Green Economy in a Blue World-Full Report

and coordination will be required between national and regional river basin organizations and downstream national (or regional) ocean and coastal management bodies. In this respect, adoption of nutrient reduction protocols to river basin conventions holds significant promise as a legal mechanism to catalyze broader reforms at national and local levels. Of course, a global legal framework on nitrogen would likely be the most effective driver of a multi-level global response, as has been demonstrated by other global environmental agreements such as the Montreal Protocol, Stockholm Convention/ POPs, and Convention on Ship’s Ballast Water and Sediments. Whether manifested through local, national, regional and/or global approaches, nitrogen reduction strategies which use market forces (taxes, cap-and-trade, smart subsidies, feed-in tariffs, etc.) present the best opportunities to truly transform each of the three key sectors by providing financial incentives for nutrient use-efficiency, recovery and reuse which should in turn help to catalyze innovation in both technology and sectoral best practice. Since greening the nutrient economy calls for substantial enhancement in the recovery and reuse of both human and animal waste, another important aspect of the transition will be to alter public perceptions regarding such re-use and assuring the public that crops grown with fertilizer sourced in this way are safe to consume. Global reactive nitrogen (and phosphorus) releases to the coastal zone in the business as usual scenario are projected to increase two or three-fold on current levels by 2050 (Seitzinger, et al., 2010) (or six or nine times pre-industrial levels), mostly from the developing world which has the most dependence on marine and coastal economic goods and services. The global economic damage from eutrophication and hypoxia, already in the hundreds of billions of US$ annually, would rise correspondingly. These figures suggest that a concerted effort to green the nutrient economy must commence immediately to avoid potentially irreversible damage to the ocean and coastal ecosystems upon which so much of humanity depends for food security, livelihoods and sustainable development. Preliminary evidence suggests that such a greening could catalyze a wide range of new business, investment and technology development opportunities and cross-sectoral partnerships, and associated contributions to (net) job creation.

prevalence of organic farms in disadvantaged rural areas than targeting specific environmental improvements. In the US, only a tiny fraction (circa US$20 million) of the annual tens of billions of dollar of subsidies to the agricultural sector go to organic farmers. Local subsidies and other incentives to remove barriers to creation of nutrient recovery and reuse businesses On average, humans excrete about 3.5 kg of reactive nitrogen (Germer, et al., 2009) per person per year. Currently around US$10 billion worth of valuable nutrients is flushed down the toilet each year. Meanwhile, over a third of humanity – 2.6 billion people – still lack a safe, hygienic sanitation facility which prevents human waste from being released into local land and waterways, many of which drain into our oceans. The economic value of nutrients contained in the waste of the un-served 2.6 billion amounts to another US$5 billion per year. Progress on the sanitation Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is among the slowest of all the MDGs (WHO/UNICEF, 2010) and this deficit has demonstrably slowed economic development in many countries (UNDP, 2012). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently committed to ‘reinvent the toilet’ in recognition of the urgent need to accelerate the sanitation MDG and the massive waste and unsustainability of traditional linear approaches to dealing with human waste. A pilot project funded by the Gates Foundation (Time World, 2011) is underway in South Africa to convert the urine of 400 000 South Africans into nitrogen fertilizer; an MIT team is also designing and testing toilets that allow recovery of fertilizer – and generate energy from biogas – through its Sanergy (MIT, 2011) project in Kenya. 3.2 Managing the transition The transition to a much more closed and efficient system of nitrogen use and reuse will require significant policy, regulatory, and institutional reforms at all geographic levels and the effective adoption and implementation of a range of available economic and financial instruments.Catalyzingsuchchangeswill require substantial political will and this underscores the need to conduct further detailed analyses on the cost-benefit and job creation calculus of greening the nutrient economy as financial returns and job creation can help to motivate decision-makers and the private sector. Since nitrogen reaches the oceans as run-off from a wide range of small and very large (and most often, multi-country) river basins, partnerships

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