Environmental Groups and Sustainable Development

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Australian Greens The Wilderness Society Friends of the Earth WWF

Bill Hare and Francis Grey,
Australian Conservation Foundation

To grow or not to grow - is this the question? It was recently suggested on a Melboume current affairs program that the current recession might be good for the environment. The guest, a well-known environmentalist, went on to say that what might really be necessary to save the environment was a 1930s-style depression.

The idea that economic growth must necessarily lead to environmental damage is pervasive - and not without historic justification. Victorian secondary school economics textbooks, for example, often discuss environmental damage as if it were a direct trade-off for economic growth. However, views such as these are, if taken as an expression of an immutable physical law, fundamentally flawed and risk focusing the environmental debate on the wrong economic questions.

Growth and ESD

The starting point for this discussion is the observation that economic growth is only one part of the basket of values that go to make up development. The concept of ecologically sustainable development is aimed at ensuring that human activities are kept within an environmentally sustainable envelope of impacts on - and use of - the natural environment. In achieving ESD a number of objectives need to be met simultaneously (see Box on p. 2). Economic development and growth need to be seen as means of achieving social and environmental goals rather than ends in themselves. Often growth per se has been confused as the social objective, when really it is an outcome of the pursuit of other more fundamental goals.

Environmental degradation

Noted environmental thinkers, economists and commentators have long observed the linkage between economic and population growth, and environmental decline. Recently, for example, the focus of much of David Suzuki's argument has been on issues such as the ultimate impossibility of the Earth absorbing continuing increases in effluent from factories. Drawing a direct relationship between effluent and industrial growth, Suzuki calls for negative economic growth as the solution. Economic growth, in his view, must of its nature lead to increases in the use of energy and physical resources.

In a similar way Ted Trainer has argued forcefully that present pattems of global economic development are environmentally and socially unsustainable. His solutions call for a reduction in material living standards in industrialised countries and, by implication, negative economic growth. Is this how the future must be if we are to live within our ecological means?

The answer to this question depends very much on our ability to de-couple economic activity from energy and resource consumption.

Decoupling growth and environmental degradation

Based on historic and current pattems of economic growth, Suzuki and Trainer are right. Rising incomes were linked to increasingly intensive pattems of energy and resource usage, environmental degradation and pollution. They are still linked to absolute increases in the level of pollution, resource and energy use.

However, by the 1980s and 1990s, a trend towards decreasing intensity of resource and energy use in industrial economies had become strongly apparent. A worldwide decline in manufacturing, as a proportion of the economy, has been accompanied by an increase in service and infommation-based industries.

Long-term analyses of industrialised economies now show that the amount of physical material and energy required for a unit of economic activity is decreasing. Technological improvements in energy, material use and production processes have meant that we can do more with much less and we have yet to reach our full potential in doing so.

The ability to use energy and raw materials more efficiently, and to reduce or eliminate pollution from manufacturing processes, shows that this trend can be accelerated. This would ease the likely impact of production on the environment as well as reduce the costs of environmental protection. Increased recycling and 'closed loop' production processes, for example, will put us on the road to ecological sustainability by reducing substantially the amount of energy and resources passing through our economy.

However, technology alone is not sufficient to effect a decoupling of economic growth from energy and resource usage and pollution. Changes in lifestyle and the way we do things in the economy will also have a strong influence on the overall level of environmental impact of a given measure of economic activity. Many would question whether there is indeed a necessary linkage between further general improvements in material living standards and human wellbeing in industrialised economies.

In our view this is where the decisive debate should be: how to break the nexus between economic well-being and resource consumption. In this context the question of being for or against economic growth becomes something of a red herring.

Growth vs. development

There is no doubt that many, particularly in the business community, equate sustainable development with sustained growth in traditional economic temms. The 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, while putting sustainability on the intemational agenda, was deeply contradictory on the subject. It argued for sustained economic growth in industrialised countries, whilst calling for these countries to 'live within the planet's means' when clearly they are not.

Whilst it is obvious that historic pattems of economic development are not ecologically sustainable, does this mean that all pattems of economic growth are unsustainable? If this is true and we consider the enormous momentum of economic development in the developing countries, which are building from a relatively low base of energy and resource consumption and desperately aspire to standards of living we in Australia take for granted, then the prognosis for the global environment is bleak.

We believe the answer to this question is in the negative. Growth in income does not necessarily mean growth in environmental damage. The object of economic growth is to increase per capita welfare. In an ESD context, per capita growth in income and economic activity should be increasingly independent of increases in material throughput. An ecologically sustainable society would ensure that each of the myriad production and consumption processes that make up the economy are sustainable. Hence, if they grow, then - by definition - the economic growth that is generated is ecologically sustainable.

For industrialised countries improvements in technology and qualitative changes in lifestyle, if pursued purposefully, vigorously and in a socially equitable manner, could lead to major reductions in fossil fuel, energy and resource use, improvements in environmental quality, and in economic and non-economic well-being. While many of our production and consumption processes will have to change, in the long run this should improve, not reduce, Australia's economic health.

For example, as production of CFCs is phased out, the opportunity for technological innovation and the development of alternatives will expand. A reduction in packaging demand may potentially be offset by an increase in recycling processes and collection of the more sophisticated, reusable materials that make up sustainable packaging. Veteran Green designer Victor Papanek, for example, recently told a Melboume conference that he had just sold a patent for a packing material made from plant fibres to Japanese multinational Ricoh, who would use it instead of polystyrene in the packaging and transport of sensitive electronic components.

Developing countries face a different set of development needs. For many, significant increases in energy and resource usage will be essential to further improvements in wellbeing and thus to slowing population growth rates. The global challenge facing industrialised countries is to ensure that the most efficient technologies and processes are made available, along with appropriate financial and institutional resources. A giant 'technological leap-frog' is needed to ensure that the rapid economic development occurring in developing countries takes place at the leading edge of technical know-how rather than with outmoded and dirty technology discarded by industrialised economies.

Negative growth

A significant period of sustained negative growth could actually be bad for the environment. The present recession in Australia has seen govemments of all persuasions increasingly willing to 'fast track' projects which, in more comfortable times, would have been better scrutinised for their environmental impacts. Bad times can slow down investment in new, more efficient technology, increasing our reliance on old, environmentally damaging technology. For example, falling incomes prevent people trading in their gas guzzlers for more modem, efficient vehicles.

In the short term, negative economic growth will often lead to a reduction in energy and resource demand and pollution. Indeed, the recent global decline in C02 emissions is linked directly to economic decline in the fommer Soviet Union.

A planned reduction in economic activity is, however, not sustainable in economic or social terms, owing to the political and economic pressures which would be generated by such policies. Economic recessions tend to amplify the gap between rich and poor, and govemments attempting redistribution of wealth under such circumstances face fommidable political obstacles. For a small, internationally exposed economy such as Australia, external economic pressures including inability to pay debt, capital flight and worsening trade balance would, combined with other pressures, lead to irresistible pressure to reverse policies aimed at reducing the scale of economic activity.

Conclusion

In focusing on the notion that economic growth per se is bad and must be stopped, one risks subscribing to the same restrictive framework that those in business and govemment often hold.

In our view, it is not economic growth that is under question. The focus of our concern must be the pattem of growth and the relationship between improvements in material standards of living and broader social and environmental objectives. The crucial questions for ecological sustainability centre on the pace and rate of adjustment which will be needed in the economy and in our lifestyles to bring our community into balance with the ecological systems on which it depends.

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