SUSTAINABILITY AT THE LIMITS OF CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION

Towards sustainable production and use of resources: Assessing the environmental impacts of consumption and production: Priority Products and Materials
2 June 2010 (United Nations Environment Program)

THE POINT
One sentence in the press release about a new report from the UN is so simple it slips by at first: “The Earth, being a finite planet, has a limited capability to supply resources and to absorb pollution.”

Nothing more profound can be said about energy and the environment. There was a time when people lived on this land without concern for the overall supply of resources and without taking seriously the waste they left behind. They treated the environment with what now seems shocking disregard.

There is a remarkable sequence in Mad Men, the widely admired television series set in the early 1960s, in which the show’s main family passes a Sunday afternoon by taking a ride in their new gas-guzzling Cadillac out into the country. As they finish their picnic and prepare to return to the car, the father tells the little boy he can pee on a nearby tree, the mother shakes out the blanket on which they have picnicked – paper refuse and all – on the empty green field, and the father puts his cigarette into a beer can from which he has been sipping and throws it off into the distance. No comment is made. It is merely mid-20th century America over-consuming resources and nonchalantly strewing waste.

Things have changed. The world needs energy, materials and land to sustain the consumption and production that constitute its economy. For entirely self-sustaining reasons, people must learn to prioritize and protect them. Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production; Priority Products and Materials is a study from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) of the key environmental and resource pressures that will set the priorities. Using a global perspective along with an understanding of regional and local factors, it identifies key materials and resources and describes ways the nations of the world can sustain economic growth without continuing to rape the environment.

The assessment, based on a review of established data, is done in 2 steps: (1) A review of the observed pressures and impacts on ecological systems (ecological health, human health, and resources); and (2) the causative economic factors from 3 perspectives.

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The 3 perspectives from which the causative economic pressures on consumption and production are described are: (1) Which production processes have the most impacts? (2) What consumption has the biggest life-cycle impacts? (3) What materials have the most life-cycle impacts?

The key findings:
(1) The great preponderance of evidence shows agriculture and food consumption to be one of the most important sources of environmental pressure (especially habitat change, climate change, water use and toxic emissions).
(2) Fossil fuel energy for heating, transportation, manufacturing and metal refining is equally impactful (causing fossil resource depletion, climate change, and many emissions-related impacts).
(3) Impacts from these things are expected to grow if business proceeds as usual because increasing emissions are “highly correlated” with increasing income and population and economic growth is anticipated. The only way impacts can be mitigated is through significant changes in production and consumption.
(4) “Interlinkages” will make mitigation challenging. Example: Both New Energy infrastructure and electric personal transport require materials that are energy-intensive to obtain and metal refining that is energy intensive. More extensive life-cycle analyses with more complete data can confirm net benefits in transitioning to them.

This good earth, once so abundant, will be tested in the 21st century by human prolificity and human greed. On the earth’s side will be the advocates of doing the right thing the right way. That means pursuing ongoing growth and well-being by using the sun, the wind, the flowing waters, the earth’s own deep heat and the ecosystem’s waste to build a New Energy economy based on principles of sustainability.

Aligned against the earth in coming decades will be the business-as-usual of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nuclear, industries that only do the right thing when there is no other alternative. Such business-as-usual gave the world the Gulf oil spill, mountaintop removal coal mining and killer cave-ins, and the unforgettable epithet "Chernobyl" as a description of devastation.

The UNEP report’s measures of sustainability come from full life-cycle analyses of the means of production and the materials of consumption. The key term there is “cycle.” As in cycle of life. The report promises that business-as-usual will bring more Gulf oil catastrophes and sustainability will slip away if the forces of greed and disregard overwhelm the consciousness that everything is part of the cycle.

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THE DETAILS
The International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, the UNEP panel that produced the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production report is charged with providing independent and scientific assessments on full life cycle resource sustainability and environmental impacts. The aim is to “decouple” economic growth and detrimental environmental impacts. The assessment is a literature review.

