't afford what they need to survive. Farmers should expand restorative practices, including tree planting and use of organic fertilizers.
August 27, 2004
MSNBC.com
Ecological Footprint
Click to this website to subscribe; then you can find out how much land is needed to support your lifestyle. Try the quick set of questions from New Scientist magazine to add up your points. For environmentally sound actions such as recycling, you get to subtract some points. Then because all the support systems such as roads, schools, and shops support your lifestyle, you are asked to double your points. Each point equals one-hundredth of a hectare so a score of 350 is equal to an ecological footprint of 3.5 hectares.
August 08, 2004
New Scientist
Look on Green GDP Objectively.
China's economy has been developing and problems of resources and environment have become obvious. China's per capita area of cultivated land is equal to about 40% of the world's average level. China's per capita water resources accounts for only 25% of the world's average. The per capita area and volume of forest amount to 20% and 12.5% respectively of the world's average. The per capita possession of mineral resources is lower than the world's average. China's economic growth is too extensive, manifested by high consumption and low efficiency. In 2003, China's GDP accounted for only 3.8% of the world's GDP, while its consumption of steel, coal, and cement amounted to 36%, 30%, and 55% of the world's output of 2001. Overgrazing causes desertification and the decrease of grassland. Deforestation results in soil erosion, and damage of the habitats of wild species. The overexploitation of water brings on the cut-off of rivers and ground settlement. The emission of pollutants reflects on the pollution of rivers, lakes and seas and the decreasing quality of the air. If no attention is paid, China will confront severe problems regarding its sustainable development. China has a large population, few resources, high environmental pressures. Conducting green GDP accounting provides references for economic development with sustainability. There is no country in the that has figured out the whole green GDP, in terms of resource depletion cost and environmental losses as these are difficult to estimate. For example, forest resources are renewable, but deforestation leads to the decrease of the area and volume of the forest. Besides cultivating trees, the forest functions in soil conservation, preservation of water resources, air purification, wind prevention, sand-fixation, and people's traveling and relaxation. Atmosphere and water have the capability to digest waste. Therefore, if the waste is within the range of the assimilation by atmosphere and water, the quality of the air and water will not decline. However, the waste in many areas has gone beyond the capability of the assimilation, which leads to the deterioration of the air and water and environmental losses. Green GDP reflects the interaction between economy and environment to a certain extent. GDP is a crucial index of macro-economy and plays an important role in establishing macro-economic policies. GDP is related with national disposable personal income, national savings, national wealth and other indexes. The accounting of green GDP reflects the economic development and mutual influences between economic development and the environment from different angles.
June 30, 2004
China Economic Net
Report Urges Governance Reforms to Stop Environmental Decline.
Statistics indicate rapidly deteriorating ecosystems. One of every six humans depends on fish for protein, yet 75% of the world's fisheries are over-fished. forty-one of every 100 people live in water-stressed river basins; 350 million are dependent on forests, with forest cover declining by 46% since pre-agricultural times. Half the population lives on less than $2 a day. The best way to force government action is to empower citizens through public access to information and participation in decision-making. Public access to information is necessary to improve the environment. Greater accountability can lead to more effective management of natural resources.
June 04, 2004
World Resources Institute
Booming China Devouring Raw Materials; Producers and Suppliers Struggle to Feed a Voracious Appetite.
