This publication draws upon the fields of science, economics and business strategy to chart the future of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. A healthy ocean provides the basis for a prosperous world, and oceans have been largely ignored as a driver of human well-being until now. Ocean health has been in a serious state of decline for the past 100 years from a range of pressures including human population growth, energy consumption and use of natural resources. Humanity will exceed the resources and environmental conditions necessary to exist, within the next century if nothing changes. Solutions to these challenges lie not only in traditional resource conservation management, but in new fields of technology, governance and innovation.
This publication draws upon the fields of science, economics and business strategy to chart the future of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. A healthy ocean provides the basis for a prosperous world, and oceans have been largely ignored as a driver of human well-being until now. Ocean health has been in a serious state of decline for the past 100 years from a range of pressures including human population growth, energy consumption and use of natural resources. Humanity will exceed the resources and environmental conditions necessary to exist, within the next century if nothing changes. Solutions to these challenges lie not only in traditional resource conservation management, but in new fields of technology, governance and innovation.
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Overview
This publication draws upon the fields of science, economics and business strategy to chart the future of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. A healthy ocean provides the basis for a prosperous world, and oceans have been largely ignored as a driver of human well-being until now. Ocean health has been in a serious state of decline for the past 100 years from a range of pressures including human population growth, energy consumption and use of natural resources. Humanity will exceed the resources and environmental conditions necessary to exist, within the next century if nothing changes. Solutions to these challenges lie not only in traditional resource conservation management, but in new fields of technology, governance and innovation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780918172624 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Leete'S Island Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2017 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Nishan Degnarain is an economist with a strong background in both the public and private sectors. He co-leads the World Economic Forum’s Special Initiative on Oceans together with Greg Stone. Since 2013, Nishan has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Oceans. Greg Stone is Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist for Oceans at Conservation International (CI). He has given a TED talk and lectured throughout the world. Greg is widely published in scientific literature, National Geographic Magazine, and authored three award-winning books, including Underwater Eden.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
One planet, one experiment.
— Edward O. Wilson The Diversity of Life
Pushing the Boundary
ANY SYSTEM — biological, financial, mechanical, or digital — has safe operating limits. The trouble is that without an operating manual we don't know where precisely these limits are when it comes to Spaceship Earth. We do, however, know that we're exceeding several already.
We also know that, even within these limits or planetary boundaries, there are tipping points. Past these points, things begin to go swiftly, irreversibly, unpredictably, dangerously, and even fatally wrong. Our momentum can then carry us clean through the boundaries and leave us stranded on the other side.
These boundaries and tipping points apply wherever we look to our global commons, a phrase used to refer to shared resources over which no individual or state has sovereignty such as fresh water, air, biodiversity, and, of course, the ocean.
As wonderful as this shared heritage and legacy might sound, we have thus far been slow to protect and preserve our commons. Most of the global governance institutions designed to do this are struggling. They need to be rethought, restructured, reorganised, and retooled. Luckily, the extraordinary age in which we're living — this Fourth Industrial Revolution of ours — offers ways of safeguarding our commons for future generations.
Back in 1798, the economist Thomas Malthus first proposed his famous theory of population and growth. In essence, he argued that human populations have the potential to grow exponentially (the rate at which they grow accelerates), whilst the rate at which food production increases stays the same (the rate is linear). When a population begins to outgrow its ability to feed itself, it is automatically checked — and brutally so.
Besides the differing growth rates of population and food production posited by Malthus, we have a more obvious problem. Even if the latter could keep up with the former, how could it do so indefinitely? What's more, the problem presented by our burgeoning population is further compounded by that population's lifestyle. Even though the growth rate is slowing and birth rates are starting to level off globally, the proportion of the global population living carbon-heavy lives of bourgeois domesticity and consumption is increasing. This is the trade-off at the heart of the ideological conflict between, on the one hand Malthus and his belief in natural limits to growth, and on the other, economists such as Adam Smith (1776) and David Ricardo (1817) whose work on labour specialisation, free trade, and comparative advantage describe a world of unfettered economic growth and innovation, limited not by natural resources but by human ingenuity. Human ingenuity, they argued, was not a scarce resource — until we started to hit against the maximum capacity for our planet to support life, with our current demands.
