An Architect's Guide to Designing for Sustainability - Part One
A team of scientists led by Mathis Wacker, an analyst at Redefining Progress, concluded in 2002 that the combined demand of humans first surpassed the Earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that human demand exceeded capacity by 20 percent in 1999. Essentially we are meeting demand by consuming the earth’s natural assets.
Environmental threats abound everywhere, the most recent and potentially greatest being the HIV pandemic. For the first time demographers announced that life expectancy has been dramatically reversed for a large segment of humanity – the 700 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa. The anticipated reduction in life expectancy is from 62 to 47 years. Already it is believed that 52 million people are infected with HIV/Aids worldwide.
Other threats include climate change, eroding soils and expanding deserts, which are threatening the livelihood and food supply of hundreds of millions of the world’s people. Environmental damage thus far includes the death of the Aral Sea, the burning of the Indonesian rainforests, the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery, the melting of the glaciers that supply Andean cities with water, the dust bowl forming in north-western China, and the depletion of the U.S. Great Plains aquifer. As stated previously, these changes bring about their own consequences so that these events expand and multiply way beyond their immediate contexts.
The sector of the economy most likely to untangle first is food production. Eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables and rising temperatures all conspire to undermine the Earth’s ability to produce enough food for its population. The 2002 grain production fell short of demand by 100 million tons, or 5 percent, the largest on record and for the third consecutive year.
Two key indicators of the well-being of the human population – life expectancy and hunger – therefore reveal significant deterioration. Unfortunately rising temperatures resulting from global warming will exacerbate this problem: if the temperatures rise to the lower reaches as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grain harvests could drop 11 percent by 2020 and 46 percent by 2050.
The most vivid example of the fine balance between environmental and human development is China: its human population of 1,3 billion together with the 400 million cattle, sheep and goats are exerting an unbearable weight upon the land. Overgrazing has resulted in the stripping of the protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on an unprecedented scale. The strong winds of late winter and early spring remove millions of tons of topsoil in a single day and have increased the desertification of the Gobi Desert by 52,400 square kilometres between 1994 and 1999.
Apart from the impact of dust storms on the local population, neighbouring countries are now also feeling the impact. On April 12, 2002, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left residents gasping for air, closed schools, cancelled airline flights and overran clinics with patients suffering from respiratory distress. Residents in Japan are also complaining of the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windows and walls.
As the desert increases, so it displaces people previously dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood. A preliminary estimate by the Asian Development Bank estimates that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands. The U.S Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2,5 million people to leave the land: in China, it will be tens of millions with no equivalent California to go to.
A reversal of the basic trends of social progress of the last half-century seemed highly unlikely until recently. With the number of hungry people increasing and life expectancy decreasing, the lives of billions of people are seriously under threat. This generation is moving into un-chartered territory as human demands begin to override the capacity of the Earth and depletes natural resources. The risk is that, at best, communities will lose faith in their traditional leaders and follow any fanatic who offers them hope, or at worst, seize – or protect – whatever resources are available to save their families.
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