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ENVIRONMENT: World’s Woes Need More, Not Bigger Answers – Report

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Dec 12 2003 (IPS) - Despite the troubles surrounding the Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, scientists are “guardedly optimistic” about humankind’s ability to manage such critical common resources as the oceans and the climate, according to a new report.

The 1997 Kyoto treaty must be ratified by industrialised nations responsible for 55 percent of 1990-level carbon dioxide emissions before it takes effect. It now has the support of countries accounting for 44 percent of emissions, and hopes are pinned on Russia’s acceptance of the pact.

The United States – which produces more than one-third of global emissions – pulled out of the treaty in 2001.

However, the new report, “The Struggle to Govern the Commons”, finds that a wide range of local strategies have successfully addressed global problems like cross-border air pollution, tropical deforestation and climate change.

The report appears in a special issue of the journal ‘Science’ today, 35 years after biologist Garrett Hardin issued his prophetic essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which warned that human beings would ultimately destroy their shared resources.

“Certainly the world is not uniform, but there are signs of some resources improving even though others are deteriorating,” says Indiana University political scientist Elinor Ostrom.

And while humans have the ability to do great harm, “people have devised ingenious ways to manage and govern the commons”, she said in a statement.

Hardin’s 1968 essay argued that only two institutional arrangements – centralised government and private ownership – could sustain shared resources such as air, groundwater and forests over the long run.

However, Hardin’s analysis failed to note that in many regions of the world, social groups – herders, fishers, local villagers – have struggled successfully against resource degradation by developing and maintaining self-governing institutions.

While these institutions have not always succeeded, neither have Hardin’s preferred alternatives of private or state ownership, the authors write.

Since the early 1990s, some 400,000 to 500,000 social groups have been established worldwide for watershed, forest, irrigation, pest, wildlife, fishery, and micro-finance management, writes Jules Pretty in a supplementary report titled “Social Capital and the Collective Management of Resources” also published in Science.

“These offer a route to sustainable management and governance of common resources,” says Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex, England.

Local groups, he suggests, might be better at managing natural resources, including protected areas.

Exclusion of people who rely on wild resources for food, fuel, medicine and animal feed from 30 percent of the 7,322 protected areas in developing countries has a long and troubling history, he writes.

This kind of fencing off of the commons is not always effective and requires enforcement. Moreover, this policy can be very costly for local people who may derive all or part of their livelihoods from these areas.

Under the right conditions of mutually agreed-upon rules, good knowledge of local resources, and appropriate political and economic conditions, communities can work together to use natural resources sustainably over the long term, he writes.

In North America, fishers, processors and other groups developed formal and informal methods to successfully manage lobster fishery in the state of Maine, says Paul Stern, one of Ostrom’s co-authors.

Agreement on fishing restrictions and very high compliance starting more than 20 years ago not only prevented the loss of the lobster fishery, but were largely responsible for a sharp increase in the abundance of lobster stocks, says Stern, a social scientist with the National Academy of Science in Washington, DC.

By contrast, the Canadian government’s management of the northern cod stock over the same period of time has been a disaster. The stock collapsed, and a fishing moratorium had to be imposed in 2002.

Chief among the mistakes was ignoring input from local fisher communities and providing subsidies to build new trawlers.

Effective governance of common resources requires information from all stakeholders, as well as an open dialogue that improves and builds trust in the information. Trust that the facts are correct can lead past conflicts to a consensus on governance rules, the authors write.

Centralised oversight institutions offer the allure of efficiency, but have failed time and again in the real world, they say. Examples abound, such as in the forests of Indonesian Borneo and the Canadian cod fishery.

Instead, institutions need to be complex and rooted in communities and markets. They must also take into account regional, national and international agreements, the authors suggest.

Tackling larger-scale environmental problems will be even more difficult, Stern told IPS.

However, one successful example is the Montreal Protocol on stratospheric ozone, which has helped stabilise the concentration of ozone-depleting substances. The ozone layer is key in shielding the planet from ultraviolet radiation, which causes skin cancer and other problems.

In fairness, unlike the embattled Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone problem was a lot easier to cope with, he says.

“Only a few chemical manufacturers and users of ozone-depleting chemicals had to change and replacement chemicals already existed,” Stern noted.

Addressing global warming requires changes by everyone, and fossil fuels like oil and coal are not easily replaced. The negative consequences are not as evident to the public as depletion of the ozone layer, Stern says, and there is no international consensus that there is a problem requiring immediate action, Stern says.

Still, while there are all kinds of problems with the Kyoto Protocol, it should be ratified because it is just the first step in creating forms of international commons governance that are needed to avoid a large-scale tragedy.

“Climate change is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced,” Stern concluded.