Tragedy of the Global Commons: Causes, Impacts and Mitigation Katar Singh * ABSTRACT Global commons include such diverse things as space, climate, biodiversity, high sea marine fisheries, eco-systems and their services to human beings. They are all open access resources and are vulnerable to what Garret Hardin called “the tragedy of the commons”. This is evident from increasing incidence and severity of such climatic aberrations as global warming, acid rain, depletion of ozone layer, droughts, floods, cyclones, and hurricanes. All these climatic aberrations are caused mainly by human activity and partly by natural processes. But they all adversely impact on human wellbeing and the quality of our environment. But times of crises are also times of opportunity. There is now growing awareness of the need for adoption of active global policies to create more sustainable economic structures and processes to mitigate the adverse impacts of climatic aberrations on human wellbeing and avert the “tragedy of the global commons”. Consequently, several catch phrases such as green accounting, green gross domestic product, a global Green New Deal, low carbon economy and a green energy revolution have come into vogue and now find their way into governance and management of global commons. This paper attempts to characterise the nature of the problem of global commons, identify its root causes, assesses the impacts of the tragedy and propose a strategy for managing the global commons so as to minimise the adverse impacts of the tragedy. The strategy proposed comprises a mixture of market-based instruments and command and control measures. The paper is largely based on a review of the relevant literature available on the subject and partly on the empirical work done by the author over the last three decades or so. Key words : Global commons, ‘tragedy of the commons’, climate change, global warming, causes, impacts, strategy * Chairman, India Natural Resource Economics and Management (INREM) Foundation Anand-388 001, India E-mail: [email protected] 1 1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND By global common pool resources (GCPRs), or simply global commons, we mean resources, or facilities, or services, which are or can be used in common by a number of countries in the world, or by several people in a country simultaneously. They include such diverse things as space, climate, biodiversity, eco-systems and their services, high seas and marine fisheries beyond the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of nations, unpatented scientific discoveries and innovations, and global institutions such as the United Nations Organisation (UNO) and its sister institutions. They are all open access resources, i.e., resources which are everybody’s property and access to which is free and unrestricted. The problems of open access arise from the lack of ownership of the resource by any person or organisation. There is some truth in the conservative dictum that ” everybody’s property is nobody’s property” and hence open access is likely to be abused, misused, and over-exploited (Gordon, 1954: 135). In other words, they are subject to what Hardin (1968) called “the tragedy of the commons” Most of the GCPRs are under high biotic 1 and abiotic 2 pressures in most of the countries of the world, particularly the developing countries including India. They are misused, over-exploited, misappropriated and polluted. For example, in India, in 2000, about 20% of its total geographical area was degraded due to various reasons. Agricultural lands suffer from soil erosion, water-logging, salinity and general loss of fertility, making them less productive. Similarly, most of India’s rivers, lakes, tanks and ponds are polluted and the groundwater aquifers are over-exploited in most of its arid and semi-arid regions. Fishery yields have been declining year after year due mainly to indiscriminate fishing using mechanised trawlers equipped with very wide maws and radars (Singh, 2009:41-44). At the global level, there have been drastic changes in climate including such aberrations as increasing intensity of global warming, acid rain, depletion of ozone layer, and increasing frequency of occurrence of floods, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, and eruption of volcanoes. Biodiversity is being lost at an almost unprecedented pace. Space is being crowded with satellites and polluted by sonic booms of supersonic aircraft. All those changes will bring about rapid and unpredictable changes in the earth’s entire biophysical system and adversely impact on human wellbeing. As a matter of fact, some of the ancient civilisations have disappeared due to the neglect of natural resources, particularly land and water resources. Famous British historian Toynbee (1939: 42-45) observed that it was the loss of command of physical environment, 1 The biotic factors affecting the GCPRs include high levels of human and domestic animal populations, their high density and rapid growth, high incidence of poverty, high level of illiteracy, high levels of emission of green house gases and high density of use of the space for various purposes. 2 Abiotic factors include floods, cyclones, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and eruption of volcanoes. 2 which led to the breakdown of the civilisation of the Tigris river basin 3. There are thus massive indications of the tragedy of global commons caused partly by human activity and partly by natural factors. But times of crises are also times of opportunity. There have been many initiatives in the past at both national and international levels to mitigate the adverse impacts of climatic aberrations on human wellbeing and avert the tragedy of the global commons. But the measures adopted followed conventional lines of unsustainable technological and economic practices and weak institutional structures. So, wise use and management of land, water and other natural resources including environment at both the national and global levels is of critical importance for global sustainable development. The main objectives of this paper are to : (i) characterise the nature of the problem involved in using and managing the GCPRs; (ii) identify the root cause of the problem; (iii) assess the impacts of some of the climatic aberrations; (iv) identify some of the challenges and opportunities; and (v) propose a strategy for wise management of the global commons. The paper is partly based on a critical review of the literature available on the subject and partly on the author’s work spanning over the period of more than three decades. We begin with a characterization of the nature of the problem of degradation of GCPRs including environment and identification of its root cause. 2. THE PROBLEM OF GLOBAL COMMONS AND ITS ROOT CAUSE Although global commons include a wide variety of resources, they all face one common problem of how to coordinate the actions of individual user nations to attain an optimal rate of production or consumption for the world community as a whole. Need for coordination and management generally becomes apparent when the flow of benefits or services from a resource is insufficient to meet the demand of its users. The primary causes of the demand for products / services of a global common exceeding its supply are increase in human and animal populations, discovery of new uses for the resource and / or its products, development and availability of new technologies for exploiting the resource and for processing, transporting, and marketing its products, discovery of new markets, and launching of new international policies and programmes. Over a relatively short period of time when the demand is constant, a problem may occur due to the decline or deterioration in the supply of the resource caused by such factors as degeneration due to natural processes, destruction by natural and / or man-made calamities, lack of necessary maintenance, etc. (Singh 1994: 12). 3 The Tigris River is the eastern member of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia, along with the Euphrates. The river flows from the mountains of southeastern Turkey through Iraq. 3 If the world community of users is unable to control the use of its commons under changing circumstances, destructive competition or conflict among the users is bound to follow, which eventually results in the depletion or degradation of the resources. Hardin (1968) characterised this eventuality as ‘the tragedy of the commons’. The logic underlying the tragedy is purely economic in nature and can be stated as: unregulated access to a global common pool resource creates a decision-making environment in which incremental private benefits to an individual nation from the increased use of the resource markedly exceed the incremental costs associated with the increased use. Under these circumstances, each rational consumer or user of a global common is motivated to consume or use more and more of the resource till the resource is completely destroyed or degraded as a result of collective and uncoordinated use by all the individual users. Thus, individual rationality leads to collective irrationality. The calculus of incremental or marginal private benefits markedly exceeding the incremental costs follows from the fact that, in the case of a GCPR, whereas an individual user nation can appropriate all the benefits resulting from its increased use of the resource, it bears only a small fraction of the incremental costs associated with its increased use; the incremental costs are shared by all the nations of the world community, implying the existence of an externality 4 in the use of the GCPR in question. Thus, the common pool problem is basically one of the existences of externality - a divergence between private cost and social cost of exploitation which eventually leads to either depletion or over-crowding or congestion (Friedman, 1971: 855). The problem is a manifestation of either the absence of exclusive private property rights or the breakdown of the structure of property rights, or institutional arrangements (Randall, 1975: 734). Hardin’s thesis of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ has since become the dominant paradigm of the exploitation of global commons resulting from their open access nature.