December 3, 2001	Monday	Ramazan 17, 1422

THE BRUNDTLAND Commission’s 1987 report helped develop consensus on the need for sustainable development. There are four elements to environmental sustainability: poverty, population, technology and lifestyle.

In tune with the report, many economists advocate the need for a rapid transition to sustainability. The transition to sustainability assumes that the old concept of growth, which some have called “throughput growth” that relies on an ever-increasing throughput of energy and other natural materials, is unsustainable. It must give way to a more creative pursuit of economic goals that are less resource-intensive.

A transition to sustainability must take into account how we undervalue capital services and fail to account for natural asset degradation. Thus, while we may be pleased at economic growth, we are actually impoverishing ourselves in the absence of a transition to sustainability. A transition to sustainability would reorient consumers’ preferences toward environmentally benevolent choices while reducing throughput per unit of final product.

A single measure— population times per capita resource consumption— encapsulates what is needed to achieve sustainability. The global ecosystem’s source and sink functions have limited capacity to support the economic subsystem. Limits to growth are evidenced in human biomass appropriation, global warming, ozone shield rupture, land degradation, and decreased biodiversity.

The circular flow representation of the physical aspects of the economic process has led ecological economists to devise a competing view of the macroeconomy, i.e., the linear throughput model. This model presents the macroeconomy as an open thermodynamic system existing within and dependent on the exosphere and recognizes that the economic process begins with an exaction from the exosphere of valuable low entropy resources and ends with an insertion back into the exosphere of valueless high entropy wastes. Because production and consumption involve the entropic dissipation of matter-energy, sustaining the optimal stock of human-made capital requires a continued source of low entropy resources and the continued availability of a high entropy waste absorbing sink.

The kind of growth that has been occurring since the Second World War is unsustainable because global population has more than doubled, energy production has more than tripled, and economic output has increased by a factor of five. Transition is a challenge faced by both developing and developed countries. It will include a stable global population, a transition to a predominantly urban society, and to a stable level of material consumption.

Since the early 1970s, when the Club of Rome talked about the limits to growth, the idea has gradually taken hold that people in developed countries would have to restrain their level of consumption if increased standards of living were to be sustained, both in developed and developing countries. Implicit in the notion of a transition to sustainability is the placing of current and future generations of consumers on equal footing.

More recently the emphasis has been on mapping out alternative scenarios using variant parameter values and policy regimes. The three basic scenarios include Conventional Worlds, Great Transitions, and Barbarization. Assuming a richer but dirtier world by 2050, but not a total breakdown of the earth’s geochemical cycles and ecosystems. The Conventional Worlds scenario predicates rapid economic development within current values and institutional constraints. The Great Transformations scenario is founded on a more radical critique, and calls for greater change in values and institutional structures.

Within this scenario, the New Sustainability variant calls for deep reductions in the flow of energy and material through the economy and a convergence of incomes in developing and developed countries. The Ecocommunalism variant is characterized by localism, face-to-face democracy, small-scale organization of production, and regional economic autonomy. The smallness and localism of the ecocommunalism variant of the Great Transformations scenario is far more radical in scope than most conventional discussions of the transition to sustainability, which still seem to be predominated by the Conventional Worlds scenario.

Finally, the Barbarization scenario predicts what might happen in the absence of a successful transition to sustainability: institutional disintegration, economic collapse, and intensified conflict along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines. Those who remain sanguine about continued growth and prosperity in the absence of decarbonization and dematerialization are in a minority.

There are difficulties in the sequencing and causal linkages involved in transition. Transitions in the material, energy, and epidemiological areas is dependent on economic transition, which is difficult for the poorest countries. Hence, there is a Catch-22. Economists have recently been describing a “development state,” one that maintains positive institutional structures to achieve transition to sustainability, but the development state itself presumes a certain level of prior material and cultural progress. The same dilemma applies to the educational transition, which is itself dependent on the other areas of transition but also a prerequisite for those very transitions.

Those who advocate a rapid transition to sustainability norms pose an intellectual challenge to the conventional claim of technology to widen the possibility of substitutability among resources without inherent loss. Conventional economists also face a challenge from the sustainability community in terms of the latter’s skepticism toward the instrument of present value discounting as a viable approach to intergenerational equity. How institutions can be designed that internalize the costs of negative externalities is yet another unresolved issue between conventional economists and the more radical sustainability critics.

There are those who take issue even with the premises of the Brundtland Commission report and argue that its definition of sustainable development as economic growth that has somehow been made more equitable and environmentally careful is itself a contradiction in terms. This view assumes that growth itself is not sustainable, and that the only option is to follow a development path towards a stable state. Better distribution of existing resources would suffice, on this view, to elevate the Third World living conditions dramatically. Economic growth, such critics believe, is not required at all for the world to adequately feed itself, and for population to be stabilized. The Indian state of Kerala is used as an example to show that adult female literacy was the most important factor in stabilizing population.

As fossil energy becomes scarce in the next few years, it will become difficult to sustain a second Green Revolution. Unfortunately, even the first Green Revolution left few farmers working at the highly sustainable 4:1 input-output energy ratio (four units of energy from biomass, for instance hay for the ox or the horse, to produce one energy unit of human food) associated with traditional agriculture. But we need not go to either technophobic or technophilic extremes to need to come to terms with the paradoxes of the transition to sustainability. The questions that need to be asked are: how can the transition to sustainable outcomes be made for peoples and ecosystems, and wealth created in the process? Who are winners and losers in transition, how can they be identified, and how can the process be invested with the greatest possible equity? To come to terms with the transition to sustainability more than defining sustainable development as “growth as usual,” although at a slower rate, is needed.

