More uncertainty lies ahead for public services

Friday, January 02, 2009

Planning for the future would be easy if the UK's population was stable and living in harmony with its environment but instead it is going through many disruptive changes and that could be a problem for government, says David Nicholson-Lord

If there is one thing certain about the nature of the century that lies ahead, it's uncertainty. From climate change to water, energy and food supplies, Earth's life-support systems are creaking under the strain of humanity. For those who run public services, the prospect of a series of overlapping emergencies, each involving the raw materials of survival and each affecting unprecedentedly large numbers of people, is a formidable new challenge.

That may sound unduly apocalyptic – but then apocalypse is in the air, the subject of an increasing number of books, articles and official reports. The New Scientist earlier this year carried a discussion on the "end of civilisation". The American academic Jared Diamond's Collapse was one of a spate of recent books examining how societies break down. Gaia scientist James Lovelock has gone further, suggesting that humans could be reduced to a "rump" of half a billion "survivors" (the world's population is currently 6.8bn) with large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable as climate change bites.

The main reason for this recrudescence of 1970s-style alarums is, of course, climate change – like the threat of nuclear war, an emergency on a planetary scale. Perhaps the key feature of climate change is unpredictability: not only will places face new extremes of temperature and rainfall but global "tipping points" – a sudden pulse of methane from ocean floor or tundra, for example – will superimpose larger patterns of instability.

Yet at the same time humanity is pressing up against the planet's resource limits. The analyses published by the Global Footprint Network in its Living Planet series measure humanity's ecological footprint against the planet's renewable resources – its biological capacity – and shows that we crossed into "overshoot", when footprint exceeds biocapacity, in the late 1980s and now use up 25 per cent more each year than the Earth can produce. By 2050, on present trends, we will be taking out nearly two planets' worth of resources each year – if such a thing is theoretically possible.

The finer print of this overshoot has recently become all too visible. Many experts believe "peak oil", when production levels plateau out while demand keeps on rising, has already arrived. Water supplies may be similarly peaking – two thirds of humanity will live in water-stressed areas, where demand exceeds supply, by 2025; recently water has had to be shipped in to centres such as Barcelona. This year has also produced, apparently out of the blue, a fully-formed food crisis, complete with riots and shortages, rocketing prices, the spread of food export bans and the appearance of a phenomenon labelled "resource nationalism."

Given the slow decline in per capita food production for several decades, the food crisis should have come as a surprise only to those who have forgotten the crucial role of numbers - specifically human numbers – in environmental calculations. World population, currently growing by some 75-80 m a year – not far off one London a month - is up from 2.5bn in 1950 to 6.8bn today and is projected to reach 9.2 billion in 2050. Environmental groups no longer acknowledge the fact, for fear of alienating supporters, but human numbers play a part, often a decisive part, in virtually every facet of environmental crisis.

Numbers are also key to the management of public services. Headlong population growth during the 18th and 19th centuries turned many of Britain's cities toxic. The recent wave of immigration has seriously overloaded schools, hospitals, health services. Overcrowding has major costs in both health and economic terms, whether it involves housing or transport systems. Big numbers are intrinsically harder to manage than small numbers, necessitating complex, finely balanced systems that are vulnerable to instability – and go wrong on a grand scale. Superimpose on these too-big, too-fast-growing numbers an environment of chronic instability and you have a recipe for a form of permanent emergency on the part of states and government agencies.

It's tempting but probably mistaken to think the UK may be insulated from the worst impacts of the unfolding 21st century crisis. Recent floods have demonstrated the threat posed by climate change to energy and water supplies and also to public health. More crucially, perhaps, the UK is one of the world's most overpopulated countries – it sources less than one-third of its consumption from its own biocapacity – so is highly vulnerable to disruption of supplies in an era of resource nationalism. The looming energy gap and the consequent risk of widespread brown-outs five or 10 years hence is one aspect of this – not a happy prospect for anyone who values public order.

Stable and sustainable populations, globally and nationally, are one important strategic answer to an era of chronic crisis. Against the UK's current (official) population figure of 61m, Optimum Population Trust calculations suggest that sustainable levels for the UK are in the 17m-27m range. Yet we are currently headed for a population of 85m in 2081, according to official projections.

A population that is relatively stable and also living in relative harmony with its environment – if only in terms of resource consumption patterns – will be much easier to serve; one in rapid, extravagant and disruptive growth could, by contrast, prove a managerial nightmare.

David Nicholson-Lord is an environmental writer and research associate of the Optimum Population Trust www.optimumpopulation.org