By RICARDO ABRAMOVAY*
We are removing materials from nature at an explosive rate, which does not allow for their regeneration and which is compromising the most important ecosystem services on which we depend.
Introduction
How much does everything you consume during the year weigh? Your food, your clothes, the materials used to build your home, your workplace or your school, the materials used to make your car or the public transport you use, and the fuels that this transport depends on. How much does all this weigh, in tons? We know approximately how much we spend, in money, to acquire the goods and services we use.
Economic science itself (anyone who has taken a semester of introductory economics will remember this) recommends that bananas should not be lumped together with bicycles and that it is better to translate everything that forms the wealth transacted in a society into something that is common to it: prices.
However, the advance of the contemporary socio-environmental crisis has given rise to a discipline (industrial ecology) that seeks to answer a question that the dominant tradition in economic science had never addressed: how are we using the materials on which our wealth depends? In what quantities? When we compare these materials with monetary indicators of wealth (the Gross Domestic Product, for example), do we find that we are using more or less materials? And what are the impacts of this use on the production of the remains of our consumption, on the packaging we discard or on greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels? What is the relationship between all of this and inequality?
What is at stake when these questions are asked is the relationship between society and the one that provides us with the material, biotic and energetic bases for forming wealth, that is, nature. In the same way that, in our body, metabolism is the reaction of our cells, transforming the food and water we ingest into energy, there is a social metabolism, which can be defined as the set of material and energy flows that occur between society and nature. And it doesn't take much insight to imagine that our social metabolism is sick.
We are extracting materials from nature at an explosive rate that does not allow for their regeneration and that is compromising the most important ecosystem services on which we depend (water, soil, climate, oceans, clean air and biodiversity). Worse still, all this extraction is not moving the world towards fulfilling the most important contemporary multilateral commitment, which is to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. More materials, but not always a better life.
These are the main findings of a report recently published by the International Resource Panel (International Resource Panel) of the United Nations Environmental Programme (IRP/UNEP) and whose title is already a spoiler of its main conclusions: Bend the trend. Pathways to a liveable planet as resources use spikes (Reversing the trend. Pathways to a habitable planet as resource use explodes). The work is the latest in a body of research that IRP/UNEP has been carrying out since 2007, when it was formed with the mission of producing and sharing knowledge to improve the way contemporary societies use the resources that underpin the supply of goods and services. Research on the topic has advanced significantly since the late 1990s.
What materials and how much?
It was in 2011 that the IRP/UNEP published the first global report on this topic. The key word is decoupling (decoupling). This involves decoupling wealth from its material, energetic and biotic base (i.e. producing using less and less of these resources), so that what nature provides us is not exhausted and so that the impacts of our use of this supply do not translate into pollution, erosion of biodiversity, emission of greenhouse gases, depletion of water, destruction of ocean life and impoverishment of soils.
To decouple the production of goods and services from their material base, that is, to depend less and less on the extraction of what nature offers us, the most obvious path is to increase efficiency through technological innovations. And this, in some way, is being done.
In 1980, for example, an aluminum can for soft drinks or beer weighed an average of 19 grams. Production at the time was 41,6 billion units. Technological innovations allowed the weight of this can to drop to 2010 grams in 13. However, in that year, 97,3 billion units were sold. In 1990, when 11 million units were sold, a cell phone weighed 600 grams. The weight dropped to 118 grams in 2011, when six billion subscribers were using the device.
Technological innovations have helped to reduce the weight of materials used in each unit, but with the explosive increase in consumption, it is obvious that the total amount of materials used has increased. Before examining the aggregate data on material use and its impacts, it is important to know what materials are involved.
The multitude of products that surround us are based on four basic materials, provided by nature and extracted by human labor. What are they?
First comes biomass, that is, agricultural crops, pastures, plantations for animal consumption, wood, fishing and gathering. In 1970, no less than 41% of the weight (in tons) of all the materials that formed social wealth came from biomass. With the advance of industrialization, this proportion fell and today biomass accounts for only 26% of the weight of all materials. But this does not mean that the world is using less biomass than it did fifty years ago. The total weight of living matter (biomass) that we remove from the soil, water, crops and forests was 12,6 billion tons in 1970 and is now 24,8 billion tons.
