Humanity could be using nearly three times as many resources per year by 2050, with substantial economic, political and environmental consequences, warns a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme.
Unless the world learns to use resources more efficiently, says the report released May 12, we could be using up to 140 billion metric tonnes of fossil fuels, minerals, ores and biomass per year due to population growth and economic growth largely in developing countries.
The result of this would be an “unsustainable future in terms of both resource use and emissions, probably exceeding all possible measures of available resources and assessments of limits to the capacity to absorb impacts.”
“Business as usual will mean that resource prices continue to escalate dramatically, which will make it extremely difficult to continue to run the economy in the way that we have. And second, there will be very drastic environmental impacts,” said Mark Swilling, a Professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and a co-lead author of the report. There will also be much higher levels of political instability due to resource conflicts, he said.
To prevent this scenario, the report urges greater “decoupling” of economic growth and resource use. Generally throughout history, as the economy grows, so does the amount of resources it consumes. Breaking that link may make economic development more environmentally sustainable.
“We need interventions, particularly policies that support innovation, that make it possible to substantially increase resource productivity,” said Swilling. The goal is to “do a lot more with less.”
“The good news that the report does reflect is that there is already evidence of decoupling of GDP growth rates from resource consumption rates,” said Swilling. He provides examples of green housing standards in European countries and technological innovations that have led to more efficient resource use.
Douglas Macdonald, Senior Lecturer with the Centre for Environment at the University of Toronto, believes that the most effective way to address resource limits and their associated problems is to change our lifestyles to reduce our impact on the natural world. “I think we should change our behaviour and I think we should combine that with increased equity. We should be changing the basic function of society so that we’re no longer committed to increasing economic growth,” said Macdonald, though he is skeptical that this will happen.
While Swilling does advocate consumption reduction in certain parts of the world, he does not believe that economic growth needs to be sacrificed to ensure that we do not run out of natural resources. New, more efficient technologies and planning will help, he said.
“You can delink consumption from the resources that are used,” said Swilling. “The prices of resources have been coming down for a hundred years, but that’s starting to change. So that will incentivize investments in resource productivity.”
He also said that poorer countries will not be able to develop along the same path as the Western world. “If they are consuming goods and services which are produced in resource-inefficient ways, they are going to come up against resource limits and rising resource prices which will undermine many of their ambitions to grow fast and eradicate poverty.”
Developing countries, he said, need to find ways of “managing their economic development processes without emulating the resource inefficient strategies that were used in the west and the wasteful strategies that were used in the west.”
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