Our Terms & Conditions | Our Privacy Policy
CaptionImage by Arek Socha from Pixabay
It is a rare day when the newspaper does not cover a topic related to natural resources or the environment. The supply of electricity and water to households, farms, and businesses; disputes between states over water rights; pollution caused by industry and traffic – these problems and many more are of growing concern to numerous and more varied groups of people.
June 5, World Environment Day, is perhaps a good occasion to sit back and take stock of the state of our environment. World Environment Day was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 to mark the opening of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
The agenda is to give a human face to environmental issues; empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development; promote an understanding that communities are pivotal to changing attitudes towards environmental issues; and advocate partnerships that will ensure all nations and peoples enjoy a safer and more prosperous future. World Environment Day is a people’s event with colourful activities such as street rallies, bicycle parades, green concerts, essays, and poster competitions in schools, tree planting, as well as recycling and clean-up campaigns.
Natural and man-made environmental resources – fresh water, clean air, forests, grasslands, marine resources, and agroecosystems – provide sustenance and a foundation for social and economic development. The main reason is that in our society, the environment has become a scarce resource.
It is a fact that too many people are using too much energy. Not only is this causing an energy crisis, but almost every environmental problem warming, acid rain, smog, destruction of rainforests, and pollution of oceans, is occurring because of our tremendous energy consumption. Due to the rapid modernization of our society during the past fifty years, energy use has increased dramatically. Controlling the use of energy and reducing its negative impact on our planet presents us with a serious problem.
The economy and the environment are well-connected. No human activity can be conducted without some connection to the environment, whether the provision of clean water and food or the usage of the latest version of a car.
MIT Economist Lester Thurow wrote in The Zero–Sum Society,
” Environmentalism is not ethical values pitted against economic values. It is thoroughly economic”. The cost of preserving the environment is inherently economic as well. Equipment and labor to clean air or water, for example, have an “opportunity” cost; they could be used to produce something else. It is a normative issue in economic terms. Some economists believe that the air in much of the country is too dirty because the people who make it dirty do not have the right incentives (disincentives) to make it clean. Environmental problems have often been seen as a form of market failure (Public Goods and Externalities).
Globally, as also in India, there is increasing concern about the way in which humanity is pushing other species to extinction. Economist Kenneth Boulding introduced the concept of a “spaceship economy”. The finite spaceship requires the interdependency of the people and systems, within the limits set by the natural system, and requires efficiency in our use of resources and care in our use of the environment.
The environment provides the economy with raw materials, which are transformed into consumer products by the production processes, and energy, which fuels this transformation. Ultimately, these raw materials and energy return to the environment as waste products. The environment also provides services directly to consumers. The air we breathe, the nourishment we receive from food and drink, and the protection we derive from shelter and clothing are all benefits we receive directly or indirectly from the environment.
“The Tragedy of the Commons” (by Ecologist Garrett Hardin) is a theory explaining how shared resources, like a public pasture, can be overexploited and depleted when individuals act in their own self-interest, even if it harms the collective. This happens because each person has an incentive to use the resource as much as possible without considering the long-term consequences for everyone else. Hardin noted that when a resource is owned in common, there is little incentive for any individual to protect it. Negative externalities are a well-known feature of the “tragedy of the commons”. In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. An externality is a cost or benefit of an economic activity experienced by an unrelated third party. The external cost or benefit is not reflected in the final cost or benefit of a good or service. For example, one such case quoted by experts is driving vehicles. Driving Cars may benefit the users, but they have many negative externalities; these include pollution, carbon emissions, and traffic accidents. Some other examples include overfishing, Water supply, and so on. Nineteenth-century whaling, which drove several species to the brink of extinction, is a classic case.
UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) principle characterized sustainable development as the “right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental needs of present and future generations.” In fact, it further states that “in order to achieve sustainable development, environmental protection shall constitute an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation from it”.
Sustainable development, as a model and important environmental theme, is evolving. Sustainable development means economic development and a standard of living that does not impair the future ability of the environment to provide sustenance and life support for the population. Working towards the protection of the Environment and Sustainable Development, along with Economic Growth, is the future way forward.
More By This Author:
Economics For Everyone – Tariffs And Trade
Economics For Everyone – Sustainability Through Circular Economy
Economics For Everyone – Managing Through Monetary Policy – US And India
Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.
Aggregated From –
Comments are closed.