The second material at the base of the contemporary supply of goods and services are fossil fuels, i.e. oil, natural gas and coal. Their share (in tons) in the formation of wealth in 1970 was greater (20%) than today (16%). However, in absolute terms, fossil fuel extraction, which was 6,1 billion tons in 1970, has reached 15,4 billion tons today.
The third important material in the formation of social wealth is metallic minerals: iron, copper, aluminum and other non-ferrous metals (gold, silver, for example). Their relative share in the supply of goods and services has remained stable over the last fifty years (rising from 9% to 10% of the total). However, with the accelerated global industrialization, the extraction of metallic minerals has increased from 2,7 to 9,6 billion tons between 1970 and the present day.
Finally, the materials that today account for the most wealth (exceeding 31% to 50% of global extraction) are non-metallic minerals: cement, clay, and gravel, which are essential for construction. In 1970, 9,6 billion tons of these materials were extracted, and today this amount has reached 45,3 billion tons.
Limits of efficiency
The result of all this is staggering numbers. In 1970, the sum of these four materials reached 30,9 billion tons. Fifty years later, the total is 106,6 billion tons. The use of materials has increased three and a half times in this period. But it is important to compare this movement with that of the formation of wealth itself.
What we can see is that the Global Gross Domestic Product has increased five times in these 50 years, more than the extraction of materials. This means that society is using resources more efficiently than it did 50 years ago, since the supply of goods and services has increased much more than the material base on which it is based. The long-awaited decoupling seems to have happened, which would indicate that humanity is making increasingly better use of what it extracts from nature.
However, this is a hasty and erroneous conclusion based on the information provided by the IRP/UNEP work. There are at least four reasons that support the warning contained in the title of the report regarding the explosive nature of the way in which we are extracting and using the resources that nature offers us.
The first reason is that despite the relative decoupling between production and extraction of resources, in absolute terms the amount of resources on which economic life depends continues to grow, despite the impressive technological innovations that have occurred during this period. The much-touted idea that the digital revolution will lead to the dematerialization of the global economy has no basis in empirical data. If the current trend continues, the 106 billion tons extracted today will be 160 billion tons in 2060, that is, in less than 40 years.
And anyone who imagines that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize energy supply will reduce the material footprint of the economic system will be shocked when they examine the materials needed to produce an electric car. A lithium battery, weighing 450 kilos, contains 11 kilos of lithium, 14 kilos of cobalt, 27 kilos of nickel, more than 40 kilos of copper and 50 kilos of graphite, as well as 181 kilos of steel, aluminum and plastic. Providing these materials (for a single vehicle) requires the processing of 40 tons of minerals. But given the low concentration of many of these minerals, this means the extraction of 225 tons of raw materials. And that’s just for the battery of a single car!
When you add this extraction of materials to the current trend in the automobile industry to produce ever larger and heavier cars, the result is what a recently published article in Nature Energy. does not hesitate to call it “mobesity”, a neologism that combines mobility and obesity. No less than 35% of electric cars sold in the world are SUVs and manufacturers are offering fewer and fewer lightweight models.
The consequences are negative not only from the point of view of the use of materials, but also for urban organization, since the space occupied by traffic and parking spaces themselves are increasingly larger. Professor Christian Brand, author of the article, advocates higher taxation on SUVs and urban redesign that discourages the purchase of this type of vehicle.
Furthermore, relative decoupling does not always occur. Global grain production, from the 1960s until the end of the first decade of the millennium, increased on the basis of land use that remained practically stable, that is, more product per unit of land used. However, this productive performance was supported by the large-scale use of modified seeds, whose high potential was revealed through nitrogen fertilizers. However, the use of fertilizers per unit of grain produced, since the 1960s, that is, there was not even relative decoupling. Between 1961 and 2017, the consumption of nitrogen fertilizers per unit of harvest increased eightfold.
It is important to know that chemicals used in agriculture have greater destructive impacts on groundwater and surface water than urban sources of pollution.
