3.1 Global Trends in Consumption Flashcards
Biocapacity
Capacity of a given area to generate on ongoing supply of renewable supply of renewable resources and to absorb it waste
Food security
The “availability and access. to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet the dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
Virtual (or embedded water)
The water involved in the manufacturing and growing of products (such as food, materials, and manufactured goods) in one place that is transferred to other, often water-scarce, places via trading.
Nexus
The interrelationship, interdependence, and interactions between water, food, and energy.
Water security
Continuing access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
What is the MDG
Millenium development goals
What were the MDGs?
- a set of interrelated global targets for poverty reduction and human development
- They were introduced in 2000 at the UN Millenium Summit; their successor Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) followed in 2015
What is relative poverty?
When a person’s income is too low to maintain the average standard of living in a particular society.
- Asset growth for very rick people can lead to more people being in relative poverty.
What is social exclusion?
Exclusion from the prevailing social system and its rights and privileges, typically as a result of poverty or the fact of belonging to a minority social group.
etc. poor people are excluded from technology.
What has happened to the middle class in the previous decades?
The middle class has grown to a great extent.
In 1990 around 50 percent of people in LICS lived on less than 1.25 dollars a day; by 2015 it was around 14 percent.
What is the rise of the middle class a result of?
- The increase in average incomes
- The fall in the number of people living in poverty
Describe the trends in poverty reduction in different regions.
- Poverty levels have more than halved on a global scale between 1987 and 2013 when they were below 800 million.
- The majority of this decline (800 million) was achieved in East Asia and the Pacific
- South Asia haled its poverty levels in the same time period. All other regions have seen marginal falls in poverty levels expect for Sub-Sahara Africa, north Africa and the Middle East
Sub Sahara Africa estimation by the World Bank
WB estimates that the worlds poorest will be S.S Africa in 2030
What are the reasons for the fall in poverty in the last decade?
- China, Eastern Europe, and India participate in the global economy
- China - global superpower (low-cost labor, attracting manufacturing & massive rural to urban migration= improved livelihoods, jobs, and a modern consumer lifestyle)
- Trickle-down of scientific & medical know-how from Europe, N.America & Japan
Why is the rise of the middle class an important economic feature?
It helps to increase the sales of goods such as electric goods, mobile phones, and cars.
Ect: Sales of cars and motorbikes have increased by over 800 percent since 2009.
However continued growth is not always guaranteed.
Does the middle class have economic security?
Not all middle class has economic security. Many people on incomes over 4 dollars/day remain vulnerable to unemployment and underemployment.
For many working in informal activities, there is little or no economic or social security.
The progress in reducing poverty has been…
Uneven
Case study of Vietnam for the rise of the middle class:
Since 1990, economic growth in Vietnam has averaged 6 percent per year.
This has resulted in the country developing from one of the world’s poorest countries into a MIC.
Reasons for Vietnam’s rise of the middle class
- As Chinas wages have risen firms have reallocated to low-cost Vietnam
- Vietnam has a young population (more workers, more efficiency)
- It has invested in education
- Vietnam is a member of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) a 12-country trading bloc
Why are women more likely to be in poverty?
- work less than men
- earn less on average
What is the result of the increase in both population and the number of wealthy people? (in terms of resources)
The consumption of resources increases making the world’s resources be in danger of being used up
What is the new global middle class? (NGMC)
- Globally, the middle class is defined as people with discretionary income
- They can spend this on consumer goods, and at the upper end, private healthcare, holidays, or even cars.
- Around 3,650 dollars- 36,500 dollars
What is the fragile middle class?
- The people who have escaped poverty but are yet to join the NGMCs
- This is similar to the idea of the “lower middle” class
Why has there been a rise in the “global middle class”?
- This change has been brought about mainly by rapid economic growth and industrialization.
- Stable government has enabled investor confidence leading to FDI (foreign direct investment)
- In addition, government investment in education and greater openness to the global market (has increased consumer spending power)
Ecological footprint
The hypothetical area of land required by a society, a group, or an individual to fulfill all their resource needs and assimilate all their waste.
What is ecological footprint measured in?
Global hectares (gha)
What is Earth Overshoot day?
This marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year
Explain how ecological footprint measures resource consumption
- This is calculated by measuring the amount of bio-productive land and sea area, built-up land, energy use, and land required for energy consumption
- It is often simplified and therefore can be an approximation
- It tends to be expressed as either an average number if hectares per person in a population or as net carbon emissions
What can ecological footprint act as?
They can act as a model for monitoring environmental impact
They can allow for a direct comparison between groups, and individuals such as comparing LICs and HICs.
They can highlight sustainable vs unsustainable lifestyles (populations with a larger footprint than their land areas are living beyond sustainable limits.)
A country increases its ecological footprint by:
- relying heavily on fossil fuels
- Increasing its use of technology, and, therefore energy (tech can also help reduce the footprint)
- High levels of imported resources (which have high transport costs)
- Large per capita production of carbon waste (that is high energy use of high fossil fuels)
- Large per capita consumption of food
- having a meat-rich diet
A country can reduce its ecological footprint by:
- reducing the amount of resources it uses
- recycling resources
- reusing resources
- improving the efficiency of resource use
- reducing the amount of pollution it produces
- transporting waste to other countries to deal with
- improving technology to increase carrying capacity
- importing more resources from other countries
- reducing its population to reduce resource use
- using technology to increase carrying capacity (for example, using GM crops to increase the yield on the same amount of land)
- ## using technology to intensify land use
Factors used in a full ecological footprint calculation:
- bioproductive (currently used) land- land used for food and materials such as farmland, garden, pasture, and managed forest
- bioproductive sea - the sea used for human consumption (often limited to coastal areas)
- energy land- an equivalent amount of land that would be required to support renewable energy instead of non-renewable energy. The amount of energy land depends on the method of energy generation (large in the case of fossil fuel use) and is difficult to estimate for the planet.
