2.0 earthmodal sustainability
The Benefits of Well-Being in Global Sustainability
"While substantial investment in environmental and social goals would be required, the world economy has the resources for such an undertaking. Moreover, the transition would mobilize “new dividends.” A green dividend would flow from the cost-savings of eco-efficient corporations and the maintenance of society’s environmental capital. A peace dividend would stem from gradual reduction of the world’s $700 billion annual military expenditure to a sufficient level for world peace-keeping, perhaps $30 billion (Renner, 1994). A human capital dividend would come from harvesting the creativity and contributions of the billions who would otherwise be consigned to poverty. A technological dividend would derive from new opportunities for innovation and wider access to the information revolution. A solidarity dividend arises from reduced security and police costs.
The economic transition is a matter of will, not resources. If values and priorities were to change, economic resources are at hand." The Great Transition, Global Scenarios Group.
The Five Elements of The Culture of Sustainability
Matthew 11: 28-30 "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
These five elements or layers represent an elaboration of the union of the three pillars. Though the five would seem to be solely concerned with human affairs, the human development pillar is usually focused on the developing world problems. But since this arena is intricately involved with global patterns, our views must isolate and highlite those aspects of human affairs that start at a truly global topmost level. The need for intelligent use of world resources demands that we coordinate our efforts to sustain ourselves—this means we have to take on the yoke of sustainability to save our planet.
It has been found that high biodiversity zones coincide in a remarkable way with cultural and language diversity. It has also found that the disparate first peoples have their own particular patterns and ways of knowledge that are appropriate to their environments. Cultural preservation through change and adaption is a priority item at UNESCO. Sustainability implies both preservation and change.
We might just achieve sustainability not through a top down method but through a bottom up people-to-people cooperation.
UNEP Launches Campaign to Plant a Billion Trees Prof. Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Prince of Monaco and Agroforestry Experts Back Global Down-to-Earth Action to Combat Climate Change Nairobi, 8 November 2006 –The vital importance of voluntary collective action in the fight against climate change is spotlighted today with the launch of a new campaign to plant a billion trees. |
As of June 2009 over 4 billion trees have been planted. This not only improves carbon sequestration but sends a clear signal that the world is capable of great spontaneous responses to the threat of an unsustainable world.
As Congress Debates Clean Energy/Climate Legislation and World Governments Negotiate Global Climate Agreement, American People Issue Clear Mandate for Action -www.earthhourus.com
WASHINGTON, DC, May 20, 2009 – An estimated 80 million Americans reported turning off their lights for Earth Hour 2009 in an unprecedented global vote for action on climate change, World Wildlife Fund officials announced today. Globally, nearly one billion people are estimated to have participated in the March 28 event, in which more than 4,100 cities and iconic landmarks around the world went dark for one hour.
Civic Entrepreneurship: A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development. (new window, pdf, 1.322 KB)
Tellus Institute (new window, website)
"Amidst the many wilting trajectories, there is a contradictory and more promising trend; namely, highly positive developments at micro and meso levels, some led by government functionaries and departments but most by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), businesses or communities, often acting in concert through a variety of partnership and collaborative arrangements. While academics debate the alternative meanings of sustainable development, governments haggle and bargain over the punctuation marks in conventions and protocols, and markets continue to pollute and divide, NGOs, communities, businesses and individuals are putting sustainable development into practice.
Instead of waiting for the proper definition of sustainable development to emerge or for the growth process to deliver, they have preoccupied themselves with building communities, sustaining livelihoods, supporting grassroots actions, restoring forests, rangelands, waterbodies and watersheds, collaborating in participatory antipollution programs, stopping harmful programs and projects, establishing protected areas, undertaking public-interest litigation, experimenting with renewable energy programs and initiating a myriad of other activities that together add up to the promise of sustainable development. They have often had to work with inadequate policy and institutional arrangements, perverse incentives, mixed signals from governments, incomplete scientific advice, lack of access to credit or to technical or managerial resources, but they have persevered."
UNITED NATIONS MILLENNIUM DECLARATION (new window, 63KB, pdf)
6. We consider certain fundamental values to be essential to international relations in the twenty-first century. These include:
•. Equality. No individual and no nation must be denied the opportunity to benefit from development. The equal rights and opportunities of women and men must be assured.
• Solidarity. Global challenges must be managed in a way that distributes the costs and burdens fairly in accordance with basic principles of equity and social justice. Those who suffer or who benefit least deserve help from those who benefit most.
• Tolerance. Human beings must respect one other, in all their diversity of belief, culture and language. Differences within and between societies should be neither feared nor repressed, but cherished as a precious asset of humanity. A culture of peace and dialogue among all civilizations should be actively promoted.
• Respect for nature. Prudence must be shown in the management of all living species and natural resources, in accordance with the precepts of sustainable development. Only in this way can the immeasurable riches provided to us by nature be preserved and passed on to our descendants. The current unsustainable patterns of production and consumption must be changed in the interest of our future welfare and that of our descendants.
