Ambitious agenda for people and planet needs everyone to play their part
Residents of Mazatlan, Mexico release Olive Ridley turtle hatchlings as part of a programme to recover the
endangered species, symbolizing the harmony between people and planet that will be required to deliver on
sustainable development.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years—no offence intended to the couple who have done just that for the last three decades—you will have encountered the term “sustainable development”. Perhaps you are already sick of hearing the words tossed around like plates at a Greek wedding, and have dismissed the concept as another plan to save the world that will soon fall by the wayside. If so, think again.
Sustainable development—or the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as the global push became officially known when world leaders committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals late last year—is revolutionary because it takes an approach based on one simple principle: everything is connected.
This is not a new concept. Native American philosophy has long held that the universe is an interrelated whole, while mathematician Edward Lorenz in 1972 famously defined the idea that small events can have huge consequences as “the butterfly effect”. However, the 2030 Agenda marks the first time that the whole world is applying this notion to the future of people and our planet—bringing goals ranging from ending poverty to achieving peaceful societies to protecting life on land and in the ocean under one umbrella. And this changes everything.
“Since the industrial revolution, we have followed a model of develop first, address inequity, and then clean up,” says UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. “In some ways, we got away with it. We saw countries progress, certain people become better off and life expectancy rise.
“The turning point came when science began to signal that this model, in particular our carbon-intensive approach, was creating massive negative impacts on our planet, economies and societies. And so now we have a universally applicable agenda, which recognizes that environmental, societal and economic challenges cannot be addressed individually.”
Particularly significant is the rejection of the outdated idea that environmental conservation is a drag on human development; now we understand it is central to our aspirations to create a world in which nobody is left behind. Imagine a world in which no rain falls, no trees grow, no land produces food, no fish come from the sea. No amount of technology could support human life in such apocalyptic conditions.
And yet we have crept closer to such a future. Global resource extraction rose from 7 billion tonnes per year in 1900 to 68 billion tonnes in 2009. We are seeing the degradation of 20 per cent of cultivated land, 30 per cent of forests and 10 per cent of grasslands. By 2050, the world population will grow to around 10 billion people and resource extraction to a mind-boggling 140 billion tonnes; over the same period, 25 per cent of the world’s food production may disappear due to climate change, land degradation, cropland losses, water scarcity and infestations. And these are only some of the issues.
We cannot continue as we did in the 20th century. The 2030 Agenda offers a new way: one that will harness humanity’s ingenuity to accelerate economic growth while ensuring that society develops, poverty is reduced and the environment is conserved.
Nobody is saying it will be easy. But we have already seen this integration in action. Remember when the aerosols and refrigerants we used so blithely were tearing a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer, exposing us to harmful ultraviolet rays? Under the Montreal Protocol to phase-out ozone-depleting substances, we acted as a global community to head off this threat.
Now, up to two million cases of skin cancer may be prevented each year by 2030. Estimates show that the phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) alone will result in $1.8 trillion in global health benefits and almost $460 billion in avoided damages to agriculture, fisheries and materials over a 70-year period. This clearly demonstrates that addressing an environmental issue brings economic and social benefits. All we have to do now is systemize such action.
Just think about how much better our lives will be when we apply this across the board—to, for example, other impacts of environmental factors on human health. Each year, seven million people die prematurely as a result of indoor and outdoor air pollution. The cost of 600,000 premature deaths and air-pollution related diseases was $1.6 trillion in the European region alone in 2010. Then we have lead and mercury poisoning, which affect millions each year. Action in these areas will bring obvious environmental, economic and societal benefits.
To succeed, nations, intergovernmental bodies, civil society, communities and the private sector must cooperate on an unprecedented scale; UNEP is working to ensure this happens. We have partnerships that span the globe. We are exploring new ways to secure the necessary finance, from governments and the private sector. And we are creating platforms such as UNEP Live to bring big data into play, so that decision-makers have all the information they need at their fingertips—both to design intelligent policies and track progress.
This week, the UN Statistical Commission will adopt the framework of indicators for monitoring the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda; UNEP has taken the lead on indicators for the goals on Sustainable Consumption and Production (goal 12) and Climate Change (goal 13) and provided input for indicators across all other goals. UNEP will keep working with the Inter-agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators over the next fifteen years to ensure that progress is being monitored—a step essential to ensure the collective work the world committed to is being carried out.