Few will argue that you can support infinite growth from finite resources. As Sir David Attenborough told the Royal Geographical Society in 2013, 'anyone who thinks you can [...] is either a madman or an economist.'
PLANETARY BOUNDARIES
Whether we're madmen, economists, mad economists, or none of the above, two things are clear. First, our global population is growing. Second, as economies grow, a greater and greater proportion of this population aspire to what those in the West might call a middle-class lifestyle. Both these facts mean that the demands put upon the planet's resources are increasing. One of our most important objectives is to reach a new definition of economic growth and uncouple it — as well as population growth — from increased resource intensity.
All over the world, more and more of us are driving more and more cars, using more water and electricity, heating or cooling more and more homes, and eating more and more meat and seafood. We currently demand more of the regenerative resources from the Earth than it can sustainably provide and produce more greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the burning of fossil fuels than it can absorb. We need, in fact, 1.5 worlds, or around 18 months of Earth's operating budget, for fresh water, food, and so on to meet our demands each year.
If we imagine the world's resources to be a bank, where once we were living off the interest generated by the capital, we are now working our way through the capital itself. As we do so, the amount of interest that the capital is able to generate is reduced. This makes living off it, as future generations will have to do as well, increasingly difficult.
It's predicted that by 2030 we'll need twice what the Earth can provide if we carry on with 'business as usual'. We are living beyond our means and beyond our planetary boundaries.
In 2009, researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Center published an article in the journal Science in which they identified nine such boundaries:
'Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed [...]
The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, [and] altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call core boundaries. Significantly altering either of these core boundaries would "drive the Earth System into a new state".'
We are also nudging the red line on several other core boundaries like ocean acidification and stratospheric ozone depletion.
In addition to all this, there are measurements where we don't even know where the red line is. For example, what is the minimum diversity of life required to make the Earth's biosphere function? Take another example: We think that the 'safe' level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 350 parts per million but we don't know for sure. We do know, however, that it has already broken through 400ppm.
Nor do we know the maximum particulate pollution load the atmosphere can withstand. What is the impact of all the novel chemicals and compounds we release into the environment? We have a fair understanding of some of these such as industrial cooling fluids (like PCBs) and heavy metals like mercury, but the full impact on cellular biology and ecology of others, like plastic, are far from clear.
How we use the planet's resources and how our colossal population interacts with the world's life-support systems needs radically rethinking if we are to stay within our planetary boundaries and keep those systems operating.
TIPPING POINTS
It's more complicated than that, though. Even were we to live within these planetary boundaries, we may pass tipping points that lead to irreversible phase changes in large-scale physical and biological conditions on Earth. Simply put, the stable and benign Holocene conditions that have so far allowed us to prosper could soon become a thing of the past. In fact, so wide-ranging and so profound are the effects of human activity that some scientists argue we have already left the Holocene epoch behind and entered a new one. The name they have given it reflects this human impact on the planet, derived from the Ancient Greek words for 'human', and 'recent' or 'new': the Anthropocene.
Our oceans are a dynamic, non-linear system. This means that subcomponents of this system can appear to be ticking along well for years on end, changing very marginally, then suddenly hit a critical mass or tipping point after which they quickly degenerate at an exponential rate. On land, we can see this when we look at the effects of deforestation. Forests need a critical mass for each sub- system to interact effectively with one another. When we clear a path through the forest — to make way for a road, for example — we often discover that the smaller side of the forest reaches this sub-optimal state and rapidly collapses.
Sometimes these tipping points are passed quite naturally. For example, 250 million years ago a sudden, unexplained, and catastrophic drop in oceanic oxygen levels wiped out 90% of all marine species.
