Joint Work­shop of the Pon­tif­i­cal Acad­e­my of Sci­ences and the Pon­tif­i­cal Acad­e­my of Social Sci­ences, 2–6 May 2014

Are Human­i­ty’s deal­ings with Nature sus­tain­able? What is the sta­tus of the Human Per­son in a world where sci­ence pre­dom­i­nates? How should we per­ceive Nature and what is a good rela­tion­ship between Human­i­ty and Nature? Should one expect the glob­al eco­nom­ic growth that has been expe­ri­enced over the past six decades to con­tin­ue for the fore­see­able future? Should we be con­fi­dent that knowl­edge and skills will increase in such ways as to lessen Human­i­ty’s reliance on Nature despite our increas­ing eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty and grow­ing num­bers? Is the grow­ing gap between the world’s rich and world’s poor in their reliance on nat­ur­al resources a con­se­quence of those growths?
Con­tem­po­rary dis­cus­sions on the ques­tions are now sev­er­al decades old. If they have remained alive and are fre­quent­ly shrill, it is because two oppos­ing empir­i­cal per­spec­tives shape them. On the one hand, if we look at spe­cif­ic exam­ples of what one may call nat­ur­al cap­i­tal, there is con­vinc­ing evi­dence that at the rates at which we cur­rent­ly exploit them, they are very like­ly to change char­ac­ter dra­mat­i­cal­ly with lit­tle advance notice. The melt­ing of glac­i­ers and sea-ice are recent symp­toms. On the oth­er hand, if we study trends in food con­sump­tion, life expectan­cy, and record­ed incomes in regions that are cur­rent­ly rich and in those that are on the way to becom­ing rich, resource scarci­ties would­n’t appear to have bit­ten so far.
“Envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems” and “future prospects” present them­selves in dif­fer­ent ways to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Some iden­ti­fy envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems with pop­u­la­tion growth, while oth­ers iden­ti­fy them with wrong sorts of eco­nom­ic growth. There are those who see envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems as urban pol­lu­tion in emerg­ing economies, while oth­ers view them through the spec­ta­cle of pover­ty in the world’s poor­est coun­tries. Some allude to “sus­tain­able devel­op­ment” only when con­sid­er­ing eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment in the glob­al econ­o­my, while oth­ers see it in terms of the devel­op­ment prospects of vil­lages in sub-Saha­ran Africa. Each of the visions is cor­rect. We know that what begins as urban pol­lu­tion becomes lay­ers of atmos­pher­ic brown clouds (ABCs), con­tain­ing black car­bon par­ti­cles and ozone, that annu­al­ly destroy some 2 mil­lion lives and over 100 mil­lion tons of crops, dis­rupts the Mon­soon cir­cu­la­tion and con­tribute to the melt­ing of arc­tic ice and the Himalayan snow. There is no sin­gle envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem, there is a large col­lec­tion of inter­re­lat­ed prob­lems. Some are pre­sent­ing them­selves today, while oth­ers are threats to the future. Although growth in indus­tri­al and agri­cul­tur­al pol­lu­tants has accom­pa­nied eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, nei­ther pre­ven­tive nor cura­tive mea­sures have kept pace with their pro­duc­tion in indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries. That neglect is now promi­nent in the rapid­ly grow­ing regions in Brazil, Rus­sia, India, Chi­na, and South Africa (BRICS). More­over, the scale of the human enter­prise has so stretched the capa­bil­i­ties of ecosys­tems, that Human­i­ty is today Earth­’s dom­i­nant species. Dur­ing the 20th cen­tu­ry world pop­u­la­tion grew by a fac­tor of four (to more than 6 bil­lion) and world out­put by 14, indus­tri­al out­put increased by a mul­ti­ple of 40 and the use of ener­gy by 16, methane-pro­duc­ing cat­tle pop­u­la­tion grew in pace with human pop­u­la­tion, fish catch increased by a mul­ti­ple of 35, and car­bon and sul­fur diox­ide emis­sions by more than 10. It is not with­out cause that our cur­rent era has been named the Anthropocene.
On the oth­er hand, eco­nom­ic growth has brought with it improve­ments in the qual­i­ty of a num­ber of envi­ron­men­tal resources. The large-scale avail­abil­i­ty of potable water and the increased pro­tec­tion of human pop­u­la­tions against both water- and air-borne dis­eases in advanced indus­tri­al coun­tries have come allied to the eco­nom­ic growth those coun­tries have enjoyed over the past 200 years. Increas­es in sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge, invest­ment in pub­lic infra­struc­ture, and uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion in advanced indus­tri­al coun­tries have meant that cit­i­zens there have far greater knowl­edge of envi­ron­men­tal haz­ards than their coun­ter­parts in poor regions. They also have resources to avoid them.
Many peo­ple are con­vinced that sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal advances, the accu­mu­la­tion of repro­ducible cap­i­tal, growth in human cap­i­tal, and improve­ments in the econ­o­my’s insti­tu­tions can over­come diminu­tions in nat­ur­al cap­i­tal. Oth­er­wise it is hard to explain why so much of the social sci­ences in the 20th cen­tu­ry has been detached from the envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences. Nature is all too often seen as a back­drop from which resources and ser­vices can be drawn in iso­la­tion. Macro­eco­nom­ic fore­casts rou­tine­ly exclude nat­ur­al cap­i­tal. Account­ing for Nature, if it comes into the cal­cu­lus at all, is usu­al­ly an after­thought. The rhetoric has been so suc­cess­ful, that if some­one exclaims, “Eco­nom­ic growth!”, one does not need to ask, “Growth in what?” – we all know they mean growth in gross domes­tic prod­uct (GDP). The rogue word in GDP is “gross”. GDP, being the mar­ket val­ue of all final goods and ser­vices, ignores the degra­da­tion of nat­ur­al cap­i­tal. If fish har­vests rise, GDP increas­es even if the stock declines. If log­ging inten­si­fies, GDP increas­es even if the forests are denud­ed. And so on. The moral is sig­nif­i­cant though banal: GDP is imper­vi­ous to Nature’s con­straints. There should be no ques­tion that Human­i­ty needs urgent­ly to redi­rect our rela­tion­ship with Nature so as to pro­mote a sus­tain­able pat­tern of eco­nom­ic and social development.

A Pro­pos­al
Rio+20 Sum­mit on bio­di­ver­si­ty preser­va­tion was con­vened to pro­vide a res­o­lu­tion to the prob­lems Human­i­ty faces in our inter­changes with Nature. In prac­ti­cal terms though, it is wide­ly acknowl­edged to have been a failure.
Look­ing through its pro­gramme it is hard to detect an over­ar­ch­ing intel­lec­tu­al frame­work that was used to iden­ti­fy Nature’s con­straints. The lacu­na was inevitable. There was no col­lec­tive endeav­our among nat­ur­al and social sci­en­tists. That is why we are propos­ing a joint PAS-PASS work­shop on Sus­tain­able Human­i­ty, Sus­tain­able Nature.
Our idea is not to cat­a­logue envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems. We pro­pose instead to view Human­i­ty’s inter­changes with Nature through a triplet of fun­da­men­tal, but inter-relat­ed Human needs – Food, Health, and Ener­gy – and ask our respec­tive Acad­e­mies to work togeth­er to invite experts from the nat­ur­al and the social sci­ences to speak of the var­i­ous path­ways that both serve those needs and reveal con­straints on Nature’s abil­i­ty to meet them.

P.S. Das­gup­ta, V. Ramanathan, R. Min­nerath

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