Dissonance and disaster

These numbers simply don’t make sense

By David Salt

“It’s baffling,” says Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction. She simply doesn’t understand why nations are continuing to knowingly “sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people”.

That’s a pretty strong statement but Mami has a special insight on the topic being the Chief of the UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. She’s seen the numbers (and was talking about them on Disaster Risk Reduction Day earlier this month).

In the last two decades there have been 7,348 recorded disaster events worldwide. By comparison, the previous 20-year period (1980 to 1999) saw 4,212 reported disasters from natural hazards. And the science is clear as to why, the rise in climate-related emergencies was the main reason for the spike. (‘Spike’ is the word used in the UN press release but I feel its use is quite inappropriate here. The word ‘spike’ suggests to me a sudden deviation from some ‘normal’ state. Once you’ve passed the spike you return to normal but that’s not what’s happening here. There’s no return to normal in any historical timeframe.)

Here are some other numbers that should chill you. From 1980 to 1999, natural hazards killed 1.19 million people, resulted in economic losses totalling $1.63 trillion and impacted more than three billion people.

From 2000 to 2019, natural hazards killed 1.23 million people, resulted in economic losses of $2.97 trillion, and impacted more than four billion people.

Rationalise this

A rationalist might suggest these numbers are suggesting we’re doing better at ‘disaster’. We had almost twice the number of disasters in these last two decades but roughly only a quarter more deaths and a only a third more people impacted (mind you, economic losses almost doubled). In other words, on average each disaster is killing fewer people.

But such a rationalisation only works if you believe we have a better handle on preventing disasters as we sail into the future. The trend, regrettably, is ever upwards; just as it is with carbon emissions, global temperatures and sea level. Of course, that’s no coincidence, as climate change is at the core of most of these disasters.

Indeed the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction reported that the increase in disasters from natural hazards is a direct result of climate change: “This is clear evidence that in a world where the global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period, the impacts are being felt in the increased frequency of extreme weather events including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires.”

Floods accounted for more than 40% of disasters – affecting 1.65 billion people, storms 28%, and extreme temperatures 6%.

If human activity (associated with unbounded economic growth) is the driving problem here, it makes you wonder about the label ‘natural’ when we talk about disasters caused by ‘natural’ hazards.

Dissonance

And this is where Mami Mizutori admits to being “baffled”. The science is clear, and has been since the 1970s, but now the evidence of what’s happening (that this science has long predicted) is rolling in like a killer hurricane. Species are going extinct and ecosystems are collapsing before our eyes. Coral reefs are withering while forests at unprecedented scales are going up in flames.

Maybe we can insulate ourselves from such evidence by closing the blinds and turning the air con up. But when the roofs and walls are ripped from our homes by cyclonic wind, and floodwaters tear through our accumulated economic capital, surely we begin to do something about it. And this is what these disaster statistics are telling us. Climate change is beginning to rip apart the human world as much as it is destroying the natural world.

Now when it comes to disaster management, it has to be said some folks in some places are doing it better. The UNDRR report indicates that there has been some success in protecting vulnerable communities from isolated hazards, thanks to more effective early warning systems, disaster preparedness and response. However, the agency warned that projected global temperature rises could make these improvements “obsolete in many countries”.

Currently, the world is on course for a temperature increase of 3.2 degrees Celsius or more, unless industrialised nations can deliver reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of at least 7.2% annually over the next 10 years in order to achieve the 1.5 degree target agreed in Paris.

Do something!

So with the scorching winds of disaster bearing down on us, why aren’t we doing more?

Because change is hard, it’s difficult, there will be losers, and there are powerful vested interests with their hands firmly on the levers of power – all the reasons we’ve discussed over time in this blog – because sustainability bites.

And there are aspects of equity and justice woven into this equation too. The poor are much more vulnerable to disasters. The UNDRR report said that the data indicates that poorer nations experience death rates more than four times higher than richer nations.

So the richer industrialised nations which are creating the problem of increased disasters (through climate change) are not, in the first instance, the places that are suffering the most. In other words, they don’t see it as their problem.

