Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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Wood demand should be set by maintaining sensible material comforts rather
than by striving to perpetuate extravagant consumption delivered in wasteful
throw-away packaging.
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As in the case of crops, we should be supporting research leading to new tree
cultivars that will combine superior productivity with hardiness.
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And, unrealistic as it may seem, rational resource management on the global level
should eventually incorporate a degree of sharing that would reduce the immen-
sity of existing inter- and intranational inequalities.
Even a partial fuli llment of these rational desiderata would lead to an aggregate
global demand for primary production in the year 2050 only marginally (25%-35%)
higher than today's harvest of phytomass. In contrast, if the global means of resource
claims were to rise to the level of per capita consumption that now prevails in the
richest countries—U.S. meat intakes are now three times the global mean, Japanese
seafood consumption is 3.5 times the world average, and the EU's consumption of
industrial roundwood is three times the global mean—then the doubling or even
tripling of global phytomass and zoomass harvests would be necessary.
But there could be no tripling of global phytomass harvests by 2050, and
although doubling is not an impossible total to contemplate, it, too, is not very
likely. Even the FAO's liberal scenarios foresee no global doubling of total food
production, although they assume 9.1 billion people in 2050 and almost 9.4 billion
in 2080 and anticipate a very high average food supply of almost 3,200 kcal/day
(FAO 2012). They envisage a worldwide agricultural production increase of some
60% by 2050 and nearly 80% by 2080, although the latter achievement would
require a 100% increase in overall agricultural output in today's low-income coun-
tries, as well as the doubling of 2010 global meat production.
Caution, foresight, and determination in pursuit of rational solutions could help
us to keep the level of global harvests within acceptable limits. The continuation of
many irrational trends and the pursuit of patently unrealistic expectations guarantee
the opposite. The results are not preordained and the worst expectations are not
inevitable, but to avoid many undesirable outcomes, the world's richest nations will
have to modify their expectations and moderate their claims. If the billions of poor
people in low-income countries were to claim even half the current per capita har-
vests prevailing in afl uent economies, too little of the Earth's primary production
would be left in its more or less natural state, and very little would remain for
mammalian species other than ours.