China's demand has driven the price of shipping freight through the roof, and because ports haven't expanded to keep pace with China's demands, one-fifth of the world's freighters are tied up waiting to load and unload cargo. China's demand for raw materials is straining the systems that move goods. The construction in China's cities has transformed it from a minor consumer into a country that absorbed half the world's cement production last year, one-third of its steel, one-fifth of its aluminum and nearly one-fourth of its copper. China has become the second-largest importer of oil. Shipyards in Japan and Korea have orders through 2007. China is building new shipyards, including the world's largest in Shanghai. Last year, global ship orders more than doubled. For the coal producers, each motionless day means paying ship owners as high as $20,000 per vessel. Once a major coal exporter, China is now consuming its production, putting pressure on the global supply. Around the world, stockpiles of everything from copper to coal have disappeared. The commodity and shipping trades are convinced that China's impact is here to stay, 1.3 billion people require a lot of electricity. Exacerbating the queue is the fact that coal is increasingly carried by smaller vessels as the bulk freighters that can carry 200,000 tons, have long-term contracts with steel mills and are going as far as Brazil for raw material. Between 1999 and 2003, China's annual exports of coal to produce electricity doubled to 80 million tons, pushing down global prices. But last year, energy shortages in China forced authorities to ration power and Beijing halted exports. Worldwide shortages resulted, and the price of coal roughly tripled. China's cravings have encouraged the mining giant Rio Tinto Group to pour $1.25 billion improvements to head off similar problems in its iron ore business. In 2003, China doubled its investment in new steel mills. Rio Tinto's wholly owned Hamersley Iron Pty Ltd last year sent more than a third of its product to China. At the center of Rio Tinto's expansion is the Eastern Range mine a joint venture with Shanghai Baosteel Group Corp., which will take all of its output. A Japanese yard takes eight or nine months to complete a large new ship but with the Ariake shipyard works at capacity, of the 10 vessels that will be completed this year, six are oil tankers, because of China's fuel demands and European rules mandating double-hulled vessels. Even the four Capesize vessels may be delayed, because shipbuilders are finding it difficult to get sufficient quantities of steel. The world needs more freighters because China's growth is tying up much of the fleet. The shipyards can't get the steel, because there aren't enough ships.
What will drive all the ships when the oil supply becomes depleted?
May 21, 2004
Washington Post
Ecological Footprint.
The ecological footprint is the acreage needed on earth to support our lifestyle. The average person in the U.S. uses about 24 acres, one of the largest Footprints in the world. Germans use 13 acres, inhabitants of countries like India use 2 acres. If you want to calculate what yours is, go to this website - www.myfootprint.org.
Biologist E.O. Wilson, "one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers," considers the Footprint to be one of the most significant recent ecological inventions because of its ability to communicate complex scientific information in relatively simple terms to explain the relationship between human consumption and the natural environment. The late sustainability futurist Donella Meadows listed the Ecological Footprint at her top indicator for measuring sustainability. In a similar vein, Dr.Mathis Wackernagel, co-creator of the Ecological Footprint considers Sustainable Sonoma County to be one of the most advanced groups in the nation for using the Ecological Footprint to create social change at the community level.
More at: http://www.sustainablesonoma.org/projects/scefootprint.html
April 21, 2004
Ecologist Says Humans Overdrawing Nature's Account.
Mathis Wackernagel, executive director of the Global Footprint Network of Oakland explained the "footprint' that is used to define how much impact people are having on nature. By 1980, the human population went past the point where consumption equaled the capacity of the planet. Now humans are consuming, 20% more than the world can sustain. The footprint is a picture of where the world is at present. The total population, rate of consumption of resources, and the efficiency of producing and using them establishes the footprint. There are 30 billion acres of productive land on planet with 6.3 billion people, that is about 4.5 acres for each human. The earth also houses 1 million other species, and what portion of the world is going to be reserved for them. Planning requires nature be more productive to meet the increasing demand or to slow population growth. Changes in technology could have a major impact, for example, nuclear fusion could change the world overnight.
April 19, 2004
Chico Enterprise Record
Namibia: WFP and UNICEF Launch Emergency Appeals to Help Over 600,000 Women and Children.
The U.N. has appealed for US $5.8 million to help 600,000 women and children in Namibia. The country suffers poverty and food deficits, compounded by three years of erratic weather in the north of the country and the AIDS pandemic. A U.N. mission found malnutrition in children under 5 is 15%. Local authorities plan to assist 530,000 from their meager resources. WFP will provide 8,000 tons of food to 111,000 rural children and their families in the worst-affected districts and is appealing for US $5.2 million to fund the operation for the next six months. The U.N. will help provide insecticide- treated bed nets to prevent malaria, expand immunization campaigns, undertake Vitamin A distribution and improve nutritional surveillance. UNICEF is appealing for US $616,000 to fund its operation over the same period. The Namibian government is usually able to assist communities but this crisis exceeds the government's capacity. HIV has soared from 4% in 1992 to 22%. At least 120,000 children have lost one or both parents from AIDS. Half the population lives below the poverty line, and an international drought appeal has not been fully funded.
