05/08/2018

We Are All Climate Refugees Now

Project Syndicate - *

This summer's fires, droughts, and record-high temperatures should serve as a wake-up call. The longer a narrow and ignorant elite condemns Americans and the rest of humanity to wander aimlessly in the political desert, the more likely it is that we will all end up in a wasteland.
ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images
NEW YORK – Modern humans, born into one climate era, called the Holocene, have crossed the border into another, the Anthropocene. But instead of a Moses guiding humanity in this new and dangerous wilderness, a gang of science deniers and polluters currently misguides humanity to ever-greater danger. We are all climate refugees now and must chart a path to safety.
The Holocene was the geological age that started more than 10,000 years ago, with favorable climate conditions that supported human civilization as we know it. The Anthropocene is a new geological era with environmental conditions that humanity has never before experienced. Ominously, the Earth’s temperature is now higher than during the Holocene, owing to the carbon dioxide that humanity has emitted into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and gas, and by indiscriminately turning the world’s forests and grasslands into farms and pastures.
People are suffering and dying in the new environment, with much worse to come. Hurricane Maria is estimated to have taken more than 4,000 lives in Puerto Rico last September. High-intensity hurricanes are becoming more frequent, and major storms are causing more flooding, because of the increased heat transfer from the warming waters of the oceans, the greater moisture in warmer air, and the rise in sea levels – all made more extreme by human-induced climate change.
Just last month, more than 90 people perished in the suburbs of Athens from a devastating forest fire stoked by drought and high temperatures. Huge forest fires are similarly raging this summer in other hot and newly dry locales, including California, Sweden, Britain, and Australia. Last year, Portugal was devastated. Many record-high temperatures are being reached around the world this summer.
How utterly reckless of humanity to have rushed past the Holocene boundary, ignoring – like a character in a horror movie – all of the obvious warning signs. In 1972, the world’s governments assembled in Stockholm to address the growing environmental threats. In the lead-up to the conference, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, which first introduced the idea of a “sustainable” growth trajectory and the risks of environmental overshooting. Twenty years later, the warning signs flashed brightly in Rio de Janeiro, where United Nations member states assembled at the Earth Summit to adopt the concept of “sustainable development” and to sign three major environmental treaties to halt human-induced global warming, protect biological diversity, and stop land degradation and desertification.
After 1992, the United States, the world’s most powerful country, ostentatiously ignored the three new treaties, signaling to other countries that they could slacken their efforts as well. The US Senate ratified the climate and desertification treaties but did nothing to implement them. And it refused even to ratify the treaty to protect biological diversity, in part because western-state Republicans insisted that landowners have the right to do what they want with their property without international meddling.
More recently, the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015 and the Paris climate agreement in December 2015. Yet, once again, the US government has willfully ignored the SDGs, ranking last among the G20 countries in terms of government implementation efforts. And President Donald Trump has declared his intention to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement at the earliest possible moment, 2020, four years after the accord entered into force.
Worse is to come. The human-caused rise in CO2 hasn’t yet reached its full warming effect, owing to the considerable lag in its impact on ocean temperatures. There is still another 0.5º Celsius or so of warming to occur over the coming decades based on the current concentration of CO2 (408 parts per million) in the atmosphere, and far more warming beyond that if CO2 concentrations continue to soar with the business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. To achieve the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to “well below 2ºC” relative to the pre-industrial level, the world needs to shift decisively from coal, oil, and gas to renewable energy by around 2050, and from deforestation to reforestation and restoration of degraded lands.
So why does humanity keep plunging dumbly ahead, toward certain tragedy?
The main reason is that our political institutions and giant corporations willfully ignore the rising dangers and damage. Politics is about obtaining and holding power and the perks of office, not about solving problems, even life-and-death environmental problems. Managing a major company is about maximizing shareholder value, not about telling the truth or avoiding great harm to the planet. Profit-seeking investors own the major media, or at least influence it through their advertising purchases. Thus, a small yet very powerful group maintains the fossil-fuel-based energy system at growing peril to the rest of humanity today and in the future.
Trump is the latest useful fool doing the polluters’ bidding, abetted by congressional Republicans who finance their election campaigns with contributions from environmental culprits such as Koch Industries. Trump has filled the US government with industry lobbyists who are systematically dismantling every environmental regulation they can reach. Most recently, Trump has nominated a former lawyer for mega-polluter Dow Chemical to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund toxic cleanup program. You can’t make this stuff up.
We need a new kind of politics that starts with a clear global goal: environmental safety for the planet’s people, by fulfilling the Paris climate agreement, protecting biodiversity, and cutting pollution, which kills millions each year. The new politics will listen to scientific and technological experts, not self-interested business leaders and narcissistic politicians. Climatologists enable us to gauge the rising dangers. Engineers inform us how to make the rapid transition, by 2050, to zero-carbon energy. Ecologists and agronomists show us how to grow more and better crops on less land while ending deforestation and restoring previously degraded land.
Such a politics is possible. In fact, the public yearns for it. A large majority of the American people, for example, want to fight global warming, stay in the Paris climate agreement, and embrace renewable energy. Yet, as long as a narrow and ignorant elite condemn Americans and the rest of humanity to wander aimlessly in the political desert, the more likely it is that we will all end up in a wasteland from which there will be no escape.

*Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, and, most recently, Building the New American Economy.

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Trump’s Clean Car Rollback Will Cost The U.S. $457 Billion

Fast Company - Adele Peters

It will also hasten the end of all life on Earth as we know it, in case the financial argument wasn’t enough.
[Photo: ablokhin/iStock]
The new Trump administration proposal to freeze rules to build more fuel-efficient cars–and revoke California’s long-standing right to set stronger standards for clean cars–would cost the American economy $457 billion by 2050, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Energy Innovation.
It would also push up greenhouse gas emissions 11% by 2035, or 139 million megatons, at a time when the world’s carbon budget is nearly depleted.
Under the current standards, set in a deal with automakers in 2012, cars were supposed to get significantly cleaner between 2022 and 2025, ending up at an average of around 54 miles per gallon and saving drivers gas costs and cutting pollution.
The new proposal would freeze standards at 2020 levels.
Most importantly, it also wants to strip California of its unique right to set more restrictive standards than the federal government–a deal written into the Clean Air Act because the state had been regulating smog long before the federal law existed.
If California chooses to set stricter standards, other states can follow; 14 states and D.C. have adopted California’s standards so far.
At the moment, the state standard and the national one are the same–but if they diverged, automakers could end up making multiple versions of each car to sell in different parts of the U.S. The Trump administration wants to take away California’s right to set higher standards.
[Image: Energy Innovation]