• Shared responsibility. Responsibility for managing worldwide economic and social development, as well as threats to international peace and security, must be shared among the nations of the world and should be exercised multilaterally. As the most universal and most representative organization in the world, the United Nations must play the central role.
Worldviews
Construction of worldviews: The 'construction of integrating worldviews' begins from fragments of worldviews offered to us by the different scientific disciplines and the various systems of knowledge. It is contributed to by different perspectives that exist in the world's different cultures.
Transformation
What is needed is change and this implies undergoing personal and social transformation. New values must be engendered in order to match and sustain the necessary worldviews which would be adapted to make the planet sustainable. New attitudes and priorities have to be found, propounded and measured. New ways of governing arise from this.
Governance
By governance we mean the act, process, or power of governing; government. Since the turn of the millennium United Nations research and reporting as well as institutions like World Resource Institute (WRI) have uncovered and articulated those aspects of sustainability which are most significant: energy, water, land, migration and so on, which can be governed generically. At the United Nations water is a huge item, not just for the developing world but for the whole planet. Water governance, for example, becomes an issue for everyone.
Mandates
A mandate is:
1. An authoritative command or instruction.
2. A command or an authorization given by a political electorate to its representative.
3. a. A commission from the League of Nations authorizing a member nation to administer a territory. b. A region under such administration.
If a country is a signatory to a treaty and does not live up to the conditions of the treaty the citizens of that country have a mandate to demand that their government perform or carry out the provisions of the treaty. This is also true for the provincial and municipal level of government.
Since a political electorate can vote to have representatives maintain a mandate, democracies have the power to transform themselves toward sustainable societies. This does not mean that they have the power to make other nations do likewise.
In the overarching and catch-all sphere of global sustainability this means that one civil society may want to prevail upon another.
Dialogue, negotiation, advocacy, and community building
Building civil society and proper government is an important topic at the United Nations. Some nations are rather "backward" in the sense that corruption prevails and internal strife erupts over inter-citizen discords. The UN Peace Keeping and Peace Making forces have been relatively successful in this respect and have managed to limit conflicts in the developing world.
(see the Five Layers page in this Help File for further expansion on the topic)
Three Pillars of Sustainability
For some first people economics and environment are not pillars but simply integral parts of their lifestyles. earthmodal sustainability is based upon centralizing ecosystems in the science and art of sustainability.
Environment
Environment is subdivided into various interest areas. One such area is industrial environmental science. Urban, suburban and rural zones each have their particularly science as well. The three pillars are really intimately inter-related. Economics does impact both human development and the environment.
Environmental Science
The work of Environmental Science describes the environment, interprets the impact of human actions (anthropogenic effects) on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and develops strategies for restoring ecosystems. In addition, environmental scientists help planners develop and construct buildings, transportation corridors, and utilities that protect water resources and reflect efficient and beneficial land use. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of environmental science, teams of professionals commonly work together to conduct environmental research or to produce Environmental Impact Statements. Other professional organizations engender work in environmental science and aid in communication among the diverse sciences.
Since most environmental issues deal with human activities, study of economics, law and social sciences are often applied in conjunction with environmental science.
Environmental science encompasses issues such as climate change, conservation, biodiversity, water quality, groundwater contamination , soil contamination, use of natural resources, waste management, sustainable development, disaster reduction, air pollution, and noise pollution.
While the environment has been studied for at least as long as there has been science, the recent interest in putting the pieces of understanding together to study environmental systems has come alive as a substantive, active field of scientific investigation starting in the 1960s and 1970s. This has been driven by the need for a large multi-disciplined team to analyze complex environmental problems, the arrival of substantive environmental laws requiring specific environmental protocols of investigation, and growing public awareness of a need for action in addressing environmental problems.
Components
Atmospheric sciences examine the phenomenology of the Earth's gaseous outer layer with emphasis upon interrelation to other systems. Atmospheric sciences comprises meteorological studies, greenhouse gas phenomena, atmospheric dispersion modeling of airborne contaminants, sound propagation phenomena related to noise pollution, and even light pollution
Taking the example of the global warming phenomena, physicists create computer models of atmospheric circulation and infra-red radiation transmission, chemists examine the inventory of atmospheric chemicals and their reactions, biologists analyze the plant and animal contributions to carbon dioxide fluxes, and specialists such as meteorologists and oceanographers add additional breadth in understanding the atmospheric dynamics.
Ecology studies typically analyse the dynamics of biological populations and some aspect of their environment. These studies might address endangered species, predator/prey interactions, habitat integrity, effects upon populations by environmental contaminants, or impact analysis of proposed land development upon species viability.
An interdisciplinary analysis of an ecological system which is being impacted by one or more stressors might include several related environmental science fields. For example one might examine an estuarine setting where a proposed industrial development could impact certain species by water pollution and air pollution. For this study biologists would describe the flora and fauna, chemists would analyze the transport of water pollutants to the marsh, physicists would calculate air pollution emissions and geologists would assist in understanding the marsh soils and bay muds.
