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Welcome to the Anthropocene

World Bank: Voices

By IW:LEARN

December 14^th, 2020

Republished from: https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/welcome-anthropocene

Author: Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, CEO and Chairperson, Global Environment Facility

The largest tropical wetland on the planet is ablaze. The hurricane season has been so busy the World Meteorological Organization has run out of names for only the second time in history. A pandemic has killed 1 million of us and dealt the global economy a hammer blow.

These overlapping crises are not just hallmarks of a bad year. They reflect the human-caused environmental damage that will keep compounding in the epoch dubbed the Anthropocene, where humanity’s impact on the planet dominates all else.

The risk is that, in their haste to reverse the worst global economic downturn since the Second World War, governments will turn to quick fixes that will accelerate environmental destruction just when the world can least afford it. That is why it is critical to act now—before major expenditures are channelled into the stimulation of sectors that will bring more carbon emissions, more land use change, more soil erosion, and more deforestation.

Failure to factor the environment into decision-making risks worsening three of what the World Economic Forum ranks as the top five threats to the global economy: climate action failure; biodiversity loss; and extreme weather. Yet today, government support for sectors that harm the environment dwarfs spending on efforts to fix that damage.

“Once governments accept that they must redirect capital toward sustainable activity, they will find there are a host of possible initiatives that deliver economic as well as ecological benefits.”

According to the Paulson Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and Cornell University, annual global spending on biodiversity conservation is between $124 billion and $143 billion—a fraction of what is required, with an annual shortfall of $598 billion to $824 billion.

This may sound like a wide gulf to bridge, but it is possible. Roughly half could be closed without new investment, the report said, by cutting subsidies to ecologically damaging sectors. Governments now spend almost $542 billion each year on agricultural, fisheries, and forestry subsidies alone. Energy and mining receive billions more.

Once governments accept that they must redirect capital toward sustainable activity, they will find there are a host of possible initiatives that deliver economic as well as ecological benefits. In Costa Rica, we were able to double the size of the forest even as we tripled the size of the economy, by going from negative incentives toward positive ones.

Our adaptation to evolving COVID-19 restrictions has shown us that society is capable of rapid and radical change when the stakes are high, while the sudden clearing of skies over ordinarily pollution-choked cities fostered greater awareness of the consequences of unending consumption growth. Investors, too, increasingly see the environment as a significant economic risk.

This change in sentiment offers us a real chance to make genuine progress on biodiversity and climate change mitigation, driven by a recognition that shifting financial and policy support toward preserving the environment is in our economic self-interest.

There has been much talk in the media about how the pandemic will affect the health and economic well-being of our children and the children of tomorrow. We cannot forget in the urgency of the present crisis that the decisions we make about the environment in the wake of COVID-19 are critical to ensuring they have both in decades to come.

And surely an investment in their future is the soundest investment of all.

About the Author

Lawyer by profession, politician by choice, and conservationist at heart, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez was elected as CEO and Chairperson of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) by its governing body, the GEF Council, in June 2020. The former Costa Rican Environment and Energy Minister was a pioneer in the development of Payment for Ecosystem Services initiatives and strategies for forest restoration, ocean conservation, and de-carbonization, and is an internationally recognized expert, having held various technical and political positions over the past 30 years, on environmental policy, multilateral environmental negotiations, and financing for nature conservation.