Most economic analysis is simply in terms of dollars and cents, costs and benefits. This study takes as its basic assumption that economic activity takes place in the “natural, physical” world, requires “energy, materials and land” and has “material residuals” that add waste and or pollution to the environment. It insists that no economic analysis is complete without a consideration of the impacts of the resource depletion and of the waste and pollution.

The report first assesses the observed pressures and impacts on ecological health, human health, and resources. It then studies the varying importance of production, consumption and materials use in those pressures and impacts.

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For ecological health, the report uses the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). It identified (1) habitat change, (2) pollution with nitrogen and phosphorus, (3) overexploitation of biotic resources such as fisheries and forests, (4) climate change, and (5) invasive species as the major concerns.

For human health, the report uses the WHO Burden of Disease assessment. It identified (1) unsafe drinking water and sanitation, (2) household combustion of solid fuels, (3) lead exposure, (4) climate change, (5) urban air pollution and (6) occupational exposure to particulate matter as the major concerns.

The report found little reliable work and significant disagreement on the scarcity of mineral, fossil and biotic resources and on whether resource scarcity and resource competition is a fundamental problem or whether they will be resolved by market activity.

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Demand projections show consumption of some metals and oil and gas will overreach and may exhaust the supply in this century if business continues as usual. Overexploitation of biotic resources is already a fact. Many resource stocks, especially fish, have collapsed. Competition for land and fresh water is a rising concern.

Pressures and impacts on ecosystem health, human health and resources assessed in the report:
(1) Impacts caused by emissions: (a) Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs), (b) Impacts caused by Eutrophication (over-fertilization causing nitrogen and phosphorus pollution), (c) Impacts caused by urban and regional air pollution, indoor air pollution and other emissions that cause human and ecotoxic effects.
(2) Impacts related to resource consumption: (a) Depletion of abiotic resources, especially fossil fuels and metals, and (b) Depletion of biotic resources, especially fish and wood.
(3) Impacts related to water and land use and resulting in habitat change and resource competition.
(4) There is too little data on the impacts related to invasive species to understand them adequately.

The report identifies the significant industrial production processes that allow prioritization of materials:
(1) Fossil fuel combustion for (a) electricity generation by utilities, (b) residential heating, (c) transportation, and (d) metal refining and other energy intensive industries. These are all major causative factors in global climate change, abiotic resource depletion and are often factors in eutrophication, acidification and toxicity.
(2) Agricultural and biomass development are major causative factors in global climate change, eutrophication, land use, water use and toxicity.
(3) Commercial fishing has led to overexploitation and collapse of fish stocks and industrial fisheries generate significant emissions.

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The report next identifies the significant consumption processes from the final demand for products and services that allow prioritization of materials. It is divided into (a) household consumption, (b) government consumption, and (c) expenditure on capital goods. Data is good in industrial economies, documenting energy use and GhGs, but very little is available on other environmental impacts. Data for the less developed emerging economies is inadequate.

Conclusions about consumption supported by multiple studies and judged “robust” by the report:
(1) Household consumption in most countries determines 60+% of life-cycle impacts.
(2) In developing and emerging econmies, food and housing are responsible for by far the largest generation of GhGs.
(3) 70% of the impacts of household consumption in industrial countries come from (a) housing, (b) mobility, (c) food and (d) electrical appliances.
(4) The impacts of government consumption – largely from investment in infrastructure and capital goods – are usually less than the impacts of household consumption.
(5) In non-Asian developing countries, where public sector spending is larger, environmental impacts are relatively larger. This is beginning to be the case in Asian emerging economies as the governments build infrastructure.

Emerging economies, especially in Asia, have become the place where GhG-intensive manufacturing of products for export to developed countries is done. This emissions rendition distorts where the source of impacts actually is.

As a consequence, impacts driven by consumption in developed countries in part are “translocated” to countries, often emerging economies with lesser environmental regulatory regimes, where production takes place.

