I was recently invited by email to give a keynote address to a conference at the Fatima Jinnah Women University which was the “Second International Conference on Sustainable Development in Contemporary World: Priorities, Challenges and Prospects”
I emailed back arguing that I was no expert in “sustainability” as it is currently commonly construed and gave my arguments and hence they probably should invite someone else. Somewhat to my surprise the inviter was even more adamant and so I ended up giving a talk on October 4, 2022 to an audience in Pakistan via Zoom (which involved me speaking into a camera in the middle of my night).
Here is a video of the entire speech (a little bit over an hour), but wanted to also post the slides from the presentation. I (try) to make four major points:
(i) for developing countries to have sustained improvements in material wellbeing they will need sustained economic growth.
(ii) one needs to make the distinction between “sustained” growth and the causes of economic growth to not be “sustained”–which can be political, conflict, economic policy, global crisis, bad luck, etc.–and whether or not the issues called “sustainable” are likely to be a cause for growth to not be “sustained.” It could be that “sustainability” issues, while real, are a very small subset of the likely challenges to sustained growth over the medium run horizon.
(iii) the prioritization among all sustainability/environmental/natural resource challenges needs a clear basis–and the contribution of natural resources to sustainable development may not be “preservation” but rather wise use.
(iv) and this point seems both obvious to everyone but also rarely articulated, is that whatever one believes about the likely severity of climate change on Pakistan’s prospects for sustainable development (whether unmitigated or optimally mitigated), everyone agrees that, on a technical level, Pakistan’s past, current and future carbon emissions will have little or nothing to do with the impact of climate change on Pakistan (except perhaps by indirect political channels). Even if Pakistan adopted the “greenest” or “lowest GHG emission” economic growth path possible, this is unlikely to have any direct impact on climate change as the externality is global and Pakistan’s emissions are small.
I am posting this well aware that people may argue I proved my original argument: that I should not be giving keynote speeches at conferences about sustainable development, but I did and so there’s that.