But it is not just about action at government and organizational level. Individuals hold the power to help sustainable development transform our world.
“Sustainable development will not be brought about by policies only: it must be taken up by society as a principle guiding the choices each citizen makes every day,” says Jacqueline McGlade, Director of UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment. “Realizing this vision requires profound changes in thinking and in consumption and production patterns.”
Take the issue of food waste. Each year, around a third of the food we produce goes uneaten—abandoned on a plate, withering at the back of the fridge or thrown out unsold from supermarket shelves. This has knock-on effects beyond wasted money. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNEP’s partner in the Think.Eat.Save. campaign, the carbon footprint of wasted food reaches 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent per year—around a third of the emissions we still need to cut to ensure the world does not warm beyond the dangerous 2°C limit this century. Globally, the blue water footprint of food wastage is about 250 cubic kilometers, which is three times the volume of Lake Geneva. The food we waste could feed the world’s hungry, who currently number just under 800 million. Just imagine the impact if everybody stopped wasting food.
Personal responsibility applies equally in other areas of sustainable consumption and production, itself a standalone Sustainable Development Goal and a factor in many more. By being more thoughtful about how we consume and produce—how we recycle, how we use energy, what kind of products we buy—we can benefit ourselves and others. Better resource use will head off scarcity, price hikes and save money. Social benefits, such as better health and a reduction in resource conflicts, will follow, thereby creating more peaceful societies. Environmental benefits will come through reduced pressure on ecosystems, less pollution and lower fossil-fuel use.
You may feel that sustainable development is too ambitious to achieve. But the ambition is the whole point. If we don’t set the bar high, we will fall far short. Ask yourself if you have ever seen such consensus on what we must do to make our world a better place. Ask yourself if you want to live in a world where conflicts continue, millions are fleeing their homes, poverty remains a massive problem and the environment that props up our very existence is being stripped. If you are lucky enough to be largely unaffected, ask yourself how long you can remain so.
There will be bumps, setbacks and disappointments along the way. It doesn’t matter. UNEP, the whole UN family and the nations of the world are committed to ensuring the sustainable development revolution succeeds. This is a real opportunity to secure the future of humanity and the many other species with which we share our planet. But we can only do it together. We are all butterflies. If we beat our wings as one, we can change the world.
Residents of Mazatlan, Mexico release Olive Ridley turtle hatchlings as part of a programme to recover the
endangered species, symbolizing the harmony between people and planet that will be required to deliver on
sustainable development.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years—no offence intended to the couple who have done just that for the last three decades—you will have encountered the term “sustainable development”. Perhaps you are already sick of hearing the words tossed around like plates at a Greek wedding, and have dismissed the concept as another plan to save the world that will soon fall by the wayside. If so, think again.
Sustainable development—or the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as the global push became officially known when world leaders committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals late last year—is revolutionary because it takes an approach based on one simple principle: everything is connected.
This is not a new concept. Native American philosophy has long held that the universe is an interrelated whole, while mathematician Edward Lorenz in 1972 famously defined the idea that small events can have huge consequences as “the butterfly effect”. However, the 2030 Agenda marks the first time that the whole world is applying this notion to the future of people and our planet—bringing goals ranging from ending poverty to achieving peaceful societies to protecting life on land and in the ocean under one umbrella. And this changes everything.
“Since the industrial revolution, we have followed a model of develop first, address inequity, and then clean up,” says UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. “In some ways, we got away with it. We saw countries progress, certain people become better off and life expectancy rise.
“The turning point came when science began to signal that this model, in particular our carbon-intensive approach, was creating massive negative impacts on our planet, economies and societies. And so now we have a universally applicable agenda, which recognizes that environmental, societal and economic challenges cannot be addressed individually.”
Particularly significant is the rejection of the outdated idea that environmental conservation is a drag on human development; now we understand it is central to our aspirations to create a world in which nobody is left behind. Imagine a world in which no rain falls, no trees grow, no land produces food, no fish come from the sea. No amount of technology could support human life in such apocalyptic conditions.
And yet we have crept closer to such a future. Global resource extraction rose from 7 billion tonnes per year in 1900 to 68 billion tonnes in 2009. We are seeing the degradation of 20 per cent of cultivated land, 30 per cent of forests and 10 per cent of grasslands. By 2050, the world population will grow to around 10 billion people and resource extraction to a mind-boggling 140 billion tonnes; over the same period, 25 per cent of the world’s food production may disappear due to climate change, land degradation, cropland losses, water scarcity and infestations. And these are only some of the issues.
