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“Esai ini menegaskan bahwa
ancaman terbesar dunia saat ini dan di masa yang akan datang adalah masalah
ekologi –bahkan kelangkaan pangan akibat kerusakan lingkungan dan bumi, yang
jika tidak diantisipasi secara serius, dapat memicu konflik dan perang”
The 1990s will demand a redefinition of what
constitutes national security. In the 1970s the concept was expanded to include
international economics as it became clear that the U.S. economy was no longer
the independent force it had once been, but was powerfully affected by economic
policies in dozens of other countries. Global developments now suggest the need
for another analogous, broadening definition of national security to include
resource, environmental and demographic issues.
The assumptions and
institutions that have governed international relations in the postwar era are
a poor fit with these new realities. Environmental strains that transcend
national borders are already beginning to break down the sacred boundaries of
national sovereignty, previously rendered porous by the information and
communication revolutions and the instantaneous global movement of financial
capital. The once sharp dividing line between foreign and domestic policy is
blurred, forcing governments to grapple in international forums with issues
that were contentious enough in the domestic arena.
II
Despite the headlines of
1988-the polluted coastlines, the climatic extremes, the accelerating
deforestation and flooding that plagued the planet-human society has not
arrived at the brink of some absolute limit to its growth. The planet may
ultimately be able to accommodate the additional five or six billion people
projected to be living here by the year 2100. But it seems unlikely that the
world will be able to do so unless the means of production change dramatically.
Global economic output has quadrupled since 1950 and it must continue to grow
rapidly simply to meet basic human needs, to say nothing of the challenge of
lifting billions from poverty. But economic growth as we currently know it
requires more energy use, more emissions and wastes, more land converted from
its natural state, and more need for the products of natural systems. Whether
the planet can accommodate all of these demands remains an open question.
Individuals and
governments alike are beginning to feel the cost of substituting for (or doing
without) the goods and services once freely provided by healthy ecosystems.
Nature's bill is presented in many different forms: the cost of commercial fertilizer
needed to replenish once naturally fertile soils; the expense of dredging
rivers that flood their banks because of soil erosion hundreds of miles
upstream; the loss in crop failures due to the indiscriminate use of pesticides
that inadvertently kill insect pollinators; or the price of worsening
pollution, once filtered from the air by vegetation. Whatever the immediate
cause for concern, the value and absolute necessity for human life of
functioning ecosystems is finally becoming apparent.
Moreover, for the first
time in its history, mankind is rapidly-if inadvertently-altering the basic
physiology of the planet. Global changes currently taking place in the chemical
composition of the atmosphere, in the genetic diversity of species inhabiting
the planet, and in the cycling of vital chemicals through the oceans,
atmosphere, biosphere and geosphere, are unprecedented in both their pace and
scale. If left unchecked, the consequences will be profound and, unlike
familiar types of local damage, irreversible.
III
Population growth lies at
the core of most environmental trends. It took 130 years for world population
to grow from one billion to two billion: it will take just a decade to climb
from today's five billion to six billion. More than 90 percent of the added
billion will live in the developing world, with the result that by the end of
the 1990s the developed countries will be home to only 20 percent of the
world's people, compared to almost 40 percent at the end of World War II. Sheer
numbers do not translate into political power, especially when most of the
added billion will be living in poverty. But the demographic shift will thrust
the welfare of developing nations further toward the center of international
affairs.
The relationship linking
population levels and the resource base is complex. Policies, technologies and
institutions determine the impact of population growth. These factors can spell
the difference between a highly stressed, degraded environment and one that can
provide for many more people. At any given level of investment and knowledge,
absolute population numbers can be crucial. For example, traditional systems of
shifting agriculture-in which land is left fallow for a few years to recover
from human use-can sustain people for centuries, only to crumble in a short
time when population densities exceed a certain threshold. More important,
though, is the rate of growth. A government that is fully capable of providing
food, housing, jobs and health care for a population growing at one percent per
year (therefore doubling its population in 72 years), might be completely
overwhelmed by an annual growth rate of three percent, which would double the
population in 24 years.
