Resiliency and sustainability in the face of industry 4.0 | Eagle Watch – Business Mirror

By Marjorie Muyrong

Conclusion

Last week, the link between the economy and ecology was explored as premise to answering the question of how the Philippines must rethink its development strategies. After all, adaptation and mitigation to climate change is most urgent in a country directly facing the Pacific. However, equally valid is the countrys desire to adapt new technologies already available abroad as part of its growth agenda. It is also hopeful that the Filipino people are concerned about potential labor displacement with industry 4.0. The question that remains is whether these new technologies set to be adopted all over the world support sustainable development and would not further aggravate the situation of those populations already vulnerable to climate change.

The dilemma of sustainable development in the Philippineslies in the fact that our climate-change problems are caused by the warming ofthe entire planet, and this worldwide warming is caused by the actions ofeveryone in this planet. Unfortunately for the Philippines, our contribution toglobal warming in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions does not compare to thedamage caused by typhoon exposure. While the Philippine emissions in 2014 wasat 106.9 metric tons, China contributes the most at 10,328.7 MT, which isaround 30 percent of all emissions.

However,even if the Philippines remains to be a low carbon-emitter, our countryexperiences the brunt of climate-change impacts. In February 2013, an empirical studylinking windspeed exposure to socioeconomic variables was published. The studyfound that, on average compared to families who did not experience typhoons,income of families exposed to typhoons is lower by 6.6 percent, thereby leadingto human capital disinvestments. In November that year, Supertyphoon Yolanda(Haiyan) hit the Philippines, causing impacts that Filipinos in Leyte and Samarprovinces have not fully recovered from until now.

InDecember 2015, the Philippines, led by then Ateneo School of Government deanTony La Via, sent a 158-member delegation to the 21st Conference of Parties(dubbed as COP21) in Paris, France, that ultimately led to the Paris Agreement.During these negotiations, the countrys negotiators foughtto set the limit of global warming only until 1.5 degrees Celsius abovepre-industrial age and not until 2.0C. Unfortunately, this year, the Duterteadministration had announced that it will no longer send delegates to climatetalks, even when a more recent empirical studyin 2018 from the Philippine Institute for Development Studies links rainfallshocks with poverty.

Economicgrowth has always been linked with capital accumulation and technologicaladvancement. Understandably, countries would want to be part of the industry4.0 bandwagon. Economic growth is simply the expansion of production. Ittherefore relies on the ability of labor and capital in transforming rawmaterials into higher-value goods. Economists have always ignored the role ofnatural resources in the equation, and its perceived abundance has been theusual explanation for ignoring the role of natural resource capital inproduction. However, ignoring land as another factor of production like laborand capital ignores how land is also able to transform seeds into crops.Ignoring marine resources means forgetting how the vast blue seas allow fish togrow from fingerlings. Mother Earth has always been an economic producerherself.

InSeptember this year, Pope Francis sent a video message to the participants ofthe UN Climate Action Summit held in New York. In his message, the Pope linkedour climate and environmental problems with the human, ethical and socialdegradation that we experience every day. He then called us to think aboutthe meaning of our models of consumption and production, and the processes ofeducation and awareness, to make them consistent with human dignity. There isalso the Ling Jiou Mountain Buddhist Society, a Taiwan-based group of Buddhistmonasteries founded by Chan Master Hsin Tao, which aims to establish theUniversity for Life and Peace in Myanmar, as an educational institution thatwould respond to the ecological crisis. In January 2019, they invited a groupof professors and researchers from various fields of study from across theworld for the first Experimental Winter School at Yangon, Myanmar. At the endof two weeks, there was agreement among the researchers that changing economicbehavior would require changing mentality in everyday life.

The dilemma of sustainable development is understandably difficult. Rethinking our development strategies, therefore, require strategies beyond economic planning. It requires changing economic thinking at the global scale. People across the world must change their consumption behavior if we hope to lessen the climate-change impacts at home. We must, therefore, rethink our participation in climate talks. We must also rethink how we teach basic economics. Perhaps, most important of all, we must rethink the power of the ordinary people in bringing about change. So, how do we harness that power?

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Marjorie Muyrongis a PhD Sociology student at La Trobe University. She is currently on-leavefrom Ateneo de Manila University as an instructor of the Economics Department.In January 2019, she joined the two-week 2019 Experimental Winter School atYangon, Myanmar.