Growing pains
February 10, 2012
Almost a billion people around the world are starving, while another billion suffer health problems linked to overeating.
Farming subsidies in rich countries have crippled the agricultural sector in the developing world as the sale of crops for animal feed drives up grain prices. It's tragically ironic that so many people suffering malnutrition today are in fact farmers.
Limits to growth
More than 40 years ago the Club of Rome - an independent non-profit organization - commissioned a team of systems analysts to design computer simulations measuring global growth prospects for a number of alternative future scenarios. Their model allowed for different developments affecting resource availability such as agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection.
Most scenarios resulted in ongoing economic growth and population increases until about 2030, when the world reached a tipping point. Only drastic environmental protection measures were capable of changing the system's behavior to allow both population and wealth to remain at a constant level.
When these findings were published in the "Limits to Growth" report in 1972, many critics slammed its predictions as overly pessimistic or even science fiction. But today no one can deny that society is consuming beyond its means, according to Indian environmental and human rights activist Vandana Shiva. Water scarcity, climate change and soil degradation are all proof that the culture of consumption that grew in the wake of the Second World War is unsustainable, she said.
Consumption boom
"We must reduce our ecological footprint - consciously and responsibly," Shiva said, citing Mahatma Gandhi as a role model for simple living. "A simple life need not be a poor life," Shiva added. "We must relieve the pressure we're putting on the planet and learn to share resources.
The average European consumes resources at 10 times the rate of a person living in a developing country in the southern hemisphere. While the world population has doubled since 1960, the amount of resources being consumed exploded six-fold.
Modern technology means resources are being used more efficiently than they were 30 years ago, but the general trend is clear: More and more people want ever-larger slices of the global resource pie.
Spare planet, anyone?
If all the natural resources currently consumed in just one day were stacked large piles, they would form the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings.
On an annual basis, this means the 7 billion people living on earth use 1.3 times more resources than the planet is capable of regenerating in the same period.
The deputy director of the German Development Institute (DIE), Imme Scholz, warned that this rate of consumption is clearly not sustainable - neither ecologically nor socially.
Scholz said the earth was approaching a "tipping point," and cited climate change as an example of how small, gradual processes can have a major impact on the environment in the long term.
On the edge
The realization that humanity is destroying its own environment - and its own future - has also taken time to gain acceptance.
In 1992 United Nations representatives gathered in Rio de Janiero agreed on Agenda 21 - a set of development guidelines for the 21st century. But resource consumption rates have continued to rise, and with them, the number of species listed as endangered and extinct.
This year's Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development aims to get policymakers back on track to deal with future development challenges. But globalization critics say they can only succeed if global resources are redistributed. Environmental protection measures must be linked to anti-poverty reforms and an economic rethink if sustainability is to become anything more than a buzzword.
Author: Helle Jeppesen / sje
Editor: Holly Fox