HERE’S SOME GOOD NEWS: There’s a mountain of evidence that a sustainable future is actually possible. Many technologies, practices, and systems already exist to bring about necessary global transformations. The Anthropocene, after all, doesn’t have to be an epoch of negative human impacts only. It could be a “good” Anthropocene, in which massive human innovation guides the world into an era of abundance within planetary boundaries. This story, of health and prosperity for all within the confines of a stable planet, has never been told before. The time has come to do so.
We believe it starts with a mind-shift, a change in perspective. As we saw in Section 2, the old ways of thinking have to go. The idea that economic growth is disconnected from nature, for example, or that environmental issues stand in the way of human development, are obsolete notions. In fact, just the opposite is true: To provide a sustainable basis for human prosperity, we must reconnect our societies with the biosphere and strengthen its resilience. The systems that support life on Earth, from a stable climate to rich biodiversity, are prerequisites for modern economies. In the Anthropocene, sustainability is the key to prosperity.
But such a mind-shift could take time, perhaps even generations, to achieve. And that’s a luxury we don’t have. To stay on the safe side of most planetary boundaries, we must reduce the rate of negative environmental impacts within this decade. We can’t wait 30 years. Unless we do something right now to lessen the risks of triggering self-accelerating Earth processes, we’re likely to suffer catastrophic outcomes within this century. For that reason, we’re proposing that, as political leaders, business managers, and private citizens, we take a dual-track strategy: 1) tackle the most urgent challenges with immediate fixes, while 2) doing everything we can to promote the long-term mind-shift that this book is all about: How to reconnect our human societies—and what we value in life—with the beauty of nature and the resilience of Earth.
Let’s address the first of these goals, the short-term fixes. We see two obvious opportunities for humanity to jump-start the future immediately. One is a global transformation to a world economy free of fossil fuels and the other is a global transformation to a sustainable food future. Both would solve many of the grand challenges facing humanity, generate social and economic benefits, create stability and security, and yield positive synergies across many planetary boundaries. In both cases, we already have the know-how to succeed. To unleash investments, innovation, and policies that enable these immediate fast-track transformations to occur the world community must agree to meet our need for modern energy and food while staying within planetary boundaries. That means defending the 2°C limit for global warming that world leaders agreed upon in 2009 in Copenhagen (although science tells us 1.5°C would be safer), which gives us a global carbon budget within which we must operate. We must also agree to produce our food within planetary boundaries, where the goals are relatively straightforward: zero loss of biodiversity and zero expansion of agricultural land, while keeping rivers flowing, and closing the loop on nitrogen and phosphorus.
POWER UP
The first fast-track solution is a switch to renewable energy systems. Based on what we know today, this should be doable by mid-century. For one thing, the sustainable potential of renewable energy is enormous, many times more than what we need to power the whole world. The current global primary energy consumption amounts to approximately 500 exajoules (EJ), and the sustainable potential for wind power alone exceeds 1,000 EJ. If you add bio-mass, solar, geothermal, and hydropower, the sustainable potential of all renewables exceeds 11,000 EJ. Additional capacity could be claimed through changes in technologies or practices that boost energy efficiency, many of which would also save money.
A recent study by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) painted a positive picture of our energy future. It showed that a total phase-out of crude oil, coal, and natural gas could be achieved by 2050 through technically feasible strategies while still meeting growing global energy needs. According to the report, this transformation could be accomplished if humanity were to stop using fossil fuels for electric power generation, heating, and transportation systems (the toughest challenge, no doubt). Heating and cooling would be achieved by using electric heat pumps, solar thermal energy, and combined heat and power technology (CHP), in which waste heat is recovered from power plants or factories for secondary uses. Vehicles powered by electricity, hydrogen, methane, natural gas, or fuel cells would replace those using gasoline. The plan also calls for efficiency improvements and savings in consumption, with a one percent reduction per year in global demand for heating and cooling, and a one percent increase per year in demand for electric power. It won’t be easy, in other words, but it can be done.
