The Great Disruption (6 page)

Probably the best and most comprehensive work done to date in this approach is the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
(
MEA
), a 2004 report that resulted from an investigation by 1,300 scientists who were commissioned by the UN to comprehensively analyze the state of the global environment.
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The report took a human point of view by looking at the planet's ability to provide the services we take from it to nourish our lives, from basic requirements like food to the various resources we need to feed the global economy, like fiber.

This is why the
MEA
was so important. It clearly assessed the ecosystem as the underpinning of the
human
economy and society.

What the
MEA
did was to identify twenty-five ecosystem services, or categories of activity that humans use. They then assessed the peer-reviewed, quality science that analyzes the state of those services around the world and concluded how sustainable our level of use was. These included recreational and spiritual services such as tourism and the pleasure we get from nature, but the report focused mainly on direct services like fish to eat, land to grow food on, forests to provide fiber, regulation of the climate, the cleaning and provision of water, and so on.

The report's conclusion was that sixteen of those twenty-five services were being used unsustainably and, in summary:

At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning. Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

I think it is important to clarify at this point the use of the words
sustainable
and
unsustainable
. They have been used so much, they have lost some of their meaning, becoming almost philosophical views rather than the literal logical terms they are.

In this case, if a system is being used unsustainably and behavior doesn't change, then it will no longer be available to use. This is a practical issue; if we don't have enough fiber, food, or water, or if we don't have a stable climate, then we simply won't have the economy or society we have now. So through this and other studies, we can now define and measure what Rachel Carson argued forty-five years ago: We are part of the environment, and our economy, health, and lives all depend upon it.

For decades in my work, I approached this issue from a values or philosophical perspective. It was my view, instinctively held, that messing with the environment was a bad idea. It was a place of extraordinary wonder and beauty, something way more impressive than anything humanity had ever created. So not looking after it was just dumb. The issue that brought this home to me most strongly was biodiversity, particularly through the lens of time. It had taken billions of years for the amazing diversity of life on earth to develop in all its dazzling complexity, brilliant design, and joyful wonder. So the idea that we were on track to wipe out 50 percent or more of all that amazing creation through our actions over just a few short centuries, for the sake of material distraction and fleeting satisfaction, was incredibly stupid. Not to mention breathtaking in its arrogance.

So for decades I presented countless speeches and workshops on these issues, appealing to people's humanity, sense of obligation, and morality to bring them along to the cause. Generally my audiences, often businesspeople, agreed with genuine earnest endorsement, but little actually changed in their lives, their organizations, or the broader community.

Then in 2005 I changed tack. When the ideas laid out in this book first became clear to me—that this issue was going to have a direct, short-term economic impact—I decided to communicate that instead.

I remember very clearly, when I presented this to a U.K. seminar of senior business executives at Cambridge University, how my new approach generated an entirely different response. I no longer argued that this was about the destruction of ecological systems or the arrogance of humanity's disrespect for nature; rather, I warned my listeners that the global economy was at risk of sudden collapse and with it their pension funds, their personal wealth, and their companies. The level of engagement in response was a quantum leap from what I had seen previously. It wasn't a wholly positive response, as I'd witnessed when I had presented on the risk to the environment. This was more sharply personal. People found the threat to the economy and to economic growth far more challenging than the threat to our planet.

My first reaction was critical, that these people cared so much about money and so little about the world. On reflection, however, I realized the criticism should be on me and my kind, that we had failed previously to communicate these issues in a way that engaged people in their lives; instead, we had preferred to stay on the ground of ethics and righteousness, perhaps believing that put us in some kind of higher moral position.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of previous approaches, what was now clear was that we had arrived at a point in history when these issues had become practical and very real. The time frame between assessment of the problem and direct economic and personal impact on people's lives had shrunk from forty years to ten or even less, and the level of engagement would now increase commensurately.

The
Milllennium Ecosystem Assessment
communicates this shift clearly. We now face threats that are not philosophical but intensely practical and personal. They are not about the balance
between
environmental protection and economic growth, but about the
causal
relationship between them. We face threats to our food supply because of excessive degradation of land and changing rainfall patterns brought about by climate change. We face further risks to food supply because of the potential collapse of fisheries both through overfishing and through broader damage to ocean ecosystems. Billions of people face increasingly urgent issues about access to fresh and clean water, both for everyday consumption and to supply industrial and agricultural processes. These and many other issues will have a direct impact on economic growth, on geopolitical and domestic security, and on our quality of life. The flow on effects of any one of these trends, let alone a number of them in combination, will be dramatic. It is important to emphasize this point—that environmental damage means economic loss—because many still don't fully accept the connection.

