Grace H. Wever,
Eastman Kodak Company
Sustainable Development and Preventive Diplomacy
--Summary of Drafting Panel Discussion--
The White Paper presents a succinct discussion of global threats
affecting the post- Cold-War world, then premises a form of preventive
diplomacy in which the United States would maintain ready four responses
-- ranging from support for democracy to military strength -- to respond
to conflicts or potential conflicts across the world. The role of science
and technology (S&T) in responding to global problems is sketched out,
followed by a longer listing of agency activities targeted at the threats.
The drafting group focused on the critical role of science and
technology in providing organizing principles for developing the global
knowledge strategy upon which sustainable development will depend. This
strategy will involve unprecedented collaboration among all of the
sciences, engineering, and the humanities. It will demand especially
effective modes of communication and cooperation among industry,
government, educational institutions, and other private organizations.
These patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration and cooperation among
major sectors of society must transcend national boundaries. S&T is used
in this paper in its broader definition that includes both the social and
the natural sciences.
LEADERSHIP AND VISION
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro allowed the nations of the
world to assess their prospects for sustainable development and to begin
the discussions that could, if pursued adequately, lead to important
international collaboration on meeting basic human needs and protecting
the global environment of the future. Meeting these needs would mean
changing levels of consumption in the industrialized world to maintainable
patterns, using our considerable intellectual capital to formulate
technologies less destructive than the ones we now use, and building the
scientific and technical bases in developing countries so that they would
be able to manage their own natural capital in a sustainable way.
The vision of sustainable human development entails a society in
which basic needs and an equitable share of life's amenities can be met by
successive generations while maintaining in perpetuity a healthy,
physically attractive, and biologically productive environment.
Sustainable human development emphasizes the quality of economic growth
rather than the annual percentages of that growth. It emphasizes
regeneration and enrichment of the human environment, rather than its
degradation. Sustainable human development will depend upon political and
religious freedom and personal security for all. Authenticating this
vision begins with leadership and requires the participation of all
sectors to arrive at a consensus on a sustainable future.
The United States is challenged to marshal our nation's substantial
intellectual and material resources to provide world leadership to engage
the pressing problems of national security and global stability now before
us. Threats to sustainable development are among the most significant
long-term threats to our security.
ISSUES
Among the threats affecting world society, five can be singled out as
global in nature and highly relevant to U.S. national security and global
stability: biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, emerging
diseases, overpopulation, and political unrest and its consequences.
Loss of biodiversity is undeniably the most urgent threat, because it
is the fastest moving of all environmental problems and is irreversible,
thus hampering future prospects of achieving stability. The significance
of this threat was insufficiently stressed in the White Paper in the
opinion of the drafting group. At the current estimated rate of
biodiversity loss, twenty percent of all living species on Earth may be
lost by the year 2020 -- an estimated total loss of two million organisms.
Such loss means the destruction of the machinery that makes our planetary
home function. We will no longer have these organisms as sources of
medicine, oils, fibers, food, chemicals, and other commodities of interest
to both industrial and developing societies. The loss of biodiversity
forecloses opportunities to construct sustainable systems for our own
people and all people across the globe.
Environmental degradation is a related threat driven by production
and consumption of goods and services in a manner that is not
environmentally benign. Degradation results from industrial,
agricultural, and other activities that by their nature or magnitude
exceed the capacity of physical and biological systems or that produce
nonassimilable pollution or undesirable human impacts. During the last
fifty years, the world has experienced the loss of nearly 25 percent of
its topsoil, an increase by 25 percent of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, the depletion by 8 percent of ozone in the atmosphere, and the
cutting of about a third of then-existing forests without replacement.
While these problems are well known, they are not sufficiently addressed
in national and international research agendas, agreements, and practices.
