Ecological sustainability

The ecological sustainability deals with nature and its ability to cope with pressures caused by human activities. The main concerns have been the depletion of the natural resources, the deterioration of the environment and the loss of the biodiversity.

Among the early warnings that brought into the public awareness the ecological limits of the Earth was the book “Silent spring”by Rachel Carson (1962). This was followed by the report of the Club of Rome, which emphasised that the resource base of the human existence is rapidly exhausted by the continuously increasing consumption and demand coupled with the exponential growth of human population (Meadows et al. 1972).

With the discovery of new reserves, technological development and substitution of the materials the threat of the raw materials exhaustion proved to be premature. Instead, the modern society is facing the problems of the environmental deterioration and the loss of the biodiversity. This shifted the interest to the “end-of-pipe” thinking. In Finnish agriculture, the nutrient loading of the watersheds emerged in recent years as the major environmental problem, and a number of protection measures such as improving storage of manure, restrictions on fertilisation and creating buffer zones along waterways have been initialised.

However, there is an increasing awareness, that in addition to the outputs at the end-of-pipe, also the input side of the economy has to be accounted for.

The measures of the society aiming at relieve the environmental burden are not adequate unless the level of the overall materials use is also reduced. This is framed out in the Fifth Action Programme on the Environment and Sustainable Development in the EU (CEC 1993):

”the flow of substances through the various stages of processing, consumption and use should be managed as to facilitate and encourage optimum reuse and recycling, thereby avoiding wastage and preventing depletion of natural resource stock: production and consumption of energy should be rationalised; and consumption and behaviour patterns of society should be altered.”

SD means adjusting the production and consumption patterns to the carrying capacity of the Earth. This requires that the world-wide materials throughput be halved within the next decades. By reducing the volume of the extracted raw materials, the environmental impact is relieved both at the input and output side of the production. This is because the extraction directly interferes with the functioning of the ecosystems, and because sooner or later the extracted raw materials are returned back to nature, usually in an altered form and in wrong places (Schmidt-Bleek 1998). Because at the same time the aim is to improve the standard of living in the developing countries, the main responsibility lies upon the industrialised countries. On the general level, the attempts to cut down the resource use have been expressed as the Factor-goals. In the industrialised countries the use of the natural resources has to be reduced to one tenth compared to the situation today. The same goal can be reached by decreasing the raw materials and energy input of the production, increasing the production per unit input or by carrying out both

measures simultaneously (Factor 10 Club 1997, Lovins et al. 1997, Weizsäcker et al. 1997).

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development first introduced in 1992 the ecoefficiency-concept (WBCSD 2001). Ecoefficiency-thinking is also thinking in terms of the whole production chain. Improving ecoefficiency means lowering the environmental burden without decreasing the human welfare or the profitability of the production (OECD 1997, Ministry of Trade and Industry 1998).

The essence of ecoefficiency is to produce more out of less. Applied to agriculture, ecoefficiency means production of nutritionally better food by using less inputs and by reducing the environmental burden. The efforts to improve ecoefficiency can be concretised with the Factor-goals. The feasibility to realise the Factor-goals within the food chain has been investigated in Sweden. The results show that, by directing the measures to the whole chain, it is fully possible to improve the efficiency of the resource use by several factors without considerable changes in the present consumption behaviour (SEPA 1999a).

However, assessing the ecological sustainability from the data on materials use, with the focus either on the input or on the output side of the production, is not enough. Ultimately ecological sustainability depends on the ecosystem viability and on the availability of the ecosystem services. These include factors such as maintenance of fertile soils, nutrient recycling, detoxification and assimilation of wastes, sequestration of carbon dioxide, biotic regulation and maintenance of genetic information. The agro-ecosystems contribute to the availability of these functions, but also their own internal structure, resilience, regeneration and productivity rely on these life-supporting bio-physical processes (Daily 1997).

The agro-ecosystem and its functions at the interface of the natural and socio-economic systems is shown in Fig. 2. The present trend of the modern agriculture towards large-scale and one-sided production with increasing regional specialisation is crucially dependent on the external inputs, mineral fertilisers and fossil energy. This causes problems both within and outside the agro-ecosystems. The environmental consequences of the unsustainable agricultural practices are seen as losses of biodiversity, decreasing fertility of the cultivated soils, eutrophication of the watersheds and emissions of the greenhouse gases. A prerequisite for the ecologically more sustainable agriculture is to decrease the overall materials use and to relieve the environmental burden of the production. In this way also the viability and productivity of the agro-ecosystems is maintained and the availability of safe and healthy agricultural products as well as public commodities is secured.

These are the issues that have emerged in the recent sustainability discussions (Kloppenburg et al. 1996, Helenius 2000).

Fig. 2. Foodsystem and its functions at the interface with other ecosystems.