By Josh Kearns
I’ve had a lot of unpopular ideas. Maybe the all-time most
unpopular, though, is this one:
The
relatively short trips made by international humanitarian science/engineering
and sustainable community development professionals for fieldwork, particularly
to far-flung destinations, are almost certainly futile from an environmental
sustainability perspective.
Most of us in the international
“humanitarian science and engineering,” and “sustainable community development”
sectors are professionally concerned with environmental sustainability. We
relentlessly flog the rhetoric of “sustainability” for grant seeking and
fundraising, in outreach and promotional activities, and in our organizational
and institutional self-assessments.
But most of us, myself included,
do an awful lot of long-haul air travel for fieldwork, incurring substantial CO2
emissions. This has led me to wonder:
What if the
good we do advancing sustainability in our fieldwork gets negated by the CO2
we emit getting there and back again?
I became worried about this after
reading climate
scientist Kevin Anderson’s article arguing that climate scientists and
others who are professionally concerned with sustainability are often a bunch
of hypocrites for engaging in so much air travel for conferences, fieldwork,
etc., and ought instead to go by train and/or travel less in order to lead by
example.
I used to work as a researcher in
the development of the Ecological Footprint, a
sustainability accounting tool that provides a quantitative metric of
sustainability by comparing humanity’s demands for energy, resources, and waste
assimilation with the planet’s biological capacity to meet these demands.
A cartoon conception of the Ecological Footprint.
From my work on the Footprint, I know that people in the "developing world" have much smaller Ecological Footprints than we do in affluent countries such as the US. For example, the average Thai Footprint is about 1/3rd that of the average American. The average Ugandan and Peruvian Footprints are about 1/6th, and the average Haitian about 1/10th that of the average American.
So, recently I began to wonder: How
long would a humanitarian scientist/engineer from the affluent world have to
live at a local, developing community Ecological Footprint level in order to
offset the CO2 they emitted getting out into the field and back home
again?
It turns out that this is not too
hard to calculate using existing Footprint data. I call the concept the Break Even Ecological Footprint,
or “BEEF,” for short. It represents
the minimum amount of time a scientist/engineer/development worker has to
remain in-country, living with the local community, in order to begin to accrue
a net sustainability benefit. Any trip shorter than the BEEF would be futile
from a sustainability perspective, as the environmental costs of travel would
outweigh the sustainability benefits of living at a lower Ecological Footprint
level relative to the affluent home-country lifestyle.
The BEEF concept can thus be
applied to gauge the net environmental sustainability benefit (or cost) of a
particular work/study trip.
Many humanitarian science and
engineering organizations are based in affluent regions and operate on college
campuses through the activities of students, faculty, and with professional
consultants from big private sector firms. The rigors of the academic calendar
and limitations on professionals’ vacation time often greatly restrict the
duration of travel by these groups for carrying out humanitarian projects.
Trips are planned, for example, over winter break or for a few weeks during
summer. Unfortunately, BEEF analysis reveals that trips of this short duration
almost always incur a net sustainability deficit. In other words, from an
environmental sustainability perspective, these would-be “sustainable
development” practitioners should better have stayed home.
Now can you see why my BEEF idea may
be record-breakingly unpopular?
If you’ve read this far and you’re
still curious to learn more about BEEF analysis, including the calculation methodology
and some sample results as well as consideration of criticisms and limitations
of the methodology, see my article in Resilience.
You can also visit the Aqueous
Solutions website and play around with our interactive BEEF Calculator. We
encourage humanitarian engineering and science professionals from affluent
countries who are planning to go abroad for fieldwork to use this calculator to
assess their trips for potential futility from an environmental sustainability
perspective.
And as long as I am pointing
fingers, I may as well implicate myself, too.
My fieldwork is located in SE
Asia, primarily Thailand and Burma. Using Footprint data for the US and
Thailand, I calculate a BEEF of 2.2-11.7 months. That's a wide range, because
it takes into account a couple of scenarios depending (1) upon how closely I
approximate an average local lifestyle while in the field, and (2) whether a
radiative forcing multiplier is applied for CO2 emissions at high
altitude.
My current stint in the field is
just shy of six months, so I’d better hope that my activities here produce
demonstrable, lasting sustainability gains for the local individuals and
communities I work with, extending well beyond my own professional life, in
order to make it all “worth it” from a bona fide sustainability
perspective.
Critically examining my own
activities this way underscores the trenchant conclusion that:
If
“sustainability” truly is among our most cherished values as professionals and
not just a buzzword constantly trumpeted to expedite project funding and social
ingratiation, then we must put our professional activities and contemporary
lifestyles to rigorous (re-)evaluation, though the implications of doing so may
be discomfiting.
What do you think?
* *
*
Author’s note: I
will be taking a short hiatus from blogging for Chemists Without Borders for
the next two weeks. I’m headed to the Kra Isthmus region of SE Burma to work
with a small village on water projects and will not have internet access. When
I return I hope to have lots photos, stories, and lessons-learned to share!
As usual, you can find me on Facebook, and
please “Like” Aqueous
Solutions!
Links to my other posts
Josh,
ReplyDeleteLove the irony!
"Do gooders generate more CO2 than they're worth."
"P.S. I'm jetting off to Burma to do some good" (Perhaps you're traveling by tramp steamer ;-)