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Environment and Development

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Lira Serrano Agag
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24 views

Environment and Development

Uploaded by

Lira Serrano Agag
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Environment and Development: The Basic Issues

 Sustainable Development and Environmental Accounting

Basically ,sustainability refers to “meeting the needs of the present generation without
compromising the needs of future generations.”

For economists, a development path is sustainable “if and only if the stock of overall capital assets
remains constant or rises over time.”

Environmental Accounting

Overall capital assets are meant to include not only manufactured capital (machines, factories, roads)
but also human capital (knowledge, experience, skills) and environmental capital (forests, soil quality,
and rangeland).

By this definition, sustainable development requires that these overall capital assets not be decreasing
and that the correct measure of sustainable national income or sustainable net national product
(NNP*) is the amount that can be consumed without diminishing the capital stock. Symbolically,

  NNP* = GNP – Dm – Dn,

where NNP* is sustainable national income, Dm is the depreciation of manufactured capital assets, and
Dn is depreciation of environmental capital---the monetary value of environmental decay over the course
of a year .

An even better measure, though more difficult to calculate with present data collection methods, would
be,

NNP* = GNP – Dm – Dn – R – A

where Dm and Dn are as before, R is expenditure required to restore environmental capital (forests,
fisheries, etc.), and A is expenditure required to avert destruction of environmental capital (air pollution,
water and soil quality etc.)

 Population, Resources, and the Environment

Rapidly growing Third World populations have led to land, water, and fuel wood shortages in rural
areas and to urban health crises stemming from lack of sanitation and clean water.

In many of the poorest regions of the globe, it is clear that increasing population density has
contributed to severe and accelerating degradation of the very resources that these growing
populations depend on for survival.

 Rural Development and the Environment

The increased accessibility of agricultural inputs to small farmers and the introduction (or
reintroduction) of sustainable methods of farming will help create attractive alternatives to current
environmentally destructive patterns of resource use
 Urban Development and the Environment

Rapid population increase accompanied by heavy rural-urban migration is leading to unprecedented


rates of urban population growth, sometimes at twice the rate of national growth.

Consequently, few governments are prepared to cope with the vastly increased strain on existing
urban water supplies and sanitation facilities.

 The Global Environment

As total world population grows and incomes rise, net global environmental degradation is likely to
worsen. Some trade-offs will be necessary to achieve sustainable world development. By using
resources more efficiently, a number of environmental changes will actually provide economic savings,
and others will be achieved at relatively minor expense.

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