Topic: Sustainable Development

UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders. Nafeez Ahmed, Medium. Sept. 4, 2015.

Why the new Sustainable Development agenda is “fundamentally compromised” by corporate interests

The problem is that this business-centric vision of “inclusive economic growth” is barely different from the failed neoliberal paradigm of market fundamentalism, which critics say has widened inequalities and accelerated debt.

this article's criticism pertains to UN's Millennium Development Goals, but the way that corporate interests and politics and ideological agendas and business-as-usual interfere with the process and with attainment of outcomes seems just as pertinent as well to process related to UNFCCC and IPCC etc.

for instance:

the SDG’s focus on cultivating more “growth, industrialisation and urbanisation” fails to account for “ecological footprints as compared to planetary boundaries.”

As the politics of development are completely removed from discussion in the SDG process, this agenda gets adopted by default without any deliberation or debate. Add to this the myopic focus on growth as the only solution and we get the antithesis of sustainability or inclusive economics as a result

“The big corporate powers... and the rich nations have already agreed on what the fig leaf will look like,” said Ladha. “Whatever the SDGs end up saying will, by the very logic of the system they serve, promote a growth-at-all-costs, neoliberal game plan of trickle-down economics and climate destruction.”

In search of lost time: the rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy.
Erik Gómez-Baggethun , José Manuel Naredo

Abstract: International environmental policy has failed to reverse climate change, resource depletion and the generalized decline of biodiversity and ecological life support systems. This paper traces economic roots of current environmental problems and examines the evolution of sustainability policy since the publication of Club of Rome’s report Limits to growth and the celebration of the first Earth summit in Stockholm in 1972 to the publication of UNEP’s Green economy report and the celebration of the last Earth summit in Rio 2012. Our emphasis is on the evolving framing of the relations between growth and the environment and the role of markets and states in the sustainability policy agenda. We review influential policy documents and Earth summit declarations since the early 1970s. Three major changes are identified in international sustainability discourse: (1) an analytical shift from a notion of growth versus the environment to a notion of growth for the environment, (2) a shift in focus from direct public regulation to market-based instruments, and (3) a shift from a political to a technocratic discourse. We note that attempts in sustainability policy to address the conflict between growth and the environment have pulled back severely since the 1970s and discuss the observed patterns of change in relation to changes in the balance of political and ideological forces. We conclude summarizing main insights from the review and discussing perspectives of the sustainability debate on growth and the environment.

More growth? An unfeasible option to overcome critical energy constraints and climate change.
Iñigo Capellán-Pérez , Margarita Mediavilla, Carlos de Castro, Óscar Carpintero, Luis Javier Miguel

Abstract: Growing scientific evidence shows that world energy resources are entering a period shaped by the depletion of high-quality fuels, whilst the decline of the easy-to-extract oil is a widely recognized ongoing phenomenon. The end of the era of cheap and abundant energy flows brings the issue of economic growth into question, stimulating research for alternatives as the de-growth proposal. The present paper applies the system dynamic global model WoLiM that allows economic, energy and climate dynamics to be analyzed in an integrated way. The results show that, if the growth paradigm is maintained, the decrease in fossil fuel extraction can only be partially compensated by renewable energies, alternative policies and efficiency improvements, very likely causing systemic energy shortage in the next decades. If a massive transition to coal would be promoted to try to compensate the decline of oil and gas and maintain economic growth, the climate would be then very deeply disturbed. The results suggest that growth and globalization scenarios are, not only undesirable from the environmental point of view, but also not feasible. Furthermore, regionalization scenarios without abandoning the current growth GDP focus would set the grounds for a pessimistic panorama from the point of view of peace, democracy and equity. In this sense, an organized material de-growth in the North followed by a steady state shows up as a valid framework to achieve global future human welfare and sustainability. The exercise qualitatively illustrates the magnitude of the challenge: the most industrialized countries should reduce, on average, their per capita primary energy use rate at least four times and decrease their per capita GDP to roughly present global average levels. Differently from the current dominant perceptions, these consumption reductions might actually be welfare enhancing. However, the attainment of these targets would require deep structural changes in the socioeconomic systems in combination with a radical shift in geopolitical relationships.