Energy from My Backyard - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 232

Figure 7.5. Change in electricity generation by 2035 according to the IEA baseline
scenario. The demand for electricity in emerging economies will drive a 70 per cent
increase in worldwide production. Use of coal is expected to increase in Asia and decrease
in the United States and Europe. Growth of nuclear power will mostly occur in China. Gas
and renewables will increase worldwide, the latter accounting for half of new global
capacity. Source: IEA ( 2012a ) (modified).
Recent economic development has not been evenly spread. Nearly a billion people
are undernourished, while 222 million metric tons of food are wasted every year in the
wealthier countries. The world's richest 500 million people produce 50 per cent of the
world's carbon dioxide emissions, whereas the poorest half a billion are responsible for just
7 per cent (Biello 2011b ; FAO 2009 ).
Increases in energy production will have a major impact on the world's supply of fresh
water. Water consumption is projected to rise by 85 per cent between 2010 and 2035
as a result of more water-intensive power generation and growing reliance on biofuels
and unconventional fossil fuels (IEA 2012a ) . According to Alexander Mueller, assistant
director-general for environment and natural resources of the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), “It is time to stop treating food, water and energy as
separate issues and tackle the challenge of intelligently balancing the needs of these three
sectors, building on synergies, finding opportunities to reduce waste and identifying ways
that water can be shared and reused, rather than competed for.” (FAO 2011b )
Since the problem of unsustainable growth became apparent in the early 1970s, an
enormous body of evidence has been gathered to try to understand its extent. According to
the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), approximately 60 per cent
of what it calls “ecosystem services” (the resources provided to humans by ecosystems,
including fresh water, fisheries, air and water purification, and the regulation of climate,
natural hazards and pests) are being degraded or used unsustainably (MEA 2005).
The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the most prominent environmental
NGOs, developed its own system for measuring the impact of human activity on the
biosphere: the ecological footprint. This measures humanity's impact on the Earth in terms
of the amount of biologically productive land and sea required to deliver the resources
we use and to absorb our waste. In 2005, the global ecological footprint was 17.5 billion
global hectares, which equates to 2.7 hectares per person. 4 On the supply side, WWF
estimated the total productive area or biocapacity of the Earth at just 13.6 billion global
hectares, or 2.1 global hectares per person (WWF 2008, 15). This effectively means that