An economic case for protecting the planet | Naoko Ishii

Summary

The speaker from Japan narrates the story of how communities historically managed local commons through social contracts to prevent overuse and depletion. This contrasts with today's global commons, such as air and water, which are under threat due to a lack of such contracts. The speaker, an economist, emphasizes the need to integrate stewardship of global commons into our economic systems, citing the example of the food system's impact on the environment. The talk concludes with a call to action for collective responsibility to preserve these shared resources for future generations.

Takeaways

• 🐟 The story of Japanese fishing villages illustrates the importance of social contracts to prevent overfishing and protect shared resources.
• 🌐 The concept of 'commons' extends globally to include air, water, forests, and biodiversity, which are under threat due to human activity.
• 🚫 Modern economies have disconnected from the local and the commons, leading to environmental damage and a lack of stewardship for shared resources.
• 🔢 Nine planetary boundaries have been identified by scientists to mark the safe operating space for humanity; four of these have already been crossed.
• 🌿 The speaker, an economist, acknowledges the absence of global commons in economic decision-making and calls for their integration.
• 🌍 It's crucial to recognize and manage the global commons, similar to how local commons were managed in the past, to prevent their loss.
• 🏙️ Cities, energy systems, production-consumption patterns, and food systems are four key areas that need transformation to protect the global commons.
• 🛑 The current food system contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.
• 🌱 There is a growing coalition of stakeholders working to transform the food system to reduce its environmental impact and ensure sustainable food production.
• 🌳 The example of palm oil production in Sumatra shows the need for collective action among farmers, companies, and governments to protect tropical forests.
• 🌐 GEF's new strategy places the global commons at its core, emphasizing the need for collective stewardship and action to safeguard our shared environment.

Q & A

What is the central theme of the story about Japanese fishing villages?

The central theme is the development of a social contract among fishermen to prevent overfishing and preserve the shared resource of fish for the community's long-term benefit.

How did communities around the world manage their shared resources historically?

Communities historically managed shared resources by developing rules and practices, changing their behavior to ensure the sustainability of resources like pastures, forests, water, and wildlife.

What is the 'tragedy of the commons'?

The 'tragedy of the commons' refers to a situation where individuals, acting independently according to their own self-interest, deplete a shared resource, leading to scarcity and potential collapse of the resource.

How has the shift from local economies to global economies affected our connection to the commons?

The shift to global economies has led to a loss of connection to local commons, as economic objectives and systems expanded beyond local areas without incorporating the concept of taking care of shared resources like oceans and forests.

What are the nine planetary boundaries proposed by scientists?

The nine planetary boundaries are thresholds vital to human survival, defining the limits of ecosystem resilience and Earth's capacity to provide services that support human development without causing irreversible environmental change.

What is the current status of the nine planetary boundaries according to the script?

As of the script's context, four of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed, indicating that we are nearing or exceeding the Earth's capacity to maintain stable environmental conditions.

Why was the concept of global commons not a significant part of economic decisions for the speaker?

The speaker, an economist, suggests that the concept of global commons was not a part of economic decisions because it was not integrated into major financial discussions like state budgets or investment plans, reflecting a broader societal oversight.

What is the speaker's personal realization about the role of humans in determining Earth's future living conditions?

The speaker realized that humans have become a dominant force shaping Earth's future living conditions and that we are running out of time to act, implying an urgent need for stewardship of the global commons.

What are the four key economic systems identified in the script that need to change?

The four key economic systems that need to change are cities, energy systems, production-consumption systems, and food systems, all of which exert significant pressure on the global commons.

How is the food system contributing to environmental issues according to the script?

The food system contributes to environmental issues by being responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, being a major user of global water resources, causing deforestation and species extinction, and wasting one third of the food produced.

What is the role of coalitions of stakeholders in transforming the food system?

Coalitions of stakeholders are coming together with a shared goal to transform the food system, aiming to produce enough healthy food for everyone while reducing its environmental footprint, thus creating a new social contract for managing the global commons.

What is the new strategy of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as mentioned in the script?

The new strategy of the GEF puts the global commons at its center, emphasizing the need for collective action and stewardship to preserve the environment and avoid the tragedy of the commons.