Since income redistribution and population stability are politically difficult goals, there is an element of realism challenging the transition to the extent that the world economy cannot simply be expanded by a factor of five or ten to alleviate poverty. Ecological realism accepts that the global economy has already exceeded the sustainable limits of the ecosystem and speeding up the growth of the world economy would invite imminent collapse. In the conflict between biophysical and political realities, it has to be that the latter must eventually give ground for the planet to transit to sustainability.

A minimum necessary condition for sustainability is the maintenance of the total natural capital stock at or above the current level. Sustainability is the amount of consumption that can be continued indefinitely without degrading capital, including natural capital, stocks. Examples of natural capital stocks include forests, fish populations, and petroleum deposits. The limiting factor in development in the contemporary era is not manmade but remaining natural capital.

In a transition to sustainability, for renewable resources the rate of harvest should not exceed the rate of regeneration (sustainable yield), and the rates of waste generation from projects should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment (sustainable waste disposal). For non-renewable resources, the rates of waste generation from projects should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment, and the depletion of these resources should require comparable development of renewable substitutes for those resources.

Tropical deforestation in one country reduces the entire earth’s biological richness, chemicals released on one continent can lead to skin cancer on another, and CO2 emissions anywhere hasten climate change everywhere. Politicians will have to understand that transition toward sustainability means that economic policy-making is no longer anywhere an exclusively national concern.

The growing debt burden of developing countries has made it nearly impossible for developing countries to invest adequately in forest protection, soil conservation, irrigation improvements, more energy-efficient technologies, or pollution control devices. Reforming foreign assistance to support ecologically sound development is critical. Shifting the tax base in developed countries, for instance, from income to environmental taxes, could make those causing environmental harm pay the price.

Without limiting some forms of growth, particularly the consumption of physical resources, transition to sustainability is unlikely. Forty per cent of the earth’s annual net primary production on land now goes directly to meet human needs or is indirectly used or destroyed by human activity. This leaves 60 per cent for the millions of other land-based species with which humans share the planet. The share could double to 80 per cent if population growth and consumption continue along present trends. At some point, vital thresholds will be crossed irreversibly in the absence of a transition toward greater efficiency in use of water, energy, and materials.

The North needs to understand that some growth costs more than it is worth, and that an economy’s optimum size is not its maximum size. People’s consumption patterns will have to be altered; this is the hardest part of the transition to sustainability. But it can be done. Pioneering energy policies in California caused electricity use per person to decline 0.3 per cent between 1978 and 1988, compared with an 11 per cent increase in the rest of the country. Californians, meanwhile, suffered no drop in living standards. On the contrary, their overall welfare improved, because of better air quality.

The ultimate question then becomes, how quickly can the throughput associated with economic activity be limited, arrested, or even reduced? Substitution of man-made capital for natural resources is inherently slow and limited, and the necessary technology cannot be organized as easily as the optimists would have us believe.

It seems that sustainable development (development without throughput growth) cannot cure existing poverty. Resources must be utilized more efficiently, but this will not by itself alleviate poverty. Poor countries should not be expected to arrest or reduce their development, which tends to be associated with throughput growth. So the rich countries must take the lead in this respect. More growth for the poor must be balanced by negative throughput growth for the rich. Transition cannot be accomplished without population stability, so that the need for growth can be reduced everywhere and especially in poor countries. At heart is the difference between conventional economics and ecological economics, where the former views consumer preferences as given and determining while the latter takes human preferences as coevolving among other factors to reflect broad ecological opportunities and constraints.

To make the transition to sustainability, the North will need to come to terms with some of its most cherished values. Conventional economics holds that to help the South, Northern societies should consume yet more to provide the South with larger markets. But the ecological economics view is that the North should stabilize its resource consumption and reduce its damage to global life-support systems. Any higher consumption must come from productivity improvements, rather than from increases in throughput growth. Since natural resources are finite, more Northern growth inevitably means less room for Southern growth.

The developed world also needs to come to terms with the fact that the GNP as conventionally measured is a misleading guide to human welfare. Environmentally benign activities typically contribute a much smaller part to national income than do environmentally malign ones. In the conventional measure of GNP, the Exxon Valdez oil spill clean-up was good to the extent that it boosted the GNP. Activities, such as walking, biking, mass transit, train travel compared to aeroplane travel, one-child families rather than six-child families, and recycling rather than trashing, contribute little to the GNP and are resisted rather than encouraged in the consumption-oriented North.

In addition, some technological optimism is simply misplaced. In the I= PAT identity, impact equals population time affluence times technology. To raise the Southern affluence to today’s level of the North means that technology must improve 46 times in the next forty years. This is far above historical rates of technological improvements. Even if the North maintains current levels of income, it would be exceedingly difficult for the South to catch up in forty years.

The poor can be helped more, and with less environmental damage, by promoting employment in developing countries rather than increasing Northern consumption and relying on “trickle down.” The transfer of up-to-date technology to developing countries to reduce waste of resources must be accelerated. A quarter of economic activities generate about 65 per cent of the increase in national income, but it is precisely these activities that are m