Introduction to Sustainability

Dr. Uwe A. SchneiderResearch Unit Sustainability

and Global ChangeDepartment of GeoSciences

Contact

• Bundesstrasse 55, Room 022 (Ground floor)

• Tel: 42838 6593• Email: uwe.schneider@zmaw.de• Web-site: http://www.fnu.zmaw.de• I‘m usually available for questions in the

afternoon

www.fnu.zmaw.de/Courses.5667.0.html

The Course

• What is Sustainability?

• Related concepts and theories

• Exercises

• Written examination

Accessed Oct 15 2010

Accessed Oct 15 2010

Accessed Oct 15 2010

Subject Areas

Psychology

Publication Year

Language

Sustainability Research

• Increasing number of scientific articles

• Contribution from diverse fields

• English dominates other languages

Sustainability

• The origins of the problem– State of the environment– Growth and the environment– The environmental Kuznets curve

• Concepts of sustainability– Definitions, meanings,

conceptualisations– Policy instruments

Environmental Problems: Air

• Acidification: Fossil fuel burning and intensive agriculture release acidifying substances, that falls as acid rain

• Ozone layer: CFCs destroy the ozone layer, increasing UV radiation

• Climate change: Fossil fuel burning releases carbon dioxide, which changes climate

• Urban air quality: Traffic emits all sorts of substances that affect health, buildings and plants directly or indirectly

Environmental Problems: Water

• Eutrophication: Nitrates and phosphate released by agriculture and industry alter competition between species

• Toxic releases: Industry releases all sorts of toxic substances

• Endocrine disruptors: Pseudo-hormones have a wide-range of applications, alter the behaviour and physiology of animals

• Depletion: Some countries already have too little water, others are rapidly depleting fossil sources

Environmental Problems: Land

• Soil erosion: Reduced vegetation cover makes that top soil gets washed away

• Desertification: Erosion, climate change, overexploitation gradually turns once fertile areas into deserts

• Salinisation: Overirrigation leads to the build up of salt in the soil

• Waste: Increasingly large areas are used for waste disposal

Environmental Problems: Nature

• Loss of nature: More land for living, industry, transport, agriculture and recreation implies less land for nature

• Loss of species: Destruction of habitat, overuse and other factors lead to local and global extinctions and loss of biodiversity

• Exotic invasions: Deliberate and unintentional transport of species imply new forms of competition between species

Resource Problems

• Depletion of resources: Human extraction of all sorts of minerals (copper, zinc) and fossil material (oil, water) exceeds their build up, implying that less and less of it is left in the ground for future generations

• Waste: Human waste exceeds the assimilating capacity of nature, leading not only to accumulation but also to reduced assimilation

Population Growth

• More people, more food, more energy, more transport, more space, more everything

• Projections 1995 2050– Western Europe 447 479 (446-512)– USA 297 356 (320-400)– SSAfrica 558 1059 (965-1159)– China 1362 1670 (1526-1826)– South Asia 1240 1845 (1737-1949)

Economic Growth

• Incomes have been growing at rates of up to 10% a year, although the average lies somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent a year, doubling incomes every 35-70 years

• Higher income implies higher consumption, higher production, more resource extraction, and more waste

• Improved technology, reduced resource constraints, education, awareness, preferences

Environmental Kuznets Curve

• Kuznets Curve: Inequality first increases, then decreases with economic growth

• Environmental Kuznets Curve: Environmental degradation first increases, then decreases with economic growth

• Holds for some, not for all pollutants• Absolute or relative pressure?• Local or global?• Even if true, no reason for complacency!

Sustainability

derived from the Latin sustinere (tenere = to hold; sus = up)

Sustain =“maintain“"support" “endure”

Sustainability

John Stuart Mill (1857)If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it ows to things that the unlimited increases of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a happier or better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary long before necessity compels them to it.

Sustainability

Bruntland report (WCED, 1987)Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs

Wonderful, but what does this mean?

