Comments to the GSP Report

April 16, 2012 Today, economics, energy and global environment are all at a tipping point and the global sustainability is seriously in danger. We have already used up 1.5 planets worth of natural resources (WWF Living Planet Report 2010). The major factor for this degradation is carbon emission which increased 11 times since 1961. Global biodiversity is also at a critical situation, causing a 6th Great Extinction since dawn of the earth. All these are human induced. If we continue our ways of production/consumption pattern of today, we will need 2 planets by 2030. Global economic crisis brought by the Lehman Shock and the Greek Crisis is making situation worse. This is all due to the global pro-growth capitalism system. In order to become rich, you produce goods to sell, make people buy and use them, and make them throw away quickly so that they will buy more. In order to make goods, natural resources will be exploited. If people stop buying, you call it economic stagnancy and incentives will be created such as tax incentives, eco-points in case of Japan or via advertisements to stimulate more consumption. This cycle of exploiting natural resources and turning them to waste is the pro-growth capitalism. The level of wealth is measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and this has to continuously grow in this system. The pro-growth system has degraded the environment to an almost irreversible level. Moreover, without fair and equal distribution of wealth, the poor gets poorer and the rich gets more rich, which is happening everywhere now, even in the rich developed countries. Hunger, or poverty or lack of resources is not a problem of being poor, but a problem of distribution. Unless we, the developed nations stop this pro-growth economic pattern, sustainability cannot be guaranteed. The GSP Report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet seeks Sustainable Development or Green Economy as a solution, but the report does not go deep enough to address this pro-growth capitalism as the root cause for the current unsustainable situation of the planet. 1

The solutions the Report comes up with, are not very much different from what had been pursued to date. Scale up investment, innovation, technological development and employment creation Pricing the environmental externalities while making explicit the economic, social and environmental costs of action and inaction Financing from both private and public sources, more ODA Using existing international institutions, and also consider creation of a global sustainable development council These are all asking for more money and more institutions, and asking all governments to become more serious on the sustainable development agenda. But as we have seen, these have all failed in the past 20-40 years. Especially in the climate change negotiations, none of these have been accepted and agreed to enable a post-Kyoto binding framework to emerge as an international consensus. As the global environment is deteriorated and the gap between the poor and the rich are widening at an alarming speed, we have to go back 40 years to the 1970s when there were warnings from Limits to Growth, Small is Beautiful, the UN Conference on Human Environment, and when people were serious about protecting nature. Yes, we have to re-recognize that there is a limit to all what we are doing if we want to achieve environmental sustainability and social justice, which are both the basis for a sustainable society. The GSP Report does not go into this issue either. Instead the GSP Report goes back to the Brundtland Report of 1987, Our Common Future where the term sustainable development was first introduced internationally by the UN. But this report is all about economic growth to solve all problems. As Jorgan Norrgard, et al say1, Until now, growth has not, as often promised, been used to reduce inequalities but rather to sustain a substantial gap between rich and poor, without having to deal with too much social unrest. We should shift to a paradigm where development is made without economic growth: De-growth.as Serge Latouche proposes in his book, Decroissance2

Jorgen-Stig Noorgaard, John Peet, Kristin Vala Ragnarsdottir (2010), History of The Limits to Growth, Solutions, Volume 1:Issue2, page 59-63 (February 26, 2010) http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com 2 Latouche (2007), Petit traite de la decroissance sereine, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2007
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For this to happen, there should be a slowdown, stop demanding for more, meaning reduction in material consumption. And this has to first start in the rich developed countries, reducing the level of resource exploitation and consumption. In case of GHG emissions, about 80-95% reduction from 1990 level by 2050 as indicated by the IPCC AR4. This is a moral issue as well, meaning that in order to achieve the social justice needed to eradicate poverty or hunger and provide a decent life for all with energy access, clean water and sanity, the rich countries must sustain or reduce their growth in order to leave environmental space for those that really need growth. . Economic growth has been made by industrial business activities worldwide. All industries have a responsibility. As B. Lloyd says, corporations have a (legal) clear line of responsibility to their shareholders alone and have continuously resisted government and international efforts to regulate the Commons3.

This is especially true in case of Japan in the UNFCCC negotiation. Today, I have the privilege of having the former prime minister, Mr. Hatoyama, I would like to emphasize that until the current Democratic Party took over in 2009, the Japanese position was totally ignoring the science about climate change, and just trying to maintain the Japanese economy to grow. Totally against absolute reduction of greenhouse gases like the Kyoto Protocol. Then Prime Minister Hatoyama was the first in Japan to ever declare a reduction target based on science. However, due to the collapse of the international negotiation and also to the last years 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear explosion, Japanese industries are again trying to change or even give up that target of 25% reduction from 1990 level by 2020. Furthermore, Japan clearly declared that it will not join the 2nd commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which is not what a developed country should be saying or doing. Japan is clearly not on the road to sustainability, nor is Japan helping the world to move into this direction. And this is all due to the persistent insistence of Nippon Keidanren representing the big emitting industries and utilities of Japan against a legally binding reduction framework. So Mr. Hatoyama, I urge you to take the initiative to make Japan commit to the 2nd Commitment Period of the Kyoto Protocol, keep the 25% reduction target and enshrine it into a Climate Change Basic Law as soon as possible. Because of the enormous
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Lloyd, B. The Commons revisited: The tragedy continues. Energy Policy 35 5806-5818 (2007) 3

tragedy we experienced last year, I believe that Japan is now better positioned to enable a systematic shift to a really sustainable economy leading us to a low-carbon energy efficient and internationally competitive country. pursue. This new sustainable society is not a large-size centralized system of today, but a small-sized decentralized system with small cities connected via IT, using local natural resources to keep the lifestyles within the limit of one planet. Localization is most important. Each local region has its own value and culture, the lifestyle of which will be measured by whether it is within the limit of one planet, and not by the measurement of the rich=pro-growth capitalism. Then Japan will be able to show a real

sustainable society model which will be the new goal for the developing world to

This means no nuclear power any more as a lesson learned from Fukushima. The biggest problem of nuclear power is that there is no way to get rid of the radioactive waste. We are currently suffering from the radioactivity released due to the explosions, contaminating all over. These are only small bits of the huge radioactive waste all reactors store. If we cannot even solve this tiny bit of radioactivity, how could we deal with 54 nuclear power plants that had been creating such radioactive wastes for years till now? This is the worst present we could give to the future generations. For a one-planet sustainable society, we need to seek an inventory of how much natural resources we have locally, and how much we could use to keep them renewable, so that we could sustain the same resource level forever. This is what Sustainable Development is all about, as defined in Our Common Future; to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, In conclusion, the economy for sustainable society should be De-growth, with decentralized local system using local natural energy and resources with local money. These decentralized compact cities are connected via IT system, which I call, an e-compact city.

Yurika Ayukawa Professor, Chiba University of Commerce