A pilot study at China’s second-largest oil field found potential to save more than 400 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year, with recovery of the initial investment achieved within 1.6 years. Industrial electric motors in China account for around 60 percent of total electricity consumption. For a total investment of less than US$5,000, an annual financial return of about US$300,000 was reported. The Rathkerewwa Desiccated Coconut Industry (RDCI) in Sri Lanka cut 12 percent off energy use, 8 percent off material use and 68 percent off water use, while increasing production 8 percent by changing its practices. Many countries have tried out such techniques with tangible results that can be replicated and scaled up, the authors urge. Below are examples from the report. He favours smooth and steady long-term strategies for revolutionary improvements in resource productivity, and argues that countries and private companies pioneering such strategies will achieve success. “Decoupling can prove the most attractive strategy of combining the wish for economic growth with the need for making do with limited resources,” said the report’s lead author, Ernst von Weizsaecker, who also serves as co-Chair of the International Resource Panel.
Such policy change can create stable, successful economies over the long term. The report argues that existing barriers to decoupling can be removed, notably subsidies for energy and water use, outdated regulatory frameworks and technological biases. Advanced furnace technology could achieve up to a 40 percent reduction in energy intensity for zinc, tin, copper, and lead smelting and processing. Some 60 to 80 percent improvements in energy and water efficiency are commercially viable in sectors such as construction, agriculture, hospitality, industry and transport. The potential to reduce energy demand through improved efficiency is around 50 to 80 percent for most production and utility systems. Many decoupling technologies and techniques that deliver up to ten times more resource productivity are already available, allowing countries to pursue their development strategies while significantly reducing resource use and negative environmental impacts. This would leave energy consumption some 22 percent lower than it would otherwise have been - a reduction equivalent to the entire energy consumption of China today. This is three times the levels of consumption in 2000 and most likely exceeds all existing available resources and the limits of the planet to absorb the impacts of extraction and use.įor example, a shortage of some of the world’s key metals may be felt within the next 50 years, affecting many industries approximately 60 percent of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth have already been seriously degraded and global demand for water is expected to rise by 40 percent so that in 20 years available supplies will likely only satisfy 60 percent of world demand.īy adopting decoupling technologies, developing countries could cut their annual energy demand growth from 3.4 to 1.4 percent over the next 12 years, while meeting their development goals.
The report builds on an earlier study that warned that developed nations’ consumption patterns, combined with increases in population and prosperity, will see us consuming 140 billion tonnes of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year by 2050 unless economic growth is decoupled from resource consumption. “Yet this dangerous explosion in demand is set to accelerate as a result of population growth and rising incomes.”
“The worldwide use of natural resources has accelerated - annual material extraction grew by a factor of eight through the twentieth century - causing severe environmental damage and depletion of natural resources,” said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner in a press release.
The same applies to food, with price volatility having risen to 22.4 percent from 2000 to 2012 compared to 7.7 percent from 1990 to 1999. These numbers show that the negative effects of unsustainable use of natural resources are already being felt, notes the “ Decoupling 2: Technologies, Opportunities and Policy Options” report, which is produced by the United Nations Environment Programme-hosted International Resource Panel (IRP). Rapidly rising resource prices - metal up by 176 percent, rubber by 350 percent and energy by 260 percent since 2000 - signal a potentially crippling trend of increasing costs as current consumption patterns rapidly deplete the world’s non-renewable resources, according to a new report.
0 kommentar(er)
