Transcript
Glen Paul: G’day, and welcome to CSIROpod, I’m Glen Paul.
Sustainable development is defined as development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs, and it’s often broken down into three components – environmental
sustainability, economic sustainability, and socio-political sustainability.
When the Rio+20 Earth Summit wound up in June of
this year, political leaders from across the globe came away with a set of
Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs for short, which basically focus on food,
water, and energy. To explore these goals, CSIRO’s Doctor Mark Stafford-Smith
formed part of a discussion panel for the Australian Council for International
Development’s 2012 Council recently held in Canberra.
To find out more I’ve got Mark on the phone. Tell
me, how much of the discussion was based on the Sustainable Development Goals
that came from Rio+20, and what was the overall reaction towards them?
Dr. Stafford Smith: Well the Rio+20 meeting actually in the end didn’t commit
absolutely to a particular set of Sustainable Development Goals, they committed
somewhat vaguely to definitely undertaking a development process for Sustainable
Development Goals, which sort of puts it a bit at arm’s length from finalising
some goals. So we’re actually in quite a challenging period I think now of
trying to work out what the goals should be, and how they can most effectively
be brought together to deliver something useful for the planet.
There are some quite serious politics about it, so
part of the concern was that the Millennium Development Goals, the goals that
we’re currently operating under at that UN level, that they’re far from
complete, they’ve driven some really good valuable changes with pulling people
out of poverty, and improving health and education standards in some places, but
of course some of them haven’t worked so well, and even the ones which have
worked quite well, we still haven’t by any means completed them.
So some countries are really concerned that we’re
not paying attention to those Millennium Development Goals, so that was one
reason why people weren’t too comfortable about signing on to a new set of
Sustainable Development Goals in Rio. The second one is that the Sustainable
Development Goals, as you said in your introduction, I mean they’re really aimed
at sustainable development, and one aspect of sustainable development that we’ve
come to understand much better in the last decade or so is that you can’t just
do that at individual country’s level, we need to have global sustainability as
well.
And so Sustainable Development Goals have to be
universal, they have to be applied to all countries, and they have to add up to
something, which means we’re not stuffing up the whole globe. And of course
there is some resistance from some developed nations to being measured in that
sort of way – they’re sort of happy enough to measure whether there’s progress
in developing nations, but not so keen to have their own record looked at too
closely.
So all of those things mean that there are a fair
bit of politics around establishing a set of Sustainable Development Goals which
might take over from the MDGs in some fashion after 2015, and which undoubtedly
need to make sure they still continue to deliver the benefits that the MDGs have
been doing.
Glen Paul: How do you approach that, because there is this argument
that political manoeuvring trumps scientific evidence – how was that approached
in the discussion?
Dr. Stafford Smith: Well I think the discussion had a pretty useful approach to
this, in the sense of saying, you know, it is genuinely important that we
continue to meet the dominantly social goals that are covered in the MDGs, but
equally it would be pretty disastrous if we missed this critical opportunity to
think about something which also delivers the sustainability of the planet, or
at least tries to.
And so I think a fair bit of the discussion really
focused on asking how can we construct a new set of goals which encompass the
MDGs, which therefore the countries that are concerned to see them completed are
comfortable with, and can sign off on, but which nonetheless push us in the
direction of global sustainability as well, the right sort of measures for that,
without trying to measure every single thing, because there’s also significant
issues around funding all of this, but at least perhaps create a new structure
in which some of the existing MDGs sit, but which starts to bring in global
sustainability issues. And those sorts of issues are the sorts of trade-offs
between the three key aspects of sustainable development, so really trying to
understand how environmental issues, economic issues, and social issues, can be
better integrated, looking for goals which explicitly do that.
