Taiwan launched its official Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in July this year, and as part of the SDGs developed, guidance was sought from two reports released by The World in 2050 (TWI2050) initiative. The Risk Society and Policy Research Center (RSPRC) is also conducting a scenario planning project to chart future trajectories for Taiwan's growth towards 2050, and has also similarly consulted with the TWI2050 initiative. TWI2050 is headed by Prof. Dr. Nebojsa Nakicenovic as its Executive Director and was established by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) as an effort to develop evidence-based research to guide policymakers in the implementation of the SDGs. To learn more about the two reports, the RSPRC invited Prof. Nakicenovic to give a talk at the "The World in 2050 Conference–Transformations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals" on October 23, 2019, to shed more light on the transformations required to achieve the SDGs globally; as well as the impacts that digitalization can bring to sustainable development, and the strategies to address them. As part of the conference, Dean of the National Taiwan University (NTU)'s College of Science Distinguished Prof. Chun-Chieh Wu and Taiwan Mobile's Social Responsibility Manager Jessica Chou were also invited to share on Taiwan's experience in sustainable development.
Opening Remarks by RSPRC Lead Principal Investigator Prof. Kuei-Tien Chou: East Asia's Stagnated Transition
Our center's Lead Principal Investigator Prof. Kuei-Tien Chou opened the conference by highlighting East Asia's stagnated transition. Prof. Chou pointed out that East Asian countries are characterized by high carbon societies: China ranked as the worst carbon emitter in the world in 2017 while Japan ranked 5th and South Korea ranked 8th. In terms of per capita emissions for countries with more than 10 million people, Taiwan ranked 8th.
Prof. Chou also pointed out that whether it be at the national or global level, there is a need to adopt a triple-helix strategic model of carbon-reduction via energy transformation, industrial transformation and the transformation of air pollution governance, and that these are not only transboundary issues but are embedded in the globalization framework. He added that the governance of Taiwan's energy and climate transition faces various pressures, from the requirements of global conventions to abide by international targets (vertical pressure), as well as horizontal pressure from local energy democracy and public participation movements demands in energy decision, and the social pressures calling for the transition into new energies.
Prof. Chou highlighted that while Taiwan's government is focused on two broad development trends in Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) development and carbon reduction, the government's preference is still to focus on the reliance of AIoT development to bring about economic growth in Taiwan. However, this means that the lack of focus on carbon reduction strategies has led to Taiwan's energy transition stagnating. As a result, Taiwan's development model is still based on a brown economic model that is not focused on labor and gender rights, but is characterized instead by low wages, low environmental expenditure, and the externalization of environmental costs. Consequently, Taiwan's electricity price ranks 6th lowest and its household electricity prices also ranks as 2nd lowest in the world.
In addition, while Taiwan has relied on a low-cost model which has helped it develop an adaptable and agile contracting manufacturing model, this is based on an old economic paradigm, Prof. Chou explained. Taiwan's industrial, social and political transformations are therefore "lazy" transformations, where businesses keep highlighting the five shortages of inadequate water, electricity, labor, land and skilled workers, but such concerns are still part of a brown economic paradigm, and there is an urgent need for Taiwan to transform beyond such a brown economy framework. As a result, while Taiwan continues to indulge in a brown economic society, other advanced countries have already embarked on the fourth industrial revolution towards a low-carbon economic society, and Taiwan is being left behind.
There is therefore a need for Taiwan to learn new paradigms from international communities, such as from the 2011 "World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability" flagship report developed by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) where Prof. Nakicenovic was a member at that time. Key in the report is a transition roadmap for urban and land use which was developed to guide sustainable development, Prof. Chou pointed out.
Prof. Chou also announced that the RSPRC has developed the "Taiwan in Transformation" report using WBGU's report as a framework, to urge the government to similarly develop a clear roadmap, and will be launching the report in November 2019. To this end, Taiwan would need to speed up its transformation using different methods, and would need to concentrate on catching up with international trends and broadening its imaginations.
