11 April 2023. Transition | Place
Paying for the sustainable development goals // Recovering our ground—on the work of Barry Lopez
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1: Paying for the sustainable development goals
There’s a long piece by Adam Tooze in his newsletter on how much it would cost to make the sustainable development goals happen. It’s outside of his paywall. The best estimate, from a whole range of reports, is that it is $4 trillion a year over the next decade. That’s a big number, obviously, and I’ll come back to it later, but to put it in context, it’s about 4-5% of global GDP, which isn’t actually a huge number when it comes to investment.
The number comes from a meta-study done by a group of experts, led by Vera Songwe, Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya, ahead of COP27. There’s a full table of the list of the other studies in the article.
The piece also breaks out this total by region:
if you ask what is needed in additional spending for low-income developing countries and emerging markets not including China, the answers tends to congregate around $1 trillion per annum by 2025. By 2030 closer to $2 trillion in additional spending will be needed. For Africa alone, by 2030 the figure is an additional $500 billion per annum.
So this figure is the investment cost of the Sustainable Development Goals, but not just for the ‘developing world’, however you define that these days, but for the whole world, rich world included. There are also estimates for just the cost of the energy transition. The most recent ones tend to group around the $1 trillion mark. (Again, there’s a table in the article.)
Beyond the numbers, Tooze also reflects on what the these reports mean, contextually. Because they suggest the resurgence of a “remarkable resurgence of world-level development thinking”:
(T)here is something disembodied, utopian, anti-political about asking this question—what will it take?—and answering with a round number - $4 trillion per annum. After all, there is no “we”, no global government that will answer this call. Nation states pursue geopolitics... Capitalism is driven by profit, pure and simple. What kind of political process do we envision that would mobilize and direct this immense amount of money?
Actually, as Tooze points out, this is an easier question to answer than it might seem at first. These are real bodies asking and answering the question. COP is a creation of the United Nations, ratified by treaty, and the United Nations, despite its critics, remains a huge collective international enterprise. And the group of experts is also real enough, connected to universities, thinktanks, businesses, and relevant multilateral bodies such as the World Bank.
All the same, as he observes, it is possible to be sceptical of such exercises. We could see them as self-serving, performative, even—though he doesn’t use this word—as forms of virtue signalling, given that we don’t appear to live in a world where businesses and governments throw their hands in the air and say, ‘It’s a fair cop, guv—here’s the $4 trillion then.’ I’m paraphrasing him at this point, since Tooze doesn’t write in the style of a 1960s British police series.
But we also live, he suggests, in a world that is going to produce more of these sorts of reports, and it’s also pretty clear that they aren’t just pulling numbers out of the air. So immediately we can see that there is a political process going on here, for two reasons.
At one level, $4 trillion a year—4-5% of global GDP—doesn’t seem that much to hit the sustainable development goals worldwide. And it’s a credible number. So—and I’m departing here from Tooze’s argument here—I think the politics work like this. If you don’t like it, you’re going to have to start explaining, sooner or later, what it is about the sustainable development goals that you’re opposed to. Is it the good health? The better education? The zero hunger? Clean energy? Clean water? Gender equality? The end of poverty? No hurry: just call when you’ve decided.
Of course, we actually know how this plays out in practice. We’ve seen it repeatedly in the arguments over climate change. When people who don’t want to support universalist goals lose the argument, they start muddying the waters about how the goals are going to be achieved. The second line of defence will be: ‘sure, we’re as committed to ending poverty/hunger/gender inequality etc as the next man’ (gendered language here is deliberate) ‘but we don’t think the $4 trillion should be spent that way’.
But from a futures point of view, this has some use. When we hear businesses making these arguments, along with the industry associations and think-tanks they finance as cover, we’ll know that they have conceded the bigger argument on universalism.
So let’s go back to Tooze here, and the actual number. It’s worth restating what it could acheive:
If we take the... figures at face value then the explosive conclusion is that sustainable development for the entire planet is within reach.
And the world has reallocated resources on a similar scale before, notably on global defence spending in the period between the 1950s and the 1960s. So it can even be done in the timescales that might be required. And here, some of the resources could come from the monies that prop up the fossil fuel sector, which has hoovered up $1 trillion a year’s worth of investment in the past. The $4 trillion is even likely to be a productive investment, rather than a cost:
Sustainable development investment builds schools, railways, power lines, renewable energy facilities... In economic calculation it is easy to make too much of opportunity costs. They are, after all, hypothetical. Even if it were to displace other hypothetical usages, the $ 4 trillion per annum on Sustainable Development would not be conspicuously useless... one would hope that it would legitimize itself by producing large and positive changes in our world.
There are some glaringly large issues here, all the same. The first is that current investment in development goals is way off what it needs to be. Looking just at Africa, these flows have been of the order of $50 billion a year, not $500, and are falling not rising.
The second is that the only country that has come close to mobilising the level of investment implied by the £4 trillion figure over the last decade in recent years is China. (Tooze quotes here Bloomberg figures for investment in energy transition that shows that half of the global total has come from China.)
The third is that—because these reports do come from expert groups that are closely aligned with global elites—they represent a “green growth” version of the future, with all of the costs that are implied by this:
It does not promise a balance achieved through reductions in demand, or minimizing our footprint on the planet. This is a growth-orientated, resource-intensive vision. It will entail new forms of extraction. It says nothing about exploitation or unequal trade.
