The Challenges of Sustainability

We have taken two fundamental problems of the modern socio-economic system as our starting point. The first one is the tension between savings/in-vestments and consumption. Societies often do not allocate enough funds from their income to the development of their production factors and re-sources, and the investment rate is not sufficient for the countries to be able to keep up with the performance of other national economies, which are their competitors. Another related problem is the composition of the pool of pro-duction factors: nowadays, such factors do not only include human-made capital in the classical sense (e.g. factory buildings, means of production, transport infrastructure), but the future production potential and standard of life are also largely determined by the quantity and quality of three other resources: human, social and natural resources. A common mistake is that the different actors of the society (private investors and governments) de-velop resources that are not critical to increasing future performance and ne-glect other resources whose improvement could be extremely beneficial.

Some of these differences between the countries are measured by the Global Competitiveness Report/Index of the World Economic Forum, among others.

At this point, we get to perceive how environmental and nature protection and sustainability became connected. It was those noticing the large-scale consumption of the natural capital who first pointed out that when the size of the natural capital was reduced, its lost yield and the ecosystem services would be available in such small quantities or poor quality that it might limit the production potential, restrain the growth of welfare or even lead to the contraction of the economy. Critics perceiving failures in the maintenance of

the natural capital said that that the model of economic growth that resulted in the consumption of the natural capital was not sustainable. If we pollute our groundwater, we cannot brew good beer; if our rivers and lakes are poi-soned, there will be no anglers and tourists; if pollinating insects become extinct, we will not have fruits and coffee, and so on.

Later on, the problem of sustainability was given a broader interpretation, and it became clear that the future production potential could be limited not only by the consumption and pollution of natural resources but also by a pro-longed decline in the population, high public debt, anarchy (a lack of real governance), a lack of confidence affecting the entire society or the accumu-lation of implicit debt in social security systems. The indebted future has many manifestations and many different reasons.

Another fundamental problem of modern socio-economic systems—one that is, in many respects, linked to the problems described above—is the tension between the short and long term. Decision-makers—who should make the above-mentioned investment decisions facilitating the maintenance of the fu-ture—are influenced by deformed interests. The rules they follow suggest that they should give priority to options that bring substantial benefits in the shortest possible time, regardless of their costs in the more distant future. The above-listed processes leading to an indebted future are frequent because they maximize short-term profit and are able to pass on to the future a large part of the costs associated with them. Increasing public debt is a good solu-tion for politicians because the loans can be used to finance the immediate implementation of impressive development projects or welfare measures, while the installments will be paid by the next governments.

In view of these facts, the problem of sustainability raises two questions:

• What proportion of consumption and investment is required by the adequate development of the resources of society and how should in-vestments be distributed between developments focusing on the dif-ferent production factors?

• When making our decisions, in addition to short-term consequences (revenues and costs), have we properly taken into account the long-term consequences of the decisions as well?

If these questions had always been relevant in the history of humankind, why did these problems become so serious during the last fifty years that each of them had to be given a separate name?

One of the key substantial changes was the emerging scarcity of the natural capital. The poor management of natural resources had already caused major problems, even the collapse or disappearance of some civilizations (the most widely known examples being Angkor Wat or the Easter Island)¹⁸⁴, but these cases always occurred on a small scale and were separate in space and time (marginal from a global perspective). By the second half of the 20th century, natural resources were becoming scarce even globally. The extension of hu-man activities in geographical terms (land take, changes in land use) and in terms of the quantity of the materials used (at the beginning of the 20th-cen-tury average global materials use was approximately 4.5 tonnes per person per year, by the end of the century it increased to 9 tonnes, and according to the OECD’s forecast, it is expected to rise to 16 tonnes per person per year by 2060¹⁸⁵) has reached staggering proportions. The first global assessment report of the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), published in May 2019, presents us with the following data.¹⁸⁶

As a result of human activities:

• 75 percent of the land has been radically transformed;

• 66 percent of ocean area has changed;

• 85 percent of wetlands have been lost;

• 25 percent of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction;

• over the past 50 years, vertebrate populations have decreased by more than 50 percent.

The report has established that ‘[t]he rate of global change in nature during the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history’.

184 Diamond J. (2005): Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005.

185 OECD (2019), Global Material Resources Outlook to 2060: Economic Drivers and Environ-mental Consequences, OECD Publishing, Paris, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264307452-en.

and Vértesy L (2010): Gondolatok a fenntartható fejlődésről. in De iuris peritorum meritis 7 - Tanka Endre emlékkötet, Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem, 2010. 15-25.

186 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, S. Díaz, J. Settele, E. S. Brondízio E.S., H. T. Ngo, M. Guèze, J. Agard, A. Arneth, P. Balvanera, K. A. Brauman, S. H. M. Butchart, K. M. A. Chan, L. A. Garibaldi, K. Ichii, J. Liu, S. M. Subra-manian, G. F. Midgley, P. Miloslavich, Z. Molnár, D. Obura, A. Pfaff, S. Polasky, A. Purvis, J. Razzaque, B. Reyers, R. Roy Chowdhury, Y. J. Shin, I. J. Visseren-Hamakers, K. J. Willis, and C. N. Zayas (eds.) (2019): Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodi-versity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany, 56 pages, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3553579.