Environment and Globalization: The Five Propositions
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By way of exploring the linkages between environment and globalization, let us posit five key propositions on how these two areas are linked, with a special focus on those linkages that are particularly pertinent for policy-making and policy-makers. The purpose of these propositions is to highlight the possible implications of the dominant trends. This is neither an exhaustive list nor a set of predictions. It is rather an identification of the five important trajectories which are of particular importance to policy-makers because (a) these are areas that have a direct bearing on national and international policy and, (b) importantly, they can be influenced by national and international policy.
Contents
Proposition #1
- The rapid acceleration in global economic activity and our dramatically increased demands for critical, finite natural resources undermine our pursuit of continued economic prosperity.
The premise of this proposition is that a sound environment is essential to realizing the full potential of globalization. Conversely, the absence of a sound environment can significantly undermine the promise of economic prosperity through globalization.
The notion that rising pressures on, and dwindling stocks of, critical natural resources can dramatically restrain the motors of economic growth is not new.[1] What is new, however, is the realization that the spectacular economic expansion we have been seeing has made the resource crunch a pressing reality that could easily become the single biggest challenge to continued economic prosperity.
The premise of the proposition is fairly simple. First, natural resources—oil, timber, metals, etc.—are the raw materials behind much of global economic growth. Second, there is ultimately a finite amount of these resources available for human use. Third, and importantly, the quantum of resources being used has grown exponentially in recent years, especially with the spectacular economic expansion of large developing economies—such as India and China—and increasing global prosperity. Fourth, we are already witnessing increasing global competition for such resources; and not just market, but geopolitical forces are being mobilized to ensure continued supplies and controls over critical resources.[2]
Add these facts together and you arrive at a realization that sooner rather than later the degradation of ecological processes—especially fragile ecological systems that are central to the preservation of our essential life systems—could cause a major hiccup in continued global economic growth, and possibly become the single most important threat to the continuation of current globalization trajectories.[3] The dynamic is not new, but it has suddenly become more real and more immediate. Growth, of course, is a paradox in the context of sustainable development.[4] We need growth in order to meet the needs of people, especially the poorest among us; but permanent global growth is impossible in a finite system. Studies demonstrate that we already exceed the productive capacity of nature by 25[5] to 30 per cent,[6] and that 60 per cent[7] of the ecosystems are currently overused.
Although scares about “limits to growth”[8] have proved less than credible in the past, simple economic logic (and available trends) argues that, as competition for scarce natural resources increases, prices will be driven up—and sooner than we might have assumed. In the past, technology has—and in the future, it certainly could—help to alleviate some of these pressures by developing new solutions and by more widely deploying existing technological solutions. However, the prospects of higher demand, growing prices and dwindling stocks are already propelling new races for control over key resources. The race is now on not just for oil, but for metals, minerals, timber and even for recyclable waste.[9] For many developing countries endowed with critical resources in high demand, this provides an opportunity to harness the power of globalization and pull themselves out of poverty. Past experience suggests that national and global economies have not been particularly good at allowing for the benefits of resources to flow down to the poor;[10] the challenge today is to find the ways and means to do exactly that.
A parallel challenge is to decrease the adverse effects of resource competition on the poor.[11] For example,“fish prices are expected to rise, reducing the availability and affordability of fish for low-income families in developing countries.”[12] In areas like the Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia, where 50 million people depend on fish for their food and their livelihoods,[13] poor families will lose food security while the wealthy, both domestically and globally, bid up the price of food the poor cannot afford. Populations dependent on the extraction or exploitation of natural resources, or on natural systems and ecosystem services, could lose their livelihoods as local sources are depleted (fisheries, forests, etc.) or degraded (soil fertility for agriculture) and will need assistance to make the transition to alternative employment.
While market mechanisms and technology could possibly assist in handling increasing resource competition, they offer no solutions for running out of ecosystem services.[14] This is a critical threat to the continuation of current globalization trajectories and the preservation of our lives on the planet. Many critical ecosystem services—including watershed filtration, soil fertility and climate stability—are un-valued (or under-valued) and, therefore, as these ecological services are threatened, there are no market signals that would spur technological development of alternative supplies. More importantly, we do not have the technological ability to create substitutes for ecological services at the volume or at the costs that would be needed.
Environmental degradation could also impact productivity through damages to health. For example, international agencies found that 2.5 million people in the Asia-Pacific region die every year due to environmental problems including air pollution (Air pollution emissions), unsafe water and poor sanitation.[15] Ignoring environmental costs destroys value. The “natural capital” of ecosystem services (such as watersheds, which provide clean water) is drawn down, creating a need to pay for services (like water filtration plants) that could have been provided for free, in perpetuity, if sustainably managed.[16] Similarly, environmental degradation, global and local, will affect the agricultural sector, on which the majority of the world’s poor depend directly for their survival. For example, recent data suggest that global climate change could reduce South Asia’s wheat area by half.[17] While gains in productivity in temperate areas could partially offset the difference, whether poorer tropical countries could afford to buy food from richer regions of the world is uncertain. To avoid famine, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research has already called for accelerated efforts to develop drought-, heat- and flood-resistant strains of staple crops.[18] The Worldwatch Institute estimates that 17 per cent of cropland in China, and a staggering 28 per cent in India, is seriously degraded by erosion, water-logging, desertification and other forms of degradation.[19]
It is most likely, therefore, that decreased environmental stability will create more hostile conditions for economic growth and also place new pressures on international cooperation. Two recent reports have documented and drawn global attention to this discussed “possibility,” which has started to become a reality. On one hand, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment[20] has meticulously documented the slide in the environmental health of the planet and how we are pushing the limits of many critical resources. The recent rise in oil prices has had the effect of making this connection tangible and recognizable even to ordinary citizens. On the other hand, the recently released Stern Review[21] has bluntly suggested that these environmental pressures have now begun impacting global economic processes and that impacts of climate change could create losses of 5–10 per cent of global GDP, and decrease welfare by up to 20 per cent if damages include non-market impacts and are weighted for ethical/distribution effects. This calculation includes estimations of damages caused by flooding, lower crop yields, extreme weather-related damages, and other direct impacts on the environment and human health.
Together, and in the context of galloping economic growth in Asia and elsewhere, these and other such findings suggest that mounting environmental degradation could impose very significant costs on globalization and economic growth. But they also hold the promise that an improved environment is central to human well-being in ecological as well as in economic terms.
Proposition #2
- The linked processes of globalization and environmental degradation pose new security threats to an already insecure world. They impact the vulnerability of ecosystems and societies, and the least resilient ecosystems. The livelihoods of the poorest communities are most at risk.
With globalization, when insecurity increases and violence erupts, the ramifications become global in reach. The forces of globalization, when coupled with those of environmental degradation, expand concepts of threat and security, both individually and through their connections. We have already begun recognizing new global threats from non-state groups and individuals, and security is now being defined more broadly to include, among other, wars between and within states; transnational organized crime; internal displacements and migration; nuclear and other weapons; poverty; infectious disease; and environmental degradation.[22]
To take one pressing example, the World Resources Institute (WRI) reports that:[23]
Water scarcity is already a major problem for the world’s poor, and changes in rainfall and temperature associated with climate change will likely make this worse. Even without climate change, the number of people affected by water scarcity is projected to increase from 1.7 billion today to 5 billion by 2025.[24] In addition, crop yields are expected to decline in most tropical and sub-tropical regions as rainfall and temperature patterns change with a changing climate.[25] A recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that developing nations may experience an 11 per cent decrease in lands suitable for rain-fed agriculture by 2080 due to climate change.[26] There is also some evidence that disease vectors such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes will spread more widely.[27] At the same time, global warming may bring an increase in severe weather events like cyclones and torrential rains.
All of this imperils human security, which in turn drives societal insecurity and, in many cases, violence. Placed in the context of globalization, violence and insecurity can spill out since now they can travel further, just as people, goods and services can.
