May 1, 2014, Thursday — Limits to Growth?
“The rogue word in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is ‘gross.’ GDP, being the market value of all final goods and services, ignores the degradation of natural capital. If fish harvests rise, GDP increases even if the stock declines. If logging intensifies, GDP increases even if the forests are denuded. And so on. The moral is significant though banal: GDP is impervious to Nature’s constraints. There should be no question that Humanity needs urgently to redirect our relationship with Nature so as to promote a sustainable pattern of economic and social development.” —Partha Sarathi Dasgupta (Dacca, India, Professor of Economics at Cambridge University and Professor of Environmental Economy and Development at the University of Manchester), Veerabhadran Ramanathan (Madras, India, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences: “My fundamental interest is in understanding how human activities are influencing the climate and environment of this planet… My current interest is to understand the influence of sub-micron size manmade particles in the atmosphere”), and Father Roland Minnerath (Sarreguemines, France, Professor of History and Social Ethics and member of the Catholic Church’s International Theological Commission). The three are members of the Holy See’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. This passage comes from a summary of the subject of an upcoming meeting of the Academy, which starts tomorrow in Rome and runs through May 6, early next week.
As Pope Francis’ controversial “tweet” on inequality as the source of social evil continues to spark debate, he may be preparing to weigh in on a number of very controversial questions, including population control, the limits to economic growth, and climate change.
So this “parish priest of the Vatican” who has astonished the world with his informality and simplicity may have more surprises in store in coming months as he continues his mission of Christian witness to the poor (including some of the rich who are spiritually poor) and forgotten (including those who toil in obscurity in simple homes throughout the world).
Starting tomorrow, a 5-day Vatican conference is about to take up some of the most controversial social and economic questions of our time, ranging from the melting of glaciers and global warming to “peak oil” to population control.
(Below, a United Nations graphic showing the world’s population as of February 26 this year — so, 57 days into the year — with some statistics about births and deaths, and a list of the world’s 20 most populous countries. The numbers of “births this year” and “deaths this year” refer to the 57 days from January 1 to February 26)
The Academy’s proceedings are not in any way “magisterial” or directly connected with official Catholic Church or papal teaching.
However, they are high-level discussion sessions intended to offer some of the best scientific insight currently available on key issues of contemporary importance, insight Pope Francis can then draw upon as he reflects, prepares his homilies and encyclicals, and takes decisions on how to lead the Church.
So, during the next six days, the prestigious Vatican-sponsored Pontifical Academy of Sciences, together with the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, will bring 45 top scientists and scholars together from around the world to discuss controversial questions like:
—Can the global economic growth of the past century continue indefinitely?
—Can the world’s population, which has risen from 1 billion to more than 7 billion since 1900, continue to grow without limit?
—Are man-made carbon emissions causing the climate change which is melting the world’s glaciers (that is, is global warming actually occurring due to human activity)?
In a preliminary summary, the three coordinators of the upcoming 5-day conference set forth the issues to be discussed under the title “Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility — Joint Workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2-6 May 2014.”
Here is the complete text of that introductory document:
Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility — Joint Workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2-6 May 2014
Are Humanity’s dealings with Nature sustainable?
What is the status of the Human Person in a world where science predominates?
How should we perceive Nature and what is a good relationship between Humanity and Nature?
Should one expect the global economic growth that has been experienced over the past six decades to continue for the foreseeable future?
Should we be confident that knowledge and skills will increase in such ways as to lessen Humanity’s reliance on Nature despite our increasing economic activity and growing numbers?
Is the growing gap between the world’s rich and world’s poor in their reliance on natural resources a consequence of those growths?
Contemporary discussions on the questions are now several decades old. If they have remained alive and are frequently shrill, it is because two opposing empirical perspectives shape them.
On the one hand, if we look at specific examples of what one may call natural capital, there is convincing evidence that at the rates at which we currently exploit them, they are very likely to change character dramatically with little advance notice. The melting of glaciers and sea-ice are recent symptoms.
On the other hand, if we study trends in food consumption, life expectancy, and recorded incomes in regions that are currently rich and in those that are on the way to becoming rich, resource scarcities wouldn’t appear to have bitten so far.
“Environmental problems” and “future prospects” present themselves in different ways to different people. Some identify environmental problems with population growth, while others identify them with wrong sorts of economic growth. There are those who see environmental problems as urban pollution in emerging economies, while others view them through the spectacle of poverty in the world’s poorest countries. Some allude to “sustainable development” only when considering economic development in the global economy, while others see it in terms of the development prospects of villages in sub-Saharan Africa.