The administration argues that higher fuel economy standards are a safety risk, claiming that if cars that are more efficient are more expensive, people will be less likely the buy newer cars with improved safety features, and if they spend less on gas, they’d drive more and therefore be at greater risk of crashes.
An Obama-era analysis found no harm to safety from making cars more efficient.
Using an open-source, peer-reviewed digital tool called the Energy Policy Simulator, Energy Innovation modeled the impact of the proposed changes. In the first few years, there would be a small financial boost because less efficient cars are cheaper to build. But as consumers spend more on gas, the costs would start to balloon.
By 2040, the cost would be the equivalent of a 57 cent-per-gallon gas tax. Another analysis estimates that an average family would end up spending $200 more a year because of the changes, and perhaps as much as $500 more.
The greatest increase in greenhouse gas emissions would happen in the 2030s because electric cars will grow significantly by the 2040s, the Energy Innovation analysis found. But the growth in emissions is large, and comes at a point when the rest of the world will be trying to quickly cut climate pollution. The proposal would also push fuel consumption 20% higher in 2035 than it would have been otherwise.
All of this could be somewhat mitigated if California can set stronger standards; at the moment, the state and federal standard are the same. The state, and others that have adopted the standard, have vowed to fight in court. That could lead to a split market for automakers, who might end up making different versions of cars for different states, increasing cost.
“Everyone loses at the end,” says Simon Mui, a senior scientist at the environmental nonprofit NRDC and the California lead for the organizations’ clean vehicles and fuels, climate, and energy program. “From a consumer angle, from an environmental angle, from an industry angle, there’s just no great logic [for this proposal] outside of the administration really catering to extremist viewpoints. It’s unfortunate that one of the key drivers for all of this seems to really just be this idea that somebody doesn’t like regulations and therefore all regulation is bad, even ones that are actually very much helping the economy.”
Other countries are continuing to move forward with policy to promote more efficient cars, meaning that American automakers could become less competitive globally. EU regulations are much stricter. India is pushing hard to shift to electric cars. Chinese consumers are on track to buy a million electric cars this year, and policy is pushing that growth.
“The auto industry, longer-term, is going to be having China breathing down their neck with their auto industry having more fuel-efficient products and that global market now exceeding the U.S. market,” says Mui. Automakers have said that they don’t want to freeze the current standards.
“The only winners are the oil companies, who stand to sell more gasoline,” says the Energy Innovation analysis.

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04/08/2018

The Five Things We Can't Answer About The National Energy Guarantee

Fairfax - Cole Latimer | Peter Hannam

The National Energy Guarantee will face one of its last major tests in August, yet despite nearly a year of development, there are still a number of unanswered questions.

Will the policy work?
The Energy Security Board, which includes the main energy regulators, has spent the past eight months coming up with a scheme it says will reduce power prices, bolster grid stability and meet a "pro-rata" reduction in carbon emissions in line with Australia's Paris climate pledges.
The National Energy Guarantee will be decided on by state energy ministers on August 10. Photo: Nick Moir
The board thinks it has created a scheme that will meet its goals without generating a carbon price that would be political Kryptonite to the Coalition party room. Others think a shadow price will soon emerge.
The refusal of the board to release the modelling that spits out the stated results - such as helping to cut household prices by $550 a year over the decade starting from 2021 - undermines confidence the guarantee will work as projected.
Industry is generally supportive, at least in public, but some chief executives say in private they worry about further concentration of the market and a halt to the renewable energy boom.

Illustration: Matt Golding
Will renewables construction and investment come to a halt under the NEG?
The NEG will begin after the end of the Renewable Energy Target runs out in 2020. The policy, introduced by the Howard government, has driven large-scale investment in wind and solar energy.
The main concern is that there is no obvious incentive for the industry given about 97 per cent of the emissions target - or more - will be achieved on the current goal even before it starts. They note too that the model summary provided by the board excludes the second phases of both Victoria and Queensland's state-based renewable energy targets.
Against those concerns, though, is the understanding that renewable energy prices are only going to continue to fall, making them ever more viable than new coal or gas-fired power. The rise in the number of companies underwriting renewable generation projects is a sign of that trend. In addition, the current timing of when ageing coal-fired power plants will exit may prove optimistic, with the result that wholesale power prices may be higher than forecast, helping renewables.
Illustration: Matt Golding
Hydropower generator Meridian Energy chief executive Ed McManus said, “regardless of the target we will still see renewable investment, coal is not part of Australia's future energy mix".

Can it be scaled?
Despite its name, the National Energy Guarantee isn't national. It only applies to the eastern states (and most of South Australia) as members of the National Electricity Market. Without Western Australia and the Northern Territory, which will be permitted to increase emissions, the power sector's so-called 26 per cent "pro-rata" emissions cut will actually turn out to be less.
While Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and the states say the scheme they want is scalable, they differ in how the goals should be changed. The Labor-led states want the power to lift the emissions goal - federal Labor wants a 45 per cent cut - to sit with the minister. Mr Frydenberg and the Energy Security Board say any change should have to be approved by the Federal Parliament.
Illustration: Matt Golding
For now, Mr Frydenberg has offered a review by mid-2024 to assess the progress. Labor, the Greens and environmental groups say the goal should be sooner, not least because Australia committed at Paris in 2015 along with all other signatories to consider lifting the climate pledge by 2019.

