In this weeks blog, NERI economist, Paul Goldrick-Kelly explores some of the key findings from his NERI InBrief 'Does consumption in the Republic of Ireland respect planetary boundaries?'
This InBrief uses the recently developed planetary boundaries framework to examine whether environmental stress generated by consumption in the Republic of Ireland oversteps these boundaries.
The reality of human induced climate change from carbon emissions is increasingly highlighted for us by recent extreme weather events that are becoming increasingly common around the world. Climate has become a pressing political issue - after unfortunate years being relegated to a second-tier concern within many political systems – with the help of movements in the global north and south.
However, we should understand that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is just one of several (linked) ecological crises we face. Human activity has destabilised a number of critical earth systems, leading to disruption within key life supporting cycles and mass extinctions.
The planetary boundaries literature attempts to put values on key thresholds in nine key systems – Climate change, Novel entities, Stratospheric ozone depletion, Atmospheric aerosol loading, Ocean acidification, Biochemical flows, Freshwater use, land-system change and biosphere integrity - to maintain hitherto relative stable ecological conditions representing a “safe operating space for humanity”. These boundaries can represent a benchmark from which we can assess human impacts on these systems.
In my new InBrief, I use this boundary data to examine whether consumption in Ireland respects these safe planetary boundaries on a per person basis. To do this, I use some of the aggregate thresholds and methodology used in a 2018 paper from O’Neill and colleagues. This paper compares consumption-based measures of ecological impact to planetary boundaries scaled to per person values. This reflects the fact that often the environmental damage associated with the production of goods and services can occur some distance from the eventual point of consumption. To reflect this, the data takes impacts produced within a territory, subtracts those associated with exports (since their consumption occurs elsewhere) and adds the effects of imports.
I find that consumption within the Republic of Ireland in 2015 (the latest data available) transgressed six of seven measured thresholds for sustainability, often significantly. This was starkest for carbon emissions, where emissions per head were over 17 times the remaining annual per person carbon budget to 2100. Nitrogen and Phosphorus use from fertilisers was over five times sustainable levels.
Similarly, ROI consumed over three times the safe boundary for the use of biologically productive land and sea area needed to meet biotic consumption and absorb the emissions we generate. Even with the country’s relatively large endowment of natural resources, consumption exceeded national space by over 50 per cent, and has exceeded nationally sustainable levels since the late 1960s according to the Global footprint network. Similarly, biomass harvested, lost, killed or unused in harvests or through changes of land use was near three and a half times safe per capita levels. Only freshwater use respected per person boundaries as outlined by O’Neill et al.
On the basis of this analysis, average consumption in the Republic of Ireland is far from sustainable. This is consistent with O’Neill’s findings where wealthy states tend to perform well on certain social indicators but significantly overshoot a safe ecological living space. The opposite trend holds for poorer states.
This highlights the enormous inequities associated with planetary crisis – while the transgression of planetary boundaries is of global significance, the crisis is largely generated by wealthy states of the global north, who disproportionately avail of global resources in their consumption.
To compound the issue, in many cases, the national populations least responsible for this degradation face the most immediate and acute challenges. Often, apparent gains in ecological policy like emissions reductions obscure “carbon outsourcing” where production of goods and services bound for wealthy states is moved from wealthy state territory based inventories to poorer countries.
We should also note the relevance of inequality within states – the wealthy consume far more than the poor within states of the global north and south. In Ireland, the top 10% in income terms emit nearly as much as the poorest half of the population. We should also note that a focus on consumption alone can obscure the key role of social power in shaping the contexts for consumption and the policy options available to us.
The extent of our overshoot implies significant changes are needed to the way we live and work in Ireland and around the world. These planetary boundaries represent key, non-negotiable conditions for continued human flourishing. If our current models of economic and social organisation cannot adapt, they’ll have to go.