State of the World 2004

Chapter 01: The State of Consumption Today

Gary Gardner, Erik Assadourian, and Radhika Sarin

The world today produces and consumes more than ever before. Modern industrial workers now produce in a week what took their 18th century counterparts four years. Private consumption expenditures—the amount spent on goods and services at the household level—topped more than $20 trillion in 2000, a four-fold increase over 1960. One quarter of humanity—1.7 billion people worldwide—now belong to the “global consumer class,” having adopting the diets, transportation systems, and lifestyles that were once mostly limited to the rich nations of Europe, North America, and Japan. Today, China, India, and other developing countries are home to growing numbers of these consumers.Yet the world is one of contrasts. While the consumer class thrives, great disparities remain. As many as 2.8 billion people on the planet struggle to survive on less than $2 a day, and more than one billion people lack reasonable access to safe drinking water. The 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent. People must consume to survive, and the world’s poorest will need to increase their level of consumption if they are to lead lives of dignity and opportunity. But the world cannot continue on its current trajectory—the earth’s natural systems simply cannot support it. The economies of mass consumption that produced a world of abundance for many in the twentieth century face an entirely different challenge in the twenty-first: to focus not on the indefinite accumulation of goods but instead on a better quality of life for all, with minimal environmental harm.

Chapter 02: Making Better Energy Choices

Janet L. Sawin

Everything we use and consume—our homes and their contents, our cars and the roads we travel, even our clothes and our food—requires energy. We need energy to produce, package, distribute, operate, and eventually dispose of all these items.Despite significant improvements in energy efficiency and a decline in the energy intensity of the global economy, the desire for bigger and faster lifestyles—combined with population growth—is driving a rapid increase in energy use worldwide.In China, India, and many other developing countries, energy use is rising rapidly as more people gain access to electricity and can afford to buy cars and modern appliances. While this creates new challenges in a world where resources are limited—the planet simply cannot provide for everyone to live like the average American or European—consuming more energy is not always bad. For many people, an increase in energy use is an essential prerequisite to meeting their basic needs, such as lighting, pumped water, or refrigeration. In the industrial world, however, people are using more energy largely because they are buying more and bigger appliances, houses, and vehicles. Today, the world’s richest people use on average 25 times more energy than the world’s poorest.Yet it is possible to live a more energy-efficient life. Already, in countries like Norway and Japan, people enjoy a very high standard of living while using far less energy per person than the average American. Government policies—including regulations, standards, subsidies, and taxes—are critical for improvements in energy efficiency and conservation, and for the sustained growth of cleaner and “greener” energy technologies. At the same time, individual consumers can play a large role through their everyday choices, by creating demand for products and services that are more energy-efficient, and by influencing wider policy decisions.

Chapter 03: Boosting Water Productivity

Sandra Postel and Amy Vickers

A sustainable and secure society is one that meets its water needs without destroying the ecosystems upon which it depends, or the prospects of generations yet to come. The good news is that it is possible to achieve this goal; however, there are significant challenges to overcome before this goal can become a reality.The scale and pace of human impacts on freshwater systems accelerated over the past half-century, along with population and consumption growth. Worldwide, water demands roughly tripled. The number of large dams climbed from 5,000 in 1950 to more than 45,000 today. For a time, only the benefits of these engineering projects were registered. Their social and ecological costs—the people displaced from their homes, the soils contaminated by salts, the fisheries destroyed, the aquatic species imperiled—were hardly considered.Easing both overconsumption and underconsumption are the two equally important sides of the global water challenge. In the developing world, the most urgent task is to provide all people with at least the minimum amount of clean water and sanitation needed for good health. But so far, the political will and financial commitments to provide the poor with access to these basic services have not been sufficient. Conversely, in industrial countries, curbing water consumption—including regulating the massive amounts of water used to groom lawns—is a persistent challenge. And in both the industrialized and developing worlds, there exists a great deal of waste and inefficiency in managing water. Opportunities to increase the efficiency of water use on farms, in factories, and in cities and homes have barely been tapped. Individuals have an important role to play by making responsible choices about their water consumption habits. By choosing a healthy and less water-intensive diet, an attractive and climate-appropriate landscape, and a lifestyle with fewer material goods, individuals can help build a world where the water needs of all are met with minimal harm to the environment.

Chapter 04: Watching What We Eat

Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg

Among the many daily decisions we make, the one that has possibly the greatest impact on the environment is the food we choose to eat. Our collective demand as consumers influences how food is both raised and consumed. Our choices can support forms of agriculture that are destructive to human, ecological, and animal health—such as the factory farm approach to raising livestock—or they can support practices that are better for people, animals, and the planet.The global food trade and the proliferation of processed foods have distanced us both geographically and psychologically from where our food is produced. In the industrialized world we pay a very large hidden price for the highly processed products and cheap fast food we have grown accustomed to. These social and environmental consequences include polluted streams and rivers, resistance to antibiotics, dramatically high rates of obesity, a breakdown of shared mealtimes, and the loss of jobs for small, local farmers.There are ways, however, to reshape our food consumption to better protect the environment and human health. To start, we need a new set of standards for evaluating what is and isn’t healthy when it comes to food. In the industrialized world, we need to move beyond counting calories, and to look at whether our food was raised with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics that harm our health and the environment. The most profound changes “eaters” can make include eating less meat or eliminating it from their diet, supporting food produced without agrochemicals, and buying locally grown food. While eating is not a choice, we do have the right—and the responsibility—to choose how our food is produced. From shopping at a local farmers’ market to preparing meatless meals to buying fair-traded coffee and cocoa, small but growing groups of consumers all over the world are voting with their forks and their wallets to build a healthier food system