Security is about protecting people from critical and pervasive threats.[28] This ranges from the security of nations to that of individuals and of societies. Human security is about creating systems that give individuals and communities the building blocks to live with dignity. Livelihoods are, therefore, an essential element of human security. Acting together, globalization and environmental stress may directly threaten the livelihoods of the poor, i.e., the capabilities, material and social assets and activities required for a means of living, and decrease their ability to cope with, and recover from, environmental stresses and shocks.
For “winners” of the process, globalization becomes an integrating phenomenon—one that brings together [[market]s], ideas, individuals, goods, services and communications. For the “losers” in the process, however, it can be a marginalizing phenomenon.[29] Just as the winners come closer to each other they become more “distant” from the losers. The dependence within society on each other becomes diminished as transboundary dependence increases. To use a basic example, as West African consumers develop a liking for imported rice, their “links” to farmers on other continents who export rice to them increase even as their “links” to farmers in their own country growing cassava decrease. Environmental stress can have a similarly marginalizing impact on the vulnerable and the weak. It is quite clear from the evidence now that even though climate change will eventually impact everyone, it will impact the poorest communities first and hardest. In the case of desertification, we already see the poorest and most vulnerable communities being displaced the most.[30] In essence, the already insecure and vulnerable are pushed to greater depths of insecurity and vulnerability.
The combined effects of globalization-related marginalization and environment-related marginalization can wreak havoc on whatever resilience poor communities might otherwise have possessed. An illustrative example is the case of small fishers in the Caribbean.[31] On one hand, globalization forces of advanced extraction technologies, reduced transportation costs, increased ability to keep fishstock fresh over long distances and increasing global demands from far-away [[market]s] combine to drive the small fisher out of the market. On the other, the very same forces dramatically decrease the amount of fish in the ocean, thereby further reducing the resilience of the small fisher. As globalization changes the patterns of environmental dependence, it may marginalize parts of Caribbean society and disintegrate local security networks.
In many ways, climate change is the ultimate threat to global security because it can existentially threaten security at every level from the individual to the planetary.[32] In a world where one-quarter of the people in developing countries (1.3 billion) already survive on fragile lands,[33] and where approximately 60 per cent of ecosystem services examined are being degraded or used unsustainably, including freshwater; capture fisheries; air and water purification; and climate regulation,[34] the implications of global climate change are becoming evident among the already vulnerable. For example, impacts of climate change on Inuit livelihoods have been recorded; evacuations of low-lying coastal populations, such as Vanuatu’s, have begun; and more dramatic adaptation and survival challenges in vulnerable states such as Bangladesh are expected. Climate change-related sea level rise and agricultural disruption could cause 150 million environmental refugees in the year 2050 which could exacerbate insecurity in host countries and regionally.[35] The death of low-lying coastal states and changes in their economic zones and maritime boundaries may cause further instability.
Three key security challenges in the context of climate change are water scarcity, food shortages and disrupted access to strategic minerals such as oil. Historically, these have been the cause of violence and war. International experience with the linkage between natural resources and conflict calls for resolute action as natural resources can fuel and motivate violent conflict (e.g., conflict diamonds funding rebel groups in Angola and Sierra Leone; conflicts over distribution of resource profits from timber and natural gas in Indonesia; oil as key factor in Iraqi invasion of Kuwait).[36] Environmental stress unleashed by potential climate change could trigger international migration and, possibly, civil wars. In fragile circumstances, environmental stress could act as an additional destabilizing factor exacerbating conflict as it combines with other political and social factors.
Conditions of insecurity and conflict impose high costs on the pursuit of sustainable development just as they impose hurdles in the way of globalization.[37] Both processes require a measure of stability without which only survival considerations will be pursued. Conflict sets back the prospects for sustainable development, often by decades, by setting in motion a negative spiral—environmental degradation leads to more competition for scarce resources, leading the powerful to secure the resources for their use, leading to conflict, which leads to worsened social relations, smash-and-grab resource use, greater resentment, etc. Security—from national to human—is, therefore, a prerequisite for realizing the benefits of sustainable development as well as those of globalization.