What will be the impact on non-energy industries?
The low emissions reduction targets for the energy sector – which itself wants more ambitious targets – means other industries will have to have work harder to cut pollution. Almost no other policies are in place to support such cuts, adding to the expectation they will be more costly for the economy.
“Government policy will need to include these other sectors, such as transport and agriculture, because if we don’t we will miss our targets,” Grattan Institute energy director Tony Wood told Fairfax Media.
Illustration: Matt Golding
The government is yet to indicate whether they will implement a target for other industries.
If the agricultural industry moved in sync, it would need to slash emissions by 18.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually by 2030, according to The Australia Institute. That reduction is not small, and would be about 2.9 million fewer head of beef cattle, 8 million sheep, 300,000 dairy cattle, and 270,000 pigs.

So what will happen?
Nobody can be certain, given the shifting politics. Odds still favour a conditional approval by the Council of Australian Governments' ministers on August 10 - which leaves open revisiting the policy later on, such as after Victoria's state elections in November.
Still, it would take a courageous jurisdiction to oppose the policy given it could be blamed for anything that goes wrong in the electricity sector from here on.
Illustration: Matt Golding
On the other hand, some view an opportunity for mischief. On the Coalition side, restive backbenchers are demanding a "point of difference" with Labor after recent less-than-hoped for byelection results.
For federal Labor, there is a reluctance to grant the Turnbull government a win that could lift its flagging fortunes. As one Labor senator told Fairfax Media, a stalling in approval could also help further strain tensions within the Coalition. Nationals are none too happy that agricultural emission cuts are next.
Whatever happens next week, it is unlikely the so-called climate wars will cease with approval of the scheme. Shifting politics could reopen new fronts at any time, and because the climate threat is unlikely to abate, it won't be too long before the need for more serious emissions action returns.

WHAT WE DO KNOW
Illustration: Matt Golding
  • There will a reduction target of 26 per cent of 2005-level emissions by 2030 for the National Electricity Market that serves eastern Australia.
  • The energy industry broadly backs the policy but thinks the emissions goal is too low.
  • It is projected to cut household power bills $150 a year, over 10 years.
  • COAG energy ministers will meet in Sydney on August 10 to sign-off - or not.
  • Federal Coalition party room meets on August 14 to debate what it approves after the COAG result.
  • States and the ACT will then develop and pass legislation - as will the Turnbull government - to approve the changes.
  • Final changes to bring the policy into effect will need to pass through the South Australia parliament, which the Turnbull government hopes will happen by November at the latest.
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Paris Agreement Failure To Cost Australia $126 Billion A Year

SBS - Nick Baker

A new report maps the economic gains and losses of the Paris Agreement.