And there’s some really interesting aspects of this,
I think. You know there are some ways in which those elements of sustainability
can be quite synergistic, so for example the classic one is that if we actually
improve people’s cooking fuels, give them energy to be able not to have to
harvest wood or cow dung, you can do all sorts of things simultaneously – you
can improve the atmosphere; reduce health problems that come from particulates
in people’s cooking areas; you can reduce the amount of time that people have to
spend collecting fuel, so that means women and children can actually get
education and other opportunities; you can reduce the total release of CO2
into the atmosphere anyway if you’ve got good energy sources to replace
these; you can reduce the impacts on local biodiversity if you’re not cutting
down lots of trees, and so on.
So in fact you can get some real synergistic effects
by thinking about these things together, just as you can also try and deal with
what are genuine trade-offs. So we know that if everyone on the globe had the
GDP of us here in Australia, we would be using resources at a rate which is
completely untenable, we’re already doing that at a global scale anyway. So by
saying we need to bring people out of poverty, which we clearly do, but we need
to do it in a way which doesn’t destroy the planet, or push us over planetary
boundaries. That I think articulates really clearly the need to think about
that trade-off, and to start thinking about different values, of different ways
of valuing progress, and valuing human wellbeing in the developed nations, so
that there is actually space on the planet for the poorer people from developing
nations to actually improve their lifestyles, without us wrecking the planet.
So starting to try and address those types of
things, and thinking about some goals which bring those issues into the open,
but which don’t get too complicated and too impossible to negotiate, was part of
the sort of discussion that was happening.
Glen Paul: Righteo. So what about sustainable development as an
oxymoron, which it is described by many as because it implies that we can keep
our development going in the same way as we have over the past 100 years as long
as we add some kind of sustainability, then all the detrimental effects of our
development model go away. What do you say to that interpretation?
Dr. Stafford Smith: Well I think it’s an oxymoron if you think of development in
the way that we’ve done it over recent decades, as you say, because that’s been
very much founded around development being more consumption. I think if we
start to reframe, as indeed Rio also committed to trying to do, if you start to
reframe the measures of wellbeing and of happiness to be something which isn’t
simply based on more consumption, which is essentially what measuring just by
GDP does, then you start to see a way out of the conundrum that you just
articulated, because what we actually want to develop – we don’t want to develop
having more TVs per house, that’s not really a measure of happiness and
wellbeing, we want to develop all sorts of other aspects of personal freedom,
personal ability to learn, and things like that, a comfortable social
environment, and certainly a safe natural environment as well.
And if you start thinking about how you could have
continuous development in those things, it’s possible to do it potentially
without having increasing consumption. Now that’s a really challenging thing in
our current economic models, in the current way in which we frame progress in
the globe, but it’s not impossible, and really that is the great challenge for
the next decade or so, and the issue around Sustainable Development Goals is a
small example of how that challenge plays out in terms of thinking about what we
ought to be measuring, instead of a straight GDP.
Glen Paul: So what’s next then for CSIRO in working towards these
goals?
Dr. Stafford Smith: Well I think it’s important for CSIRO to be thinking about
these issues, well for many reasons really, but for two particular reasons. One
is that if these goals are established by 2015 they will inevitably help to
drive, just as the MDGs have, they will help to drive the focus of our overseas
aid here in Australia, but also potentially the things that we measure inside
Australia, too. So I mean they will in fact help to set some of the future
directions for the sort of research that an organisation like CSIRO ought to be
doing.
So I mean we have considerable interest then I think
in helping to ensure that they are created with a coherence which enables a
sensible agenda to be pursued later on, and all the things I’ve mentioned are
important in that. But they’re also important of course because CSIRO does
have, as part of its role, very much an obligation to be thinking ahead about
these sorts of issues on behalf of Australia and the nation, and so there are
various areas of research within CSIRO, like the Integrated Carbon Pathways
Project, which is seeking to explore some of these types of issues, and we need
to see that area, I think, of research gradually grow, so thinking about it is a
really important thing.
Glen Paul: Indeed. Thank you very much for discussing with us
today, Mark.
Dr. Stafford Smith: No worries.
Glen Paul: Doctor Mark Stafford Smith. And to find out more about the research, or to
follow us on other social media, visit
www.csiro.au.