All the same, Tooze suggests, we should be taking this number seriously, and the reports that go with it, precisely because it does come from within the ‘global power elite’ (his phrase, not mine). It is the best elite estimate we have,
of what would be necessary to produce some semblance of sustainability within the existing status quo. And, as such, it is a hostage given to fortune. Unlike other, more radical visions this, perhaps, is a callable promise.
2: Recovering our ground
At Orion there is a memoir by the nature writer Robert MacFarlane of finally meeting the geographer Barry Lopez, after years of letters and email. Lopez’ book Arctic Dreams had had a profound influence on MacFarland and his work.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do justice to MacFarlane’s article, which is republished from From Here to the Horizon, a photography book published in honour of Lopez after his death, not least because the photogaphs that accompany the article are luminescent. But let me convey the spirit of it here.
A keynote—a grace note, really—of Barry’s vast and varied body of work concerns the need to speak with precision about the places you inhabit and that inhabit you. To be able to disaggregate and denote the elements of your home ground is not to practice an Adamic, possessive form of naming, but rather to sharpen perception—and to begin to honor the immense complexities, human and more-than-human, of a given landscape and its communities. Good place-language, well used, opens onto mystery, grows knowledge, and summons wonder.
(Laura McPhee // Born New York, NY, 1958 – lives Wood River Valley, ID and New York, NY // Irrigator’s Tarp Directing Water, Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, 2004)
Without this detail, writes MacFarlane, our understanding of the living world “can blur into a generalized wash of green”. And that’s what happening, partly as result of urbanisation, partly as a result of the virtualisation of our lives. We are becoming increasingly blasé about place:
The terrain beyond the city fringe has become progressively more understood in terms of large generic units (field, hill, valley, wood) and as such, more exploitable. Landscape has become blandscape, ripe for rezoning.
One of Lopez’ later projects, with his wife Debra Gwartney, was called Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. It was intended to restore “the distinction between things”, that was being lost. They invited 45 writers to define, or perhaps evoke, hundreds of words and phrases that were specific to the American topography:
“That rivers and streams seldom flow (naturally) in straight lines is a gift of beauty. Otherwise we would not have canyons that bear the shape of moving water,” begins Ellen Meloy’s elegant entry for gooseneck, a term meaning those “meanders so tight in succession that their bows nearly meet one another.” Lopez tells us a shinneryis “(a) type of low brush thicket . . . difficult to impossible to cross on foot or horseback” that takes its name from the shin oak (Quercus havardii). Here, human affordance is measured, as well as constituent flora.
MacFarlane suggests that Home Ground is less a taxonomy and more of a prose poem, promoting a way of seeing that is always about the particular and not the abstract. Reading MacFarlane’s account, it’s impossible not to think of his own Lost Words project, which similarly proceeds on the basis that the naming of things is a way of re-grounding us in our landscapes.
Lopez’ understood his ‘home ground’ to include a community of life that went far beyond the human, and, especially as he got older, he recognised the human capacity to reduce or destroy the ability of that ground to be home to non-human species. Lopez travelled during his lifetime, suggests MacFarlane, “from wonder and anxiety to rage and despair at the radical “unhoming” of life on Earth”. He contrasts two passages, the first written in 1988, the second in 2020, shortly before his death:
Both are dazzling pieces of writing, but where the first argues richly for a particularized, pluralized geographical knowledge as a precaution against damage, the second, three decades on, unflinchingly addresses a shattered ecological present and a calamitous future. Trouble, in the first, is starting to make itself felt: “a less noticeable pattern of disruption: acidic lakes, skies empty of birds, fouled beaches, the poisonous slags of industry , the sun burning like a molten coin in ruined air.” Trouble, in the second, is everywhere apparent; the question is only how best to stay with it.
Here’s a section from that second piece:
Crudely put, it is that we can no longer afford to carry on in a prolonged era of polite reflection and ineffective resistance. An Era of Emergencies is bearing down on us...We must reckon with the Sixth Extinction, which will remove, for example, many of our pollinators and one day, probably, many of us. We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitative.
Lopez’ own home was destroyed by wildfire, intensified by global warming, months before he died, and with it five decades of journals and correspondence.
Lopez began as a photographer as well as a writer, and From Here to the Horizon emerged from a desire to create a photographic exhibition that would complement Home Ground. It contains images by 50 of the best American landscape photographers of the past 50 years. MacFarlane describes the book as “a field guide to both wonder and loss.”
Update: Octopus
Almost as soon as I had posted my recent piece on the proposed octopus farm in the Canary Islands, I noticed an article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian on the same topic. I took two things away from it. The first is that farming octopus might be a tougher proposition than the company expects, because the octopus might have other ideas:
Past attempts to farm octopuses have failed because... they have proved simply too unwieldy to contain. They can squeeze themselves through any hole that can fit their beak, which is about the width of a 50p coin. They are not only dextrous, but strong, capable of opening screw-top jars and lifting heavy tank lids. They can also survive up to half an hour out of water: long enough to make a dash for it through a drainpipe.
But she also wonders about the distinction that is made in these discussions between sentient creatures and less sentient creatures:
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the very concept of “animal intelligence” is fraught, judged as it is by human standards... Only relatively recently have scientists accepted that fish invent tools , making them arguably more resourceful than animals of great dexterity... The arc of the moral universe is surely bending towards less exploitation of living beings, less net suffering – regardless of their intelligence.
j2t#444
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