E3G

Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World

By Tom Burke

In much of the world we have done well on this environmental agenda. We have made significant progress in improving air and water quality, wastes are much more commonly recycled. Furthermore, the cost of dealing with them turned out to be much less than was often thought. Cutting pollution very often also cut costs.

Dealing with this environmental agenda may not have seemed easy at the time but compared to the agenda that is now coming to dominate the environmental debate it really was. In the 21st century we must face the hard politics of the environment.

The agenda is different: climate change, deforestation, water availability, biodiversity loss, fisheries collapse, soil loss. The need to tackle these issues is not so obvious. Fishermen are still arguing that there are plenty of fish in the sea. Former Chancellors of the Exchequer will still tell you there is no need to do anything about climate change.

If you do act on this agenda, there are many more losers than winners. It is not immediately obvious what policy tools and institutions are needed. The media has great trouble getting a clear focus on the complex trade-offs involved and has no easy way of dealing with problems where the villains and the victims are the same people.

Needless to say, we have made little progress in solving these problems.

The agenda of the hard politics of the environment might also be called the sustainable development agenda. I know of no concept more prone to produce definitional constipation than sustainable development. I am quite content with the original Brundtland definition – development which meets the needs of today’s generation without undermining the capacity of future generations to meet their needs.

Put operationally this means finding the ways to provide rising real incomes to some 8 billion people without collapsing the ecological foundations of the economy – croplands, rangelands, forestlands, freshwaters, the atmosphere and the ocean.