Three unavoidables if the West wants to sustain itself in a rapidly changing world

Speech I recently gave for the Koninklijke Industrieele Groote Club (www.igc.nl) in Amsterdam.

Brexit, Border Wall, Catalan separatism — western countries are absorbed by their own sovereignty issues. As a consequence, a much bigger issue is not addressed: how to sustain the West itself? Precisely when the West as a whole is losing influence, it is trapped in internal division. Instead of reflecting on a future-proof and non-imperialistic role for the West, (too many) western politicians are wasting precious time fighting each other and bullying the rest. The result is that they catalyze precisely the kind of marginalization they try to stop.

On 2 February 2019 I wrote that if the GDP projections of PwC are correct, not a single European country will sit at the table when the G8 gathers in 2050. Yet precisely now, nationalism is thriving and entire nations manage to grossly overestimate themselves.

As a Dutchman I live in the midst of this turmoil. At the same time, I crossed the globe in the last 10 years, speaking with social actors on all continents about sustainable solutions for social issues. Based on this experience, below 3 urgent recommendations to western politicians if they want the West to play a viable role in the years to come.

I. Stop being in denial

  1. Stop disguising the present
    • In this critical time of shaping our planetary future, facing major threats like cyber crime, nuclear risks, pandemics, global terrorism and climate change, the West cannot afford misleading politics: presenting ‘alternative facts‘ for electoral gain, hiding costs and difficulties when promoting solutions, and creating a false dichotomy between nationalism and globalism.
  2. Stop idealizing the past
    • As the West needs to respond to new issues (like its loss of power and the need for global solutions to global issues), it cannot afford a nostalgia that makes people only yearn for times that won’t come back. Above all, western countries need to overcome their post-imperial stress syndrome in which they only weaken their position by behaving as if they are still calling the shots. Brexit is currently the most dramatic example of this. It painfully shows that the United Kingdom is in no position to negotiate with 27 nations on an equal footing. Ironically, only a supranational entity like the EU can make this kind of equal dialogue possible. Leaving the EU means: falling back on the old law of the strongest between nations. Separatists in Scotland and Catalonia will bump into the same reality if they ever face negotiations with the UK or Spain.
  3. Stop blocking the future
    • Reform is gravely needed to make international institutions more suitable for global dialogue and collaboration. The longer the West waits with giving up its disproportionate power in the UN Security Council, World Bank, IMF, etc., the bigger the chance that non-western nations create their own entities (like China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). This weakens not only the western-controlled entities, but also the world’s ability to solve its joint issues.

II. Secure your Western values

  1. Secure your activism
    • 400 years ago, the West started embracing a mentality of not accepting human suffering, but always seeking “to relieve and benefit the condition of man” (Francis Bacon, 1620). This mentality is inherently optimistic, as it persistently believes that it is worth seeking solutions for whatever challenge we face. The current doom and gloom attitude of the West threatens this spirit. Time to breathe new life into it and make the whole world benefit.
  2. Secure your democracy
    • 200 years ago, the West started embracing the idea that every human being deserves equal respect and equal opportunity to participate in civil and political life without discrimination or repression. This idea is currently under pressure, with politicians disqualifying entire groups in society based on religion or ethnic background, with income inequality rising again, freedom in decline worldwide, and even EU countries leaning towards authoritarian types of governance. Time to re-affirm the meaning of universal human dignity.
  3. Secure your solidarity
    • 100 years ago, the West started embracing a welfare system in which the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens. After World War II, this system got expanded in Western Europe in response to Fascism, Nazism and Communism. It had become painfully clear that people who have nothing to lose become prone to extreme politics. In this time of new uncertainty and discontent, the West can draw from its past a powerful incentive to invest in solidarity again. Globalization, automation and robotics will disturb the labor market to such an extent, that a growing group of unemployed people cannot be retrained in time and stay unemployed. It will be up to us to decide, whether we want to further humiliate these citizens by treating them as a ‘cost item’ to society, or invite them to show their value in other ways.