Proposition #3
- The newly prosperous and the established wealthy will have to come to terms with the limitations of the ecological space in which both must operate, and also with the needs and rights of those who have not been as lucky.
Consider the following:
- Emerging economies now dominate and drive global growth.[38] Last year their combined output accounted for more than half of total world GDP.
- China has become a major importer of just about all natural resources. It is now also the world’s largest importer of recyclable waste material.[39]
- “About 700,000 Chinese tourists visited France last year and the number is climbing annually. By 2020, the World Tourism Organization estimates, 100 million Chinese will make foreign trips each year.”[40]
- Mittal Steel, a company born in India, with its recent hostile takeover of Arcelor, is now the world’s largest and most global steel company.[41] While the company’s financial headquarters is in Europe, much of the company’s growth has been in emerging [[market]s]—India and China, but also Latin America and elsewhere in Asia.
- “By one calculation, there are now more than 1.7 billion members of ‘the [class]’—nearly half of them in the developing world. A lifestyle and culture that became common in Europe, North America, Japan and a few other pockets of the world in the twentieth century is going global in the twenty-first.”[42] “China and India alone claim more than 20 per cent of the global Class total—with a combined [class] of 362 million, more than in all of Western Europe.”[43]
The point of the above is that the key decisions that will affect—and are already affecting—the trajectories of globalization as well as environmental processes are no longer solely Northern. They are increasingly coming from a few large developing countries, especially China and India, but also a handful of other large developing countries. A palpable excitement accompanies this dramatic rise, but there are challenges as well as opportunities.
The dramatic growth in these new economies has forced them to think about the management of that growth, including its environmental dimensions. In many cases, they are doing so on their own terms and in the context of their own specific realities. China, for example, has embarked on substantial environmental programs. Some immediate programs are fueled by the upcoming Olympic Games to be held in China,[44] but many are much longer-term initiatives that emerge from an explicit realization by China that the costs of environmental degradation are a major strain on the country’s prospects for continued prosperity, and threaten to affect its standing in the world.
The rapid rise of this set of erstwhile developing countries should also trigger reflection within established industrialized economies on the questions of growth and consumption. It is not viable—nor was it ever—to urge consumption restraint on the newly prosperous while continuing on paths of high consumption oneself. While the question of consumption will be discussed more specifically later, the point to be made here is that the newly prosperous as well as those who have been affluent for much longer will now have to come to terms with the limitations of the ecological space in which both must operate and also with the needs and rights of those who have not been as lucky.
The interaction of globalization and environment are writ large in the new realities unleashed by the focus of global possibilities in terms of both processes moving southwards. For example, it is popular to say that “China is the workshop to the world”;[45] but it is also worth asking ”who is the customer of this workshop’s products?” and “who are the suppliers to the workshop?” Of course, China is used here as a metaphor because it is the most dominant example of a host of rapidly developing countries providing manufacturing to the whole world, industrialized as well as developing. But to the extent that China (and some other countries) have emerged as the new “workshop” of the world, the suppliers to this workshop are the still poor raw material-based economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and the customers of the products from this workshop are the populations in the North and within the affluent pockets in the South. To consider the “workshop” metaphor seriously requires placing the “workshop” within a supply chain that is (a) truly global in nature, and (b) not just an economic supply chain, but an environmental one.
None of the above, however, must distract our attention from the fact that countries that industrialized earlier—in North America, Europe and East Asia/Oceania—are still major movers of globalization and environmental processes[46] and have long-standing and continuing responsibilities in this regard. Many of the most pressing environmental problems that the world faces today are not caused by developing countries and, in fact, belong to a different industrialization era. The rise, and the scale of the rise, of new emerging economies in Asia should be a moment of reflection for the “old” rich countries about their own consumption and resource-use patterns. The ecological space for the North is constricting and societies that continue on the path of highly consumptive growth themselves have no right or standing to ask the “new” rich to restrain their appetites. Certainly not until they themselves have done so.