Today the United States
and the Soviet Union are growing at just under one percent annually (Europe is
growing only half that fast). But Africa's population is expanding by almost
three percent per year, Latin America's by nearly two percent and Asia's
somewhat less. By 2025 the working-age population in developing countries alone
will be larger than the world's current total population. This growth comes at
a time when technological advance requires higher levels of education and
displaces more labor than ever before. For many developing countries, continued
growth at current rates means that available capital is swallowed up in meeting
the daily needs of people, rather than invested in resource conservation and
job creation. Such policies inescapably lay the foundations of a bleak future.
An important paradox to
bear in mind when examining natural resource trends is that so-called
nonrenewable resources-such as coal, oil and minerals-are in fact
inexhaustible, while so-called renewable resources can be finite. As a
nonrenewable resource becomes scarce and more expensive, demand falls, and
substitutes and alternative technologies appear. For that reason we will never
pump the last barrel of oil or anything close to it. On the other hand, a
fishery fished beyond a certain point will not recover, a species driven to
extinction will not reappear, and eroded topsoil cannot be replaced (except
over geological time). There are, thus, threshold effects for renewable
resources that belie the name given them, with unfortunate consequences for
policy.
The most serious form of
renewable resource decline is the deforestation taking place throughout the
tropics. An area the size of Austria is deforested each year. Tropical forests
are fragile ecosystems, extremely vulnerable to human disruption. Once
disturbed, the entire ecosystem can unravel. The loss of the trees causes the
interruption of nutrient cycling above and below the soil, the soil loses
fertility, plant and animal species lose their habitats and become extinct, and
acute fuelwood shortages appear (especially in the dry tropical forests). The
soil erodes without the ground cover provided by trees and plants, and
downstream rivers suffer siltation, causing floods and droughts, and damaging
expensive irrigation and hydroelectric systems. Traced through its effects on
agriculture, energy supply and water resources, tropical deforestation
impoverishes about a billion people. This pattern is endemic throughout Central
America, much of Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and South America.
The planet's evolutionary
heritage-its genetic diversity-is heavily concentrated in these same forests.
It is therefore disappearing today on a scale not seen since the age of the
dinosaurs, and at an unprecedented pace. Biologists estimate that species are
being lost in the tropical forests 1,000-10,000 times faster than the natural
rate of extinction.1 As many as 20 percent of all the species now living may be
gone by the year 2000. The loss will be felt aesthetically, scientifically and,
above all, economically. These genetic resources are an important source of food,
materials for energy and construction, chemicals for pharmaceuticals and
industry, vehicles for health and safety testing, natural pest controls and
dozens of other uses.
The only reason that
species loss is not a front-page issue is that the majority of species have not
yet been discovered, much less studied, so that none but a few conservation
biologists can even guess at the number and kinds of species that are
vanishing. The bitter irony is that genetic diversity is disappearing on a
grand scale at the very moment when biotechnology makes it possible to exploit
fully this resource for the first time.
Soil degradation is
another major concern. Both a cause and a consequence of poverty,
desertification, as it is generally called, is causing declining agricultural
productivity on nearly two billion hectares, 15 percent of the earth's land
area. The causes are overcultivation, overgrazing, erosion, and salinization
and waterlogging due to poorly managed irrigation. In countries as diverse as
Haiti, Guatemala, Turkey and India, soil erosion has sharply curtailed
agricultural production and potential, sometimes destroying it completely.
Though the data are uncertain, it is estimated that the amount of land
permanently removed from cultivation due to salinization and waterlogging is
equal to the amount of land newly irrigated at great expense each year.
Finally, patterns of land
tenure, though not strictly an environmental condition, have an immense
environmental impact. In 1975, seven percent of landowners in Latin America
possessed 93 percent of all the arable land in this vast region. In Guatemala,
a typical case, two percent of the population in 1980 owned 80 percent of the
land, while 83 percent of farmers lived on plots too small to support a
household. At the same time, even in Costa Rica, with its national concern for
social equity, three percent of landowners held 54 percent of the land. These
large holdings generally include the most desirable land. The great mass of the
rural population is pushed onto the most damage-prone land, usually dry or
highly erodible slopes, and into the forests. Land reform is among the most
difficult of all political undertakings, but without it many countries will be
unable to create a healthy agricultural sector to fuel economic growth.
Environmental decline
occasionally leads directly to conflict, especially when scarce water resources
must be shared. Generally, however, its impact on nations' security is felt in
the downward pull on economic performance and, therefore, on political
stability. The underlying cause of turmoil is often ignored; instead
governments address the poverty and instability that are its results.