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Across and within national borders, increasing wealth correlates directly with increasing energy consumption and the increasing generation of greenhouse gases.

The very general definition of “materials” used in the report includes things used for their structural properties (steel, cement) and those used for energy by humans (food) and machines (fuels).

Materials use (measured in the mass used) correlates with the stage of a country’s development and the density of its population. In industrialized countries, the most materials use is in minerals, the second biggest materials use is in biomass and the third is in fossil fuels. In many developing countries, the per capita use of minerals and fossil fuels is much lower but biomass use is similar. This makes biomass proportionately much more important than minerals or fossil fuels in developing countries.

Using mass as a measure of materials’ use is inadequate to assess relative importance because of asymmetries of development, population density and wealth. Life cycle analysis is thought to be a more accurate assessment of impacts. Life cycle studies and databases with information on mining, smelting, processing metals and burning fossil fuels are available.

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Mass-based assessment of impacts and life-cycle analysis impacts vary by ~12 orders of magnitude, making a study of both important. There is limited data.
(1) Studies of agricultural goods and biotic materials show a higher impact importance from animal products which, for instance, consume a disproportionately larger part of the world’s crops and therefore of its land.
(2) Studies show that the burning of fossil fuels has the highest emissions-related impact of any material and plastics have the highest environmental impacts among materials.
(3) Many metals have a high impact per kilogram but only iron, steel and aluminium have high impact priorities.
(4) Studies are inconclusive about construction materials.

Conclusions
Plenty of studies are available. The overall points are consistent: (1) Agriculture and food consumption are among the most important drivers of environmental challenges such as habitat change, climate change, water use and toxic emissions. (2) The use of fossil fuels for heating, transportation, manufacturing and metal refining has comparable significance due to its depletion of fossil resources, climate change, and many emissions-related impacts.

Impacts are unlikely to be reduced and will likely worsen in a business-as-usual (BAU) future because that will lead to economic growth unfettered by regulatory protections against impacts. Energy consumption and CO2 emissions increase with increasing personal wealth, which is what will come with BAU. With increasing economic growth, personal wealth, and population, impacts will worsen unless production and consumption change.

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Undoing BAU will mean confronting the challenge of interlinkage. The New Energy economy will offer the temptation to do what seem like the right things but to do them in the wrong way. Rooftop solar energy is not entirely right if toxic materials in used panels are not managed. Solar power plants are not entirely right if they are not built to use water with maximum efficiency. The best effort must be made to site wind power installations sensitively. The lithium in the batteries that will power the battery electric vehicle revolution must be mined sustainably.

Doing life-cycle analyses of means and materials and making the complicated trade-offs that minimize interlinkage is not compromising principle, it is – as the UNEP report suggests – accepting the human condition and setting priorities.

The UNEP report is a beginning. Based on studies of individual countries or country blocks, its conclusions are conditional. Its authors nevertheless see its conclusions as “quite robust” but call on UN member nations to seek collaborations and better data.

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QUOTES
- From the report: “The Earth, being a finite planet, has a limited capability to supply resources and to absorb pollution. A fundamental question the Resource Panel hence has to answer is how different economic activities influence the use of natural resources and the generation of pollution.”

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- From the report: “Emerging economies (particularly in Asia) have developed themselves as exporters of large amounts of products to developed countries. As a consequence, impacts driven by consumption in developed countries in part are translocated to countries where production takes place.”

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- From the report: “…different studies, and different perspectives points, paint a consistent overall picture…Agriculture and food consumption are identified as one of the most important drivers of environmental pressures, especially habitat change, climate change, water use and toxic emissions…The use of fossil energy carriers for heating, transportation, metal refining and the production of manufactured goods is of comparable importance, causing the depletion of fossil energy resources, climate change, and a wide range of emissions-related impacts…The impacts related to these activities are unlikely to be reduced, but rather enhanced, in a business as usual scenario for the future…”