At the same time, today it does mean that emerging economies at least have the opportunity to shape the future in ways that they did not have before. They could choose to follow distinct and different paths of their own that stem from their own particular developmental conditions as well as an understanding of today’s world. In essence, they have an opportunity—and hopefully the motivation—to bend the curve[47] in ways that “old” industrialization did not or could not.
China, for example, is a particularly interesting and important example of the opportunities for paradigm shifts that might emerge from this shift in the global centre of gravity. Not only is China a major importer of just about all natural resources (and so it will remain), it is emerging as a new hub of recycling.[48] China—and, increasingly, India—lie at the cusp of a new set of challenges and opportunities. They seem aware of the opportunity they have to do things differently from countries that industrialized earlier and under different circumstances. The most pressing global environmental problems that the world faces today are not of their making; but they have a real opportunity to undo these problems by “bending” the proverbial curve that expresses the relationship between growth and environmental degradation. The question is whether these emerging economies of the South will have the foresight to embrace the opportunity and to chart a development path that is different from that which had been followed by those who came before them, and whether the “old” affluent economies of the North will demonstrate a shared commitment to assist the developing world in charting such a path and by demonstrably taking the lead in curtailing their own unsustainable patterns.[49]
Proposition #4
- Consumption—in both North and South—will define the future of globalization as well as the global environment.
To put this proposition most bluntly, the central challenge to the future of environment and globalization is consumption, not growth. Fueled by the aspirational “norms” of consumption[50] that also become globalized through, in part, the global media and advertising, consumption changes magnify the footprints of growth. For example, while global population doubled between 1950 and 2004, global wood use more than doubled, global water use roughly tripled, and consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas increased nearly five times.[51]
A focus on consumption immediately draws our attention to the challenge of inequity. That challenge cannot be brushed aside. A simple but powerful illustration suggests that on average, in 2000, one American consumed as much energy as 2.1 Germans, 12.1 Colombians, 28.9 Indians, 127 Haitians or 395 Ethiopians.[52] These numbers are, of course, stylized but they do help make the point that we live in a massively unequal world and that these inequities are central to the future of globalization as well as the environment. Also, one should note that national averages hide massive consumption inequity within nearly all societies. The very affluent within developing countries over-consume just as the poor within affluent countries under-consume.
The scope of the challenge is highlighted by the 2006 Living Planet Report[53] which points out that, based on current projections, humanity will be using two planets’ worth of natural resources by 2050—if those resources have not run out by then. Humanity’s ecological footprint—the demand people place upon the natural world—has increased to the point where the Earth is unable to keep up in the struggle to regenerate. The key to resolving this challenge is to de-link consumption from growth, and growth from development:[54] to provide the poor with the opportunity to increase their use of resources even as the affluent reduce their share so that a sustainable level and global equity can be achieved.[55]
Technology is one key element in meeting this challenge. The policy decisions we now take that will influence future trajectories of technology development and deployment—and of consumption choices—will shape the interaction between globalization and the global environment. The good news is that these trajectories can be shaped by policy. Technology has been one of the great drivers of modern globalization.[56] It has also become one of the principal drivers of environmental processes. Transport technologies, for example, have not only made the world a smaller and more “global” planet, they have also resulted in new environmental stress, especially through increased atmospheric carbon concentrations. Technology has sped up prosperity for many, but it has also allowed extraction of resources—fish, timber, metals, minerals, etc.—at unprecedented rates, thereby placing new and massive pressures on stocks.
At the same time, technological advances have allowed, in some areas, reduced environmental stress. Evidence suggests, for example, that China’s economic growth has come with a relatively lesser increase in emissions than what had happened earlier in Europe and North America because China has been able to “leapfrog” to technologies that are much cleaner than Europe and North America were using at similar stages in their development. Although its emission rates per GDP are still high, they are decreasing and have been halved in the last decade.[57] For example, their fuel economy standards are higher than those of the United States.[58]
Technological solutions will inevitably determine the future of globalization as well as the global environment. But they will do so within the context of global consumption demands. Technology cannot change the demands or help us satisfy all of them but it can, through globalization, help meet these demands in a more planet-friendly way.
