Sustainable Development

Introduction

Sustainable development is now a universal slogan. It is common parlance in China as in Britain. But what are we talking about? Sustainable development means different things to different people. On the one hand there is room for misunderstanding and different priorities. On the other, different experiences of sustainability can lead to new thinking, and new thinking is what we need. Today I want to suggest how our thoughts are evolving, and what should now follow.

So what does sustainable development actually mean? John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility, has described our experience of sustainable development as being like a blind man encountering an elephant. Each comes across a different part and tries make sense of the hide, belly, trunk, tusks and other bits of anatomy. The reports are hugely diverse. Yet all the bits add up to an extraordinary, as-yet-invisible whole.

Perhaps the best known definition of sustainable development that of the Brundtland Commission of 1987:

"Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

But that begs as many questions as it answers. I have a suggestion of my own:

"Durable change for the better while protecting the earth we inherit and the earth we bequeath".

Or a sound bite from Rob Gray:

Treating the world as if we intended to stay".

Planetary Health

If we and future generations are indeed to stay, we need an Earth in good environmental health. That health is now endangered. A periodical visitor from space would find more change in its surface in the last two hundred years than in the preceding two thousand, and more change in the last twenty years than in the preceding two hundred. As was suggested in the title of a recent book, there is something new under the sun.

What has been going on? I suppose there are five main factors.

First we have been multiplying our numbers at a giddy rate. At the time of Thomas Malthus the population was 1 billion. Now there are 6.4 billion of us. This year is the 10th anniversary of the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development. In the last ten years fertility rates have dropped in many areas, and much has been achieved through the wider use of birth control, and female education. But the world's population could still be up to 9 billion by 2050, with growth where it can least be supported. China was one of the first countries to recognize and act on population issues.

Next is deterioration of land quality and accumulation of wastes. We have been damaging the soils which sustain all terrestrial creatures, a well recognized problem in China. The Asian Development Bank believes that in China more than 40 percent of land area is affected by wind erosion, salinization and desertification. Most countries still lack coherent policies on minimalization and disposal of wastes.

Next comes pollution of both salt and fresh water. Oceanic pollution is worst offshore. In the oceans as a whole, fish stocks are a useful test. Recent estimates by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization indicate that at least 60% of world fisheries are fully exploited or over-fished.

Meanwhile demand for fresh water has doubled every 21 years. Over the next two decades water use by humans seems likely to increase by 40% while 17% more water will be needed to grow food for growing populations, particularly in poor countries. Water shortages are not new. Yet the amount of fresh water available remains the same as it was at the time of the Han and Roman Empires when the human population was 450 million.

Next is our continuing destruction of other living species at rates comparable to those caused by extraterrestrial impacts in the long past. Current rates of extinction could be many times what they would be under natural conditions. The number of endangered or threatened species listed by International Union for the Conservation of Nature has dramatically increased. One in four mammal species, which are key indicators of eco-system health, are facing a high risk of extinction in the near future.

On a global scale, damage to ecosystems is already extensive and the future course of evolution will be substantially changed by current human activity. As has been recently stated by the Worldwide Fund For Nature:

"All species are doing a job, even if we don't know what that job is. Removing a species from the ecosystem is like removing a rivet from an aeroplane without knowing its function. Nobody would want to fly in that aeroplane, but that is what we are doing to our environment."

Nowhere is this more true than in the micro-world of bacteria and viruses, which learn how to react to almost any drug we may throw at them. Humans take 20 years to reproduce. Bacteria do the job in 20 minutes. Nor can we yet assess the effects of introduction of genetically modified organisms.

Last we have been changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. Acid precipitation can be dealt with when there is sufficient political will. There is an array of international agreements to manage and eventually reverse depletion of the ozone layer. Climate change is more difficult. It relates directly to the ways in which we produce and use energy. Since the industrial revolution we have been using the sky as a waste unit. As a result carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has now reached its highest level in over 400,000 years, and is at a third higher than in pre-industrial times. The last two years has seen the annual rate of increase rise to over 2 parts per million, faster than the 1.5 parts per million rise in previous decades. The science of the carbon cycle is imperfectly understood, but there is a clear relationship between atmospheric carbon and global surface temperature.

The only real controversy is about the degree of change we are bringing about. The Third Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in 2002 suggested rises in average global surface temperature of between 1.4ºC and 5.8ºC by the end of this century, an increase on its previous Assessment of 1996. Sea levels are predicted to rise world wide between 9 and 88 cm between 1990 and 2100, but could be more if current melting in the Arctic and Antarctic continues.

As has been well brought out in UNEP's Millennium report on the Environment known as GEO 2000, almost all environmental problems are getting worse and in many cases the long term effects have yet to be seen.

The sheer scale of the problem was brought out in a Declaration signed by 1500 scientists in Amsterdam in July 2001. They gave two clear warnings:

"Human activities have the potential to switch the Earth's System to alternative modes of operation that may prove irreversible and less hospitable to humans and other life... The nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the Earth's system, their magnitudes and rates of change are unprecedented. The Earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state".

