Royal Society report on ‘People and the Planet’ released

As part of a new survey by the Royal Society which will feed in to the Rio+20 summit in June, an expert group has looked at the problem of world consumption and growth.

The report took two years to compile and highlights the issues as well as recommendations for the summit. The report’s chairman Sir John Sulston says, "This is an absolutely critical period for people and the planet, with profound changes for human health and wellbeing and the natural environment. Where we go is down to human volition - it's not pre-ordained, it's not the act of anything outside humanity, it's in our hands."

Recommendations include family planning access for women, reducing waste and finding an alternative to GDP. These aren’t exactly new ideas, but the weight behind the report is considerable. Sir John is a Nobel Prize winner and headed the UK wing of the Human Genome Project.

Family planning is a somewhat controversial subject, as many developing countries feel it is over consumption in the developed world that is the problem, rather than the population increases in the third world. Research shows that women in the developing world want family planning, and that people generally benefit from it. Much of this will need to happen in Africa, as the population of the poorest continent is set to rise by two billion by the end of the century. Universal access would cost world governments around $6 billion per year, it is estimated.

The answer to this problem lies not only in family planning, but also universal education, increased consumption for the poorest billion, and a decrease in consumption for the wealthier nations. Inequality is something the report focuses on strongly, "A child in the developed world consumes 30-50 times as much water as in the developing world; CO2 production, a proxy of energy use, can also be 50 times higher," noted Sir John. “We cannot conceive of a world that is going to carry on being as unequal as it is, or even become more unequal."

Yet many middle income countries are catching up with the west in some regards, and are beginning to experience similar problems. Particularly this can be seen with obesity, which is beginning to become a problem in these countries. Some of the future targets should perhaps include reducing over consumption in the more developed developing countries, which are finding the same pitfalls as the developed world in many cases.

The Rio+20 will be key in addressing some of these problems and part of that will revolve around setting new sustainable development goals, in a similar vein to the Millennium Development Goals, which have been a moderate success.