By Kimbowa Richard, Uganda
Coalition for Sustainable Development / East African
Sustainability Watch Network
When I attended the Bonn Civil Society Meeting: Advancing the Post 2015
Sustainable Development Agenda (March 22 – 23, 2013) I was eager to
participate in the workshop on ‘Planetary boundaries’ as it is a concept that
is receiving substantive global attention. Furthermore I had many questions /
clarities to make as I had got negative sentiments on it from other civil
society actors in East Africa in relation to its missing action on social
issues like poverty reduction. In fact the planetary boundaries concept was
accepted into the ‘Zero Draft’ of the Rio+20 conference as an
essential element in negotiations toward setting environmentally related goals.
However, following heavy scientific criticism, the concept was excluded from
the Summit’s final statement in June 2012 (Yale University, 2013)
Why focus on planetary boundaries?
The planetary boundaries concept refers to nine limits to
human impact on the life of the planet. When transgressed, these limits will
trigger a cascade of ill effects, putting human life and civilization in peril
and irreversibly altering the viability of habitats for virtually every species
on Earth. By remaining within these limits, life can go forward (The Guardian,
2013).
The Stockholm Resilience Group, a group of academics
based at Stockholm University, has quantified the levels at which decline in
various processes and systems accelerates precipitously and dangerously: these
include climate change, biodiversity loss, bio-geochemical change, ocean
acidification, conversion of wilderness to cropland, freshwater consumption and
ozone depletion. By understanding the dimensions and the limits of our planet's
boundaries, we can begin to 'price in' the environmental costs and the gains of
delivering our products and services.
According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2013),
among the global regions, Sub Saharan Africa, South & Central Asia regions
will suffer high costs in the ‘Business As Usual’ trajectory though all regions
will experience significant avoidable costs given global interdependencies. The
high costs will be due to poverty, food insecurity, health insecurity, energy
poverty, water stress, high fertility rate, temperature stress, drought and sea
level rise.
A Critique of the planetary boundaries concept
However according to Yale University, a huge challenge
for many environmental metric projects (like planetary boundaries) is defining
the goals and targets of the indicators they present. One of the major arguments from scientists is that planetary
boundaries, or biophysical thresholds, are set subjectively, and humans, not
ecological systems, determine the question, “How much is too much?” Research
has shown that there are limits to an ecosystem’s capacity to absorb human
impacts, and this understanding must be applied when defining a threshold or
target. For example, we can only divert so much river water for irrigation
before a river runs dry, and a plant can only take up so much nitrogen before
the excess is washed away during a rainstorm.
Another major challenge for planetary boundaries and
other environmental metric projects is comparability between the types of
issues they present. Scientists argue against the attempts of the
planetary boundaries concept to compare local and global issues collectively.
Is it adequate to compare a global issue, such as climate change, with more
local issues, such as biodiversity, water, land and fertilizer? For a planet-wide
standard, this may be a hard argument to win because many of the processes
presented in these boundaries are not static around the world, and
vulnerability to changes in these processes may vary geographically. But these
are problems that should be examined everywhere, and it is important to
consider what geographical scope is necessary for adequate comparability and
applicability of a given project.
Several concepts of environmental change attempt to
integrate costs and benefits into a framework, which ultimately is a decision
that must be made with regards to a project’s objectives and metrics (e.g.,
examining human influence on environmental change or measuring progress
toward a policy-defined environmental objective). Many times, changes in the
environment with respect to human influence are often seen as negative. The
authors at the Breakthrough Institute frame this as a problem with planetary
boundaries – which they only measure environmental change as negative, and it
is impossible for progression toward these boundaries to be positive. They
argue that humans have benefited from many of these changes, and any framework
attempting to measure environmental change must acknowledge these trade-offs.
The planetary boundaries framework also addresses ethics
within science – arbitrarily setting numbers that “reflect preferred outcomes.”
The planetary boundaries concept failed to make an explicit connection between
particular outcomes and values. Without clarification of meanings and
trade-offs between numbers, these thresholds suggest “what is” or “what ought
to be,” therefore hindering the transparency of the project’s ethical
commitments.
Planetary boundaries Discussions in Bonn:
Recommendations to the Post 2015 development
Having participated in 2 meetings to discuss the
‘planetary boundaries’ concept, we noted that traditional frameworks for
development state that poverty is the main ‘problem’ to be addressed. But we
noted that a new approach is needed that transforms our international priorities
towards a framework that ensures prosperity for All people within the limits of
our planets resources. This means looking at equality, wealth and consumption
in a new and integrated way.
For example access to and use of natural resources is
deeply unequal. We see that extreme wealth as well as extreme poverty need to
be addressed in a Post-2015 framework. We also emphasized the need to
look at the structural causes of poverty and inequity which include the
concentration of wealth, power and resources in the hands of the few, and
challenge this unequal access to resources. The unequal access to resources is
determined by social conditions such as gender, age, class, north - south,
disability, politics etc. These inequalities play out at local, national and
international levels.
