A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

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Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Built up land - considered to be replacing primary cropland, though this assumption is obviously shaky, e.g. think of Dubai or Tibet with their vast areas of land that cannot be cultivated! Source - Tom Chance’s Website Andrew Simms, Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation, calculated that the world overshot its biological capacity for the year on 23 rd September 2008, the earliest “ecological debt day” on record and that we are heading for ecological system collapse. Another indicator is the increasing proportion of the Earth’s land prone to drought. UK Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research says that area is likely to rise to nearly one third. Together with rising food prices, this is leading to increasing numbers of hungry people who are likely to migrate. In California, drought is having a devastating effect on people, the economy and agriculture in the state that is the largest producer of food and agricultural products in USA. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency. Wealthy nations like us take far more than our fair share of world resources, as I show in the chart below. Putting it bluntly, it’s greed. Citizens in Europe and other rich countries generally consume far more resources than people anywhere else. London’s “footprint” is huge. London requires 125 times its surface area to provide its needs. If everyone consumed like Londoners, we would need three planets; five at the Los Angeles rate! Yet most countries aspire to this unsustainable “Western” way of life. UK’s food and farming footprint is up to six times the food growing area of the UK. In the UK we are taking very much more than our fair share and we must substantially reduce it. We need to take this seriously and reduce our consumption of resources, make better and more efficient use of them and, in particular, avoid new construction unless there is a powerful justification. Eco-footprints per country Average hectares* per person 1 United Arab Emirates: 15.99 2 United States: 12.22 3 Kuwait: 10.31 4 Denmark: 9.88 5 New Zealand: 9.54 6 Ireland: 9.43 7 Australia: 8.49 8 Finland: 8.45 9 Canada: 7.66 10 Sweden: 7.53 11 France: 7.27 12 Estonia: 7.12 13 Switzerland: 6.63 14 Germany: 6.31 60
Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com 15 Czech Republic: 6.3 16 United Kingdom: 6.29 17 Saudi Arabia: 6.15 77 China: 1.84 108 India: 1.06 141 Bangladesh: 0.6 Weighted average: 3.1 *hectare = 11 959.9005 square yards Sources: World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Living Planet Report 2000, Gland, Switzerland. The inconvenient truth As populations and their aspirations increase, we face an even greater problem. A fair share would be approximately 1.8 global hectares per person. The inconvenient truth is that ultimately, people in the USA, Denmark, Germany, France and UK for example will need to reduce their average ecological footprint per person from 12.22, 9.88, 6.31, 7.27 and 6.29 respectively to 1.8 global hectares. This is a major adjustment! I asked Tom Chance to help me make sense of how we can meet this challenge. He referred me to “tom’s blog” (at that time): “Most people including BioRegional and WWF calculate our fair share according to the projected global population in 2050. That works out at 1.8gha rather than the figure based on current population - which works out at 2.1gha - because most targets relate to our average footprint in 2050. That also doesn't leave any land totally protected for other species, for example wilderness reserves and national parks. There is no agreement on the total proportion of land that we should leave - estimates range from 10% to 40% - but we can say that 1.8gha is definitely too generous if you care about biodiversity. You might think it's important to protect other species; you might agree with James Lovelock that biodiversity is necessary for a healthy biosphere and atmosphere that can support us; …..or you might just be cautious about overexploiting every last bit of land!” So, clearly, even 1.8gha is too much if we take account of other creatures – even if our only reason for caring about their fate is that our lives actually do depend on them as they are part of a complex eco-system. However, in his blog Why I am not an eco-angel he also says: “If you (or we!) do everything much more efficiently, you don't need to cut everything out. What I mean by that is that, if you produce food twice as efficiently (for example) you don't need to go on a severe diet! The way we make stuff at the moment makes it basically impossible for a UK citizen to lead a reasonable life within their fair share, but it is possible if we really reinvent our economy.” He continues: “I've gone past the suggestion that it's our individual responsibility to somehow reduce our impacts down to a sustainable level on our own. Not only is this message impossible to sell to anyone outside the "keen green" demographic (because it's too hard); it's also fundamentally wrong! Here are 3 reasons why: We won't change people's values by being angelic. We merely reinforce how different we are to the norm, which is heavily marketed by government and business. It's good to avoid charges of 61
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