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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 – – – – 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 – – – – average temperature extreme weather ice sheets / sea level rise ocean acidification • Environmental effects outcomes for us – – – – – 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 • • • 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