Sustainable Development SOSC 562

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Sustainable DevelopmentSOSC 562

• Instructor Jerry Patchell (sopatch_at_ust.hk)
• TA Kaxton Siu
• (Kaxton_at_ust.hk)

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What is Sustainable Development?
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One Problem Two Vicious Circles
Poverty
Affluence
Environmental degradation
Environmental degradation
Resource imports, pollution exports
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How does poverty cause environmental damage?

• Agriculture need to survive causes overuse of
  land (grazing, intensive agriculture, fertilizer,
  fuel wood, logging) leading to deforestation,
  topsoil erosion, water contamination
• Worsened by
• population pressures
• lack of control over local resources and poor
  governance
• Inability to invest in environment
• Industry inefficient, dirty industry locates
  where wages and influence over environment are
  low, causing pollution of air, land, and water
• Cost-based competition
• Labour intensive
• Low capacity to invest in environment

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How does affluence cause environmental damage?

• High productivity levels cause greater throughput
  of materials and energy per person
• Higher income levels enable greater consumption
  of energy and materials
• Greater throughput of energy and materials means
  more land used for agriculture (more pesticides,
  fertilizers, erosion), more wood and mineral
  resources used, more energy extracted and used,
  etc.
• Urbanization has disconnected producers and
  consumers relieving them of the influence of
  environmental degradation on their lives.

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How are the two vicious circles connected?
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Connections

• Trade in resources, pollution and waste
• Exploitation of global commons for resources and
  waste disposal
• Impact of local actions on global health

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Two Paths to Sustainable Development
Livelihood
Lifestyle
Affluence
Poverty
Environmental degradation
Resource imports, pollution exports
Environmental degradation
Cooperation on Global Governance
Welfare Improvement Basic needs (food, shelter,
edu.) Productive employment Control over
resources Population control Energy
Environmental Remediation Production Consumption
Fulfilling employment/leisure Responsibility and
participation Energy
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From Ad Hoc Responses to the Environmental Crisis

• Social Demands
• Catalytic events disasters, Pollution, Habitat
  Destruction etc.
• Scientists, Environmentalists, Social Movements
  raise Awareness demand for action, green
  consumption
• Political Action
• Government Regulations, Penalties, and
  Administration
• International Conferences and Agreements
• Business Response
• Evasion
• Compliance with regulations
• Sustainability as strategy

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to an (Ambiguous) Consensus on Sustainable
Development

• "Sustainable development is development that
  meets the needs of the present without
  compromising the ability of future generations to
  meet their own needs. (WCED)

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The short definition was qualified by its
originators in the following manner It
(sustainable development) contains within it two
key concepts

• the concepts of needs, in particular the
  essential needs off the world's poor, to which
  overriding priority should be given and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of
  technology and social organization on the
  environment's ability to meet present and future
  needs. (WECD, 1987, 43)

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History

• Stockholm 1972 UN Conference on the Human
  Environment
• Report of the World Commission on the Environment
  and Development Our Common Future.
• Rio 1992 UN Conference on Environment and
  Development Agenda 21
• Johannesburg 2002 2nd World Summit on
  Sustainable Development

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Far-Reaching Ethical, Political and Economic
Implications

• Raised the environmental issue to a high level
• Recognizing the issue of intra-generation and
  inter-generation equity
• While, still allowing for growth and development
• And bound all countries to a global effort.

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Local, National and Global Strategies

• revive growth, but change the quality of growth
• meet essential needs for jobs, food, energy,
  water, and sanitation
• ensure a sustainable level of population
• conserve and enhance the resource base
• reorient technology and manage risk
• merge environment and economics in decision
  making
• enhance the flow of capital to developing
  countries
• link trade, environment, and development by
  improving the terms of trade
• increase the diffusion of environmentally sound
  technologies and their funding to developing
  countries.

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Who does sustainable development?

• The UN and its agencies
• Dozens of environmental conventions and
  programs(UNDP)
• National, state, local governments, communities
• 110 national, over 6000 local Agenda 21s
• Non-governmental organizations
• Thousands involved
• Industry Sectors
• All firms involved in service provision from
  cradle to cradle
• Companies and other Organizations
• Environmental Management Systems Corporate
  social responsibility/sustainability programs
  ethical investing
• Consumers
• Green consumer movements, fair trade

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How is Sustainable Development Done?

• Integration
• Systems any change in behavior or technology to
  reduce environmental impact requires and causes
  changes throughout the human-environment system
• Principles traditions, ideologies, economic
  theories, laws etc. that shape environmental
  behaviour have to be changed
• Practices the tasks, processes, and technologies
  of the way we work and play are changed according
  to system needs.