Outlines

00:00

🐟 Sustainable Fishing and the Commons

The speaker begins with a narrative about Japanese fishing villages, highlighting the practice of sustainable fishing to prevent overfishing and the tragedy of the commons. They describe how a social contract among fishermen ensured the long-term viability of fish stocks by imposing penalties for cheating. The concept is then expanded globally, noting similar practices in medieval Europe, Asia, and the Amazon for managing shared resources. The speaker emphasizes the shift from local economies to global ones, which has led to a disconnection from the commons and a resulting environmental crisis. Modern science is introduced as a reminder of the importance of global commons, with the mention of nine planetary boundaries proposed by scientists to measure our impact on the environment. The speaker concludes this section by reflecting on the current state of these boundaries, indicating that we have already crossed several, signaling an urgent need for action.

05:00

🌏 The Global Commons and Economic Transformation

In this paragraph, the speaker shares a personal story of their journey from an economist with no consideration for the global commons to becoming the CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). They reflect on the absence of the global commons in major economic decisions and the resulting ignorance towards its importance. The speaker then discusses the consequences of humanity's overwhelming impact on the Earth's systems and the urgency of the situation, emphasizing that it is the current generation's responsibility to preserve the global commons. They propose a new social contract, similar to the one used in fishing villages, but on a global scale, and outline four key economic systems that need transformation: cities, energy, production-consumption, and food systems. The speaker acknowledges the complexity and difficulty of these changes but stresses the necessity of taking action.

10:03

🌱 Transforming the Food System for a Sustainable Future

The final paragraph focuses on the food system's impact on the global commons, detailing its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and deforestation. The speaker points out the alarming rate of species extinction and the waste of food production. Despite these challenges, they present a positive outlook by discussing coalitions of stakeholders working together to transform the food system with the goal of producing healthy food while reducing its environmental footprint. The speaker shares a personal experience in Sumatra, where they observed deforestation for palm oil plantations and met with various stakeholders committed to change. They highlight the importance of collective action and the creation of a new social contract to manage the global commons. The speaker concludes by urging the audience to embrace the concept of global commons and to take stewardship of these shared resources, stressing that there is no room for egoism and that the preservation of the global commons is a collective responsibility.

Keywords

💡Commons

The term 'commons' refers to shared resources that are accessible to all members of a community or society. In the video, it is used to describe resources like air, water, forests, and biodiversity that are essential for human survival. The concept is central to the theme of the video, illustrating the need for collective responsibility to avoid the 'tragedy of the commons,' where overuse and lack of management lead to the depletion of these resources.

💡Tragedy of the Commons

This concept describes a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource. The video uses the story of Japanese fishing villages to illustrate how social contracts can prevent this tragedy by managing the shared resource of fish responsibly.

💡Social Contract

A 'social contract' is an unwritten agreement that shapes how members of a society should act towards one another and towards the community as a whole. In the video, the speaker discusses how fishermen in certain communities developed a social contract to prevent overfishing, which serves as a metaphor for the global commons, emphasizing the need for a similar global agreement to protect shared resources.

💡Sustainability

Sustainability refers to the ability to maintain or continue a behavior, process, or condition so that it can endure over time without causing harm to the environment or society. The video's theme revolves around the need for sustainable practices to manage the global commons, ensuring that future generations can also rely on these resources.

💡Planetary Boundaries

The concept of 'planetary boundaries' is a framework that outlines the limits of how much change to the Earth's systems can be made without potentially dangerous consequences. The video mentions nine such boundaries, emphasizing that we have already crossed four, indicating the urgency of addressing the health of the global commons.

💡Global Environment Facility (GEF)

The Global Environment Facility is an international organization that provides financial support to projects that benefit the global environment. The speaker, who was appointed as CEO of the GEF, uses this as a personal narrative to illustrate the shift in focus from local economic objectives to global environmental concerns.

💡Economics

Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The video discusses the speaker's background as an economist and how economic systems and objectives have often overlooked the importance of the global commons, leading to the current environmental challenges.

💡Decarbonization

Decarbonization refers to the process of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. The video calls for a sharp decarbonization of the world economy within one generation, highlighting the need for a significant shift in our energy systems.

