Summary - The Big Picture of Sustainability

Summary

The Big Picture of Sustainability

June 2002 – Bali, Indonesia

The issues summarized:

Fighting disease in a warmer, more populated and polluted world
Feeding and watering 9 billion people while protecting vital ecological processes
Managing megacities for their people and the environment
Adapting to warmer climates, different rainfall amounts and patterns, and variable climates in a more populated world
Protecting the world's soils
Reversing deforestation, fish loss, and biodiversity decline
Identifying knowledge needs, using knowledge, dealing with inequality in knowledge access, in a world with large numbers of poor people.

Some specifics about Asia:

Asia is undergoing the fastest transformation anywhere in the world:

50% of mangroves have gone in 50 years, with carbon absorption capacity equivalent to the emissions of 6.3 million cars.
Some marine fish stocks are only 5% of their numbers in the 1930s.
Over 52% of Asia's population will be in cities by 2020, with 15 of the 27 world megacities in Asia.
Greenhouse gases and sewage pollution from these cities will be immense.
Wind erosion in China blankets Beijing in dust every year.
India's rivers are catastrophically polluted.
The removal of Kalimantan's peat soils will devastate the coast and its fisheries.
Indonesia's forests are disappearing at 30 million ha/yr and will soon vanish, with huge implications for water, erosion, indigenous people, biodiversity and greenhouse gases.
Water has stopped reaching the sea in China's Huang because of irrigation withdrawals, and the China sea could become a foul-smelling oxygen-free zone as a result.
SE Asia's people suffer in one of the world's most savagely variable climates, the future behavior of which is uncertain in a warmer world.
Malaria is now occurring at higher altitude, and food poisoning is more frequent, as the world warms.
Soil erosion is at its highest in Asia, threatening food security, filling rivers with sediments and covering coastal and coral ecosystems with mud.

Some challenges for humanity:

The scale and intensity of environmental change and degradation is new in human history. It demands planning and unprecedented co-operation between countries.
The signs are not good! Squabbling over carbon dioxide, whales, fish, forests and water is counter-productive. Also, planning is counter to the view that markets can fix everything.
Yet, markets are important
Human institutions need to be designed to reduce material and energy use as megacities develop, to arrest the decline of natural resources, to share water resources, to protect poor people from environmental and economic vandalism, and to allow the efficient use of knowledge.
Ensure that knowledge is appropriate and used, in an age when "muddling through" is no longer enough.
Build the capacity of less developed nations in knowledge production and use.
Fund research and public science partnerships even though they may be counter to the interests of the powerful and wealthy.
Recognize that sustainability is a path not an endpoint.
Realize that we have only one planet!

How can science and the knowledge it creates help?

How is science changing?

The natural and social sciences, and humanities, are working together
The old hierarchy of sciences is breaking down
Traditional knowledge is gaining ground as an important contribution to knowledge for sustainability
Science is becoming more is policy-related and involves people other than scientists.