Chapter 3:
Living in peace with the environment:
The environmental dimension of sustainability

Current generations should meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This definition of sustainable development was adopted at the World Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992.

Economic and social development issues are thus closely connected with environmental issues. In order to fulfil human rights in the long run, we need an intact biosphere. We can no longer assume this. The scale of our species' impact on the rest, with which we are bound in mutual dependence, is now such that we need to take deliberate steps to ensure that future generations have a liveable environment. The potential impact of global climate change is just one example of this.

We therefore need global patterns of economic production and distribution that correspond to worldwide social and cultural requirements and to ecological needs. As the United Nations Human Development Report 1999 indicates, we are far away from this aim. To find a solution to this problem is now humankind's greatest challenge.

Sustainability as a concept has developed broadly over the last 20 years. The seventies saw growing public and political awareness that our worldwide development and economic growth are on a track that can not be sustained indefinitely. The nineties have brought widespread awareness of problems ranging from carbon dioxide and other emissions into the atmosphere, to climate problems, deforestation, desertification, fresh water supply, soil degradation, depletion of marine resources, to the challenge of producing food for perhaps 10 billion people in 50 years while maintaining biodiversity.

In Rio the concept of sustainability was generally recognised as embracing aspects of resource utilisation and of socio-economic and cultural development. On one hand, it acknowledges the right of all people and all countries in the world to develop a better standard of living. On the other hand it recognises that our present lifestyle in the North cannot be extended to 10 billion people with the technologies we have today.

The most immediate constraints we have to deal with are environmental, and are associated with material use and transfers. Humanity has more than doubled natural material transfers into the environment in recent years. We have released into nature tens of thousands of new chemical and biochemical products. The results have often surprised us, as did the depletion of the ozone layer, which protects life on earth against ultraviolet radiation, as an artefact of industrial chemical release.

An information society offers a possible partial solution: "dematerialisation". We can reduce the amount of material extracted from, synthesised and dispersed into the environment per unit of economic activity. This is the key to long-term improvements, and to an equilibrium between economy and environment which encourages global equity.

Sustainability and the information society

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a central - perhaps predominant - role to play in eventually reaching sustainability and improvements in the quality of life. The Forum takes the position that whether we can reach a sustainable state will be decided in the course of shaping the future information society. (see Challenge 2025)

On the one hand, these technologies are major drivers of economic globalisation. Because of this they are now indirectly causing additional social and environmental burdens worldwide. This is typical of so-called rebound effects of technological progress. A particular technology may enable a particular good or service to be produced with the consumption of fewer material resources; but if it stimulates demand, including demand for other technologies, it may increase total resource use. (Large numbers of people travelling to meetings that discuss the information society could be taken as an ironic example.)

On the other hand, these technologies offer, in principle, huge opportunities for overcoming social exclusion, for supporting cultural diversity, for stimulating the economy and for reducing environmental burdens by increasing material productivity. While this so-called dematerialisation is a typical, promising feature of most technological progress, ICT has by far the highest potential in this regard. On top of that, ICT is the technological basis for an open worldwide information and knowledge society, and it is in this context that our mental images for the future will be shaped.

Whether information and communication technologies will lead to more sustainability, or not, essentially depends on the further development of the global economic and societal frameworks within which they are deployed, and on corresponding attitudes and values. Building such frameworks is the single most important challenge to politics and societies entering the 21st century.

Such frameworks require more than ideas: development along sustainable and equitable lines needs transfers of resources. We need global instruments that commit the industrialised states to support and co-finance social and ecological developments and improved standards, in countries in transition and in developing countries. In the long run, the result is likely to be something like a global civil society and a global citizenship.

Why do we need new frameworks -
is something lacking in global governance?

The world is now integrating economically into a single worldwide market. This essential aspect of the present globalisation process is strongly encouraged by the availability of ICT and its ability to eliminate distance. Any consideration of the information society must take this into account. Environmental issues often have to do with costs and competitiveness. World market conditions strongly influence environmental matters, and many other aspects of life for members of the information society.

By far the strongest existing frameworks for the global market are the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the rules of the world financial markets, and other organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We summarise the founding principles of these as free trade with deregulation - "laissez-faire free trade". Both originate from an era quite different from the information society: when states were far more powerful than commerce, and when ICT consisted mostly of the electric telegraph. They are solely régimes for trade. As such, they are necessarily concerned primarily with the short term. They should be upgraded in order to comply with issues of sustainability and the environment.

We observe that there is a wide range of conflicts between the WTO process and some groups aspiring to represent civil society, which became obvious to a world-wide public in the recent Seattle protests. Some of these - over for example the ability of capital to escape social and environmental responsibilities either by relocating or by overturning states' regulations - are of concern to the ISF only inasmuch as the information society depends upon a habitable environment. Others are generally agreed to be its direct concern - like the risk that the present global market may impose uniformity in the cultural content of ICT services (see Chapter 4).

Free trade is necessary to the global information society, but the ISF asks all concerned to question whether it is sufficient. The so called "planned economies" do not provide the alternative. Both are essentially 19th-century concepts.

Markets are clearly the system of choice for the transformation of resources and skills into economic activity. The role of an economic system is to optimise economic activity via markets under frameworks. The question is thus: how can we build a better framework, one that encourages the development of a sustainable information society?

This is where the "European Way" approach enters the stage. The European Way fully acknowledges that we will need the power of markets, continuing innovation, and free and open global information and knowledge flows to master the challenges ahead of us. Nevertheless on top of that, we also need better frameworks for global governance and the global economy, to cope with feedback effects of future development, such as the rebound effect.

We might call this goal a "strong global socio-ecological market economy". We offer towards the construction of its framework such European traditions as individual liberty, social solidarity and equity. It must include global citizens' rights and obligations, as the basis for steering world affairs towards a sustainable path. It will require global agreement on some core elements of a global ethics. Within its framework, people may interact with all the vigour of a free market-place.

The framework we have will not, as it is, lead to sustainability. The opposite of sustainability is extinction.

The conferences in Rio and Kyoto showed that the EU and its member states are prepared to take strong measures for environmental protection. The EU has a strong regulatory framework backed by investment in research, by voluntary agreements with industry and by such measures as taxation designed to further environmental goals. Many citizens are directly involved in campaigning, in the use of green purchasing power and in a multitude of local activities, including participation in Local Agenda 21 activities. We also find in the EU growing acceptance of a relationship between the development of the information society and an ecologically sustainable economy. Such phenomena are closely linked to the nature of the European Way.

In this context, citizens and governments in the EU can make an early start on significant applications of ICT to sustainability, for example using it to improve traffic, education, personal contact, and work so that "bits travel instead of atoms". On the global scale, we suggest that ICT may make a significant contribution to the implementation of such measures as the Clean Development Mechanism proposed within the post-Kyoto process. Indeed, it is hard to see how such a complex international framework mechanism could be implemented otherwise. Such use of ICT in implementing global frameworks may even come, in retrospect, to be seen as a key component of the global information society.

Towards a global framework

Our central message is that beyond national, regional or individual concerns and activities, the world economic régimes have to be developed further into a stronger framework of global governance, if we want an intact environment and sustainability.

This can be achieved by new multilateral international agreements. Europe should bring its best traditions and experiences from its own past and from its own processes of increasing co-operation and integration into these debates. It should become more pro-active on the issues.

The need to reach a consensus obviously means that an international framework will not be constructed overnight. We have to accept as a priority the intellectual challenge of consensus-building with our partners all around the globe. The EU can play a strategic role in achieving such a global consensus. The ISF requests its support for a truly global dialogue, to clarify what is common ground and to draw in others' experience and ways (see Chapter 8). Here, promoting and further developing the "European Way" could be a significant contribution.