“Empty Planet: An Alternative Future?”

LaRae LongSustainability News, Earth Systems Science, Books and Reviews, Latest Headlines

© Hazel Henderson, 2019

While the authors of Empty Planet’s  see a population bust, the United Nations (UN) sees population growth and diminishing land, water, and food supplies in “Climate Change and Land”.  These two contrasting forecasts of humanity’s future are worth our attention. Which future do you foresee?

The just-published “Empty Planet”: The Shock of Global Population Decline“, Crown, 2019, will, I predict ,l be  a  best-seller .  The Canadian authors, Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs global opinion research firm and John Ibbetson, author and writer at large for Canada’s Globe and Mail are first-rate paradigm-shifters, using deep research, statistics and scientific survey methods to challenge conventional population forecasting.

Bricker and Ibbetson’s research is persuasive, expanded my mind and helped change some of my assumptions while confirming others,  concerning how to view and respond to global forecasts on socioeconomic trends and the ecosystem challenges of climate change.

The authors focus on the United Nations (UN) statistics and forecasts by their UN Population Division (UNPD) that expect (in various low to high scenarios)  that our current 7.6 billion-member human family to reach highs between 10 -11 billion members by the end of this century. The authors question these forecasts, as based on unrealistic assumptions of past fertility rates, as well as extrapolating from past conditions that have now changed.

Whether the human population stabilizes by 2100 at around today’s 7.6 billion  ( as the authors and some other researchers expect) or tops out at the UNPD’s highest scenario of 11.2 billion people, is an urgent policy issue worldwide. This issue relates to ecological resource limits and whether the  global temperature can be kept below 1.5 degrees to 2 degrees Celsius — beyond which the Earth will become less habitable to many species,  including humans and our children.

Meanwhile, the UN’s other agencies, most of whose research we find excellent and follow closely (including UNDP, UNCTAD, UNITAR, UNICEF, UNOPS, ILO, UNESCO). We also follow the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015, as well as crucial research by the courageous scientific teams from all UN member countries who contribute their expertise to the UN’s IPCC, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.  IPCC’s October 2018  report shocked the world by finding that humanity has about 10-12 years to turn policies around — mostly by phasing out fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy and resources and re-designing our industrial processes in many feasible, often profitable ways.

This report energized millions in peaceful demonstrations, even with schoolchildren, around the world.  It also horrified conventional asset managers who claimed they could not re-code their models and algos fast enough and shift their portfolios to renewables, so as to avoid a financial disaster of “ stranded fossil assets “in countless 401Ks and fossilized sectors.  We cover all these issues in our Green Transition Scoreboard® reports annually since 2009 and will soon release these as a textbook: “Mapping the Global Green Transition: 2009-2020”, to help enrich business school curricula. In August 2019, the IPCC issued another  Summary for Policymakers  on “Climate Change and Land“, on which I commented for our Latest Headlines for our 30,000 professional users worldwide:

 

IPCC Special Report/August 7, 2019

 

“Ethical Markets offers this instant review of the key takeaways in the new IPCC report “CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAND”, just released.

We applaud this magisterial work of so many scientists from around the world, willing to expose themselves to the reprisals of fossilized sectors and  their  PR , intellectual mercenaries, as well as science-deniers in financial markets still mis-investing in unsustainable sectors, including the agro-chemical industrial complex and industrial livestock-produced meat , highly processed junk foods and sugary drinks.

This IPCC report identifies all the stresses on our environment, now evident in 2019 on every continent on Earth, from the melting icebergs and glaciers to floods, fires, heatwaves and increasingly powerful hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes.  The report focuses on land, suffering from droughts, floods and fires and how these effects of climate change are impacting the human food system worldwide. The visuals and charts synthesize all the cross-cutting information to show how all these Earth systems interact and how their interacting creates new feedbacks, most negative, some positive.

The bad news: one-quarter of Earth’s ice-free land area is subject to human-induced, anthropocentric degradation.  The rate at which we are eroding soils (on which all our food is currently grown) is far higher than the rate at which soil is formed by natural processes. Climate change is exacerbating land degradation in low-lying coastal areas, river deltas, drylands and in permafrost areas.  In 2015, about 500 million people lived within areas which experienced desertification between the 1990s and 2000s. (pg. 3).  Frequency of dust storms and their intensity has increased due to unwise land use and degradation, affecting human health (pg. 6).  The IPCC uses 2 global models: 1) to measure CO2 emissions from human sources, and 2) “carbon accounting“ to balance out these emissions with Nature’s efforts to capture ambient CO2 through photosynthesis by plants and trees and storing this carbon back into the Earth’s soils. (pg. 8).

The better news:  the report shows future scenarios on how societies can mitigate climate change and its effects, and adapt to them, by initiating changes in their development directions, roughly consistent with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  These 17 Goals, adopted by 195 nations in 2015,  are the preferred new human development path and indicator beyond GDP.

