Papers Today

// World sustainability crisis prediction debunked

The world is not approaching a massive sustainability meltdown as
predicted by green group WWF, according to a recent review of the NGO's latest "living planet" report by Denmark's Environmental assessment institute.

The institute is headed by Bj??rn Lomborg, famous for questioning in "the sceptical environmentalist" the severity of many current environmental problems (ED 27/02/02 http://www.environmentdaily.com/articles/index.cfm?action=article&ref=11673). WWF has been charting the world's ecological footprint since 1998. Its most recent update, released this summer, predicted a massive overshoot of the world's biological productive capacity by 2050. Without urgent policy changes, it said, the global "ecological overdraft" would be so severe as to cause rapid declines in human welfare after 2030 (ED 09/07/02 http://www.environmentdaily.com/articles/index.cfm?action=article&ref=12532). Drawing on current academic debate on the ecological footprint concept, Mr Lomborg's institute challenges WWF's gloomy prognosis. Altering just a few assumptions, it says, produces a more plausible conclusion that the world's per capita ecological footprint has actually fallen by 27% over the last 40 years and will not exceed the Earth's biocapacity any time up to 2100. Aggregating diverse ecological pressures into a single indicator such as an ecological footprint is not wrong in itself, the institute argues. What matters is that the resulting numbers should be meaningful. Those produced by WWF, it contends, largely fail this test. About half of WWF's global ecological footprint, as well as half of its growth over the last 40 years, comes from energy, measured mainly as carbon dioxide emissions. The only way of reconciling these emissions with sustainability, WWF proposes, is to plant a sufficient area of forest to absorb them again. The approach is based on an untenable "strong sustainability" assumption that there can be no substitution between resources, the institute responds. It also ignores options other than forest carbon absorption, such as greatly boosting low or non-carbon renewable energy sources. Underlying these issues, the institute says, is that the computer model used by WWF to project ecological overshoot is basically the same as the one on which the famous "limits to growth" report of 1972 was based. "Almost every quantitative prediction that was generated at the time and can be evaluated today turned out to be wrong", it comments. And whereas the World3 model contains a series of "lethal conditions" any one of which can lead to ecological collapse, projections made by UN agencies are universally more optimistic than WWF's derived from World3. Follow-up: Danish Environmental assessment institute http://www.imv.dk/, tel: +45 72 26 58 00, and ecological footprint report http://www.imv.dk/include/downloadfile.asp?file_id={440A67A2-D769-45D8-84ED-0FF60D04EFF3}. Environment Daily 1293, 24/09/02 -------------------------