Barney Foran is a senior analyst with the CSIRO Resource Futures Group which seeks to apply hard nosed analysis to key issues for Australia's long term futures from 25 to 100 years away. He has degrees in agricultural science and ecology and has spent a major part of his career working with pastoral industries in Central Australia, Southern Africa and the mountainlands of New Zealand. He arrived in Canberra in 1993 to develop a scientific program dealing with the nexus between population policy, economic development, resource use and environmental quality. Barney’s current research and analytical interests include: Australia's population futures to 2100 and their interactions with the physical economy; the concurrent resolution of long term challenges in Australia's environmental sectors; implementing 'triple bottom line' accounting with real data at national and sectoral levels; and environmental effects of globalised trade flows on key environmental outcomes for Australia. Barney led the team responsible for the development of the CSIRO Future Dilemmas study released in November 2002. The study distilled six key issues with which the Australian people, the economy and decision makers will have to grapple as we approach the year 2020. While the dilemmas are challenging and difficult to resolve, Australia still has two decades of moderate optimism and a reasonable resource base to underpin strategic decisions made in a long term context. There is a general consensus that 'leaving it all to market forces' will not effectively serve the interests of our children's children.

Population and Environment: Many hands on the tiller
by Barney Foran

Session 2: Questions/discussion

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Well, why are we concerned? The graph in the slide is for the last 100 years of GDP growth, in the blue, and primary energy use, in the red. And really, I will keep asking the question: can this go on forever? They are one and the same thing.

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If we look at land and water use over the last 150 years, we see environmental history, if you like, writ large: tamed land or homogenised land, arable land plus improved pasture land, and on the other side, water. Energy use, land taming and water use in the Australian context have been going up exponentially for somewhere between 100 and 150 years.

And the question again is: can that go on forever? Behind each dollar of final demand, in the economists' jingo, or consumption as we call it, there is nearly a kilogram of carbon dioxide, 37 litres of managed water or 3 square metres of land permanently stuffed up. These are what we are starting to call the blood-pressure variables of a modern economy like Australia.

Bob [Wasson] has already noted where we started as environmental scientists, with relatively simple, what I call rhetorical, ways of trying to bring these things together, and we followed Doug [Cocks]'s lead in this, when he asked me to try and implement these. They are great ideas, but we found that when you start implementing them on water, land, energy et cetera you suddenly get into huge challenges of science and doing the same job over and over.

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So that led us, as environmental scientists, to construct models – or this model in particular, the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework – of Australia, with an environmental history of somewhere between 50 and 150 years inculcated into its data sets. In that we deal with everything. All of the physical transactions that underpin the Australian economy and society, if you like, and many of the economic variables and social variables are in there in one form or another, but where I will end up is to say that this is part of the way ahead, not the whole way ahead.

A year or so ago, we put part of that out in a major presentation for a federal government department, the Department of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs, in which we highlighted six big issues as being critical in the view we took out to 2050: ageing, the mix and volume of our trade – just how physical and dumb an economy is the one that we run at the moment – greenhouse, which you know about, the amount of resources – a real issue, where oil and gas we are worried about, fisheries we are worried about, and arable land quality – biodiversity, water quality and air quality.

Of course, no-one asked us to solve the equation, if you like, to come up with what we would do about all this, but obviously it is going to take a lot of money to solve all these things. And the big challenge is to solve them concurrently and in the one dynamic, fluid motion going through the next 50 or 100 years.

It is essentially, from an environmental science point of view, a physical problem with which we have to deal, notwithstanding that there are social and economic hurdles along the way.

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One such set of hurdles is a recent analysis my colleagues at Sydney University have put out where we have structurally decomposed the last 30 years of greenhouse gas emissions in a full data set that describes the function of the Australian economy. You will see on the slide five accelerators of greenhouse gas emissions, which in total add up to +4.5 per cent yearly, pushing greenhouse gases forward; you have got about five retardants, which when you add them up give about -2.1 per cent; and so overall there is this positive thing of greenhouse gas emissions. And the analyses would be similar but different, if you get my meaning, if I did land taming and water. We haven't got around to that yet.

So we are faced with a structure of an Australian economy which is a tough, complex beast to deal with.

Part of the issue, if you like, is what I call these days putting in the macro, meso and micro things. Most of our innovation in Australia is taking place down at the micro level. All our CRCs inventing genes to kill carp in the Murray-Darling – everything is down to the micro level. But when you get up to meso, how do you manage Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane? And then as you roll that up and say, 'How do you get up to manage the whole land?' the chain of command down and back up again, you find that all of the effort is going into mobile phones to take pictures in the changing room. There are challenges, let me say, at the meso and the macro levels, which we haven't even started to address yet.

Our conference organisers asked us to pose the key question, and from my point of view, from an environmental scientist's point of view – with this huge historical viewpoint in our data and some understanding of social and economic issues – for us the question is: how can we as a nation reduce our physical metabolism? That's all the blood-pressure indicators of greenhouse, water and land, and I'd make the point that blood pressure doesn't kill you but in the end it cuts down your enjoyment of rugby on a Saturday night, certainly, if you get too over the top.

But do we take that down to 50 or even as low as 30 per cent of the current levels, and do that over the next 50 years without causing social, economic and environmental chaos, or major discontinuities when the arse falls out of the system!

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In finishing, I think the key question is one of harmonisation. You would have heard the Treasurer, Peter Costello, talk about that the other night when under the gun from Kerry O'Brien [on ABC TV's 7.30 Report] and I guess I have given [on slide] this rather prosaic image of the bloke – and he is a bloke in that situation – with one of these backhoes with all the levers, and they are the policy levers. The idea is that over the next 50 years (this is just a greenhouse gas example; we have others for water and land disturbance, if you like) we have got to draw back very sensitively on all the accelerators while at the same time pushing the retardants forward, and – as these blokes in the seat there do at times – there are times when you really have to push some of the accelerators. If there is a big rock down below there, you actually have to grab hold of it and get it out, and get it out of the way before you dig a bit further.

So I think the big challenge for all of us in dealing with this population-environmental issue is getting hold of all those levers and working out the time trajectories and the pressures that we have to apply to bring the environmental system, anyway, over and down to levels that are quite a deal less than they are at the moment. I am talking particularly about energy and greenhouse, land and water.