By RICARDO ABRAMOVAY*
It is in the fight against inequalities that lies the core of achieving a society capable of preventing the large-scale destruction of the foundations that support life itself.
The world is unable to decouple economic growth from the impacts caused by the insatiable thirst for natural resources on which the supply of goods and services depends. Climate change, erosion of biodiversity and pollution (what the United Nations calls the “triple planetary crisis”) will not be faced seriously if wealth continues to rely on the increasing extraction of materials that today form the basis of economic growth itself.
According to the International Resource Panel of the United Nations Environment Program (IRP/UNEP), there are four basic materials whose rate of acquisition signals the quality of the relationship between society and the resources on which its reproduction is based: biomass , metallic minerals (iron, copper, gold, but also products such as aluminum, mercury, nickel, among others), non-metallic minerals (sand, clay, essential for construction) and fossil fuels.
It was in 2011 that the International Resource Panel of the United Nations Environment Program (IRP/UNEP) published the first work on the topic, whose title already indicates an important ambition: “decoupling the use of natural resources and the environmental impacts of growth economic". What it is?
In 1970, when the world population was 3,7 billion inhabitants and the global GDP (in 2015 values) reached US$ 18 trillion, the four materials totaled 30 billion tons. The most recent report on the subject of IRP/UNEP (Bend the trend. Pathways to a liveable planet as resources use spikes) shows the explosion in the use of resources. Today, with a population of 8,1 billion inhabitants and a global GDP of US$93 billion (in 2015 values), the economic system annually extracts a dizzying amount of 106 billion tons of these four materials. The population, since 1970, has multiplied by just over two, the GDP by five and the use of materials by 3,5.
This then means that there has been important progress, as each unit of wealth, over the last fifty years, has been achieved with the use of a smaller quantity of materials. Five times more wealth using “only” 3,5 times more materials indicates, at first glance, that the objective of decoupling wealth and resource use is being achieved. Why then does it mean Bend the Trend (Change the Trend) of recent IRP/UNEP work? From the immense richness of this report, four answers to this question can be extracted.
The first is that despite this “relative decoupling”, in absolute terms, resource extraction continues to increase, even if the pace of this increase is lower than the pace of economic growth. The increase from 30 to 106 billion tons per year in the extraction of biomass, metallic minerals, non-metallic minerals and fossil fuels compromises, often irreversibly, essential ecosystem services such as water supply, clean air, climate stability and biodiversity .
The second response to the urgency of “changing the trend” refers to inequalities. The per capita material footprint, which was 8,4 tons per year in 1970, increased to 12,2 tons at the beginning of the third decade of the millennium. But the inequalities that these averages hide could not be more shocking: in low-income countries the per capita material footprint in 2020 was 4 tons.
In the most prosperous segment of middle-income countries (where China and Brazil are located), the footprint exceeds the world average and reaches, in 2020, 19 tons per capita, bringing these countries closer to the average of high-income countries, which is 24 tons. per capita. Of course, there must be space to expand the use of resources by poorer countries (for the construction of schools, hospitals, means of communication and transport), but this implies a drastic reduction in the material footprint of rich countries and even in the segment most prosperous of high-income countries.
Hence the third answer about the reasons for “changing the trend”, which refers to the interaction of social, ecological, institutional and technological factors on the basis of which natural resources are extracted and transformed to meet social demands and needs. The report examines four economic sectors (food, housing, mobility and energy) showing that the basic premise for reducing inequalities and, at the same time, the threats contained in the growing use of resources is that there are drastic changes in production and consumption patterns. .
These changes cannot depend on individual decisions. 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”. 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.
In food, more than increasing the productivity of areas where the monotony of grains focused on animal production predominates, the priority is to stimulate the diversification of diets and the corresponding reduction in the consumption of animal products, which is currently excessive in most parts of the world.
The fourth answer lies in the link that the report makes between the notions of justice and sufficiency, an expression that is gaining increasing strength on the agenda of multilateral organizations. It is the concept of sufficiency that links the idea of “just transition” to the use of resources. The work of IRP/UNEP even proposes changing the focus of this transition from efficiency to sufficiency. The efficiency in the use of resources, although fundamental, has as its counterpart consumption patterns that encourage their increasing extraction. Hence the IRP/UNEP emphasis on the link between justice and sufficiency.
It is in the fight against inequalities, supported by consumption patterns that strengthen the goods and services of a dignified life for all, that lies the core of achieving a society capable of preventing efficiency gains from continuing to be expressed in widespread destruction. scale of the bases that support life itself.
*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 newspaper Economic value.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