While GDP is still driving societies over a cliff, with all its similar, narrow, money-denominated economic indicators: average inflation, unemployment, inequality, etc. (like flying over a country at 60,000 feet, seeing little detail), the SDGs are mostly science-based. Financial metrics are anthropocentric and based on money, like all the financial models and strategies reliant on all these bouncing currencies, so they are mis-investing in stranded 19th and 20th-century “assets” that have become liabilities!  In computer terms, such bugs and errors in the conventional economic source code still drive operating systems in most markets.

Examine these future IPCC scenarios:  Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) from now until 2100 (pg. 14).  They include SSP 1 which sees humanity on a path toward 2100 which requires greater knowledge of Earth Systems Science, renewable energy, circular economies and shifts in cultures from competition to include more cooperation, reducing inequality and foresees human population stabilizing by 2100  at today’s level of 7.6 billion people.  These are all paths we advocate at Ethical Markets and in our TV series “Transforming Finance” and our Green Transition Scoreboard® (all at www.ethicalmarkets.com)

All these changes require disruption of 19th and 20th-century industries, from phasing out fossil fuels, obsolete global gem mining  ( lab-grown, cultured diamonds are competing at a fraction of the cost ), industrial livestock production, cutting meat consumption in favor of healthier plant-protein foods and beverages.  All these science-based new sectors are expanding rapidly with many start-ups, some going public.

The IPCC scientists cannot advocate these kinds of political challenges to the status quo, but only layout humanity’s many viable options (pg. 25).

Thankfully, we do spell these policy shift out in great detail in our reports, as well as challenging global finance to overhaul its obsolete models, concepts, and algorithms in accordance with all the new science.

There is only one thing we would ask the IPCC scientists who authored this IPCC  report:  please define carefully whether you are referencing freshwater  (since your definition in the report of “water“ seems to refer only to the planet’s 3% of dwindling freshwater).   This ignores the planet’s 97% of saltwater and the thousands of edible, nutritious halophyte salt-loving plant foods (e.g. quinoa) that make up the other half of the planet’s “plant kingdom“!   We advocate such viable short-term shifts for expanding the global food system, thus avoiding the famine expected to engulf some 200 million members of our human family, and conserving much of the precious freshwater now used in glycophyte agriculture for human drinking needs and uses.

All summed up in our TV show “Investing in Saltwater Agriculture: The Next Big Thing“ with NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell.

Examining these new IPCC scenarios shows how different policy paths in responses to climate change and land-based food crises, can mitigate and adapt to the future conditions we humans continue to create by our own policies and unforced errors.  These risks are largely in continuing unsustainable exploitation of natural resources and emissions of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane,  etc. ) from use of fossil fuels and outdated industrial methods of production.  These IPCC Sustainable Societal Pathways (SSPs) drew me to SSP 1 as the scenario, which in our research, seems preferable, based on policies and market/consumer choices as mentioned:

Shifting to 100% renewable energy and resources, inclusionary strategies to reduce inequality, better-targeted investments in education and knowledge-creation, conserving natural resources, forests, wilderness habitats for our fellow-species, more cooperation, and creativity, as well as continued competition to challenge poor ideas and proposals.   This SSP1 scenario also results in a human family stabilizing at today’s level of 7.6 billion people in 2100.

At first, I was shocked, visualizing  this population stabilizing as   due to the widely-expected famine caused by our unsustainable current global food systems teetering perilously on the planet’s 3% of dwindling freshwater, as well as the now-familiar losses due to climate catastrophes: more destructive hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, methane releases from melting permafrost and rising sea levels as glaciers in Antarctica and the Arctic release their water into  the oceans.

Reading Empty Planet showed me a different and benign path to stabilizing our human family at its current level: it was good news!  Authors Bricker and Ibbitson showed in chapter after chapter, covering almost every country and region on our planet, the less visible trends stabilizing our human family: urbanization, the empowerment of women to decide how many, when and even whether to give birth ,  as well as  the overall advance in human awareness and knowledge due to today’s massive communications networks, satellites, mass media and social connectivity (see my “The Politics Of Connectivity”).

This startling, well-researched alternative view of our human future lays out a persuasive, more positive course that is possible for this Age of the Anthropocene, with humans in charge of our own fate (through better or worse actions and policies).  The future might turn out pretty well!

This is why I see Empty Planet as a best-seller.  I will continue to cite its conclusion in my own research and presentations and to our Ethical Markets’  global media audience.  Another additional reason:  the authors’ cogent case for all nations, especially the many now in Europe with declining populations, to learn from tolerant cultures, the benefits of accepting immigrants and refugees and encouraging their adjustment and assimilation as a proven path to re-vitalization.  The authors cite both Canada and the USA as the best examples of such success!

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