William E. Rees

Urban ecological footprints: Why cities cannot be sustainable—And why they are a key to sustainability

It is sometimes said that the industrial revolution stimulated the greatest human migration in history. This migration swept first through Australia, Europe, and North America and is still in the process of transforming Asia and the rest of the world. We refer, of course, to the mass movement of people from farms and rural villages to cities everywhere. The seeming abandonment of the countryside is creating an urban world—75% or more of the people in so-called industrialized countries now live in towns and cities, and half of humanity will be city dwellers by the end of the century. Although usually seen as an economic or demographic phenomenon, urbanization also represents a human ecological transformation. Understanding the dramatic shift in human spatial and material relationships with the rest of nature is a key to sustainability. Our primary purpose, therefore, is to describe a novel approach to assessing the ecological role of cities and to estimate the scale of the impact they are having on the ecosphere. The analysis shows, that as nodes of energy and material consumption, cities are causally linked to accelerating global ecological decline and are not by themselves sustainable. At the same time, cities and their inhabitants can play a major role in helping to achieve global sustainability.

Perceptual and structural barriers to investing in natural capital: Economics from an ecological footprint perspective

This paper argues that perceptual distortions and prevailing economic rationality, far from encouraging investment in natural capital, actually accelerate the depletion of natural capital stocks. Moreover, conventional monetary analyses cannot detect the problem. This paper therefore makes the case for direct biophysical measurement of relevant stocks and flows, and uses for this purpose the ecological footprint concept. To develop the argument, the paper elaborates the natural capital concept and asserts the need of investing in natural capital to compensate for net losses. It shows how the ecological footprint can be used as a biophysical measure for such capital, and applies this concept as an analytical tool for examining the barriers to investing in natural capital. It picks four issues from a rough taxonomy of barriers and discusses them from an ecological footprint perspective: it shows why marginal prices cannot reflect ecological necessities; how interregional risk pooling encourages resource liquidation; how present terms of trade undermine both local and global ecological stability; and how efficiency strategies may actually accelerate resource throughput. Affirming the necessity of biophysical approaches for exploring the sustainability implications of basic ecological and thermodynamic principles, it draws lessons for current development.

Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability

Conventional wisdom suggests that because of technology and trade, human carrying capacity is infinitely expandable and therefore virtually irrelevant to demography and development planning. By contrast, this article argues that ecological carrying capacity remains the fundamental basis for demographic accounting. A fundamental question for ecological economics is whether remaining stocks of natural capital are adequate to sustain the anticipated load of the human economy into the next century. Since mainstream (neoclassical) models are blind to ecological structure and function, they cannot even properly address this question. The present article therefore assesses the capital stocks, physical flows, and corresponding ecosystems areas required to support the economy using “ecological footprint” analysis. This approach shows that most so-called “advanced” countries are running massive unaccounted ecological deficits with the rest of the planet. Since not all countries can be net importers of carrying capacity, the material standards of the wealthy cannot be extended sustainably to even the present world population using prevailing technology. In this light, sustainability may well depend on such measures as greater emphasis on equity in international relationships, significant adjustments to prevailing terms of trade, increasing regional self-reliance, and policies to stimulate a massive increase in the material and energy efficiency of economic activity.

The built environment and the ecosphere: a global perspective

The human population is rapidly urbanizing, leading many observers to conclude that humans are leaving nature and the countryside behind. This is a perceptual error consistent with the technological optimism inherent in the prevailing expansionist cultural worldview. By contrast, ecological analysis reveals that modern cities are actually increasingly dependent on the goods and services of nature. This fact is merely obscured by technology and urbanization itself. Typical high-income cities appropriate the productive and assimilative capacity of a vast and increasingly global hinterland, resulting in an ‘ecological footprint’ several hundred times larger than the areas they physically occupy. In the next 27 years, the urban population alone is expected to grow by the equivalent of the total human population in the 1930s. This will double the 1970s urban presence on the Earth. Unfortunately, the conventional development path is biophysically unsustainable, calling for a radical transformation of our thinki...

Urban ecosystems: the human dimension

This paper develops a human ecological perspective on cities and urban regions. It describes the role of cities in the expanding human ecological niche and its implications for sustainable urban development. I have used a new technique, ecological footprint analysis, to convert the material and energy flows required to sustain the human population and industrial metabolism of “the city” into a landecosystem area equivalent. This approach emphasizes that, although urbanization has become the dominant human settlement pattern, cities themselves constitute only a small part of the total ecological space appropriated by their human inhabitants. In short, the ecological locations of human settlements no longer coincide with their geographic locations. Every city and urban region depends for its existence and growth on a globally diffuse productive hinterland up to 200 times the size of the city itself. Cities are therefore increasingly vulnerable to global ecological change and geopolitical instability. Given the deteriorating state of the ecosphere, policies to decrease the ecological footprint of cities while increasing regional self-reliance may enhance urban sustainability.

What's blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial.