What's the cost for Australia if the Paris climate change agreement falls apart? Around $126 billion a year, according to a new report.
A team of Australian scientists from local universities and the CSIRO has mapped out the economic impact of countries complying with the Paris Agreement and found that gains far outweigh losses.
The report showed that if the Paris Agreement came undone and warming was not limited to two degrees, the world would lose $23 trillion dollars a year over the long term.
Report co-author Tom Kompas from the University of Melbourne said this is the equivalent to the world experiencing four to six 2008-style global financial crises every year.
Prof Kompas told SBS News the costs primarily come from "loss of agricultural productivity, loss of human productivity and land loss" brought about by climate change.
The report found South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa were the hardest hit by temperature increases, underscoring the point that poorer countries are the ones most impacted by climate change.
"The losses in GDP are shocking [in these areas]," Prof Kompas said.
The report said climate change will see a major "loss of agricultural productivity". AAP
He said for Australia, costs come from "sea level changes and especially the loss of agricultural productivity" caused by climate change.
Looking at the numbers even further, Prof Kompas said warming not being limited to two degrees would cost each Australian household $14,000 a year in the long term.
While the Australian government has not placed exact costs on the impact of climate change, the Department of Environment and Energy has acknowlegded that "Australia faces significant ... economic impacts from climate change across a number of sectors".
While other studies have been released on the economic impacts of climate change, this report claims to be the first large dimensional model that breaks down costs to individual countries.
And Prof Kompas said the team was surprised with the numbers.
"Economists around the world have largely underestimated the damage from climate change … Previous works have not come even close to the $23 trillion in global damages," he said.
The Paris accord was agreed to by more than 190 nations as a path toward curbing harmful emissions in 2015.
Last year, President Donald Trump announced the US would pull out of the landmark deal.
Mr Trump used an economic argument against the deal, saying it placed "draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country".
And former prime minister Tony Abbott, who signed the agreement, has said Australia should back away from its target.
"If we had known then what we know now about America's withdrawal, about the economic damage that renewable energy, in particular, would do to our power system and to our industries, we would never have signed up," he told Sky News.

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Deaths Rose 650 Above Average During UK Heatwave – With Older People Most At Risk

The Guardian -  |

Exclusive: data shows spike in deaths coinciding with high temperatures, with frail, older people with kidney or heart problems most vulnerable
Blackpool sun-seekers: the heatwave has coincided with a 650-strong spike in fatalities. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Nearly 700 more deaths than average were recorded during the 15-day peak of the heatwave in June and July in England and Wales, according to official statistics.
Experts said that an increase in deaths is fully expected during heatwaves, but they cautioned that the provisional data requires further analysis to determine if the higher mortality is statistically significant for the summer months.
“The heatwave will have been associated with a number of excess deaths,” said Dr Adrian Boyle of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. “The people most at risk in a heatwave are the frail elderly with heart or kidney problems.”
The UK is “woefully unprepared” for deadly heatwaves, a cross-party committee of MPs concluded in a report published on 27 July. The MPs said the government had ignored warnings from its official climate change adviser, and that without action heat-related deaths will triple to 7,000 a year by the 2040s.
The height of the heatwave was from 25 June to 9 July, according to the Met Office, a run of 15 consecutive days with temperatures above 28C. The deaths registered during the weeks covering this period were 663 higher than the average for the same weeks over the previous five years, a Guardian analysis of data from the Office of National Statistics shows.
ONS analysis for previous years indicate hundreds of additional deaths were associated with brief periods of heatwave conditions in July 2016 and June 2017. The full toll of the 2018 heatwave could reach 1,000, according to one prediction.
“Although the 2018 data is only preliminary, there seems to have been a concerning increase in the number of deaths,” said Dr Isobel Braithwaite, of the public health charity, Medact. “This fits in with current scientific evidence, which clearly shows that long periods of very warm weather can harm people’s health, particularly at extremes of age and in people with other pre-existing health problems.”
“While working in A&E this summer, I saw patients presenting with heatstroke and other conditions that were probably exacerbated by the hot weather, and this obviously places an additional strain on our already struggling health services,” she said.
Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “Some trusts have reported record numbers of people coming in to A&E, with increased emergency admissions, often for respiratory problems and conditions made worse by dehydration. We have heard concerns about large numbers of people from care homes requiring treatment.”
Dr Nick Scriven, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, which represents hospital doctors specialising in emergency care , said: “The pressure was real and felt at the frontline. I would not be surprised at all if an effect on mortality is shown. The figure of about 700 would seem very plausible.”
He said dehydration can lead to many issues, from dizziness and falls, to an increased risk of infections, heart attacks and strokes. High temperatures can increase air pollution, and some urban areas including London saw alerts issued for ozone pollution. “That can really affect those with respiratory conditions,” Scriven said.
The heat also puts NHS staff themselves under pressure, he said. “NHS staff are working in often intolerable conditions. Compounding the heat is the fact that this is prime holiday season and there is little slack in the system regarding staff numbers.”
Braithwaite said the 2018 heatwave showed that hospitals and care homes must be made ready to cope with high temperatures. “We now know that the frequency and intensity of heatwaves is set to increase significantly over the coming decades because of climate change, so we have to heed this warning call in order to protect the public’s health,” she said. “We also need to treat the underlying cause of the problem by rapidly cutting emissions.”
“The extreme heat has highlighted the shortcomings of ageing buildings, which are not designed or equipped to deal with these conditions,” said Cordery. “Staff and patients are paying the price now for past decisions to delay investment in the NHS estate.”
The ONS data records when deaths are registered, not when they occurred, but 77% of deaths are recorded within five days. Even higher levels of excess deaths are seen in the colder months, but the year-to-year variation is lower in the summer months.
“We cannot say whether any of these [663] deaths are due to the heatwave or from other causes,” said an ONS spokeswoman. “Causes of deaths data for 2018 will be published next summer and they may provide a better understanding.”

