Barney Foran looks at the six principles of sustainability.

The Canberra Times
Saturday 18 December 2004

Page B8 Forum

Requirements for sustainability
The future’s in our hands
A Special Forum Series

This is the fourth in a series of Forum articles published in conjunction with the ACT Government’s Sustainability Expert Reference Group. Today, Barney Foran looks at the six principles of sustainability.

AUSTRALIA’S embrace of the real sustainability debate is something akin to the one-day cricket season. There are two teams, one for and one against, a rowdy crowd, many notable experts and some blokes out in the middle dressed in black pants who run the show.

We all have a good day, the scoreboard gives a mob of meaningless statistics, and then we go back to our normal lives.

We read about it in the paper next morning but nothing really changes. Next week there will be a different team, probably wearing green. Perhaps this time we’ll win.

Sustainability is a bit tougher than one-day cricket. Many worthies strut the stage telling us that sustainability is a “journey”, we just don’t “know enough”, we’d better “be cautious” or action might “harm growth” or interfere with “business confidence”.

In science, we now know enough to have good ideas on what sustainability is all about. We talk about long-run physical sustainability, for without clean air, good water and healthy agricultural soils, all the dollars in the world and the widgets they buy, count for little.

To harden the debate, to make the great game more of a contest than the normal walkover for the home team, we propose six principles of physical sustainability. Not quite 10 commandments, and not yet chiseled into stone tablets, but they form a working hypothesis of what we’ll have to do, once we’ve finished talking about it.

Like a good cricket team, these principles work together. Each has its place. Stabilising long-run population, just by itself, without working on the others in concert, would be like having the Baggy Greens composed entirely of Steve Waughs perhaps all talking simultaneously.

Stabilising human population number in Australia is relatively simple. We’ll hit somewhere between 25 and 27 million by 2050 if we continue with our present policies. We can keep in place all the population policies that have given us the Australia we have today.

The “best” population structure is to have even numbers of people in each 10-year age cohort. This stops us booming and busting at the edge and in the middle of cities. It means we concentrate on quality of life rather than rolling housing booms.

The grand global elements are carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur. Throw water (H2O) in there as well, though it is a global molecule rather than an element.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, human society and its financial flows have been driven by the increasing capture and release of these elements. On a global scale, the big-numbers people are increasingly perturbed by their increasing use that is well outside the globe’s long-term equilibrium position.

We know about carbon as carbon dioxide, the driver of possible long-term climate change.

Nitrogen is the sleeper: he’s carrying the drinks. It is the fertilizer that keeps our world cropping systems going. Without it we could feed only three billion people. Its over-use acidifies soils and pollutes water bodies, but we keep using more and more of it.

For sustainability we have to reduce use of this bunch of global elements to about half, or some say even a quarter for elements like carbon.

Basing economy and society on flows rather than stocks is about living off the interest rather than continually eating into the capital base. Australia is a great consumer of capital, both renewable and non-renewable. The move to wind farms for electricity is a welcome start, but it is just that, a small start in a mammoth reconstruction and refurbishment of the nation’s metabolism.

Shortening the supply chain is about three things.
The first is the recycling of water, nitrogen and phosphorus out of the cities’ effluent back to their food production heartlands. The second is physically connecting both the body and the mind of urban Australia to the sweat and toil of food production, and helping us see more plainly that you are what you eat. If you have crook soils then you will have crook human health. The third is about reducing reliance on extended supply chains that might get broken if world oil supply becomes constrained.

Engineering society for durability and resilience is about pulling back from the edge of the high-revving motor, that is today’s society and economy. Durable infrastructure and widgets are things that last a long time and can be repaired.

It is also about industrial ecology, where we join all of our industrial processes so that one man’s waste is another man’s feedstock, and overall we get little or no waste.

Society resilience is somewhat similar. Communities living well within their capability rather than continually being on the edge, worrying about interest rates, the school and the hospital. It’s all about a lower-revving design for the economy, and the society that depends on it.

It’s about playing cricket in the back yard, maybe training the next Ricky Ponting, instead of buying our kids a new computer game.

Finally the X factor, the team magic, that brings all those together, the requirement for a “new” economics where taxes tell the truth. When science uses life-cycle analysis to look at the physical content of our personal consumption budgets, we find that the more money we spend, then the more energy, water, greenhouse gas and land disturbance is included, or embodied, in the consumption dollar.

It’s what we scientists call a linear or straight-line function, the more we spend the more we use over the full production chain or life cycle.

So our personal consumption drives both our economic growth and our resource consumption.

This leads to a compounding effect: if we grow our economy at say 3 per cent a year, we will nearly double resource use and pollution every 25 years, all other things being equal.

This new economics will need to use the best of economic theory and practice to work out equitable ways of taxing energy, greenhouse, water and land, and so force the rate of innovation in resource-saving. It is possible that this new economy could substantially replace personal income taxation and payroll taxes with physical taxes. And pigs might fly you’ll be saying. Well, to get a truly sustainable economy in the long run, they might just have to.

These six principles of physical sustainability should be in every chief executive’s checklist for each development proposal. In Canberra we’ve started the sustainability debate with an excellent study of our own ecological footprint. (http://www.sustainability.act.gov/sus-reps/sustain-vol3.pdf)
This suggests that the consumption habits hidden deep in our neat suburbs are as far away from sustainability as the chance of the Socceroos winning the next World Cup. But the Socceroos are currently on the field, playing friendlies and working on it.

When will we Canberrans it the paddock and become strong and toned for the great sustainability race? Well at least we are talking about it. Perhaps next year will being some surprises.

Barney Foran is an environmental scientist. He led the team that developed the Future Dilemmas report on Australia’s future population options. His next look at Australia, Balancing Act: A Triple Bottom Line Analysis of the Australian Economy, will be published early in 2005.