In the Philippines, for
example, the government regularly granted logging concessions of less than ten
years. Since it takes 30-35 years for a second-growth forest to mature, loggers
had no incentive to replant. Compounding the error, flat royalties encouraged
the loggers to remove only the most valuable species. A horrendous 40 percent
of the harvestable lumber never left the forests but, having been damaged in
the logging, rotted or was burned in place. The unsurprising result of these
and related policies is that out of 17 million hectares of closed forests that
flourished early in the century only 1.2 million remain today. Moreover, the
Philippine government received a fraction of the revenues it could have
collected if it had followed sound resource management policies that would have
also preserved the forest capital. This is biological deficit financing writ
large.
Similarly, investments in
high-technology fishing equipment led to larger harvests but simultaneously
depleted the stock. Today, ten of 50 major Philippine fishing grounds are
believed to be overfished; the net result of heavy investment is that the
availability of fish per capita has actually dropped. These and other
self-destructive environmental policies, combined with rapid population growth,
played a significant role in the economic decline that led to the downfall of
the Marcos regime. So far, the government of Corazon Aquino has made few
changes in the forestry, fishery and other environmental policies it inherited.
Conditions in sub-Saharan
Africa, to take another case, have reached catastrophic dimensions. In the
first half of this decade export earnings fell by almost one-third, foreign
debt soared to 58 percent of GNP, food imports grew rapidly while consumption
dropped, and per capita GNP fell by more than three percent. A large share of
those woes can be traced to Africa's dependence on a fragile, mismanaged and
overstressed natural resource base.
Exports of mineral and
agricultural commodities alone account for a quarter of the region's GNP, and
nearly three-quarters of the population makes its living off the land, which
also supplies, as fuelwood, 80 percent of the energy consumed. The land's
capacity to produce is ebbing away under the pressure of rapidly growing
numbers of people who do not have the wherewithal to put back into the land
what they take from it. A vicious cycle of human and resource impoverishment
sets in. As the vegetative cover-trees, shrubs and grass-shrinks from
deforestation and overgrazing, soil loses its capacity to retain moisture and
nourish crops. The decline accelerates as farmers burn dung and crop residues in
place of fuelwood, rather than using them to sustain the soil. Agricultural
yields then fall further, and the land becomes steadily more vulnerable to the
naturally variable rainfall that is the hallmark of arid and semiarid regions,
turning dry spells into droughts and periods of food shortage into famines.
Ethiopia is only the most familiar case. The sequence is repeated throughout
the region with similarly tragic results.
If such resource and
population trends are not addressed, as they are not in so much of the world
today, the resulting economic decline leads to frustration, resentment,
domestic unrest or even civil war. Human suffering and turmoil make countries
ripe for authoritarian government or external subversion. Environmental
refugees spread the disruption across national borders. Haiti, a classic
example, was once so forested and fertile that it was known as the "Pearl
of the Antilles." Now deforested, soil erosion in Haiti is so rapid that
some farmers believe stones grow in their fields, while bulldozers are needed
to clear the streets of Port-au-Prince of topsoil that flows down from the
mountains in the rainy season. While many of the boat people who fled to the
United States left because of the brutality of the Duvalier regimes, there is no
question that-and this is not widely recognized-many Haitians were forced into
the boats by the impossible task of farming bare rock. Until Haiti is
reforested, it will never be politically stable.
Haitians are by no means
the world's only environmental refugees. In Indonesia, Central America and
sub-Saharan Africa, millions have been forced to leave their homes in part
because the loss of tree cover, the disappearance of soil, and other
environmental ills have made it impossible to grow food. Sudan, despite its
civil war, has taken in more than a million refugees from Ethiopia, Uganda and
Chad. Immigrants from the spreading Sahel make up one-fifth of the total
population in the Ivory Coast. Wherever refugees settle, they flood the labor
market, add to the local demand for food and put new burdens on the land, thus
spreading the environmental stress that originally forced them from their
homes. Resource mismanagement is not the only cause of these mass movements, of
course. Religious and ethnic conflicts, political repression and other forces
are at work. But the environmental causes are an essential factor.
