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Livability isn’t sustainability
William E. Rees, Georgia Straight (Vancouver)
The world is experiencing the greatest human migration in history. This is a rural-urban migration that has swelled the population of the world’s cities 50 percent to three billion in the 1990s and is expected to add another 2.2 billion people to those cities by 2030. This means that in just three decades, the urban population alone is expected to grow by the equivalent of the total human population in the early 1930s! And most of this explosive growth will take place in the poorest of cities, adding millions of people to their already swarming, squalid slums.
All this raises a critical question: in an age of alleged “sustainable development”, just how sustainable are the world’s cities, both rich and poor?
…Appalled by pollution? No problem! Once people get rich enough to care about air and water quality, they’ll deal with it. In the words of economist Wilfred Beckerman, “the surest way to improve your environment is to become rich”. Worried about resource shortages? No issue here either, now that technology can substitute for nature and thus decouple the economy from the ecosphere. As Nobel-laureate economist Robert Solow famously put it, “If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then…the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.”
But is it really that easy? Can economic growth and technological prowess really fill all the potential potholes on the road to sustainability? Maybe not, if we look more closely at the biophysical and ethical dimensions of the problem.
First, what do we mean by sustainability? On the simplest level, something is sustainable if it can safely remain in its present state or maintain its present course indefinitely. Thus, a sustainable society might be one that is experiencing positive social, cultural, and economic change—i.e., development—that does not degrade the ecosystems upon which that society is dependent. Note that development as defined here can occur with or without growth in the scale of the economy.
But how can we determine whether or not a society is overusing its critical ecosystems? By using ecological-footprint analysis (EFA), a quantitative tool I have pioneered with my students at UBC. EFA estimates the area of average land and water ecosystems required, on a continuous basis, to supply the resources consumed, and to assimilate the wastes produced, by any specified population, wherever those ecosystems are located.
It turns out that the residents of the world’s rich cities require five to 10 hectares of productive ecosystem per capita compared to the half-hectare needed by the poorest of the poor. By this measure, in 2001, Greater Vancouver’s 2.1 million residents had an aggregate eco-footprint of almost 14 million hectares. This is 48 times the size of the Greater Vancouver Regional District, or about 20 times the area of the entire lower Fraser Valley, from Hope to the sea.
In effect, EFA shows that although modern urbanites may reside in cities, they do not actually live there ecologically. The ecosystems that support wealthy city dwellers’ consumer lifestyles may actually be mainly in other countries half a world away. For example, most of the pollution generated by China’s factory cities is attributable not to newly urbanized Chinese but to consumption by people living in high-income cities like London and Vancouver.
The separation of production from consumption renders complacent urbanites both blind to the degradation resulting from their consumer lifestyles and unconscious of their increasing dependence on a deteriorating resource base.
(27 October 2005)
William E. Rees is an ecological economist and professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning.
Swedish tenant owner cooperative starts oil break with geothemal heating
Steve, Inventing for the sustainable planet (Swedish blog)
High oil prices, and the Prime Minister’s announced intention to break oil dependency make Sweden something of an interesting study in Post-Carbon transition. The Swedish Daily, DN, today reports on a tenant owner cooperative which is starting its break with oil by transferring to a renewable energy source of heat – from the ground underneath the building.
The tenant owners of the apartment building Tallen 12, in Solna, just outside Stockholm are fed up with rising oil prices – 140 percent over the last ten years. The cooperative hopes the move will save them five million kronor (about $417,000) over 15 years.
Heating costs have been worrying house owners for a long time. Now, apartment building owners like Tallen are waking up to the fact that today’s prices bring the break-even point for investments in renewable energy within easy reach.
…the story of Tallen is probably illustrative of how the break with oil could happen: as prices rise, building owners turn to renewable solutions as they become more and more financially viable. Here an energy farm owned by several tenant owner cooperatives would be viable, especially in conjunction with a local food system.
(6 November 2005)
Community resource management: old rules, and new sustainable ones
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World (blog)
As regular readers of these pages know, I am predicting that, at some point in this century, the large political and economic structures (state governments and multi-national corporations) that currently govern much of our lives will collapse, probably due to a combination of total dysfunction in the new wired world and economic bankruptcy. This will leave a vacuum that will be filled, I predict, by community-based organizations.
…The challenge is that we have become so used to relying on large central governments and corporations to manage things for us, that we have lost the knowledge of how to self-manage our own communities. My nine articles on communities (list here, scroll down to the Community subheading) have focused mainly on the social management of communities — self-forming new communities and then getting along with other members. Just as important will be the economic management of these communities, and in particular the management of the communities’ resources.
…What rules will a community-based society need to put in place to effectively manage its resources when the existing central governments and corporations crumble and are no longer in a position to act by the above, or any, rules? I think, given enough time and through trial and error communities will (re-)discover rules that work. But here, based on a number of recent e-mail discussions with readers, is my first cut at such a rule set:….
(4 November 2005)
British to help China build ‘eco-cities’
Frank Kane, The Observer (UK)
British engineers will this week sign a multi-billion contract with the Chinese authorities to design and build a string of ‘eco-cities’ – self-sustaining urban centres the size of a large western capital – in the booming country.
Arup, the London-based consulting firm that has already signed up for one such project near Shanghai, will announce it has clinched a deal to extend the concept into a string of cities around China.
The eco-cities are regarded both as a prototype for urban living in over-populated and polluted environments and as a magnet for investment funds into the rapidly growing Chinese economy.
…The eco-cities are intended to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems
(6 November 2005)
Mentioned by Brian Hosey at Gristmill. Also, see the press release from Arup.
