Man-Made Crises 'Outrunning Our Ability To Deal With Them', Scientists Warn

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/global.html

11 September 2009

MAN-MADE CRISES 'OUTRUNNING OUR ABILITY TO DEAL WITH THEM', SCIENTISTS WARN

The world faces a compounding series of crises driven by human activity, which existing governments and institutions are increasingly powerless to cope with, a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists has warned.

In today’s issue of the leading international journal Science, the researchers say that nations alone are unable to resolve the sorts of planet-wide challenges now arising.

Pointing to global action on ozone depletion (the Montreal Protocol), high seas fisheries and antibiotic drug resistance as examples, they call for a new order of cooperative international institutions capable of dealing with issues like climate change – and enforcing compliance where necessary.

“Energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity,” say the researchers, who come from Australia, Sweden, the United States, India, Greece and The Netherlands.

“These issues are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to free-ride on the cooperation of others.”

There are few institutional structures to achieve co-operation globally on the sort of scales now essential to avoid very serious consequences, warns lead author Dr Brian Walker of Australia’s CSIRO.

While there are signs of emerging global action on issues such as climate change, there is widespread inaction on others, such as the destruction of the world’s forests to grow biofuels or the emergence of pandemic flu through lack of appropriate animal husbandry protocols where people, pigs and birds co-mingle.

“Knowing what to do is not enough,” says Dr Walker. “Institutional reforms are needed to bring about changes in human behaviour, to increase local appreciation of shared global concerns and to correct the sort of failures of collective action that cause global-scale problems.”

“We are not advocating that countries give up their sovereignty,” adds co-author Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.

“We are instead proposing a much stronger focus on regional and worldwide cooperation, helped by better-designed multi-national institutions. The threat of climate change to coral reefs, for example, has to be tackled at a global scale. Local and national efforts are already failing.”

The scientists acknowledge that the main challenge is getting countries to agree to take part in global institutions designed to prevent destructive human practices. “Plainly, agreements must be designed such that countries are better off participating than not participating,” they say.

This would involve all countries in drawing up standards designed to protect the earth’s resources and systems, to which they would then feel obligated to adhere.

However they also concede that the ‘major powers’ must be prepared to enforce such standards and take action against back-sliders.

“The major powers must be willing to enforce an agreement – but legitimacy will depend on acceptance by numerous and diverse countries, and non-governmental actors such as civil society and business,” they add.

“To address common threats and harness common opportunities, we need greater interaction amongst existing institutions, and new institutions, to help construct and maintain a global-scale social contract,” the scientists conclude.

More information:

Professor Terry Hughes, CoECRS and JCU, [phone] (in Sweden)
Dr Brian Walker, CSIRO [phone] (in Sweden until Sept 15), after October 8, [phone]
Jenny Lappin, CoECRS, [phone] (Copies of Science paper available on request)
Jim O’Brien, James Cook University Media Office, [phone] or 0418 892 449
http://www.coralcoe.org.au/

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5946/1345

Science 11 September 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5946, pp. 1345 - 1346
DOI: 10.1126/science.1175325

Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions

…

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.

We are not advocating that countries abandon sovereignty. Lack of sovereignty can impede cooperation. Piracy is an obvious example. It is rife off of the Somali coast because Somalia lacks a government capable of enforcing laws (including international laws) against piracy. Because of this, the United Nations Security Council has authorized interventions by other states within Somalia's territorial waters and even on land—an unprecedented act. Nor are we advocating simply that today's transnational institutions be strengthened; some of these institutions prevent progress or are ineffective or inefficient . Instead, we advocate a renewed focus on effective cooperation, facilitated by better-designed institutions.

Today, climate disruption is on the international agenda but other, interacting global challenges are neglected. International institutions primarily focus on single problems, ignoring system-wide interactions. Addressing climate change through forest plantations, for example, may replace ecosystems targeted by the U.N. Biodiversity Convention (2). Similarly, promotion of biofuels can accelerate deforestation and erode the food security of impoverished nations (3). Pandemic influenza is more likely to emerge where pigs and birds intermingle with people; yet no global protocols exist for appropriate animal husbandry, only for trade in animals and animal products. Although mechanisms exist to address individual drivers, their interactive effects must be dealt with comprehensively (4, 5) (see figure).

Limited understanding and a lack of forewarning exacerbate unwanted outcomes of global drivers. Organizations that manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the knowledge are too often lacking (6). For example, contributors to the Convention on Biological Diversity and to the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution recently issued separate statements of concern about proposed large-scale ocean fertilization experiments, whereas parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change said nothing, even though the experiments were to learn if fertilization could reduce atmospheric CO2. These organizations must work together to determine what such large-scale experiments should investigate and whether they should be undertaken.

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[phantom power]

1. An old friend of mine likes to say "80% of wisdom is fatigue"