March 10, 2004
Associated Press
Ethiopia: Spiraling Population Growth Contributing to Food Insecurity.
Polygamy is fuelling a population explosion in southern Ethiopia, which compounds the food crisis and is one of the causes of a lack of food in Ethiopia. Five million people need food aid in the drought-prone country. Women and children in polygamous households are disfavored by the bread-winner husbands and are confined to their farms and disadvantaged in terms of health care, education and employment. Female headed households are more likely to be food insecure. Traditionally this has been a breadbasket region, but recently aid agencies have been confounded with malnutrition and large numbers of child deaths. The crisis in Ethiopia is not simply a lack of food but the population explosion, a decline in rainfall, a slump in coffee prices and reduced employment. Ethiopia will soon have the 10th largest population in the world, estimated at 71 million by 200. By 2050 173 million people will live in the impoverished nation.
September 08, 2003
IRIN News (UN)
David Attenborough on Population and Immigration.
Sir David Attenborough, the eminent naturalist, called for control of population growth and warned of global disaster. He is quoted as saying that "The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most." An academic group Optimum Population Trust (OPT) wants to put population reduction at the heart of government policy.
believes that Britain should reduce its population from 59m to about 30m by 2130, the same as in 1870. It wants economic incentives for women to stay childless, free contraception, a balanced approach to immigration and a government population reduction policy. The campaign is supported by academics and environmentalists including the chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission. The National Statistics Office predicted the population would peak at 64m in 2040 and then fall. However the figures underestimated net immigration and the new figures mean Britain could have a population of 73m by 2050. British governments have reacted to growth by providing more homes, roads, schools and facilities but is commissioning studies to decide if it needs a population policy. Sir Crispin Tickell, who chairs the government panel on sustainable development said that population increase is one of the biggest global problems. Tickell and others believe countries such as Britain will make it tough for immigrants but this may not be enough and incentives for smaller families may be necessary. Native birth rates have fallen but immigration and the fact we are living longer means numbers will keep going up. Attenborough believes solving Britain's problems is trivial compared with reversing the global population boom. He said: "Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.
August 03, 2003
Sunday Times (South Africa)
What Limits Carrying Capacity - Oil orTopsoil?.
Bruce Sundquist, Carrying Capacity Committee,
Allegheny Group, Sierra Club
I once believed that energy was the key issue, but now I am totally
convinced that soil resources are the crucial issue. The reasoning behind
that conclusion is given below.
Those concerned about energy resources invariably point to the
exponential growth in energy consumption, but they rarely ponder the
reason why the growth is exponential, and therefore never foresee an end to
exponential growth until energy supplies are totally depleted. The reason
why energy consumption grows exponentially is because both
population and technological advances are growing exponentially. In
recent years, the rate of discovery of energy resources has outpaced
energy consumption, due largely to major technological advances in the
science of finding new energy resources. Both the quality of new
reserves and the amount of total reserves have thus not been falling.
Thus energy prices have fluctuated but have shown no clear trend. In an
environment such as this, energy consumption is bound to grow
exponentially. Such a process cannot continue, and eventually reserves and
reserve-quality must decline. Then prices must rise. People with large
cars will then buy small cars. People with small cars will ride the bus,
bus riders will walk or bicycle, and countless other conservation measures
will occur quite naturally--without any help from Audubon Society. Growth
will stop being exponential and later turn
negative. Rising prices will make thin seams of coal profitable to mine
and to convert to gas and liquid. Supply and demand will always remain
in balance; the total system will probably always show a high degree of
stability, though inequities in distribution will always be with us.
Exponential growth of energy consumption will be relegated to the history
books where it will join countless other phenomena that have defined the
course of human history, and that have shown exponential growth in their
early stages. New processes such as information generation and flow will
have their turn at exponential growth before they plateau and seek a
steady state.
There is one exception to the picture outlined above--soil-based systems.
