Buddhism, Limits to Growth and the 7th Millennium Development Goal
•Download as PPT, PDF•
2 likes•899 views
Electronic presentation to United Nations Day of Vesak conference, "Buddhist Response to Global Warming and Environmental Protection" May 9, 2014, Bai Dinh Temple, Vietnam. A blogpost of mine mentions this, see: http://globalchangemusings.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/mdg-7-spectacular-failure.html
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Buddhism, Limits to Growth and the 7th Millennium Development Goal
Similar to Buddhism, Limits to Growth and the 7th Millennium Development Goal (20)
More from Australian National University
More from Australian National University (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Buddhism, Limits to Growth and the 7th Millennium Development Goal
- 1. CRICOS #00212K Buddhism, Limits to Growth and the 7th Millennium Development Goal Buddhist Response to Global Warming and Environmental Protection May 9, 2014, Bai Dinh Temple, Vietnam Prof Colin D Butler ARC Future Fellow
- 2. CRICOS #00212K Summary The Buddhist response to the environmental risks we face is feeble compared to their size We need a vigorous, more engaged Buddhist civil society to help “address” this 2
- 3. CRICOS #00212K Kenneth Boulding (1910-93) The Economics of Spaceship Earth 3 “the only person who believes in perpetual economic growth is either a madman or an economist”
- 4. CRICOS #00212K “Limits to Growth” published 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Stockholm conference Rio II President Reagan dismisses population as a serious issue “” “Cornucopian enchantment”” Earth summit President Bush “US lifestyle not for negotiation” From hopes of a global ecological consciousness to an emerging fortress world 4
- 5. CRICOS #00212K MDG 7: “Ensure Environmental Sustainability” Target 9. Integrate principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs & reverse the loss of environmental resources Target 10. ½ by 2015, proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water & basic sanitation Target 11. Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers Poverty and health Poverty and well-being 5
- 6. CRICOS #00212K 25. Forest cover 26. Areas protected for biodiversity 27. Energy use (kg oil equivalent) per $1 GDP 28. CO2 emissions per capita 29. Consumption CFCs (ozone) 30. % population using solid fuelsPoverty and health Largely solved (since early 1990s) 6 Failure to - recognize any limit -distinguish clean from dirty energy (other than for cooking fuel) MDG 7 environmental targets
- 7. CRICOS #00212K 25. Biodiversity targets (not just protected land) 26. Alternative indicators for human well-being 27. Clean energy target eg switch subsidies for fossil fuel (c $0.5 trillion) to cleaner energy 28. Live within our “Carbon budget” 7 Improved MDG 7 targets
- 8. CRICOS #00212K 64 36 20 80 Percentage change in yields to 2050 -50 -20 0 +20 +50 +100 UN Devt Prog, 2009 CLIMATE CHANGE to 2050: MODELLED CHANGES IN CEREAL GRAIN YIELDS Poor Countries Projected to Fare Worst 8
- 9. CRICOS #00212K Climate change will 'lead to battles for food', says head of World Bank (April 2014) (Jim Yong Kim) 9
- 11. CRICOS #00212K 11 Typhoon Haiyan - 2013
- 12. CRICOS #00212K12 “Exxon Mobil's response to climate change is consummate arrogance” Bill McKibben, 2014 Unprecedented wildfires are burning in the American west. What does big oil have to say about climate change?
- 13. CRICOS #00212K13
- 15. CRICOS #00212K15 “Our practice needs to extend beyond our sitting cushions and Dharma practice halls, to embrace a broader understanding of what is happening in our world, to our world.” (David R Loy)
Editor's Notes
- Brief Biographical note Professor Colin Butler, University of Canberra, Australia, colin.butler@canberra.edu.au Colin is an Australian academic known internationally for his work on sustainability and health. In 2009 he was named one of “100 doctors for the planet” by the French Environmental Health Association. He contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and is sole editor of Climate Change and Global Health (CABI 2014). In 1989 Colin co-founded the Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight (www.bodhi.net.au), which works mainly in South Asia. This may be the oldest Buddhist influenced development organization based in a non-Buddhist country. He has been involved with the organization of several UNDV meetings, including in Hanoi in 2008. Colin is currently working on a book called The Human Titanic. Buddhism, Limits to Growth and the 7th Millennium Development Goal Spaceship Earth is a closed system in which resources (other than sunlight) are limited. But humanity collectively behaves as if there are no limits, despite ever-growing evidence, such as the high price of energy and food and the proximity of dangerous climate change. Early steps towards global ecological consciousness have faltered, shown also by the weakness of the Millennium Development Goal concerning environmental sustainability. We are becoming accustomed, perhaps inured, to the growing number of catastrophic events; at the same time many rich populations appear addicted to profits they make from destroying the foundations of civilization. The Buddhist response to this crisis is feeble in comparison to the risk. The Buddhist response needs to be multiplied by a far more vigorous and engaged Buddhist civil society. 26th February 2014 Dear Professor Colin Butler, My name is Alice Minchin, and I am writing on behalf of myself and my colleagues and fellow medical students, Alice McGushin and Kate Lardner. We would like to invite you to be a part of AMSA Global Academy, an online course in global health to begin in April 2014. The aim of AMSA Global Academy is to provide medical students with an opportunity and platform to further their knowledge in global health. The course will be run through an online interface allowing 100-200 medical students to participate. It will be run for a total of 16 weeks and consist of 8 modules. Your expertise in shaping the content of this course would be hugely beneficial. We would greatly appreciate your advice and guidance on the specific module of Climate Change and Health, which Alice, Kate and myself are co-convening. Each module will consist of: A recorded or live lecture by an expert or panel of experts Required and suggested readings Online discussion boards Online quiz We would specifically like your input into the lecture, revising learning objectives for the module and suggesting some stimulating articles and reading material. For the Climate Change and Health module, we are planning on having four focus areas: the science behind climate change, the health implications, consideration of populations more vulnerable to the health and other effects of climate change, and the role of the health professional. With your expertise surrounding the global health implications of climate change, we hoped you would be able to contribute to the third component of our module, considering vulnerable populations, specifically those in developing nations. Other populations we wish to cover are Paediatric and Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and we will be seeking speakers for those components as well. Specifically, we hoped you would be able to contribute a short ~10 minute video lecture on the topic of developing nations as populations more vulnerable to the health consequences of climate change, as well as making suggestions for further readings/references, and possibly the learning outcomes and assessment quiz. With your experience and knowledge, if you felt there was a particular focus or example area that was pertinent to medical students’ future practice that should be incorporated into the lecture, we would be very appreciative of your opinion and input! We are still in the process of wording our learning objectives, but they would relate back to those four areas we hope to address in the module. The other modules, for your interest, are: Introduction to Global Health Power and policy in global health Global health delivery: where the rubber hits the road Social determinants of health: thinking beyond our silo Health in emergency settings: conflicts, disasters and displacement Health worker migration and Australia’s role Climate change and health Technology in global health We feel that the course would greatly benefit from your input, however in the event that you were unable to contribute, we would welcome any suggestions for alternative speakers. In addition, please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any additional information or clarification. We look forward to hearing from you soon. Kind regards, Alice Minchin ([email_address]), Alice McGushin ([email_address]) and Kate Lardner ([email_address]) AMSA Global Academy Team People searching through the debris of destroyed buildings in the aftermath of a strike by Syrian government forces, in the neighborhood of Jabal Bedro, Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday (AP Photo/Aleppo Media Center AMC) Feb 2013 Dear presenting author,
- Kenneth Boulding Kenneth Boulding, an Economist, Philosopher and Poet, Dies at 83By SYLVIA NASARPublished: March 20, 1993 Kenneth Boulding, a much-honored but unorthodox economist, philosopher and poet, died yesterday. He was 83. His assistant, Vivian Wilson, said Professor Boulding, who had taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder since 1977, died at his home after a long bout with cancer. Nominated at different times for Nobel Prizes in both peace and economics, Professor Boulding was renowned less for a single contribution to economics than for a large number of interesting intellectual and moral insights that both charmed and challenged his fellow social scientists. In addition to writing three dozen books, three volumes of poetry and 800 articles, Professor Boulding — whose white mane, stammer and pointed wit made him distinctive — lectured frequently and entertainingly. “Ken Boulding is like wine that can’t be shipped very far,” said Mancur Olson, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. “His talks, his writing were so full of brilliant asides that no summary does them justice.” Early Successes The son of a plumber, Kenneth Ewart Boulding was born in grimy Liverpool, England, in 1910. He won a chemistry scholarship to Oxford, said Mark Blaug, professor emeritus at the University of London, but soon switched to economics. In 1931, at age 22, he had his first paper — a short but brilliant work on economics — accepted by the Economic Journal, edited by John Maynard Keynes, the British economist. After fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Chicago and a short spell teaching at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Professor Boulding came to the United States for good. He taught at several colleges around the country before settling at the University of Colorado. Like the American economist Paul Samuelson and the British economist Nicholas Caldor, Professor Boulding initially concentrated on adding his own insights to Keynes’s theory that depressions are due to too little private spending and that governments should run deficits to end them. His first book, “Economic Analysis,” was an introductory textbook that over four editions between 1941 and 1966 blended Keynesian and neoclassical economic theory into a coherent synthesis. Professor Blaug said the book was “remarkable in showing how far one can go in economics by using no tool more complicated than that of demand and supply.” Professor Boulding, from a family of deeply religious Methodists, became a Quaker as a young man and remained a passionate if unconventional Christian throughout his life. An ardent pacifist, he opposed Word War II and lost his wartime post as an economist at the League of Nations. Concerns Beyond Economics His spiritual and philosophical concerns ultimately led him to look far beyond economics. “Imagine someone who was half Milton Friedman, half Mahatma Ghandi,” said Professor Olson, who knew Professor Boulding well and credits him for influencing his own work. Professor Boulding invented new areas of economics, including the economics of peace, and published a book of that title in 1945. (An Ayer edition is still in print.) Professor Boulding won the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1949, a prize given every two years to the economist under age 40 judged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought. The award was recognition that Professor Boulding was one of the best and brightest of his generation of economists. After that, he increasingly wandered from the traditional concerns of economics. “He left economics,” said Wassily Leontief, himself a Nobel Prize winner in economics. “He became a universal philosopher.” Though an outsider among modern economists, Professor Boulding was heaped with many honors. He became president of the American Economic Association in 1968 and was awarded dozens of honorary degrees. Part of his charm was his rare diversity. He wrote rhymed poetry (one of his books was entitled “Beasts, Ballads and Bouldingisms”), sculptured, painted water colors and, friends said, used to sing entire Gilbert and Sullivan musicals from memory and could recite nearly all of Wordsworth. Professor Boulding is survived by his wife, Dr. Elise M. Boulding, a professor emerita of sociology at Dartmouth College; five children, J. Russell, of Bloomington, Ind., Mark, of Denver, Philip, of Olalla, Wash., William, of Durham, N.C., and Christie Boulding-Graham of Wayland, Mass., and 16 grandchildrenhttp://www.colorado.edu/econ/Kenneth.Boulding/ http://www.personal.psu.edu/~dxl31/research/otherstuff/boulding.html http://www.panarchy.org/boulding/systems.1956.html http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Boulding/kboulding-con0.html http://www.eoearth.org/article/Boulding,_Kenneth_Ewart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLjhaaP9bP8
- Mark Malloch-Brown: developing the MDGs was a bit like nuclear fusion The man who helped devise the millennium development goals on forgetting the environment, pre-9/11 optimism and his hopes for the next set of targets Mark Tran Mark Tran theguardian.com, Friday 16 November 2012 23.10 AEST Jump to comments (…) Mark Malloch-Brown on the rising number of poor people living in troubled countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan Link to video: Mark Malloch-Brown: The poor will live in 'an arc of weak states' The high-level panel appointed by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to draw up a post-2015 development agenda might well be casting envious backward glances at the small team that drafted the millennium development goals (MDGs). Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, then the head of the UN Development Programme, explains how he and the small group wrote up the MDGs in the basement of the UN office in New York in "relative casualness", so much so they almost forgot to include a section on the environment – MDG seven on environmental sustainability. "The document had gone to the printing presses as I passed the head of the UN's environmental programme," says Malloch-Brown (video). "I was walking along the corridor, relieved at job done, when I ran into the beaming head of the UN environment programme and a terrible swearword crossed my mind when I realised we'd forgotten an environmental goal … we raced back to put in the sustainable development goal." Unlike the sometimes improvised nature of the MDGs, the post-2015 development framework promises to be a more elaborately choreographed affair. Ban has appointed three co-chairs – the UK prime minister David Cameron, the Liberian president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – to head a panel of 26 experts. Their job is to produce a "bold and ambitious" report by the end of May. To avoid the impression that the new framework is being cooked up by experts in a backroom – or basement – there is an ambitious outreach programme. Malloch-Brown commends the effort to consult widely but worries about the "committee-isation" of the process. In an interview at his office at FTI Consulting in London, Malloch-Brown says the eight MDGs melded a human-rights based approach embodied in the Human Development Report; a World Bank pro-market structural adjustment strategy; and the target-setting mindset of rich donors in the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "The development of the MDGs was a bit like nuclear fusion," he said. "There was a lot going on in lots of labs." Malloch-Brown credits Kofi Annan, the then UN secretary general, backed by the Labour government, including a high-profile development secretary, Clare Short, in pushing for the MDGs at the UN millennium summit in 2000. "It was a benign, optimistic time, before 9/11 and the Iraq war, when peace and harmony was not thought to be impossible. It was in that context that Kofi directed myself and others to get universal support of the whole membership", for the MDGs, says Malloch-Brown. Despite the promising international backdrop at the time, Malloch-Brown speaks of civil war within the development community, hence the focus in the MDGs on targets. With different and competing political and economic models, the MDGs did not specify how those goals they were to be achieved. "It was all about outcomes in a world of division and confrontation," he says. Malloch-Brown believes a consensus now exists on what constitutes successful development, citing Cameron's golden thread, although he prefers the term common threads, to include transparency, rule of law and accountability of governments. Malloch-Brown asserts that as China and India develop – although not at such a breakneck speed as before – the world's poor people will be concentrated in an arc of weak or failing states, stretching from west Africa through Yemen to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In dealing with those countries, Malloch-Brown argues that it will not be sufficient to provide better healthcare and access to education or to provide a dynamic private sector to create jobs. "You need accountable institutions, accountable to their own people, and the rule of law both to police that private sector and to prevent it from behaving monopolistically and in rent-seeking ways – but you also need that rule of law to stand up for the rights of the poor," he says. "These are the threads which bring political leaders of very different political persuasions together. For 2015, we have an opportunity we didn't have in 2000 to capture that consensus." He acknowledges that any reference to democracy in a post-2015 development agenda would be a step too far for some, just as opposition from conservative religious groups, including the Vatican and some Islamic countries, led to a watering down of MDG three on gender equality. But Malloch-Brown believes – perhaps he is overoptimistic in this – that the need for successful development rather than any triumphal march of, in his words, "Westminster-style democracy" will ensure that the common threads will find their place in any development model. He cites the growing number of protests in China as a sign that top-down development, so seemingly successful in east Asia, has its limits. As for what should succeed the MDGs, he agrees with many commentators on the need to address inequality; a strengthening of MDG eight, which was vague on the responsibilities of rich countries; consolidating health, which is scattered across MDGs; and fleshing out MDG three on gender equality. "What you want to avoid is a Christmas list of goals with every interest group racing to get in their goals," says Malloch-Brown. "We know what's missing: infrastructure, jobs and definitely a stronger MDG eight about the obligations of those of us in richer countries."