The Global Energy Assessment (GEA), a major international study of the world’s energy future, in 2012 presented similar results. The study showed that it would be possible to decarbonize the world’s energy systems by 2050 while meeting rising energy demand, although it will require major investments in renewable energy systems. The GEA estimated that some 1,500 billion USD per yr would be enough to spur massive investments in clean-energy technology. The current subsidies for fossil energy amounts to an astounding 500–600 billion USD per yr, or about a third of the investment needed to unleash a global transformation to a clean-energy future within a climate boundary. So just phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies, a promise already made by the G20 countries, would go a long way toward opening the window for a renewable energy future. Moreover, these are small numbers compared to the overall global GDP. As shown by the fifth assessment of the IPCC Working Group III, mitigation efforts to stay within 2°C of global temperature increase would slow down economic growth by a mere 0.06 percent.
This was hammered home in late 2014 by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, led by Felipe Calderón, which convincingly showed in its “New Climate Economy” report that there is no contradiction between economic growth and a transition to a decarbonized world economy. On the contrary, most analyses today show that pathways to decarbonization involve profitable investments with low short-term costs and high returns in the medium and long term.
The best way to kick-start this global energy revolution, we believe, would be a global price on carbon. Most global energy analyses suggest that a price in the range of 50 to 100 USD per ton of CO2 would be necessary by 2050. But in the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) the price has been hovering below 20 USD per ton of CO2, which clearly is too low to stimulate transformative change. Only Sweden has operated a systematically high carbon price for a long period. Since 1990, Sweden has had a comprehensive carbon tax across all energy sectors of approximately 100 USD per ton of CO2. This tax has resulted in a decoupling of the Swedish economy, allowing continued economic growth while reducing national CO2 emissions from industry. It has also resulted in a transformation of the heating sector, shedding off the last fossil energy sources in favor of heat production based on biomass residue from the forest industry. Placing the right price on carbon can thus trigger an energy transformation.
Feeding the world through sustainable agriculture will require both bioscience and indigenous knowledge, as can be found here in the Dominican Republic.
Why are we so confident the time has come to make this transition? One reason is that renewable energy technologies have now reached a market penetration big enough to enable them to take the big leap into dominating the energy market. Empirical evidence shows that new technologies require a market penetration of approximately 10 percent before they can accelerate to a dominant position. For decades, despite very rapid growth rates, renewable energy systems, from photovoltaics to wind turbines, have accounted for only single digit percentages of various energy markets. But this is rapidly changing. In Germany and several other countries, renewable energy systems have already approached the 10 percent threshold in market penetration.
Another reason, of course, is the urgency of reducing global CO2 emissions. As we saw in chapter 2, for Earth to have a reasonable chance of staying below an additional 2°C of warming, the world’s economies must decarbonize by 2050. After that, in the second half of this century, we must have negative emissions (by sequestering more carbon than we emit, for example, in land and biomass). Two thirds of the long-lived greenhouse gas emissions, or 78 percent of CO2 emissions, come from the use of fossil fuels in our energy systems. If we can solve this problem, we can solve a large portion of the climate challenge.
A global energy transition, in other words, would solve the bulk of the global climate crisis, provide energy to poor nations as well as rich, and expand the many alternatives to fossil fuels we have today. Technically and economically, we’re ready to jump-start a sustainable future.
A TRIPLY GREEN REVOLUTION
The second fast-track solution is a transition to sustainable agriculture. This should also be doable by mid-century, when a world population of some nine billion people will require 50 percent more food. Agriculture today represents the single largest cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions (about 30 percent of global GHG emissions originate from agricultural production, roughly half from cultivation and the other half from deforestation). It’s also the world’s largest user of land (almost 40 percent of the world’s terrestrial surface is under agriculture), and the largest user of freshwater (70 percent of withdrawals of freshwater from rivers are used for irrigation). In addition, agriculture is the main source of nutrient overload from leakage of nitrogen and phosphorus into our waterways. What we eat has a much larger cost than what we pay.
Every square meter of available land is cultivated in Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa.
Agriculture’s heavy footprint derives from its modernization since the 1950s. The “green revolution” that brought such a remarkable increase in productivity during the second half of the 20th century was based on fertilizers, fossil fuels for tractors and food processing, and an extensive use of chemicals. What we need now is a new kind of revolution—a “triply green” revolution that boosts productivity even higher, but also reduces impacts on the environment and sustainably manages water resources. This revolution will require a global partnership between science, farmers, businesses, and societies in which we reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuels (for traction, transport, processing, and fertilizer production), close the loop on nutrient flows (what goes out needs to go back in), and strengthen the resilience of the environment (for example through improved water productivity). Among the keys to achieving these goals will be reducing food waste (as much as 30 percent is lost between farm and fork), rethinking our diets (especially with respect to meat consumption), and improving water management (through some old-fashioned ways to collect rainfall and store runoff).
In many regions of the world, there’s still a huge gap between current crop yields and what could be achieved through modern techniques. In large parts of Africa’s savannah regions, for example, average yields of staple food crops such as maize, sorghum, and millet remain around 1–2 metric tons per hectare, even though it should be possible to generate yields on the order of 4–6 tons per hectare.
A major challenge is securing a reliable water supply. Although these regions generally have enough water in total, the bulk often comes in a few great downpours, with a high risk of droughts and floods with long dry spells in between. In these smallholder, rain-fed agricultural systems, less than 50 percent of the rainfall is generally used to produce food. Instead, it’s lost through evaporation and runoff, which generally causes soil erosion and land degradation. Improved water management, ranging from soil and water conservation to small-scale irrigation systems, could go a long way toward enabling big improvements in productivity. Investing in strategies to manage rainfall—such as collecting runoff for supplementary irrigation in water-harvesting micro-dams that store excess runoff water during intensive rainfall events—can reduce risks enough to trigger investments in other improved practices.
But water measures alone won’t do it. Farmers also need more nutrients. Compared to farmers in the USA or Europe, who apply more than 100 kg (220 pounds) of nitrogen and phosphorus to each hectare per year, many African farmers apply less than 10 kg (22 pounds) to each hectare per year, even though they lose more than 50 kg (110 pounds) per hectare of these chemicals when the harvest is removed. No wonder, then, that such soils eventually degrade and lose their productivity.
The “triply green” solution for these farmers isn’t to dump more fertilizers on their fields, but rather to adopt sustainable and affordable practices for improving soil, nutrient, and water management. Take plowing, for example. Although it effectively reduces weeds, plowing also exposes the richest part of the soil, the top layer, to heat and erosion. In tropical regions, this contributes to rapid burning of organic matter, which not only releases CO2 but also reduces the water-holding capacity of the soil, its rooting depth, and its capacity to absorb rainfall and avoid erosion. The effect of plowing is thus a gradual degradation of soil fertility.
By contrast, when farmers adopt conservation tillage the soil is not turned with a plow. Instead it’s opened along planting lines to a depth of at least 15 cm (six inches), which exceeds the traditional plowing depth. This creates a “micro ditch” where rainwater is concentrated and enables farmers to carry out precision application of manure and fertilizers. The idea is to copy nature as much as possible to build up organic matter and biological activity, which in turn raises productivity.
No-tillage practices have caught on lately in places such as Ghana, Zimbabwe, Niger, Kenya, and Tanzania. About 25 percent of US farmers have also replaced plow-based techniques with zero-tillage methods, while more than 70 percent of farmers in Latin American countries such as Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia have done the same. As Rattan Lal of Ohio State University has shown, adopting such practices could shift agriculture from being a major source of carbon emissions to becoming a carbon sink, sequestering potentially 1 Gt C/yr (gigaton, nine zeros), which is more than 10 percent of current global emissions.
Another way to enrich soils is to recycle wastes. Our societies today remain far too linear in terms of agriculture, with nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers plugged in at the farm end, and waste and leaking nutrients coming out the other end, polluting our freshwater and marine systems. The challenge is to close nutrient loops. Productive sanitation systems provide one such strategy. Almost all of the nitrogen and phosphorus we eat returns to the environment through our excreta and waste. Using ecological sanitation systems that separate urine and feces, and different systems to recycle treated waste from urban areas to return nutrients back to agricultural land (where it came from), we can reduce nutrient loads, provide affordable fertilization, and reduce the pressure on finite phosphorus resources. Closing the loop on nutrient cycles is a necessary strategy to return us to a safe operating space with respect to nitrogen and phosphorus. At the same time, we should recognize that many poorer regions, where fertilizers are not being used enough, will need to significantly increase inputs of such nutrients.
Advancements in biotechnology will also play an important role in a triply green revolution. The scale and pace of the world food challenge is so great, we’ll need new breakthroughs in genetic crop research to succeed. This could be accomplished, for example, through the development of perennial cereal crops to drastically reduce tillage requirements, make the systems resilient to droughts and dry spells (because of their deeper root systems), and immediately transform cropland from carbon sources to carbon sinks. Similarly, genetic strains with drought resistance, high nutritional value, or short growing periods may soon be combined into single food crops.
To sum up our short-term fixes, then, we believe that humanity can jump-start a transition to a sustainable world by focusing on renewable energy and agricultural reform. But to bring about lasting change we must also inspire a long-term shift in perspective that ignites a new generation of leadership, renewal, and innovation.
THE BLUE MARBLE
As the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbited the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968, Earth appeared to rise from below the horizon like a blue marble in the vast blackness of space. For the first time, humanity saw our home planet as a single fragile sphere. “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” astronaut Jim Lovell said. The photograph astronaut William Anders took of the “Earthrise” (see page 3) became one of the most famous in history, suddenly bringing home to many millions around the world the importance of preserving our shared planetary inheritance.
Sadly, in recent decades we’ve forgotten that message. In the midst of an unprecedented growth in the world economy, we’ve largely ignored the rapid deterioration of Earth. We’ve forgotten that a stable climate, adequate freshwater supplies, clean air, and biodiversity are all generated by a functioning stratosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere. Instead, we’ve benefited from mistreating the planet, perceiving environmental protection as an economic cost and thus a burden to growth. We’ve convinced ourselves that we must choose between growth or sustainability, but cannot have both.
As we saw in Chapter 3, the consequences of holding onto these invalid assumptions about the relationship between nature and society are now beginning to be felt. We’re pushing, or at risk of pushing, the boundaries for climate change, freshwater use, land use, nutrient overloading, air pollution, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution, well beyond the ranges that would safely maintain a stable Earth. We can’t continue to operate the planet like a subprime loan, taking advantage of Earth to live beyond our means.
The time has come to put an accurate value on natural capital in economic terms. For some time now, we’ve failed to attribute the full cost of our production and consumption systems. In simple terms, we’ve been cheating ourselves. At the same time that we’ve increased GDP, which is essentially the only aggregate measure of economic progress that we have, we’ve also degraded land, polluted air, destroyed water-supply catchments, cut down rainforests, and contributed to the melting of polar ice sheets. We must reverse that relationship by recognizing that the global economy is, in fact, a subsystem of the biosphere. To serve humanity well, the economy needs to operate within the confines of Earth’s life-support systems, not only for future generations but also for the stability and security of nations today.
As cracks have appeared in the current global development model, it’s become increasingly clear that we need a better way to measure human progress, one that moves beyond GDP as an indicator of wellbeing. There’s a growing recognition that global sustainability, equity, resilience, and happiness must all be important parts of a new definition of human development. The current metrics are insufficient for the task. We must begin to implement a broader social–ecological perspective on human wellbeing in richer nations (that have reached saturation levels in growth), while investing in efficient and effective growth to alleviate poverty in poorer nations.
Finding ways to foster human wellbeing on a crowded, increasingly wealthy planet is the newest challenge for humanity. In 1990, an estimated 42 percent of the world’s population was living in absolute poverty (earning less than 1.25 USD per person per day). By 2015, that number may be as low as 10 percent. Annual growth rates in double digits since 2005 have lifted out of poverty an estimated 430 million people in South Asia and 250 million in East Asia. But as we saw earlier, research increasingly shows that we cannot sustain our gains against global poverty without also safeguarding ecosystem services and attaining global sustainability. The progress we’ve made in combating poverty today may be undermined tomorrow by environmental feedbacks from Earth due to growing human pressures on the planet.
Hydroelectric projects such as the Bakun Dam in Sarawak generate electricity with low carbon emissions, but they also impact ethnic minorities and natural habitats.
Under today’s development paradigm, every nation fends for itself in a market where no one takes responsibility for Earth’s shared ecological space, the global commons we argued in Chapter 7 no longer exists. Earth is largely seen as a free lunch, where the greedy grab the bulk of what they want, and the hungry stand by empty-handed. What’s needed in the Anthropocene is a just, rights-based, and equitable sharing of the world’s remaining ecological space.
Toward that end, Oxfam has recently developed an integrated paradigm, based on the planetary boundaries idea, to address both the social and biophysical challenges of safe and just human development. The ceiling for development would be set by the planetary boundaries (how much ecological space we can appropriate). The safe operating space under the ceiling would then be given a floor, corresponding to basic and universal human requirements for a good life. Meeting these requirements (for food, shelter, health, energy, education, resilience, and security) takes up a certain portion of the natural capital and the Earth system’s services (for example, a portion of the remaining global carbon budget to stay under 350 ppm of CO2, a certain amount of land and water for food, a certain amount of nitrogen and phosphorus, and so on). This social core would be a non-negotiable universal right to ecological space on Earth. The remaining part, between the biophysical ceiling and the social floor of the planetary boundaries, constitutes the degree of freedom, within the safe operating space, for meeting aspirations beyond basic needs.
This human development paradigm is simple, but drastically different from what we have today. Its goal is to ensure that we share social and natural capital in a just way without undermining the prosperity of fellow citizens or future generations.
A SHREWD INVESTMENT
One of the most important insights of the planetary boundaries framework is the recognition that we should stop thinking about certain things as costs or burdens for societies and see them for what they truly are: long-term natural venture capital for prosperity and wealth creation.
For two decades, delegates from around the world have argued over the most beneficial “burden-sharing” regime for the UN’s framework convention on climate change. Beneficial for whom? For themselves, never for the world. The same goes for air pollution standards, critical loads for chemicals, restrictions on use of heavy metals, negotiations to curb global deforestation, or the endless efforts within the UN convention on biological diversity to come to grips with the global extinction of species—so far to no avail. Why? Because national leaders create strategies based on short-term cost-benefit analyses, in both political and economic terms. And Earth so far, almost always, gets undervalued.
This might be understandable if there were any evidence that sustainable management of natural resources, living ecosystems, and the global climate were indeed a burden to our economies and societies. But there isn’t any such evidence. Nowhere. It’s a myth we chose to cultivate. Even in conventional economics we know that production processes depreciate capital, that eroding assets is a cost, while protecting and maintaining assets is a long-term benefit. The same goes for Earth.
The evidence is overwhelming, dating back to 18th-century economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith. Back then, land was a key source of wealth. But as technological revolutions over the years gradually reduced the value of land in relation to other industrial capitals, this fundamental insight was lost. Today we know these economists had it right. Our common planetary capital—including a stable climate and ecosystem services, from provisioning of food from agricultural land to regulation of freshwater flows to mega-cities—should be the basis of the forms of capital in our economy.
A shift in our economic perspective is thus 200 years overdue. The key first step in making that shift, apart from putting an economic value on natural capital, would be to incorporate benefits from sustainable practices into the equation. The question shouldn’t be: What’s the cost of moving toward a low-carbon society. It should be: What different kinds of benefits will investments in low-carbon energy systems, transportation, and food production generate for families, sectors, nations, and regions?
Perceptive business leaders have also picked up on the fact that additional benefits are likely to follow from investing early in a transition to sustainable business models and sustainable nations. They recognize that the real risk for organizations could be getting left behind. We live, after all, in an increasingly turbulent world, where crossing tipping points and “peak everything” are imminent threats, resulting in price volatilities, unacceptable risks of disastrous outcomes, and a scramble for resources. The real cost for a business or a nation, therefore, may be to stubbornly stay put in the current dirty, unhealthy, inefficient, and increasingly unattractive, growth model. Nations and businesses that run ahead of the crowd, transitioning to closed-loop production systems and renewable energy sources, may well be the biggest winners of tomorrow.
Figure 8.1 Exploring Avenues for a Decarbonized World. Many analyses today show, as illustrated here, that a world transformation to a renewable energy future is possible by the second half of this century. Returning to the safe space for climate will require action on many fronts, combining major expansions of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biomass, with major efficiency improvements and changes in behavior. Without a global energy transformation we will follow the dotted business-as-usual line. CHP is “combined heat and power,” highly efficient processes that capture waste heat in conventional systems, such as steam clouds rising from cooling towers, and integrate it back into production of usable heat and power.
Jobs are an integral part of a dual-track strategy for growth within planetary boundaries. In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a young cook stir-fries meat from a cobra.
A old stone wall separates farmland from grazing land at Öland, Sweden, where sheep interact with diverse flora and fauna. A rapidly changing environment puts such ecosystems at risk.
