choose the future!
Dear Kevin,
I would like to comment on your recent appointment to the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Global Sustainability.
The two stated objectives of the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Global Sustainability are to facilitate global sustainability and to tackle poverty.
If by global sustainability, the UN means sustainability in the broadest sense, including sustaining the biosphere, using renewable resources sustainably and the efficient use and eventual replacement of non-renewable resources, then simultaneously achieving these two objectives will be very difficult.
The poor people of the word have a right to aspire to a quality of life equal to that of those in the First World, and morally we must both allow them and help them to achieve this. An obvious implication of achieving a reduction of poverty and raising the quality of life for poor people is that, by definition, they will consume more; morally, we must help them to achieve access to a level of consumption that is contemporaneously equal to our own.
A sustainable world (the only sort there is in the long run) is only able to provide a limited amount of the resources and natural services that we require and that underpin our quality of life. Therefore, the world can only support a certain number of people at a certain level of individual consumption of these resources; if we have a greater number of people they will have less access to these resources, if we have a lesser number of people they will have more access to these resources. You can’t have both too high a level of consumption and too many people and be sustainable.
I’m sure that you are aware that humanity, with its current mix of rich and poor, has either met, or more likely exceeded, the capacity of the Earth to sustainably provide the resources and natural services that we require of it. As we are already at or beyond the capacity of the Earth to support us, we can only achieve both of the stated objectives at the current population level and probably only at a lower population level.
To achieve global sustainability in a poverty free world we must determine what level of total consumption the world’s natural systems can sustainably support, determine what minimum level of individual consumption is required to provide the quality of life we want to achieve, and then calculate from these factors the appropriate world population required to achieve this.
To determine a value for the minimum level of individual consumption that we should target we must consider the consequences of a level of individual consumption that is too low. If people’s quality of life of drops too low it will make the society too poor to be stable, due to lowered levels of education, poor communications, and unsatisfied expectations.
Once we have determined and implemented the correct population size and the correct level of consumption we will have achieved global sustainability. Increasing either of these factors without decreasing the other correspondingly will push us beyond the limit of sustainable use of the Earth’s resources. As the size of our economy is the product of the individuals’ consumption and the number of individuals participating in that economy, we will not be able to have economic growth once we have achieved global sustainability.
To achieve both of the Panel’s stated goals we must:
- limit and probably reduce the size of the world’s population
- determine and impose an appropriate level of equitable individual consumption
- stop economic growth by creating a steady-state global economy.
If we fail to achieve any of these interrelated requirements we must fail to achieve the stated goals of facilitating global sustainability and tackling poverty.
Thanks,