Overfishing, pollution, and climate change continue to undermine the sustainability of global fisheries. To prevent the collapse of wild fishing stocks and preserve ecological sustainability, states will need to expand oversight, increase compliance with international agreements, and recognize a lower carrying capacity within their fisheries.

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The proportion of wild fishery stocks exploited at biologically unsustainable levels has been increasing for the past four decades. As measured by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) across their 17 Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs), 35.4% of managed fisheries were considered to be unsustainably exploited in 2019. Only 64.6% are fished at what is commonly referred to as the maximum sustainable yield (MSY), down from 90% in 1974. The World Bank estimate of 90% of global fisheries being fully exploited or overfished is just as dire, explaining the overall decline in fish catches.

The abundance of fish populations declines as exploitation rates increase. To ensure a long-term yield is optimised and deemed “sustainable,” stocks must be exploited at a lower level that aligns with their fertility and rebuild rate. This is the MSY and requires rigorous data collection and analysis of individual fish stocks within a wild fishery, relying on well-funded and effective state-level oversight.

Individual countries are responsible for managing fisheries within their borders and their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which can extend 230 miles (200 nautical miles) beyond their territorial sea. State agencies tasked with managing fisheries must control access by deciding who gets to fish and with what methods, calculate MSY to regulate harvest levels and enforce compliance, as well as rebuild stocks through habitat protection and artificial propagation when necessary. 

These state-run fisheries will often partner with one of the 17 RFMOs established in 2001 by the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA) to improve cooperation across national boundaries for monitoring and protecting fish populations and their habitats.  

Managed Fisheries Need Resourcing and Reliable Data

Despite the existence of RFMOs and inherent incentives for individual countries to effectively regulate fishing within their borders, serious gaps in fisheries management persist. 

Developing countries often do not have the resources to fund effective oversight, leaving their waters vulnerable to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing by industrialised fishing fleets that trawl their EEZs. These fleets are known for unsafe working practices, slave labour, human trafficking, and criminal abuse. Unfortunately, it can even be other states that see opportunity in fisheries without oversight. An example is China, which is regularly unresponsive to international fishing laws and home to some of the worst offenders of IUU.  It is estimated that one in five fish are caught illegally, with IUU accounting for 30% of all fish sourced from developing countries’ fisheries. 

The FAO offers the most comprehensive view of global fish stocks, catches, and fishing trends available, though it often relies on self-reporting of states, meaning it receives inconsistent and often unreliable data from many countries without the infrastructure to track and report fishing activities, nor the political interest to provide it. The data they get often focuses on a handful of commercially viable stocks or uses different measurement standards making it difficult to compare across countries. Outside EEZs in areas beyond national jurisdictions – also known as international waters – trustworthy data becomes more difficult to attain. 

You might also like: 19 Overfishing Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

Determining the health of a wild fishery along with its complex and integrated ecosystem matters. Even with carefully calculated MSYs, there are consequences, as any level of exploitation has the potential to transform an environment. 

Overfishing of one species can remove a predator or food source for another, which has subsequent impacts throughout the food web. In the case of fishing fleets’ excessive pursuit of bottom-dwelling ground fish with weighted trawl nets that drag across the ocean floor, overfished vertebrates are being replaced by invertebrate species, such as shrimp, crabs, and lobsters. Coastal fisheries such as kelp forests have been transformed into urchin barrens, and coral reefs replaced by algae. 

Without accurate and timely data, states are challenged to maintain effective oversight. The wrong MSY or incorrectly calculated stock productivity – which refers to the number of fish born and reach adulthood – can lead to the overfishing of key species, increasing the potential for a trophic cascade – or tipping point – rippling through a region’s food web and causing the collapse of an entire stock. 

Once the most abundant stock of species in the world, the Atlantic cod fishery off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia collapsed in the 1990s, having lost 97% of its numbers since the late 1950s. The same occurred to the California Sardine in the 1950s, the North Sea herring in the 1960s, and the Peruvian anchovy in the 1970s.

Challenged By Climate Change

Managed fisheries often assume stable parameters when determining an area’s productivity, basing these assumptions on historical evidence that has shown single species stock rebuild when fishing pressures are reduced (e.g., overfishing, pollutants) and the environmental conditions are held constant. 

However, climate change is introducing new variables and uncertainties, such as warming sea temperatures, increasing acidification of oceans, and hypoxic conditions that create dead zones when oxygen drops to levels few organisms can survive in. It is disrupting the natural dynamics of marine ecosystems, affecting biological processes, altering food webs, while changing the distribution and productivity of species. 

The historical parameters managed fisheries have relied on to enforce regulation are changing, making it more difficult to ascertain sustainable levels. 

More on the topic: 7 Solutions to Overfishing We Need Right Now

What Can We Do?

Global seafood demand is expected to grow in line with population growth until 2050, further straining fisheries as catch volumes drop and environmental pressures increase. However, the world’s marine ecosystems cannot satisfy both the global demand for seafood and remain sustainable. There will be less to catch and fisheries around the world will need to expand efforts at protecting and restoring habitats, establish realistic and sustainable limits of fishing, and combat IUU. No longer can they manage their stocks species-by-species, but rather as an integrated ecosystem where every level of the food web needs protection.

Supporting countries with underfunded agencies and lack of infrastructure to better manage their EEZs should be a priority of the FAO and non-governmental organisations focusing on sustainability, with a goal to reduce the areas where illegal fishing can occur with impunity.

Access must also be restricted further, reducing the overcapitalization of fishing fleets while ensuring compliance by allowing those who are permitted to fish to make a profit. For example, systems that leverage Individual Transfer Quotas (ITQ) or Individual Vessel Quota (IVQ) grant fishers “exclusive and transferrable rights” to catch a set percentage or amount of a MSY of a certain fish stock. This approach is widely used in the US, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Iceland, and Namibia. 

But in controlling access, the cultural and socioeconomic dynamics inherent to fishing communities – with an estimated 60 million people employed in fishing and fish farming – need to be recognized. Quotas can lead to job losses, threatening livelihoods that are deeply rooted in a maritime identity passed down for generations. Social protections have become an essential part of fisheries management to head off local IUU, providing income security, retraining, unemployment insurance, and educational resources. 

UN member states also need greater accountability for heading off illegal fishing. 

The Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA) is the only legally binding international agreement for deterring and eliminating IUU-caught fish from entering ports and national markets, with adherence far below where it needs to be. Non-governmental organisations such as the Pew Trusts are devising ways to help signatories of the PSMA identify which ports are most likely to receive illegal catch to better target compliance measures. Others are helping track illegal fishing fleets and advocating for UN member states to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty. Adopted by the UN in 2023, the treaty goes beyond PSMA to combat IUU and overfishing by protecting 30% of oceans by 2030 and requires 60 countries to sign on to make it legally binding. To date, only 6 nations have written the Global Ocean Treaty into their respective laws.

Aquaculture, which is expanding in the face of growing demand for seafood, is becoming increasingly unsustainable and environmentally destructive. Focusing on commercially viable carnivorous fish stocks, they use wild caught bycatch for food, fail to support biodiversity, and are a source of chemical pollutants that spread to surrounding environments. Aquaculture is best suited for herbivorous species that do not require a diet of processed seafood. Indeed, 33% of all wild catches go to feed farmed animals. Bivalves, such as oysters, mussels, and clams, have been recognized as the most environmentally sound to farm, requiring no feed, shellfish beds filter algae and pollutants out of the water while reducing erosion by stabilising shorelines.

As for the public, it is important to recognize the limits of our oceans and the decreasing availability of wild catch, supporting sustainable fisheries by being a conscientious consumer. When choosing to eat seafood, learn where it comes from; locally sourced catches reduce the carbon footprint of transportation and provide employment to your community. If farmed, learn if the operations are properly managed. Research common brands and eco-labels, such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Blue Ocean Institute, or Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), but be aware they come with their own caveats and limitations in dealing with bycatch and sustainable fishing practices, while creating conflicts of interest by requiring fisheries to pay for certification. It is important to scrutinise certification criteria and, if possible, determine whether sourced from a well-managed wild fishery.

You might also like: 5 Sustainable Plant-Based Seafood Companies Leading the Way

As environmental pressures increase and ecosystems change, fishing communities and consumers will face the reality that there will be less wild seafood to catch. In accepting the need to further restrict access, increase oversight, and collaborate across jurisdictions, it is possible global fisheries can reach sustainability while supporting resilient, biodiverse marine ecosystems for future generations.

The post The Future of Sustainable Fishing: More Oversight and Lower Yields appeared first on Earth.Org.

Development initiatives aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are counterintuitively relying on the same economic growth that leads to unsustainable development. Societies and policymakers need to examine alternative ideas and approaches to achieve sustainability.

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Sustainability in human development is a necessity. In the modern world, we can no longer require populations to stay within their ecological means without jeopardizing the wellbeing of those that come after. Within international development, sustainability is defined as the long-term viability of both human development – allowing current and future generations to improve their social conditions and pursue aspirations – and Earth’s diverse range of ecosystems that make development possible. 

Economic growth, historically touted as the engine of human development, has disproportionately benefited a handful of high-income countries (HICs) at the expense of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the environment. Extreme poverty and socioeconomic gaps persist, while natural resources dwindle and the global climate changes.

Today, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have taken on a central and influential role in defining the global path to sustainability. Adopted in 2015 by 191 UN member countries, the 17 goals and 169 individual targets call for integrating social, economic, and environmental priorities and serve as a framework for state governments, NGOs, development agencies, and the private sector to implement sustainable practices. 

Unfortunately, the goals have proven to be optics over substance and have limited transformational impact. Conflating sustainability with progress in areas like eco-efficiency, the SDGs counterintuitively incentivize unsustainable development by relying on economic growth to meet their targets.

Alternative ideas and frameworks for sustainable development are numerous and potentially more fruitful; they not only offer novel approaches to address the complex challenges of development but also bring renewed perspectives and creative policy innovations that look beyond the SDGs and their growth-oriented development, contributing to humanity’s continuing pursuit of sustainability.

You might also like: What Is Sustainability and Why Is it Important?

In What Ways Are the SDGs Unsustainable?

Since first referenced in the context of development in 1972 by Barbara Ward in the book Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, sustainability has sought compromise between economic growth and conservation. 

When the Brundtland Report was issued 15 years later in 1987, calling for nations to re-evaluate their development models to preserve planetary support systems, there was wide acceptance that Earth lacks the carrying capacity to extend the full range of material wealth currently experienced by a handful of privileged nations to future generations. But since much of the world’s population still had not met all its basic needs, the Brundtland Report concluded that sustainable approaches to development should not prohibit development in LMICs. Rather HICs should do their equitable part and design development strategies decoupled from overexploitation of natural resources.

This idealistic but unworkable model of self-regulated goodwill and altruism among developed countries that have long benefited disproportionately from unsustainable growth laid the foundation upon which future international efforts of sustainable development were built. 

In 2000, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) called for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger while ensuring environmental sustainability by 2015. And while those subsequent 15 years saw measurable reductions in poverty – much of it attributed to the economic growth of China and southeast Asia, it also saw global emissions of carbon dioxide increase, an estimated 5.2 million hectares of forest lost, marine fish stocks decline to below safe biological limits, and increased extinction rates; all while developed countries continued to grow their populations and economies, unwilling to change or compromise their development models.

