Sustainable Action

Overcoming the Barriers

Christian Berg

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429576621
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Categoría: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

In this timely exploration of sustainable actions, Christian Berg unpacks the complexity in understanding the barriers we face in moving towards a sustainable future, providing solution perspectives for every level, from individuals to governments and supra-national organizations offering a lucid vision of a long-term and achievable goal for sustainability.

While the 2030 Agenda has already set ambitious targets for humanity, it offers little guidance for concrete actions. Although much is already being done, progress seems slow and some actions aiming at sustainability may be counterproductive. Different disciplines, societal actors, governmental departments and NGOs attribute the slow progress to a number of different causes, from the corruption of politicians to the wrong incentive structures.

Sustainable Action surveys all the fields involved in sustainability to provide action principles which speak to actors of different kinds, not just those professionally mandated with such changes. It offers a road map to all those who might not constantly think about systems change but who are concerned and want to contribute to a sustainable future in a meaningful way.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability issues, as well as those looking for a framework for how to change their systems at work to impact the quadruple bottom line: environment, economy, society, and future generations.

1

Introduction

Sustainability – a utopian ideal?

Contents

1.1 Sustainability - an “exhausted” concept?

1.2 Phase transition towards sustainability

1.3 Understanding the barriers to sustainability

1.4 Developing action principles for sustainability

1.5 Concept of sustainability

1.6 Structure of the book

1.7 Methodological approach

1.8 Summary

1.1 Sustainability – an “exhausted” concept?

The concept of sustainable development has had a remarkable career. In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published their final report with a definition of the concept, which has since then been referred to as the “Brundtland definition” (WCED 1987). It has shaped not only politics but civil society and business throughout the world. In 1992 at the Rio Summit, basically every nation on earth reached agreement on making sustainability their common goal for the future path of humanity (UNCED 1992). In 2015, just 23 years after Rio, the world community agreed on comprehensive, concrete and measurable targets for the period up until 2030: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN 2015). Furthermore, in the same year, 2015, the Conference of the Parties (COP) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was able to come to a global agreement on the reduction of climate change (UNFCCC 2015).

There are a multitude of sustainability activities all over the world, among governments, civil society and business. The first countries have decided to phase out coal, the first car manufacturers have declared they would become carbon neutral, the first companies have announced they would become entirely waste free. This is all great and important – and should not be neglected.

At the same time, however, one may justifiably ask about the results of all these discussions, agreements and commitments. Humans have so dominantly shaped the face of the earth that they have become the dominant influence even in geological terms – we have entered the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). Is there any progress in protecting our natural livelihood? Have we managed to distribute resources more equitably? Some progress is measurable – the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for instance, have at least in certain respects and in part been accomplished. But what about our ecosystems, what about climate change, what about biodiversity?

Looking at the concentration of CO₂ within the atmosphere, which the Keeling Curve has measured since 1958 (see Figure 1.1), one can only sadly say: failed. Despite half a century of discussion on environmental issues (Rachel Carson 1962) and more than twenty summits on climate change, emissions continue to rise as if we had not done anything. Where on this curve can we see any effects of the Rio Conference, the Kyoto Protocol (1997), or the Paris Agreement (COP 21, 2015)? The Keeling Curve shows a continuous increase in CO₂ concentration with only one or two minimal qualifications: the gradient decreases slightly in the early 1970s and slightly more in the early 1990s, but these are due to the economic downturns after the oil crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Does the Keeling Curve not document the striking failure of our sustainability policies – or does it even call into question the concept of sustainability as such? What is the value of all our commitments, agreements and best-intended actions if they show no result? Are we fooling ourselves?

FIGURE 1.1 Keeling Curve: Carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa

Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography (2019), https://scripps.ucsd.edu/.

Moreover, climate change is, of course, only one of several environmental issues, potentially not even the most threatening one. Biodiversity loss, potentially even more threatening than climate change (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015), has dramatically increased in recent decades. In several aspects, humanity is exceeding the planetary boundaries, which implies increased likelihood of irreversible harmful developments (see Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2 Planetary boundaries

Source: Steffen et al., Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet, Science Vol. 347. 13 February 2015, Issue 6223, doi: 10.1126/science.1259855.

The 2018 Living Planet Index of WWF documents a 60% fall in just over 40 years (WWF 2018). The state of the oceans is alarming due to acidification, temperature rise and pollution (World Ocean Review 2017); the tropical rain forests and their indigenous people are severely threatened by deforestation and land use change (Martin 2015), and we are plundering the planet by exploiting its natural resources (Bardi 2014).

The status of human development has improved globally between 1990 and 2017 – but strong differences remain with regard to regions (sub-Saharan Africa lags behind with an Human Development Index (HDI) of 34.9% compared to the global average of 72.8%) and gender (the worldwide HDI average for women is almost 6% lower than that for men); and inequalities reduce HDI improvements significantly (inequality adjusted HDI is 58.2% instead of 72.8 in global average) (UNDP 2018). Roughly 60% of the global population do not have access to safely managed sanitation services, and 30% have no access to safe drinking water (UNESCO 2019, 1).

The overall account of the Sustainable Development Report 2019 is that “Four years after the adoption of the SDGs and the Paris Agreement no country is on track to meeting all the goals. We are losing ground in many areas” (Sachs et al. 2019, viii).