"The accelerating human transformation of the Earth's environment is not sustainable. Therefore the business-as-usual way of dealing with the Earth's System is not an option. It has to be replaced - as soon as possible - by deliberate strategies of management that sustain the Earth's environment while meeting social and economic development objectives".

The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 was supposed to bring together the disparate strands of sustainability, and examine the problems of the human condition. Some progress was made on broad issues and some good, even unlikely things emerged, among them partnerships between non-governmental organizations, business and industry, universities and the rest. But overall the outcomes were probably best described as, "many trees, but little wood".

Values

Clearly we have more of a crisis than most people and their leaders have grasped. The environment has to be seen as a kind of endowment of natural capital which we have inherited and will pass on to our descendants. I do not think that anyone could disagree with the statement by a well-known economist that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment". In short without a healthy environment, there can be no healthy economy.

But there is a real difficulty on how to assess health. The ideologues of ever freer trade like to suggest the price mechanism. But as another distinguished economist once remarked: "Markets are superb at setting prices, but incapable of recognizing costs". Prices are indicators. But we have to make sure that they tell the truth about costs. A pricing system should include not only the traditional costs, but also the costs involved in replacing the resource, and those of the damage that use of that resource may do.

Recently efforts have increased, not least in China, to bring greater compatibility between classical economics and sustainability. Within the World Bank new methods of environmental accounting have been used to take account of the depreciation of natural capital. On this reckoning any losses must be offset by gains elsewhere, for example in the stock of such human resources as services, knowledge and social capital. As this is similar to normal business accounting, it fits well with current economic thinking.

But our ability to substitute human capital for environmental capital must be limited. Technology can create as many problems as it solves. Who could have predicted that seemingly inert chlorofluorocarbons would become such a threat to the ozone layer? Not everything can be given monetary or economic values. How can we value the loss of a species, or of such ecological services as the air we breathe?

Responses

What so far has been the response among ordinary people? It tends to follow a regular pattern. First there is a widespread sense of unease, even helplessness. It seems just too much to understand, let alone cope with. Then people try and patch up things as they are with diminishing results. Then they see the need for something more radical. There are many stops, starts and backsliding. Finally they begin to think differently, and what was difficult before looks easier if not almost inescapable. I leave it to you to judge where each of us now is in this process. In some areas we are well ahead, and in others far behind.

Civic society must be fully involved, but governments carry much responsibility. They must display leadership, while respecting and to some extent guiding public opinion. Again this has been evident in China.

I now turn to the Chinese experience. I have been a member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development since its inception. The Council's reports are a good illustration of how attitudes and policies have changed over the last thirteen years. Each year they have become both clearer and more practical as the work of the various expert groups or task forces has enlarged our knowledge of conditions in China.

The last set of recommendations was perhaps the most telling yet. In my view the essential elements in the success of the Council have been: regular access to the Chinese leadership; growth of genuine and uninhibited dialogue between Chinese and foreign participants; the existence of expert groundwork by the contributing task forces; visible progress in dealing with certain problems such as air and water pollution; and above all the sense that the leadership was listening to the Council, and ready, within the usual political limitations, to take the necessary actions.

Obviously success has not come all at once. Some issues like pricing of water, effective measures for conservation of biodiversity, the wide range of energy issues, particularly in cities, and the sustainability of land conversion, particularly in western China, have raised substantial difficulties. China is not alone in this respect.

Perhaps the single biggest problem, as the leadership has always acknowledged, is local and even regional implementation of policies which look well on paper but require painful efforts to enforce. At the same time China has been foremost in some of the theoretical aspects of sustainable development. The Task Force on Environmental Economics, in which I take a special interest, is now engaged on work of possibly world-wide significance in seeking to define what Wen Jiabao has called "green, clean growth" as a contribution to the overriding objective of xiaokang.

I have been asked if I have any points to which I think China should pay particular attention in working towards this goal. One or two are obvious: the problems of rapid urbanization; the effects of increased meat-eating on Chinese food security; new technologies for making cleaner use of Chinese coal resources; and future transport policies. At present China seems to be moving towards greater use of cars, whereas in Europe we are back to trains, bicycles and even rickshaws.

For the future, I cannot help thinking that as the most heavily and variously populated country in the world, China could make a unique contribution in the field of bio-medicine and bio-technology generally. The same goes for conservation of the unique spread of biodiversity in China.

I have three main recommendations for you:

• First is to applaud and encourage your current work on environmental and natural resource pricing. This calls for a need to move from a 'standard of living' approach to a 'quality of life' approach.
• Second is to persuade you that models of development and accountability elsewhere are not necessarily appropriate in China. You have the opportunity to leap-frog over the mistakes made elsewhere. What happens in one part of China is not necessarily applicable in other parts. Each region has its own character and potentialities.
• Third is to educate the next and future generations in ways consistent with the great traditions of Chinese civilization in knowledge of natural processes, connectedness with the natural world, and a broad sense of responsibility for the good health of the earth.