Infectious diseases affecting humans, plants, and animals are
spreading rapidly as a result of trade and travel, and -- amplified by
malnutrition -- threaten public health and productivity on a broad and
intensive scale. The rapidly growing human population, widespread
pollution and the deterioration of other environmental factors that may
contribute to the maintenance of good health, as well as the lack of
dependable supplies of clean drinking water for fully a fifth of the
world's people, contribute together to the acceleration and spread of such
diseases. Our capacity to prevent or treat known and future diseases at
an adequate level is unknown.
Population growth is putting excessive demand on human and physical
capacity to meet human needs for food, housing, health, employment, and
education. Population growth in industrialized countries exerts a
disproportionately negative effect on the global environment and must be
brought under control if global stability is to be achieved. (If the U.S.
had the same population as in 1943, even continuing to use more energy per
capita than any other country, we would not need to import any oil, burn
any coal, build any nuclear plants, or drill along the shores of
California and Florida.) The population policies adopted by most
developing countries during the past twenty years should be encouraged and
strengthened through global action so that resources might be utilized
sustainability. Only part of world population growth is attributable to
unwanted fertility and thus susceptible to family planning. Population
momentum and large desired family size in some countries are also
principal factors in population growth. Therefore, S&T narrowly conceived
cannot entirely solve this threat, although it can contribute to the
solution. A more comprehensive response will require an integrative
policy addressing gender issues and barriers to productive resources,
labor markets, and political power.
Warfare and ethnic and social clashes set back efforts to meet
critical human and environmental needs. Political unrest tends to be a
regional problem, but one with global impact as a consequence of forced
migrations and other disruptive effects. The potential use of chemical
and biological agents of warfare in the service of terrorism and nuclear
proliferation further increase the gravity of this threat.
Without social justice and the kind of equality that would produce
stability throughout the world, these problems will only get worse.
Countries and stakeholder groups perceive the issues and threats to
success differently. Recognizing and integrating their diverse views is a
critical part of leadership in forming policy goals to address those
issues.
POLICY GOALS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Six public policy goals for achieving sustainable development were
identified. These goals apply equally to domestic programs as well as to
U.S. leadership in a stable and secure world. It may seem an
insurmountable challenge to set societal goals that integrate the issues
identified above. However, dealing with them as freestanding issues is
not an option, since sustainability cannot be achieved through isolated
policy- and decision-making. Because the goals are interconnected, they
will require input from many sectors of society.
Promote Knowledge for Long-term Development. In view of the central
role of individual choices in addressing the issues, there is an
overarching need to foster knowledge concerning the nature and interaction
of matter, energy, living organisms, information, and human behavior.
Knowledge is here construed broadly to encompass fundamental research, its
dissemination through formal and informal education, and its application
to convert natural resources into goods and services to meet human needs.
There are an estimated one billion illiterate people in the world;
high levels of illiteracy undermine long-term development goals. Economic
development requires the synergistic application of technology and the
ability to assume higher risk to achieve higher returns. Yet these two
requirements alone are insufficient to reach poorer populations who can
afford neither technology nor risk. Long-term development comes only to
countries that target the well-being of their people in more than merely
quantitative terms. Education has been linked to productivity and
population stabilization and is the principal component of societal
well-being and stability. Even so, education is effective only when
supported by health and nutrition and by appropriate infrastructure. This
is true as much in the United States as in the developing world.
Promote Institution Building. The integration of education,
infrastructure, health systems, and sustainable productivity requires the
re-creation and linking of organizations and programs representing many
sectors of society. Institution building for sustainable development
calls for better definition of goals and management procedures,
incentives, and training. It is a difficult process, but one for which
the United States has a great deal of expertise to offer developing
countries. One good example is the work of the Instituto Nacional de
Biodiversidad (INBio) in Costa Rica, which brings representatives from
industry, the educational community, scientific community,
conservationists, media, government, and others together to work on the
biodiversity of the country as national patrimony. Because INBio can
demonstrate profit from biodiversity, the matter of the nation's
dependence upon it becomes a reality rather than a slogan, and the nation
develops a will to add to it out of its own self interest.