Then, on top of all this, there is that wonderful capacity of humans to adapt to changing conditions, in this case to normalise extreme weather. A study released last year in PNAS found people have short memories when it comes to what they consider ‘normal’ weather. On average, people base their idea of normal weather on what has happened in just the past two to eight years. This disconnect with the historical climate record is thought to obscure the public’s perception of climate change.

The researchers behind this PNAS study suggested this is a classic case of the boiling-frog metaphor: A frog jumps into a pot of boiling hot water and immediately hops out. If, instead, the frog in the pot is slowly warmed to a boiling temperature, it doesn’t hop out and is eventually cooked. While scientifically inaccurate, this metaphor has long been used as a cautionary tale warning against normalizing the steadily changing conditions caused by climate change.

This latest report on disaster and climate change is another wake-up call – the water’s scorching! Surely we have more sense than a boiling frog?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Last chance to see

The contradictions of ‘sustainable’ tourism in a post pandemic world

By David Salt

Tourism is riven by irony. It can empower local economies, support meaningful conservation efforts and enable people to learn more about other cultures while simultaneously encouraging them to reflect upon their own. At the same time, the act of travelling to distant locations creates greater strain on the already stressed Earth system, homogenizes and commodifies intangible culture and often places intolerable pressure on limited resources in poor regions.

Tourism can bring out the best in us and yet it frequently comes with a price that few of us want to acknowledge.

But why even talk about this in a time of global pandemic lockdown? No-one is actually travelling at the moment (far fewer people, anyway)!

Well, as Joni Mitchell says: “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” and now that global tourism has been effectively shut down most of us are yearning for our holiday escape.

As the hotel reservations dry up and jet contrails that once criss-crossed our international skies fade away, what is it we can say about tourism and its impacts (both good and bad)? And what will (or should) happen when we get passed the pandemic?

Last week the UN released a policy brief asking these very questions, and it makes some telling points. We might all say we want things to return to ‘normal’, but when it comes to tourism, we really need a new normal. The old ways of doing things are clearly unsustainable.

The loss of an economic powerhouse

Something that is becoming blindingly obvious as the corona lockdown grinds on is that tourism plays a massive role in our economy.

According to 2019 data, tourism generated 7% of global trade, employed one in ten people and provided livelihoods to millions of people in developed and developing countries. As borders closed due to the COVID lockdown, hotels shut and air travel dropped dramatically. According to the World Tourism Organisation, international tourist arrivals decreased by 56%, and $320 billion in exports from tourism were lost in the first five months of 2020. And most forecasts suggest worse is to come.

The UN is particularly concerned about the impact on small island developing states (in, for example, Palau, tourism generates almost 90% of its exports) and developing countries (in Africa, tourism represented 10% of all exports in 2019).

Tourism also provides a critical source of money for conservation, often in developing countries where there is little capacity for such work. For example, a 2015 United Nations World Tourism Organization survey determined that 14 African countries generate an estimated US$142 million in protected-area entrance fees alone. The shutdown of tourism activities has meant months of no income for many protected areas and the communities living around them.

The loss of tourism income further endangers protected and other conserved areas for biodiversity, where most wildlife tourism takes place. Without alternative opportunities, communities may turn to the over-exploitation of nature, either for their own consumption or to generate income. There has already been a rise in poaching and looting, partly due to the decreased presence of tourists and staff.

Cultural conservation is also taking a beating. Many cultural organizations have also seen their revenues plummet with the lockdown. During the crisis, 90% of countries fully or partially closed World Heritage sites, and around 85,000 museums were temporarily closed.

And yet the pandemic has also had an environmental upside with significantly fewer carbon emissions resulting from the downturn in tourism activity. The tourism sector has an incredibly high climate and environmental footprint, requiring heavy energy and fuel consumption and placing stress on land systems. The growth of tourism over recent years has put achieving the targets of the Paris Agreement at risk. Transport-related greenhouse gas emissions from tourism has been estimated at 5% of all human originated emissions.