- Climate change will 'lead to battles for food', says head of World Bank Jim Yong Kim urges campaigners and scientists to work together to form a coherent plan in the fight against climate change Share 4251 24 inShare90 Email Larry Elliott, economics editor The Guardian, Friday 4 April 2014 07.02 AEST Jump to comments (306) As Jim Yong Kim warned of the risks of climate change, the UN said food prices had risen to their highest in almost a year. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Battles over water and food will erupt within the next five to 10 years as a result of climate change, the president of the World Bank said as he urged those campaigning against global warming to learn the lessons of how protesters and scientists joined forces in the battle against HIV. Jim Yong Kim said it was possible to cap the rise in global temperatures at 2C but that so far there had been a failure to replicate the "unbelievable" success of the 15-year-long coalition of activists and scientists to develop a treatment for HIV. The bank's president – a doctor active in the campaign to develop drugs to treat HIV – said he had asked the climate change community: "Do we have a plan that's as good as the plan we had for HIV?" The answer, unfortunately, was no. "Is there enough basic science research going into renewable energy? Not even close. Are there ways of taking discoveries made in universities and quickly moving them into industry? No. Are there ways of testing those innovations? Are there people thinking about scaling [up] those innovations?" Interviewed ahead of next week's biannual World Bank meeting, Kim added: "They [the climate change community] kept saying, 'What do you mean a plan?' I said a plan that's equal to the challenge. A plan that will convince anyone who asks us that we're really serious about climate change, and that we have a plan that can actually keep us at less than 2C warming. We still don't have one. "We're trying to help and we find ourselves being more involved then I think anyone at the bank had predicted even a couple of years ago. We've got to put the plan together." Kim said there were four areas where the bank could help specifically in the fight against global warming: finding a stable price for carbon; removing fuel subsidies; investing in cleaner cities; and developing climate-smart agriculture. Improved access to clean water and sanitation was vital, he added, as he predicted that tension over resources would result from inaction over global warming. "The water issue is critically related to climate change. People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth. Fights over water and food are going to be the most significant direct impacts of climate change in the next five to 10 years. There's just no question about it. "So getting serious about access to clean water, access to sanitation is a very important project. Water and sanitation has not had the same kind of champion that global health, and even education, have had." The World Bank president admitted that his organisation had made mistakes in the past, including a belief that people in poor countries should pay for healthcare. He warned that a failure to tackle inequality risked social unrest. "There's now just overwhelming evidence that those user fees actually worsened health outcomes. There's no question about it. So did the bank get it wrong before? Yeah. I think the bank was ideological." The bank has almost doubled its lending capacity to $28bn (£17bn) a year with the aim of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 and spreading the benefits of prosperity to the poorest 40% in developing countries. "What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt. "It's going to erupt to a great extent because of these inequalities. So what I hear from heads of state is a much, much deeper understanding of the political dangers of very high levels of inequality," he said. "Now that we have good evidence that suggests that working on more inclusive growth strategies actually improves overall growth, that's our job." Kim said he was shaking up the bank's structure so that it could lend more effectively and to end a culture in which the organisation's staff did not talk to each other. Instead of being organised solely on a geographic basis, the bank will now pool its expertise across sectors such as health, education and transport so that ideas could be shared across national borders. The bank's private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, will be encouraged to work with the public-sector arm. Kim said the changes had come about because knowledge was not flowing through the organisation. "We were working at six regional banks. The six regional banks were working pretty well, but there was not the sense that there was any innovation in tackling a problem – that if you went to the World Bank you'd have access to that innovation."
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/what-would-the-buddha-do_b_5085001.html