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3 Building a Green Economy The Case for an Economic Paint Job ROBERT B. RICHARDSON Humans in the twenty-first century are confronted with a new generation of environmental and economic problems of an unprecedented scale and scope. The dual demographic forces of population growth and wealth accumulation have led to a global economy that has, by most accounts, exceeded the natural limits of the biosphere in several ways (Global Footprint Network, 2010; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Evidence can be found in studies of the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, and desertification, all of which threaten the long-term viability of economies and livelihoods. Rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions imply an escalating threat of unrestrained climate change, along with potentially calamitous consequences for humans. The damages from climate change are likely to be economically significant and distributed unevenly around the world, based on physical vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Ecosystems are increasingly threatened by both quantitative losses in areal extent (for example, through deforestation) and qualitative degradation of ecosystem structure or functions (for example, from pollution or invasive species). The losses in biodiversity from these ecosystem changes are expected to have dire consequences for human welfare, health, livelihoods, and food security. Combined with human development stressors such as food insecurity, freshwater scarcity, and malnourishment, the environmental crises are compounding existing social problems related to unemployment, economic inequity, social instability, and poverty. And the widening wealth gap between the rich and poor globally and within the United States highlights grave concerns about the anticipated friction and conflict associated with rising inequality. Increasingly, the global economy can be characterized by its dependence on the ongoing exploitation of Earth’s natural resources as well as its people, and it has been described as an extension of a colonial system (Cato, 2009). The world economy has expanded at unprecedented rates in recent decades; global economic expansion has increased approximately fivefold since 1950, and it has nearly quadrupled in the last quarter-century (UNEP, 2011). This has contributed to an overall rise in average household income, but that growth has been increasingly concentrated in favor of higherincome households. Meanwhile, roughly 60 percent of the world’s major ecosystem services that support life and livelihoods have been degraded; world fisheries stocks are declining because of overfishing, and some 40 percent of agricultural land has been degraded in the past fifty years by land use practices that have contributed to erosion, salinization, soil compaction, nutrient depletion, pollution, and urbanization (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). 4| Robert B. Richardson These trends suggest that the current economic paradigm has led to growth that substantially increased material wealth—particularly for higher-income households—but this growth was accomplished through the depletion of natural resource stocks and the degradation of the functions and vital services of ecosystems. World population reached seven billion people in late 2011, and current estimates of population growth project three billion more people by 2050. Combined with a projected quadrupling of the global economy by 2050, these estimates imply a daunting increase in the demand for food, the consumption of physical goods, the demand for fuels to produce and transport those goods, and the demand for natural resources (especially land and water), leading to escalating impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). For several decades, these issues have been the fragmented concerns of some scientists, economists, and activists, but recently they have begun to converge and attract the attention of policymakers and the media. These accumulated threats are increasingly viewed as an integrated problem, a supersized externality generated by an economic system that is based on competition, profit maximization, and the pursuit of unremitting growth. Furthermore, given the long-term outlook necessary to address these problems, there is growing evidence that our political and economic institutions may be inadequately equipped to deal with these issues because of myopia. Politicians are motivated by short-term election cycles, investors expect quicker payback periods, and financial markets do not reward decisions based on long time horizons. Conventional tools and approaches to these integrated issues will be hopelessly ineffectual at creating the kind of economy that acknowledges the limits of global ecosystems, advances equity and fairness, and facilitates cooperation toward mutually beneficial decisions and policies among and within countries. Evidence of these mounting problems paints a dark picture of the state of the global economy, and in many ways, the national economy of the United States is emblematic of the greater problem . In chromatic...

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