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03/08/2018

We’ve Reached Earth Overshoot Day Earlier Than Ever Before And It’s Not Good

NEWS.com.au - Gavin Fernando

THE world has just broken a worrying new record — and Australia shoulders a lot of the blame for it.

Andrzej Krauze
HAPPY Earth Overshoot Day!
Just kidding. This is not actually a good thing. It means that for the rest of the year, we will be basically living on resources “borrowed” from our future.
But what does this actually mean, and what are the potential consequences?

What Is Earth Overshoot Day?
Earth Overshoot Day marks the point in the year where we run out of our “allocated” supply of natural resources.
The Global Footprint Network (GFN), an organisation partnered with the World Wide Fund for Nature, produced the results.
To calculate the date for Earth Overshoot Day, it crunched United Nations data on thousands of economic sectors such as fisheries, forestry, transport and energy production.
The GFN claimed we have just used up our allotted supply of regenerative natural resources for the year, earlier than ever before in history.
This means that, from today onward, we will be in “credit” mode. Any and all of the natural resources we use, such as water and land, will be “borrowed” from next year’s “budget”, contributing to the cycle.
“One year is no longer enough to regenerate humanity’s annual demand on the planet, even using conservative data sets,” the GFN states.
We're using up the earth's resources faster than ever before
In other words, in 2018, Earth’s 7.6 billion humans will consume 1.7 times more from Mother Nature than it’s capable of regenerating.
According to previous figures, the trend of sliding into “ecological debt” has gradually worsened over the years.
In the 1960s, for example, we managed to stretch three quarters of our year’s allocated “supply” across the whole 365-day period, giving us an “energy surplus” of about three months.
By 1987, we’d “run out” by mid-December.
By 2007, we’d “run out” by the end of October.
As of today — August 2 — we’re officially in “credit mode”. It’s the earliest time in the year that’s ever happened. Judging by this, we’re just a couple of months away from doubling the amount of the Earth’s natural resources that have been allocated to us.
The report warns that in 2018, we’ll use up the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to support human civilisation.
By 2030, this date will fall around the middle of the year, meaning we’ll need the equivalent of two Earths to support human civilisation.
“Our economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet,” said GFN chief executive officer Mathis Wackernagel. “We are using the Earth’s future resources to operate in the present and digging ourselves deeper into ecological debt.
“It’s time to end this ecological Ponzi scheme and leverage our creativity and ingenuity to create a prosperous future free of fossil fuels and planetary destruction.”
See where this is going?

