´óÏó´«Ã½

I've not written here for a couple of weeks, but it's refreshing to see what good hands this blog is left in when I take a little time out.

Chief exhibit is the discussion surrounding the sheaf of articles on "planetary boundaries" - and thanks to simon-swede and manysummits, among others, for ploughing into the material and having a look at what it means.

In case anyone hasn't read through the previous thread where such comments are homed, Johan Rockstrom of the (an interesting title in itself) and a group of other concerned researchers offered up the concept that there are boundaries to various aspects of our exploitation of the Earth's resources beyond which it would be prudent not to venture.

Examples include: our output rate of greenhouse gases, nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers, and ozone-depleting chemicals; our toll on biodiversity; the proportion of the Earth's surface taken for farming and settlement; the supply of freshwater - that sort of thing.

Dr Rockstrom orders these into seven boundaries, and concludes that for some of them, humanity has already overstepped.

In addition to all the comments you've already posted on the last thread here, this raised a couple of questions in my mind.

The first is whether "planetary boundaries" takes us forward - as manysummits argues - from the whole "limits to growth" discussion that will be familiar to anyone who's touched on sustainability concerns over the last four decades; the second, whether it's useful.

More than 200 years ago, gave us the first simple limits to growth argument, noting "the difficulty of subsistence" that "must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind" if the human population continued to grow "unchecked".

So here we have limits in one dimension, basically - hunger.

In the 20th Century, "" thinking has become much more sophisticated, encompassed many more issues, and used computer models in an attempt to quantify various aspects of the future.

But it still largely talks in terms of how natural constraints limit humanity's capacity to grow - economically, or just in terms of population size - rather than turning that around and asking how humanity's expansion affects nature.

The "planetary boundaries" notion is different in that it sets out limits for nature, rather than for us. Then it looks at what breaching those boundaries will mean for nature - and for us.

It is based more in ecology than economics - and also, thanks to the revolution in environmental science during the last 20 years, based more in evidence - in the observation of rivers and oceans and forests and the atmosphere that now pour back real-world data as never before.

The notion that there are planetary boundaries is perhaps obvious, but as the journal Nature argues, attempting formally to set out where they are ought to be a useful exercise - if only so that other researchers come along and argue against it, and thought progresses.

Already, others are arguing against it.

In companion articles in the same journal, for example, climate scientist Myles Allen argues that the 350ppm boundary proposed by Rockstrom for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has "relatively little support" in the scientific literature, that it may take centuries to achieve even if emissions decline rapidly, and that it represents an "unnecessary distraction" from existing political targets such as the .

I wonder, too, whether it's reasonable to think in terms of a boundary for biodiversity loss.

Many of the arguments for preserving the wonderful totality of life on Earth are primarily ethical in character; and an argument that we need to keep the rate of species loss below 10 times the background rate perhaps misses the point that ideally, it wouldn't be anything more than the background rate.

I see now that I've got ahead of myself. In chewing over my first question - how does the planetary boundaries idea take us forward? - I've started to look at whether it's likely to be useful in understanding the many dimensions and drivers of environmental decline, and in curbing it.

Here, we are into the realms of speculation, of course. My suspicion is that even if discussions take off immediately, it'll be a heck of a long time before some of the boundaries are consensually drawn.

It might be possible to analyse some of them quantitatively - the impacts of on food supply, perhaps - but others are likely to prove much less tractable.

And as we are seeing now in the run-up to the - as we are likely to see next year as the global goal of curbing biodiversity loss - turning science into political action is still the elusive ingredient in this whole picture.

In the middle of contemplating this big, airy, conceptually-driven look at environmental ills and solutions, I neglected to mark a birthday last week.

It is the birthday of something at the other end of the scale from planetary boundaries - not a grand conceptualisation, and not something concentrating on the problem, but something aimed at providing localised solutions.

I even missed the doubtless delicious lunch that went with it - in order to attend meetings planning how the ´óÏó´«Ã½ will cover the Copenhagen summit, for Pete's sake! The sacrifices I make for you...

The birthday in question was that of certified seafood. It is 10 years since the (MSC) was created with a mandate to slow the decline of marine life by assisting the discerning customer to finance its protection.

I see the MSC label in some of the shops where I buy food. The organisation now calculates that about 7% of the world's capture fisheries are certified as sustainable, from longline-caught Norwegian haddock to the western Australian rock lobster.

When I interviewed MSC chief Rupert Howes two years ago for a on sustainable fisheries, the figure was 6%. So it's going up, but slowly - although the tentacles of certification are gathering more fleets to its bosom, the vast majority remain outside.

And it's not difficult to see why. Being certified as sustainable means abiding by a heap of what any frontiersman of the deep would viscerally classify as "red tape" - restricting catches to a scale aimed at ensuring the fishery can persist forever, filling in the paperwork needed so the origin of a batch of food can be traced, using gear designed to keep bycatch as low as possible, and so on.

And some of these - more expensive gear, smaller catches, more bureaucracy - will impact a fisherman's profitability, right?

Wrong. To mark its birthday, the MSC commissioned a number of journalists to interview fishermen taking part in the scheme; and among are that MSC certification can make fishermen richer.

Some Australian fishermen reported restaurants would pay between 30% and 50% more for certified fish. Even supermarkets (and Walmart, among others, is signed up) are paying more.

In one sense, I've always liked the certification concept, whether it's for fish or flowers or timber.

If I want to have my goods produced sustainably, I can - and the certifying body takes away from me the unfeasibly huge task of finding out for myself how sustainable it is.

I look for the logo, I pay my price premium and everyone's happy. And if I'm not bothered, if I just want the cheapest I can find and hang the health of the stock, then I can do that that too.

But that also tells you that certification can never be all of the solution.

So, 7% of the market is currently certified as sustainable. What's the limit - 10%, 12%, 20%? No-one knows - but I'd wager a sustainable salmon dinner with a feast of organic croutons on top that it's a lot less than 100%.

Certification can bring other benefits. The MSC cites examples of fisheries where the government has liked the extra profits and sustainability of the certification regime so much that it's imposed it on all its fleets.

But many fisheries, one suspects, will always slip through the sustainability net if certification is all there is.

Industrial fishing brings us up hard against limits to growth.

in the early 1990s; whether it will ever grow again is still a moot point.

And we are depleting some stocks of their largest fish so spectacularly that we have imposed a new biological limit on their growth - species are becoming smaller, and reproducing earlier, than before our intervention.

So I'll wish the MSC a belated Happy Birthday, and hope they celebrated with - well, fishcakes, I suppose, with on top.

Perhaps they are shedding a little light on the burning issue of how to stay within the planetary boundaries that nature imposes.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?