More recently and less naturally, we might look at what happened when we passed a tipping point just a few decades ago in the Black Sea. At the end of the 1960s, it was home to a healthy and diverse range of fish, crabs, sea stars, and plankton, all of which formed a finely balanced ecosystem reliant on stable conditions that had persisted for thousands of years.
Of the fresh water that drains into the Black Sea, 85% comes from just three rivers. Between them, the Danube, Dniestr, and Dniepr pour over 67 cubic miles of water into this delicate ecosystem every year — enough to fill Lake Winnipeg in Canada. The Danube alone carries the waste water of 80 million people who live along its length. In the 1970s, as industry and agriculture intensified along the banks of these rivers, huge amounts of phosphorous, nitrate, and silicate also ran off into these rivers, and then into the Black Sea itself. This was great news for the phytoplankton that thrive on such compounds, and for the fish that lived off these plankton. Fishermen saw their catch go up from 200,000 tonnes in 1970 to 600,000 in 1985, so it was great news for them, too.
However, all the fish that the fishermen were hauling in had been fulfilling a very specific function in the food web. In their place, the populations of certain carnivorous jellyfish skyrocketed. Over the same period, the biomass of these jellyfish increased from just one million tonnes to 700 million tonnes. Unlike the anchovies, these jellyfish have no predators. When they die they simply sink to the sea floor, where their decomposition draws the oxygen out of the water, further reducing the habitat available to fish.
Intrinsically, neither the prehistoric ocean anoxia nor the recent Black Sea crisis was harmful. It could be said that the harm done to certain species was merely an opportunity for other species to thrive and that both bodies of water would regain a new, albeit different, balance over time. The anchovies' loss was the jellyfish's gain.
This point can hardly be emphasised too much: the Earth and its oceans will continue to be just fine whatever action we do or do not take. Our struggle is not to save the planet. Our struggle is merely to save ourselves. And in a meaningful timescale.
This struggle means restoring and preserving ocean health in a way that allows it to supply us with what we need. Wherever we look, however, species and whole ecosystems are undergoing drastic changes. We are approaching and passing tipping points that are both hard to define and not linear, which means that we may not know we're passing them but, once we do, the changes become exponential and often irreversible.
Take, for example, fishing stocks in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean or whale populations in the Antarctic. Take the Great Barrier Reef in Australia or the marine systems within almost any industrialised port such as Singapore, Tokyo, Mumbai, New York, or Santos in Brazil.
Take the Gulf Stream that flows from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico across the Atlantic, eventually releasing its heat far further north alongside western Europe. Without it, the UK would experience Alaskan conditions and Norway would be as hospitable as Antarctica. The melting of the Greenland ice cap and Arctic ice could, in a matter of decades, disrupt the oceanic thermohaline circulation engine that keeps the Gulf Stream going. This is not a hypothetical. The Gulf Stream has already slowed by 30% in the past 50 years. What is more, our diagnostic tools and computer models are far from sophisticated. Among the many things we don't know is this: If it stops, when will the Gulf Stream start up again? Thousands of years? Hundreds of thousands? Never?
The Antarctic ice sheet is another example. It contains enough water to raise the entire global sea level not by inches but by hundreds of feet. Once it melts past a certain point, its decline will accelerate and quickly become irreversible. Then there's the deforestation in Amazonia, and desertification in East Africa. The list goes on.
Wherever we look, wherever we break through planetary boundaries or slip silently and unknowingly past tipping points, the effect on our global commons is likely to be profound. The conditions we find on the other side will be different, some of them hostile to human life, and many of them irreversible.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
The trouble with shared, unregulated resources like the world's oceans is that self-interest must be put aside by every party if they're to be sustainably governed and managed. Agreements must be made, treaties hammered out, deals negotiated, and compromises reached. This usually takes a great deal of time, effort, and political will. The approach tends to be hampered by some participants' assumption that they're playing a one-off, zero-sum game in which one party's gain is another's loss.