Where Does Australia Sit In This?
The GFN estimates that 86 per cent of countries are currently living beyond their means.
It ranked every country by comparing its biocapacity — the ability to “regenerate” what people demand from those surfaces — to its ecological footprint, a measure of how much area of biologically productive land and water a population requires to sustainably function.
On the list of countries where their biocapacity exceeded their ecological footprint (this is the “good list”, if you will) Australia ranked 24th.
In fact, Australia was listed as one of very few OECD countries on this list.
This is in part because compared to many other countries, we have a relatively tiny population compared to the size of our landmass.
But on a per capita basis, Australia is actually one of the world’s worst offenders, as you can see in this graph:
If the whole world lived like Australians, we would need 4.1 Earths per year               
In other words, if the whole world lived like Australia, would need the resources of more than four planet Earths to sustain ourselves — well over twice the global average.
The good news, at least, is we’re getting better. In 2016, Australia was the worst offender — surpassing even the United States.
A key contributing factor is our continued reliance on fossil fuels — particularly coal-fired power stations, through which we contribute to some of the highest global greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the world.
By comparison, if we all lived like Vietnam or Morocco, the global overshoot date wouldn’t arrive until mid-December.
Climate Council says government has failed to tackle climate change
Is This A Reversible Trend?
While Earth Overshoot Day has come earlier and earlier over time, there is some good news — it’s a reversible trend.
In fact, the date has not moved all that much since 2011, despite continued population growth.
The GFN makes a number of recommendations — green up your commute by using public transport or a bicycle instead of a car every day; recycle and work towards zero waste; eat more vegetables and less livestock (livestock-related activity accounts for almost 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans); and use the most fuel-efficient option when filling up your car or booking a flight.

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Yes, Humans Are Depleting Earth’s Resources, But ‘Footprint’ Estimates Don’t Tell The Full Story

The Conversation - 

Purse seiner fishing in the Indian Ocean. Footprint estimates do not assess how sustainably resources such as fisheries are managed. Jiri Rezac, CC BY-SA
Experts widely agree that human activities are harming the global environment. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world economy has grown dramatically. Overall this is a success story, since rising incomes have lifted millions of people out of poverty. But it has been fueled by population growth and increasing consumption of natural resources.
Rising demand to meet the needs of more than 7 billion people has transformed land use and generated unprecedented levels of pollution, affecting biodiversity, forests, wetlands, water bodies, soils and air quality.
On Aug. 1, humans will have consumed more natural resources in 2018 than the Earth can regenerate this year, according to the California-based Global Footprint Network. This environmental nonprofit calculates the annual arrival of Earth Overshoot Day – the date when humanity’s demands on nature exceed what the network’s analysts estimate the Earth can regenerate over the entire year. Aug. 1 is the earliest date since ecological overshoot began in the early 1970s.
Aug. 1 is the earliest arrival of Earth Overshoot Day since humans started overusing the planet’s resources in the 1970s. Global Footprint Network, CC BY-SA
As an ecological economist and scholar of sustainability, I am particularly interested in metrics and indicators that can help us understand human uses of Earth’s ecosystems. Better measurements of the impacts of human activities can help identify ways to sustain both human well-being and natural resources.
Earth Overshoot Day is a compelling concept and has raised awareness of the growing impact of human activities on the planet. Unfortunately, the methodology used to calculate it and the ecological footprint on which it is based is conceptually flawed and practically unusable in any science or policy context. In my view, the ecological footprint ultimately does not measure overuse of natural resources – and it may very well underestimate it.

Rising demands, finite resources
The Global Footprint Network estimates when Earth Overshoot Day will arrive based on its National Footprint Accounts. These include extensive data sets that the organization uses to calculate two overarching indicators:
  • The ecological footprint, perhaps the most commonly used metric of the environmental impacts of human resource use. Each country’s ecological footprint is an estimate of the biological resources required to meet its population’s consumption demands and absorb its carbon emissions.
  • National biocapacity, which is an estimate of how well each country’s ecosystems can produce the natural resources consumed by humans and absorb the waste and pollution that humans generate. 
The Global Footprint Network’s National Footprint Accounts compare countries’ annual demand for goods and services to the resources they produce.