With fisheries, for example, the science suggests that with our current growth trajectory all global fisheries are on the path to collapse—indeed 30 percent of them already have. A study published in
Science
in 2009 concluded that every type of fish currently consumed by people will have collapsed by 2048, defined as catches having dropped by 90 percent. When they say collapsed, they mean just that—the end of the fishing industry. With five hundred million people
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in families that depend upon the direct and indirect income of fisheries and around one billion people relying on fish as their prime source of animal protein, the economic and social implications of collapse are profound, as the
MEA
demonstrates. We're already feeling the impact, with a World Bank study of 2008 finding that overfishing was already costing the industry $50 billion a year.
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We can get an idea of what this would look like by considering the smaller case study of the collapse of the Newfoundland cod in Canadian waters in the early 1990s due to overfishing. In a haunting example of sudden, nonlinear change, the catch size dropped from hundreds of thousands of tons a year to close to zero in the space of just a few years, despite a failed last-minute attempt to save the stock through the imposition of catch quotas. Along with the loss of a valuable industry, the collapse led to the loss of thirty thousand jobs and a cost to taxpayers of $2 billion in income support and retraining. If sustainable fishing had been practiced instead, the industry would today be worth $900 million a year.

Aquaculture is often proposed as a solution to declining catches. While aquaculture has theoretical potential, current practices suggest that the ecosystem economics is questionable there as well. Farmed fish species such as salmon and tuna have to be fed many times their body weight in wild fish meal, increasing inefficiency and diverting cheap fish protein catches away from local populations. The loss of ecosystem services in establishing aquaculture farms can also be huge. A 2001 study of mangroves in Thailand referenced by the
MEA
found that protecting mangroves and their existing uses returned between $1,000 and $36,000 per hectare, whereas conversion to shrimp farming returned just $200 per hectare.

When thinking of water systems and economics, we often gravitate toward the oceans, but inland water systems are tremendously important as well, and under particular strain. An estimated 50 percent of them were lost in the twentieth century. Even after this loss, the ecosystem services provided by inland water systems have been estimated at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion annually. As an example of direct human losses following environmental change, we need look no further than the Aral Sea, an inland sea and one of the world's four largest lakes, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Severe overirrigation originating in the Soviet era literally drained the once massive lake, so that by 2007 it had been reduced to 10 percent of its former size. Around thirty-five million people were dependent upon the lake for water, fish, and transport—services it no longer provides. The loss of water has dramatically changed the climate and is quickly turning the area into a desert, with hotter, drier summers and colder winters. With declining water quality and availability, increased dust storms, and a host of other associated problems, the region has seen its rates of a whole range of diseases increase dramatically, along with the number of children born with birth defects. Once again, environmental problems caused direct human and economic loss with surprisingly broad systemwide impacts.

The ongoing TEEB Report—
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
—builds upon the work of the
MEA
to provide an up-to-date and quantified understanding of the value of ecosystem services. One example they provide looks at the case of deforestation in China between 1950 and 1998, where a massive increase in the logging of natural forests provided the backbone for the construction industry in a rapidly expanding economy. This period of growth has vastly improved the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese, but it has not been without a cost. In this case, the study concluded that the loss of ecosystem services, in the form of flood damage, drought, lost nutrients, and so on, amounted to an economic loss of $12.2 billion annually. This loss amounted to almost double the market value of the timber over the same time period. For every $1 of timber sold in China, $1.78 of ecosystem services were lost.
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These are just a few examples of how ecosystem breakdown has far-reaching economic impacts. With ecosystem change and breakdown now under way globally, I draw two conclusions. First is that the economic impacts will be global and system threatening, and second is that these threats are no longer to our children's children, but to us. They are hitting on our watch.

So if this is the case, why have we not responded? Why do we ignore such pressing global environmental challenges yet respond so dramatically to economic ones, as we did in 2008 during the financial crisis?

The answer is that despite the overwhelming evidence, we still don't see these issues as economic ones. People hear and accept the environmental arguments, but they don't fully accept their economic impacts. So I'm often told something like this:

Look, I get these issues are really important and I care about them deeply, but while the loss of rainforests and coral reefs would be tragic, it won't directly affect us that much in our day-to-day lives.

This is a common assertion, which I understand looking at the history of the debate. It is the legacy of environmentalists and scientists focusing for decades on the ecological impacts, framing the issues as one of protecting “the environment.”

Most people still don't think they live in “the environment” but rather see that as “somewhere else,” so they connect to environmental protection in an abstract way. I don't mean they think this literally and logically—people get the basic science of where humans fit into the ecosystem and evolution. I'm referring more to a kind of cultural context and resulting subconscious response.

This view is deeply ingrained. For thousands of years, humans have sought to distance themselves from “nature,” which historically was a difficult environment in which to live, with many sources of discomfort and danger, from extreme weather to dangerous animals. So we have been steadily moving our society away from it and into air-conditioned houses, sealed buildings, massive sprawling cities, large comfortable “climate-controlled” cars, and so on. Not everyone can afford this, but even those who can't mostly aspire to.

So in this context, many people have engaged with environmental protection in an abstract way, separating it from their lives in both space and time. They see the threat being to the environment, as in nature—forests, polar bears, orangutans, and whales—and to the future, as in their children's children.

This natural cultural tendency has been caught in a self-reinforcing loop with what works for advocates of change. At Greenpeace we were acutely aware that our membership was more responsive to the need to “save the environment” when it was positioned as saving whales, especially if they were being killed by foreigners a long way away. In the 1990s, asking them to give up their cars was rather less popular than asking for $50 to stop foreigners from butchering whales!

All this is interesting historically but unfortunately is no longer relevant. As articulated by studies into the economic linkages to ecosystem breakdown and resource constraint, the economic impacts will be dramatic and have direct global and personal impact.