Whole Environment Bonds

 George Monbiot writes:

The living world is being hit by everything at once: the only way to stop our full-spectrum assault on Earth systems is to reduce our economic activity. Level down, George Monbiot, 4 October

David Allen said is quoted as saying ‘You can do anything, but not everything’. In much the same way, we can solve any environmental problem, but not every environmental problem. The linkages are too tight and too complex; the time lags too obscure. Mitigating one problem is likely to worsen another. So, as Mr Monbiot writes:

[I]f we were to build sufficient direct air capture machines to make a major difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations, this would demand a massive new wave of mining and processing, to make the steel and concrete.

Mr Monbiot’s solutions to this broad environmental crisis are to ‘ramp down economic activity’ and to redistribute wealth. He indicates how unlikely this is to happen by calling it secular blasphemy. I agree with his assessment of the likelihood of its occurring. So I try here to offer a more positive vision.

The first thing to emphasise is that Mr Monbiot coyly (and, from the point of view of his own well-being, wisely) avoids the question of population. Yet this need not be contentious. At the 1994 Cairo Summit, more than 180 countries promised ‘access to reproductive and sexual health services including family planning’ to all their citizens. That should be done for ethical reasons; it would also alleviate future environmental pressures. I do not see a reduced population as a goal in itself; rather it is one way in which environmental depredations could be reduced.

I now believe that targeting even such broad problems as climate change or atmospheric pollution is inadequate. Current environmental depredations are too complex, linked and pervasive so that, as Mr Monbiot implies, any attempt at solving one problem could well worsen others.

What I propose here is a possible way in which we can provide incentives for people to tackle all environmental problems, simultaneously, over a very long time period.

It is essentially a more panoptic variant of my Environmental Policy Bonds and Climate Stability Bonds ideas. However, rather than target a single group of metrics such as those encompassing climate change and its impacts, the aim here is to improve all aspects of the environment over the entire planet Earth.

I suggest that we take an inventory of a random sample of the Earth’s sea and land resources. We could take, say, 5000 areas of 1km squared over the entire globe and thoroughly inventory them for biodiversity, degree of air or water pollution (at different heights and depths). Every ten years thereafter we could take a random sample of, say, 100 of these areas, conduct exactly the same environmental inventory and note the direction of the environmental indicators for each area. As a starting point, we could target every metric for improvement in every sampled area. If every metric in every sampled area shows a sustained improvement, then the bonds would be redeemed. It would take many decades before such a widespread improvement had been achieved. Nevertheless, because such Whole Environment Bonds would be tradeable, people could make improvements and expect to be rewarded for doing so.

There would need to be intense, informed discussion as to which metrics to include. There would, for instance, be the question of whether we take temperature (air or sea) as a metric for targeting, or whether the concerns we have about the climate would be fully subsumed within the other indicators (biodiversity, for example), being targeted. (Are we concerned about climate change, or the impacts of climate change on plant, animal and human life?) Much work is being done on environmental indicators: see, for example, this pdf document.

More those unfamiliar with the Social Policy Bond concept, the basic idea is that a group of people (governments, non-governmental organisations, philanthropists, the public) contribute to a fund that will be used to redeem non-interest bearing bonds only when a specified goal has been achieved and sustained.

I don’t think I’m quite as pessimistic as Monbiot and other environmental commentators, but I recognise that the chances of Whole Environment Bonds ever being issued as I envisage are remote. After more than thirty of years, very little in the way of outcome-based incentives is being offered in a way that encourages broad, long-term solutions to our social and environmental problems. (See here and here for why I think the non-tradeable version of my idea, which is being implemented, has little to offer.) The relevant question though is: what is the alternative?