III. Start valuing your assets

  1. Value your allies
    • If China can openly reject western democracy, Russia openly annex Crimea, and Turkey openly censor the media, western countries better start valuing their like-minded allies. This is the worst moment for the West to be internally divided, as it directly undermines the strength and credibility of western ideology. Building and preserving western partnerships, even at the cost of national sovereignty, may be the only way for the West to keep the critical mass that it needs to sustain what it holds dear.
  2. Value your culture
    • In 2030, Asia will represent 66% of the global middle-class population and 59% of middle-class consumption. Economic power means cultural power: the world will see more eastern-oriented products, adapted to the preferences of the biggest market: Asia. The West will have to decide where it draws the line in adapting to this culture shift. Not for superiority reasons, but to maintain a western sense of home and preserve the cultural assets with which the West can complement other nations.
  3. Value your planet
    • All of the above becomes irrelevant if the West cannot preserve the biggest asset it shares with all nations: our one world, with its global issues and vulnerable ecosystems. Before sustaining itself, the West needs a plan for the planet, for “there is no planet B”. The planet does not care about East or West, North or South. It only feels the weight of 7 billion people and eagerly awaits the moment in which all unite around one vision for the one earth we have.

In short, we urgently need western politicians who don’t give in to polarized debates but boldly manage to do both: preserving our assets with western nations as our contribution to the common good and our sense of home in the world, and preserving our planet with all nations to have a home at all.

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Technologies that can make this world a better place – part 2: reforestation 2.0

Promising new technologies can suddenly make the future look a lot less gloomy. Today part 2: reforesting the world’s most barren lands by nurturing “the underground forest” and allowing it to heal itself.

Tony Rinaudo (courtesy of Silas Koch/World Vision)

Meet Tony Rinaudo, also known as the Forest Maker or Tree Whisperer, one of the very few people on earth whose achievements can be seen on satellite images. This man is responsible for regenerating no less than 240 million trees in the last 30 years.

In 1983, after two years of doing reforestation ‘the old way’ in Niger, namely by planting trees, Rinaudo despaired:

I was in charge of a reforestation project that was failing miserably, it wasn’t that I was particularly dumb, it was the same story all over west Africa. And I remember the frustration that just hit me: north, south, east, west, was a barren landscape, and I knew perfectly well that 80 or 90% of the trees I was carrying [in my car] for planting would die.

But then Rinaudo took a closer look at the few bushes scattered around the land. He knew these bushes were in fact trees that had been hacked down. Suddenly he wondered: what if we would prune these left-over trees and allow them to grow?

In that moment, everything changed. We didn’t need to plant trees, it wasn’t a question of having a multi-million dollar budget and years to do it, everything you needed was in the ground.

Rinaudo had found an “embarrassingly simple solution” to a seemingly insurmountable problem. The root system of the chopped down trees remained alive under the ground; a whole “underground forest” was still available, as Rinaudo would describe it. The only thing needed was some human care and protection, allowing the trees to grow and heal themselves. In Rinaudo’s words: the only thing needed was some humans “working with nature rather than hitting it on the head all the time.”

After his discovery, Rinaudo had to overturn generations of accepted wisdom, as well as a resistance to giving some land back to nature.

When you’ve got people who are on the edge of starvation every year, not just in famine years, you’ve got this perception that you need every square inch of farmland to grow food crops. And here’s this nut telling people they should sacrifice some of their land for trees.