If one examines the global data on various soil related issues
(croplands, forest lands, grazing lands, irrigated lands, fisheries) one
is struck by the huge number of positive feedback phenomena
(instabilities) that have historically never allowed a steady state to be
reached, but instead have produced an endless series of collapses of
soil-based systems. A few examples:
When irrigation production falls short of desire, people attempt to get
along with less water per unit of output. The result is salination and
less--not more--crop production. When timber production falls short of
desire, people harvest trees at younger ages. The result is less
productivity--not more. When livestock production falls short of desire,
more grazing animals are put on the same pasture. The result is
overgrazing, soil erosion, less grass and less--not more--cattle. When
cropland production falls below demand, fallow periods are decreased, the
result is massive wind erosion, chemical degradation of the soil, and
less--not more--crop production. All of this idiocy has always been
defended by the economists of the day using a process called discount
economics. Take the extra profits from not conserving soil and soil
quality and put these profits in a bank. Then, by the time the earth is
converted to a barren wasteland, you simply live off the interest-income
from your bank account. Is this imbecilic? Before you decide, ask any
forester whether he uses present-net-value analyses, and ask any
agricultural expert whether soil-conservation makes economic sense.
Soil-based systems are clearly not stable, equilibrium-seeking systems.
They have always been subject to massive positive-feedback processes.
The worse things get, the faster they get worse. This is why all those
ancient civilizations (all agriculture-based) have collapsed rather than
seeking a more soil-conservative mode of operation. I have seen nothing
that would make me believe that discount economics will ever fall out of
favor. Take a look at all the economic analyses of soil conservation
that have appeared in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation over the
past few decades. Virtually every such analysis will assure us that soil
conservation is simply not worth the effort, and anyone expressing doubts
about the discount economics involved is seen as a dunce, or worse.
Homo Rap/ens and Mass Extinction: An Era of Solitude?.
We are on the brink of a great extinction, species are vanishing faster than they did before the arrival of humans. As humans exploit the last vestiges of wilderness, they destroy the habitat of tens of thousands of species of plants, insects and animals. The lush natural world is being rapidly transformed into a prosthetic environment. Given the magnitude of this change, one would expect it Yet there is evidence that human activity is altering the balance of the global climate. The long-term effects of global warming cannot be known with any certainty. But the greenhouse effect could wipe out densely populated coastal countries within the present century, while dislocating food production in the world. The result could be a disaster for billions of people. The world's rainforests are part of the earth's self-regulatory system.
Humankind cannot destroy its planetary host. The earth is stronger than humans will ever be. The advance of Homo rapiens has always gone with the destruction of other species and ecological devastation. Of the remaining outcomes, the second, in which over-numerous humans colonise the earth at the cost of weak-ening the biosphere, corresponds most closely to this bleak vision.
The increase in human population is unprecedented and unsustainable. More than likely, it will be cut short by the classical Malthusian forces, this may be a discomforting prospect; but it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude.
July 22, 2002
John Gray - Professor London School of Economics.
Arable Land.
"In 1830, there were 32 acres of land per living human being. Today there
are fewer than 5 acres, including uninhabitable land."
2000
ZPG
Resources per person ...
In India and China, there are a total of 2 billion people living on an area of only 31 meters by 31 meters
1999
Paul Story
How Many People Can the Earth Support?.
2 billion... Everyone at the current U.S. standard of living and with
all the health, nutrition, personal dignity and
freedom that most Americans currently enjoy
1/2 billion ... Everyone at the same affluence level as in 1, but
with few restrictions on commerce, pollution, land
use, personal behavior (within current law), etc.
Basically a libertarian, laissez faire economy, with
few or no environmental restrictions. This points out
that there is a population price to pay for the current
American way of Commerce.
4 billion ... Everyone at the same affluence as indicated in 1, but
with many and onerous restrictions on freedoms
relative to behaviors leading to environmental
degradation. Including: Massive recycling. Driving restrictions.
Restrictions on the transport of food Prohibitions against cutting of trees
on one's property. Limitations on the burning of fossil fuels.
6 billion ... Only people in the U.S. and Europe at current U.S.,
France, Great Britain, German, and Scandinavian
levels of affluence. Everyone else at the current
prosperity level of Mexico
20? billion ... Everyone in the world at Mexico's current
prosperity level
40? billion ... Everyone in the world at the current prosperity level
of Northwest Africa
...Increasing population density is inextricably linked to loss of freedom
and losses of choice. In the worst of the above scenarios,
we can forget the Bill of Rights.
