Overshoot?
As product developers with a perspective on the impact our work has on society and its natural environment, we must ask ourselves whether we believe that technology will ultimately contribute to the solution of the mounting crises we can observe, or if it will continue to worsen the problems. Current models do not suggest that technology will lead to solutions fast enough to make the effects, for example of the climate crisis, more manageable. While our industrial output has certainly helped reducing poverty and hunger in the world and created a world of convenience for the middle class and upwards, the results of this activity place humanity on a collision course with adverse developments in the natural environment. The question is, will society and its technology be able to react in time to ensure the continuation of civilization as we know it? What does that mean in terms of lifestyle choices we have to make, now and in future generations? Are any choices we can make and any technologies we can develop viable in the face of a world population approaching 10 billion?
This question is not new. It was already brought up in 1798 by the economist Thomas Malthus (in “An Essay on the Principle of Population”). In his essay, Malthus discussed population growth as the main driver that might lead society to a point where it overshoots the capacity of the natural environment to support it. Any technological advancement that might push this boundary, such as new agricultural methods, would also give rise to even faster population growth. From today’s perspective, the focus on population growth may be less relevant for industrialized and highly developed regions, as indeed we might see peak population (for the time being) within this century. Be that as it may, industrializaion has more than made up for the population growth factor in exacerbating the danger of society running into an overshoot of the natural environment’s carrying capacity. The Global Footprint Network calculates Earth Overshoot Day every year, based on the extraction of natural resources and emissions created by human activity. The day marks the passing of the threshold where the natural environment could regenerate from human activity within a yearly cycle. Of course, in reality, there is no convenient reset on New Year’s, and overshoot effects add up. In this sense, Earth Overshoot Day marks an overshoot on the cyclical regenerative basis of our natural environment. Past Earth Overshoot Day, we statistically enter the area of harmful over-extraction and pollution, with potentially long-lasting negative effects past individual short-term cycles.
The question for product development in technology is whether we will be able to reduce the effects of human activity on the natural environment and place it on a trajectory where it might one day match the regenerative carrying capacity again. We know from studies conducted on population growth in different species that it is possible to cross into extractive overshoot, but that this might result in a lasting reduction of the overall carrying capacity of the natural environment (see below). Thus, the bounce-back from overshoot might reduce the harmful activity much further than to simply cut it back to the line of the regenerative carrying capacity. Sometimes, the population almost dies off entirely. In December 1951, biologist Victor B. Scheffer published his seminal paper “The Rise and Fall of a Reindeer Herd” in The Scientific Monthly. The herd of reindeer introduced on St. Paul island in Alaska was able to grow exponentially for a short while, consuming available food far into extractive, non-regenerative regions. Remarkably, they were able to do so for a number of years, reaching a population of more than 2,000 individuals, until at some point there was a drastic bounce-back with an even faster shrinking of the population, until only a handful of reindeer lived on the island. A very similar story unfolded on another Alaskan island a few years later. In both cases, the population was not able to maintain itself close to the line of sustainable existence, carried by the natural environment.
Of course, humanity is not a herd of reindeer on an island. What should separate us from them is our ability to project the consequences of our actions into the future, and to plan ahead accordingly. History will decide if we live up to this claim. For the time being, the rising curve of humanity’s CO2 emissions suggests otherwise.
If we do not want to end up in a devastating overshoot scenario, we must #flattenthecurve of harmful human activity and keep it below the longterm regenerative carrying capacity of the natural environment.
For the role of technology in society, this means we have to closely monitor the extractive and polluting consequences of human activity, and to find new, innovative ways to reduce them. We need to build models with a holistic approach, including extraction and pollution, but also population growth and lifestyle changes. These models can then be translated into goals that must drive the development of products. This will not be a gradual change, but it will mean adopting new economic mindsets and strategies that might seem counterintuitive in today’s world of technology products. But when we take the consequences seriously, today’s world is already the world of the past, even if it fights for survival.
