Living within Earth’s means
EARTH Overshoot Day (EOD), which falls on Aug 1 this year, will most likely pass unnoticed by nearly all Malaysians as well as the global community, even though its significance for us all, the planet and future generations is deeply alarming.
According to the www. overshootday.org website, EOD “marks the date when we (all of humanity) have used more from nature than our planet can renew in the entire year” which is based on the Ecological Footprint (EF), a measurement of human impact on the environment. For the global economy to be sustainable, it cannot consume more than nature can produce and it cannot produce more waste than nature can assimilate.
Of greater concern is that the date keeps getting earlier every year, which indicates we are living well above the ecological limits of one planet with no signs of addressing this critical situation.
An analogy to this would be that if we had a fixed deposit in the bank and expected to live on the savings for the year, we would have run out of our savings on Aug 1 and have to draw from our principal. The planet works on the same premise with natural capital replacing principal.
Based on the Living Planet Report (LPR) 2016, we are now consuming the resources of 1.6 planets compared to 1.5 planets in 2007.
As Professor William Rees, originator of the ecological footprint analysis (EFA) which measures ecological limits, questioned in a speech at an EPSM conference in 2007, “We know enough not to load a ship beyond its cargo capacity as indicated by the Plimsoll line. Why do we think we can get away with overloading the earth?”
LPR 2016 showed that “monitored species population abun- dance declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012”. The same report goes on to state that four of the nine Earth system processes, or Planetary Boundaries, are already beyond their safe limits and may lead to dangerous levels of instability in the Earth system resulting in increasing risk to life on earth. It will come as no surprise that one of these four processes is climate change.
Could the current spate of extreme weather events and natural disasters such as floods, heat waves and forest fires that we are currently experiencing in different parts of the world be symptoms of this increasing risk to life?
With an ecological footprint of 3.7 global hectares per capita (LPR 2016), we in Malaysia are consuming the resources of 2.2 planets in general without differentiating the urban-rural divide.
Most of us living in urban cen- tres where the footprint is higher have a direct role to play in lowering our footprints.
At the same time, in the era of a new Malaysia, government intervention can play a central role in this issue by ensuring all development planning from now on is refocused on prioritising recognition of ecological limits so that social and economic goals are kept within the limits of the natural capital budget.
A good starting point would be to acknowledge ecological limits and reassess the role of the economy rooted in growth which leads to serious depletion of ecosystem services.
There are various avenues for the government to do this. They include the Mid-term Review of the 11th Malaysia Plan, the national Budget for 2019 and forthcoming budgets, the national roadmap for the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 12th Malaysia Plan.
Creating an institutional framework for mainstreaming sustainable development in Malaysia involving all ministries as well as the three tiers of government, would provide the mechanism to facilitate this sustainable shift.
Another important activity would be to obtain original baseline data for EF in Malaysia by issuing a directive for a pilot project to measure the ecological footprint of one major city in Malaysia.
This could then become the starting point to generate strategies to make the shift to low carbon development in Malaysia while also safeguarding biodiversity.