Can we afford to save the world?

The environmental problems the world faces are daunting.  One often hears that the economic costs involved in resource conservation, reforestation, transition to a new energy regime, and so forth are so high that solving them is simply too expensive.

But this begs the question: what is the cost of not dealing with the deteriorating global environment?  And how does it compare with the projected costs of fixing the mess?

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute has some answers to these questions. The crux of the matter is that “The health of an economy cannot be separated from that of its natural support systems.”  The Guardian UK has just published a summary of the calculations from Brown’s inspiring book “Plan B 2.0″ (also featured in the Natural Patriot’s essential reading list). The cost of ignoring natural degradation is probably incalculable but very high:

“A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing. No matter how carefully crafted and well-implemented, a poverty eradication programme will not succeed if croplands are eroding and harvests are shrinking, if water tables are falling and wells are going dry, if rangelands are turning to desert and livestock are dying, if fisheries are collapsing, if forests are shrinking, and if rising temperatures are scorching crops.”

And the equation works in both directions: there is little hope of halting the global environmental free-fall without bringing the world’s poorest people out of their desperate straits. So, if we’re honest about it, we have little choice but to bite the bullet and shell out the money.  Can we really do this? What will it cost to make human civilization sustainable in the long term?  Brown has made rough estimates of the costs of emergency health care and rehab for the global environment:

Sounds like an awful lot of money.  So let’s put this in perspective.   Here’s what the Earth Policy Institute estimates that the world spends on military budgets:

So the USA alone spends more than three times as much on the military as Brown estimates is required to transform the globe to long-term sustainability.  Terrorism and hostile nations are threats, no doubt, but are they really three times as dangerous as our global life-support system irreversibly falling apart?

Lester Brown again:

“Restoring the Earth will take an enormous international effort – one even larger and more demanding than the often-cited Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed, lest environmental deterioration translates into economic decline, just as it did for earlier civilisations that violated nature’s thresholds and ignored its deadlines.”

So we estimate that restoring the Earth will require additional expenditure of $93bn per year. Many will ask if the world can afford this. But the only appropriate question is: can the world afford not to?”

I highly recommend the whole book.