We cannot continue as we did in the 20th century. The 2030 Agenda offers a new way: one that will harness humanity’s ingenuity to accelerate economic growth while ensuring that society develops, poverty is reduced and the environment is conserved.
Nobody is saying it will be easy. But we have already seen this integration in action. Remember when the aerosols and refrigerants we used so blithely were tearing a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer, exposing us to harmful ultraviolet rays? Under the Montreal Protocol to phase-out ozone-depleting substances, we acted as a global community to head off this threat.
Now, up to two million cases of skin cancer may be prevented each year by 2030. Estimates show that the phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) alone will result in $1.8 trillion in global health benefits and almost $460 billion in avoided damages to agriculture, fisheries and materials over a 70-year period. This clearly demonstrates that addressing an environmental issue brings economic and social benefits. All we have to do now is systemize such action.
Just think about how much better our lives will be when we apply this across the board—to, for example, other impacts of environmental factors on human health. Each year, seven million people die prematurely as a result of indoor and outdoor air pollution. The cost of 600,000 premature deaths and air-pollution related diseases was $1.6 trillion in the European region alone in 2010. Then we have lead and mercury poisoning, which affect millions each year. Action in these areas will bring obvious environmental, economic and societal benefits.
To succeed, nations, intergovernmental bodies, civil society, communities and the private sector must cooperate on an unprecedented scale; UNEP is working to ensure this happens. We have partnerships that span the globe. We are exploring new ways to secure the necessary finance, from governments and the private sector. And we are creating platforms such as UNEP Live to bring big data into play, so that decision-makers have all the information they need at their fingertips—both to design intelligent policies and track progress.
This week, the UN Statistical Commission will adopt the framework of indicators for monitoring the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda; UNEP has taken the lead on indicators for the goals on Sustainable Consumption and Production (goal 12) and Climate Change (goal 13) and provided input for indicators across all other goals. UNEP will keep working with the Inter-agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators over the next fifteen years to ensure that progress is being monitored—a step essential to ensure the collective work the world committed to is being carried out.
But it is not just about action at government and organizational level. Individuals hold the power to help sustainable development transform our world.
“Sustainable development will not be brought about by policies only: it must be taken up by society as a principle guiding the choices each citizen makes every day,” says Jacqueline McGlade, Director of UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment. “Realizing this vision requires profound changes in thinking and in consumption and production patterns.”
Take the issue of food waste. Each year, around a third of the food we produce goes uneaten—abandoned on a plate, withering at the back of the fridge or thrown out unsold from supermarket shelves. This has knock-on effects beyond wasted money. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNEP’s partner in the Think.Eat.Save. campaign, the carbon footprint of wasted food reaches 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent per year—around a third of the emissions we still need to cut to ensure the world does not warm beyond the dangerous 2°C limit this century. Globally, the blue water footprint of food wastage is about 250 cubic kilometers, which is three times the volume of Lake Geneva. The food we waste could feed the world’s hungry, who currently number just under 800 million. Just imagine the impact if everybody stopped wasting food.
Personal responsibility applies equally in other areas of sustainable consumption and production, itself a standalone Sustainable Development Goal and a factor in many more. By being more thoughtful about how we consume and produce—how we recycle, how we use energy, what kind of products we buy—we can benefit ourselves and others. Better resource use will head off scarcity, price hikes and save money. Social benefits, such as better health and a reduction in resource conflicts, will follow, thereby creating more peaceful societies. Environmental benefits will come through reduced pressure on ecosystems, less pollution and lower fossil-fuel use.
You may feel that sustainable development is too ambitious to achieve. But the ambition is the whole point. If we don’t set the bar high, we will fall far short. Ask yourself if you have ever seen such consensus on what we must do to make our world a better place. Ask yourself if you want to live in a world where conflicts continue, millions are fleeing their homes, poverty remains a massive problem and the environment that props up our very existence is being stripped. If you are lucky enough to be largely unaffected, ask yourself how long you can remain so.
There will be bumps, setbacks and disappointments along the way. It doesn’t matter. UNEP, the whole UN family and the nations of the world are committed to ensuring the sustainable development revolution succeeds. This is a real opportunity to secure the future of humanity and the many other species with which we share our planet. But we can only do it together. We are all butterflies. If we beat our wings as one, we can change the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment