By Kim Won-soo
April 22 marked the 51st Earth Day, and on that day United States President Joseph Biden hosted his first summit on climate change in line with this year's theme, "Restore Our Earth." This reflects the mounting concern over the global unsustainability crisis facing humanity.
The Earth is suffering from the unprecedented level of abuse by humanity of its natural ecosystems, going beyond renewable natural limits. Each year the gap between the abuses and sustainable limits is widening.
Over the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution began, the human population has exploded in a way that has mutually reinforced phenomenal economic growth with improvements in the quality of life including, in particular, health. As a result, the population has increased almost 8-fold, from 1 billion to close to 8 billion. This rapid increase, coupled with excessive mass production and consumption, has created increasingly unbearable pressure on natural ecosystems and the environment. Now the pressure is moving dangerously close to the point of no return.
The Global Footprint Network estimates that the annual Earth Overshoot Day for 2021 now stands at Aug. 22. This means that, for the remainder of the year beyond Overshoot Day, humanity is overusing ecological resources more than the planet's renewable natural capacity. It also means that humanity already needs 1.7 planets; but this is obviously impossible as we do not have another planet Earth.
Overshoot Day was delayed last year by three weeks thanks to the slowdown of human activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a paradoxical sense, the pandemic may well be a self-correcting step taken by Mother Nature to warn against unsustainable human behavior.
If uncorrected, humanity may face mass depopulation one day, which would be the sixth such event in the history of the Earth in the last few hundred million years. But it will be the first of its kind not caused by nature but by a species itself. Furthermore, Earth may survive again as it has done in the past; but human beings may not be able to escape from the self-inflicted mass depopulation bordering on extinction. This is all the more tragic as it would be inflicted by the current generation onto our descendants.
Therefore, before it is too late, these dangerous trends must be stopped and reversed. In a collective effort, world leaders unanimously agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015 as a first step. The SDG were meant as the beginning of the end of excessive nature-abusing development practices. In their place, the SDG attempted to reorient the development path in a human centered and nature friendly direction.
The SDG contain both the causes of and the solutions to the unsustainability crisis. The causes are inter-connected; as are the population explosion and ecosystem erosion. The solutions must be integrated to address these inter-connected causes. That is why the SDG have 17 goals and 169 targets, covering all aspects of human life, social (people), environmental (planet), economic (prosperity) and political (peace) as well as emphasizing the importance of working together (partnership). These 5 P's represent a comprehensive blueprint for action to be shared by all of humanity.
A solution to each SDG needs to be found in connection with other goals. For example, a solution to make cities more sustainable (Goal 11) needs to be calibrated in concert with the sustainable circulation of key resources like water (Goal 7) and energy (Goal 8) as well as the sustainable use of land ecosystems (Goal 15) to be supported by innovative infrastructure (Goal 9) for good health (Goal 3) and quality education (Goal 4).
The positive news is that once a solution is calibrated for one SDG, it will provide solutions to other inter-connected SDGs as well. As the causes are interconnected, so are the solutions.
The SDG are necessary to prevent a man-made apocalypse from striking our future generations. But we need to do even more. The progress in SDG implementation has been slow over the last five years. The public and private sectors together must further concretize national action plans for SDG. International discourse is needed to identify a new vision of transformative paradigms moving beyond the current forms of capitalism and democracy which have been the two cornerstones to sustain an industrialized civilization for the last 200 years.
Searching for a transformative civilizational paradigm needs to look beyond the so-called Industrial Revolution 4.0. It is uncertain how the paradigm will eventually shift and what the final evolution will be called. But one thing is clear. The word "industrial" will be replaced by a new word. And that word may well incorporate "digital" and "sustainable" transformations.
Capitalism needs to be updated to reduce deepening inequalities and ensure more inclusive growth. Democracy also needs to be updated to correct deepening polarization by the winner-takes-all decided by a 51-49 vote. It needs to ensure a more representative governance by respecting the minority's views.
These tasks are challenging but not insurmountable if we work together with a collective sense of urgency. Not much time is left for us to turn away from our suicidal path.
Mother Earth keeps sending us warning signs. Extreme weather events caused by climate change and pandemics are just two examples of the nature-sent wake-up calls. Humanity must heed them now; or the future warnings will be more and more biblically apocalyptic.
Now is the time for humanity to wake up and start fundamentally transforming our ways of life. Sustainability is the only way to ensure a future that will be better and safer for all, as one planet and one people. Sustainability must be embedded in our daily life. Sustainability must be engrained in the new civilizational paradigm.
Kim Won-soo is the former under secretary-general of the United Nations and the high representative for disarmament. As a Korean diplomat, he served as secretary to the ROK president for foreign affairs. He is now the chair of the international advisory board of the Future Consensus Institute (Yeosijae) and a member of the Group of Eminent Persons for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBTO).
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The Earth is suffering from the unprecedented level of abuse by humanity of its natural ecosystems, going beyond renewable natural limits. Each year the gap between the abuses and sustainable limits is widening.
Over the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution began, the human population has exploded in a way that has mutually reinforced phenomenal economic growth with improvements in the quality of life including, in particular, health. As a result, the population has increased almost 8-fold, from 1 billion to close to 8 billion. This rapid increase, coupled with excessive mass production and consumption, has created increasingly unbearable pressure on natural ecosystems and the environment. Now the pressure is moving dangerously close to the point of no return.
The Global Footprint Network estimates that the annual Earth Overshoot Day for 2021 now stands at Aug. 22. This means that, for the remainder of the year beyond Overshoot Day, humanity is overusing ecological resources more than the planet's renewable natural capacity. It also means that humanity already needs 1.7 planets; but this is obviously impossible as we do not have another planet Earth.
Overshoot Day was delayed last year by three weeks thanks to the slowdown of human activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a paradoxical sense, the pandemic may well be a self-correcting step taken by Mother Nature to warn against unsustainable human behavior.
If uncorrected, humanity may face mass depopulation one day, which would be the sixth such event in the history of the Earth in the last few hundred million years. But it will be the first of its kind not caused by nature but by a species itself. Furthermore, Earth may survive again as it has done in the past; but human beings may not be able to escape from the self-inflicted mass depopulation bordering on extinction. This is all the more tragic as it would be inflicted by the current generation onto our descendants.
Therefore, before it is too late, these dangerous trends must be stopped and reversed. In a collective effort, world leaders unanimously agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015 as a first step. The SDG were meant as the beginning of the end of excessive nature-abusing development practices. In their place, the SDG attempted to reorient the development path in a human centered and nature friendly direction.
The SDG contain both the causes of and the solutions to the unsustainability crisis. The causes are inter-connected; as are the population explosion and ecosystem erosion. The solutions must be integrated to address these inter-connected causes. That is why the SDG have 17 goals and 169 targets, covering all aspects of human life, social (people), environmental (planet), economic (prosperity) and political (peace) as well as emphasizing the importance of working together (partnership). These 5 P's represent a comprehensive blueprint for action to be shared by all of humanity.
A solution to each SDG needs to be found in connection with other goals. For example, a solution to make cities more sustainable (Goal 11) needs to be calibrated in concert with the sustainable circulation of key resources like water (Goal 7) and energy (Goal 8) as well as the sustainable use of land ecosystems (Goal 15) to be supported by innovative infrastructure (Goal 9) for good health (Goal 3) and quality education (Goal 4).
The positive news is that once a solution is calibrated for one SDG, it will provide solutions to other inter-connected SDGs as well. As the causes are interconnected, so are the solutions.
The SDG are necessary to prevent a man-made apocalypse from striking our future generations. But we need to do even more. The progress in SDG implementation has been slow over the last five years. The public and private sectors together must further concretize national action plans for SDG. International discourse is needed to identify a new vision of transformative paradigms moving beyond the current forms of capitalism and democracy which have been the two cornerstones to sustain an industrialized civilization for the last 200 years.
Searching for a transformative civilizational paradigm needs to look beyond the so-called Industrial Revolution 4.0. It is uncertain how the paradigm will eventually shift and what the final evolution will be called. But one thing is clear. The word "industrial" will be replaced by a new word. And that word may well incorporate "digital" and "sustainable" transformations.
Capitalism needs to be updated to reduce deepening inequalities and ensure more inclusive growth. Democracy also needs to be updated to correct deepening polarization by the winner-takes-all decided by a 51-49 vote. It needs to ensure a more representative governance by respecting the minority's views.
These tasks are challenging but not insurmountable if we work together with a collective sense of urgency. Not much time is left for us to turn away from our suicidal path.
Mother Earth keeps sending us warning signs. Extreme weather events caused by climate change and pandemics are just two examples of the nature-sent wake-up calls. Humanity must heed them now; or the future warnings will be more and more biblically apocalyptic.
Now is the time for humanity to wake up and start fundamentally transforming our ways of life. Sustainability is the only way to ensure a future that will be better and safer for all, as one planet and one people. Sustainability must be embedded in our daily life. Sustainability must be engrained in the new civilizational paradigm.
Kim Won-soo is the former under secretary-general of the United Nations and the high representative for disarmament. As a Korean diplomat, he served as secretary to the ROK president for foreign affairs. He is now the chair of the international advisory board of the Future Consensus Institute (Yeosijae) and a member of the Group of Eminent Persons for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBTO).
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