Download Week 2 Slides Revised PPTX File

Sustainable development
• Capabilities
• Environmental sustainability
• Environmental social sustainability?
Money isn’t everything: HDI
(Human Development Index)
• HDI: a weighted average
– Life expectancy at birth
– Education: mean years of schooling vs. expected
years of schooling
– GNI per capita (PPP US$)
– For details, see http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
• Some variants
– Inequality-Weighted HDI
– Gender Inequality Index
– Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index
HDI is an attempt to put numbers to the
capabilities definition of development
• not how much income people have, but what people
have the chance to do and become
• Functionings
– What you do
– What you do constitutes (forms, creates) who you are
– So, functioning: doing, being
• Capabilities
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What can you do?
What can you become, accomplish?
Development as freedom, opportunity
Health, education, income, (etc), expand capabilities
• Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum
SOCIAL AND
ENVIRONMENTAL
SUSTAINABILITY: LINKED?
• This question can be taken to mean ‘can
you not have one kind of sustainability
without the other?’, or to mean that the
problems are linked.
• For the latter (broader) interpretation,
Syria is a case in point: lack of
environmental sustainability (prolonged
drought, driving many from the countryside
into the city without any money or
prospects) has contributed to a social and
political breakdown.
• Timothy Snyder argues that a contest for
limited agricultural resources was also a
cause of World War II. See his books
Bloodlands (2010) and more recently
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and
Warning (2015). The following two slides
have excerpts from Christopher R.
Browning’s review of Black Earth in the
New York Review of Books, 8/10/2015:
‘Snyder begins by setting out what he dubs
“Hitler’s portrait of a planetary ecosystem.” Races
were real, different, and unequal, and they
competed in a zero-sum game for the planet’s
limited resources (land and food). For Germans to
live and live well (what Snyder considers the two
meanings of the word Lebensraum), others
races—which at this particular time meant for
Hitler the Slavs of Eastern Europe—had to be
defeated, displaced, and decimated.’ […]
“Snyder notes that in the postwar period of the
Green Revolution, the world enjoyed a brief respite
from food scarcity and experienced a growing
stability of states providing the protection of
citizenship. In such a historical setting, the world of
Hitler can seem distant and even irrelevant. But
with the waning of the Green Revolution and the
rising threat to food, water, and inhabitable land
posed by climate change, Snyder envisages
numerous possible scenarios of catastrophe
around the world that could make Hitler’s
worldview of struggle for survival in a zero-sum
ecosystem relevant again.”
• Note the reference to zero-sum, a concept
from game theory. A zero-sum game is
one in which my gain is your loss, and vice
versa – a fixed pie to be divided up.
• One way of viewing the environmental
sustainability problem, and its social and
economic aspect, is that there is a
difference between the game as played
today (or at any particular point in time),
and the game as it unfolds over time.
• Today, considering just this point in time,
we could view a contest for resources as
Snyder says Hitler did – a fixed amount of
good farmland, say, that will yield a certain
amount of food.
Over time, however, the problem is not zero
sum, in that the size of the pie that will be
available for future generations to divide up
depends on whether or not nations
cooperate to mitigate climate change, and
invest in adaptations to climate change: lack
of cooperation means more warming & thus
reduced agricultural, fishery & forestry
capacity, so the pie shrinks over time.
Lack of cooperation is what you would expect if the
game were zero-sum. Which is to say that
Snyder’s argument – in addition to predicting
resource wars – is a sort of validation of Godwin’s
Law: he’s saying those who don’t cooperate in
controlling climate change are treating the planet’s
resources as zero-sum, and thus are like Hitler.
Usually when Godwin’s limit is reached, though,
there’s not a serious argument behind it – Snyder
does seem to have that.
ENVIRONMENTAL
SUSTAINABILITY
Expected costs of climate change, proportional to GDP
Source: Climate Vulnerability Forum
Non-climate costs of a carbon economy (e.g., air pollution), proportional to GDP
Source: Climate Vulnerability Forum
Layers of uncertainty
• Action  effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide
• Carbon dioxide environmental effects
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average temperature
extreme weather
ice sheets / sea level rise
ocean acidification
• Environmental effects outcomes for us
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health
productivity
infrastructure (coastal; heat-related)
migration, conflict
mass extinction, knock on effects from that
• Uncertainty is not our friend here: most of it is in the upper
(greater damage) tails
SOME DEFINITIONS AND
ANALYTICAL TOOLS
•
renewable and non-renewable resources
–
‘renewable’ usually have either
•
a limit beyond which they are not renewable (maximum sustainable yield, e.g. for fisheries)
and/or
•
non-renewable aspects (half the topsoil on the planet lost – washed into the sea – in the past 150 years: 10,000 years of agriculture, now this)
• non-renewable resources
– fossil fuels
– ecosystem services (beyond maximum sustainable yield): fresh water, fish;
swatting flies
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•
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sustainability as a problem of economic systems: is capitalism to blame?
sustainability as a ‘growth’ problem: growth of what?
sustainability as a collective action problem
Excludable vs. common pool resources
Excludable
• Possession is
clearly defined
– a tanker full of
oil
Nonexcludable,
rival: common
pool resources
Nonexcludable,
non-rival:
public goods
•
•
•
•
• broadcast
radio
• scientific
information
CO2
fish
see Ostrom
HOW big
the pool?
– local forest
– planet
Managing non-excludable resources
• Common pool resources: controlling
access
– property rights, trading
– state control
– various forms of negotiated community control
• Public goods: getting people to pay
Two views on what happens when nonrenewable resources are used up
Substitution, ‘weak
sustainability’
• Assumes substitute is
available at some price
– (Assumes resource is priced)
• Resource depleted  price
rises  backstop (next best
technology or substitute
resource) used
• Cornucopian view: technology
will always solve the problem
• Limits to Growth controversy
No substitute, ‘strong
sustainability’
• Some resources finite
• Some we just have to use less
of, or there will be grave
consequences for future
generations
• See papers by Neumayer et al.
Hard sustainability vs.
cornucopians
• Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L.
Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William
W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth
• A classic statement of hard sustainability.
• vs. cornucopian view (see Julian Simon;
Simon-Ehrlich wager) that technological
change will overcome resource constraints
The cornucopia and the market
• Most expressions of the cornucopian view
are based on the price mechanism and
market incentives: as a resource is
depleted, scarcity drives up its price, and
this stimulates investment in better ways
to extract it and investment in technologies
that substitute for it or conserve it.
Cornucopia without the market?
• What happens when the resource is
unpriced? The use of the atmosphere as a
dumping ground is a resource, for
instance. As the services of the
atmosphere are compromised, the price of
dumping CO2 into it doesn’t go up, so
there’s no market incentive to invest in
technological solutions.
Overshoot and collapse
• Another issue raised in The Limits to
Growth.
• Malthus: population stops growing when
subsistence level is reached
• Meadows et al: that works if resources are
fully renewable. If not renewable, industrial
civilization can overshoot the earth’s
capacity to support it, and then collapse.
• Climate related resources
– Are common pool
– Global
– Hard sustainability problem
• Gardiner, ‘Perfect moral storm’
– Uncertainty about cause, effect;
intergenerational collective action problem;
international collective action problem
– ‘Moral corruption’ (self-deception)
– Watch Anderson video with this in mind