This week in Monaco, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release a 900 page report on the impact of climate change on the oceans and coastal habitats, as well as the implications for fisheries. We can expect that the report will be extremely worrying for small-scale fisheries—showing that the climate emergency will continue to threaten the future of fish populations, it will impact on fish migrations, it will cause more frequent and violent storms that coastal fishing communities are ill-equipped to survive, and it will raise ocean levels that will wipe out vast areas of coastal lands and submerge low lying small island states.
But what will IPCC suggest to respond to this and how will governments react?
The IPCC’s report will set out the harms that will be unleashed on ocean habitats and the billions of people who rely on oceans and coastal areas for their livelihoods and food security. But it should also describe that the economic activities rapidly expanding in coastal and marine areas are a major source of the problem. In order of magnitude, offshore oil and gas, international tourism, particularly to small-island states, and international shipping, account for enormous amounts of greenhouse emissions and habitat destruction. All of these sectors are predicted to grow substantially over the next decade. The OECD forecasted in 2015 that the ocean industry will likely grow from 1.5 trillion dollars to over 3 trillion dollars by 2030. This is most often seen as a huge opportunity. The oceans are therefore viewed as a new frontier for corporate profit making that can drive yet more economic growth and consequently, it is claimed, lift millions out of poverty.
In 2012, the European Commission identified the ‘blue economy’ as being important for economic recovery after the global financial crisis. It prioritised five sectors for further investment and growth, to be stimulated by public-private partnerships and business friendly re-regulation: aquaculture, marine-biotechnology, shipping, coastal tourism and seabed mining. The message from the European Commission was that this growth would be good for the environment as well. It is impossible to see how it could be, but the European Commission drew attention to the idea of making these sectors more efficient in terms of their carbon emissions, and also the it has drawn attention to its efforts to increase energy production from offshore wind turbines. The European Commission was the first to speak of a ‘sustainable blue economy’, and therefore its policy was about achieving ‘blue growth’. The European Commission has recently released indicators for monitoring ‘blue growth’; including tracking profits and jobs. But there are no environmental indicators at all. By and large, the Commission has drawn attention to growth in the five sectors, but has not monitored greenhouse emission reductions at all.
Shortly after the European Commission launched its blue growth strategy, The United Nations, the World Bank and a host of governmental and non-governmental organisations embraced the ‘blue economy concept’. It was formerly launched at Rio+20. Very much like the green economy idea, this is based on the central idea that there is a huge opportunity for economic development from coastal and marine ecosystems, and it is possible to vigorously pursue this growth while simultaneously saving marine and coastal ecosystems. In fact, UNEP argued that saving marine ecosystems will be more profitable than business as usual.
Some countries and organisations are more interested in the ecological imperative of the blue economy concept than they are from its profitable side: more countries are moving to ban single use plastics, and there is also increasing attention to saving critical marine ecosystems as they are massive carbon sinks. But most continue with the European Commission’s approach of putting the business opportunity well in front of the ecological imperative. A most depressing event confirming this was the ‘Sustainable Blue Economy Conference’ held in Nairobi last year, attended by 18,000 delegates and sponsored by the EU, the UN, the Words Bank, Canada and Japan. While it was promoted as combining conservation with business opportunities, in reality it was a trade fair for the oceans. The conference organisers proudly announced billions of dollars in deals that were made as a result of the meeting, but there were hardly any new serious pledges made on saving ecosystems or reducing greenhouse emissions. There were no representatives from small-scale fishing organisations speaking at the main event either—inexcusable given that the small-scale fishing sector is by far the largest in this blue economy in terms of providing real needs for society, and it is by far the most vulnerable in the blue economy from the climate emergency.
Blue Growthism: The worst form of climate change denial
The IPCC report on the oceans is an opportunity to confront the dangers of blue growth. However, more likely is that governments and international organisations will use this report to justify yet more blue growth propaganda—more conferences and calls for ever greater investments in profitable businesses. But those that make this call need to confront the reality. The biggest area of blue growth—in terms of both profits and greenhouse emissions—is offshore oil and gas. It is a booming sector, with subsidies dwarfing what is being spent on trying to replace fossil fuels with renewable energies for coastal communities. The World Bank and others are promoting eco-tourism as part of the blue growth packages for developing countries, but the sector’s contribution to global greenhouse emissions has been estimated to be 8%. A popular idea from blue growth is that tourism can help fund marine conservation projects, such as protecting coral reefs—the habitats that are on the brink of extinction from greenhouse emissions.
Growth in international shipping—which has long relied on the dirtiest fossil fuels—is predicted to double in a decade or so, but so far the idea for ‘eco-ships’ and net zero emissions from the sector lack any credibility. The only recent time that greenhouse emissions from these blue sectors has declined was following the global recession.
The stark truth is, if we are going to invest in growing the most profitable sectors of the ocean economy, there will be a huge price to pay in terms of greenhouse emissions, pollution and habitat destruction. We are yet to see any presentation on blue growth that refutes this convincingly.
When UNEP released its report at Rio+20 on ‘towards the green economy’, it claimed there was irrefutable evidence that economic growth could be sustained while massively lowering emissions and natural resource destruction. This was an attempt to silence any doubt over the blue growth logic. What UNEP was claiming is that the economy can completely decouple growth from ecological impact—they are two forces that through innovation could be set on completely different trajectories. UNEP referred to the findings of an international expert panel it set up, called the International Resources Panel, which apparently found evidence for this absolute decoupling theory. Since then the OCED has also set up its own research programme on decoupling, and they too report positive examples where countries have sustained economic growth while significantly lowering their greenhouse emissions; if these countries can do it, then everyone else can too.
But the evidence is not there. Ironically, one of the most alarming studies that showed this was produced by the IRP itself, in 2016, entitled “Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity assessment”. Apart from a few countries under recession, the researchers found no examples of countries doing particularly well economically that have significantly reduced their environmental footprint. Furthermore, the data that has been used by organisations such as the OECD on monitoring decoupling fails to include the resources and emissions used to produce imported goods. Developed countries that appear to be consuming less to maintain economic growth have relied more heavily on buying goods—or outsourcing their production—from developing countries. What the study found is that—in global perspective—more resources are depleted and more pollution is produced to achieve economic growth than before:
“The speed at which we are exploiting natural resources, and generating emissions and waste, is increasing faster than the economic benefits gained. This disproportionately accelerates environmental impacts such as climate change, resource depletion and reduced ecosystem health”.
The report also showed that without exception, the progress of national economies relies on the enormous consumption of resources, and that now we have reached a point where large numbers of material resources are simply not available at a scale for allowing growth to be maintained. This means that unless developing countries find a completely different way to grow, then it is impossible that they can emulate the historic growth of developed industrialised ones.
“Given the fact that the global economy, at today’s level of resource use, is already surpassing some environmental thresholds or planetary boundaries, this shows that the level of well-being achieved in wealthy industrial countries cannot be generalized globally based on the same system of production and consumption.”
The IRP study is not an isolated example. There have been quite a number of other studies showing that it is impossible to have sustained economic growth while reducing greenhouse emissions. To get anywhere near the targets agreed on in Paris 2015, countries are going to have to accept consuming and producing less, and this reduction in the economy has to be substantial in developed countries. Based on this evidence, in 2018 hundreds of European scientists wrote to the European Commission pleading for economic growth to be jettisoned as an objective for the European Union:
“For the past seven decades, GDP growth has stood as the primary economic objective of European nations. But as our economies have grown, so has our negative impact on the environment. We are now exceeding the safe operating space for humanity on this planet, and there is no sign that economic activity is being decoupled from resource use or pollution at anything like the scale required. Today, solving social problems within European nations does not require more growth. It requires a fairer distribution of the income and wealth that we already have…If current trends continue, there may be no growth at all in Europe within a decade. Right now the response is to try to fuel growth by issuing more debt, shredding environmental regulations, extending working hours, and cutting social protections. This aggressive pursuit of growth at all costs divides society, creates economic instability, and undermines democracy”.
These arguments are falling on deaf ears. Perhaps the most alarming indicator came with the controversial decision to award the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2018 to the Americans Paul Romer and William Nordhaus. They were selected on the basis of their contribution for understanding the economics of climate change. But both Romer and Nordhaus are extreme proponents of ‘growthism’, and it is for this reason that they were selected for global stardom.
Paul Romer is a radical free-market ideologue, briefly vice president of the World Bank, who famously promotes ‘charter cities’; areas of the developing world where representative governments are dissolved and society is run instead by a foreign corporation or developed country government, which according to Romer will be far more efficient in stimulating economic growth. He was close in getting political backing for this proposal in Madagascar and Honduras. But he won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for his theory on economic growth being driven by ideas, not labour or resources. Derived from this, he believes that resource depletion and climate change will put no limits to growth; we can grow the economy as much as we like because of the inherent innovation of humankind, which has been unleashed by modern capitalism. He is therefore optimistic that left relatively unregulated, the private sector will solve the climate problem.
Nordhaus’s work is similar. He developed a mathematical model that tried to estimate the economic costs of climate change. Originally this was used to try and work out a reasonable level for a carbon tax. His work was rightly seen as an important contribution to international thinking on the economics of climate change. But he went on to gain more favour among governments and corporations by using his model to argue that trying to reduce climate change to 1.5% of pre-industrial levels was more costly to the global economy than allowing greenhouse emissions to rise to a higher level. He predicts that economic growth will ensure future generations will be better off—despite the costs caused by climate change—and with this prosperity they will be more likely to survive the climate change problem. Nordhaus recognises the disruptions caused to some sectors in the meantime, such as agriculture and fisheries, but he dismisses this as not something to worry about, as agriculture only makes up a small % of global GDP. Jason Hickle, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, explained what dangerous nonsense this is:
“Using this logic, Nordhaus long claimed that from the standpoint of “economic rationality” it is “optimal” to keep warming the planet to about 3.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels—vastly in excess of the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold that the IPCC insists on. It sounds morally problematic and flies in the face of scientists’ warnings, but economists and policymakers have lined up behind Nordhaus’s argument…How do they figure this? Because if climate breakdown ends up starving and displacing a few hundred million impoverished Africans and Asians, that will register as only a tiny blip in GDP. After all, poor people don’t add much “value” to the global economy. The same goes for things like insects and birds and wildlife, so it doesn’t matter if global warming continues to accelerate mass extinction. From the perspective of capital, what most of us see as tremendous ethical and even existential problems literally don’t count.”
Resisting blue growth
There have been multiple criticisms levelled at the blue growth concept, including how it has tended to marginalise small-scale fisheries and reproduces enormous inequalities. However, the central fallacy of believing in decoupling the ocean economy from pollution, greenhouse emissions and habitat destruction needs to be taken more seriously. It is this dangerous claim that poses such a grave threat to the future of coastal communities and the fisheries sector. It allows industrialised nations and transnational corporations to continue with unsustainable market growth.
The IPCC report being released this week is the perfect opportunity to put blue growthists in the spotlight. On what basis can the ocean economy produce ever more corporate profits, while taking the climate emergency seriously? We must reject explanations for a laissez-faire approach to the climate emergency such as those awarded the Nobel Prize, and argue that this will pose an existential threat to millions involved in small-scale fisheries.
As the European scientists pleading for an end to the GDP fetish make clear, realising that capitalism is not the saviour of its own destructive environmental and social tendencies does not mean the world has to embark on an endless recession full of suffering. Once the mental shackles of growthism are done away with, then there is an enormous opportunity to transform our way of living and develop different indicators of success. It is a most urgent debate.