Modify Consumption. The consumption habits of the industrialized
nations and, increasingly, of the newly industrializing countries are
devouring the world, polluting its waters, and unbalancing the global
climate system. The solutions lie in reforms in energy consumption, land
use, tax policy, and subsidy and investment policies in our own country
and abroad. Achieving these reforms will depend upon an educated and
informed public that understands the need for fundamental change in
patterns of life and alternate ways of achieving fulfillment and
well-being. The role of national leaders is critical in creating the
climate for reform.
Shape New Market Strategies and Trade Policies. Our international
trading policies will need adjustment to achieve the ambitious vision of
these goals, to open markets equitably, make capital broadly available,
maintain a strong business and industrial base, provide for sustainable
resource throughput, counter unstable tax and regulatory climates, shape
equitable and effective intellectual property rights structures, and train
workforces. A sustainable environment needs to be more than a sidebar to
discussions of market incentives: Sustainable development requires more
accurate accounting for the value of natural resources and intact
ecosystems. As long as their cost is valued without considering
replaceability, pollution consequences, or effect of biodiversity loss,
changes in patterns of consumption and more equitable distribution of
wealth cannot occur.
Forge Cooperative Partnerships for Development. Many Third World
problems are ones for which the United States has little relevant
experience. Taking our experience as a model for transportation and
health systems, for example, may prove disastrous in cost, land use, and
social services. Cooperative partnerships are needed to seek solutions
through the application of appropriate technology. Such technology can be
effective in promoting new markets for the United States and lessening the
need for other forms of assistance to less developed countries.
Involve Stakeholders. Sustainable development depends upon
involving the stakeholders in identifying goals, forging workable
institutions, and promoting vigorous economic growth in a healthy
environment. The socialist totalitarian approach to development has
proven a failure; free-market democratic societies are generally believed
to promote world stability. But these require discipline to promote
development in which all have a stake, development that only comes from
consensus and involvement. Democratic societies also require equity of
involvement between the classes and the genders; the reality and
perception of present inequality threatens basic stability and even the
ability to absorb the advantages of scientific and technological advances.
IMPLEMENTATION:
Solutions and Recommendations
There is a need to develop highly integrated but practicable
solutions to complex, cross-boundary issues and threats. These solutions
should be considered not as expenditures, but as investments in
sustainability. But before examining the recommendations, it is
appropriate to address the issue of preventive diplomacy that forms the
core of the White Paper.
Preventive Diplomacy. The White Paper expands the concept of
preventive diplomacy to include, along with "traditional diplomacy and
military strength," support for democracy and sustainable development,
with the argument that environmental degradation, overpopulation, and
inequitable distribution of resources contribute to and even cause social
unrest, internal strife, and regional conflicts. However, it is arguable
whether the conflicts that have occurred since the end of the Cold War
have arisen out of environmental stress or population growth, or even
primarily out of the inequitable distribution of economic resources,
rather than from the struggle for control over political and economic
resources. Did environment, population, and resource distribution
problems lead rogue states such as North Korea and Iraq to take the
positions they currently take, or will sustainable development alter those
policies? Did the destabilization of Algeria, Kenya, India, Nigeria,
Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Haiti result from these problems, or
from the unwillingness of one group to share power and resources with
another?
Clearly, environmental degradation and overpopulation can create
conditions that threaten national security or weaken central state power,
and can lead dominant groups to make political decisions about resource
distribution. But if conflicts facing the world today are essentially
political in derivation, then the leverage for S&T narrowly conceived to
prevent or manage them is little, or at least constrained. Moreover,
there may be as much need for the commitment to use existing information
about identifying potential conflict, as for extensive new research. This
disagreement about preventive diplomacy may be due in part to disagreement
whether the unequal distribution of resources is an environmental rather
than political problem, but members of the drafting group were concerned
that such an approach not dilute efforts to advance both preventive
diplomacy and sustainable development in appropriate terms.
