Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7
Let me, as the last speaker, join the others in expressing our very deep gratitude to this very unusual honor we are receiving through the Takeda Foundation. In particular, I would like to extend my gratitude to the respective jury under the chairmanship of Professor Motoyuki Suzuki, whom I had the honor of meeting before in Berlin and other places. I am very grateful to be again in Japan. My friend and colleague from our common times at Wuppertal, Bio Schmidt-Bleek, has already explained to you why we shall need new technologies if we are to master the challenges of sustainable development. Schmidt-Bleek, who his friends call Bio, has single-handedly developed his beautifully simple concepts of the ecological rucksack and MIPS, which have earned him the Takeda Award. The jury under Professor Suzuki were generous enough to also pack me into his rucksack, so that's why I'm here. The rucksack and MIPS concepts can serve as very useful yardsticks for judging the sustainability performance of any product or service. The rucksack tonnage is, of course, a rough and ready kind of yardstick. It is not meant to tell the entire environmental story, but it is meant to tell the forgotten part of the story and, as Bio has just explained very convincingly to me, it is the heaviest and probably most important part of the story. Figure 1 To appreciate this statement, let us take a glance, from an ecological point of view, at the history of the industrialized countries over the last 150 years, which is the history of the Industrial Revolution and its recent tail-end which was characterized by pollution control, but also the information explosion and the industrialization of the life sciences. You see that countries typically started off poor and clean and then they industrialized and got rich and dirty, and then they were so rich they could afford costly pollution control. So they ended up rich and clean, which sounds like a perfectly harmonious story. Many people are very happy with it and, in fact, I'm very grateful to those that contributed to this success story. Figure 2 On the other hand, we will have to ask ourselves what "rich and clean" means in ecological terms, and this, I'm afraid, is going to be disappointing as we can see in the next graph. The daily toll, ecological toll, is devastating. We see that roughly 100 plant and animal species become extinct every day and we blow some 60 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air every day. Over-fishing and deforestation goes on almost unmitigated. Figure 3 Let me not now repeat the entire story the way Bio has just done it. Let me get your attention to one additional phenomenon which deserves environmental consideration. It's the greenhouse effect. This graph shows you the steady and periodic increase over the last decades of carbon dioxide concentrations measured at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Mountain that is far away from any industrial agglomeration. Figure 4 Now, carbon dioxide itself would not create alarm because at these concentrations it's completely non-toxic. The trouble comes in when you look at the correlation between carbon dioxide concentration and temperatures on earth, as has been established by French and Russian researchers more than 15 years ago by looking into the chemistry of fossil air bubbles in the Antarctic ice. Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 We can see that in the Industrial Age from the right-hand end of the blue curve we have a huge increase of carbon dioxide, and now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expecting that after 1,000 years of more or less stable temperatures on earth we are going to get a drastic increase of temperatures during the coming century, the just begun century. The forecasts go that it is anything between 2 degrees Centigrade and 5.8 degrees, which is a drama that even temperature may not by itself cause so much alarm, but there is more reason for being alarmed. If you look at the third curve, which is the sea water table, you can imagine what might happen if the forecasts of temperatures become true - what might happen to the sea water table.