Automobiles, in fact, are an interesting area of interplay between technological advances and consumption growth. Although the far greater number of automobiles more than makes up for these advances, the fact is that the automobile today is many orders of magnitude cleaner in environmental terms than automobiles were 30 or 40 years ago. The promise of technology also lies in the fact that, even with existing knowledge, we have the ability to make automobiles an order of magnitude cleaner than they are today. The point, of course, is that technology does not operate in a vacuum. In particular, it cannot be understood outside of the context of consumption.[59]
Ultimately, the trajectories of the future—as well as the technologies available—will be shaped by our aspirations of what a “good life” really is.[60] The moral and spiritual dimension of planetary aspirations may not seem like an appropriate subject for policy discussions, but it lies at the very heart of the type of global society that we want to live in and the type of global society that we are constructing. Not only are policy discussions impacted by aspirational decisions of society, they can in fact shape these aspirations. The Brundtland Report[61] released 20 years ago was very much an attempt to shape global aspirations on environment as well as what we now call globalization. Agenda 21, which emerged from the Rio Earth Summit 15 years ago, was another such attempt.[62] Since then, an array of other influential ideas have come from governments, civil society and business. For example, concepts of “natural capitalism,” industrial ecology, eco-efficiency, “Factor Ten” efficiency improvements, and “Global Transitions” have been proposed and some have gained currency in civic discourse, business strategy and government policy.[63]
The European Union has launched an initiative that aims to “reduce the negative environmental impacts generated by the use of natural resources in a growing economy,” decoupling growth and environmental impact.[64] Similarly, the U.K. has signalled a shift towards a “One Planet Economy,” with the launch of the government’s new U.K. Sustainable Development Framework.[65] Sweden has pledged to become the first “oil-free nation” by 2020 by switching to alternative fuels.[66] In short, key actors have begun to recognize—and some to implement—the notion that ultimately consumption will have to be constrained.
The purpose of this proposition, therefore, is not simply to say that consumption is the key to understanding globalization and the environment. It is to propose that de-linking consumption from growth, and growth from development is possible. That the promise of sustainable development is—or can be—an honest promise; honestly kept. It is also to suggest that policy interventions are necessary to make this transition and to offer the hope that slowly—albeit too slowly—this realization is coming to be accepted by decision-makers. The challenge, of course, is whether this slow realization will be able to trigger the much larger change in global consumption trajectories before it is too late.
Proposition #5
- Concerns about the global market and global environment will become even more intertwined and each will become increasingly dependent on the other.
Although still unrecognized by many, it is nonetheless a fact that a large proportion of existing global environmental policy is, in fact, based on creating, regulating and managing [[market]s]. The most obvious examples are direct trade-related instruments like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora (CITES) or the Basel Convention on Trade in Hazardous Waste. But even less obvious instruments such as the Climate Convention (especially through its emission trading provisions) or the Biodiversity Convention (through, for example, the Cartagena Protocol on living modified organisms) operate within created or existing marketplaces and markets are a central element of their design and implementation.
For their part, the managers of market interactions—most prominently in the area of international trade, but also in investment, subsidies, etc.—have also belatedly come to the conclusion that they cannot divorce market policies from environmental policy for long. To take international trade as an example, we see that a significant part of international trade is in environment-related goods—ranging from trade in resources such as timber or fish to flowers and species, and much more. Moreover, trade in just about all goods has environmental relevance in the manufacture, transport, disposal and use of those goods. The Preamble to the Marrakech Agreements establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) recognizes this clearly. And following its lead, the Doha Round of WTO negotiations has also acknowledged this intrinsic connection by placing environment squarely on the trade negotiation agenda.[67] Although those negotiations are currently stalled, the principle of the inclusion of environmental concerns on the trade agenda is no longer in question and is not in doubt.
Importantly, there is a synergy in the stated goals of the [[trade] and the environment] system. Both claim to work in the context of, and for the attainment of, sustainable development.[68] Given that international trade is a principal motor of globalization, one can argue that sustainable development should be considered an ultimate goal of globalization, just as it is the stated end-goal of the international trading system.
This integration of environment into trade policy and trade into environmental policy will only intensify. The hope, of course, is that not only the two policy issues, but also the two policy arenas, will interact more than they have to date; that each will recognize that they share the meta-goal of sustainable development; and that both will seek to reach that goal through collaboration. One must start, therefore, with the acceptance that policies that impact [[market]s] go beyond the WTO (e.g., supply chains, regional and bilateral arrangements, etc.) just as policies that impact the environment go beyond UNEP (e.g., national and local initiatives, private sector and civil society initiatives, etc.). Our concern here, therefore, is larger than to the future of WTO and UNEP; it is how environmental and market dynamics interact to reap the potential of globalization and environmental improvement.
One interesting example of how the interactions between markets and environment may play out beyond international trade is in the area of electronic waste.[69] The manufacture of electronic equipment is one of the world’s fastest growing industries. Yet, with the proliferation of such equipment also comes the growing environmental challenge of proper management of the equipment at the end of its useful life. As technology advances and the demands by consumers for new and advanced equipment soar, proper management of the waste will be of paramount importance. In 2004 alone, about 315 million personal computers became obsolete.[70] Despite efforts by many countries to tighten control over acceptable disposal methods, adopt processes to recover valuable constituents and use safe practices to deal with the hazardous constituents in e-wastes (e.g., cadmium, lead, beryllium, CFCs, brominated flame retardants, mercury, nickel and certain organic compounds), many difficulties lie ahead.
One interesting sub-component of this is the trade in refurbished mobile phones. Phones that are used and discarded in advanced industrialized countries (and some fast-industrializing developing countries) end up in poorer countries where they are refurbished and resold, soon to become useless and electronic-waste. By this time, however, there are few options for proper disposal and few affordable opportunities to return items to the original producer. Resolving this growing problem will require us to think outside of the confined boxes of “[[market]s]” and “environment.” For example, a mechanism could be established to fund the buy-back of mobile phone waste in developing countries wherein the funds are collected from producing companies (based on their average cost of buyback) and donors. The collection itself could be done by the same small entrepreneur who sells used phones, thereby contributing to livelihood, with the network of collection and compensation managed with civil society assistance, since they have far better access to local markets and entrepreneurs than large multinationals. Such a mechanism illustrates how a creative and integrated approach and the inclusion of relevant market actors can bring the benefits of global markets to the poorest communities in ways that are beneficial to the environment and lead to the shared goal of sustainable development.
Looking at the larger picture, one does begin to see the emerging recognition of the need for better integration among the key players. On the trade side, for example, the Doha Declaration and its reaffirmation of sustainable development as the meta-goal of global trade policy was a manifestation of this recognition. Soon afterwards, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) of 2002 also reaffirmed the centrality of the [[trade] and environment] connections in its Declaration and all its deliberations. However, the move from the declaratory to the regulatory remains mired in institutional challenges since our systems of global governance have been designed to keep the two issues apart rather than to inspire collaboration for the achievement of common goals.[71]
The central point of this proposition, then, is that even though the reality of the global marketplace and the global environment are intrinsically intertwined and becoming ever more so—through the mechanisms of international trade; manifestations of environmental stress; the changes in peoples’ livelihoods; and the actions of business and civil society—the processes of decision-making in these two areas are still far apart and only occasionally interact. The good news is that recent developments have nudged policy-makers in the two areas to talk to each other just a little bit more. To be meaningful, however, this nudge must soon convert into a real push and the stated common goal of sustainable development should become a central driver of coordinated policies.
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