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How can we stop climate change?

• How does the human-environment system work?
• What are the principles governing human inputs?
• What practices need to be changed?

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Sustainable Development as Integration
Science Technology
Environment
Environment
Society
Politics
Economy
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Sustainable Development as Integration

• All activities depend on the environment
• Society is the core of the system because it
  shapes relations with the environment and because
  of need for equity (resources, health,
  responsibility intra inter generational)
• Society needs economy for support and to exist
  within carrying capacity
• Society exists within long-term technological
  conditions
• Society requires government to set common
  standards of behavior.

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Integrating Principles

• inter-generational equity
• intra-generational equity
• precautionary principle
• public trust doctrine
• subsidiarity principle
• polluter pays principle (PPP)
• user pays principle (UPP)

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• The principle of inter-generational equity is at
  the heart of the definition of sustainable
  development. It requires that the needs of the
  present are met without compromising the ability
  of future generations to meet their own needs.

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• The principle of intra-generational equity
  requires that people within the present
  generation have the right to benefit equally from
  the exploitation of resources and that they have
  an equal right to a clean and healthy environment.

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• The precautionary principle holds that where
  there are threats of serious or irreversible
  damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall
  not be used as a reason for postponing
  cost-effective measures to prevent environmental
  degradation.

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• The public trust doctrine means that governments
  must act to prevent environmental damage whenever
  a threat exists, whether it is covered by a
  specific law or not.

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• The subsidiarity principle requires that
  decisions should be made by the communities
  affected or on their behalf, by the authorities
  closest to them.

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• The polluter pays principle (PPP) suggests that
  the polluter should internalize all the
  environmental costs of their activities so that
  these are fully reflected in the costs of the
  goods and services they provide.

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• The user pays principle (UPP) applies the PPP
  more broadly so that the cost of a resource to a
  user includes all the environmental costs
  associated with its extraction, transformation
  and use (including the costs of alternative or
  future uses foregone).

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Sustainable Sai Kung a practical introduction
to sustainable development

• The core of sustainable development is that
  people from diverse backgrounds, often with
  conflicting interests need to work together to
  produce integrated answers to environmental
  pressures.

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Sector/Community Study

• Choose a sector or community
• Baseline conditions and impacts
• Stakeholder awareness and capacities
• Issue analysis
• Alternatives generation
• Indicators and monitoring system
• Stakeholder feedback to your plan
• Community integration

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Sector/Community Study

• Done
• Fisherfolk
• Wind energy
• Hiking
• Water recycling
• Ecotourism
• Seafood restaurants
• Expat community
• Scuba diving
• Recreational fishing
• Transportation
• Composting

• To Be Done
• Awareness
• Houses
• Housing estates
• Education
• Recycling
• Industry
• Old folks, young folks
• Yachting, waterskiing, etc
• Environmental awareness
• Politics
• Various businesses e.g. construction
• And much, much more.

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Sai Kung

• Environment
• Attributes and quality
• Society
• Pop. groups services
• Technology
• Infrastructures and products
• Economy
• Sectors composition values jobs
• Politics
• Representation/Administration participation

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Evaluation System

• Group reports 2 x 15 marks 30
• Participation 20
• Final report 50

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Requirements

• read basic literature on sustainable development
• Field research
• Literature/case study research
• Willingness to talk to people
• Creativity

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The significant problems we face cannot be
solved at the same level of thinking we were at
when we created them.

• Albert Einstein

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Sustainable Development as Integration
Science Technology
Environment
Environment
Society
Politics
Economy
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Defining an oxymoron

• Sustainable?
• Development?

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Other Definitions

• (www. sustainableliving.org)

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• Ecological Definition
• IUCN, WWF and UNEP. 1980.
• Sustainable development - maintenance of
  essential ecological processes and life support
  systems, the preservation of genetic diversity,
  and the sustainable utilization of species and
  ecosystems.

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Ecological Definition

• Keiichiro Fuwa. 1995.
• Biophysical sustainability means maintaining or
  improving the integrity of the life support
  system of Earth.
• Mohan Munasinghe and Walter Shearer. 1995.
• Biogeophysical sustainability is the maintenance
  and/or improvement of the integrity of the
  life-support system on Earth. Sustaining the
  biosphere with adequate provisions for maximizing
  future options includes providing for human
  economic and social improvement for current and
  future human generations within a framework of
  cultural diversity while (a) making adequate
  provisions for the maintenance of biological
  diversity and (b) maintaining the biogeochemical
  integrity of the biosphere by conservation and
  proper use of its air, water and land resources.
  Achieving these goals requires planning and
  action at local, regional and global scales and
  specifying short- and long-term objectives that
  allow for the transition to sustainability.