The 17 SDGs were announced in 2015 to supersede the MDGs and renew the call for reducing social inequality and protecting the environment. With these goals, the UN was resigned to the model of growth economics driving development, accepting (if not leaning into) the inequitable reality of development. Even making growth an explicit goal, as captured in Goal 8: ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’. 

With the release of the SDGs, the UN also advocated for an increase in private sector engagement. Initiatives like the UN Global Compact and Impact 2030 call for market solutions, private investment, and technology innovation to support sustainability. The outcome was a steady stream of consumer products that do not shy away from branding themselves as “sustainable”; products such as water-efficient fixtures and biodegradable bottles that prioritize discretionary consumption over protection of natural resources and environmental conservation.

Why Isn’t Eco-Efficiency the Same as Sustainability?

While sustainability is a balancing act between social, economic, and environmental needs, there is no definite prioritization between these three dimensions. Of the three, economic growth tends to deprioritize environmental concerns, placing the burden on the free market to weigh the environmental and social impacts of economic choices. This results in sustainability being redefined by markets. Instead of decoupling growth from development, the focus falls to how efficiently dwindling natural resources can be used to achieve development, a concept known as “eco-efficiency”.

Eco-efficiency is admittedly a practical way to moderate environmental stressors in the short term, focusing minds on reducing the resource intensity of economic activities. Increasing recycling rates and renewable energy, while reducing the amount of water, minerals, and trees utilized to produce goods and services are tangible and quantifiable actions. Consumers will regularly see companies label their products as sustainable when using less plastic for packaging, powering their factories with renewable energy, or producing clothes from cotton, hemp, or bamboo.

But eco-efficient products do not achieve sustainability on their own in a growing economy, failing to reduce aggregate demand for resources (nor do they diminish inequality and extreme poverty). For instance, if an individual company uses 50% less plastic per unit of output (50g instead of 100g for packaging) the eco-efficiency is clear. However, if the intention is to grow and increase sales, they will quickly require more plastic. Where 100 units of packaging requires 5,000g of plastic, 300 units requires 15,000g, 1,000 units requires 50,000g. Scale that up to an entire economy where development relies on growth and it becomes clear that eco-efficiency is not a substitute for sustainability.

Water efficient fixtures and biodegradable water bottles are similar examples, both requiring new manufacturing capabilities that rely on land, water, and other natural resources to operate. The intent is not to reduce the total number of products sold, just to use slightly fewer inputs to make them. In the pursuit of sustainability and by embracing consumption-based growth, the SDGs have come to incentivize unsustainable practices.

What Are the Alternatives for Sustainability?

While the SDGs are not guarantees for sustainability, they do serve as a framework for pursuing development in a conscientious way. The SDGs, like the Brundtland Report and the MDGs before them, are a stepping stone to sustainability. Their limitations and disingenuous facades create the impetus for alternative ideas to achieve balance with the planet’s ecosystems.

Well-known concepts such as steady-state economics – which advocates for keeping populations and economies at a fixed size, and “degrowth” – where the objective is to shrink the overall economy to minimize the use of natural resources, can be insightful, requiring thoughtful reflection on humanity’s impact to planetary support systems, but are not viable in the short-term.  An attempt to hold economies at a constant size, or actively decrease output, would require a rapid and drastic transformation of how societies are organized. And while falling fertility rates globally may be a form of degrowth or steady state, there is no guarantee the trend won’t reverse at some future point, and neither is there a foreseeable end to increasing consumption in a shrinking population, given the breadth and depth of unmet needs in developing countries. 

More practical movements, like Beyond GDP, view common economic metrics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as poor measures of development, advocating for governments and policymakers to place greater emphasis on human and environmental wellbeing. 

The Genuine Progress Indicator tries to measure the social and ecological impacts of growth, calculating pollution and inequality as a loss to national value; countries that aggressively regulate pollution and inequality have a relatively higher value then those that do not. The UN’s Inclusive Wealth Index tries to measure the value of social and environmental assets of a nation, which often go unmeasured in economic transactions, while the Human Development Index (HDI) examines social criteria such as health and education for assessing human development. However, many of these metrics do not replace GDP but rather augment it, layering new dimensions that can be inadequate proxies themselves or inconsistently measured between countries and making it difficult to compare across jurisdictions. And while they struggle to address aggregate consumption, their focus on non-economic factors of development is a valuable contribution to sustainable thought. Additional work will be needed before a sustainability-centric metric is widely accepted and adopted.

Circular economy puts carrying capacity at the forefront, offering a model of “sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible.” In reducing the amount of virgin natural resources needed for development, a circular economy seeks to reduce the stresses on carrying capacity through a constant recycling of materials. In 2020, the European Union adopted the Circular Economic Action Plan (CEAP) aimed at reducing waste and increasing recycling in resource-intensive sectors such as textile, plastics, and construction. In the US, recent legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law advocate for a circular economy and include provisions encouraging waste reduction and recycling. 

Doughnut economics attempts to push the circular concept further by incorporating social and ecological justice in a donut-shaped model. Where the outer layer is the ecological limits of nature, the inner layer symbolizes “the minimum social foundation necessary” for sustainability, and the center of the doughnut is where human development and the planet find harmony.

The challenge for circular economics is its emphasis on reducing waste and not growth. If every item is recycled, it would represent at best a steady state of a 1:1 replacement of products. If development continues to rely on growth, virgin natural resources will still be necessary. Doughnut economics as a conceptual model is utopian in nature and does not provide an actionable plan for reaching ecological harmony, making it impractical in the short-term for real-world applications. 

One approach that could have an immediate impact on growth-oriented economies is granting non-human species legal rights. Recognizing the right of flora and fauna to exist without prejudice, thereby requiring environmental welfare be considered in all economic decisions. This idea is not new. The belief that the environment should enjoy constitutional protections influenced the establishment of Earth Day in the US – with personhood for the natural environment already enshrined with the laws of Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand. It recently gained renewed attention when New Zealand’s Maori King Te Arikinui Tuheitia Park and 15 chiefs from Tahiti and the Cook Islands declared whales to have the same rights as people.

More on the topic: Nature Rights: What Countries Grant Legal Personhood Status to Nature And Why?

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, sustainability will require a shift away from the growth-at-all costs mentality of development. Each iteration of ideas, insights, and models that embrace sustainability free of a reliance on economic growth contributes to this future where human development and environmental preservation go together. The more these ideas spread, educating consumers, influencing policymakers, and informing economic decisions, the closer societies get to preserving the planet’s essential life-support systems while pursuing developmental aspirations.

The post The UN Sustainable Development Goals Are Unsustainable; Here’s Why the World Needs Alternative Approaches  appeared first on Earth.Org.

Despite promising to be flexible, low-cost, and promote sustainability, Voluntary Environmental Agreements (VEAs) have proven to be ineffective unless accompanied by the threat of regulatory consequences.

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Negative externalities created by market economies require environmental regulations to limit the release of harmful pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions that degrade ecosystems and undermine social welfare. 

Historically, regulatory efforts to safeguard ecosystems and promote public health have come in the form of government mandates and legally enforceable restrictions administered by state regulators. Laws such as the United States Clean Air Act of 1970, the 2021 European Union Climate Law, and amendments to China’s Environmental Protection Law in 2014 set prescriptive rules and standards referred to as command-and-control (CAC) policies. These laws compel pollution control and abatement to reduce the environmental impacts of industrialization and consumer culture.

However, shifting political realities in the developed world in the 1980s brought deregulation, privatization, and the belief that environmental laws were overly rigid, resource intensive, and reactive. Regulators became seen as barriers to economic growth, feeding acrimonious relationships with private companies and disincentivizing creative, market-based approaches to abatement. 

In response came Voluntary Environmental Agreements (VEAs). Also known as self-regulation, such agreements vary in their structure and mechanisms but are intended to either go beyond what is already required by existing environmental law, or focus on pollutants not yet regulated in the hopes of preventing costly future government mandates. Voluntary agreements theoretically offer emitters the flexibility to pursue lower cost innovation in pollution abatement and sustainable practices, while partnering with regulators on setting targets and standards that are realistic and attainable. 

And while there have been a few notable successes in voluntary partnerships between state regulators and industry, including the removal of lead from gasoline and the phase out of so-called “forever chemicals” from food packaging and paperboard, these agreements still nominally required regulators to ensure compliance. 

As research on voluntary agreements accumulates, it is clear these arrangements are ineffective unless backstopped by the threat of penalty and mandated compliance. It is important to recognize the weaknesses of self-regulation in mitigating environmental degradation and climate change.

The Limits of Environmental Regulation

Reducing and eventually eliminating harmful pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions is the objective of environmental regulation. However, any policy that places restrictions on economic activity will inevitably be hindered by political circumstances, the demands of private industry, and active disinformation campaigns by interest groups trying to reduce the severity of the regulation – or stop it altogether. 

In representative governments, policymakers are compelled to balance economic efficiency and cost effectiveness, or, rather, the trade-offs between the needs of their constituents and economic imperatives of industrial polluters. They write laws that seek to optimize social warfare (i.e., economic efficiency) and maximize the benefits of pollution reduction while maintaining abatement costs equal across polluters (i.e., cost effectiveness). There is also the possibility of distortionary effects. When new regulations conflict with existing law, trade agreements, subsidies, and tax structures, they can produce unintended consequences. This happened with US subsidies for ethanol fuel production – considered a renewable energy source – contributing to a substantial increase in food costs for lower income countries.

Strict CAC policies empower regulators to assign ownership to the source of pollution, set standards, monitor emitters, and ensure compliance through legal enforcement, but they also have several shortcomings. Of most importance is the fact that they are costly to maintain, though it is important to highlight that the benefits of a cleaner environment and preservation of biodiversity are difficult to price and likely far exceed taxpayer costs and the expense to business. In 2022, the EU spent €278 billion (US$302.7 billion) on environmental protection (2% of its GDP), and is expected to spend more in the coming years. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2022 fiscal year budget was $9.6 billion. 

Moreover, true to the critiques of deregulators, laws sometimes mandate antiquated technology or design standards that disincentivize creative approaches to abatement. Or they may focus on telling individual businesses what level of discharge is safe and legal, which fails to address aggregate pollution across all emitters. CAC policies are also jurisdictional and do not travel across borders, while pollution consistently does.

Market-oriented policies are theorized to overcome some of this inflexibility and expense, with economic incentives to push polluters into finding cost-effective abatement practices on their own. Emissions taxes, subsidies, and permit systems (e.g., carbon cap-and-trade) are common mechanisms in market-based approaches, alongside liability laws and public disclosures. These differ from voluntary agreements as they are written by policy makers, and regulators take an active role in compliance.

Indeed, it was a permit trading scheme set up by the EPA in the face of budget cuts that successfully reduced the prevalence of acid rain in Eastern US by capping sulphur dioxide emissions. The EPA started with the country’s largest coal-powered energy plants, allowing them to trade their permits, then expanded the program nationally. While less rigid than CAC, the scheme still came with constant monitoring and the prospect of penalties if the cap was exceeded. 

