Environmental Threats and Opportunities

1
Environmental Threats and Opportunities
2 Main Questions

• What are the greatest threats that humanity will
  encounter as it attempts to navigate the
  transition to sustainability?

• What are the most promising opportunities for
  avoiding or circumventing these threats on the
  path to sustainability?

By Natalie Zaczek 2005
2
Conceptual Issues

• Difficulty in the analysis arises because hazards
  have spatial (x) and temporal (t) dimensions and
  important interactions
• Local changes can lead to regional and global
  changes

• 1) - affect the ability of multiple sectors of
  almost any society to move ahead toward our
  normative goals for sustainability
• 2) - have cumulative or delayed consequences,
  with effects felt over a long time
• 3) - are irreversible or difficult to change
• 4) - have a notable potential to interact with
  each other to damage earth's support systems

3
Environmental Perspectives, Industry Energy
FIVE categories Land and water pollution
Air pollution Contaminants of the
human environment Resource
losses Natural disasters

• market incentives will induce the adoption of
  cleaner technologies

• Water and Air pollution top priorities
• Ozone depletion and climate change
• (priorities for industrialized nations)

4
Interaction Perspectives
Atmosphere and Climate
Water
Research support and political action remain
largely confined within the narrow categories of
traditional thinking.
Conflicts over water rights are sources of
continuing social and economic stress
Need an approach that tracks all substances put
into the air Need to account for
processing Multiple and interacting effects on
multiple situations
5
Conclusion
Most significant threats to it are likely to be
the cumulative, interactive consequences of
activities across a number of sectors
To emphasize our beliefs that attention to scale
matters in efforts to promote a sustainability
transition
Over longer time periods, unmitigated expansion
of even these individual problems could certainly
pose serious threats to people and the planet's
life support systems.