💡Take-Make-Waste

The 'take-make-waste' model is a linear economic system where resources are extracted, manufactured into products, and then discarded after use. The video criticizes this model for its unsustainable nature and calls for a change towards a more circular and sustainable production-consumption system.

💡Food System

The 'food system' encompasses all the processes and infrastructures involved in feeding a population, from production to consumption. The video highlights the environmental impact of the current food system, including greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and deforestation, and calls for a transformation towards a more sustainable approach.

💡Stakeholders

Stakeholders are individuals or groups who have an interest or concern in a particular issue or organization. The video discusses the importance of stakeholders, such as smallholder farmers, food companies, and financial institutions, coming together to form coalitions and create new social contracts to manage the global commons.

Highlights

The concept of a social contract in Japanese fishing villages to prevent overfishing and maintain shared resources.

The story of global commons and avoiding the tragedy of the commons through community management.

Examples of resource management from medieval Europe, Asia, and indigenous Amazon communities.

The shift from local economies to global ones and the resulting disconnect from the commons.

The current state of global commons, with four planetary boundaries already crossed.

The speaker's personal experience as an economist and the lack of consideration for global commons in economic decisions.

The assumption of unlimited self-repair capacity of the Earth and the reality of its limits.

The urgent need for action to preserve the global commons before it's too late.

The importance of recognizing and integrating stewardship of the global commons into all aspects of life.

The four key economic systems that need transformation: cities, energy, production-consumption, and food systems.

The environmental impact of the current food system, including greenhouse gas emissions and water usage.

The issue of food waste and the need for a more sustainable food system.

The positive developments of stakeholders coming together to transform the food system.

The role of the GEF in creating a new strategy centered around the global commons.

The call to action for everyone to embrace and steward the global commons.

The emphasis on collective responsibility for the preservation of the global commons.

Transcripts

Good evening, everyone.

I am from Japan,

so I'd like to start with a story about Japanese fishing villages.

In the past, every fisherman was tempted to catch as many as fish as possible,

but if everybody did that,

the fish, common shared resource in the community, would disappear.

The result would be hardship and poverty for everyone.

This happened in some cases,

but it did not happen in other cases.

In these communities,

the fishermen developed a kind of social contract

that told each one of them to hold back a bit to prevent overfishing.

The fisherman would keep an eye on each other.

There would be a penalty if you were caught cheating.

But once the benefit of a social contract became clear to everyone,

the incentive to cheat dramatically dropped.

We find the same story around the world.

This is how villagers in medieval Europe

managed pasture and forests.

This is how communities in Asia managed water,

and this is how indigenous peoples in the Amazon managed wildlife.

These communities realized they relied on a finite, shared resource.

They developed rules and practices on how to manage those resources,

and they changed their behavior

so that they could continue to rely on those shared resources tomorrow

by not overfishing,

not overgrazing,

not polluting or depleting water streams today.

This is a story of the commons,

and also how to avoid the so-called tragedy of the commons.

But this is also a story of an economy

that was mainly local,

where everybody had a very strong sense of belonging.

Our economies are no longer local.

When we moved away from being local,

we started to lose our connection to the commons.

We carried economic objectives, goals and systems beyond the local,

but we did not carry the notion of taking care of the commons.

So our oceans, forests,

once very close to us as our local commons,

moved very far away from us.

So today, we pump millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air,

we dump plastics, fertilizers and industrial waste

into the rivers and oceans,

and we cut down forests that absorb CO2.

We make the wild biodiversity much more fragile.

We seem to have totally forgotten

that there is such a thing as global commons:

air, water, forests and biodiversity.

Now, it is modern science

that reminds us how vital the global commons are.

In 2009, a group of scientists proposed

how to assess the health of the global commons.

They defined nine planetary boundaries vital to our survival,

then they measured how far we could go

before we cross over the tipping points or thresholds

that would lead us to the irreversible or even catastrophic change.

This is where we were in the 1950s.

We broadly remained within safe operating space,

marked by the green line.

But look at where we are now.

We have crossed four of those boundaries,

and we will be crossing others in the future.

How did we end up in this situation?

Well, my personal story may tell us something.