The second reason for the urgency of “changing the trend” concerns inequality. The average material footprint per capita in 1970 was 8,4 tons per year. In the preface to the report published by IRP/UNEP in 2011, Achim Steiner, then Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote that “in the coming decades, the level of resources used by each person needs to fall to somewhere around five to six tons. Some developing countries are even below this level, such as India with 4 tons per capita and some developed countries, such as Canada, with 25 tons.”
And what has happened since then? Instead of falling, this average (per capita) has risen to 12,2 tons of materials. And inequalities have only deepened: in low-income countries (almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa and a significant part of South Asia) the material footprint per capita in 2020 remains around four tons. In the most prosperous segment of middle-income countries (where China and Brazil are located) the footprint exceeded the world average and reached 2020 tons per capita in 19, bringing these countries closer to the average for high-income countries, which is 24 tons per capita.
Of course, there must be room to expand the use of resources by poorer countries (for the construction of schools, hospitals, means of communication and transport), but this presupposes (as Achim Steiner rightly advocated) a drastic reduction in the material footprint of rich countries and even in the most prosperous segment of middle and even low-income countries.
The third reason for the United Nations’ warning is the evidence that reducing the economy’s material footprint requires drastic changes in production and consumption patterns. Much more than electric cars, the essential thing is to increase collective mobility and encourage the use and reuse of central areas to implement initiatives such as the “fifteen-minute city”, a model already applied in cities such as Bogotá, Melbourne and Paris.
In housing, the idea of compact and connected cities and the use of alternative materials to those currently dominant are the ways to reduce the material footprint and the use of cement, whose disposal at the end of its life is highly problematic and which accounts for almost 8% of global emissions. In food, more than increasing the productivity of areas where the monotony of grains used to feed industrially farmed animals predominates, the priority is the diversification of agricultural landscapes, diets and the corresponding reduction in the consumption of products of animal origin, which is currently excessive in most of the world.
The fourth reason is of an ethical-normative nature. In discussions on climate, the idea that a just transition is necessary has become widespread, and this can only be achieved if the emphasis on decarbonizing economic life is on the commitment to providing public goods that improve social life, and if there are financial mechanisms so that adaptation to extreme climate events focuses primarily on those living in the areas most likely to be hit by increasingly frequent disasters. This is where the link established in the IRP/UNEP report between just transition and sufficiency comes from.
It is worth transcribing the definition of this term by IRP/UNEP: “A concept that is gaining strength on the political agenda and that, from a resource perspective, refers to the need to: increase the use of resources in low-development contexts to allow a dignified life, while reducing consumption levels in those parts of the population that live well above the planet's capacity”.
The emphasis that multilateral organizations, companies and governments have placed on increasing the efficiency of resource use has had as a counterpart what experts call the ricochet effect or rebound effect: the examples of soda and beer cans and cell phones mentioned above (to which we can add cement and countless other products) show that technological innovations that lead to a reduction in the quantity of materials contained in each unit of products tend to reduce their prices, increase their consumption and, therefore, increase, in absolute terms, the extraction of materials on which the products depend.
This is not about denying the importance of efficiency, but rather about recognizing that making it the central objective of socio-environmental policies will not reduce the pressure that the use of resources exerts on the ecosystem services on which life itself depends.
Conclusion
The idea that the fight against inequality consists of increasing the material footprint of the poorest countries and people to the level of those at the top of the social pyramid is completely illusory. The data from the latest IRP/UNEP report show that such a path would only accelerate the destruction of ecosystem services that current production and consumption patterns are causing. Hence the idea of an explosion contained in the title of the IRP/UNEP paper. And that is why it proposes changing the focus of the transition from efficiency to sufficiency.
It is true that the paths to achieving efficiency are relatively well defined and are the focus of the current efforts of the vast majority of companies, governments and even multilateral organizations. However, the paths to reducing the material footprint, which involves, above all, reducing inequalities in the use of resources, are far from being defined. Addressing this dilemma should be a central theme of global multilateralism.
*Ricardo Abramovay is a professor at the Josué de Castro Chair at the Faculty of Public Health at USP. Author, among other books, of Infrastructure for Sustainable Development (Elephant). [https://amzn.to/3QcqWM3]
Originally published in the magazine Science and Culture.
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