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Economic Definition

• R. Repetto. 1986.
• The core of the idea of sustainability, then, is
  the concept that current decisions should not
  impair the prospects for maintaining or improving
  future living standards... This implies that our
  economic systems should be managed so that we can
  live off the dividend of our resources,
  maintaining and improving the asset base. This
  principle also has much in common with the ideal
  concept of income that accountants seek to
  determine the greatest amount that can be
  consumed in the current period without reducing
  prospects for consumption in the future.
• This does not mean that sustainable development
  demands the preservation of the current stock of
  natural resources or any particular mix of human,
  physical and natural assets. As development
  proceeds, the composition of the underlying asset
  base changes.
• There is broad agreement that pursuing policies
  that imperil the welfare of future generations,
  who are unrepresented in any political or
  economic forum, is unfair.

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Core Economic Definitions

• Robert Haveman. 1989.
• Sustainable development is the maintenance or
  growth of the aggregate level of economic
  well-being, defined as the level of per capita
  economic well-being.
• John Pezzey. 1989.
• Our standard definition of sustainable
  development will be non-declining per capita
  utility - because of its self-evident appeal as a
  criterion for inter-generational equity.

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Social Definitions

• David Munro,1995.
• Sustainable development is a complex of
  activities that can be expected to improve the
  human condition in such a manner that the
  improvement can be maintained.
• Nazli Choucri, 1997.
• The process of managing social demands without
  eroding life support properties or mechanisms of
  social cohesion and resilience.

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Self-reliance Definition

• Mustafa Tolba, 1987.
• Sustainable development has become an article of
  faith, a shibboleth often used but little
  explained. Does it amount to a strategy? Does it
  apply only to renewable resources? What does the
  term actually mean? In broad terms the concept of
  sustainable development encompasses
• 1. Help for the very poor because they are left
  with no option other than to destroy their
  environment
• 2. The idea of self-reliant development, within
  natural resource constraints
• 3. The idea of cost-effective development using
  differing economic criteria to the traditional
  approach that is to say development should not
  degrade environmental quality, nor should it
  reduce productivity in the long run
• 4. The great issues of health control,
  appropriate technologies, food self-reliance,
  clean water and shelter for all
• 5. The notion that people-centered initiatives
  are needed human beings, in other words, are the
  resources in the concept.

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Spatial Definition

• R. Norgaard, 1988.
• Thus we need to nail down the concept of
  sustainable development. I propose five
  increasingly comprehensive definitions. First we
  can start at the local level and simply ask
  whether a region's agricultural and industrial
  practices can continue indefinitely. Will they
  destroy the local resource base and environment
  or, just as bad, the local people and their
  cultural system? Or will the resource base,
  environment, technologies and culture evolve over
  time in a mutually reinforcing manner? This first
  definition ignores whether there might be
  subsidies to the region - whether material and
  energy inputs or social inputs such as the
  provision of new knowledge, technologies and
  institutional services are being supplied from
  outside the region. Second, we can ask whether
  the region is dependent upon non-renewable
  inputs, both energy and materials, from beyond
  its boundaries. Or is the region dependent on
  renewable resources beyond its boundaries which
  are not being managed in a sustainable manner?
  Third, we can become yet more sophisticated and
  ponder whether the region is in some sense
  culturally sustainable, whether it is
  contributing as much to the knowledge and
  institutional bases of other regions as it is
  culturally dependent upon others. Fourth, we can
  also question the extent to which the region is
  contributing to global climate change, forcing
  other regions to change their behavior, as well
  as whether it has options available to adapt to
  the climate change and surprises imposed upon it
  by others. From a global perspective, this fourth
  definition of sustainable development addresses
  the difficulties of going from hydrocarbon energy
  stocks to renewable energy sources while adapting
  to the complications of global climate change
  induced by the transitional net oxidation of
  hydrocarbons. Fifth, and last, we can inquire of
  the cultural stability of all regions in
  combination, are they evolving along mutually
  compatible paths, or will they destroy each other
  through war. These definitions become
  increasingly encompassing. All, however, address
  sustainability of changing interactions between
  people and their environment over time.

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Overcoming the contradiction?

