The World Development Committee - Whose Earth?

Whose Earth?

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Background Information

The Facts:

The earth is warming faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years.
The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, on global record.
The summer of 2003 was Europe's hottest for 500 years.
By 2100 the world could be between 6 and 10 degrees C warmer on average.
CO2 emissions are a primary cause of global warming.
The burning of coal, oil and gas has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 30% over natural levels.

The Impact:

The area of the world stricken by drought doubled between 1970 and 2005.
150,000 die as a result of climate change each year.
30 million more people may be hungry because of climate change by 2050.
Rising sea levels and crop failure could create 150 million refugees by 2100.
The economic costs of global warming are doubling every decade.
People in low-income countries are four times more likely to die in natural disasters than people in high-income countries. Globally disaster losses increased from $71 billion in the 1960s to $608 billion in the 1990s. Poverty and lack of authentic development increases people's vulnerability to extreme weather.

A Deeper Analysis:

The Way We Are--World Development is concerned with the welfare of people, but addressing inequalities through economics and politics alone will not be enough. There is a deeper problem, which is that the world is living beyond its means. The West has run an environmental overdraft for centuries, partly because it had drawn on the resources of the rest of the world. The developing world has no such luxury, and neither any longer, have we. Authentic development must be ecologically attuned.

Much of our global environmental awareness is limited to the greenhouse effect, and the need to reduce our use of fossil fuels if we are to stop the atmosphere heating up. But to most people, and governments, the issue is how to make the substitution without any further alterations to our way of life. The problem goes much deeper than that.

The Problem--The planet is a finite system, with physical resources, like air and fresh water, bound together with living systems made up of countless species of plants and animals, each performing a different function. These ecosystems are like a web, and the species like strands. If one or two strands (species) are lost, the web can be repaired. But lose too many, and it collapses. We are close to that point now--up to a third of land-based species could face extinction by the middle of the century. There is the possibility that the rain forest of the Amazon, which is the powerhouse of much of the earth's climate, as well as home to vast numbers of species, could soon start to dry out. This is both climate change, and the result of climate change--our troubles compounded.

And on the front line are the people of the developing world. It is not usually appreciated that the quality of life for many rural Africans in the 19th century was higher than it is now. The population explosion that has seen Ethiopia rise from 5 million people in 1900 to 77 million today, and 170 million expected by 2050, has squeezed the natural world into unsustainable corners (40% forest cover in Ethiopia in 1900 down to 4% by 1990), with a more erratic climate and degraded agriculture as a result. Freeing up trading conditions will benefit only those who devised the system, and it is a fallacy to think that economic growth will solve the problem. We need an economy of stability, in which activity works to redistribute wealth, and to improve the quality of life, rather than increase the quantity of goods we use up. We learn this from nature--economy and ecology have the same root, coming from the Greek word that means both household and world. Each year the rain forest produces more new growth and new life per acre than intensive agricultural systems, but it doesn't grow in area or in height. All the incoming energy from the sun is used up with maximum efficiency, and the material resources (minerals) are all recycled so that none leave the system.

Ecosystem Services--Living ecosystems regulate the natural world, and also regulate our own human lives. Climate control, waste regulation, fresh water, food, building materials, pharmaceuticals, cultural values and psychological support are all provided for us by the natural world. We normally treat only the more tangible of these as resources. But all are services which nature provides. We can harvest them in a balanced and sustainable way, or we can mine them to exhaustion. If it seems that nature in some situations is hostile, it is usually because we have impaired its ability to deliver a stable environment, or because we are forcing it to perform in a manner that is fundamentally not natural. For most of these services there is no alternative source, and we cannot survive without them.

The Solutions

It is better to learn how to work within natural systems, than to replace them. So cattle in the African grasslands are far less productive and far more damaging to the environment than the wild game animals working in combination. But this has to be done sustainably, as the appalling destruction of world fish populations has shown.
Complex mixed agriculture is far better than single crop production, as usually favoured by economists. Hill tribes in New Guinea have worked out how to mimic the complexity of the rain forest in their gardens, with highly productive results. But they are being pressured into replacing these with plantations.
Bushmen in southern Africa, often thought of as primitive, have a more nutritious and reliable diet from foraging in the desert, than the settled cattle farmers in the more fertile lands around them. And they have more leisure time too! But progress, in the form of the Botswana government, has decreed that they have to be settled, and turn to cattle.
In the rain forest, all the nutrients that we expect to find in the soil are in the trees. Once the trees are removed, the soil sustains crops for only a few years and then semi-desert conditions develop. Cattle and other forms of intensive monoculture are sustained only by the use of chemicals.
As the pressures mount, environmental refugees will flee the land. They cannot be accommodated in the West (the principle is fine, but the numbers will be too great, and it only shifts the problem rather than solves it). They cannot go to the cities, as that will encourage further shifts to western-type agriculture to sustain the growing urban masses. They have to be empowered to stay on the land, by being given the freedom and resources to develop in a sustainable way--without the pressure of competition from the West.

Rules of Thumb:

However sophisticated or technological our world is, it is still part of nature, and has to obey the rules.
If we give nature room to manoeuvre, it can heal much of the damage we have already done.
We have to include ecosystem services in our economic balance sheets, and make decisions accordingly.
Looking to nature will help us design sustainable responses to human problems.
To banish poverty, we also have to banish excessive wealth.
God's creation is indivisible.