Science and Technology Vehicles. Worldwide development of the
discovery, integration, dissemination, and application of knowledge calls
for a global knowledge strategy. As stated in the opening of this paper,
this strategy will require unprecedented collaboration among the physical,
biological, medical, and social sciences, mathematics, engineering, and
the humanities. It will demand especially effective modes of
communication and cooperation among industry, government, educational
institutions, and other private organizations. These patterns of
interdisciplinary collaboration and cooperation among disciplines and
among major sectors of society must transcend national boundaries.
The material resources to implement a global knowledge strategy are
potentially available, without new money, by elevating knowledge and
education to higher priority on national and international agendas. At
present, annual international expenditures for official development
assistance total about $60 billion and for military expenditures in
developing and industrialized countries about $760 billion. Although this
argument has been made in a similar way before, it is worth repeating that
allocating an amount equal to three per cent of this $820 billion would
provide annually some $25 billion to develop a global knowledge strategy.
In addition, private investment in the global information infrastructure
could greatly expand the creation of and access to knowledge.
The United States has superb national intellectual resources in our
universities and colleges, and in federal, industrial, and private
research laboratories and centers. The U.S. higher education system is
one of our main international advantages and a principal element of our
world leadership. This capacity is more than adequate to meet the demands
of a strategy that attempted to develop the human resource infrastructure
worldwide for sustainability. We will need to invest appropriately in our
institutions of higher learning and will need to open these institutions
in appropriate ways to aspiring scientists of all nations. Existing
high-quality human capacity in U.S. universities could also be placed in
developing countries to establish training programs and other facilities.
S&T has a major role to play in global stability but only as
scientific capabilities are developed in all countries and integrated with
the other domains of knowledge. It is clearly in our interest to
strengthen the scientific and technical infrastructure particularly of the
developing nations. The application of technology requires the
development of institutions in these countries with the capability of
organizing the knowledge necessary for national development and to
expedite the transfer of additional knowledge from other nations.
Education should be an international effort, and other industrialized
countries could assist in making all educational establishments accessible
to students from the developing world.
The science and technology community, both public and private, has
many roles to play in moving us toward sustainable development. By
informing the vision-making process with a reality-based image of the
future, S&T can help to identify current issues and threats and predict
future ones. By recognizing gaps in knowledge about such threats, S&T can
play a role in expanding the knowledge base and in informing and educating
the public. S&T can also play a clear role in developing solutions. For
example, it can compare, through scenario building, different management
options such as legislative and regulatory approaches versus voluntary
programs, plans, and initiatives. S&T contributes in the area of R&D,
identifying, developing, and refining technology options. It contributes
data on impacts and threats from alternative paths, including estimating
costs, risks, benefits, and potential impacts on social, economic, natural
resource base, and environmental factors. The S&T community also
contributes by developing measurement tools to track the impact of
policies, plans, technology options, and so forth. Again, its role is to
inform and educate the public and private sectors of potential outcomes,
examining cross-boundary impacts. And lastly, perhaps its most critical
role is to educate all sectors on the need for behavior change.
Further research is needed in many areas. An important research task
needing attention and funding is to identify appropriate indicators for
sustainability, in order to set parameters for policy and action. Another
area concerns the effectiveness of different approaches to human capital
development and the relative trade-offs between development targeted at
the poor versus those most likely to make use of new information and
capital investments. Another area concerns the relationships between
population growth and the empowerment of women. Still another question
(connecting to issues about power associated with preventive diplomacy)
concerns the best way of achieving more equitable distribution of wealth
in free-market democratic societies; while it is commonly accepted that
democratic societies are the best vehicles for sustained development, the
processes of achieving it are less clear.
