Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

Industry – the ones that produce the plastics and the products that use them – aren’t helping much. They throw plastic at us in large volumes, mixing a bunch of different types. It’s then up to ‘us’ – and by that I mean individuals, local communities and councils – to build the infrastructure and systems to handle it. Governments need to put more pressure, and set stronger regulations, on industrial producers. Industry needs to streamline the plastics they use. They need to be recyclable. They need to invest in chemical recycling solutions that help us close the loop on plastics. And, in the meantime, they need to support local communities to build the infrastructure they need to handle the waste they generate.

Paper and water don’t go together. Paper is made of a compound called cellulose, which dissolves in water. Why anyone would think it’s a good idea to make drinking straws out of paper is beyond me. They really are useless. Yet ‘paper straws’ have become the sustainability badge for restaurants and bars across the world. I’m not an advocate for plastic straws. I don’t really care about them. But I do care about ineffective policies, especially if they take the place of ones that could really make a difference. Plastic straws are just not a big deal in the scale of the world’s plastic pollution. Especially in rich countries, the odds that your plastic straws will end up in the ocean are pretty small. Even if they’re not recycled, they’re probably being sent to landfill. We don’t know exactly how many plastic straws end up in the ocean, but they’re probably around 0.02% of ocean plastics. If we want to get strict on single-use plastic straws, fine. But it can’t be a government’s leading policy for tackling plastic pollution.

The same is true of fish. Some communities rely on fish as an important source of their nutrition. And they often don’t have protein-rich plant-based substitutes lining the supermarket shelves, or omega-3 supplements in the local pharmacy. Until these alternatives become affordable and accessible across the world, I won’t recommend eating no or less meat or fish as a sustainable solution for everyone. But many consumers in rich countries could certainly eat less without noticing any difference.

What can consumers do in the meantime? There are a number of seafood guides that do a good job of giving recommendations. In the UK, the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide is my go-to.22 In the US, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch is the best.23 Other countries have their own guides. These rate specific fish populations from ‘best choice’ to ‘avoid’, based on rigorous independent assessments. Most have websites and apps where you can look up any type of fish you’re hungry for, finding out where it was sourced and the method of catch. The problem is that the consumer has to go looking for the information. You need to know this before you step into the supermarket.

This situation is a perfect reflection of the three-true-statements: things are awful (30% are still overfished, and the EU missed its target); things are much better (30% is much less than the 78% it used to be); things can be improved. We know how to put good, sustainable policies in place. If we can implement them across the board, an end to overfishing is well within our reach.

Despite the controversy about their effectiveness, the world has set bold targets to scale up the amount of ocean that our MPAs cover. We’ve already missed our first target of protecting 10% of the oceans by 2020 – in 2021, just 8% were protected. The next target to aim for is 30% by 2037, then half of the world’s ocean by 2044. If we’re to stand a chance of meeting these targets we need to get a move on.

As seen in Chapter 5, things like transport and packaging tend to have small emissions. One large meta-analysis, published in Nature, looked at the environmental impact of fish from thousands of fish farms and wild fisheries.33 They found that most of the popular fish we eat – tuna, salmon, cod, trout, herring – were the most climate-friendly types of meat. Fish are not quite as good as plant-based protein sources, but they can still be a fairly low-carbon choice. Most fish perform well on other environmental metrics too. They’re nearly all better than chicken.

No generation has done this before. As seen in Chapter 1, ‘sustainability’ has two halves. Our ancestors were never sustainable because they never achieved the first half – meeting the needs of the current generation. Half of all children died, preventable disease was common and nutrition was often poor.

We won’t solve climate change, stop deforestation or protect biodiversity without changes to how we eat. Hunger rates have fallen quickly over the last 50 years, but one in 10 people still don’t get enough food to eat. It’s not because we can’t grow enough food. It’s because we feed it to livestock, put it into cars, or in the bin where it gets wasted. That’s good news: it means the power to reshape the food system is in our hands. Technologies are changing the way we make food. We can produce products just like meat, without the environmental impact or the animal slaughter. That would save an incredible amount of resources and help alleviate global malnutrition at the same time. We just need to make these products nutritious, tasty and cheap enough for the global stage. In 50 years, we won’t be using half of the world’s land to grow food, or raising and slaughtering billions of animals every year to feed ourselves. Everyone in the world can be well fed on a planet that isn’t eating itself alive.

Plastic pollution is the most tractable problem in this book. That is, stopping plastic leaking into the environment and 1 million tonnes flowing into the ocean every year. Invest in waste-management systems and we could stop this. The biggest barrier is money. Most of the world’s plastic pollution now comes from low- and middle-income countries. Rich countries have a responsibility as manufacturers and trade partners to help other countries make landfills and recycling centres a priority. Work together, and plastic pollution will be solved in the next few decades. If it was higher on the agenda, it’s one problem we could solve in just a fraction of that time.

The problems we’re facing are tightly interconnected. The worry is that this gives us impossible trade-offs; we’ll be forced to prioritise one problem at the expense of another. But it isn’t the case; instead, these interdependencies mean we can solve a lot in one go. Move to renewable or nuclear energy to improve air pollution and climate change; eat less beef to improve climate, deforestation, land use, biodiversity and water pollution. Improve crop yields to benefit the climate and humans.

Yet it’s something that we need to overcome. The fact that our intuitions are so ‘off’ is a problem. At a time when the world needs to eat less meat, we’ve seen a pushback against meat-substitute products because they’re ‘processed’. When we need to be using less land for agriculture we’ve seen a recent resurgence in organic, but more land-hungry, farming. When more of us need to be living in dense cities I hear more people dreaming of a romantic life in the countryside with a self-sufficient garden plot. If what we need to do is at odds with what feels right, then that’s a problem. That means that the societal image of sustainability needs to change. Lab-grown meat, dense cities and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward.

The world spent most of 2020 at home, at a huge cost to the quality of life for millions of people. Our lives were stripped back to the bare minimum. There were hardly any cars on the roads or planes in the sky. Shopping malls and entertainment venues were shut. Economies across the world tanked. There was a dramatic and almost-universal change in how all of us lived. What happened to global CO2 emissions? They fell by around 5%. That’s a hard pill to swallow. We want to believe in ‘people power’ – that if we all just pull together and act a bit more responsibly then we’ll get there. Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives.

The second thing we can do is vote with our wallets. Every time we buy something we’re sending a clear signal to the market – and those who bring products to the shelves – that this is what we care about. Every time we buy an electric vehicle, a solar grid connection or a plant-based burger, we’re telling innovators across the world that there is demand, shouting ‘We’re over here, come and serve us’.