pr 28 03 12 barriers to change

							PRESS RELEASE
Embargo: 09:15 GMT / 10:15 British Summer Time, Wednesday March 28, 2012

Contacts:
Mr. Terry Collins, +1-416-878-8712, tc@tca.tc
Mr. Owen Gaffney, +46 86739556, +46 730208418, owen.gaffney@igbp.kva.se
Ms. Anne Kathrin Raab, +44 7921609742, +49 2288150616, raab@ihdp.unu.edu

Planet Under Pressure organizers and experts are available for interviews.
Live audio stream of the news conference starting at 09:15 GMT (10:15 British
Summer Time), Wednesday March 28:
http://c3379912.workcast.net/planetunderpressure.html


                     Barriers to change
Beyond GDP: Experts Preview “Inclusive Wealth” Indicator to Reflect Sustainability of
                Natural, Human as well as Manufactured Capital

Needed to surmount sustainability hurdles: new yardstick of national progress;
reforms of corporate reporting; an overhaul of environmental institutions

Brazil and India pay a high price for rapid economic growth, according to experts
speaking at a major international meeting in London, Planet Under Pressure.

Between 1990 and 2008, the wealth of these two countries as measured by GDP per
capita rose 34% and 120% respectively. But a myopic focus on economic capital is
flawed, scientists and economists at the conference argue. Natural capital, the sum
of a country’s assets, from forests to fossil fuels and minerals, declined 46% in Brazil
and 31% in India, according to a new “Inclusive Wealth Indicator” designed to
augment GDP as a measure of economic progress.

When measures of natural, human and manufactured capital are considered
together to obtain a more comprehensive value, Brazil’s “Inclusive Wealth” rose just
3% and India’s rose 9% over that time.

“The work on Brazil and India illustrates why Gross Domestic Product is inadequate
and misleading as an index of economic progress from a long-term perspective,” says
Professor Anantha Duraiappah, Executive Director of the United Nations University’s
International Human Dimensions Programme (UNU-IHDP).
“A country could completely exhaust all its natural resources while posting positive
GDP growth. We need an indicator that estimates the wealth of nations – natural,
human and manufactured and ideally even the social and ecological constituents of
human well-being.”

The first Inclusive Wealth Report, to debut in full at a joint UNU-IHDP and United
Nations Environment Programme event at June’s UN “Rio+20” summit in Brazil, will
describe the “inclusive wealth” of 20 nations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China,
Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, the
Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, USA, United Kingdom and Venezuela.
The 20 nations featured in the report represent 72% of world GDP and 56% of global
population.

Authored by 17 specialists from the UK, USA, Chile, Malaysia, India, Germany and
Australia, the Inclusive Wealth Indicator is undertaken by UNU-IHDP with UNEP
support and in collaboration with the UN-Water Decade Programme on Capacity
Development (UNW-DPC) and the Natural Capital Project of Stanford University.

“Our goal is to provide national governments with a bi-annual report to assess
transition to the so-called green economy, to create productive and sustainable
economic bases for the future,” says Duraiappah.

Says Dr. Pablo Muñoz of UNU-IHDP, the report’s Scientific Director: “Until the
yardsticks which society uses to evaluate progress are changed to capture elements
of long-term sustainability, the planet and its people will continue to suffer under
the weight of short-term growth policies.”

Yvo de Boer, former head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and
now Special Global Advisor to KPMG, has a similar message for businesses, calling on
them to measure and report on sustainability in their corporate practices.

He notes a growing trend within commerce of companies “building frameworks for
sustainability reporting processes, stronger information systems and appropriate
governance and control mechanisms on a par with those currently used in financial
reporting.”

Unprecedented natural resource scarcity, rising food prices, energy security issues
and population growth of up to 10 billion by 2100, means “the private sector is ever
more challenged to overhaul its strategy and make its business models future proof.”
“First and foremost,” he says, “businesses need to fully assess and understand future
sustainability risks ... define their responses to deal with them, and analyze
opportunities for efficiency, substitution or adaptation.”