Return to normal

Taken together, this presents us with a bit of a conundrum. Everyone is pushing for a return to normal, an opening of our borders and the return of the stimulus provided by a growing economy. But that very return to business as usual would see an increase in the environmental decline that international tourism helps create. It’s the conundrum that modern life seems unable to solve, that our societal addiction to economic growth prevents us from engaging with the real costs of that growth.

Even the UN report on COVID-19 and Transforming Tourism seems blind to this contradiction. It points out all the advantages that modern tourism brings but, even though it acknowledges its high environmental footprint, it proposes that we ‘tranform’ tourism as we get past the pandemic by doing it exactly the way we did it before but be a bit more clever about it.

Okay, I’m sure the authors of this report would disagree with my summation. The report uses all the right words (resilience, competitiveness, innovation, green growth, digitalization and inclusiveness) but as far as I can see they are asking for all the benefits of mass tourism without acknowledging the costs of tourism when done as ‘business as usual’ (or the difficulty of reforming this business-as-usual approach).

The term ‘transform’ means different things to different people. To me it means a fundamental shift from the system you are a part of to something quite different. Transformation is not about a little change around the edges, and yet that is what I read in the UN report (noble though its aspirations are).

A new normal

If society was to really to engage with the sustainability of tourism in an uncertain future then maybe we should be talking about how we can protect the many environmental and cultural values of our top tourism destinations in a way that doesn’t involve travelling to see them.

How do we generate the resources required to steward our world heritage in a carbon constrained future? How might we enable access to these rich experiences in a meaningful and fair manner? How do we make tourism more than its current tradition of seeking the new, the pleasurable and the exciting? How do we cultivate this new tourism so that people in the developing world still receive the support they have come to depend upon from traditional tourism?

I believe most people would simply reject any notion of tourism that leaves behind the travel component, and people are hungering for their next hit of travel after this prolonged period of enforced homestay.

However, if we’re being honest, we should acknowledge that tourism is already under mounting pressure from a changing world, and that’s been happening long before COVID 19. Increasing areas of the world are falling out of bounds because of environmental collapse (think fire and storm for starters), political instability, lawlessness and disease.

Last chance to see

If you reject my thesis that tourism as we have known it has to profoundly change – to transform – then may I recommend this itinerary as your next grand tour: the snows of Kilimanjaro, the Great Barrier Reef and Tuvalu. Call it your ‘last-chance-to-see’ tour, and tell your grandchildren you were among the lucky few who used their tourist dollars to experience some of the world’s wonders before they were lost forever.

Maybe that’s the human condition – ‘that we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.’

Image: Image by kendallpools from Pixabay

The Sustainable Development Goals: Game-changer or good-looking rehash?

From Agenda 21 to the Millennium Development Goals and beyond

By Peter Burnett

Australia, along with most nations in the world, has signed up to the Sustainability Development Goals (or SDGs for short), the UN’s latest effort to broker a pathway forward to a more sustainable future. How are we going in our efforts to meet the SDGs? And, indeed, is there any value in the SDG approach? I’m a tad cynical but the SDGs have definitely put a new face on sustainability.

The value of SDGs came into sharp focus for me last week at a conference in Melbourne titled ‘Why Should the Public Sector Care About Sustainable Development?’ (I think the answer to the conference-title question is simple: our future depends on it.) One of the conference presenters was John Thwaites, former Victorian Deputy Premier and Environment Minister, now a Professorial Fellow and Chair of the National Sustainable Development Council (NSDC), an NGO. John’s topic was the Sustainable Development Goals. Last year the NSDC released a progress report on SDG implementation in Australia, hot on the heels of Australia’s first official progress report.

John spoke with some passion about the value of the SDGs and gave examples of how they were influencing actual decisions by government and non-government bodies alike. Having been more focused on government policy-making, I had not considered his argument that the SDGs were gaining some real traction due to their social influence. So I thought it was time for another look: are the SDGs breathing new life into sustainable development?

Origins of the SDGs

Before answering that question, some history. The SDGs are a set of 17 goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. The UN describes them as a ‘shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet’.

You’ve probably seen the catchy 17-tiled SDG infographic, as it gets quite a lot of exposure (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals

Countries made their original commitment to sustainable development at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The summit adopted the Rio Declaration, which sets out some 27 sustainability principles, along with a 350-page action plan called Agenda 21 (an agenda for the 21^st Century).

The problem was that, to get everyone on board, rich countries had to make commitments to poor countries based on a principle of ‘intra-generational equity’. In essence this came down to promising poor countries that they wouldn’t lose the opportunity to develop, and to consume their fair share of the environmental resource pie in doing so, just because the rich countries had already eaten most of it.

Of course, this implied that the rich countries would henceforth constrain their own consumption. With the deal done and the pressure seemingly off, the rich countries went home and, unsurprisingly, did not consume less to free up resources for poor countries. So when everyone met again, at ‘Rio+5’ in New York in 1997, the poor countries objected strongly and the meeting almost collapsed.

The MDGs

Giving up on sustainable development wasn’t really an option. So they had another go, this time endorsing eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to mark the new century. The MDGs focused on poverty, with only one goal embodying a commitment to environmental sustainability*. The target date was 2015.

The MDGs breathed some life back into the sustainability. Real progress was made, though I think this was made possible by allowing the rising tide of economic growth to lift all boats, particularly in China, at the expense of ongoing environmental decline.

In any event, the Rio+20 Conference in 2012 decided that the MDGs warranted follow-on goals, and so the SDGs came to pass. Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs reflect a more even balance between social and environmental goals, with five of seventeen goals having an environmental focus. The SDG’s also have some real substance, with 17 goals supported by 169 targets and 232 indicators.

Australia and the SDGs

The proof of the pudding however is in the eating. Australia’s first implementation report to the UN is simply a compilation of actions taken by governments and others that align with the SDGs. Further, while some good things are reported (eg, the National Disability Insurance Scheme), others are glossed over. The report for example refers to government support for Ramsar wetlands, omitting mention of the small amounts involved. Still other things are trivialised: the section on ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ reports that community gardens are increasingly popular, supported by ‘grass-roots’ organisations!

Irrespective of how good the reported measures are, the government makes no claim that the SDGs have driven any change in domestic policy and files its report under ‘aid’ on the DFAT website. Clearly the SDGs are not a game-changer from the government’s point of view.

The NSDC report is more analytical, using a ratings scheme under which Australia scores an overall 6.5/10. While this corresponds to a university ‘credit’ grade, averaging conceals a wide spread of ratings. We are best in looking after ourselves, scoring 8.9 in health and education, and worst at sharing, rating 4.4 on climate action (ie, sharing the Earth’s capacity to absorb pollution with future generations) and 4.3 on reduced inequalities.

Are the SDGs making a difference?

I’m sure John is right and that the SDGs are gaining some traction, including in ways not readily measured. But is that influence putting a dent in the underlying problem, that we are consuming environmental resources more quickly than nature can replace them?

The NSDC answers this question itself, opening its report with the comment that despite strong economic growth, ‘our children and grandchildren face the prospect of being worse off than we are as a result of increasing inequality, environmental degradation and climate change.’

A key problem is that while the SDGs are new in some respects, they are old in others. The goals, targets and performance measures are new, but the underlying principles are not. The UN Resolution adopting the SDGs in 2015 simply calls up the earlier principles and resolutions, such as those from Rio in 1992. This means that governments (and the rest of us) have no new reason for taking the hard decisions that sustainability requires, to keep the pursuit of economic development within nature’s capacity to replace what we consume.

Trumped by the short term

This is the reason for my cynicism. Because there is nothing new foundationally in the SDGs, short term political imperatives to grow the economy will continue to trump normative or moral obligations to share available resources with future generations and poor countries, no matter how often those obligations are repeated.

I’m sure John Thwaites is right and that the SDGs are making a difference. It’s just that they don’t contain anything that would make a fundamental difference. As a result, I expect that, short of a crisis, we will continue to play the game and report actions that are consistent with the SDGs, without actually changing our ways.

*The MDGs were later endorsed at ‘Rio+10’, the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg, 2002. These ‘Rio+’ conferences are now a thing, with Rio+30 due in 2022.