But as soon as farmers started to see the results of Rinaudo’s method (called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration, or FMNR), the new technique took off. And here we are: 3 decades later and 240 million trees richer. At the UN’s global climate talks in Katowice (December 2018), Rinaudo explained the profound impact of these trees. They:

  • improve farming yields
  • reduce ground temperatures
  • hold water in the soil
  • provide firewood
  • make farming in hot places more comfortable
  • and last but not least: all these trees act as a powerful carbon sink, with the potential to draw in billions more tonnes of carbon

A satellite image of the Humbo region of Ethiopia, showing tree cover in 2005 (left) and in 2017 (right). (Courtesy of World Vision)

Working with World Vision since 1999, Rinaudo has taken his technique across the world, from arid Somaliland to tropical East Timor. His big dream: to see FMNR introduced into at least 100 countries by 2030, as a powerful way of improving people’s lives and pursuing Sustainable Development Goal #15.

In September 2018, Rinaudo received the Right Livelihood Awards, often described as the Alternative Nobel Price. Rinaudo received the award “for demonstrating on a large scale how drylands can be greened at minimal cost, improving the livelihoods of millions of people. [Rinaudo’s reforestation method] has the potential to restore currently degraded drylands with an area the combined size of India.”

Below a video about Rinaudo’s work and impact, produced by World Vision. Much more information can be found on the FMNR website.

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Technologies that can make this world a better place – part 1: desalination 2.0

Promising new technologies can suddenly make the future look a lot less gloomy. Today part 1: turning salt water into sweet water in a way that is not only affordable to countries like the US and Saudi-Arabia.

Today, 2.1 billion people lack safe drinking water at home, a figure that is expected to increase. (UN) Our water use is growing twice as fast as our population growth. More and more regions are reaching the limit of being able to deliver sustainable water services. If nothing changes, the projection is that by 2050 at least 1 in 4 people will be affected by recurring water shortages. (UN)

For this reason, 193 countries committed in 2015 to Sustainable Development Goal #6: access to safe water and sanitation for all by 2030. Not an easy goal to pursue. The world is facing severe water challenges: more droughts, melting ice caps, pollution, lack of water infrastructure, growing bio-energy demands, growing meat demands, and endangered ecosystems.

But here is an intriguing fact: most countries have a coast line and therefore direct access to plenty of salt water. Shouldn’t we consider desalination (turning salt water into sweet water) one of the most obvious solutions to the scarcity issue? Yes, we should. And as a matter of fact, there are already over 18,000 water desalination plants operating in 150 countries, producing water for 300 million people. (PNAS, 2017)

Desalination plants, however, cost a lot of money (up to 1 billion USD) and require a lot of energy: producing a 1000 liter of drinking water takes as much energy as the average Belgian consumes each day. Some countries, especially those with large oil reserves, can cope with these demands (50% of Saudi-Arabia’s drinking water comes from desalination). For other countries it is soon too much. Most of the desalination plants are therefore only in a few countries (see below).

Distribution of desalination plants by country. Source: Nanalyze (2014)

To make desalination more affordable, researchers have been looking for ways to reduce the energy costs and make the process less dependent on expensive and immobile desalination plants. This has led to some promising innovations. In this blog I would like to highlight two of them:

  • A team of Rice University (Houston, US) managed to reduce energy costs by using low-cost, commercially available nanoparticles and sunlight in the desalination process. At the same time, they turned the process into a compact water solution for families and communities also at remote locations. (PNAS, 2017) In other words: no 1 billion USD plant needed. Professor Qilin Li : “We are creating off-grid systems to provide water anywhere it’s needed.” The video below explains.
  • Marjolein Vanoppen of Ghent University (Belgium) found a way to both generate energy and lower the amount of energy needed to produce drinking water. How: by benefiting from the fact that when salt and fresh water come together, the salt moves towards the fresh water, a movement that generates energy. In Vanoppen’s solution, energy is first generated by allowing salt to move from salt water to waste water (not suitable for drinking water production). The generated energy is then used to further desalinate the salt water until it is drinkable. In the video below, Vanoppen explains (from 49:03).

Promising innovations like these require further research and investment funds for scalable applications. A perfect opportunity for governments and entrepreneurs to demonstrate the visionary leadership this world so profoundly needs.

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