Keynote Speech by Prof. Nakicenovic: Six Transformations to Achieve the SDGs
Prof. Nakicenovic began his talk by saying that small and incremental changes are no longer workable solutions for global communities, and that there is a necessity to embark on major transformations, such as by changing the way people produce and consume. He echoed Prof. Chou's talk by saying that there is a need to move away from a brown economy to a sustainable one. Nonetheless, Prof. Nakicenovic emphasized that Taiwan is not the only country facing such a challenge, where even countries such as Germany also have to confront similar issues. Even so, Prof. Nakicenovic pointed out that humanity is not "starting from scratch" and it is possible to build on the progress that has been made. He highlighted the four great achievements humans have made since the beginning of the industrial revolution:
- Life expectancy has doubled due to improved health, sanitation and urban living, and the world's life expectancy is expected to increase to more than 80 years old in a few decades.
- While 800 million people around the world go hungry every day, there are also a billion who are obese, which means that on average humans are producing enough food, but the question is about how to restructure the system to achieve equity moving forward, in order bring along people who are left behind.
- As more people live in democracies which tend not to be at war with one another, the result is that more people are dying due to suicides rather than from war and violence.
- There are today 6 billion mobile phones in the world, which means that almost everyone owns a phone, though with 1 billion people not having access to electricity, it remains a gigantic human challenge to devise solutions in order to bring along people left behind.
On the topic of climate change, Prof. Nakicenovic pointed out that in the last 100,000 years, the climate had been cooler prior to the last 20,000 years before incredibly rapid warming set in, though even so, the temperature held constant in the last 10,000 years, thereby allowing humans to successfully leave Africa to conquer new territory and develop agriculture. However, Prof. Nakicenovic highlighted that humans are leaving the Holocene period today, and in order to be able to continue to develop, humans need to adopt sustainable development, which is really about ensuring that Earth will continue to be kind to humans for development.
Prof. Nakicenovic added that while the Paris agreement had set an ambitious target to limit global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius, humans are not far from this target as the world has already reached the point of a 1 degree Celsius warming, and when we look at the systems which are already in danger, the Antarctic and Artic ice sheets, as well as alpine glaciers, are already beginning to disappear, and coral reefs are also disappearing due to increasing acidification.
However, in order to achieve the Paris target, emissions would need to peak next year (in 2020) and decline to zero subsequently, Prof. Nakicenovic explained, and therefore the continuous use of fossil subsidies and fossil-based transport are contrary to achieving the target. Prof. Nakicenovic emphasized that humans can therefore no longer continue to be arrogant about the impact they are causing to the earth.
Nonetheless, humans are today at the forefront of radical innovations and convergence technologies, Prof. Nakicenovic highlighted, and this has resulted in global prices of new technologies falling as shipment increases, such as in solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, for example. As such, greater investment in such new energy technologies will lead to higher production and lower prices.
On the other hand, Prof. Nakicenovic pointed out that the costs of nuclear energy (in the United States (US) and France) has instead been increasing, mainly due to the fact that there has been fewer and fewer construction of nuclear power plants.
Based on current data, Prof. Nakicenovic explained that two future trends are likely to take centerstage: small and incremental reduction in costs, which with the appropriate social steering, will enable the diffusion of more new technologies–though in order for this to happen, fundamental and new ways of working will be required. For example, while there have been technological radical changes every 5 decades or so in the past, which have resulted in railways, planes, telecommunications and individual forms of transport, these systems will need to be combined and harmonized in order for there to be radical and sustainable change, one instance of which is in Japan where transportation has evolved into magnetic levitation railway systems.
Six Transformations to Achieve the SDGs
To this end, Prof. Nakicenovic explained that the SDGs are a "great gift to humanity" because it is an aspirational and holistic agenda. However, because the SDGs do not talk about how the goals can be achieved, the TWI2050 was therefore developed to provide the strategies to do so.
Prof. Nakicenovic also pointed out that the SDGs are interrelated and cannot be subdivided. To highlight how they are integrative, he explained that in the modeling that he and his team conducted, instead of tackling energy security, air pollution, and climate change separately, if all the three goals are implemented in a "synergistic" manner, the cost of implementing relevant programs would be 40% lower and make it more feasible to achieve the goals when done in a holistic manner.
