Speech - by Achim Steiner to the High-Level Session on
Resource Efficiency in the Framework of the German G7 Presidency.
Speech
by Achim Steiner to the High-Level Session on Resource Efficiency in
the Framework of the German G7 Presidency.
- See more at:
http://www.unep.org/newscentre/default.aspx?DocumentID=26791&ArticleID=34802#sthash.LOHqVYVZ.dpuf
Speech
by Achim Steiner to the High-Level Session on Resource Efficiency in
the Framework of the German G7 Presidency.
- See more at:
http://www.unep.org/newscentre/default.aspx?DocumentID=26791&ArticleID=34802#sthash.LOHqVYVZ.dpuf
Human progress is moving quicker and
quicker as time goes on. It's what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history's
Law of Accelerating Returns: more-advanced societies have the ability to
progress at a faster rate than less-advanced societies. And we have witnessed
this. Over the last century or so we have cut mortality rates, reduced poverty,
if not as evenly as we would have liked, and created technologies we could
hardly have dreamt of. Yet this progress has come at a price-through intensive
use of our planet's finite resources.
The "great acceleration"
of the last 50 years has seen a rapid transformation of the human relationship
with the natural world-more so than in any other period in our history-with
escalating use of natural resources leading to environmental degradation. We
are, as Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen puts it, living in the Age
of the Anthropocene-the era in which our activities have a significant and
measurable impact on the Earth's ecosystems.
If we consider the Law of
Accelerating Returns, and that the rate of advancement in the 30 years between
1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985, advances are
getting bigger and happening more quickly. Yet we don't have to look at our
progression as linear; there is an opportunity to radically change the next 30
years by choosing resilient pathways that introduce greater resource
efficiency.
We must ask ourselves what the
consequences of this pace of consumption and trajectory of population
growth-forecasted to reach nine billion by 2050-will be. By 2009 we were
extracting 68 billion tonnes of resources, compared to around 7 billion tonnes
in 1900. Under current trends of population growth and expanding middles
classes, global extraction of resources is set to reach 140 billion tonnes by
2050. This will probably exceed the availability and accessibility of
resources, as well as the carrying capacity of the planet to absorb the impacts
of their extraction and use.
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