Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for transforming India from an $8 trillion dollar economy to a $20 trillion economy sets up a quantum leap in national productivity. Such unprecedented scaling up of developmental target is a tremendous economy booster but its success requires reengineering national and state planning strategies to mobilise required human, knowledge and material resources.
Equally important would be to integrate the action plans with globally prioritised themes and practices. In this context, the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit (September 25-27, 2015), has set an agenda under the theme: Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for 2015-2030 (Agenda-2030 for short); the 17 goals and 169 targets under Agenda-2030 will serve as road map for our future developmental plans.
Ever increasing human population has drastically changed our cherished ideas about development. The popular model – Market Economy First, Everything Else Next – is under pressure for replacement by one that chants the mantra of Sustainable Development and Green Economy.
Key issues forcing this paradigm shift are the realisation that our life supporting natural resources are finite but over-exploited beyond their regeneration potential (Malthusian catastrophe) and that only a concerted global effort for their scientific management and preservation would save the situation.
Three Earth Summits have been held so far to explore viable solutions: two in Rio de Janeiro (1992 & 2012) and one in Johannesburg (2012). The recent 2012 Earth Summit (Rio+20), after a review of an assessment and accomplishments of the policies of the previous two Earth Summits, has set the global agenda as sustainable development (SD) (concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with commitment to promote an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations) and green economy (GE).
The GE has been defined as an economy that contributes to eradicating poverty, sustained economic growth social inclusion, human welfare and creating employment, while maintaining the healthy functioning of the earth’s ecosystems (more details on UN website for Rio+20). The Agenda-2030 (plan of action for people, planet and prosperity) comes as a sequel to the first agenda under Millennium Development Goals for 2000-2015.
India has been and continues to be a strong supporter of SD programmes. It has steadfastly pursued the global priorities set at the earth summits. However, the emphasis and the significance as an overarching, robust SD policy need to be more explicit and visible; the adverse consequences of non-compliance to a SD regime needs to be conveyed to the stakeholders with due urgency.
The importance of biodiversity to SD needs to be understood in terms of the life supporting services it provides to society. Thomos Lovejoy lists many such services: sources of wild species (genes) for crop improvement, sources of medicine (2015 Nobel Prize awarded to rese-arch on traditional medicine is a testim-ony), cycling of nutrients, water, energy, bio-geo-chemical cycling, source of life supporting oxygen, acting as a huge carbon sink by photosynthetic carbon fixation and influence on rain fall of the area.
Ultimately, biodiversity is the “mother of all natural resources” which sets the limits of all development. Literature on SD is replete with warning notes urging planners’ urgent attention to the impending problems due to unsustainable rates of consumption of natural resources.
For example, William F Laurance and colleagues (Science, 2001) provide graphic details of the effects of the ongoing development in the Brazilian Amazon forest: “It contains 40 per cent of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest and plays vital roles in maintaining biodiversity, regional hydrology, climate and terrestrial carbon storage.
It also has the world’s highest absolute rate of forest destruction, currently averaging nearly two million hectares per year. Predictably, the Brazilian Amazon will be drastically altered by ongoing development schemes and land use trends over the next 20 years”.
Valuable lessons
There are valuable lessons to be learnt from the above Brazilian Amazon development model for a sustainable management of our natural resources. The post earth summits’ era leaves us with no option but to green the market oriented developmental models by embedding them firmly in a SD framework.
Carrying forward the process could be accomplished by two independent but complementary measures: First, convincing the academics in higher educational and research institutions that their participation is vital for success of Agenda-2030 programmes.
The “conquer the markets” (Patents & Intellectual Property Rights) type of translational research popular in the campuses has to yield appropriate space to accommodate translational research that specifically explores viable solutions to SD related issues.
For instance, James Watson and colleagues (Nature, 2015) have provided valuable insights into novel ways of preserving sustainable ecosystems. The 17 goals and 169 targets under the Agenda-2030 provide similar, exceptional opportunities to the academics from all knowledge systems (sciences, social sciences, management etc) to productively participate and achieve professional excellence.
Second, to provide the necessary knowledge base to such highly focused translational research, it would be worthwhile to establish an independent National Institute for Sustainability Research with a network of similar institutes in all states to professionally address the challenge.
Individually and collectively, these institutes could network with similar global institutes and provide evaluative inputs on key SD issues to contextually support or complement or even challenge the developmental indicators generated by other institutions.
These outcomes could then be collated and conflated to evolve appropriate short term and long term action plans. It is noteworthy that China has already put in place a major stakeholder sensitisation programme for SD through its universities. These two measures provide a combinatorial platform to build a national resolve to take forward SD programmes under Agenda-2030 with commitment.
(The writer is a retired Professor of Bot-any and former Registrar, Bangalore University)
Published 15 November 2015, 17:04 IST