CAMBRIDGE – Despite many successes in creating a more integrated and stable global economy, a new report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability – Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing – recognizes the current global order’s failure, even inability, to implement the drastic changes needed for true “sustainability.”
The Panel’s report presents a vision for a “sustainable planet, just society, and growing economy,” as well as 56 policy recommendations for realizing that goal. It is arguably the most prominent international call for a radical redesign of the global economy ever issued.
But, for all of its rich content, Resilient People, Resilient Planet is short on concrete, practical solutions. Its most valuable short-term recommendation – the replacement of current development indicators (GDP or variants thereof) with more comprehensive, inclusive metrics for wealth – seems tacked on almost as an afterthought. Without quick, decisive international action to prioritize sustainability over the status quo, the report risks suffering the fate of its 1987 predecessor, the pioneering Brundtland Report, which introduced the concept of sustainability, similarly called for a paradigm shift, and was then ignored.
Resilient People, Resilient Planet opens by paraphrasing Charles Dickens: the world today is “experiencing the best of times, and the worst of times.” As a whole, humanity has achieved unparalleled prosperity; great strides are being made to reduce global poverty; and technological advances are revolutionizing our lives, stamping out diseases, and transforming communication.
On the other hand, inequality remains stubbornly high, and is increasing in many countries. Short-term political and economic strategies are driving consumerism and debt, which, together with global population growth – set to reach nearly nine billion by 2040 – is subjecting the natural environment to growing stress. By 2030, notes the Panel, “the world will need at least 50% more food, 45% more energy, and 30% more water – all at a time when environmental limits are threatening supply.” Despite significant advances in the past 25 years, humanity has failed to conserve resources, safeguard natural ecosystems, or otherwise ensure its own long-term viability.
Can a bureaucratic report – however powerful – create change? Will the world now rally, unlike in 1987, to the Panel’s call to “transform the global economy”? In fact, perhaps real action is born of crisis itself. As the Panel points out, it has never been clearer that we need a paradigm shift to achieve truly sustainable global development.
But who will coordinate an international process to study how to encourage such a shift, and who will ensure that scientific findings lead to meaningful public-policy processes?
First, there must be a significant international and interdisciplinary research effort to tackle these issues comprehensively; the Panel’s recommendation to establish an international science panel is therefore a step in the right direction. But creating such a body will take time, and the challenge is to get the best science to policymakers quickly.
The 2010Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, commissioned by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, echoed the current consensus among social scientists that we are mismeasuring our lives by using per capita GDP as a yardstick for progress. We need new indicators that tell us if we are destroying the productive base that supports our well-being.
The United Nations University’s International Human Dimensions Program (UNU-IHDP) is already working to find these indicators for its“Inclusive Wealth Report” (IWR), which proposes an approach to sustainability based on natural, manufactured, human, and social capital. The UNU-IHDP developed the IWR with support from the United Nations Environment Program, to provide a comprehensive analysis of the different components of wealth by country, their links to economic development and human well-being, and policies that are based on social management of these assets.
The first IWR, which focuses on 20 countries worldwide, will be officially launched at the upcoming Rio+20 Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Preliminary findings will be presented during the Planet under Pressure Conference in London in late March.
The IWR represents a crucial first step in transforming the global economic paradigm, by ensuring that we have the correct information with which to assess our economic development and well-being –& and to reassess our needs and goals. While it is not intended as a universal indicator for sustainability, it does offer a framework for dialogue with multiple constituencies from the environmental, social, and economic fields.
The situation is critical. As Resilient People, Resilient Planet aptly puts it, “tinkering around the margins” will no longer suffice – a warning to those counting on renewable-energy technologies and a green economy to solve our problems. The Panel has revived the call for a far-reaching change in the global economic system. Our challenge this time is to follow words with action.
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Jonathan Lam
Gamesmith94134: The Middle Class Goes Global
MEDDLE IN CLASSES
Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is the Fairest of all?
Desire, vision, revolution gives the mirror to his call.
Economy, sovereignty compares in shapes when he howls.
Prosperity, Democracy shifts where middle-class flights like fowls;
Developed, emerging market, eye-leveled shelf Aphrodite loaded.
Future reveals travesty blurred his eyes, heart-fell surrealism loathed.
Equitable, reserves bounces, nothing shows on the crystal ball.
Strife to middle-class, he cries. How do I look like the one on the wall?
May the Buddha bless you?
Jonathan Lam
Gamesmith94134: Dr. Doom Warns Wall Street and Washington---- Heed Karl Marx's Warning!