The Appeal of Voluntary Agreements

VEAs can be set up by any entity – governments, standards organizations (e.g., ISO 14001), civic groups, non-governmental organizations (e.g., Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and trade groups (e.g., unilateral agreements for sustainability). These arrangements are entirely dependent on participants’ willingness to comply, as there are no consequences should they refuse or become noncommittal.

In many developed countries, voluntary agreements augment existing regulations rather than substituting them, encouraging polluters to go beyond what is already required by law. The proliferation of these agreements has been fed by the belief that prescriptive environmental regulation increases production costs, crowds out research investment, and reduces market competitiveness. This view has been bolstered by conjectures such as the ‘Porter Hypothesis,’ which insist that low levels of regulation will promote technological innovation in pollution control. Initiatives such as the 33/50 Program, set up in 1990 by the EPA, asked companies to voluntarily reduce usage, disposal, and discharge rates of 17 toxic chemicals by 33% of 1988 levels by 1992, and 50% of 1988 levels by 1995. It achieved its goal a year earlier with only a light regulatory touch.

In developing countries, voluntary agreements can help sidestep the challenges of enforcing CAC policies. With many of the planet’s most severe pollution challenges, developing countries often lack comprehensive legislation or regulatory agencies with appropriate funding, expertise, or staff. Essential infrastructure such as waste management processing and water treatment plants are limited or non-existent. Additionally, informal workers and enterprises can be difficult to monitor. 

There is dedicated funding from aid agencies and the United Nations to engage companies with voluntary agreements, supporting alternative control and abatement strategies in unregulated spaces. These organizations heavily leverage public disclosure to try and shame polluters into action by releasing reports on their impact to local environments.

Flaws

It has become clear that for voluntary approaches to be effective, there needs to be accountability. The presence of a strong, formal regulatory framework to enact voluntary arrangements lets polluters know that regulation may not be far behind if they fail to change their behaviour. 

Voluntary programs in developed countries that showed success – such as the aforementioned 33/50 Program – required engagement, partnership, and education from regulators to set measurable goals and monitor the results. It also came with the possibility of formal regulation if toxic discharges did not fall. The same can be seen in voluntary product certification initiatives that have gained public confidence, such as Energy Star for appliances and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Organic labelling. These initiatives are backed by regulators with the resources to enforce standards and monitor for compliance.

In developing countries, the need for strong regulation holds particularly true. The informal economy – 60% of the world’s employed population – is less susceptible to public disclosures and often not incentivized to seek formal certification. For large companies and multinational corporations that do participate in agreements while operating in lower income jurisdictions, data on environmental performance can be unreliable, often being self-reported and unverifiable. Companies might also take advantage of communities where the free flow of information is constrained, obfuscating their pollution levels and abatement efforts. There is also the likelihood of selection bias for those firms that participate in voluntary agreements and are willing to self-report because they have already met unambitious standards. 

You might also like: Research Gap: The Geographical Bias of Environmental Data

Local communities and authorities may even protect polluters if they provide employment in the area. Such was the case of a cluster of tanneries in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, where voluntary agreement signatories failed to alter their practices and continued to discharge their effluents into the surrounding waterways. The tanneries received significant political support and protection as key employers. Without enforcement authority, regulators had no recourse. 

Critics also argue that the existence of voluntary agreements (and the funds dedicated to reporting) divert limited resources away from building functional regulatory institutions, offering “seemingly convenient but ultimately unrealistic solutions to the difficult challenges” of environmental protection.

High profile voluntary agreements do little to dispel this criticism. The CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project) is an international non-profit that oversees global standards for companies voluntarily disclosing their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and climate change strategies. While fostering transparency, the ultimate objective for CDP is reporting, not abatement. This provides multinational companies like Ford Motor Company a high rating for transparency despite their expanded production of fossil fuel vehicles. 

At times, companies’ low-carbon strategy is to purchase offsets through the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM), a voluntary program that allows entities to buy or sell carbon credits, which go on to fund global projects in reforestation or farming regeneration to create carbon stores. The VCM was valued at US$2 billion in 2022. The issue? It does not stop emissions but rather allows polluters to brand themselves carbon neutral (or even carbon negative) by purchasing credits while still discharging greenhouse gases, which continue to increase worldwide. 

More on the topic: The Benefits of Voluntary Carbon Markets

Can Voluntary Agreements Work?

For any regulation to be effective – whether voluntary, market-oriented, or CAC – clear targets need to be set, monitoring and reporting must be reliable, and there needs to be a credible regulatory threat. 

Public disclosure requires an aware and engaged public to become educated on how their communities are being harmed by pollutants. Even when regulators face budget constraints or diminishing returns on their efforts, they can leverage voluntary agreements, as Colombia did when setting wastewater emissions standards. They partnered with private industry to establish technical requirements and gain inhouse expertise to build regulatory capacity.

The limits of CAC policies will continue, as they are unable to directly regulate cross-border pollutants and climate change. Voluntary agreements have their place in setting global standards and expectations, promoting cross-border cooperation between state governments and international organizations that operate in areas without strong regulatory institutions. Resourced by organizations like the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and supported by international frameworks like the UN’s Sustainable Goals. 

But the regulation of pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions cannot fall to private enterprises and the market alone. Regulators must be empowered with the tools and policies they need to hold polluters accountable. Markets fail and create externalities, companies are built to prioritize profits over sustainable solutions, and the ideal role of every state government should be to step in and protect its populations from the harms of pollution and environmental degradation.

You might also like: Sustainability Reporting in the Era of ESG: Best Practices and Emerging Trends 

The post Penalties Required: The Limits of Voluntary Environmental Agreements  appeared first on Earth.Org.

Held up as a case study for successfully transitioning away from fossil fuels, Uruguay now generates up to 98% of its electricity from renewable energy. The country offers lessons in energy sovereignty and the importance of community engagement in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

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Generating 98% of its electricity from renewable sources, Uruguay’s rapid adoption and expansion of sustainable sources of energy has been lauded internationally as a model for transitioning national power systems away from fossil fuels. 

Avoiding nuclear power entirely, Uruguay first embraced wind turbines as a source of cheap, reliable power; providing 40% of the country’s capacity in less than a decade. It then expanded its solar and biomass capacity to an almost fully decarbonized mix of energy sources, joining a very short list of high-income countries producing over 90% of their energy needs with low-carbon sources – including Iceland, Sweden, and France. Once a net importer of energy, Uruguay now exports its surplus energy to neighbouring Brazil and Argentina. 

In less than two decades, Uruguay broke free of its dependence on oil imports and carbon emitting power generation, transitioning to renewable energy that is owned by the state but with infrastructure paid for by private investment. Can such a feat be replicated elsewhere?

Ramón Mendéz Galain believes so. Uruguay’s former national director of energy in the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining, who was the impetus for the country’s shift away from dirty fuels, has been promoting the country’s success as a repeatable framework of energy sovereignty for developing countries. He offers a model that can free them from the vicissitudes of global energy prices. He credits “a supportive regulatory environment and a strong partnership between the public and private sectors” as the necessary ingredients for providing populations “access to affordable, reliable, sustainable” energy that furthers economic and social development. 

However, this oversimplifies a transition that – at this point – is uniquely Uruguayan.

Energy that Is Cheap and Renewable

Widespread, affordable energy is an essential ingredient to the economic and social development of all nations. The more expensive energy is, the less accessible it becomes. 

For centuries, countries in Europe and North America powered their economic and social development with low-cost thermal fuels such as coal, oil and liquified natural gas, sowing the seeds of climate change while setting a fossil fuel standard globally adopted and exceedingly difficult to escape. In 2023, 80% of global energy use was still derived from fossil fuels despite the growing pressures to decarbonize energy systems with sustainable, renewable power sources, subjecting developing countries without domestic oil reserves to the extreme swings in fuel prices.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) insist sustainability is improbable without affordable and renewable sources of energy. It is also essential for meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global temperatures to 1.5C, as well as the recent COP28 agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. 

All the more reason for energy sovereignty to be a national and political imperative for countries unable to control the price of energy while also suffering the effects of climate change. 

However, dirty fuel systems are entrenched, still cheap, and a low-carbon future requires substantial capital investments difficult to attract for developing countries. If they do receive foreign investment, hard-hit local communities are often excluded from the planning process, dispossessed of their land and livelihoods, and deprived of compensation. 

Recent renewable energy projects in lower-income countries have been accused of “land and water grabs, violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples and denial of worker’s rights”. For instance, Morocco used colonial era laws to forcibly purchase tribal pastoral lands to build a concentrated solar panels (CSP) plant without residents’ consent. The Nepalese government’s push for expanded hydroelectric capacity has created remote self-governing enclaves where private companies operate independent of the state’s authority. And in the Kutch district of India, the state regularly requisitions community grazing lands for wind farms, marginalizing locals and depriving them of their very way of life. 

This suggests that a more rigorous, conscientious approach by governments of developing countries can better mitigate the pitfalls of an energy transition. They should adhere to the tenants of energy sovereignty by providing affected communities the chance to participate in the process and reap the benefits of low-carbon systems and should  leverage renewable energy sources such as second and third generation technologies, which include hydroelectric, biomass, geothermic, wind, solar, oceanic, and integrated bioenergy systems, to break away from dependency on dirty fuels and reduce greenhouse gases.  

The Uruguay Way

A relatively small nation spanning 175,000 square kilometres (76,568 square miles) with a population of 3.4 million – 96% of whom live in urban centres – Uruguay has no significant fossil fuel reserves. Fortuitously, its geography makes it ideal for utilizing powerful rivers and uninterrupted grasslands for wind energy. Indeed, prior to its expansion of wind farms, the nation was dependent on a hydro-thermal mix, relying heavily on four hydroelectric dams built between 1960 and 1979. When river levels dropped the country had to burn fossil fuels to make up the difference in electrical output to satisfy demand. 

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Uruguay’s government failed to invest in new energy production, maintaining the same hydro-capacity it had since the 1980s. When severe droughts struck in 1999, 2004, 2006, and again in 2008, the country was forced to import ever larger quantities of oil. In 2005, oil made up 55% of Uruguay’s total energy supply, and residents still experienced blackouts and energy rationing. 

“In dry years…cost overruns could be as high as $1 billion. And for a small economy like Uruguay, this is 2% of GDP”, Mendéz explained in an interview with NPR in November 2023. 

With climate change undermining the country’s long-term energy security, Uruguay’s government wrote into its 2005 national energy policy a 25-year strategic vision for diversification. But it was an empty promise, as the government did not yet have a firm plan to secure a mix of sustainable energy sources. It wasn’t until three years later when Mendéz – at the time a university particle physicist who understood the potential for Uruguay’s wind industry – wrote a detailed proposal for a national transition to non-nuclear renewable energy which led to Uruguay’s president appointing him as the national director of energy. 

The national plan that Mendéz subsequently submitted called for the decarbonization of the country’s electric grid by developing its own green energy sector. His argument for the plan was not explicitly to fight climate change but rather to support a national imperative to secure reliable, cheap, domestic energy. Considered ambitious, if not audacious, for a country that had little experience with building and operating wind or solar power, Mendéz’s “strong national narrative” had the ability to unite Uruguay’s disparate political parties into a consensus. It provided the political support critical to ensuring a successful transition. But on its own, it wasn’t enough. 

Uruguay’s National Administration of Power Plants and Electrical Transmissions, better known as UTE, owns and operates the transmission, distribution, and sale of electricity. Founded in 1912, it was the legally sanctioned monopolist of production until 1977 with the passage of the Electricity Act. Despite this opening of the energy market to non-state entities, it still served as a de facto monopoly. 

In the same way Uruguay’s abundance of wind and rivers proved fortuitous for energy sovereignty, so was the government’s oversight of the electric grid. Unhindered by the profit-motives of private sector providers who could have lobbied against the energy plan or coerced expensive concessions out of the state, UTE is aligned with the interest of the Uruguayan people, and by extension responsive to the state’s regulatory framework. This was counter to the prevailing view of the time, known as the Washington Consensus, that advocated for power distribution and national energy infrastructure to be privatized. By happenstance, it was also the UTE that had established a partnership in 1990 with the University of the Republic to oversee a pilot project for wind-generated energy production in the Sierra de los Caracoles region that bestowed the grid operator with existing base-level knowledge of wind generation. But how to pay for this expensive, capital-intensive transition? 

As mentioned, developing countries can be restrained by access to financial resources. They often face the “finance divide” in sovereign borrowing as international markets perceive them to be too risky or unstable, with markets offering loans that on average charge three times the interest rates seen in higher-income countries. Such usurious lending increases the risk of debt distress, reduces government cash flows, and can force states to cut essential public services to afford interest payments. International Financial Organizations (IFOs) such as the IMF and World Bank coordinate financing through mechanisms that can place equally onerous conditions and constraints upon the country. Ironically, it was both the IMF and World bank that rejected Uruguay’s request to fund its energy transition, calling it unfeasible without the government offering heavy subsidies to private energy companies.

Instead, Uruguay turned to the UTE, empowering the entity to issue competitive bidding contracts to energy companies in the form of Purchase Power Agreements (PPAs) to attract direct investment – as well as international expertise in wind and solar technology. The first PPAs came in the form of 20 years long commitments to private energy companies that UTE would purchase all electricity they produced through renewable sources at an agreed rate, priced in US dollars. This ensured consistent revenue to investors, a stable business environment for the companies, and allowed the state to retain full control of distribution. Mendéz considered the PPAs a “good-news-bad-news” proposition for private energy producers: 100% of all energy production would be purchased by UTE, but what they produced will never be theirs to control. It belonged to Uruguay.

Unexpected allies in the transition were the labour groups that worked in generating plants run on fossil fuels that were set to be decommissioned. But Uruguay’s history of labour rights meant the government was ready to engage with unions early in the transition to reduce the negative effects of plant closures. As renewable capacity grew, workforce training for existing workers allowed them to develop skills and experience building and operating wind turbines and solar arrays. An estimated 50,000 jobs were created during the transition – 3% of Uruguay’s labour force. These partnerships between the government and labour organizations strengthened support for state control of the electric grid, with unions regularly opposing attempts by subsequent administrations to privatize parts of the UTE. 

What Can We Learn From Uruguay’s Transition?

Energy sovereignty is the right and the ability for communities to control and develop their energy systems in the way they decide, unbeholden to private interests or external pressures that would undermine that right. At the turn of the century, Uruguay was dependent on private energy producers and was stuck in a cycle of furthering the effects of climate change through dirty energy systems, which exacerbated the very droughts that forced the country to buy expensive oil. This inevitably pressured the government to enact a clear, strategic vision for the country’s energy future with the help of a particle physicist who realized the country’s potential. Uruguay has significantly reduced its carbon footprint and nurtured domestic development that is credited with reducing poverty rates from 40% to 10% in less than two decades.

The Uruguay Way is a framework of laws, regulations, institutional support, and consensus building. Ramon Mendéz Galain has travelled the world promoting this framework as a pathway to energy self-sufficiency and reduction of greenhouse gases. However, what can not be dismissed within Uruguay’s success are the unique benefits the country possessed at the start of its transition: an effective state-controlled utility provider, ideal geography, and trust in institutions. This is a benefit-of-the-doubt that few governments, whether high-income or developing, enjoy from their constituents. 

Uruguay is a small country with existing social capital, a functioning democracy, and a history of engaging labour groups. It is hard to say for certain if these are necessary conditions for a broad transition, but they have proven valuable in successfully engaging residents and ensuring they are the beneficiaries of cheap, reliable, and sustainable energy. 

Uruguay has managed a technical transition conscientious of its people, the future of climate change, and the economic challenges of investing in large-scale, capital-intensive infrastructure. Perhaps what we can best take away from Uruguay’s impressive feat is the power of unified political support for energy sovereignty and the state’s appreciation for the rights of its people and their ownership over their country’s new energy system.

The post The Uruguay Way: Achieving Energy Sovereignty in the Developing World appeared first on Earth.Org.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies aimed at raising recycling rates and shifting the financial burden of post-consumer waste disposal onto producers have been unable to stop the sale of difficult-to-recycle consumer goods. 

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In late 2020, investigative reporters unveiled a 50-year long disinformation campaign by the plastics industry which claimed that post-consumer plastics can be recycled into valuable new products. However, most of the estimated 600 billion plastic bottles and containers produced worldwide were never meant to be recycled. 

The costs associated with recycling are considered prohibitive – plastics actually degrade during the recycling process and many cannot be reused more than once – though manufacturers found they could hide behind the ’polluter pays’ principle to avoid liability of their products’ detrimental effects on the environment and human health. Companies promoted the narrative that consumers are the real source of plastic waste and should pay to dispose of it, thereby shifting the responsibility of disposing 25 million tons of plastic bottles per year onto increasingly expensive, taxpayer-funded solid waste management systems.

While contributing to plastic pollution – with plastic clogging waterways, littering green spaces, and swirling about in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – the global plastics industry has amassed $712 billion of value as of 2023.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies are meant to address these kinds of market failures, offering a consumer-friendly reinterpretation of the polluter pays principle. EPR originated in a 1990 report by Swedish academic Thomas Lindquist, giving name to an emerging movement in Europe eager to shift more of the responsibility (and cost) of disposing end-of-life consumer goods away from overburdened public infrastructure and onto producers and manufacturers. Advocating for waste reduction, lower public spending, and innovative design by private enterprise in support of a circular economy, EPR has gained momentum worldwide as a tool to hold producers accountable for the costs and long-term consequences of their products.

You might also like: 6 Policies and Innovations Tackling Plastic Pollution

Where Is Extended Producer Responsibility Practiced?

Within higher-income countries, which are home to 16% of the world’s population and discharge 34% of the estimated 2 billion tons of solid waste created every year, the social pressure to be better stewards of natural resources coalesced with governments’ fiscal pressures to reduce the rising expense of processing and disposing of solid waste to move EPR policies into the mainstream. Where producers are compelled by the state to internalize a marginal amount of the external costs they  place on the environment and public infrastructure by taking an active role in the collection, recycling, and final disposal of post-consumer products. EPR is also intended to provide incentive for producers to evaluate their entire product life-cycles, from design to fabrication, for opportunities to implement sustainable practices. Producers should be able to then reduce their own disposal costs by making their goods easier to recycle.

After Lindquist’s report, the first Extended Producer Responsibility scheme appeared in Europe in 1994 with the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD) targeting beverage companies. It then spread to Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), batteries, and durable goods made of easy to recycle components, successfully increasing recycling rates across Europe. 

The upshot is the differing manifestations of EPR across European Union borders. Denmark, for example, leverages direct reimbursement contracts between producers and municipal waste handlers to help fund existing infrastructure. While in Belgium, producers have established not-for-profit Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) to manage obligations of its industrial members. This variation has led to a call for harmonization across the group to allow producers to avoid vastly differing requirements between jurisdictions.

In the US, EPR has been implemented at the state level, with 35 states and the District of Columbia (DC) approving regulations that extend disposal responsibility to producers, often for WEEE and environmentally toxic materials such as paints, batteries, and e-waste. In Japan, the 2001 Home Appliance Recycling Law (HARL) made it mandatory for manufacturers to recycle common household appliances such as washers, dryers, and air conditioners. By 2021, appliance recycling rates were above 70% and reached 92% in the case of air conditioners and laundry machines.

To address the rise of WEEE and e-waste, a number of developing countries have resorted to EPR-inspired regulations that require producers to build and run their own waste management infrastructure. Filling a gap within many lower-income countries where processing post-consumer goods for recyclable materials is difficult, heavily manual, and undertaken by poor, informal workers who are exposed to hazardous pollutants used in the extraction process. New laws and state subsidies have spurred local technology manufacturers, such as TCL and Changhong in China, to develop national systems for recycling e-waste, while Western multinational companies have sought efficiency through joint operations, as HP and Apple did in establishing the Vietnam Recycling Platform.

You might also like: What Is E-Waste Recycling and How Is it Done?

What Are the Limitations of EPR?

While EU member states and other developed countries continue to expand the purview of their EPR policies in support of a circular economy – e.g., starting in 2025, EU countries can begin to require textiles to be fully circular – consumer goods producers continue to design, manufacture, and sell products that cannot be recycled. Producers exploit gaps in regulatory coverage and the inability of state-level EPR to reach beyond political boundaries, effectively allowing unprocessed waste not covered by transnational agreements such as the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal to be transported and dumped in countries with either more lenient or non-existent regulations. This “waste haven” effect became painfully clear to developed countries in 2017 when China banned imports of 24 types of post-consumer solid waste, forcing many countries to scramble to find new places to send it. In many cases, they did not, and recyclables ended up being incinerated or sent to landfills.

Developing countries also suffer from the widespread sale of consumer products that are difficult to recycle. In the case of sachets – hand-sized, single-use plastic pouches containing inexpensive, micro-portions of households products sold by multinationals to low-income consumers – they have become a serious environmental threat. Every year, 855 billion sachets – each made of several layers of plastic bonded together and requiring expensive, technologically sophisticated equipment to recycle – are sold to poor consumers who lack access to any recycling infrastructure at all. 

EPR rules in their current form are fragmented, uncoordinated, and fail to prevent the continued production and sale of non-recyclable and difficult-to-recycle goods to consumers, without consequence to the manufacturers. Current EPR legislature allows companies to avoid the sins of the past, leaving post-consumer waste that was sold and dumped in years prior as an ongoing concern, especially as plastics can take centuries to degrade. This translates into substantial amounts of post-consumer goods that continue to pollute fragile ecosystems and jeopardize the health and wellbeing of the environment. 

More can be done. For example, we should leverage existing frameworks, such as the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), to require producers to improve product life cycles instead of relying on EPR to incentivize voluntary sustainable practices. We should also go beyond the ESPR’s focus on energy efficiency and targeting recyclability of the end products. From concept to end-of-life, producers should design goods that reflect the realities of contemporary waste management systems across international borders.

Embracing the idea that if a consumer product cannot be recycled or reused at the end of its life, then it should probably not be sold at all.

You might also like: 4 Smart Waste Management Solutions That Are Revolutionising the Industry

The post Impossible to Recycle: The Limitations of Extended Producer Responsibility Policies appeared first on Earth.Org.