Noting that we are ‘living beyond our means’ in terms of
our consumption of natural resources, if we do not address our unsustainable
use of natural resources we will exacerbate poverty, inequality and future
prospects for human development. We therefore agreed with the premise in the
Oxfam ‘Doughnut’ report that links planetary boundaries to a social foundation
and articulates that “Humanities challenge in the 21st century is to
eradicate poverty and achieve prosperity for all within the means of the
planets limited natural resources.”
We noted the structural causes of planetary stress that
include exploitation of the global commons (e.g. over exploitation of marine
resources), and the exploitation of ‘other peoples’ natural resources (e.g.
land grabs) which collectively pushes us beyond planetary boundaries; nations
are not accountable for the resources that they use and want to use to achieve
their human development plans and long-term societal well-being. Institutions,
laws and governance mechanisms that control the flows of resources, money and
goods are set up in a way that exploits natural resources and reinforces
inequalities, e.g. fiscal policies (for example harmful subsidies) that
reinforce the way in which capital is accumulated and distributed and policies
that perpetuate existing inequalities (racial, gender, disability, age,
class/caste, indigenous etc); Lack of accountability in terms of financial
processes and implications of actions - of international corporations and
governments;
Non-compliance within a full implemented human rights
framework (which includes rights relating to the environment) by different
stakeholders and institutions e.g. corporations and governments, Bretton woods
institutions etc. Non-compliance and failure to implement existing
international obligations; Unequal power and voice that determines access to
and use of natural resources at a local level (e.g. land, range lands, water,
forests, energy) and at levels spanning from local to international;
Competitive conspicuous consumption (e.g. Prada handbags and Ferrari’s), and
the values that underpin this behavior, drive collective overuse of natural
resources.
Recommendations to the Post 2015 development
The Post 2015 human development goals, in addition to
facilitating improvements in human well-being, must also facilitate the
sustainable long term use of planetary resources at all levels:
- Regulate all stakeholders including financial
institutions, international corporations and thus make them accountable for
their unsustainable use of natural resources.
- Develop and enforce accountability mechanisms at all
levels such as national level ombudsperson, international courts.
- Conduct resource sufficiency evaluation and reporting
at all levels (accountability in terms of biophysical natural resources).
- Include new measures of progress that go beyond GDP and
account for natural resource sustainability.
- Incentivize sustainable lifestyles and consumption at
the individual, community and national level (e.g. financial incentives for
green electricity)
- Strengthen capacity building, technology and financial
transfer for achieving sustainable lifestyles around the globe.
- Include in the post 2015 framework monitoring and
evaluation of social externalities of environmental interventions (e.g. nuclear
power stations, hydro electric dams etc).
- Incorporate sustainability into the political
discourse, which in turn will hold governments and other actors to account.
- Include the valuation of natural capital and natural
resources in decision-making processes.
- Revise the definition of an inclusive green economy to
be genuinely transformative and be driven by the sufficiency as well as
efficiency of natural resource use (link back to Rio+20 declaration)
Specifically at the local level, the following
recommendations came out:
- Link local realities with national and international
and vice versa.
- Support local level decision-making processes that
relate to the management, allocation and use of natural resources ensuring
accountability and transparency and based on equal participation.
- Develop an indicator in the framework relating to the
use of time and value of work in environmental interventions disaggregated by
sex.
- Empowering civil society to engage with scientists and
other stakeholders, inform people about rights, policies and planetary
boundaries, and hold governments and private sector to account.
At the National level:
- Develop legislative frameworks, mechanisms for ensuring
the implementation of existing policies, allocating and reallocating budgets in
line with the human rights framework, sustainable development frameworks and
equality criteria (e.g. learning from what happens with gender budgets). This
is relevant both at a national level and in the delivery of projects and
programmes.
- Design and reinforce the implementation of sustainable
development policies. Monitor and evaluate any ‘implementation gap’.
- Articulate the resources required to achieve their
human development plans and support their long term societal well-being, e.g.
‘national resource accounting’.
- Increase the role for parliaments in holding
governments to account.
- Track and monitor the unequal access to natural
resources within as well as between countries is a vital issue in relation to
this agenda.
- Create an enabling environment for civil society
organizations.
And at the International level:
- Encourage the intergovernmental system to periodically
conduct international resource sufficiency evaluations, by aggregating national
resource evaluations, to gauge global progress towards a sustainable world.
- Encourage the scientific community that are
articulating and defining planetary boundaries to engage with all relevant
stakeholders including communities at the local level.
The Bonn Civil Society discussions led to this statement
to be submitted to the UN High Level Panel on Post 2015 for advocacy
work. However, Individuals and organizations are still invited to express
their support for this statement. Please go to: http://www.worldwewant2015.org/node/332177
to read the statement on ‘Planetary
Boundaries’ and endorse it.
