New Scientific Panel on
Sustainable Resource Management
Budapest/Nairobi/Paris, 9 November 2007
- Assessing the environmental risks of biofuel
production and metal recycling are two of
the issues likely to top the agenda of a
newly formed global think tank on resource
efficiency.
Launched here today at the World Science
Forum, the new "International Panel
for Sustainable Resource Management"
will provide scientific assessments and
expert advice on the use intensity, the
security of supplies and the environmental
impacts of selected products and services
on a global level.
"Climate change rightly tops the environmental
agenda at the moment, but the world faces
more inconvenient truths that must be addressed,"
said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General
and Executive Director of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), which has
established the panel.
"Economic growth in our modern times
cannot be achieved with old consumption
and production patterns - a point brought
into sharp relief by our new Global Environment
Outlook-4 which shows that collectively
humans are over-utilizing the Earth's nature-based
resources at a rate that is outstripping
nature's ability to renew and replenish
them," he said.
"We need to provide a boost to resource-efficient
growth and innovation. We need to break
the links between economic growth and environmental
degradation, and finding ways to achieve
this "decoupling" is what the
new resource panel is all about."
Established by UNEP, with the support of
a wide range of governments, the European
Commission and representatives from civil
society, the new scientific panel is part
of an international partnership on resource
management. It will look at the impacts
on resources and materials used in all phases
of their life cycle.
"Quadrupling resource-productivity
worldwide (doubling wealth while halving
resource use) is the smoothest avenue to
sustainable development," according
to Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker, Dean of
the Donald Bren School of Environmental
Science and Management at the University
of California, and Co-chair of the Panel.
"We all agree that a lot more economic
wealth is needed for six and a half billion
people let alone nine billion people that
we expect to live on earth by the middle
of this century. On the other hand, we are
already now overexploiting the earth. It
is fair to say that we should reduce the
consumption of carbon energy and other natural
resources by roughly a factor of two. It
is high time for the UN System to address
the global resource challenges, and I feel
honoured being invited to help on this exciting
agenda", he said.
"Humanity is facing its most serious
challenge in how to interact with the ecosystems
that support us and all forms of life,"
said Ismail Serageldin, the other Panel
Co-chair and Director of the Library of
Alexandria. "We must find new and innovative
ways to meet the needs of an expanding population,
richer diets, and the appetite for energy.
We must redesign the international and national
policy environment so that it nurtures the
development and promotes the introduction
of these new ways world-wide."
The new International Panel for Sustainable
Resource Management is expected to provide
hard scientific and empirical assessments,
written in a clear language about complex
issues and reports which can be read by
those who can take action.
It is hoped that the Panel will assess
the situation at the global level and will
advise which priority issues to address,
for instance metal recycling (should we
'mine or recycle', and what are the environmental
risks), or the complex issue of bio-based
products (are we tackling climate change,
or are we 'burning our food' as some say).
The Panel is supported by a Secretariat,
hosted by the Sustainable Consumption and
Production Branch of UNEP's Division of
Technology, Industry and Economics, based
in Paris. See www.unep.fr
Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson
