Beyond the dictatorship of GDP THE WORLD | 31.01.09/14/49 | XNUMX:XNUMX p.m.
Say the word "degrowth" in front of an economist, and you will see him roll his eyes, accuse you of wanting Third World misery and, presumably, turn on his heels and rant against backward environmentalists. But it turns out that ... we are already shrinking. By the crisis, who is for the first time in a long time to decline the level of gross domestic product (GDP)? No. Due to the continuous damage that humanity inflicts on the natural capital of the planet, that is to say on all the biological resources which serve as a support for its activities.
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But, if this damage is documented by thousands of studies on climate change, the biodiversity crisis, the multiplication of pollution, it suffered from not being able to be synthesized by a significant indicator. Nothing to oppose the reign of GDP - which has come to become the fetish of enrichment and well-being. GDP increase, good. Lower GDP, bad. And when the GDP goes up, and yet the society exhibits more and more manifestly its discomforts and tensions, it is ... that it does not go up enough! As for the ecological crisis, well, this is another matter, which the GDP cannot measure, and which is therefore secondary ...
NEW INDICATORS
In the same way that it was necessary to move from the medicine of doctors mocked by Molière to infectious medicine inspired by Pasteur, so we must move from an "economic science" to a vision of human society in the twenty-first century that thinks general prosperity in relation to its environment. To start with, new indicators are needed. The good news is that, over the last ten years or so, such an index has gradually developed and strengthened: "the ecological footprint" is arousing growing interest in academic circles.
Aurélien Boutaud and Natacha Gondran's book is therefore timely: explaining in clear and rigorous terms the method developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees for ten years, it is to our knowledge the first presentation in French of this essential tool. . The presentation begins with the first question: "How is the capacity of the environment to meet our current and future needs limited?" To understand this, a reminder of the general functioning of the biosphere emphasizes the interplay of interrelations that are established there and that the energy is supplied by the Sun, through different forms including the essential one of photosynthesis.
The economy is reduced to modesty: "The sphere of human activities (" the econosphere ") is intimately dependent on the biosphere from which it draws its energy and its raw materials." Therefore, "human activity cannot continue to develop in the long term if the biosphere were to be too seriously damaged". But "does the econosphere mobilize today more services from the biosphere than the latter can regenerate?"
To answer, we must compare the quantity consumed and the quantity supplied. This is what the ecological footprint method will do, by reducing the types of ecosystems (forests, cultivated land, pastures, etc.) to a common unit, the "global hectare". This is both a producer of biomass and assimilator of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. The method thus succeeds in defining the ecological footprint of different countries or of the entire Earth.
Of course, the ecological footprint has gaps, which the work does not fail to point out: it leaves aside mineral materials, water, toxic elements and radioactive waste and gives little room for the erosion of biodiversity. But it is nonetheless a tool that allows us to understand that ... the limits are exceeded. Since 1987, according to this index, humanity has consumed more natural services than the biosphere can regenerate, that is to say, consumes its natural capital. The next logical question, which the ecological footprint does not answer, is that of the dimension of natural capital. In other words: how long can it last without a general disaster? Green economists, at work!
The Ecological Footprint, by Aurélien Boutaud and Natacha Gondran, La Découverte "Repères", 128 p., € 9,50. Unpublished.
Hervé Kempf
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