Nairobi, 25 May 2016: Are we beyond the limits of our planet? What are the main impacts of our consumption on the Earth systems? Which countries contribute the most to these impacts?
These are the kind of questions which a May 2015 study titled Environmental Limits and Swiss Footprints Based on Planetary Boundaries sets out to answer.
There are two key concepts in the study – Planetary boundaries and Environmental footprints.
Planetary Boundaries are a set of nine bio-physical limits of the Earth system that should be respected in order to maintain conditions favourable to further human development. Crossing the suggested limits would lead to a drastic change in human societies by disrupting some of the ecological bases underlying the current socioeconomic system.
Environmental footprints - also known as consumption-based or demand-based indicators - allow for quantification of environmental impacts induced by consumption of a country wherever these impacts occur on Earth.
A key assumption of the study is that past, current and future populations on Earth have, by definition, similar rights to resources.
The performance of a country is computed by comparing its yearly uses of resources to its maximum “rights”.
The study was commissioned in November 2013 by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment to the Global Resource Information Database (UNEP/GRID-Geneva) and the Institute of Environmental Sciences (University of Geneva), and was written in collaboration with the NGO Shaping Environmental Action (EA). It can be downloaded here.
In 2013 the Swiss Government adopted the Action Plan for a Green Economy and has officially expressed the necessity of respecting Planetary Boundaries in its Swiss Position on a Framework for Sustainable Development Post-2015.
Global limits versus footprints
The most known global limit is Climate Change but other global limits (Planetary Boundaries) have been identified: Ocean Acidification, Stratospheric Ozone Depletion, Nitrogen and Phosphorus Losses, Atmospheric Aerosol Loading, Freshwater Use, Land Cover Anthropization, Biodiversity Loss and Chemical Pollution.
The study proposes new indicators for some of the limits and explores the possibility of applying Planetary Boundaries to Switzerland. Sweden conducted a similar study in 2013.
The proposed indicators (limits and footprints) provide an indication of the ecological sustainability of the impacts of Swiss consumption over a long-term global perspective.
The share of a Planetary Boundary per country is defined as the share of the country population relative to the global population at a reference date.
The global limit computed per Planetary Boundary is reduced to the country scale. Global and national limits (Planetary Boundaries) are then compared to the size of the current footprints.
Environmental footprints - also known as consumption-based or demand-based indicators - provide a complementary perspective to classical territorial indicators. Territorial indicators consider emissions or impacts occurring on the territory of a country, e.g. the domestic greenhouse gas emissions reported under the Kyoto Protocol. Footprints aggregate environmental impacts and/or resource uses along global production-consumption chains according to a life cycle perspective.
A footprint perspective is increasingly relevant in our interlinked global economy since a rising part of the impacts on a territory is generated to satisfy consumers in other countries. This is especially the case for small, open and service-oriented economies such as Switzerland. More than half of the Swiss environmental impacts occur abroad.
“No nation or region can appropriate a larger share of the global commons without both transparently reporting this to all other nations, and agreeing on mechanisms to ensure that the aggregate use of planetary space remains within safe boundaries,”says http://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/2011/sept/EN/article5.asp Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute.
“Staying within the safe operating space... in a world with growing populations and affluence, will require distributing the planetary space among nations. This is, to say the least, a challenging but necessary task, which, when we succeed, will benefit humanity as a whole for generations,” he adds.
Biodiversity “rapidly deteriorating”.
From a global perspective three of the six computed performances show a clearly unsafe situation either because of a large overshoot (Climate Change and Ocean Acidification) or because of an overshoot combined with a “rapidly deteriorating” trend (Biodiversity Loss).
The objective of the Biodiversity Loss Planetary Boundary is to avoid a level of biodiversity loss that would lead to irreversible and widespread undesired states of ecosystems. Biodiversity acts as a slow variable affecting the resilience of ecosystems, hence the services they provide, e.g. carbon storage, pollination or freshwater. Biodiversity is usually considered a regional issue rather than a global issue, since changes occur at a local or regional scale.
A global perspective can, however, be adopted by considering that evidence for the important role of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning and human well-being is considerable. The global limit for Biodiversity Loss is set with an indicator expressed in terms of the potential damage to biodiversity per land cover type accounting for the level of biodiversity per biome.
The limits are not calculated for: Stratospheric Ozone Depletion (since it is currently phased-out), Atmospheric Aerosol Loading and Chemical Pollution (rationales are lacking for setting a potential limit), and for Freshwater Use (considered by the experts consulted as a regional issue with a regional limit only).
Potential use of limits, footprint indicators
Potential uses of the limits and footprint indicators proposed in this report are to:
- Raise awareness
- Set priorities among the Planetary Boundaries both at the global and national levels
- Identify large overshoots and analyse long-term trends, i.e. relative differences over 5-10 years periods, of aggregated values.
The study hopes to open the path to establishing a new mindset based on the recognition of global environmental limits, the possibility to quantify these limits, as well as the footprints of nations. It definitely has potential to change the way we practice environmental assessments and environmental policies both at the global and national levels, says the report.
The University of Geneva, with EA and UNEP/GRID-Geneva, developed the blueDot project (Environmental footprints of nations: national performances and global priorities based on Planetary Boundaries) which is applying the methodology to 48 countries/regions covering the whole world and representing 90 per cent of world GDP. Information will also be provided on the main sectors directly (by using resources) and indirectly (by providing consumption goods) involved in each Planetary Boundary.