Five years ago, I was appointed

as CEO of the GEF, Global Environment Facility,

but I am not a conservationist

or an environmental activist.

I am an economist,

and for the last 30 years,

I had worked for public finance in my home country and around the world.

I can tell you one thing for sure:

during these 30 years,

the notion of the global commons never crossed my mind.

I didn't have a single conversation about the global commons

with my colleagues.

This tells me that the notion of the global commons

was not really entering into the big money decisions

like state budgets or investment plans.

And I'm wondering, why do we have this sheer ignorance

about the global commons,

including me, myself?

One possible explanation might be

that until recently, it didn't really matter too much.

Even if we mess up some part of the environment,

we were not fundamentally changing the functions of the earth system.

The global commons had still enough capacity

to take the punches we gave them.

In fact, the fish were still plentiful,

the fields for grazing were still vast.

Our mistake was to assume

that the capacity of the earth for self-repair

had no limits.

It does have limits.

The message from the science is very clear:

we humans have become an overwhelming force

to determine the future living conditions on earth,

and what's more, we are running out of time.

If we don't act on them,

we will be losing the global commons.

It's only our generation who are able to preserve it --

preserve the commons as we know them.

Now is the time we start managing the global commons

as our parents or our grandparents managed their local commons.

The first thing we need to do

is to simply recognize that we do have the global commons

and they are very, very important.

Then we need to build the stewardship of the global commons

into all of our thinking,

our business, our economy,

our policy-making --

in all of our actions.

We need to recreate the social contract of the fishing villages

on the global scale.

But what does it mean in practice?

Where to start with?

I see there are four key economic systems

that fundamentally need to change.

First, we need to change our cities.

By 2050, two thirds of our population will live in cities.

We need green cities.

Second, we need to change our energy system.

The world economy must sharply decarbonize,

essentially in one generation.

Third, we need to change our production-consumption system.

We need to break away from current take-make-waste consumption patterns.

And finally, we need to change our food system,

what to eat and how to produce it.

And all of those four systems

are putting enormous pressure on the global commons,

and it's also very difficult to flip them.

They are extremely complex,

with many decision-makers, actors involved.

Let's take the example of the food system.

Food production is currently responsible

for one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

It is also a main user of the world's water resources.

In fact, 70 percent of today's water is used to grow crops.

Vast areas of tropical forest are used for agriculture.

This deforestation drives extinction.

In fact, we are losing species 1,000 times faster

than the natural rate.

And on top of all of that bad news,

one third of food produced today globally

is not eaten.

It's wasted.

But there is the good news,

good signs.

Coalitions of stakeholders

are now coming together to try to transform the food system

with one shared goal:

how to produce enough healthy food for everyone,

at the same time,

to try to cut, to sharply reduce,

the footprint from the food system on the global commons.

I had an opportunity

to fly over the Indonesian island of Sumatra,

and I saw with my own eyes

the massive deforestation

to make room for palm oil plantations.

By the way, palm oil is included in thousands of food products

we eat every day.

The global demand for palm oil is just increasing.

In Sumatra, I met smallholder farmers

who need to make a day-to-day living from growing oil palm.

I met global food companies,

financial institutions

and local government officials.

All of them told me that they can't make the change by themselves,

and only by working together under a kind of new contract,

or a new practice,

do they have a chance to protect tropical forests.

So it's so encouraging to see, at least for the last few years,

this new coalition among these committed actors along the supply chain

come together to try to transform the food system.

In fact, what they are trying to do

is to create a new kind of social contract to manage the global commons.

All changes start at home,

at your place and at my place.

At GEF, Global Environment Facility,

we have now a new strategy,

and we put the global commons at its center.

I hope we won't be the only ones.

If everybody stays on the sidelines, waiting for others to step in,

the global commons will continue to deteriorate,

and everybody will be much worse off.

We need to save ourselves from the tragedy of the commons.

So, I invite all of you to embrace the global commons.

Please do remember that global commons do exist

and are waiting for your stewardship.

We all share one planet in common.

We breathe the same air,

we drink the same water,

we depend on the same oceans, forests, and biodiversity.

There is no space left on earth for egoism.

The global commons must be kept within their safe operating space,

and we can only do it together.

Thank you so much.

(Applause)