Keynote Speaker
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University; Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan

Jeffrey Sachs: Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much, Lee [Bollinger], for those wonderful words, and also especially for your leadership at Columbia University. Lee is leading Columbia's remarkable entry into a global role, which I think is unprecedented for an American university, and his support and backing for the Earth Institute are so powerful and so gratefully acknowledged by all my colleagues and by me. I really want to thank you for that, Lee.

The Earth Institute is celebrating its tenth year in a world of growing problems that exemplify why the Earth Institute was created in the first place. The discussion that we will be having in the next couple of days with some of the world's leading thinkers and practitioners on the challenge of sustainable development is no small and incidental matter for our planet. Indeed, while it's one of the most neglected topics in our current politics in Washington and in so many other parts of the world, it's probably the central challenge we face on the planet if we aim to stay secure, stay alive, and bequeath a safe and prosperous world to the next generation. We're meeting today because we're not getting this right, because we have not perhaps yet adequately framed the questions, and we certainly have not adequately addressed the questions at the scale and with the breadth, the scope, and the global reach that they require. We've assembled a wonderful group of participants, and a wonderful group of speakers and panelists who will enable us to take an important step forward in thinking about this challenge.

Since it's not a challenge that we talk about every day-- I have not yet heard the President Bush's speech on sustainable development-- it's probably a good idea for us to understand why we are even asking this question and what it means. Therefore, in anticipation of our first panel, I would like to give you my own sense of why this rather funny title was chosen and what it really means for us in our deliberations. Since by tomorrow afternoon we really do plan to come up with answers to this question, it's probably a good idea to focus on what exactly we are asking.

So this is the question: Is sustainable development feasible? And of course the first thing that you ought to ask is, “Well, what do you mean? What is sustainable development?” And it is a phrase that is a little bit lumbering, not very well known and somewhat obscure. For all those reasons I chose it as the title for my academic chair, so that people would say, “What does that mean?” and I'd have a chance to explain why I think it's so important.

So sustainable development has two concepts, and it's the merging of the two concepts that really is the challenge, because accomplishing one or the other is probably not so hard, it's the combination of these two challenges that is really the great and unsolved trick.

First is development. Development means a lot of things, and one could give a lengthy and no doubt boring disquisition on what development really means, but I want you to think about it as meaning improved material conditions, not improved values, not improved spiritual conditions, not improved quality of human interactions necessarily, but the physical stuff of life, access to food, to water, to shelter, to transport, communications, and other things that are part of our consumption in our lives and in the lives of everybody, whether they're fighting to stay alive, or living in material splendor as we do, relatively speaking, in the United States and in Europe.

So one part of the challenge of sustainable development is to ensure that material life is adequate for everybody on the planet. I would like to define it more specifically, and that is that the five-sixths of the world that lives significantly less well in material terms than do the one-sixth in the high income countries of the United States, Europe, Japan, Singapore, Israel, and a few other places. Those five-sixths of humanity should have the opportunity to narrow the material gap which they now face at a reasonable pace. I place special emphasis on the gap faced by the poorest of the poor, roughly the poorest billion people on the planet, who face such extreme material deprivation that their daily lives are a fight for survival, and who die by the millions every year because they don't succeed in that daily struggle. It may be that they don't succeed in getting enough safe water, or bad rains cause a famine and they don't get enough food, or the lack of nutrition means that they can't mount an immune response to a common pathogen, or they get sick and there's no clinic anywhere nearby where they can take a routine treatment course, say for malaria, which costs a dollar and will nonetheless be unavailable for hundreds of millions of people. Two to three million children will die this year for want of that one dollar treatment course of medicine.

That's the bottom of the income distribution in the world, and the challenge of development is to end that kind of misery and give a prospect for the five-sixths of the planet that are in the low and middle income countries to narrow the gap with the richer countries. Now of course the richer countries want this to happen without having to make sacrifices, or significant sacrifices, in their own wellbeing. I would say that the real politics of sustainable development is to find space and institutions and other approaches so that the material deprivation at the bottom and the relative material deprivation in the broad middle can be reduced over time, without causing damage to the material wellbeing of the richer world. And indeed, where the rich world still has expectations of continuing material progress and continuing improvements in material wellbeing in the future. That's one half the equation.

I said that wouldn't be so hard. It's actually pretty tough to achieve all of that, even if you didn't have one arm tied behind your back by the other side of the equation, which is sustainability. Somehow this has to be done in a way that carries on not only in a matter of years but a matter of decades, and in fact over the course of generations. Sustainability can be challenged on many different dimensions, but what we'll mean by it here is environmental sustainability, that material conditions can improve without undermining the ecosystems and other physical functions of Earth systems that are part of the sustenance of life and part of the value of life itself. So it's the combination of economic improvement and environmental sustainability which is the challenge that we're confronting.

