The Climate of Sustainable Development Goals: A View Sitharamam - - PDF document

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Seminar on ‘Critique of Sustainable Development’, IEA Nantes, June 6-7, 2017

The Climate of Sustainable Development Goals: A View

Sitharamam Kakarala

Fellow, IEA Nantes (2016-17) & Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India

About a decade ago a scholar of Indian origin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, wrote “the climate of history”, speculating what climate change arguments could mean to his discipline, History, especially if the planet Earth were to become, as speculated by climatologists and creative writers alike, a planet without ‘us’, the human beings (Chakrabarty, 2009). Any honest and meaningful discussion on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) would have to confront the same ‘hard’ question as a backdrop of critical reflection, for, in a planet

• f Earth without ‘us’ not only the knowledge of history but all human knowledge itself

becomes superfluous. I venture to propose in this paper to approach the issue of SDGs from such a perspective to highlight some key concerns and unresolved and built-in contradictions in the UN framework, with a hope to find meaningful way forward.

From MDGs to SDGs?

The SDGs, often seen as successor of the previous UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 2000-2015 (Sachs, 2012) argue that the ‘successful’ implementation and realisation of these goals will depend upon arriving at concrete action from states parties, sound indicators and close monitoring, very similar to that of the MDGs. I however would like to suggest that much has transformed materially and conceptually during the first decade and a half of the new millennium that makes the SDGs challenge qualitatively different from that of its predecessor not merely in terms of obtaining commitments from the states parties or arriving at relevant and effective indicators of implementation, or rigorous methods and strategies of monitoring

• etc. Rather, the real challenge with regard to realising the SDGs lie in, I venture to suggest,

arriving at conceptual clarity: what is the substance of the idea of ‘sustainability’? how should we understand the term in a deeply diverse and economically uneven world of needs, wants,

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aspirations, production and consumption? What are the right or appropriate indicators of performance? How should they be monitored? Notwithstanding a lot of writing on the idea

• f sustainability, it’s a truism that there is no real consensus. How then should we approach
• f studying SDGs?

Some suggested that the SDGs be clustered under three heads: economy, environment and social inclusion (Sachs, 2012). While it’s a useful approach as it helps them to view as three key clusters as opposed to 17 individual goals, and hence making them amenable to public memory and recollection, they are also been presented as though there are no conflictual issues between each of these three clusters. The dominant wisdom presents that the goals of social inclusion (reduction and eventual eradication of poverty, hunger, access to quality education and health etc) are intricately dependent upon achieving rapid economic development (the so called growth model), though some have cautioned on the need for carefully worked out redistributive strategies to make the ‘gains’ reaching the bottom most sections of the society (Sen & Dreze 2013). The achievements of MDGs in this logic were intricately connected to sustaining rapid economic growth for relatively longer periods of time. Are SDGs visualising the continuity of the same process and policies, may be with a little extra emphasis on the environmental concerns? In MDGs environmental protection was represented by only goal 7. In SDGs however goals 8, read in conjunction with goals 12, 13, and 14 present a more expansive conceptualisation of environmental protection that includes issues such as climate justice. Read together seriously, goals 8, 12, 13 and 14 present the need for a qualitatively higher commitment towards environmental and climate sustainability. Goal 8 promotes ‘sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all’. Thus, presenting a view that sustained economic growth can at once be sufficiently inclusive, providing full employment and environmentally sustainable. Goal 12 emphasizes on sustainable consumption and production, goal 13 urges combatting climate change, goal 14 advocates sustainable use of marine resources. I would like to submit that the substantive meaning and content of goal 8 is to be derived in the light of combined reading of goals 12 to

• 14. Thus, the idea of sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth is to be pursued

through commitment to sustainable consumption and production goals that utilise the natural resources in a sustainable way, which in turn have clear convergence with climate

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action goals. The pursuit of sustained and inclusive growth envisaged under the MDGs had no such constraining value framework.