- built (consumed) land- land used for development such as roads and buildings
- biodiversity land- land required to support all non-human species
- non productive land- land such as deserts, subtracted from the total land avaiable.
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Factors taken into consideration for the simplified version of the ecological footprint:
- land or water required to provide aquatic and atmospheric resources
- land or water needed to assimilate wastes other than carbon dioxide
- land used to produce materials imported into the country to subsidize arable land and increase yields
- replacement of productive land lost through urbanization
Carbon footprint
GHG (greenhouse gases) emissions by a person/country/event etc. expressed as CO2 equivalent
Changes in ecological footprints for HICS, MICS, and LICS over time
LICs tend to have smaller ecological footprints than HICs because of their lower rates of consumption
In HICs people have more disposable income, leading to a greater demand for and consumption of resources.
HICs produce more waste in pollution
LICs is responsible for recycling many resources.
Water distribution is…
uneven
What will/is happening to the demand of water?
It will increase due to population growth and rising standards of living. This will further stretch the Earth’s resources.
Demand for water is increasingly strained by:
- growing population
- growth of the middle class (which can afford more goods)
- changing dietary habits into higher meat consumption, growth of tourism and recreation (e.g. golf courses)
Where is one place where water availability is likely to decrease?
Sub-Sahara Africa (where 300 million people live in a water-scarce environment)
Climate change will increase water stress in many areas too, such as Central and Southern Europe.
What does embedded water allow countries to do?
Allows countries with scarce water resources to benefit from water-intensive goods (since water itself is difficult to transport) and allows countries to save their own water resources while benefiting from others
What is blue water?
Fresh water, e.g from the Earths surface and underground resources
What is green water?
water from precipitation e.g. the rain, stored in plants, snow
What is grey water?
polluted water, e.g washing machines, showers, draining from households
When do problems with virtual water occur?
- When water-intensive products are produced in already dry regions with the use of irrigation like strawberries in Spain and cotton in central Asia
- when we buy the fruit and the t-shirts we have also imported virtual water from these dry regions … and perhaps contributed to water pollution.
Physical water scarcity
occurs when the natural water resources in an area cannot meet the needs of the people living there
Where does physical water scarcity occur?
North-west china, central Asia, parts of Australia, south west United States and Northern Africa
Economic water scarcity
arises when poor management of the water resources in an area, such as under-investment in water storage and distribution systems, causes the demand for water to exceed the amount available.
Where does economic water scarcity occur?
This occurs especially in low-income countries where the government lacks the funds to invest in infrastructure, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, northern India, and part of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.)
Water trap
A situation in which one does not have a stable water supply by pipelines, so they have to walk to collect waster for basic household activities
Case study for the water trap
Malawi:
- 1/3 of the population lives more than 30 min away from improved water facilities
- the problem is not a shortage of water per se, but a shortage of safe water
- many only have access to unimproved water sources (e.g. wells they dig themselves which can be easily contaminated e.g. by agricultural fertilizers)
- In some regions of Malawi, over half of the filtered, safe water is lost (because of leakages or thefts) before it reaches consumers
Food intake pattern
Food intake has steadily increase as the worlds population has increased
What is food intake measured in?
Calorie intake
Where has calorie intake remained the same?
Sub-Sahara Africa
Where has calorie intake increased heavily?
East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa
Land availability patterns
Land availability/person has declined in many areas
Cause of decrease in land availability
- rapid population growth
- land-use changes
- land grabs by foreign companies
What happens in diet as countries develop?
Move away from cereals towards a more varied diet, including meat, vegetables, and dairy products
The growth in consumption is due to.,.
A decline in prices, especially prices relative to income
Farming and food production trends and patterns
In recent years, the growth rates of food production and crop yields have been falling
- some of this reduction can be put down to natural hazards (fire, floods, drought), global climate change and the use of land to produce biofuels.
Three main ways of increasing crop reduction:
- extensification
- multi cropping
- intensification
What is extensification?
expanding the area farmed
What is multi-cropping?
harvesting two or more crops a year
What is intensification?
for example, using high-yielding varieties or genetically modified organisms
Reasons for increasing farm productivity worldwide:
- technological developments provide farmers with the means to perform tasks such as ploughing and harvesting much more quickly
- Pesticides and chemical fertilizers have become more commonplace around the world, and these increase yields by removing competitor plants and inspect species while boosting the nutrient base for growing plants
- Farm sizes have been growing allowing greater use of machinery and enabling economies of scale to be achieved.
- Increasing demand, providing farmers with financial incentive to increase production in an efficient manner
- improved spatial integration, through the construction of roads and railways enables farmers to transport their produce cheaply to more markets, increasing sales.
What happens to obesity with urbanization?
Obesity increases with urbanization
as people gain access to high-calorie foods, and their lifestyles become more sedetary.
Case study: London (food production and consumption)
- 95% of fruit and 60% of vegetables are imported, and 80% of everything that seven and a half Londoners eat comes from abroad.