We spend hardly any time in our society talking about the important points on this question, although this week Time magazine's cover is a wonderful feature on global warming, which shows that these issues are becoming so incredibly pressing that they are finally reaching the centrality that is absolutely required of them. The point of our initial assessment is that we're not on a course of sustainable development right now. In fact we aren't even close. And we're not on a path of sustainable development in either dimension of this challenge.

On the development side there's more good news than bad, in that a broad part of the middle income world, and some important parts of the poor world, are achieving significant improvements in material life. And this is not something to sneer at for anyone who says, “Well, that's not so important, money doesn't buy happiness.” It ain't true if you're poor: it certainly does. Money buys the survival of your children, it buys increasing life expectancy, it buys the end of hunger, it buys the end of indignity, it means a tremendous amount. Development is taking place in half of the world, in Asia, at a remarkable, unprecedented rate. Typically, it is not being achieved in the poorest of the poor parts of the world, however, and especially in Africa. So if one asks about the challenge of the development part of sustainable development, we're failing on that for the very poorest people on the planet, the people for whom the past generation has been an epic of worsening economic conditions, shortening life expectancies, rising child mortality rates, the spread of AIDS, the resurgence of malaria, the spread of hunger, and the increasing phenomenon of famine. I'm speaking mostly of sub-Saharan Africa. Of course the picture is more complicated; if you average the global population together there actually is a tremendous amount of progress on development. But the progress is centered in China, India and Southeast Asia, so there is a mixed picture on development. However, we are not succeeding to address the very poorest people on the planet, roughly the bottom one-sixth, in any systematic way.

We're certainly not achieving the second dimension of sustainable development, which is the environmental and ecosystem sustainability. Every single major ecosystem on the planet is under profound stress. It should be the number one talked about issue, because it is right at the core of our needs, our survival, and our future prospects. In some places environmental stress has become so remarkably significant that it has led to outright chaos. Darfur, which we portray as a political crisis, is first and foremost an ecological crisis. Already a generation ago there was not enough water available in western Sudan to support the growing populations of pastoralist and sedentary communities. And that water stress has resulted in violence, conflict, and now state-directed murder. While we view these crises as political crises, we should understand them first as ecological crises. They will abound, and they will get worse, because challenges of water, food supply, natural resources, and the impositions on the planet's physical systems by every objective measure and every new finding, leads us to have greater concern, and the prospects are indeed extraordinarily complex and challenging.

Fisheries are are facing collapse all over the world's oceans. Remaining terrestrial habitats are under tremendous threat throughout the tropics, so there's a massive species extinction underway, the sixth great species extinction in Earth's history. There is massive loss of land and degradation of soils in many parts of the world where food production is under stress, Massive changes in chemical fluxes are occurring in the world, where human-made impacts, so-called anthropogenic impacts, are dominant. The nitrogen cycle is now dominated by human interventions through the application of fertilizers which we absolutely and utterly need to feed the world's population, but the application of nitrogen-based fertilizers is now so great that it dominates the nitrogen cycle on the planet with increasingly dire consequences in many parts of the world, such as the eutrophication of dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and many, many other places where rivers carry the nitrogen into waters that are a vital part of global ecosystems. The carbon cycle is now also dominated by human interference, and that's having profound effects on every aspect of the planet. Climate change is the one effect we talk about, and we're beginning to understand better and better that climate change interferes with virtually every aspect of biophysical systems-- not just with temperature, but humidity, precipitation, the ability to grow crops, pests, pathogens, changes in species' ranges that lead to species extinctions, etc.

Pathogens are emerging through changes of human habitat-- SARS, avian flu, AIDS, are all what are called zoonotic diseases. They are not just accidentally emerging right now, they're emerging because of the changing patterns of interaction of human society and animal disease reservoirs, as well as changing patterns of food consumption and food production. These are all parts of a series of anthropogenic forcings on the planet.