IV
A different kind of
environmental concern has arisen from mankind's new ability to alter the
environment on a planetary scale. The earth's physiology is shaped by the
characteristics of four elements (carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur); by
its living inhabitants (the biosphere); and by the interactions of the
atmosphere and the oceans, which produce our climate.
Mankind is altering both
the carbon and nitrogen cycles, having increased the natural carbon dioxide
concentration in the atmosphere by 25 percent. This has occurred largely in the
last three decades through fossil-fuel use and deforestation. The production of
commercial fertilizer has doubled the amount of nitrogen nature makes available
to living things. The use of a single, minor class of chemicals,
chlorofluorocarbons, has punched a continent-sized "hole" in the
ozone layer at the top of the stratosphere over Antarctica, and caused a smaller,
but growing loss of ozone all around the planet. Species loss is destroying the
work of three billion years of evolution. Together these changes could
drastically alter the conditions in which life on earth has evolved.
The greenhouse effect
results from the fact that the planet's atmosphere is largely transparent to
incoming radiation from the sun but absorbs much of the lower energy radiation
re-emitted by the earth. This natural phenomenon makes the earth warm enough to
support life. But as emissions of greenhouse gases increase, the planet is
warmed unnaturally. Carbon dioxide produced from the combustion of fossil fuels
and by deforestation is responsible for about half of the greenhouse effect. A
number of other gases, notably methane (natural gas), nitrous oxide, ozone (in
the lower atmosphere, as distinguished from the protective ozone layer in the
stratosphere) and the man-made chlorofluorocarbons are responsible for the
other half.
Despite important
uncertainties about aspects of the greenhouse warming, a virtually unanimous
scientific consensus exists on its central features. If present emission trends
continue, and unless some as yet undocumented phenomenon (possibly increased
cloudiness) causes an offsetting cooling, the planet will, on average, get
hotter because of the accumulation of these gases. Exactly how large the
warming will be, and how fast it will occur, are uncertain. Existing models
place the date of commitment to an average global warming of 1.5-4.5°C (3-8°F)
in the early 2030s. The earth has not been this hot for two million years, long
before human society, and indeed, even Homo sapiens, existed.
Hotter temperatures will
be only one result of the continuing greenhouse warming. At some point, perhaps
quite soon, precipitation patterns are likely to shift, possibly causing
dustbowl-like conditions in the U.S. grain belt. Ocean currents are expected to
do the same, dramatically altering the climates of many regions. A diversion of
the Gulf Stream, for example, would transform Western Europe's climate, making
it far colder than it is today. Sea level will rise due to the expansion of
water when it is warmed and to the melting of land-based ice. The oceans are
presently rising by one-half inch per decade, enough to cause serious erosion
along much of the U.S. coast. The projected rise is one to four feet by the
year 2050. Such a large rise in the sea level would inundate vast coastal
regions, erode shorelines, destroy coastal marshes and swamps (areas of very
high biological productivity), pollute water supplies through the intrusion of
salt water, and put at high risk the vastly disproportionate share of the
world's economic wealth that is packed along coastlines. The great river
deltas, from the Mississippi to the Ganges, would be flooded. Estimates are
that a half-meter rise in Egypt would displace 16 percent of the population,
while a two-meter rise in Bangladesh would claim 28 percent of the land where
30 million people live today and where more than 59 million are projected to live
by 2030.
Positive consequences
would be likely as well. Some plants would grow more quickly, fertilized by the
additional carbon dioxide. (Many of them, however, will be weeds.) Rainfall
might rise in what are now arid but potentially fertile regions, such as parts
of sub-Saharan Africa. Conditions for agriculture would also improve in those
northern areas that have both adequate soils and water supplies. Nonetheless,
as the 1988 drought in the United States vividly demonstrated, human societies,
industrial no less than rural, depend on the normal, predictable functioning of
the climate system. Climate undergoing rapid change will not only be less
predictable because it is different, but may be inherently more variable. Many
climatologists believe that as accumulating greenhouse gases force the climate
out of equilibrium, climate extremes-such as hurricanes, droughts, cold snaps
and typhoons-will become more frequent and perhaps more intense.
