The World Economic Forum concluded its annual Davos Agenda last Friday.
The Agenda was both urgent and existential: Accelerating a Nature-Positive Economy for People and Planet. At the heart of this seemingly inscrutable agenda is the simple proposition of sustainability.
Our collective impact on our planet’s resources — air, water, vegetation, animals and soil — are pushing these critical resources beyond the tipping point. The global enterprises of agriculture, manufacturing and transportation have increased global greenhouse gases, especially methane and carbon dioxide in volumes that have put the planet on a warming path that is nearly irreversible.
In many parts of the world inorganic fertilizers have fouled our rivers and poisoned our lakes and oceans. Unbridled land use change for infrastructure, agriculture and human settlement has decimated critical biodiversity; both plants and animals.
The dominant economic logic of natural resources as a factor of production, as an inanimate inexhaustible input to production into the far future. But we know this is patently wrongheaded. The irresponsible exploitation of air, water, soil, vegetation and animal resources has long-lasting negative consequences for people’s health, the planet and the economy. We know that degraded land, polluted lakes and rivers are slow to recover or may never recover even after degrading practices stop.
Thanks to wanton deforestation and poor land use planning, the quality and quantity of water is in decline everywhere. The 11 major rivers that drain into Lake Victoria are huge channels of sediment from upland farmlands in Kenya and Tanzania. The sediment plume in the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria is largely due to land degradation in the upland regions of the Nyando and Sondu river basins.
Consequently, the proliferation of the water hyacinth and the domination of the Nile Perch are nearly irreversible ecological changes that have consequences on the health and their economies of the nearly 40 million inhabitants of the Lake Victoria basin.
The loss of vital soil resources, especially nitrogen, organic carbon and phosphorous from poor land use practices is the cause of low crop productivity, and enduring hunger and malnutrition among rural households in many parts of the developing world. It is estimated that about 46 percent of Africa’s land area is degraded and about nearly 80 percent of cultivated land is degraded and loses up to 60 kg of nutrients per hectare per year.
The reckless expansion of human settlement, agriculture and transport infrastructure along wildlife migration corridors now threatens the ecological integrity of national parks and reserves and the viability of wildlife populations across East Africa, especially in Kenya and Tanzania. Trends in large mammal census between 1977 and 2016 reveal inexorable decline of large mammal populations. Huge declines have been observed among migratory wildebeest, whose numbers have reduced by from 588,000 in 1979 to 157,000 in 2016.
Achieving a nature-positive economy demands that we deal with the uncompensated environmental effects of the GDP enterprise on the environment. We must address environmental externality by fully accounting for the full cost of present and future damages in national accounts.
The views expressed are the writer’s