• R.E. Munn, 1989.
• The phrase sustainable development has been
  criticized, for example, by O'Riordan (1985) as a
  contradiction in terms. If development is equated
  with economic growth, this criticism is indeed
  justified Malthusian limits prevent sustained
  growth in a finite world... Ultimately, however,
  uncontrolled economic growth will cause the
  quality of the environment to deteriorate,
  economic development to decline and the standard
  of living to drop.
• Of course, the word development does not
  necessarily imply growth. It may convey the idea
  that the world, society or the biosphere is
  becoming "better" in some sense, perhaps
  producing more, or meeting more of the basic
  needs of the poor. The word therefore involves a
  value judgement. In principle, development could
  become sustainable through structural changes
  (economic, political, cultural or ecological) or
  a succession of technological break-throughs.

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Integrating economic definition with environment

• Johan Holmberg, 1992.
• Sustainable development means either that per
  capita utility or well-being is increasing over
  time with free exchange or substitution between
  natural and man-made capital or that per capita
  utility or well-being is increasing over time
  subject to non-declining natural wealth.
• There are several reasons why the second and more
  narrow focus is justified, including
• Nonsubstitutability between environmental assets
  (the ozone layer cannot be recreated)
• Uncertainty (our limited understanding of the
  life-supporting functions of many environmental
  assets dictates that they be preserved for the
  future)
• Irreversibility (once lost, no species can be
  recreated)
• Equity (the poor are usually more affected by bad
  environments than the rich).

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Integration and Fundamental Change?

• Maurice Strong, 1992.
• Sustainable development involves a process of
  deep and profound change in the political,
  social, economic, institutional, and
  technological order, including redefinition of
  relations between developing and more developed
  countries.
• World Bank, 1992..
• Sustainable development means basing
  developmental and environmental policies on a
  comparison of costs and benefits and on careful
  economic analysis that will strengthen
  environmental protection and lead to rising and
  sustainable levels of welfare.

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Alternative/Qualitative Growth Definition

• J. Coomer, 1979.
• The sustainable society is one that lives within
  the self-perpetuating limits of its environment.
  That society... is not a "no growth" society...
  It is rather, a society that recognizes the
  limits of growth... and looks for alternative
  ways of growing.

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Contrasting Perspectives

• Status Quo Neo-liberal economists World Bank,
  OECD, Lomberg, WBCSD, green consumers, ecological
  modernizers, green economists
• Reformers Environmental NGOs, IUCN, Limits to
  Growth, ICLEI, Bruntland, Schumacher,
  Environmental Justice
• Transformers Anti-Capitalist, Social Ecology,
  Ecofeminist, Ecosocialist, Indigenous/South, Deep
  Ecology, Eco-facists

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Controversy and Acceptance

• Weak vs. Strong sustainability
• Human-centered (anthropocentric) vs.
  Nature-centered (eco-centric) perspective
• North vs South
• Laissez-faire vs. Distributive Justice
• Private vs. public vs. common property views
• Social vs. Scientific Definition

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Social versus Scientific definition of
Sustainability

• Societies (nations) define what is sustainable
  rather than basing sustainability on
  scientifically based theories of ecosystem
  carrying capacity

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A Scientific Definition

• "A sustainable society meets three conditions
  its rates of use of renewable resources should
  not exceed their rates of regeneration its rates
  of use of non-renewable resources should not
  exceed the rate at which sustainable renewable
  substitutes are developed and its rates of
  pollution emission should not exceed the
  assimilative capacity of the environment (Herman
  Daly).

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A Social Definition?

• Sustainable development in Hong Kong balances
  social, economic and environmental needs, both
  for present and future generations,
  simultaneously achieving a vibrant economy,
  social progress and better environmental quality,
  locally, nationally and internationally, through
  the efforts of the community and the Government.

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Sustainable Development as a Balance
Environment
Economy
Society
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Issues, Dependencies, Limitations and Conflicts
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Carrying Capacity

• The maximum number of individuals of a species
  that can be sustained by an environment without
  decreasing the capacity of the environment to
  sustain that same amount in the future.

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The Problem with a Balance

• What happens when the economy grows?
• To the previous balance with the environment?
• To the previous configuration of society and
  culture?

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Key Points SusDev Driving Forces

• Problem of poverty and environment
• Problem of affluence and environment
• Connections between the two
• Key SusDev Ideas
• Intra generation Equity
• Inter generation Equity
• Need to develop social institutions to bring
  about change

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Key Points Tensions and Integration

• Ambiguity of susdev
• Tensions in different ideological approaches
  (e.g. weak vs. strong, anthropocentric vs.
  ecocentric)
• Tensions between environmental, economic and
  social views
• Need to integrate and overcome tensions
• Integrating principles