MOST of the world鈥檚 politicians and policy makers who will meet at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg next week have greatly underestimated the role that advances in science and technology can play in resolving the seemingly intractable problems of poverty and environmental degradation.
Today鈥檚 debates on sustainable development focus overwhelmingly on politics. Rich countries attribute extreme poverty in Africa and elsewhere almost entirely to poor policies and corruption, rather than the lack of appropriate technologies for the tropical ecologies of the impoverished countries. Politicians argue endlessly over who should bear the costs of avoiding long-term climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, while neglecting the potential for new technologies to ease the harsh trade-off between current energy use and future climate change.
Policy makers from rich countries tend to make four errors in their approach to sustainable development. First, they tend to regard the problems of under-development as a morality story. Poor countries are poor, in their view, because the poor do not behave like 鈥渦s鈥�. The battle against poverty thus becomes a battle against corruption, wrong ideas and incompetence, and little more. Of course, the morality tale sometimes fits, as in present-day Zimbabwe, where an ageing tyrant, surrounded by rapacious lieutenants, is destroying his country in a vain and desperate attempt to cling to power.
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Yet serious analysis reveals starkly and powerfully that poor governance is just one of many factors that trap more than one billion people in extreme poverty. Biophysical constraints are also critically important barriers to development (Scientific American, March 2001, p 70). In Africa, such constraints include the ancient grip of malaria and other diseases, the vulnerabilities of rain-fed agriculture in the tropics, and the high transport costs for the 80 per cent or so of sub-Saharan Africa鈥檚 people who live more than 100 kilometres from the coast. Similar constraints of disease, ecology and physical isolation trap the extremely poor of Central and South Asia, the Andes and elsewhere.
Second, these policy makers, and especially key international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that strongly shape the policies of the poor countries, regard economic progress as overwhelmingly the result of market forces, downplaying the role of technological advance. Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics, demonstrated in 1957 that the great bulk of US economic growth in the first half of the 20th century was the result of technological progress rather than the accumulation of capital. That finding has stood the test of time. Modern economic growth has depended on science-based technologies that have enabled the rich countries to enjoy bountiful food harvests, an escape from early deaths from infectious diseases, and dramatic increases in the mobilisation of energy. Markets, to be sure, played handmaiden to this scientific progress, but so too did huge public investments in scientific research, in higher education, and in the diffusion of technologies. By underestimating the role of public investments in science and technology in their own countries, governments of industrialised countries have also neglected the importance of supporting science and technology in poor countries to address distinctive problems such as tropical disease and tropical agriculture.
Third, they underestimate the risks that we face if we fail to invest in a deeper scientific understanding of our ecological challenges. Many of the global environmental concerns 鈥� anthropogenic climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, the destruction of biodiversity and the collapse of ecosystems due to intensified human activity, and threats posed by industrial products released into the environment 鈥� are as yet poorly understood. We are living with societal risks that are barely perceived. The discovery in the early 1970s of the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons to stratospheric ozone was fortuitous, and likely saved millions of lives. Environmental changes as a result of human pressures are creating new patterns of disease transmission and unanticipated dangers to the basic functioning of ecosystems. The recent advances in the earth sciences such as geochemistry, ecology and climatology have been dramatic, but at today鈥檚 modest levels of public investment in these fields there is little reason to expect that we can keep ahead of unforeseen global risks.
Fourth, and finally, many policy makers in rich countries have been lulled into the mistaken belief that if technological fixes are indeed needed for sustainable development, they will magically appear through the invisible hand of market forces. They have been lulled into this belief because they have grown up in an era in which technological advances did seem to appear 鈥渙n command鈥� from a dynamic private sector. Unfortunately, the notion of a self-sustaining torrent of private-sector-led progress is a myth. Innumerable major technologies of recent decades 鈥� the Internet, pharmaceutical products, synthetic materials, improved seed varieties 鈥� have their roots in government-sponsored research programmes.
The overall result of these policy biases and misconceptions is dramatic under-investment in research and development for sustainable development. Those international institutions devoted to sustainable development, such as the World Bank and the specialised UN agencies, have in effect been discouraged from playing a major role in research and development efforts, and have seen their budgets squeezed even as the societal needs for increased R&D have risen steeply.
Increased public support for science and technology is urgently needed in the following areas: tropical diseases, tropical agriculture, biodiversity and the preservation of ecosystems, and carbon management for sustainable energy. In each of these areas, current levels of international financial support are minuscule compared with the stakes involved, and compared to the realistic promise of dramatic breakthroughs.
The World Health Organization鈥檚 Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2001), which I chaired, documented the enormous economic toll that the poorest countries suffer as a result of the burden of infectious diseases, many of them like malaria rooted in the tropical environment. My own earlier research found that malaria may cost one percentage point or more per year of economic growth in countries in sub-Saharan Africa where it is endemic (Nature, vol 415, p 680). It is no surprise, therefore, that endemic malaria and endemic extreme poverty have gone hand in hand in modern history.
But while malaria accounts for three per cent or more of the world鈥檚 disease burden, it accounts for less than two-tenths of one per cent of the world鈥檚 annual investments in biomedical research 鈥� roughly $100 million or less out of more than $60 billion. This remarkably low level of R&D reflects the lack of market potential for private investors in poor countries, as well as the lack of political pressure on rich temperate-zone governments to invest heavily in research that has little direct effect on their voters. The need for more investment here is urgent and growing, in view of the spread of drug-resistant strains of the malaria pathogen in the hardest-hit regions of the world, and given that the potential for developing new drugs and vaccines is more promising then ever in view of the recent mapping of the pathogen鈥檚 genome, and the imminent mapping of the genome of the mosquito that transmits the disease.