Chapter 05: Moving Toward a Less Consumptive Economy

Michael Renner

Today’s industrial economies are able to churn out large quantities of goods with considerable ease and at such low cost that there is great incentive to regard most merchandise as throwaways—intended to fall apart easily—rather than designing and manufacturing for durability. This mentality, perpetuated by unbridled consumption and the quest for endless economic growth, has brought humanity to the edge of an environmental abyss. Our world is one of resource overuse, widespread air and water pollution, diminished ecosystems, and a delicate climate balance that is being unhinged.We need a major reduction in the human claim on Earth’s resources. But because humanity’s poorest desperately need to increase their consumption, the rich will need to cut their use of energy and materials—some argue by as much as 90 percent over the next few decades.A less consumptive economy is possible, but it will take government action, consumer education, and growing numbers of corporate trailblazers to make it happen. Innovative opportunities to curb consumption now exist at the government, business, and consumer levels—many of which are already being put into action. These include: developing environmental standards and other regulatory tools; undertaking ecological tax reforms that make market prices reflect the full ecological costs of products; reducing the raw materials needed to create a product; utilizing “cradle-to-cradle” or “closed-loop” systems where the byproducts of one factory become the feedstock of another; implementing “extended producer responsibility” laws that require companies to take back products at the end of their useful life; and extending and deepening the lives of products by making them more durable, and easier to repair and upgrade.

Chapter 06: Purchasing for People and the Planet

Lisa Mastny

Spending billions of dollars annually on goods and services—often more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of entire countries—corporations, international organizations, universities, and other large institutions are key in fostering the shift toward an environmentally sustainable world. Through their daily purchases, these mega-consumers hold considerable sway over the health and stability of many of the world’s most fragile ecological systems.In some industrial countries, government purchasing accounts for as much as 25 percent of GDP. Government procurement in the European Union alone totaled more than $1 trillion in 2001, or 14 percent of GDP. In North America, it reached $2 trillion, or about 18 percent of GDP. Universities, too, spend billions of dollars each year on everything from campus buildings to cafeteria food. In the United States, colleges bought some $250 billion in goods and services in 1999—equivalent to nearly 3 percent of U.S. GDP. And the United Nations spent nearly $14 billion on goods and services in 2000.Because of the large-scale, systematic approach that most institutions apply to their purchasing decisions, a single purchase made by one professional buyer or department can have a tremendous ripple effect, influencing the products used by hundreds or even thousands of individuals. Green purchasing—buying products that are better for the environment and for human health—can save institutions money as well. Recycled toner cartridges, low-flush toilets, and compact fluorescent lamps are just a few of the items that bring considerable cost savings, whether upfront or over their lifetimes. Moreover, for many corporations, green purchasing can be a way to win recognition—as well as “PR” points—from both supporters and critics

Chapter 07: Linking Globalization, Consumption, and Governance

Hilary French

The rapid globalization of the consumer economy during the 1990s was closely linked with a general economic boom in the form of more manufactured goods and services, and greater monetary flows across international borders. One subcomponent of this expansion has been the rapid growth in trade in a range of environmentally sensitive commodities, such as minerals, forest products, fish, and agricultural produce—all which leave their mark on the planet’s natural systems. Additionally, by stretching the physical distance between the location where a product is first made to where it is later used and then disposed of, today’s global economies tend to insulate end consumers from the various negative environmental and social impacts of their purchases. Shifting to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production is a global challenge. Global alliances need to be strengthened to create an economy based on protecting rather than plundering the planet’s wealth. This can be achieved in part by strengthening international environmental treaties and institutions, revamping world trade rules, and promoting more effective collaboration among international institutions, national governments, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations

Chapter 08: Rethinking the Good Life

Gary Gardner and Erik Assadourian

If you are very poor, there is no doubt that greater income can improve your life. But once the basics are secured, well-being does not necessarily correlate with wealth. Today, many discussions of sustainability focus on the ecological or economic measures needed for a healthy world. But the social and psychological needs of human beings also shape our cultures, and help to determine whether our civilization is sustainable or not. Most governments make ongoing growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) a leading priority of domestic policy, under the assumption that wealth secured is well-being delivered. Yet undue emphasis on generating wealth, particularly by encouraging heavy consumption, may be yielding disappointing returns. Overall quality of life is suffering in some of the world’s richest countries as people experience greater stress and time pressures and less satisfying social relationships, and as the natural environment shows more and more signs of distress. By redefining prosperity to emphasize a higher quality of life, rather than the mere accumulation of goods, individuals, communities, and governments can focus on delivering what people most desire. Indeed, a new understanding of “the good life” can be built not around wealth, but around well-being: having basic needs met, along with freedom, health, security, and satisfying social roles.