Could we meet the needs of everyone on the planet without stripping the Earth of all its resources? A paper in this week’s Nature Sustainability says: kind of.
It should be possible to meet the basic physical needs of everyone on
the planet without using up physical resources too quickly. But it
wouldn’t be possible to extend a first-world standard of living to
everyone without needing “a level of resource use that is two-six times
the sustainable level,” researcher Daniel O’Neill and his colleagues
report. Only a drastic improvement in efficiency would allow the planet
to manage this higher standard of living.
O’Neill and his colleagues looked at the resources that humans use a
lot of and that are critical for the planet’s health: things like fresh
water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Exceeding the
“planetary boundaries” of these resources risks global environmental
stability—and we’re not doing well on that front.
Pushing boundaries
The new paper assesses around 150 countries for their performance at
meeting a series of human needs, ranging from the very basic (nutrition,
sanitation, and freedom from extreme poverty) to the more advanced
(like equality and democratic quality). They used the data to assess how
well countries are doing at meeting their citizens’ needs and how much
they’re eating into the planet’s resources to achieve this. To achieve
global utopia, every country on the list would need to meet all of its
citizens’ needs without exceeding its share of planetary resources.
Instead, unsurprisingly, an interactive graphic
shows that the countries that are doing well on quality of life are
hogging the resources, while the countries that aren’t hogging resources
generally lag on well-being. Wealthy countries like the US, Canada,
France, and Japan are generally doing well by their citizens but are
blazing through planetary boundaries. Countries like Malawi and Nepal
aren't gobbling up resources, but they also aren't meeting well-being
thresholds.
The relationship isn’t perfect, though: some countries have to deal
with the worst of both worlds. Turkey, Mongolia, South Africa, and
Swaziland are doing particularly badly—they’re transgressing on five or
six of the seven planetary boundaries the researchers assessed, while
meeting well-being targets on zero (Swaziland) to three (Mongolia) of
the 11 well-being thresholds.
On the other hand, some countries get high marks with much less.
Vietnam stands out of the crowd, meeting six of the well-being targets
while transgressing only two planetary boundaries. Germany does a smidge
better than other wealthy countries, hitting all well-being targets but
only five of the seven planetary boundaries.
O’Neill and his colleagues point out that the efficient countries
give reason for hope: “Some nations are able to achieve the social
thresholds at a much lower level of resource use,” they write. “These
results give a sense of the possibility space for achieving the social
thresholds within planetary boundaries.”
Unsustainable
On the other hand, they add, if population growth continues on its
current path, the problem will become more and more complicated. It may
be possible to meet the basic physical needs of everyone on the
planet—as long as “everyone on the planet” is still less than seven
billion people. As the population increases, the need for efficiency
increases, too.
Things like democratic quality and equality don’t directly produce
high standards of living, but they are associated with them. These items
have less of a clear relationship to resource use: getting everyone
food and healthcare is linked strongly to physical resources, but
getting everyone social support is a different ball game. Extra
consumption of resources isn’t as closely tied to advanced needs, the
researchers suggest.
This implies that wealthy countries should be able to reduce their
consumption without reducing their quality of life. But this would
require a shift from the pursuit of GDP growth to what the researchers
term “alternative economic models such as a steady-state economy.”
This grading system has some rough edges—for instance, it makes the
assumption of an average per-person distribution of resources, when the
reality is that some regions will always have a higher need or footprint
than others. Water-scarce areas, for example, have to use more
resources in maintaining their water supply.
Future research will need to address some of these complications if
we want to come up with more precise estimates. But this is a start at
answering the question of what a sustainable world that takes care of
everyone could look like and what it would take to get there.