Abstract In 1992, 1,700 of the world’s top scientists issued a public statement titled The World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. They reported that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” More than a decade later, the authors of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment were moved to echo the scientists’ warning asserting that “[h]uman activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of the Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” Ours is allegedly a science-based culture. For decades, our best science has suggested that staying on our present growth-based path to global development implies catastrophe for billions of people and undermines the possibility of maintaining a complex global civilization. Yet there is scant evidence that national governments, the United Nations, or other official international organizations have begun seriously to contemplate the implications for humanity of the scientists’ warnings, let alone articulate the kind of policy responses the science evokes. The modern world remains mired in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and collective denial seemingly dedicated to maintaining the status quo. We appear, in philosopher Martin Heidegger’s words, to be “in flight from thinking.” Just what is going on here? I attempt to answer this question by exploring the distal, biosocial causes of human economic behavior. My working hypothesis is that modern H. sapiens is unsustainable by nature—unsustainability is an inevitableemergent property of the systemic interaction between contemporary technoindustrial society and the ecosphere. I trace this conundrum to humanity’s once-adaptive, subconscious, genetic predisposition to expand (shared with all other species), a tendency reinforced by the socially constructed economic narrative of continuous material growth. Unfortunately, these qualities have become maladaptive. The current coevolutionary pathway of the human enterprise and the ecosphere therefore puts civilization at risk—both defective genes and malicious “memes” can be “selected out” by a changing physical environment. To achieve sustainability, the world community must write a new cultural narrative that is explicitly designed for living on a finite planet, a narrative that overrides humanity’s outdated innate expansionist tendencies.

Globalization and Sustainability: Conflict or Convergence?

Unsustainability is an old problem - human societies have collapsed with disturbing regularity throughout history. I argue that a genetic predisposition for unsustainability is encoded in certain human physiological, social and behavioral traits that once conferred survival value but are now maladaptive. A uniquely human capacity - indeed, necessity - for elaborate cultural myth-making reinforces these negative biological tendencies. Our contemporary, increasingly global myth, promotes a vision of world development centered on unlimited economic expansion fuelled by more liberalized trade. This myth is not only failing on its own terms but places humanity on a collision course with biophysical reality - our ecological footprint already exceeds the human carrying capacity of Earth. Sustainability requires that we acknowledge the primitive origins of human ecological dys-function and seize conscious control of our collective destiny. The final triumph of enlightened reason and mutual compassion over scripted determinism would herald a whole new phase in human evolution.

Human nature, eco-footprints and environmental injustice

Extreme poverty has been reduced, but 40% of the worlds population still live on less than two dollars per day and 850 million people remain underfed. Meanwhile, the rich enjoy unprecedented levels of consumption, and obesity is a significant public health problem. The standard solution to poverty is economic growth but evidence that humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth undermines this approach. This paper explores the distal causes of the crisis. This paper argues that biophysical unsustainability is an inevitable “emergent property” of the interaction of techno-industrial society and the ecosphere with deep roots in fundamental human nature and that the problem is being reinforced by prevailing conceptual frames and cultural norms. With increasing land and resource scarcity in the twenty-first century, the expanding eco-footprints of the wealthy will increasingly displace the poor. To avoid eco-violence and the descent into chaos, the world community must acknowledge the true human nature of our collective dilemma and act to override innate behavioural predispositions that have become maladaptive in the modern era. Since the problematic drivers act beneath conscious awareness, the overall purpose of this paper is to help bring them to consciousness on grounds that they must be understood if they are to be controlled. Paper presented at the Seminar on Inequality and Sustainable Consumption, University of East Anglia, 4–6 July 2006.

An Ecological Economics Perspective on Sustainability and Prospects for Ending Poverty

Despite our pretensions to science, modern industrial society is as myth-bound and mystical as any that has preceded it. Our prevailing cultural myth includes a dangerous vision of global sustainability and poverty reduction centered on unlimited economic expansion, “free” trade and technological fixes. This paper dissects the modern myth, exposing its conceptual flaws and practical failings. It then proposes an alternative conceptual framework for development derived from ecological economics and ecological footprint analysis. The new framework recognizes that the human enterprise is a subsystem of the ecosphere whose growth is constrained by biophysical limits. If humanity is to seize control of its destiny it must arise above wishful thinking and tribal instinct. Global society needs a new cultural myth rooted in humanitys unique claim to intelligence and self-awareness in the face of danger. Human security depends on equitable development—not growth—within the means of nature. Sustainability with social justice can be achieved only through an unprecedented level of international cooperation rooted in a sense of compassion for both other peoples and other species.

Cumulative environmental assessment and global change

Abstract This paper assesses the role of cumulative assessment in the context of global change. The case is made that it is no longer adequate to assess only the local or regional cumulative effects of development, but that global constraints must also be taken into account. The four- to five-fold expansion of economic activity since the Second World War has produced a level of material and energy exchange between the ecosphere and the economy that is already capable of irreversibly disrupting global life support and undermining global ecological stability. This ongoing trend permanently changes the relationship between humankind and the ecosphere. Society must now be prepared to contemplate the possibility that additional net material growth may be both uneconomic and ecologically unsustainable. In an economically full world, cumulative effects assessment should therefore assume a global perspective, adopting no net loss of essential natural capital and zero-impact growth as routine development objectives.