Since climate change will
be felt in every economic sector, adapting to its impact will be extremely
expensive. Developing countries with their small reserves of capital, shortages
of scientists and engineers, and weak central governments will be the least
able to adapt, and the gap between the developed and developing worlds will
almost certainly widen. Many of the adaptations needed will be prohibitively
costly, and many impacts, notably the effects on wildlife and ecosystems, will
be beyond the reach of human correction. A global strategy that relies on
future adaption almost certainly means greater economic and human costs, and
vastly larger biological losses, than would a strategy that attempts to control
the extent and speed of the warming.
Greenhouse change is
closely linked to stratospheric ozone depletion, which is also caused by
chlorofluorocarbons. The increased ultraviolet radiation resulting from losses
in that protective layer will cause an increase in skin cancers and eye damage.
It will have many still uncertain impacts on plant and animal life, and may
suppress the immune systems of many species.
Serious enough in itself,
ozone depletion illustrates a worrisome feature of man's newfound ability to
cause global change. It is almost impossible to predict accurately the
long-term impact of new chemicals or processes on the environment.
Chlorofluorocarbons were thoroughly tested when first introduced, and found to
be benign. Their effect on the remote stratosphere was never considered.
Not only is it difficult
to anticipate all the possible consequences in a highly interdependent, complex
system, the system itself is poorly understood. When British scientists
announced the appearance of a continent-sized "hole" in the ozone
layer over Antarctica in 1985, the discovery sent shock waves through the
scientific community. Although stratospheric ozone depletion had been the
subject of intense study and debate for more than a decade, no one had
predicted the Antarctic hole and no theory could account for it.
The lesson is this:
current knowledge of planetary mechanisms is so scanty that the possibility of
surprise, perhaps quite nasty surprise, must be rated rather high. The greatest
risk may well come from a completely unanticipated direction. We lack both
crucial knowledge and early warning systems.
V
Absent profound change in
man's relationship to his environment, the future does not look bright.
Consider the planet without such change in the year 2050. Economic growth is
projected to have quintupled by then. Energy use could also quintuple; or if
post-1973 trends continue, it may grow more slowly, perhaps only doubling or
tripling. The human species already consumes or destroys 40 percent of all the
energy produced by terrestrial photosynthesis, that is, 40 percent of the food
energy potentially available to living things on land. While that fraction may
be sustainable, it is doubtful that it could keep pace with the expected
doubling of the world's population. Human use of 80 percent of the planet's potential
productivity does not seem compatible with the continued functioning of the
biosphere as we know it. The expected rate of species loss would have risen
from perhaps a few each day to several hundred a day. The pollution and toxic
waste burden would likely prove unmanageable. Tropical forests would have
largely disappeared, and arable land, a vital resource in a world of ten
billion people, would be rapidly decreasing due to soil degradation. In short,
sweeping change in economic production systems is not a choice but a necessity.
Happily, this grim sketch
of conditions in 2050 is not a prediction, but a projection, based on current
trends. Like all projections, it says more about the present and the recent
past than it does about the future. The planet is not destined to a slow and
painful decline into environmental chaos. There are technical, scientific and
economical solutions that are feasible to many current trends, and enough is
known about promising new approaches to be confident that the right kinds of
research will produce huge payoffs. Embedded in current practices are vast
costs in lost opportunities and waste, which, if corrected, would bring massive
benefits. Some such steps will require only a reallocation of money, while
others will require sizable capital investments. None of the needed steps,
however, requires globally unaffordable sums of money. What they do demand is a
sizable shift in priorities.
For example,
family-planning services cost about $10 per user, a tiny fraction of the cost of
the basic human needs that would otherwise have to be met. Already identified
opportunities for raising the efficiency of energy use in the United States
cost one-half to one-seventh the cost of new energy supply. Comparable savings
are available in most other countries. Agroforestry techniques, in which
carefully selected combinations of trees and shrubs are planted together with
crops, can not only replace the need for purchased fertilizer but also improve
soil quality, make more water available to crops, hold down weeds, and provide
fuelwood and higher agricultural yields all at the same time.
But if the technological
opportunities are boundless, the social, political and institutional barriers
are huge. Subsidies, pricing policies and economic discount rates encourage
resource depletion in the name of economic growth, while delivering only the
illusion of sustainable growth. Population control remains a controversial
subject in much of the world. The traditional prerogatives of nation states are
poorly matched with the needs for regional cooperation and global
decision-making. And ignorance of the biological underpinning of human society
blocks a clear view of where the long-term threats to global security lie.
