Good day, everybody …
Just two weeks ago I shared some of my thoughts about the green economy in an event organised by Sciences Po and Ecolo Ethik in Paris. Inevitably my main messages will be repeated, but I hope they will be still fresh for such a young and fresh audience. You are future policy makers, leaders and active members of our society. I believe that you have a very important role to play in shaping this world, your own future.
On 7th June last year a scientific article in the journal Nature stated the following: "Today conditions are very different because global-scale forces including, but not limited to, climate change, have emerged as a direct result of human activities. Human population growth and per-capita consumption rate underlie all of the other present drivers for global change".
The world's population is increasing by about 140. 000 people per day. In just 30 years - one generation - 2 billion people more will share the planet, which is more than the total amount of the population on the planet at the beginning of the 20th Century. On top of that, in just over 15 years from now, there will be an additional 3 billion middle class consumers, which corresponds to twice the total population at the beginning of the previous century.
Of course, this is great for those 3 billion whose living standards will rise, and for the businesses that will succeed in providing for those demands, but this will put great stress on many resources. We will need three times more resources -140 billion tons annually- by 2050. The demand for food, feed and fiber is projected to increase by 70%.
To put it simply: the world has changed. We are more interconnected and interdependent than ever. Many challenges, like climate change, disappearing biodiversity, scarce resources (like water, land or oceans), potential pandemics, poverty, global security … can only be addressed if we join our forces. Looking to the future, the "business as usual" scenario simply will not work. Transition from our current resource intensive growth model to a resource efficient growth model is absolutely necessary. It is actually inevitable for all our economies. For the first time, we humans, are affecting the balance of our planet.
For the past two centuries we have relied on an economic growth model based on cheap and abundant resources. This great acceleration has been a fantastic achievement of the generations of humans that have so successfully overcome so many obstacles to bring such unimagined health and prosperity. But we cannot go on growing in the resource-intensive way we did in the past; certainly not on a global scale. Today the richest 20% of the world consume about 60 times more than the poorest 20%. Just imagine the stress on the world's resources if the rest of the world would live the same way as we do.