It's a problem that was famously framed as 'The Tragedy of the Commons' by the English economist William Forster Lloyd nearly two hundred years ago. He studied the 'common' grazing land that most villages at the time set aside for common grazing and noticed that when everyone acted out of self-interest the consequences were inevitably contrary to the common interest — and their own — in the long term. Overcoming this tragedy is an endeavour to which economists the world over are applying themselves to this day, sometimes to Nobel-winning effect as was the case in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom shared the economics prize for her work on the commons. She remains the only woman so far to win it.
Lloyd's observations present what in economics circles is known as The Prisoner's Dilemma, a famous thought experiment in which two rational individuals may choose not to collaborate even if it's in their collective interest to do so. Accused of a crime, they can choose both to stay silent and ensure a better joint outcome or they can confess, thereby optimising their own individual outcomes at the expense of the other — but ensuring a longer overall sentence. Invariably, most put their short-term interests first if this is their first and only offence. Things become interesting if they are repeat offenders or if they trust each other.
In Antarctica, the only continent with no human indigenous or local populations of people, we made peaceful progress toward solving the Tragedy of the Commons. The Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961 and has been acceded to by 53 countries. The basic tenet is that Antarctica should be used for scientific research and off-limits to military activity and that any such activities cannot form a basis for any claims to land or resources (which were just beginning to be made at the time).
Although imperfect, it was brilliant in its simplicity and worked for two reasons. First of all, no one wanted to live there. Second, nobody ever seriously considered the possibility of drilling for oil or mining for coal and precious metals, all of which are thought to abound under a continental ice sheet that's anywhere between 1 and 3 miles thick. It seemed to work as intended and indeed it still does, essentially making Antarctica one huge protected area.
A more recent agreement which is part of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), however, has worked out less well. The 1982 Convention on the Conservation and Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) was designed to cover the resources of the entire Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. Because these resources are easier to get at that those on the land, there has been far less cooperation and it was developed after we began to fish in the Southern Ocean.
Governance in the Arctic is even more problematic because of the adjacency of powerful nations like Russia, the US, and Canada to the resources such as oil, fisheries, and shipping lanes. Nations have made claims in the polar regions of the north and there is no multilateral treaty that resolves resource use. Global warming is exacerbating the situation because, as the sea ice melts, oil extraction gets easier and cheaper, new fishing grounds become more accessible, and new shipping lanes open up. This has led to actions like when the Russian deep diving research submersible MIR dove over 13,000 feet and placed a flag on the North Pole, symbolically claiming it for Russia. The Canadians argue that they control the newly open water of the Northwest Passage, yet the US drives a ship through there without permission every couple years simply to set a precedent indicating that it is open international water.
Institutions like the UN that are designed to resolve disputes like these have often been born of tragedy and disaster. Global governance institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and various United Nations bodies and agencies would likely never have been established were it not for the two world wars.
Many of these institutions recognise that they need to adapt if they're to stay relevant. The world in which the victors of the Second World War, the five Permanent Members of the Security Council, set the global agenda, is no more. Now the G77 and non-OECD nations, particularly China, India, Russia, and Brazil, all have a greater say in the global leadership agenda.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Soul of the Sea"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Gregory S. Stone and Nishan Degnarain.
Excerpted by permission of Leete's Island Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD by Ambassador Peter Thomson, President of the UN General Assembly,
PREFACE,
INTRODUCTION,
OUR OCEAN CIVILISATION,
1 Pushing the Boundary,
2 Life-Support System Diagnosis: Declining Ocean Health,
3 Oceans in the Industrial Age,
4 Knights in Shining Armour,
5 Teetering on the Edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
A VISION FOR OUR OCEAN,
6 New Values for a New Revolution,
7 Ocean Innovation Springboards,
8 No Chance of Zero Risk,
THE LEADERSHIP MOMENT,
9 Systems Acupuncture,
10 An Ocean Renaissance,
EXHIBITS,
EPILOGUE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,