ISEAL Alliance

The following article is an excerpt from The Ecological Wealth of Nations, a report released recently by ISEAL member Global Footprint Network. The report demonstrates the growing need for nations to recognize the value of their own ecological assets, as well as the need to find a way for humanity to live well, within the means of our planet.

A generation ago, humanity used resources and produced carbon dioxide emissions at a rate the planet could regenerate and reabsorb. Today, we not only exceed that threshold, we require the amount of capacity from nature it would take almost one and a half planets to sustainably produce, according to the most recent figures from ISEAL member Global Footprint Network.

Global Footprint Network’s data show that humanity is demanding nature’s resources and producing carbon dioxide emissions at a rate 44 percent faster than what nature can regenerate and reabsorb. Put another way, it takes a year and five months to produce the ecological services humanity demands in one year.

As we have shifted from living within our means to incurring an ever escalating ecological debt, the rules of the game have changed. No longer can we operate as if resources were limitless. This new reality demands a new approach to the way nations value their ecological assets: not as stocks to be liquidated for economic growth, but as an important source of on-going wealth in their own right.

Ecological Constraints and National Well-being

Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates the Ecological Footprint of more than 100 nations and humanity as a whole. The Ecological Footprint determines the amount of productive land and sea required to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb its wastes. Put simply, it calculates how much nature can provide, how much is being used, and who uses what.

Ecological Footprint accounting serves as a method for calculating society’s use of nature’s assets. Based on data from the United Nations, as well as in-country statistical sources, Global Footprint Network’s research compares humanity’s Ecological Footprint (the demand our consumption places on the biosphere) with biocapacity (the biosphere’s ability to meet this demand), providing a kind of bank statement for the planet.

In 1962 most of the world’s countries were using resources and emitting carbon emissions at a rate that their own ecosystems could keep up with. Today, less than 20 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where this is still the case.

Countries that import food, fibre and timber resources or products that incorporate them are meeting their consumption demands by using ecological assets from outside their own borders, and are at risk if demand outpaces supply, or if resource shortages develop in the exporting country.

In an ever more globalized world, countries meet the demand for the resources they consume by using both their own biocapacity, and the biocapacity of other countries. With continuing growth in world population and, in many places, per capita consumption, competition for resources is rapidly increasing. As prices rise and shortages develop, countries may find it difficult to maintain their economies and the well-being of their residents -- and to achieve sought-after development goals or even to sustain existing successes. Wealthier countries will likely be buffered from the impacts of these resource shortages longer than countries with less purchasing power.

These shortages have already started to become apparent. In December 2007, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization began warning about absolute rather than distributional global food shortages (Rosenthal, 2007). One response has been an international “biocapacity grab,” with countries buying up the rights to food production — that is, buying cropland biocapacity in other countries in order to ensure a continuing adequate supply of food. Saudi Arabia, for example, has contracted for the use of large areas of land in Ethiopia, while South Korean companies have tried, thus far unsuccessfully, to obtain growing rights to half of the arable land in Madagascar (Rice, 2009).

In addition to these attempts to purchase biocapacity, a recent report by the UN Environmental Programme suggests that military conflicts over control of increasingly scarce natural resources will expand over the coming decades (UNEP, 2009).

A New Map of the World

Countries also make demands on biocapacity external to their own borders through the emissions of carbon dioxide that come from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes such as cement manufacturing. These emissions quickly disperse throughout the global atmosphere. Biocapacity somewhere on the planet is needed to sequester them if their accumulation in the atmosphere is to be avoided. With climate agreements, there soon may be significant costs imposed for emitting carbon dioxide, as well as significant economic benefits for those countries that have more sequestration capacity than they are using.

How much is a country relying on domestic, versus foreign, biocapacity to satisfy its own consumption demands? Knowing the answers to such questions can help a country better manage its economic and social well-being.

Many countries rely, in net terms, on the biocapacity of other nations to meet domestic demands for goods and services. For example: Japan imports Ecuadorian wood to make paper; Europe imports meat fed on Brazilian soy; the United States imports Peruvian cotton; and China obtains lumber from Tanzania.

Because disruptions of this supply chain can negatively impact their economies and their quality of life, countries that are importing renewable resources are dependent on how well both their own ecological assets and those of their trading partners are being managed. Knowing where this biocapacity is located, and the stability of these assets in the face of political, economic and climatic challenges, can help a country manage its imports and select its trading partners to reduce the risks that come from exposure to trade in an increasingly resource-constrained world.

Investment Risks and Opportunities

Achieving a sustainable society means, at a minimum, getting out — and staying out — of ecological overshoot.

Remaining on our current path is not a viable option — ecological limits have already been transgressed, wastes are accumulating in the atmosphere and the oceans, ecosystems that we depend on are in decline all over the planet. In a world of overshoot, business-as-usual means exasperating an already growing ecological debt. This risks further climate change, ecosystem degradation, and possible permanent losses of productivity.

The good news is that change is possible, and that those who provide the strategies, technologies, products and services that support the transition to sustainability will be at a distinct advantage. Countries that find ways to create the greatest improvements in the well-being of their people on the smallest Footprints, while maintaining or even expanding their biocapacity, will be more resilient in the face of growing resource constraints and rising costs for carbon emissions, and will be able to maintain their development gains.

Infrastructure, because of its long life, will play an especially important role in determining whether the sustainability challenge will be successfully met.

The energy, transportation, housing and manufacturing systems we build today will be with us long into the future. If we invest in systems that can operate on a small Footprint, that do not have negative impacts on biocapacity, and that are flexible and resilient in face of changing resource constraints, they will provide lasting benefits.

If, on the other hand, we design infrastructure that is dependent on a high level of resource throughput, or that damages or depletes the ecological services that make its operation possible, any benefits gained will be at best short-lived.

Similarly, the way we manage agricultural, water and forestry systems will determine whether they will be able to provide an ongoing stream of renewable resources and carbon sequestration services.

With more than half the world’s population already living in cities, and that percentage expected to grow, urban infrastructure and the supply chains that support it are especially critical. Cities provide unique opportunities for achieving efficiency gains in housing and mobility systems while improving quality of life.

Utilities providing energy, water and waste management services can be integrated to generate Footprint reductions that in less densely -populated areas might be more difficult to attain.

In countries with rapidly expanding populations, education, especially of women, along with improved health care and access to family planning options, can help mitigate the contribution of population growth to local and global overshoot.

The Way Forward

Reintegrating human society into the larger ecological community will take a new social and economic architecture, one more aligned with the Earth’s physiology.

The old geopolitical paradigm will need to give way to a new biopolitical one, and with this shift will come a transition from competition to collaboration, a richness of new possibilities, and creative new solutions for living well without transgressing the Earth’s ecological limits.