Portugal exceeded all environmental limits
Portugal has surpassed all environmental limits and current and future ones, to be sustainable, will only emit half of the greenhouse gases of previous generations, indicates a study released this Tuesday.
The study’s authors, researchers from the Instituto Superior Técnico, concluded that the limits in all environmental categories, such as greenhouse gas reward, waste production, water and air source, fresh water consumption, have already been exceeded. or pressure on ecosystems (in this case within limits, but only because Portugal is not self-sufficient in terms of food).
Compared to the 1990s as new and future generations have an available greenhouse gas acquisition limit that is 41% lower than the current one.
The study “Ecological Limits: The Intergenerational Impact of the Use of Natural Resources”, within the scope of the project dedicated to Intergenerational Justice, by the Gulbenkian Futuro Forum, was presented on Tuesday in an online session for journalists and was coordinated by Tiago Domingos and Ricardo da Silva Vieira, from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), having been developed by Maretec, IST’s research center.
The calculators calculate the impact of the use of natural resources by different generations in Portugal, identifying the legacy (or burden) to future generations, and concluded that the generation of past generations has a significant weight in climate change. Older generations have much higher per capita environmental impacts than younger generations, especially with regard to water and pressure on ecosystems.
Another reference is that all generations, with the exception of those born after 2000, have exceeded ecological limits. Those born between 1940 and 1959 were the ones who moved farther from the limits, producing more burning of greenhouse gases.
Yet the authors note that older generations, despite having greater environmental impacts, were also those who contributed to policies that helped to partially decouple environmental indicators from economic growth.
The introduction of natural gas and renewable energies reduced the atmospheric and as-supplied species of gases, which also decreased with energy efficiency measures and less polluting transport. And waste recovery policies also have effects on the environmental impact of waste disposal.
Ricardo da Silva Vieira explained, in the presentation of the study, that seven categories of environmental impact were analyzed (identifying the ecological limits within each one) and that six generations were defined, covering the entire past century to the present.
All generations, he pointed out, have exceeded the different limits estimated in the study (based on official data and on the Paris Agreement targets on reducing greenhouse gases), with the exception of the youngest, all generations as a generation have a high point of environmental impact, which happens earlier and earlier in each new generation.
It is this observation that leads Ricardo da Silva Vieira to admit that there are signs that “the impacts of younger generations are tending to be lower”. Because the peak impact of each generation has been getting lower and even the environmental impacts at the national level are also decreasing, including that of climate change.
This decrease may not be enough, he noted, with Tiago Domingos having attributed that in the case of climate change, each year it is above what can be emitted in terms of greenhouse gases.
Ricardo da Silva Vieira had previously talked about the great evolution in the area of the environment, with today much more information and awareness of the matter, and today there are also many more options in terms of cleaner technologies. Not to mention the public policies that have changed since 2000 the direct link between economic growth and the environment, with the former not necessarily having to generate environmental impacts today.
The study on the generational impact on the environment comes after another by the Gulbenkian Foundation on equity at work in Portugal.
“Human development patterns and economic activities have resulted in sustainability challenges of unprecedented scale and urgency, such as climate change and the loss of global biodiversity. This troubling development raises the critical question of whether human-induced pressures exceed environmental limits of planet Earth “, warns the Gulbenkian Foundation.