The Commission on Macroeconomics and Health recommended a new Global Fund for Health Research, worth at least $1.5 billion per year, to address the neglected diseases of the world鈥檚 poor. In addition, it advocated greatly stepping up funding 鈥� also by around $1.5 billion per year 鈥� of public-private research ventures targeted on specific areas such as vaccines for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Technological advances in temperate-zone agriculture can rarely be directly applied to the very different setting of tropical agriculture. The crops, pests, soils, precipitation patterns and problems of cropping and storage are distinctive across ecozones. While US technological advances with hybrid seeds were translated, with considerable effort, to parts of Asia amenable to irrigation and the intensive application of fertilisers, these same techniques have not yet proved their applicability in rain-fed, sub-humid sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, food productivity in Africa and many other tropical regions lags far behind the productivity of food systems in the US and Europe, and features of tropical ecology seem to play an important role.
There is considerable evidence of high social rates of return from R&D in tropical food production, and yet R&D spending in this area is very low. The international community has long tried to compensate by supporting a worldwide network of 16 tropical agriculture research units known as the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), but these units also suffer from a massive under investment. Consider the fact that the leading high-tech agricultural firm in the US, Monsanto, currently spends around $600 million per year on R&D, while the CGIAR network has an annual operating budget of just $350 million, only part of which goes to R&D.
Recent research by Pedro Sanchez, formerly director of the International Center for Agroforestry Research in Nairobi and this year鈥檚 winner of the World Food Prize, exemplifies the kind of important advances that are possible with a steadfast investment in R&D in the distinctive ecological setting of Africa鈥檚 sub-humid tropics. Sanchez not only documented the remarkable loss of soil nutrients that has resulted from decades of food cropping unrelieved by fertiliser inputs in low-income Africa, but also demonstrated how this soil degradation could be reversed through novel patterns of inter-cropping and the use of locally available rock phosphate (Science, vol 295, p 2019). These new methods are already raising food productivity for tens of thousands of impoverished farmers, but are still not widely applied because of financial limitations in follow-on research, extension and credit support for subsistence farmers.
The intensification of the human impact on the physical environment poses novel and still very poorly understood threats to ecosystem functioning and biodiversity in many parts of the world. Ecosystems are complex networks, in which the emergent patterns of behaviour 鈥� for example, the composition and balance among species 鈥� is the outcome of subtle and highly non-linear interactions that are only just beginning to be understood and modelled. Recent history has uncovered repeated cases where the loss of a key species, for example as a result of habitat fragmentation, has resulted in a cascade of community-level effects among the remaining species. By the very nature of these issues, detailed ecological knowledge is required at the local scale to rescue degraded habitats of forests, coastal regions, mountain slopes, and other fragile ecological settings where the lives of hundreds of millions of impoverished people are at risk as the result of ecological degradation. E. O. Wilson and colleagues have wisely called for an All Species Mapping effort to support fundamental advances in our ecological knowledge.
Perhaps the most significant economic dilemma in sustainable development involves our dependence on fossil fuels. The role of carbon emissions from fossil fuels in contributing to long-term climate change is now almost universally accepted, though the impacts of rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon are still highly uncertain. Recent evidence from the palaeoclimate record suggests the possibility of abrupt and highly non-linear climatic responses to carbon emissions.
The potential social benefits of new technologies to sequester the carbon released from fossil fuel burning are therefore enormous. The annual social costs of anthropogenic climate change could easily reach one or more per cent of global GNP by mid-century, the equivalent of trillions of dollars per year, so the benefits of sequestering carbon emissions before they reach the atmosphere could be phenomenal. As my colleague Klaus Lackner has suggested, one possibility for carbon sequestration would involve geochemical processes such as fixing the carbon in magnesium ores to produce thermodynamically stable magnesium carbonates that could be re-deposited in mines. Alternative possibilities involve pumping carbon emissions from power plants directly into the deep ocean.
The development of one or more of these approaches will of course require extensive R&D. And since the benefits of research in one country will likely spill over to the rest of the world, there is a strong case for a global R&D effort on this front. Fortunately, the case for public funding for R&D into carbon sequestration has been recognised by some governments, including the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, the current levels of funding are woefully inadequate.
I do not want to leave the impression that sustainable development must simply await new scientific breakthroughs. Even with existing technologies it is wholly possible to save millions of people per year from deadly infectious diseases, and to preserve vital ecosystems through conservation, nature refuges and sustainable agricultural practices. Considerably larger flows of foreign assistance are needed to extend these existing technologies to the world鈥檚 poor.
Still, the current neglect of R&D for sustainable development needs to be rectified as well. This will require an overhaul of the strategies, financing and operations of the major international institutions such as the World Bank and key specialised agencies of the UN. The World Bank鈥檚 annual grants for R&D are currently less than $150 million per year, a tiny fraction of the bank鈥檚 overall lending and grant activities each year. At the same time, the specialised UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the WHO, which could contribute enormously to an enhanced global R&D effort, are held back by the lack of donor support.
The Johannesburg Summit provides an unrivalled opportunity for the world鈥檚 political leaders to recommit their nations to the cause of sustainable development in the 21st century. A decision in Johannesburg to bolster the world鈥檚 scientific and technological capabilities in sustainable development would set the world on a much more secure, prosperous and sustainable course for our new century.