Overcoming these economic
and political barriers will require social and institutional inventions
comparable in scale and vision to the new arrangements conceived in the decade
following World War II. Without the sharp political turning point of a major
war, and with threats that are diffuse and long term, the task will be more
difficult. But if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the planet and a heavy
toll in human suffering, nothing less is likely to suffice. A partial list of
the specific changes suggests how demanding a task it will be.
Achieving sustainable
economic growth will require the remodeling of agriculture, energy use and
industrial production after nature's example-their reinvention, in fact. These
economic systems must become circular rather than linear. Industry and
manufacturing will need processes that use materials and energy with high
efficiency, recycle by-products and produce little waste. Energy demand will
have to be met with the highest efficiency consistent with full economic
growth. Agriculture will rely heavily upon free ecosystem services instead of
nearly exclusive reliance on man-made substitutes. And all systems will have to
price goods and services to reflect the environmental costs of their provision.
A vital first step, one
that can and should be taken in the very near term, would be to reinvent the
national income accounts by which gross national product is measured. GNP is
the foundation on which national economic policies are built, yet its
calculation does not take into account resource depletion. A country can
consume its forests, wildlife and fisheries, its minerals, its clean water and
its topsoil, without seeing a reflection of the loss in its GNP. Nor are
ecosystem services-sustaining soil fertility, moderating and storing rainfall,
filtering air and regulating the climate-valued, though their loss may entail
great expense. The result is that economic policymakers are profoundly misled
by their chief guide.
A second step would be to
invent a set of indicators by which global environmental health could be measured.
Economic planning would be adrift without GNP, unemployment rates, and the
like, and social planning without demographic indicators-fertility rates,
infant mortality, literacy, life expectancy-would be impossible. Yet this is
precisely where environmental policymaking stands today.
Development assistance
also requires new tools. Bilateral and multilateral donors have found that
project success rates climb when nongovernmental organizations distribute funds
and direct programs. This is especially true in agriculture, forestry and
conservation projects. The reasons are not mysterious. Such projects are more
decentralized, more attuned to local needs and desires, and have a much higher
degree of local participation in project planning. They are usually quite small
in scale, however, and not capable of handling very large amounts of
development funding. Often, too, their independent status threatens the
national government. Finding ways to make far greater use of the strengths of
such groups without weakening national governments is another priority for
institutional innovation.
Better ways must also be
found to turn the scientific and engineering strengths of the industrialized
world to the solution of the developing world's problems. The challenges include
learning enough about local constraints and conditions to ask the right
questions, making such research professionally rewarding to the individual
scientist, and transferring technology more effectively. The international
centers for agricultural research, a jointly managed network of thirteen
institutions launched in the 1960s, might be improved upon and applied in other
areas.
On the political front,
the need for a new diplomacy and for new institutions and regulatory regimes to
cope with the world's growing environmental interdependence is even more
compelling. Put bluntly, our accepted definition of the limits of national
sovereignty as coinciding with national borders is obsolete. The government of
Bangladesh, no matter how hard it tries, cannot prevent tragic floods, such as
it suffered last year. Preventing them requires active cooperation from Nepal
and India. The government of Canada cannot protect its water resources from
acid rain without collaboration with the United States. Eighteen diverse nations
share the heavily polluted Mediterranean Sea. Even the Caribbean Islands, as
physically isolated as they are, find themselves affected by others' resource
management policies as locusts, inadvertently bred through generations of
exposure to pesticides and now strong enough to fly all the way from Africa,
infest their shores.
The majority of
environmental problems demand regional solutions which encroach upon what we
now think of as the prerogatives of national governments. This is because the
phenomena themselves are defined by the limits of watershed, ecosystem, or
atmospheric transport, not by national borders. Indeed, the costs and benefits
of alternative policies cannot often be accurately judged without considering
the region rather than the nation.
The developing countries
especially will need to pool their efforts in the search for solutions.
Three-quarters of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have fewer
people than live in New York City. National scientific and research capabilities
cannot be built on such a small population base. Regional cooperation is
required.
Dealing with global change
will be more difficult. No one nation or even group of nations can meet these
challenges, and no nation can protect itself from the actions-or inaction-of
others. No existing institution matches these criteria. It will be necessary to
reduce the dominance of the superpower relationship which so often encourages
other countries to adopt a wait-and-see attitude (you solve your problems
first, then talk to us about change).