A new dimension of Sustainability

Let me further state as to why I argue that SDGs have a constraining value framework. Any rudimentary analysis of production and consumption patterns over the last three decades cannot but indicate how fundamentally unsustainable our existing production and consumption patterns are. I draw my data and arguments from the global (ecological) footprint network modelling, which is gaining significance in understanding (and reinterpreting) the idea of sustainability over the last decade. 1 At its simplest level, the concept of ‘ecological footprint’ is calculated based on a measure of a nation’s available ecological resources on one side (such as forest land, farm land, marine resources etc) and extent of consumption on the other (such as carbon emissions, energy, food, marine, forest resources consumption, extent of human habitations etc) and the resulting ecological deficit/reserve.2 The outcome is to present the national ecological footprint in terms of the ‘global hectares’ that the nation is consuming at present and how much deficit or reserve that the country is in. similarly, at the individual level, the per capita global hectares required for an individual person’s consumption is also provided. An interesting insight that emerges from this new approach is an insight that though many developed countries seem to have done exceptionally well with regard to economic and human development their ecological footprint indicates fairly high levels of ‘unsustainable’ production and consumption patterns. As figure 1 demonstrates, top 12 HDI countries have a per capita ecological footprint ranging from 4 global hectares (gha) in the case of Norway to 8.59 gha in the case of United States, when the available per capita biocapacity is 1.71 gha. Similarly, while many developing countries have fared poorly with regard to economic and human development indices, their ecological footprint has not yet reached significantly unsustainable levels. As figure 1 demonstrates, many developing countries which have a very

1 I gratefully acknowledge my debt to Henk Manschot and Caroline Suransky for introducing the concept, the

network and materials in this regard.

2 Complete details of the concept and method are available at http://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-

work/ecological-footprint/

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low HDI rank (between 135 and 150) are performing well as their per capita ecological footprint is well under 1.79 gha. The situation however rapidly changing, especially in those countries which are embarking on rapid economic expansion, for there appears a close connection between rapid economic expansion and growth, changing patterns of production and consumption and per capita gha, leading them into, from the vantage point of ecological footprint, unsustainable direction. My intention here is not to romanticise the underdevelopment of the global south or unduly criticise the developed west. Rather the intention here is to highlight that there is a complex and deeply entangled problem between achieving high economic growth and the consequent cultures of unsustainable production and consumption on the one hand, the ecological deficit footprint on the other. The tension between goal 8 and goals 12 to 14 in the SDGs are to be scrutinised in the background.

Figure 1. source: http://data.footprintnetwork.org/

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More specifically, as national illustrations I have taken the data related to four countries, two from the developed west (United States and France) and two from the aggressively developing global south (China and India). As figure 2 demonstrates, the United States has ecological footprint of nearly 2.8 billion gha in 2012, which is marginally less from a higher 3.1 billion gha in early 2000s. its per capita footprint stands at 8.59 gha in 2012, less from 10.7 gha in early 2000s. France has an ecological footprint of 323 million gha in 2012, down from a peak of 362 million gha in 2008. Its per capita gha stands at 5.06 gha in 2012, down marginally from 5.81 gha in 2008. What is important to note is from the beginning of 1970s, the ecological footprint of both the countries, for that matter many high HDI countries, is consistently in the same range of ecological deficit. The cases of China and India demonstrate a slightly different story. As is well known by now, China began its liberalisation process since 1979 and India since the beginning of 1990s. as can be seen in figure 2, China’s ecological footprint was at 1.3 billion gha in 1979, and stands at a staggering 5 billion gha in 2013, a fourfold increase in three decades. Similarly, its per capita gha grew from 1.35 in 1979 to 3.59 gha in 2013. India’s ecological footprint grew from 641 million gha in 1990 to 1.36 billion gha in 2013, an increase of over 100 percent in two

• decades. The per capita gha grew from 0.74 gha in 1990 to 1.06 gha in 2013. From the

ecological footprint vantagepoint, both China and India demonstrate that entangled connection between ‘growing’ economically and ‘going’ in the unsustainable production and consumption direction. This point further can be underscored by comparing China and India. China’s has achieved more rapid economic growth comparatively between the two. For instance, its GDP per capita has grown from approximately $ 800 in 1990 to $ 6500 in 2015, approximately eight-fold

• increase. During the same period, GDP per capita rose in India from approximately $ 550 in

1990 to $ 1750 in 2015, approximately a little over two-fold increase. Now parallel this with their expanding ecological footprint data. Between 1990 and 2013 China has expanded its footprint by nearly 300 percent (from 1.79 billion in 1990 to 5 billion 2013), while India managed to expand its footprint by 100 percent. So, while the economic growth seems to have played a crucial role in achieving a part of the MDGs by China and India, it goes without saying that their ecological footprint tended in the direction of deficit. The greater is the rapidity in economic expansion, the greater is the likely ecological deficit.

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Thus, it can at the least be argued that the climate of SDGs is qualitatively different from that

• f MDGs. True, goal 7 in MDGs did emphasize on environmental sustainability. But the

substantive nature of the challenge was identified as scientific and technological developments helping create more environmental friendly approaches to life and making them more inclusive (…). The general belief appears to be technology finding efficient, clean and renewable solutions to make environmental sustainability achieved. In other words, the focus was on sustainable production processes. But the goals 12 to 14 of SDGs present us more substantial challenge of creating ‘sustainable production and consumption patters’, though the core challenge continues to be identified as creating technology driven sustainable production processes. I would like to submit that here the data of global footprint network becomes crucial in helping us first, take cognisance of the magnitude and significance of the issue of consumption and its sources, second, the intricate linkages between high economic growth and ecological deficit across the developed world for over prolonged and sustained period of time, and, third, persistence of that intricate linkages in the journey of developing countries that are embarking on rapid growth strategies. I would further submit that the data clearly demonstrates the limits of strategies that keep sustainable production processes in the centre in achieving the sustainability goals, for what is needed is, besides all the possible technological improvements stated, a multipronged strategy of conscious moderations of societal and individual consumption patterns far more significantly in the developed world, and clear and conscious incorporation of those principles into the developing world processes. However, such an argument is not likely to go well with the current mode of development which is dependent upon not moderation, but expansion of consumption.3 Here lies the most fundamental tension in achieving the sustainability goals under the SDGs. Unless there is a conscious beginning of a discourse on an ethic of moderation in consumption scales and patterns, both societal and individual alike, there is no honest possibility of walking into ecological sustainability. Put differently, as long as the world economic development is driven by ever expanding demand for consumption, however efficient the production processes

3 Metaphorically, the success of the advertisement industry across the globe is dependent upon generating and

sustaining such a ‘desire’ in the consumer to consume more and more. As an example, during the early 1990s the global giant Pepsi Cola popularised the phrase, ‘Yeh Del Mange More’ (this heart craves more) as a slogan for popularising its drink.

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might be, however ecologically renewable and clean the sources of energy might be, the global ecological deficit is not likely to be mitigated. By way of conclusion I would like to suggest that an important question that is closely connected to sustainable consumption is the issue of sustainable social transitions. For want

• f time and space I only will say that not paying adequate attention to the issue is a key source
• f the emerging global phenomenon of identity populisms of various kinds. However, this

issue hasn’t found a place in the current global concern regarding achieving SDGs.

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009). “The Climate of History”, Critical Inquiry 35. Sachs, Jeffrey D (2012). “From Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals”, Lancet. Sen, Amartya & Jean Dreze (2013). An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

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Figure 2. Source: http://data.footprintnetwork.org/

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Figure 3. source: https://tradingeconomics.com/

United States GDP Per capita income China GDP Per capita income France GDP Per capita income India GDP Per capita income

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