If nothing else changed, if we just went on with the level of economic activity that we have right now, we would be in an unsustainable trajectory. This is very important to understand. With the current emissions of carbon of about seven gigatons per year, with the current rate of deforestation, with the current stresses and withdrawals of blue water flows from river systems, we would already be on an unsustainable course. Now that's a problem. Why? Because there's no chance that we're just staying where we are right now. Even if we just stayed at what's about a 55 trillion dollar per year gross world product measured at what's called purchasing power parity prices, even with our current level, six and a half billion people, and an average per capita income of about $8,000 per person in purchasing power adjusted prices, we are on an unsustainable trajectory: more category 5 hurricanes, more climate change, more water stress, more loss of habitat, more destruction and loss of corals, more depletion of fisheries, and the like. But remember the development part of sustainable development. The world's not staying where it is. The poor actually say we'd frankly like to have a little bit more consumption, thank you. We're not so happy with you guys out in the United States at $40,000 per capita and us at one-tenth or one-hundredth of that level, thank you. And now that we've kind of figured out how technology can work for us as it's worked for you, we wouldn't mind having some cars, some electricity and some other things.

We're not staying where we are. And let me just give you some quantification of that. There are six and a half billion people on the planet today, as best we can roughly estimate. The current trajectory is that that will reach about nine billion by mid-century-- roughly another 50% increase of population. The current per capita income level in the world is about $8,000, I noted, with the United States at about $40,000. If the rest of the world merely closed the gap, and some countries and some vast regions-- Asia notably, which makes up half the world's population-- are moving fast to do that, what we have built in is a massive increase of material throughput in the global economy. If the development side of sustainable development is successful, we have built-in a four or five or sixfold increase of economic activity by 2050. That's if we're lucky, that's if it works. If it doesn't work the chances for peace and stability on the planet are compromised. The idea that the United States and Europe say, Sorry, no room for you guys, is really not a geopolitically viable, and certainly not desirable, option. The point that I come back to every day in my own thinking is that we're already environmentally unsustainable, and now we need to observe a successful trajectory of a massive increase of energy use, physical consumption, deployment of physical resources, and it's easy to see just how enormously large the challenge is. And every ecosystem on the planet is implicated in this.

Now one good piece of news that I do want everyone to keep in mind. There's certainly no benefit, there's no comfort, no solution whatsoever to not helping the poorest of the poor. They're not part of the global environmental challenge, because their level of resource use is so low. The 800 million or 1 billion poorest people on the planet use so few resources that helping those people to reach a basic, decent level of wellbeing does not pose global environmental challenges at all. In fact, I would put it quite the other way. Helping the poorest of the poor is pure win-win in terms of sustainable development, because in the case of the very poorest people it's their poverty rather than their economic level of development that's the biggest threat to the environment. That's because the poorest of the poor live on the so-called extensive margin. They're farmers typically, they're cutting down trees, they're hunting bush meat, they're taking whatever resources they can from the local environment to stay alive, including mining soil nutrients, degrading land in the long term to survive in the short term, and the poorest of the poor are systematically having the largest number of children, so the population pressures are by far the greatest in the poorest countries. What this means is that if the poorest of the poor can be helped to reach just a bit higher level of material well being so that they survive, so that they're not dying of poverty, so that they're using a bit more electricity and a bit less fuel wood for their energy needs, there is actually a huge net benefit for the world, and for the environment. The benefits will come in terms of a far greater likelihood of peace, because the poorest places are by far the most likely to fall into violence and civil war and to become bases of terror; in terms of population limitation, the poorest of the poor have by far the the fastest population growth; and in terms of improvements in sustainability and biodiversity, because the poorest of the poor, not in every case but to a very significant extent, are living in highly biodiverse tropical environments where massive land degradation is underway that is a reflection of the poverty itself.

If the group of countries in what's called the low level of human development by the UN system accounts-- made up of the 800 million people on the planet with the lowest life expectancy, the lowest literacy, the lowest GNP-- could rise in level to the middle income status, the consequences would be only a 4% rise of total economic activity on the planet, and only about a 6% increase of carbon emissions. That when we're going to have massive doubling or tripling of carbon emissions because of what the rich world is doing. So globally those would be very tiny changes, but the effects on the poorest of the poor would be to raise life expectancy from 46 to 67 years, lower child mortality rates from 183 deaths per 1,000 births to 60 deaths per 1,000 births, which is the middle tier average, lower the use of traditional fuels from 71% of all energy use to just 17% and thus take the pressure off the local biomass, and lower the total fertility rates if they would become the average of middle income countries from an average of about six children per very poor household to an average of two and a half children per middle income household. So the point is the solution is not to keep the poor poor. The poorest of the poor present both a massive security and humanitarian concern for the world, but also from an environmental point of view helping the poorest of the poor to rise to the next rung, the middle income rung, is not where the global sustainability challenge is to be found. That's to be found in the massive increases of economic activity in Asia and the continuing growth of economic activity in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the other high income world.

Now, is there a solution to this conundrum? If we just do what we're doing now, drive the same kind of cars, have a world filled with more iPods and more of what we have but now spread throughout the world, we have no chance of achieving sustainability. What one can say unequivocally is the current technologies applied globally put us on a path of massive environmental ruin, and I'm choosing my words with care. Even our current levels of economic activity are technically unsustainable, but now multiply that by four or five or six. The stresses on every vital ecosystem will lead within decades to collapse of critical functions. So the only solutions are changes in the way we live. That means some mix of technology, institutions and values, the subjects of the panels that will be coming soon.

Let me start with technology. If we're not to solve this simply by stopping economic progress or reversing it, economic progress in the sense of true material wellbeing, we have to find better ways to do what we're doing now in how we use ecosystem services, and how we use energy and deploy it, how we grow food, and so on. I would say there are four great technological challenges. The first, and probably the most central, is the energy system. It's also tough because energy lies at the very core of economic life. The modern energy system based on fossil fuel is the sine qua non of the last two hundred years of economic development. The infrastructure on energy is about a fifty-year lifetime infrastructure, for power plants and structures, and about twenty years for transport equipment, so changing the energy system is a very long-term proposition, right at the core of economic life. But we're going to have to do it, because if you simply multiply fossil fuel use, the problem is not, incidentally, as about twenty-five books have wrongly put it in the last six months that we're going to run out of fossil fuel. If you've written those books I will differ with you, and if you have read them and worried about them I would put you at ease at least on this account. The good news is we are not going to run out of fossil fuels for centuries. The bad news is we are not going to run out of fossil fuels for centuries. We're going to be using lots of fossil fuels and putting an enormous amount of carbon in the atmosphere with all of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, so we have to find a way to de-carbonize our energy. That can be done by using alternative energy sources, though none is at a scale and level of safety right now that economically can replace a fossil fuel era, or by de-carbonizing fossil fuels through the so-called carbon capture and sequestration technologies which are so far unproven but promising. A sustainable energy system is the first bit of technology that we're going to need.

Second, we're going to have to find different ways to grow food. Why? Because the loss of habitat on the planet, both marine and terrestrial, is due overwhelmingly to food production. This may be a surprise, but most deforestation is not for parking lots and paved roads and cities, most deforestation is for adding arable land, for pasture, for increased meat consumption. The soybeans for China are the leading margin of deforestation of the Amazon right now, together with the meat for Europe. Similarly, in the oceans we are on a cataclysmic path of destroying virtually every major fishery on the planet. If it swims we bomb it. And our technology for hunting and gathering in the oceans has become so sophisticated that we can decimate the oceans, and we're doing it right now. So we're going to need new ways to grow food. What we're really searching for vis-à-vis the oceans is fish, and if we can grow enough through aquaculture we may be able to escape the hunting and gathering routine in the oceans the same way we made the substitution from hunting and gathering to primarily settled agriculture 10,000 years ago. But just like settled agriculture, aquaculture as it's practiced right now is environmentally hazardous, so it's not yet a solution. There are two reasons for that. First, the way the fish are bred can cause the spread of disease and pollutants in the waters, especially in coastal waters. Second, most of the fish we like are carnivores, and so we fish the oceans to feed the farmed fish. We need good vegetarian, vegan fish, safely grown through aquaculture as one way to have our oceans and our omega-3s as well. But if you're attentively reading the newspapers you probably saw the transgenic pork may give us omega-3s also. So there are all sorts of possibilities of improved ways to grow food. But the current path is not viable if we want to have our rainforests, if we want to have our ocean systems. And we do want to have them because the consequences of not having them are not merely aesthetic or moral; they will be devastating from many points of view.

Third, health is wealth. We are in the path of multiple and increasingly frequent zoonotic diseases. We don't have a global health system. When the avian flu arrived in Niger about eight weeks ago and The New York Times ran a story that said, “Experts worry about lack of medical care as avian flu arrives in Africa,” one could only say “Duh.” Because Africans are dying at the rate of eight to ten million deaths per year for lack of basic healthcare. We don't care, it seems, until the prospect of avian flu coming from Africa grabs our attention. It is absolutely reckless and foolhardy, as well as unconscionably mean-spirited, that we have turned our eyes away from this amount of suffering and the lack of access to basic healthcare. The idea that we're going to find our way through all the avian flus to come without a global surveillance system that actually reaches into Niger and northern Nigeria and all other parts of the world is foolhardy. The pathogens do not stop at the nation's border. It seems that nothing does, and that's probably true, but certainly not the pathogens, not the birds, not the migratory fowl. The AIDS pandemic was a zoonotic disease that should have alerted us already to the need for global public health. So we're going to need technological solutions for global health surveillance and management.

Fourth, we need ecological management more generally, not just in these specific areas, but the way we manage watersheds and ecological zones more holistically is only in its infancy in terms of the underlying science.

Politics is central to this. The basic state of our politics today is that we have almost no politics on this issue. We're fighting all the wrong wars in this country. The one war that we are fighting is a war that is only costly, that solves nothing, and it's a war we never should have fought. But we haven't even started to fight the wars on poverty, disease, and environmental degradation, and they don't even know it in Washington. So we need a quite fundamental change in how our political systems are organized. First, the White House needs a subscription to Scientific American. The gap between science and society is profound and extraordinarily dangerous. We can solve these challenges just with goodwill, even if we had it, or just with clear thinking, even if we had it. These are scientific problems first, and I would say foremost. We will require massive improvements in science and technology and application if we want to have nine billion people living better lives. Of course if we don't have science and technology we can have war and violence and benighted global disarray. But there is no way we're going to solve this problem, even through good works and goodwill. Science has to be at the center of it. We have not just a scientifically innocent government now, we have a scientifically antagonistic government. But that is probably temporary because we still have a Constitution. But what we don't have, ladies and gentlemen, is a government that can absorb the science. Our departments, or ministries in other countries, are not equipped to be at the interface of science and policy. It's hard work, it requires a lot of expertise, it requires a lot of training, and our political leaders do not have the training to understand these issues, nor do our senior civil servants. We have a disconnect between what the job of politics and government is seen to be, and what it really has to be. And this I put as a major, but solvable, unresolved problem.

The second problem is that these are all global-scale problems. Not one of them can be solved by any country alone. There is no such thing as a superpower anymore, much less this image of a sole superpower, the United States. It doesn't mean anything anymore. You can have the biggest army, but a superpower defined only in terms of bombing capacity is a pretty useless definition. The United States can not solve these problems on its own. The United States can't even really lead the solutions anymore. The United States is one part of the global discussion. It's not part of it right now because it has absented itself, because we are wasting our time and our energies on other things. These issues are solvable only on a global scale, at global levels of cooperation, and not only through national capitals. What we're doing today and tomorrow is part of the global solution, and it is absolutely as real, or more real, as anything that goes on in Washington. The new kind of politics also has to be much more networked and much more multi-sector, and not run just by elected officials. It has to be global, which is why I'm grateful that so many people have come from all over the world to participate in our discussion.

A third change is we need institutions that look after the future, because even if we looked after each other better, or even if we were smart enough to better look after our own self-interest, we would still have to look after future generations more systematically, and we don't yet have the institutions to do that. Our capacity to diminish future possibilities is really astounding. The people of the future don't vote, they don't have a say, and we don't have them clearly in mind.

And then finally we need to safeguard the commons of the oceans, the atmosphere, the biodiversity, which under the treaties belong to each country in which they lie, but that's a nonsense. Biodiversity is a global diversity, it's a heritage for the whole world, and is not owned by any sovereign nation or corporation. Learning how to manage that global commons is also part of the political solution.

We will have a very hard time doing this with nine billion people on the planet. There still is every opportunity to help the poorest of the poor choose voluntarily to have fewer children, and every instinct of the rich countries to become pro-natalist, to have more children so that somehow those children will pay the social security taxes for us, have to be resisted. We will be better off if we safely and voluntarily arrive at a world of seven and a half billion rather than nine billion by a much more decisive reduction of total fertility rates. I can tell you the poorest of the poor can't begin to afford having six children. They don't have a chance to raise them in a healthy, educated manner, but they lack access to contraception and family planning, they have no assurance that their children will survive, their daughters are not being educated, and on all of those fronts the United States should be playing a role that it's not playing. The main role we're playing is to suppress family planning right now. So there we go again, on an absolutely anti-sustainable development trajectory.

Finally, we're here today, ladies and gentlemen, because this issue is not an esoteric issue to be left to the climate scientists, the earth scientists, and the public health specialists, although they need to be in the lead because, as I stressed, the deeper science of this is our first pathway to survival. But I strongly believe that in the years ahead the very issues that we are going to talk about in the next couple of days will be at the very core of our geopolitics. Everything that we think is at the core of our geopolitics, the war against terror, Islamic fundamentalism has almost nothing to do, in my opinion, with the real challenges that we face on this planet. They are a distraction and a misunderstanding. We had better be talking to each other in all parts of the world, understanding that the biggest challenge is not us against them, but the biggest challenge is all of us together to find a path to sustainable development.

Thank you very much.