A facility or mechanism for developing and disseminating information
about technologies suitable for sustained development in the Third World
is needed. The clearinghouse mechanism in the Convention on Biological
Diversity, once established, might fulfill part of this need. An idea
with many adherents is the creation of an "institute for sustainability"
that would accelerate exchange at the national level. Existing efforts --
such as the U.N. Development Programme -- might be modified to promote a
global knowledge strategy. The regional technology-based economic
development activities promoted and facilitated by many state governments
might be able to play a role. Such a facility should promote the
application of existing technology and, where that is insufficient, the
discovery and development of new technology. The United States itself
could benefit from such cooperative partnerships, which could be
established on a reciprocal and cost-sharing basis. Mutual economic
benefit can be based on international science and technology cooperation.
Government agencies clearly have key roles to play in promoting a
global knowledge strategy. For example, the National Science and
Technology Council (NSTC)'s initiative Technology for a Sustainable Future
holds promise for long-term economic growth to create jobs while improving
and sustaining the environment. It has a global dimension and addresses
the issue of intergenerational equity. The partnership it seeks among
business and industry, federal, state, and local agencies, schools and
universities, and other private organizations is consistent with the goals
expressed in this document.
Barriers to Sustainable Development. The barriers to sustainability
are many:
- Governmental institutions that are too weak organizationally and
financially, too corrupt, or too lacking in political will to come to
grips with urgent problems before they become insoluble
- Nongovernmental organizations in developing countries that are too few
and ineffective to assist in national development
- Civil societies that are too weak or ill-informed to demand the
equitable treatment necessary for political and social sustainability
- Societies that are unable to understand and put into effect valuable
technological and scientific advances
- Poverty that by its intensity, rate of growth, and distribution not
only limits the capacity of the poor to become productive, but also
exaggerates the adverse impact of the poor on the resources they must use
to live
- Gender inequality that impedes the ability of women to function
effectively as contributing members of their societies
- Demands on capital markets, private and public, so large that
requirements for energy, industrial, and agricultural investment cannot be
met without creating insupportable
- Regulatory policy that impedes technology transfer needed for
sustainability and "perverse incentives" that encourage development
through destructive land use patterns
- Lack of financing for scientific (biological, social, and physical)
research needed to support sustainability
- An insufficient number of scientists and technologists in the
developing world to deal with their problems of developing sustainability.
On the last point, technology transfer and the development of locally
appropriate solutions cannot take place if countries with nearly eighty
percent of the world's population continue to have only six percent of the
world's scientists. Training foreign students who do not return to their
own countries, training them in disciplines with little present or
potential application in their own countries, and organizing training
without adequate concern for promoting adequate infrastructure for them at
home all serve to undermine the role of the American education sector as a
tool for global sustainable development. Further, recent speculation
suggests that "brain drain" to the United States may foreclose employment
for our own trained scientists.
OUTCOMES AND FEEDBACK
Neutralizing or eliminating these barriers cannot be accomplished
through U.S. efforts alone, but can be through international partnerships
that systematically shape market and trade strategies, work to reduce
consumption, promote more effective institutions, and involve all
stakeholders in a long-term global knowledge strategy. The White Paper
rightly stresses the ineluctable link between our own national security
and global stability, and the need for continued U.S. leadership in the
world. Failure to address the major threats to security and stability
identified in this paper jeopardizes the ability both of the United States
and of world society to achieve a healthy, sustainable future for
humankind.
Science and technology have clear and important role to play in this
process. Investment in research and in education (which is perhaps the
best "preventive diplomacy") is the foundation of the global knowledge
strategy needed for achieving sustainable development. Once made, this
investment must be evaluated rigorously in a continual process of issue
re-definition, policy making, and implementation. Scientists must deal
with misunderstandings about the scientific process that arise with the
public media and that make the arguments for sustainable development more
difficult to comprehend. The science and technology community has an
obligation to educate both public and policy makers about the nature of
the threats to stability and possible solutions to them.
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