GOVERNMENT

Experts Optimistic About Future Of World Ecology, Economy

World Resources Institute conference may mark turning point in previously stormy relations between industry and conservation groups

Wil Lepkowski, C&EN Washington

Think of what a wonderful world it would be if world population stabi­lized at, say, 6 billion souls. If ero­sion of the planet's fisheries, farms, wildlife, and species variety were stopped. If social and industrial prac­tices ceased depleting the globe's resource "capital," and industrial wastes were so nontoxic that they could be reinserted into the food chain. If advanced technologies wondrously increased the efficien­cies of traditional energy sources and made more feasible such other renewable energy sources as solar and biomass. If new theories of eco­nomic growth actually lessened, not increased, the gap between rich and poor people. If ecological and eco­nomic values became one system of thought, seeing nature as capital stock, not as a useless economic externality. And if because of, not despite of, all this, industry profited and provided jobs for those who need them most.

That, at least, is how an ambi­tious international conference spon­sored by the World Resources Insti­tute of Washington, D.C., would like us all to envisage the future. The conference, optimistically titled, "The Global Possible," recently wound up three days of such think­ing at the Wye Plantation confer­ence center on the marshy shores of Chesapeake Bay.

Institute president Gus Speth said in his office a few days afterward

Speth: not just an issue for the rich

that the conference marked a turn­ing point in ecological/economic relations. The world may not be better off environmentally, but talk of gloom and doom scenarios can now end, he said. Angry confronta­tions between conservationists and industrialists are passe, as both have come to understand the values in­herent within their sectors.

"For the first time," he says, "the international community has come together across a broad range of is­sues and identified actions that can be taken to alleviate the problems. The people from [developing coun­tries] did not rail against the rich [countries]. There was a strong un­dercurrent of feeling that signifi­cant changes in policies in most gov­ernments and the private sector were needed. And in that context came an interesting emergence of the role of the market. We talked a lot about the role of governmental agencies

in making the markets work bet­ter."

Speth says the need for resource management and environmental protection isn't just an issue for the rich. "Environmentalists now know that problems of resource manage­ment and environmental deteriora­tion are not going to be solved with­out supplying people with jobs so they can earn their livelihood in nondestructive means and take the pressure off the resource base. The feeling was that poverty is the worst pollution and the source of a lot of resource destruction."

Speth admits that facts are still facts. Environmental deterioration does continue. Every day around the world, big and little stories about some toxic chemical spill, mass poi­soning of wildlife, weird anomalies in the weather, or the disappear­ance of once-flourishing species of wildlife and of tropical forests show up in the news.

But environmentalists are seeing more and more that it makes little sense to fight the sector that pro­vides people with jobs. And no one sector is wholly to blame anyway. Much degradation can be laid to practices by the poor in developing countries themselves.

Forests, for example, are cut not always because some timber compa­ny wants the wood, but instead be­cause subsistence farmers need the land to grow food. And the poor need wood for heating and cooking.

Then there is the inevitable prob­lem of graft in developing countries. Most experts know that many gov­ernment officials of those countries covet big-ticket development proj­ects. It is their chief source of under-

. the-table income. The bigger the project, the bigger the take. "The rake-off factor cannot be ignored here," comments one federal re-

24 May 21, 1984 C&EN

Recommendations cover resource! environmental Issues searcher familiar with those realities. Still, as this source says, action can­not follow without rhetoric, and the rhetoric lately has carried a new sense of responsibility.

Accordingly, the World Resources Institute is establishing a task force to connect industry with environ­mental organizations. "The business community sees that effective re­source management is the key to access to the materials that it needs," says Speth. "And as we move into this new era, the business communi­ty has the opportunity to play a leadership role."

Speth rhetorically asks whether the chemical industry couldn't take the lead in urging private enter­prise and government to establish a network of natural areas, or, as the National Academy of Sciences once termed them, "Homes."

Business would help identify and preserve at least 10% of the most biologically rich biomes around the world—forests, prairies, deserts— whose collective biological diversi­ty make them of immense practical value to future generations. They would be off limits to the intensive agriculture and industrialization that is wiping out so many species at such a rapid rate today. The net­work would ensure that potentially important plants, insects, and ani­mals would be available to be stud­ied as future tools of progress in such fields as biotechnology.

Speth was chairman of the Coun­cil on Environmental Quality in the Carter Administration. Attaching economic value to biological diver­sity, he says, is probably the issue that gets to the heart of what gov­ernments and industries face as the world continues to industrialize.

The trouble, says a conference background paper, is that conven­tional economics sees ecological con­siderations as irrationalities. And although the paper says that con­servationists have been calling for years for economists to get their house in order, and to consider all the externalities that result from economic activities, their entreaties have spawned little response.

But Speth says that a new spirit can now begin. The 1970s are over. Both sides have learned their les­sons. •

Population, poverty, environment • Establish more labor-incisive in­

dustries and more access to land, livestock, and other natural resources for the poor.

• Improve status and opportunities for women.

• Improve sanitary facilities, cheap at $2.00 to $4.00 per person.

# Double access to family planning services within the next decade.

The urban environment • Slow the rate of migration to city

shantytowns by providing higher em­ployment, higher Incomes and services in rural areas.

• legalize informal settlements* tius allowing them basic services.

* Strengthen urban tax bases to make the services affordable.

* Encourage nongovernment insti­tutions to work on these problems.

Fresh waters • Develop simple* low-cost, and de­

centralized supply and sanitation systems.

• Establish management and pric­ing systems to promote conservation and avoid waste of Irrigation wa­ter,

• Control industrial pollution at the source,

Biological diversity • Complete a network of protected

sites to total 10% of the total land area.

* launch major public awareness campaign.

* Ran ami manage conservation areas at national level.

• Start new training programs, • Start work leading to funding of

biomes by industrialized countries.

Tropical forests * Preserve 100 million hectares of

threatened tropical forests as biome reserves.

• Increase by fivefold planting of fuel wood and double timber planting by year 2000*

* Rehabilitate 150 million hectares of seriously degraded tropical water* sheds.

• Intensify agriculture in areas adja­cent to threatened forests.

• Create the research, education, training, and management infrastruc­ture needed, (Cost for all of above: $S*3 billion through 2000.)

Land resources • Intensify agricultural yield from

good land. * Reduce losses of agricultural land. * Emphasize integrated land use. • Strengthen research capabilities, • Give more political and econom­

ic support for agrarian reform.

Energy • Remove subsidies for energy pro­

duction and consumption, including allowing domestic oil and gas prices to rise to international levels,

* Develop energy plans that recog­nize the enormous untapped potential of energy conservation and renewable energy sources,

* Greatly expand investment in fuel wood development

• Emphasize more heavily renew­able energy R&D,

Nonfuei minerals • Secure free operation of the mar­

ket as the best means of ensuring long-run supplies.

• Establish mechanisms to ensure an even flow of funds to pfoducirtg countries despite fluctuations in mar­ket prices*

• Ensure that tariff and nontariff bmlms to fabricated and processed mineral products do not hamper devel­opment of industries in developing countries.

• Ensure that funds and regulations are available for environmental protec­tion and restoration.

Air, atmosphere, and climate * Plan energy to avoid excess w>

cumulation of carbon dioxide. • Adopt energy conservation prac­

tices and policies. • Reduce sulfur dioxide and other

gases in this decade ami limit trans-boundary a t pollution.

• End nonessential uses of fluoro-carbons.

• Develop renewable energy sources as precaution against greenhouse effect

May 21, 1984 C&EN 25