The United States, in
particular, will have to assign a far greater prominence than it has heretofore
to the practice of multilateral diplomacy. This would mean changes that range
from the organization of the State Department and the language proficiency of
the Foreign Service, to the definition of an international role that allows
leadership without primacy, both in the slogging work of negotiation and in
adherence to final outcomes. Above all, ways must soon be found to step around
the deeply entrenched North-South cleavage and to replace it with a planetary
sense of shared destiny. Perhaps the successes of the U.N. specialized agencies
can be built upon for this purpose. But certainly the task of forging a global
energy policy in order to control the greenhouse effect, for example, is a very
long way from eradicating smallpox or sharing weather information.
The recent Soviet proposal
to turn the U.N. Trusteeship Council, which has outlived the colonies it
oversaw, into a trusteeship for managing the global commons (the oceans, the
atmosphere, biological diversity and planetary climate) deserves close
scrutiny. If a newly defined council could sidestep the U.N.'s political fault
lines, and incorporate, rather than supplant, the existing strengths of the
United Nations Environment Programme, it might provide a useful forum for
reaching global environmental decisions at a far higher political level than
anything that exists now.
Today's negotiating
models-the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even the
promising Convention to Protect the Ozone Layer-are inadequate. Typically, such
agreements take about 15 years to negotiate and enter into force, and perhaps
another ten years before substantial changes in behavior are actually achieved.
(The NPT, which required only seven years to complete these steps, is a notable
exception.) Far better approaches will be needed.
Among these new
approaches, perhaps the most difficult to achieve will be ways to negotiate
successfully in the presence of substantial scientific uncertainty. The present
model is static: years of negotiation leading to a final product. The new model
will have to be fluid, allowing a rolling process of intermediate or
self-adjusting agreements that respond quickly to growing scientific
understanding. The recent Montreal agreement on the ozone layer supplies a
useful precedent by providing that one-third of the parties can reconvene a
scientific experts group to consider new evidence as it becomes available. The
new model will require new economic methods for assessing risk, especially
where the possible outcomes are irreversible. It will depend on a more active
political role for biologists and chemists than they have been accustomed to,
and far greater technical competence in the natural and planetary sciences
among policymakers. Finally, the new model may need to forge a more involved
and constructive role for the private sector. Relegating the affected
industries to a heel-dragging, adversarial, outsiders role almost guarantees a
slow process. The ozone agreement, to cite again this recent example, would not
have been reached as quickly, and perhaps not at all, had it not been for the
cooperation of the chlorofluorocarbon producers.
International law, broadly
speaking, has declined in influence in recent years. With leadership and
commitment from the major powers it might regain its lost status. But that will
not be sufficient. To be effective, future arrangements will require provisions
for monitoring, enforcement and compensation, even when damage cannot be
assigned a precise monetary value. These are all areas where international law
has traditionally been weak.
This is only a partial
agenda for the needed decade of invention. Meanwhile, much can and must be done
with existing means. Four steps are most important: prompt revision of the
Montreal Treaty, to eliminate completely the production of chlorofluorocarbons
no later than the year 2000; full support for and implementation of the global
Tropical Forestry Action Plan developed by the World Bank, the U.N.'s
Development Programme, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the World
Resources Institute; sufficient support for family planning programs to ensure
that all who want contraceptives have affordable access to them at least by the
end of the decade; and, for the United States, a ten-year energy policy with
the goal of increasing the energy productivity of our economy (i.e., reducing
the amount of energy required to produce a dollar of GNP) by about three
percent each year. While choosing four priorities from dozens of needed
initiatives is highly arbitrary, these four stand out as ambitious yet
achievable goals on which a broad consensus could be developed, and whose
success would bring multiple, long-term global benefits touching every major
international environmental concern.
VI
Reflecting on the
discovery of atomic energy, Albert Einstein noted "everything
changed." And indeed, nuclear fission became the dominant force-military,
geopolitical, and even psychological and social-of the ensuing decades. In the
same sense, the driving force of the coming decades may well be environmental
change. Man is still utterly dependent on the natural world but now has for the
first time the ability to alter it, rapidly and on a global scale. Because of
that difference, Einstein's verdict that "we shall require a substantially
new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive" still seems apt.
Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol.68, No. 2, 1989
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