I find it amazing and tragic how organisations and governments keep issuing reports that confirm the dire situation humanity is in with regards to depleting resources, climate change and economic contraction. Latest is a report Limits Revisited: a review of the limits to growth debate commissioned on behalf of British MPs written by Tim Jackson (author of Prosperity without Growth, 2009) that concludes we are headed for “an eventual collapse of production and living standards” in the next few decades, given business-as-usual. 

The report makes for some interesting reading and refers to some very important studies but offers nothing new in terms of scientific insight. It simply restates what previous studies have already confirmed, the global economy is running into resource limits. Going forward we should not expect resource fuelled economic growth but rather contraction.

As for climate change, we are pretty much doomed to failure, for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5°C warming (the “safe limit”) the world only has 6 years to decarbonise the entire economy. That seems impossible given that fossil fuels cover 80% of global energy consumption and it takes many decades to replace all the current infrastructure.

It has been more than 40 years since the Club of Rome presented the Limits to Growth report but absolutely nothing has been done to steer society onto a new “greener” path. Resource depletion and emissions have continued unabated. 

Living sustainably is now impossible and instead we have to focus on bolstering our resilience to coming shocks and disturbances. While I do think we should do everything in our power (e.g. limit the destruction of ecosystems, transition from fossil fuels to renewables, go from global to local economies) to change the way we live on this planet we also have to realise that many so called “solutions” are no longer viable because we waited too long. 

We could have stabilised our population at 3.84 billion in 1972, leaving more space for ecosystems and a larger per capita share of resources for people. We could have replaced much of the infrastructure needed to make a transition to alternative fuel sources by now. But we didn’t do those things. Now, instead, nature is forcing us to live within the planet's limits through the usual mechanisms (e.g. epidemics, starvation, drought). 

The war torn Middle East (e.g. Syria, Iraq, Yemen) is a clear case of overpopulation, depleting resources (freshwater, oil) interacting with climate change (megadrought) and conflict over the remaining resources. These states were fragile to begin with (e.g. high inequality, lack of trust, lack of infrastructure) so even small perturbations were enough to push them over the edge. 

But even countries with a higher degree of resilience from the outset have started crumbling under the pressure of entropy in form of deflation (e.g. Greece, Italy, Japan). The downward trend is global. The collapse process, i.e. reduction in socioeconomic complexity, is already underway.

Politicians, journalists and pundits have for many years used the number of 50% regarding Sweden’s self-sufficiency in agriculture. A new investigation from the agricultural magazine ATL, however, shows that this number without a doubt is incorrect. A protracted crisis with blockaded imports would result in a catastrophe.

Sweden has made itself vulnerable to shocks and disturbances in international trade by outsourcing production of basic commodities and relying on imports. The precarious global geopolitical situation have brought the question of self-sufficiency back on the political agenda. 

In 2002 the last reserves and warehouses with foodstuffs in case of a national emergency were dismantled. Ten years later we read in a report from LRF that about half of all the food Swedes consume comes from imports. People have therefore assumed that Sweden has a self-sufficiency level of 50%. 

But the relationship between imported and domestically produced food only shows a theoretical potential. Current stocks would only last for a maximum of 3 weeks if there is a true crisis. There are no warehouses with food and chemicals for water purification and our largest packaging plant was shut down last year, according to Therese Frisell at the National Food Agency. 

In other words, Sweden is not self-sufficient at all. According to Frisell our capacity is at zero. This is due to that Sweden is heavily reliant on imports for industrial agriculture, for example oil, fertilizers and protein for animal feed.

Researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences together with the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency claim that farmers can produce food in a time of crisis but that this would require a large scale transition. Farmers would have to rely less on machines, switch from cereals to root crop and from pigs and chickens to uncultivated pasture meat. Farmers can not do it alone, they would need extra manpower. And if the transition fails, Sweden would likely not be able to support its growing population. People would starve.

We need to increase society’s general resilience to shocks and disturbances. With that I mean that we need to increase communities capacity to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks.

Extreme events have long lasting effects on society and need to be managed properly or major losses will be inevitable. Megadroughts in Syria and California, the rapid spread of wildfires in Indonesia and Canada or massive flooding in the UK and Denmark are just some examples of extreme events that we will have to get used to due to climate change and resource depletion. Other shocks may come from a fragile financial system in form of massive unemployment, from a dysfunctional political system that leads to a revolution or from mass migrations due to failed states. 

Extreme events are notoriously difficult to predict because probabilities are hard to measure and uncertainties are high. That's why it's so important to take proactive measures to strengthen a society's general resilience to such events. This requires a complex systems perspective and understanding of human-nature interactions. Strengthening general resilience includes:

The important thing with diversity is that it can offer both functional diversity and response diversity. In other words, a diverse system can offer many different functions but also a diversity of responses to disturbances so that critical functions are maintained even if some parts of the system fail. For example, in a marine ecosystem some fish may carry out similar functions (e.g. grazing on corals) so that if one species disappears there is another that can keep on carry out the critical function for the benefit of the overall ecosystem. Similarly if a bridge or air plane has many backup safety mechanisms that all perform the same function (i.e.redundancy) the risk of a collapse or crash is much lower. This is also applicable to the economy where a diversity of many small companies with similar functions contributes to stability in case some should default. That's why it’s very unhealthy to have a few but major banks that can crash the entire system. It is also a reason why societies with high income inequality do poorly, because all the wealth has been concentrated at the top which creates instability and risk of revolution. Heterogeneous landscapes with high biodiversity have higher resilience to extreme events and so monocultures is a really bad idea since it increases vulnerability to massive crop failure, loss of pollinators, and spread of pests.

Connectivity can both be a good and a bad thing depending on degree. In today’s society we most often have a high degree of connectivity, international interdependence, that makes us vulnerable to the rapid spread of extreme events or cascading effects. Modularity helps contain disturbances to specific regions/sectors and lowers the risk of contagion. The more self-sufficient communities can be the better. Especially for the provision of essential goods and services such as water, food, energy and health care. Decentralised systems of decision making are also more flexible and can respond more rapidly to a crisis than any central control system ever can.

As was common sense only two generations ago having reserves, no matter if it’s food or skills, contribute to a faster recovery after a disturbance. Just-in-time logistics make communities vulnerable to sudden shocks or major disturbances. So does a reliance on finite resources like oil. Keeping strategic reserves while improving local supply or transitioning to renewables is increasingly important. We know that plants and animals that survive a disturbance are critical to ecological recovery from e.g. extraordinary fires or volcanic eruptions. Keeping seed banks is also increasingly important as ever more species are lost. Social memory is another important aspect that can help push for a faster recovery.

Transparency and up to date information about status and trends of ecosystem and social health is essential to maintain resilience over the long-term. Complex systems are not static but ever changing and so to provide adaptive management one needs to constantly be learning and collecting information to ensure stability of the system. Citizen science and decentralised monitoring is much more effective and low cost than large-scale operations by central authorities. Traditional knowledge about changes over time is invaluable. Indicators can also help provide early warnings of potential tipping points.

Trust is the basic glue that holds society together and it’s fundamental to everyday social and economic interactions. It is easier to maintain trust when groups are small and people know each other but harder in large communities and cities. When trust is high people are more willing to cooperate and transaction costs are low. This is yet another reason why decentralisation of decision-making is important. Today we live in a society where basic trust between actors has been replaced with money, but that monetary system is inherently unstable and increasingly untrustworthy. Trust takes a long time to build up but can be erased rapidly. When trust in a society is low transaction costs increase as fewer people are willing to cooperate or trade. The erosion of social trust is very damaging to a society that in the end may lead to bank runs, social unrest or even conflict.

There has been a media storm lately regarding the productivity of organic farming compared to conventional farming methods in the two major Swedish daily newspapers. The debate has mostly been between different groups of scientists having a “pro” conventional farming attitude versus scientist being “pro” organic farming. It all started with a group of scientist from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) promoting a new book in which they claim that ecological farming on a massive scale would lead to starvation because of lower yields. In response a number of other scientist argued that these type of statements where unscientific, emotional and cherry picking of statistic without providing a proper context (for more on the content of the debates see DN and SVD). So I did some digging and the following post will bust some myths and present some facts about organic farming. Before I go on to some of the statements posed in the article, I will just briefly give some context to the challenges we are facing globally regarding food production.

Today there are 7.2 billion people on the planet. In a world committed to feeding a population of 9.6 billion by 2050 (UN, 2013) we face unprecedented risks and challenges. As we know, we are currently putting extreme pressure on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. There are so many of us now that we are disrupting the whole planet’s nutrient and energy flows and degrading ecosystems worldwide (MEA, 2005; Rockström et al. 2009). Food production is central to solving our environmental dilemma. Over 35% of Earth’s land surface is devoted to agriculture which gobbles up 70% of global freshwater use and contributes with 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Foley et al., 2011). Climate change (fig1) and topsoil erosion (fig2), interacting with increasingly uneven access to declining oil, water, and phosphorus supplies (Sverdrup et al. 2013) will greatly exacerbate the unpredictability of agricultural production. Yet an estimated 33% of global food production is wasted (FAO, 2011). This is a depressing fact of how unsustainable our current food system is. Globally, we need to reduce waste and make food more accessible to vulnerable people at the same time as we raise farmers livelihoods. And farming systems need to go from carbon source to carbon sink, building organic matter in soils, raising productivity and resilience to droughts. Sweden is in a unique position to meet these challenges because we have a small population relative to land area and crop yields will increase as climate warms (not accounting for potential increase in floods etc). 

Myth 1. Organic farming leads to starvation
Myth 2. Organic farming results in half the amount of food
Myth 3. Organic farming cannot provide for a growing population

Myth 4. Organic farming is worse for the environment

Illustration from Granstedt (2013)

A look at Swedish Agriculture and Food Consumption

In 2010, Sweden had 81 ha/holding of organic farming, above 10% of utilized agricultural area (European Commission, 2013). Of current total cropland about 75% is considered to have high yields, resulting in 800 000 hectares with potential for improvements (LRF, 2012). Most greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture comes Nitrus Oxide (N2O) emitted through the use of synthetic fertilizers. Nitrous oxide is also emitted during the breakdown of nitrogen in livestock manure. Methane (CH4) is the second most prevalent greenhouse gas emitted from agriculture. Domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep produce large amounts of CH4 as part of their normal digestive process. Also, when animals' manure is stored or managed CH4 is produced. The third most common greenhouse gas emitted from agriculture is carbon dioxide (CO2) from cultivated fertile soils (see chart below). Conventional heavy soil tillage influence CO2 emissions because it accelerates the loss of soil organic matter. See chart below for overview of emissions from agriculture. In Swedish agriculture, crops only use 40% of the supplied Nitrogen and 65% of the supplied Phosphorus and only a small fraction are recycled into croplands. Here we could make improvements.

But what we eat also matters. Sweden imports 50% of all food consumed, compared to the 30% in 1950 (LRF, 2012). Food consumption and waste amounts to 25% of Swedish household greenhouse gas emissions (Naturvårdsverket, 2008). What we eat has to change if we want to meet our climate goals according to one report (SLU, 2012). Below is a chart showing greenhouse gas emissions from various protein sources.

Data from SLU (2012)

Conclusion