Sustain the planet that sustains us
By RICHARD STEINER
PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Editorial
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
As world leaders gather in Johannesburg next week for the 2002 Earth Summit, they face the most precarious environmental situation in our history. Yet thanks to the intransigence of the Bush administration, the summit is shaping up to be just another theatrical charade, filled with empty rhetoric, nebulous action plans and few accountability standards. In short, a tragic failure -- just as President Bush and his big business buddies want.
Obviously these people don't understand (or care) that since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro the environmental crisis has grown worse. The world has lost another million square miles (about 10 percent) of tropical forest. Another 100,000 or so species have gone extinct. CO{-2} emissions and temperatures have continued to climb. Another billion people walk the Earth. Rates of material and energy consumption have soared. Thousands of square miles of arable land have turned to desert, more fisheries are overexploited and about half the available freshwater and 40 percent of the total primary productivity of the entire planet are now diverted into human use -- at the expense of all other species and habitats.
A study estimated that, to support the increase in human population and resource consumption, we would need an additional three to six Earth-like planets.
Because any solution to the global environmental crisis will have to include a dramatically increased financial commitment, the true measure of the Earth Summit will be for governments to "show us the money."
In addition to debt relief, leaders of developed nations need to show up at the summit with their checkbooks open, ready and willing to put up the hard cash necessary to solve this problem. This money is urgently needed to provide economic alternatives to ecologically destructive activities, help stabilize population, purchase protections on threatened ecological habitat, enforce environmental laws and treaties, develop sustainable energy and food production systems, restore damaged ecosystems and reduce poverty and waste.
If governments could collectively dedicate $40 billion a year -- just 0.1 percent of the world economy, or one-tenth of global military spending -- to environmental sustainability, many of the problems could be fixed. But to date, the combined financial commitments of governments, international financial institutions and private philanthropies have been grossly inadequate for the job.
For instance, although the Bush administration just announced that it would increase U.S. support for the Global Environment Facility (the principal United Nations/World Bank mechanism for funding environmental projects in developing nations), the amount is mere pennies for the job at hand -- and they know it.
Such pocket change from the wealthiest and most resource-consuming nation on Earth makes a mockery of our commitment to this serious issue. We have to stop fooling ourselves in thinking that past levels of financial support to environmental protection and sustainability are enough. They aren't.
If government leaders were serious about slowing environmental deterioration, they would be looking into new fiscal mechanisms to provide the money necessary. They could create a new fund for the environment by assessing a 1 percent tax on all non-renewable resource production globally, such as oil, gas, coal and minerals. This would collect on the order of $20 billion a year and would give the policy-makers a real chance to get at some of these issues.
Money not expended annually for this expanded environment budget could accrue as the corpus of a Global Permanent Fund, whose investment earnings could be used to support additional U.N. environment and sustainability programs long into the future. In essence, it is time to put our money where our minds, hearts, and mouths are -- sustaining the planet that sustains us.
Without such a substantial increase in financial commitment to the issue, Johannesburg will be a resounding failure regardless of what is said or done there. If Bush and other world leaders aren't prepared to put up the money and effort necessary to solve the problem at the summit, they should all just stay home, save the jet fuel and CO{-2} emissions and spare us the charade.
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Rick Steiner is a professor and conservation specialist at the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program in Anchorage, Alaska, specializing in global environmental policy; afrgs@uaa.alaska.edu
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