Sustainability =

• Weak sustainability– Non-declining utility– Non-declining production opportunities– Non-declining yields of resource services

• Strong sustainability– Non-declining natural capital stocks– Ecosystem stability and resilience

• A social construct• Includes efficiency and equity

Non-declining utility

• Pezzey: utility should not fall• Hartwick: consumption should not fall• Solow: consumption should be constant• Whose utility, consumption?• What is utility, consumption?• What time scale?• Substitution is allowed

Non-declining production opportunities

• Robert Solow, Talbot Page• No assumption about what is

consumption, utility• Production for whom?• What is production?• What time scale?• Substitution is allowed

Non-declining natural capital stocks

• Taken literally, this stops everything – no substitution is allowed

• In practice, some substitution and compensation must be allowed, but how much?

• Is spatial substitution allowed? Or, at what spatial scale?

• What stocks are maintained? Habitats, species, genes?

• What about viruses and pests?

Non-declining resource services

• Back to an anthropocentric viewpoint? Depends on services to whom? To Homo Sapiens or to other species as well?

• What are services?• What time scale?• What spatial scale?• Substitution is allowed, as long as the

service is generated

Ecosystem stability and resilience

• An ecocentric viewpoint? Is stability measured as stably serving human needs?

• What is stability, resilience?• What spatial and temporal scale?• Are ecosystems naturally stable?• Beyond a point, no substitution of man-

made stocks and activities for natural stocks and processes

A social construct

• Sustainability is defined as society would like to define it

• There is no objective definition possible• Some argue that if only we get the

procedure of defining sustainability right ...

• This is an example of a political goal jumping the environmental agenda

Sustainability, equity, and efficiency

• Recently, the sustainability debate has been widened to include issues of distributional justice and economic efficiency

• Whilst equity and efficiency are important goals in their own right, and cannot be separately assessed, there is little reason to blur the concept of sustainability ...

• ... except for political reasons

CHIEF SEATTLE'S LETTER

• ~1800s, Authenticity debated

• … how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

• “ … This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.”

The Emergence of Sustainability in Economics

• Classical economics• Neo-classical economics• Welfare economics• Environmental and Resource

Economics• Recent Developments

Classical Economics

• Smith: invisible hand of general equilibrium, social good by individual action

• Malthus: growing population, diminishing returns to scale in agriculture

• Ricardo: diminishing returns to scale (intensive margin), diminishing quality (extensive margin)

• Mill: innovation, input substitution; amenity value „it is only in backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object[ive]“ (1857)

Classical Economics -2

Mill (1857): There is room in world, no doubt, for a great increase in population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. [...] The density of population necessary to obtain all of the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse [...] has been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. [...] Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature

Neo-Classical Economics

• Value is relative, determined in exchange, reflecting preferences, production costs and scarcity

• Demand and supply lead to equilibrium• Absolute scarcity no longer seen as a

problem, a reflection of the times• Keynes‘ macro-economics indirectly

reinvoked interest in economic growth• Earlier growth models: no resource

limits

Welfare Economics

• Rigorous theory of social good• Utilitarianism: Social good is the weighted

sum of individual good• Pareto optimality: At least as good for all,

better for one (actual and potential)• Marshall and Pigou: Externalities and taxes

– if there are unintended and uncomponsated consequences of one agent to the next, the market transactions need not be Pareto improving – Pigou taxes can counteract this

Environmental and Resource Economics

• In the 1960s and 70s, things changed: Limits to Growth, Silent Spring, oil crisis, pollution, space travel, congestion

• First, natural resources are scarce• Second, environmental services are

valuable• Third, there are significant

environmental externalities

Recent Developments• (Evolutionary) game theory for shared

resource management, international agreements

• Imperfect competition, endogenous technological development and diffusion, limits to growth, other long term issues

• Overlapping generations• International trade and investment • Behavioural economics for valuation

Three Related Themes

• Efficiency: The allocation of goods and services by the market to rational agents is efficient only if there are no externalities

• Optimality: Efficiency is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for optimality; optimality includes equity

• Sustainability: Taking care of posterity