Prof. Nakicenovic also pointed out that while the United Nations (UN) had looked at the literature to identify the interlinkages between the SDGs, the framework (in the chart below) that was developed was too complicated.
As such, the aim of TWI2050 was to cluster the SDGs in a manner that would enable them to be modelled more easily, while at the same time developing initial pathways to achieve the SDGs. TWI2050 therefore designed six transformations which Prof. Nakicenovic explained that if achieved, could enable all the 17 SDGs to also be achieved as well.
Decarbonization and energy transformation are one of the six transformations proposed, but Prof. Nakicenovic pointed out that in order to achieve the Paris target, a 50% reduction in emissions would be required every decade. However, as the world has embarked on this target relatively late, it would therefore be necessary to also use new technologies such as in the areas of carbon capture and reforestation to do so. Prof. Nakicenovic also spoke of other potential transformational technologies, such as a supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) power plant developed by NET Power, which allows natural gas to produce electricity while creating near-zero emissions. The process works by burning natural gas with pure oxygen, and then uses a high-pressure CO₂ turbine to produce electricity and liquid water.
Impact of Digitalization on Sustainable Development
Prof. Nakicenovic focused the next part of his talk on the impact of digitalization on sustainable development. He pointed to mobile phones as a success story, in how mobile phones have taken only 30 years to diffuse in both OECD and non-OECD countries. However, other forms of technologies might not diffuse at a similar rate–for example, 2 billion people worldwide still do not have access to safe sanitation. Prof. Nakicenovic highlighted that the success story for mobile phones would need to be replicated in other technological areas, though understandably, granular and modular technologies such as mobile phones tend to have a faster diffusion rate.
Prof. Nakicenovic pointed out that new technologies bring about both advantages and disadvantages. For example, mobile phones require only 100th of the energy required to power analog devices, or in other words, they are 100 times more efficient. However, at the same time, digital technologies can increase consumption as well. Therefore, digitalization presents both as an opportunity and as a danger. Another example he pointed to was artificial intelligence (AI) which can create structural unemployment in the short run, but might lead to new jobs being generated. As such, interim measures such as safety nets would need to be strengthened to ensure that people who are left behind would still be able to have dignified and reasonable livelihoods.
However, Prof. Nakicenovic believes that a greater problem lies in the privacy of the Internet and mobile phone use, which can impact on freedoms. In addition, a particular area of concern is in autonomous weapons. He pointed to how one company had appointed an AI algorithm as one of its board members to veto decisions but eventually removed it last year because of the concern that there was no transparency in how decisions were being made by the AI. Also, while driverless vehicles like Tesla's can drive autonomously, it has not been decided how blame during accidents should be attributed. In the long run, there is also the question of whether the status of humanity would change in a world dominated by digitalization, and also if AI were to become part of humans, the question of human intentionality would also arise. Prof. Nakicenovic then quoted British mathematician and scientist Alan Turing as saying that when machines would one day start communicating with one another, that intelligence might emerge from them, and pointed out that the possibility of consciousness arising from AI can therefore not be excluded.
Nonetheless, Prof. Nakicenovic explained that in order for the major transformations required to achieve the SDGs to occur, operating on a business as usual basis can no longer be a possibility. In addition, achieving the SDGs would only be the first step, and humans would need to transform ourselves, our values and our norms, and this would also require new human development and new societies, as well as new technologies. He concluded his talk by saying that a new history of humans is emerging and humans would therefore need a new vision moving forward. As a parting note, he emphasized how there are only 10 years left to 2030, and that as humans leave the Holocene era, that the digital Anthropocene would hopefully be a green one. He added that the Anthropocene period began 50 years ago, when an acceleration in consumption began from the 1970s resulting in an increase in carbon emissions which greatly infringed on the Earth's systems. The question therefore was whether it would be possible for humans to make development sustainable in the Digital Anthropocene, he said.
The second part of this article will highlight the key points given in the talks by NTU Dean of Science Prof. Chun-Chieh Wu and Taiwan Mobile Social Responsibility Manager Jessica Chou, as well as highlights from the question and answer session.
Part 2: The World in 2050 – Local Strategies to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals