Assessing future sustainability by forecast of Genuine Savings paths

The World Development Indicators (WDI) database provides historical trends of the Genuine Savings (GS) indicator, going back more than 40 years for about 200 countries. The indicator accounts for subsoil mineral depletion and global warming as environmental degradation. The major shortcoming of existing studies is that they have only considered present and past values of GS. This paper describes an approach to provide future paths of GS until the end of the current century by applying an integrated assessment model (IAM). To cover various mineral resources as well as their environmental impacts, we combine an originally developed mineral resource model and an existing detailed environmental impact assessment model with an existing, orthodox IAM. To be consistent with the WDI, we include data for subsoil resource depletion. Moreover, while applying the IAM, we consider a wider coverage of environmental impact categories compared to WDI. Our findings indicate that, after 2030, GS are positive, thus indicating sustainability in many geographical regions, except Latin America. The results also show that the critical factor that pushes down Gross Savings to GS is the environmental external cost from human appropriation of net primary productivity via land use and changes in land use. Copyright Springer Japan 2014