At present, he notes, “if companies had to pay for the full environmental costs of
their activities, they would have lost 41 cents out of every (US) $1 earned in 2010.
The external environmental costs of 11 key industry sectors rose by almost 50
percent between 2002 and 2010, from $566 billion to $854 billion.”

“It is clearly no longer the question if we must transcend to a more sustainable
economy. The question is the pace at which we are able, and especially willing, to
achieve it.”

Meanwhile, leading experts in the issue call for fundamental reforms of global
environmental governance and a "constitutional moment" comparable in scale and
importance to the reform of international governance that followed World War II.

“Stark increases in natural disasters, food and water security problems and
biodiversity loss are just part of the evidence that humanity may be crossing
planetary boundaries and approaching dangerous tipping points,” says Professor
Frank Biermann of VU University, Amsterdam, director of the Earth System
Governance research alliance and IHDP’s Earth System Governance Project.

Among specific measures called for by Biermann and colleagues:

* Creation of a UN Sustainable Development Council to better integrate sustainable
  development concerns across the UN system, with a strong role for the world’s 20
  largest economies (G20).
* Upgrading the UN Environment Programme to a full-fledged UN agency – a step
  that would give it greater authority, more secure funding, and facilitate the
  creation and enforcement of international regulations and standards.
* Stronger reliance on qualified majority-voting to speed decision-making in
  international negotiations;
* Increased financial support for poorer nations, including through novel financial
  mechanisms such as air transportation levies.

Says Biermann: "Incremental change is no longer sufficient to bring about societal
change at the level and with the speed needed to stop earth system transformation.
Structural change in global governance is needed, both inside and outside the UN
system and involving both public and private actors"
At the London conference, 3,000 experts spanning the spectrum of interconnected
scientific interests, policymakers and business representatives are examining the
planet’s vital signs, potential solutions, hurdles and ways to break down the barriers
to progress. The conference is the largest gathering of experts in global sustainability
in advance of “Rio+20” and the largest gathering ever of such a group of experts.

It concludes tomorrow with the presentation of the final conference statement.



NOTE TO EDITORS

The research discussed in the press release, the conclusions drawn and the opinions
offered are those of individual speakers or research teams at the Planet Under
Pressure conference.

How GDP compares to Inclusive Wealth – Preliminary Findings




Overview of the changes in per capita wealth in India
Overview of the changes in per capita wealth in India



More information about Planet under Pressure Conference

The international science conference will be the biggest gathering of global
environmental change specialists in advance of the United Nations Rio+20 Summit:
2,800 scientists, policymakers, industry and media representatives will meet to hear
the latest research findings on the state of the planet and discuss concepts for
planetary stewardship and societal and economic transformation towards global
sustainability.

More information on the web: www.planetunderpressure2012.net/
Follow the conference via RSS: www.planetunderpressure2012.net/xml/news.xml
Live webstreaming, daily news show and live audio feeds:
http://c3379912.workcast.net/planetunderpressure.html
Planet under Pressure Conference Organizers

International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
IGBP provides essential international scientific leadership and knowledge of the
Earth system to help guide society onto a sustainable pathway during rapid global
change.
www.igbp.net

DIVERSITAS
By linking biology, ecology and social sciences, DIVERSITAS produces socially relevant
new knowledge to support sustainable use of biodiversity.
www.diversitas-international.org

International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change
IHDP provides international leadership in framing, developing and integrating social
science research on global environmental change, and promotes key findings of this
research to help address these challenges.
www.ihdp.unu.edu

World Climate Research Programme
WCRP improves climate predictions and our understanding of human influence on
climate through observations and modeling of the Earth system and the policy-
relevant assessment of climate conditions.
www.wcrp-climate.org

Earth System Science Partnership
ESSP is a partnership of the four international global change programmes. It is an
integrated study of the Earth System, the ways that it is changing, and the
implications for global and regional sustainability.
www.essp.org

Scientific sponsor of the conference: International Council for Science.
ICSU is a non-governmental body with a global membership of national scientific
bodies (120 Members, representing 140 countries) and International Scientific
Unions (31 Members). Its mission is to strengthen international science for the
benefit of society. www.icsu.org