A brief review in Nature of an excellent article that attempts to value the ecological benefits and costs as a result of the economic activity around the world between 1960 and the year 2000. It speaks to most of the issues that we have been discussing. Read this review in nature and then read the actual study, in order to become familiar with the specific results. Again the combination of the original and review is more demanding than a simple normal blog post and so double credit will be assigned to this post (this means that we will not have a blog post next week)
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Environmental economics: To the rich man the spoils
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Abstract
Global
economic growth during the past century has lifted many into lives of
unprecedented luxury. The cost has been the degradation of vital
ecosystems — a cost borne disproportionately by the world's poor.
Through
our rapacious exploitation, ecosystems and the benefits they bring to
us are disappearing at an unprecedented and alarming rate. Qualitative
evidence suggests that the rich world is profiting from this process,
whereas poorer countries are bearing the brunt of the resulting
environmental degradation. Srinivasan et al.1, writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
provide a quantitative basis for that claim, calculating the
distribution of costs and benefits over a range of indicators of
ecosystem change. The results might, in an ideal world, lead to a
radical reassessment of who is in debt to whom.
Measured
in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), the size of the world's
economy has doubled almost three times since 1950. But the proposition
that aggregate economic growth alone is the most important and powerful
force for human progress and poverty reduction has increasingly been
questioned2, 3.
Economic growth fuelled by international trade relies on the
consumption of heavily advertised and marketed goods and services.
Poorer people and the natural world, marginalized by the market economy,
lose out.
Besides basic economic needs, a high
quality of human life must include satisfactory human relationships,
communities, freedoms and opportunities4, 5.
Well-functioning ecosystems are even more fundamental. The buzz-word is
'ecosystem services': the favours such as food and fuel; protection
from storms, disease and solar radiation; regulation of water and
climate; creation of soils; and inspiration for art, literature,
religion and culture that the natural world bestows on us. Current
economic models undervalue this provision, because many ecosystem
services are 'public goods', historically provided for free. This leaves
them prone to overexploitation, a trend exacerbated by global
population growth: 15 of the 24 ecosystem services identified in the
seminal Millennium Ecosystem Assessment initiated by the United Nations
in 2001 were found to be in decline at the global scale6.
The
current political focus on climate change has brought this pressure on
our ecological support systems into sharper relief. Sustaining ecosystem
processes is all the more difficult because many change abruptly and
nonlinearly when pressed beyond a certain threshold. Qualitative or
context- and case-specific evidence indicates that poorer countries bear
most of this pressure7.
An example is the widespread conversion of tropical mangrove forests to
shrimp aquaculture. These farms supply Europe and North America with
cheap shrimp, but nearby residents must pay the costs: the loss of the
storm regulation, fish nurseries, and fuel and fibre sources that the
mangrove forests provided8.
This type of unequal exchange has been termed an 'ecological debt' owed by rich countries to the poor7.
As raw materials — whether they be shrimp, palm oil, or crude oil and
gas — become scarcer, and exploitation of them advances into new
territories, this debt will probably increase. The prices at which
exports are sold do not include compensation for the goods' local — or
sometimes global — environmental costs. That problem is exacerbated by
rich countries' disproportionate use of environmental sinks, such as the
atmosphere, to take up their higher carbon emissions.
Srinivasan et al.1
present for the first time a global-scale quantitative analysis of the
distribution of major environmental costs across nations in three income
groups: low (representing 32% of the world's population), middle (50%)
and high (18%). The timescale of the study is 1961–2000, and it covers
six categories of environmental change: climate change; stratospheric
ozone depletion; agricultural intensification and expansion;
deforestation; overfishing; and mangrove conversion. In the case of
climate change, the authors calculate that nations in the low, middle
and high income groups were responsible for 13%, 45% and 42% of
greenhouse-gas emissions, respectively. The resulting climate damages
were estimated to be distributed 29%, 45% and 25%. The same pattern of
cost transfer to the poorest nations is observed for ozone depletion,
overfishing and aquaculture. In the case of agricultural change and
deforestation, the authors find that arguably the costs were largely
generated and borne within nations.
When the figures
for the six categories are aggregated and adjusted for different
currency purchasing power, the low-income group of nations bears 20% of
the total costs, the middle-income group 60% and the high-income group
20%. Taking into account equity weighting (the fact that a unit of
income is not the same to a poor as to a rich person, making costs a
heavier burden to shoulder) the percentages are 45%, 52% and 3%. A
significant proportion of the cost burden of the low-income group is
caused by the activities of the other groups: looking at climate-change
damage alone, rich countries might already have imposed costs on poor
countries greater than the poor countries' existing foreign debt. The
people bearing these costs include the one billion or so who already
lack daily access to safe drinking water, electricity, secure food
supplies and basic education.
Several caveats are
needed to put these striking results into context. First, any study is
only as good as the available data. Globally robust data sets on
environmental externalities are incomplete, and therefore the results
are indicative, not absolute. Some significant environmental changes
have been omitted: the destruction of coral reefs, the dispersal of
persistent pollutants and the costs of biodiversity loss. The authors
are up-front about these limitations. But they justly suggest that the
omissions indicate that their estimates of ecological debts are
conservative.
Furthermore, the study does not look at
the benefits of increased trade to material wealth and human health.
But it is unlikely that this would change the balance of the results:
the available, albeit partial, evidence indicates that, despite some
gains by poorer countries through the liberalization of trade and
finance, the number of people living in poverty has increased or stayed
the same during the past 25 years, and the gains of economic
globalization have been heavily skewed towards wealthy nations2 (Fig. 1). One of the most detailed studies on global inequality concludes9
that income divergence between rich and poor nations has "at best ...
decelerated after 1950, but [has] not reversed". Large areas of Central
and South America, and almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, have been left
behind.
Figure 1: Inequality in economic growth.
a,
Although gross world product and the value of exports throughout the
world rose steadily during the period 1981–2001 (values relative to 1990
= 100), the number living below the US$2 per day poverty line has
increased slightly10. b,
Whereas in 1820 the difference between the mean incomes of the poorest
60% of countries and of the richest 10% was fourfold, by 1992 the
disparity was tenfold (value of mean income of poorest countries in 1820
= 1)9.High resolution image and legend (33K)
Srinivasan and colleagues' work1
should raise the scientific profile of issues vital to human
well-being, including research into ecosystem services and the effects
of large-scale ecosystem conversion, and how such changes both create
and alleviate poverty. We must better understand the complex
interactions between our economic, social and ecological systems, and
the biological diversity that supports them. Scientists and society as a
whole need to ask of our current economic paradigms in an era of
globalization: why do they produce such inequities; who pays the costs;
and are they ecologically and socially sustainable?
The original article : http://www.pnas.org/content/105/5/1768.full.pdf+html?sid=dac4179a-95bf-4803-8637-a3a214fbfe15