August 21, 1998
Ross McCluney
Grain Production Dropping; Fuel Thefts Rising.
The world’s grain harvest is expected to be 61 million tons short of consumption. Production has failed to meet demand in six of the last seven years. The world’s grain stocks will be enough for about 57 days. The amount in the bins when the next harvest begins are the measurement of food security. If stocks plunge lower than 60 days’ supply, prices begin to climb. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that wheat prices this year will be up 14%, and corn prices 22%.
If the weather is good this year, prices might not be as high as expected, but if the harvest is cut by heat or drought, increases could be above the projections.
With carryover stocks at the lowest level in 34 years, the world could soon be facing high grain and high oil prices at the same time. The USDA estimates this year’s global grain harvest at 1,984 million tons, down 24 million tons from last year. It is 3% below the high of 2,044 million tons in 2004.
World grain consumption has risen every year in the last 45 years, except for 1974, 1988 and 1995, when sharp price hikes and tight supplies pushed consumption down. Demand for grain is driven by population growth and rising income. Now it is being pushed by the growing demand for grain-based ethanol for cars and trucks. Food versus Fuel.
About 60% of grain is used as food, 36% as feed, and 3% as fuel. The latter, however, is growing by more than 20% each year.
While population growth is expected to slow, the annual amount of increase is projected to be above 70 million individuals until 2020. The world’s farmers must try to feed another 70 million people each year, regardless of weather. Population growth is centered on Indian and sub-Saharan Africa.
In low-income countries, the population mostly eats starchy food. In more affluent countries, people eat more grain-intensive foods such as meat, milk and eggs. Improving incomes are allowing 3 to 4 billion consumers to eat more poultry, pork, beef, milk, eggs and farmed fish. Global meat production leaped from 44 million tons in 1950 to 265 million tons in 2005 and keeps climbing.
The U.S. is expected to use 20% of the projected harvest to produce corn ethanol. That consumption will match our export and exceed Canada’s total harvest.
Farmers are facing record growth in demand when technology to boost grain yields is lagging, aquifers are being depleted and rising temperatures threaten to reduce future harvests. Water tables are falling, and wells are going dry in countries where half the world’s people live. While farmers battle water shortages and global warming, it has not been widely reported, but globally farms are being affected by skyrocketing diesel fuel prices.
Diesel and gasoline thefts are increasing. Bulk fuel often is stored in unsecured buildings. Fuel theft is on the increase everywhere.
Rising diesel prices are hard on farmers but a nightmare for truckers. They must buy at the pump and pay the price, which is much above bulk rate.
The rising cost of pesticides and fertilizers is causing farmers to make some adjustments. "From the Wilderness" reported that farmers are putting more reliance on jobs away from the land just to survive. The economics of modern agriculture necessitates taxpayer subsidies to offset the losses farmers suffer as their incomes continue to drop. Net farm income is expected to be down 22.3% from last year.
Ralph says: Many years ago while working in India, on one of our later trips, I was asked to meet with a senior government official in New Delhi. I had no idea what he wanted, in fact I had only briefly met him once before. "You have been coming to India for several years" He said, "I would like to hear your comments, as an impartial observer, on the changes you see in our country". I told him that when we first came to India we were horrified at the conditions we saw. With the years things had dramatically changed, and we no longer saw the signs of starvation that had concerned us in the past. It appeared that the standard of living for the whole country had improved dramatically. I told him that in my opinion they should be congratulated for all that had been done for the people.
I will never forget his response. He smiled and thanked me, but then he shook his head and said, "We have worked very hard to improve our agriculture and now we can feed all our people, and even export a small amount of food. But next year we will have a million more mouths to feed, and the year following a further million and the next year it will be five millions more. We cannot keep up with the population growth and if it continues we face the worst famine the world has ever seen".
July 5, 2006
Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment Method.
This site allows you to estimate the overall environmental impacts from
producing a certain dollar amount of any of 500 commodities or services in
the United States. It will provide rough guidance on the relative impacts of
different types of products, materials, services, or industries with respect
to resource use and emissions throughout the U.S.
Emissions Measurement Methods.
Overconsumption,
Unsustainable Consumption
