Det saknade miljömålet - Jordens Vänner

abstract
In 1999, the Swedish parliament adopted 15 environmental
goals. Taken together, they are intended to function as
an action plan for the national environmental policy. An
evaluation every fourth year is part of the environmental
goal policy, as a necessary step for this policy to be reliable.
A sixteenth goal was decided in 2005. There does not seem
to exist anything similar to the Swedish environmental
goals anywhere in the world.
However, the global perspectives are almost totally
missing in the Swedish environmental goal structure,
the only exceptions being the global warming and ozon
layer goals. This is remarkable, considering the ever
increasing globalisation. One practical manifestation of
the globalisation are the growing imports of food, feed,
pulp and paper from the developing world to the wealthy,
industrialized countries. Very recently, the industrialized
countries have started to import large quantities of biofuels
from the South. Together with increasing wealth in the
South and a rapidly growing population, this results in
forests and savannas being cleared to make room for new
pastures, plantations and arable land. This leads to habitat
destruction, which is by far the most important cause of
the ongoing impoverishment of biodiversity.
There is an obvious need for a new environmental goal
focusing on impacts in the South from growing imports
of agricultural and forest products to the North. Such
a complementary environmental goal, including eight
subgoals, is proposed and formulated in this report.
This report contains 14 case studies, 11 of which concern
renewable natural resources and three non-renewables.
The renewables are wood & paper, cotton, ethanol,
palm oil, soybeans, Brazilian beef, coffee, cocoa, bananas,
giant prawns, and fish meal & fish oil, the non-renewables
tantalum, gold and oil. The 11 renewable natural resources
have in common that they require large areas, which is
the fundamental reason for the habitat destruction that
they cause (fish meal & fish oil being one exception, as it
does not cause extensive habitat destruction).
Areas necessary to meet Swedish imports of renewables
have been calculated. It has not been possible to calculate
any area for wood & paper or giant prawns from aquaculture,
respectively. Furthermore, ”area” is not relevant
with respect to fish oil & fish meal, or to the portion of
giant prawns imports that has its origin in fishery. The
areas below are given in square kilometres.
Cotton 1 600
Soy 1 600
Coffee 1 300
Brazilian Beef 1 100
Ethanol 500
Palm Oil 300
Cocoa 300
Bananas 100
Wood & Paper ?
Giant Prawns ?
Fish Oil & Fish Meal -
At the UN Conference on Environment and Development
in Rio de Janeiro (UNCED) in 1992, Friends of the Earth
International launched the concept of Environmental
Space, focusing on all human beings’ equal right to the
world’s natural resources, and the current extremely
uneven distribution of resource consumption (one fifth
of global population accounts for a dominating share of
world consumption of natural resources). Part of the environmental
space concept is also that today’s utilization
of natural resources must not impoverish biodiversity or
confine the options of future generations. There are many
similarities between the environmental space concept and
the philosophy behind the views of the Swedish environmental
goal policy presented in this report.
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