Mr. Gert van Vugt,
You make the best description on the theory on the economical growth Paradigm that the economic change seems like Malthusian’s diminishing return, and I agree. However, Mr. Roubini makes his point on the social disruption reverse itself through the diminishing demand. If we can put away the elements like the Ponzi scheme and benefactors in social caused deficiency or defects to growth. Corruption by capitalism and the dependency by socialism among societies both caused failure in the economical and societal development.
Perhaps, we focus on the circuitry on the accumulation of wealth and consumable wealth that runs the economy. It seems both the capitalism and socialism ran short and proven wrong in the economical model or social model that became self-destructive; eventually, the economy runs from diminishing demand to diminishing return, or vice versa. So, if we use the living standard as the equilibrium position to the supply line of the circuitry of wealth balanced by both of the diminishing return and diminishing demand.
How about I call my paradigm on the wealth circuitry in economical and social growth that supports and balances both accumulated wealth and consumable wealth; and it created a “Z” shaped development running both on the diminishing demand and diminishing return; which is based on the assumption, the route above the standard of living equal in length with the one below the standard of living is in agreement of its living standard to sustain a viable growth, which contains;
• The base line as the diminishing return where the societies kept peace with its populace that consumable wealth that cause economical displacement like with its negative growth or no growth; it provides entitlement or social programs with non-productive individual citizens for example, 27% of its population on welfare with add-on with subsidies to sustain a standard of living.
• The top line as the diminishing demand that ended with accumulated wealth favors of concentrated wealth owned by individuals that ended with profitless, 1% holds 27% of the global or national wealth, plus those with extra wealth is not in production yields to no growth.
• And the diagonal line that connected to both ends is the support of the price and value in the middle is the standard of living which contains the most of the productive individuals who is moving up and down the ladder of growth.
If more of the wealth accumulated than the wealth consumed, then it causes saturation of the wealth. The diminishing demand under the standard of living agreement made the demand idle because of the shortage of consumption. In the process, the standard of living will go down to meet its demand after the deflationary measure to make it consumable. In reverse, the wealth consumed is over the wealth accumulated, as it is less profitable. Then, it triggers the inflationary measures to aggregate demand to accumulate more wealth in its diminishing return mode; eventually it will balance itself again with the agreement of the standard living with a viable growth.
It is not the supply and demand. It is rather the circuitry of wealth under the spells of the lower living standard that diminishing demand is being part of the deflationary measure. If the accumulated wealth became saturated, then it means the lower living standard that made the demand finite like lesser demand in loan of dollars in ECB.
I am certain I am not being introspective; I may twist the theory a little; but the proof of the lower living standard in Europe made it plausible.
May the Buddha bless you?
Mark Pitts
The implied suggestion that all these economic changes be imposed from above is, to say the least, highly undemocratic.
Zsolt Hermann
People do not act without motivation, so whatever we suggest, we plan we need to figure out if there is any motivation for people to follow our suggestions.
Usually when we spring into action we can be motivated by positive, pulling influences, or negative pushing influences.
In terms of our lifestyle, our present attitude, global socio-economic system we are in a historical moment when both the positive and negative motivations could be found together.
This report, or similar factual, transparent, scientific publication describing the present global situation, the inevitable collapse of our present constant growth, expansive, exploitative system, but at the same time providing practical steps for solving the crisis can be considered the positive, pulling motivating forces.
At the same time the deepening, unsolvable global crisis, basically dismantling all the human institutions we have built so far, causing actual and potential significant suffering for most of humankind, can provide us with the negative, pushing motivating force.
If we think and act wisely, we always take a step towards the positive direction, a step ahead of the blows inevitably coming behind us.
If the scientifically assembled global educational information packages, available to all nations and all social layers are successful in explaining each and every human being that we all exist in a totally interconnected and interdependent system, and our individual, or national health and prosperity fully depends on the health and optimal function of the system as a whole, then each and every one of us would accept and join a proposed, global, integral human system willingly without any tricks and coercion.
This is going to be the only way of building something truly sustainable.
Gordan Zelnicki
That is only the first step, Inclusive Wealth Report is expected to create a International intervention on a massive scale as Procyon Mukherjee suggested. The question is how much permanent damage and destruction we produce along with the growth. The resources of our planet are not exclusive property of the corporations that exploit them. Think of the BP and the oil spill...
PROCYON MUKHERJEE
The U.N. Report 'Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing' highlights the need for rejecting the silos that we have created around food, water and energy and the nature of treatment that we give to each. It has called for identifying the ‘planetary boundaries’ that define our livelihood for the future and the urgent need to create a consensus around how to price goods and services for all and the same applies to the pricing of opportunities that need to be made available to the majority; the investments needed for working on social exclusion cannot be left to the vagaries of small institutions and provincial governments, but would need national and international intervention on a massive scale.
Procyon Mukherjee