Each of the visions is correct. We know that what begins as urban pollution becomes layers of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs), containing black carbon particles and ozone, that annually destroy some 2 million lives and over 100 million tons of crops, disrupts the Monsoon circulation and contribute to the melting of arctic ice and the Himalayan snow.
There is no single environmental problem, there is a large collection of interrelated problems. Some are presenting themselves today, while others are threats to the future.
Although growth in industrial and agricultural pollutants has accompanied economic development, neither preventive nor curative measures have kept pace with their production in industrialized countries. That neglect is now prominent in the rapidly growing regions in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS).
Moreover, the scale of the human enterprise has so stretched the capabilities of ecosystems, that Humanity is today Earth’s dominant species. During the 20th century world population grew by a factor of four (to more than 6 billion) and world output by 14, industrial output increased by a multiple of 40 and the use of energy by 16, methane-producing cattle population grew in pace with human population, fish catch increased by a multiple of 35, and carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 10. It is not without cause that our current era has been named the Anthropocene.
On the other hand, economic growth has brought with it improvements in the quality of a number of environmental resources. The large-scale availability of potable water and the increased protection of human populations against both water- and air-borne diseases in advanced industrial countries have come allied to the economic growth those countries have enjoyed over the past 200 years. Increases in scientific knowledge, investment in public infrastructure, and universal education in advanced industrial countries have meant that citizens there have far greater knowledge of environmental hazards than their counterparts in poor regions. They also have resources to avoid them.
Many people are convinced that scientific and technological advances, the accumulation of reproducible capital, growth in human capital, and improvements in the economy’s institutions can overcome diminutions in natural capital. Otherwise it is hard to explain why so much of the social sciences in the 20th century has been detached from the environmental sciences.
Nature is all too often seen as a backdrop from which resources and services can be drawn in isolation. Macroeconomic forecasts routinely exclude natural capital. Accounting for Nature, if it comes into the calculus at all, is usually an afterthought. The rhetoric has been so successful, that if someone exclaims, “Economic growth!”, one does not need to ask, “Growth in what?” – we all know they mean growth in gross domestic product (GDP).
The rogue word in GDP is “gross”. GDP, being the market value of all final goods and services, ignores the degradation of natural capital. If fish harvests rise, GDP increases even if the stock declines. If logging intensifies, GDP increases even if the forests are denuded. And so on. The moral is significant though banal: GDP is impervious to Nature’s constraints. There should be no question that Humanity needs urgently to redirect our relationship with Nature so as to promote a sustainable pattern of economic and social development.
A Proposal
Rio+20 Summit on biodiversity preservation was convened to provide a resolution to the problems Humanity faces in our interchanges with Nature. In practical terms though, it is widely acknowledged to have been a failure.
Looking through its programme it is hard to detect an overarching intellectual framework that was used to identify Nature’s constraints. The lacuna was inevitable. There was no collective endeavour among natural and social scientists. That is why we are proposing a joint PAS-PASS workshop on Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature.
Our idea is not to catalogue environmental problems. We propose instead to view Humanity’s interchanges with Nature through a triplet of fundamental, but inter-related Human needs – Food, Health, and Energy – and ask our respective Academies to work together to invite experts from the natural and the social sciences to speak of the various pathways that both serve those needs and reveal constraints on Nature’s ability to meet them.
—P.S. Dasgupta, V. Ramanathan, R. Minnerath
Here is a list of the participants in the upcoming conference:
Werner Arber
Margaret S. Archer
Scott Barrett
Antonio Battro
Enrico Berti
Joachim von Braun
Edith Brown Weiss
Yves Coppens
Paul J. Crutzen
Gretchen Daily
Partha S. Dasgupta
Pierpaolo Donati
Gérard-François Dumont
Mary Ann Glendon
Juan Grabois
Daniel Kammen
Charles Kennel
Nancy Knowlton
Anil Kulkarni
Yuan Tse Lee
Pierre Léna
Juan J. Llach
Jane Lubchenco
Karl-Goran Maler
Marcia McNutt
Roland Minnerath
Walter Munk
Naomi Oreskes
Janice E. Perlman
Charles Perrings
V. Ramanathan
Peter Raven
Martin Rees
Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga
Jeffrey Sachs
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo
Herbert Schambeck
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
Robert Scholes
Achim Steiner
Joseph Stiglitz
Wilfrido Villacorta
Jeff Vincent
Peter Wadhams
Stefano Zamagni
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The Anthropological Question
“You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because, in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” —Walker Percy (1916-1990), American Catholic convert and writer, author of The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos
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