STWR - Share The World's Resources

After decades of reliance on fossil fuels, humanity is close to breaching the sustainability of Earth. To meet both the objectives of conquering poverty and protecting the environment, we need a complete transformation of technology on which human economic activity is based, says a report by UN DESA.

New industrial revolution needed to avert ‘planetary catastrophe’ - UN News Centre

Selling nature to save nature, and ourselves - Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service

Link to UN DESA report: World Economic and Social Survey 2011 - The Great Green Technological Transformation

18th July 2011

New industrial revolution needed to avert ‘planetary catastrophe’

5th July 2011 - UN News Centre

Humanity is close to breaching the sustainability of Earth, and needs a technological revolution greater – and faster – than the industrial revolution to avoid “a major planetary catastrophe,” according to a new United Nations report.

Major investments will be needed worldwide in the developing and scaling up of clean energy technologies, sustainable farming and forestry techniques, climate-proofing of infrastructure, and in technologies reducing non-biological degradable waste production, according to The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation, published today by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

“It is rapidly expanding energy use, mainly driven by fossil fuels, that explains why humanity is on the verge of breaching planetary sustainability boundaries through global warming, biodiversity loss, and disturbance of the nitrogen-cycle balance and other measures of the sustainability of the earth’s ecosystem,” the report says. “A comprehensive global energy transition is urgently needed in order to avert a major planetary catastrophe.”

The survey says $1.9 trillion per year will be needed over the next 40 years for incremental investments in green technologies. At least $1.1 trillion of that will need to be made in developing countries to meet increasing food and energy demands.

“Technological transformation, greater in scale and achievable within a much shorter time frame than the first industrial revolution, is required,” it says. “The necessary set of new technologies must enable today’s poor to attain decent living standards, while reducing emissions and waste and ending the unrestrained drawdown of the Earth’s non-renewable resources.”

“Staging a new technological revolution at a faster pace and on a global scale will call for proactive government intervention and greater international cooperation. Sweeping technological change will require sweeping societal transformation, with changed settlement and consumption patterns and better social values,” it adds.

In the preface to the report, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes that “rather than viewing growth and sustainability as competing goals on a collision course, we must see them as complementary and mutually supportive imperatives. This becomes possible when we embrace a low-carbon, resource-efficient, pro-poor economic model.”

The survey concludes: “Business as usual is not an option. An attempt to overcome world poverty through income growth generated by existing ‘brown technologies’ would exceed the limits of environmental sustainability.”

The report comes out yearly. Last year’s survey called for a major overhaul of the machinery for international finance, aid and trade.

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Selling nature to save nature, and ourselves

5th July 2011 - Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service

Avoiding the coming catastrophic nexus of climate change, food, water and energy shortages, along with worsening poverty, requires a global technological overhaul involving investments of 1.9 trillion dollars each year for the next 40 years, said experts from the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) in Geneva Tuesday.

"The need for a technological revolution is both a development and existential imperative for civilisation," said Rob Vos, lead author of a new report, "The Great Green Technological Transformation".

Absent in the U.N. report is a call for the other necessary transformation: what to do with the market-driven economic system that has put humanity on this catastrophic collision course? Attempts to "green" capitalism are failing and will fail, according to many of the more than 200 social science researchers at a groundbreaking international conference in The Hague titled "Nature Inc?" Jun. 30 to Jul. 2.

"We must start tackling and questioning some core capitalist dictums, such as consumerism, hyper-competition, the notion that 'private' is always better, and especially economic growth," says Bram Büscher, the conference co-organiser and researcher at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) at Erasmus University in The Hague, Netherlands.

Equally important is to stop looking at nature as a collection of economic objects and services that "must only benefit some specific idea of human economic progress", Büscher told IPS.

Governments, the World Bank, the United Nations and development agencies, international conservation organisations and others have all come to see markets as the only way to mobilise enough money to end deforestation, increase the use of alternative energy, boost food production, alleviate poverty, reduce pollution and solve a host of other serious and longstanding problems.

Started as a small gathering of academics, Nature Inc? became a major event as hundreds of experts from around the world wished to participate. Büscher believes the main reason for this is that many are actively doing research on environmental and conservation issues and are increasingly running into new market schemes like carbon credit trading, payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity derivatives and new conservation finance mechanisms, and so on.

"Payments for ecosystem services are the newest tropical 'miracle' crop," said Kathleen McAfee of San Francisco State University.

The market is putting new values on tropical forests as carbon sinks, reservoirs of biodiversity or ecotourism destinations, McAfee said during the conference.

The World Bank, U.N. and others say that the only way to generate large corporate sector and private investment to protect tropical forests is by payments for ecosystem services such as carbon and biodiversity offset markets such as Reduced Deforestation and Degradation for biodiversity known as REDD+. These are also touted as the way out of poverty for communities living in or near forests.

"However, markets are preconditioned on inequality and will only make matters worse," McAfee said.

Markets will look for the cheapest land available, which means the poorest will be displaced because they don't have formal land tenure or they will be persuaded by promises of large payments. In order to secure the investment, carbon traders will place restrictions on the use of the land for decades.

Technical assessments and monitoring will also be needed, which results in high costs as was the case for a project in Costa Rica, McAfee said. "The poor got very little...it didn't even cover their costs," she noted.

When the European Union committed to reduce its carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020, some European multinational industries with high carbon footprints simply moved to countries like the United States where there were no restrictions, said Yda Schreuder of the University of Delaware.

"Europe going it alone on carbon reductions has resulted in higher overall emissions globally," said Schreuder, author of "The Corporate Greenhouse", a critical look at the political economy of the climate change debate.

Globalisation greatly enables companies to quickly shift their operations to where costs or restrictions are lower. To meet its 2020 target, Europe reduced its use of coal 35 to 50 percent by switching to renewable energy like wind, but mainly through much higher use of natural gas obtained from Russia.

Natural gas emits much less carbon than coal. However, over the same time period, Russia increased its use of coal for domestic energy because it could make more money selling natural gas to Europe, Schreuder said.

"The World Trade Organization encourages all this to happen. Markets are a driving force behind increasing emissions of carbon," she added.

Digging deeper into these schemes reveals their inherent contradictions and unintended consequences, but they are "often promoted in lyrical win-win language", said Büscher.

Many believe the green technology transformation that the new U.N. report calls for is unlikely to succeed without a move away from the economic growth-at-all-costs paradigm that dominates nearly everyone's thinking. There is an overwhelming need to find alternatives and stop promoting an economic system that has created the crisis.

"These are incredibly complex problems and there are no simple solutions," Büscher concluded.

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