Both of these measures are expressed in global hectares. One hectare is equal to 10,000 square meters, or about 2.47 acres.

Going into overshoot
To estimate when Earth Overshoot Day will arrive, the Global Footprint Network calculates the number of days in a given year for which Earth has enough biocapacity to provide for humans’ total ecological footprint. The rest of the year represents “global overshoot.”
When the footprint of consumption worldwide exceeds biocapacity, the authors assert that humans are exceeding the regenerative capacity of Earth’s ecosystems. This year, they estimate that humans are using natural resources 1.7 times faster than ecosystems can regenerate – or, put another way, consuming 1.7 Earths.
As an example, the ecological footprint for France is 4.7 global hectares per person, and global biocapacity is 1.7 hectares per person. Therefore, it would take (4.7/ 1.7 =) 2.8 Earths if everyone lived like the French.
France’s Overshoot Day would be estimated as (365 x (1.7/ 4.7)) = 130, or the 130th day of the year, which is May 5 based on 2014 data. The United States reached overshoot even earlier, on March 15.

What to count?
However, there are some fundamental and misleading shortcomings in these calculations. In a 2013 paper, six authors from academia, The Nature Conservancy and the California-based Breakthrough Institute analyzed how the Ecological Footprint falls short. In their view, it primarily measures humans’ carbon footprint but does not address other key impacts.
To calculate ecological footprints, the Global Footprint Network estimates the supply and demand of renewable biological resources across six land use types: forests, fishing grounds, croplands, grazing lands, developed lands and the area of forest required to offset human carbon emissions – that is, the carbon footprint. According to the network’s own analysis, each of these land use types is nearly in balance or in surplus, except for the carbon footprint.
Conventional tillage leaves fields in South Dakota vulnerable to erosion. Impacts like this are not captured in footprint calculations that focus on quantifying resources. USDA NRCS South Dakota, CC BY-SA
The two key categories for producing food – cropland and grazing land – are defined in such a way that they can never be in deficit. And the analysis does not reflect environmental consequences of human use of these lands, such as soil erosion, nutrient runoff or overuse of water. It measures only land area.
For example, the ecological footprint for Indonesia is 1.61 global hectares per person, which is among the lowest 30 percent of all countries. But according to a 2014 study, Indonesia has the highest deforestation rate in the world.
Furthermore, the footprint calculation does not consider whether stocks of natural resources are decreasing or increasing as a result of human consumption. This question is critical for understanding ecological impacts.
These national ecological footprint calculations also conflate sustainability with self-sufficiency. They assume that every nation should produce all of the resources it consumes, even though it might be less expensive for countries to import some goods than to produce them at home.
As an example, the network lists Canada as an “ecological creditor” whose biocapacity exceeds its population’s ecological footprint. However, Canada is among the top 10 oil-producing countries in the world, and exports much of that oil for foreign consumption. Most of it goes to the United States, an “ecological debtor” that consumes more resources than it produces.
Thinking purely in terms of generic “resources,” everyone is better off when debtor countries can import resources from nations with supplies to spare. There are real and important environmental impacts associated with producing and consuming oil, but the network’s calculations do not address them. Nor do they reflect the decline in natural capital from extracting a nonrenewable resource.

Measuring sustainability
The Global Footprint Network asserts that “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” but it may be impossible to create a single metric that can capture all human impacts on the environment. Earth Overshoot Day highlights unsustainable uses of natural resources, but we need scientifically robust ecological indicators to inform environmental policy, and a broader understanding of ecological risks.
Better measurements of sustainability should reflect changes in our supplies of natural capital, include estimates of uncertainty and incorporate multiple pathways to reducing carbon footprints. The best tool for measuring human impacts on the planet may be a dashboard of environmental indicators, not a footprint.

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