And while the scientific accounts of climate change, climate migration, biodiversity loss, pollution and deforestation call for increased urgency of action (see Steffen et al. 2018), the sustainability discourse is challenged from a mostly unexpected angle: populism. Populists and their agitation absorb so much attention, cause setbacks in international treaties, provoke distrust in scientific evidence, denounce the media, heat up societal polarization to such an extent that they might become a bigger threat to sustainability than, for instance, the “ambition gap” of the Paris Agreement.¹ This rise of right-wing populism in many regions of the globe and our prevailing unsustainability might even have overlapping root causes, as the feeling of insecurity which makes people turn to populism is partly rooted in rapid changes, growing inequalities, and the perception that an “elitist” political class seems incapable of addressing the real problems (J.-W. Müller 2016; Dibley 2018; Lockwood 2018). We will return to this in a later section (see 4.3).

What are the consequences? Let us look at three different responses to this situation.

1.1.1 Abandon the concept of sustainability?

Dennis Meadows, co-author of the first report to the Club of Rome² The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) and a pioneer of sustainability long before this concept had entered the international discourse, noted in 2000 that it would be too late for sustainable development, and that we should rather strive for “survival development” (D. L. Meadows 2000, 147f.).³

Benson and Craig proclaim the end of the concept of sustainability:

It is time to move past the concept of sustainability. The realities of the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002) warrant this conclusion. They include unprecedented and irreversible rates of human induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. These factors combine to create an increasing likelihood of rapid, nonlinear, social and ecological regime changes. The recent failure of Rio 20 provides an opportunity to collectively re-examine – and ultimately move past – the concept of sustainability as an environmental goal. We must face the impossibility of defining – let alone pursuing – a goal of “sustainability” in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty and lack of stationarity.

(Harm Benson & Kundis Craig 2014, 777)

They rather propose “resilience thinking as one possible new orientation”.

According to the German social scientist Ingolfur Blühdorn, sustainability as a “road map for a structural transformation of socially and ecologically self-destructive consumer societies” would be “exhausted” (Blühdorn 2017).

Of course, these authors have good reasons for their arguments – there is far too little progress, measured against both the necessary and the possible. However, should we abandon the ideal that the peoples of the world can prosper in harmony with each other and with nature? Have we underestimated the complexity of the issues? Have we relied too much on the idea that insight would lead to action – even though every one of us can experience the opposite in his or her own life?⁴ Have we perhaps not found the right governance model for sustainability? Have we underestimated the inertia of systems, the resistance to change, the lack of institutional support for cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary initiatives? The answers to all these questions is unfortunately in the affirmative OK: yes! But does this disqualify the goal as such? Abandoning the goal of sustainability because it would be too late or because it would be unrealistic sounds to me like committing suicide in fear of death. It is a sad irony that the frustration with the concept of sustainability seems to increase around (or shortly after) the time when the global consensus on the need for progress has reached an all-time high. Both the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda are significant milestones in the history of global collaboration – however piecemeal, unambitious, or unrealistic they might be considered.

This book will argue that we need to keep sustainability as an ideal; an ideal which we might never reach, which might be utopian, but still a necessary one.

1.1.2 Abandon liberal democracy?

Humankind has apparently not found the right governance model for sustainability. Some scholars argue that the Western liberal democracies have obviously not been able to tackle the problems, and that we will see an increasing “environmental authoritarianism” (Beeson 2010;⁵ Chen und Lees 2018; Blühdorn 2019). Blühdorn and Deflorian argue that the prevailing policy approaches to sustainability have failed and should rather be seen as “the collaborative management of sustained unsustainability”. The authors “firmly hold on to the belief that a radical socio-ecological transformation is urgently required” and cannot really offer an alternative (yet) but want to facilitate the urgently needed transformation by deconstructing prevailing narratives (Blühdorn & Deflorian 2019, 13). In his 2018 book, The Sustainable State, Chandran Nair, founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, a Hong-Kong-based think-tank, is likewise critical of the “laissez-faire, industrialized Western model” which is not sustainable. Instead, he is advocating strong interventionist governments to shape the future (Nair 2018). Nair emphasizes that he is not justifying China’s policies – but he does acknowledge its great potential in tackling issues which the Western countries have so far not come to grips with:

[O]ne can disagree with China’s nondemocratic nature, but it remains true that the country has had a much better track record in improving the lives of its ordinary people – and in a much shorter period – than many other developing countries. It is also not clear how China could have improved these standards of living so quickly without strong state intervention.

(Nair 2018, 177)

I agree with many of these authors’ observations – although I do not follow all of their conclusions. However, as a privileged citizen of a Western country which has achieved some limited success in protecting its own environment at the cost of externalizing much of its ecological and social footprint to other parts of the world (see 5.1; Peters, Davis & Andrew 2012, 3273), I feel obliged to take up this discussion of the relationship between liberal values and the role of the state. I do share the abovementioned authors’ concern about the question whether liberal democracies will be able to tackle our global challenges effectively. But we have to be reminded that our freedom needs to end where we deprive others of their freedom, as John Stuart Mill nicely put it: “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it” (Mill 1869, 2...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: sustainability – a utopian ideal?
• PART 1: Barriers
• Index