Environmental chemistry is the study of chemical alterations in the environment. Principal areas of study include soil contamination and water pollution. The topics of analysis involve chemical degradation in the environment, multi-phase transport of chemicals (for example, evaporation of a solvent containing lake to yield solvent as an air pollutant), and chemical effects upon biota.
As an example study, consider the case of a leaking solvent tank which has entered the soil upgradient of a habitat of an endangered species of amphibian. Physicists would develop a computer model to understand the extent of soil contamination and subsurface transport of solvent, chemists would analyze the molecular bonding of the solvent to the specific soil type and biologists would study the impacts upon soil arthropods, plants and ultimately pond dwelling copepods who are the food of the endangered amphibian.
Geosciences includes environmental geology, environmental soil science, volcanic phenomena and evolution of the Earth's crust. In some classification systems it can also embrace hydrology including oceanography.
As an example study of soils erosion, calculations would be made of surface runoff by soil scientists. Hydrologists would assist in examining sediment transport in overland flow. Physicists would contribute by assessing the changes in light transmission in the receiving waters. Biologists would analyze subsequent impacts to aquatic flora and fauna from increases in water turbidity.
Economics
There are at hand new forms of economics and these are slowly becoming prominent to various forms of government. Of particular importance is the United Nations effort to develop Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003 (SEEA 2003) (new window, website). The three Natural Resource Economics, Environmental Economics and Ecological Economics are not mutually exclusive of each other but overlap and reinforce, though at some points reach different conclusions. Fundamentally the GNP is addressed as a measure of wealth and wellbeing, the idea being that measure of successful economic activity includes natural capital, human and social capital as well as manufactured capital.
Natural resource economics - Wikipedia
Natural resource economics deals with the supply, demand, and allocation of the Earth's natural resources. This subfield of economics is therefore interested in the primary sector of the economy which engages in resource extraction (that is, the extraction of raw materials). One main objective of natural resource economics is to better understand the role of natural resources in the economy in order to develop more sustainable methods of managing those resources to ensure their availability to future generations.
Areas of discussion
Natural resource economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research within economics that aims to address the connections and interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its focus is how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of earth's natural resources. Resource economics brings together and connects different disciplines within the natural and social sciences connected to broad areas of earth science, human economics, and natural ecosystems. Economic models must be adapted to accommodate the special features of natural resource inputs. The traditional curriculum of natural resource economics emphasized fisheries models, forestry models, and minerals extraction models (i.e. fish, trees, and ore). In recent years, however, other resources, notably air, water, the global climate, and "environmental resources" in general have become increasingly important to policy-making.
Environmental economics - Wikipedia
Environmental economics is a subfield of economics concerned with environmental issues. Quoting from the National Bureau of Economic Research Environmental Economics program:
“ [...] Environmental Economics [...] undertakes theoretical or empirical studies of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies around the world [...]. Particular issues include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming."
Topics and concepts
Central to environmental economics is the concept of market failure. Market failure means that markets fail to allocate resources efficiently. As stated by Hanley, Shogren, and White (2007) in their textbook Environmental Economics: "A market failure occurs when the market does not allocate scarce resources to generate the greatest social welfare. A wedge exists between what a private person does given market prices and what society might want him or her to do to protect the environment. Such a wedge implies wastefulness or economic inefficiency; resources can be reallocated to make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off." Common forms of market failure include externalities, non excludability and non rivalry.
Externality: the basic idea is that an externality exists when a person makes a choice that affects other people that are not accounted for in the market price. For instance, a firm emitting pollution will typically not take into account the costs that its pollution imposes on others. As a result, pollution in excess of the 'socially efficient' level may occur. A classic definition is provided by Kenneth Arrow (1969), who defines an externality as “a situation in which a private economy lacks sufficient incentives to create a potential market in some good, and the nonexistence of this market results in the loss of efficiency.” In economic terminology, externalities are examples of market failures, in which the unfettered market does not lead to an efficient outcome.
Common property and non-exclusion: When it is too costly to exclude people from accessing a rivalrous environmental resource, market allocation is likely to be inefficient. The challenges related with common property and non-exclusion have long been recognized. Hardin's (1968) concept of the tragedy of the commons popularized the challenges involved in non-exclusion and common property. "commons" refers to the environmental asset itself, "common property resource" or "common pool resource" refers to a property right regime that allows for some collective body to devise schemes to exclude others, thereby allowing the capture of future benefit streams; and "open-access" implies no ownership in the sense that property everyone owns nobody owns. The basic problem is that if people ignore the scarcity value of the commons, they can end up expending too much effort, over harvesting a resource (e.g., a fishery). Hardin theorizes that in the absence of restrictions, users of an open-access resource will use it more than if they had to pay for it and had exclusive rights, leading to environmental degradation. See, however, Ostrom's (1990) work on how people using real common property resources have worked to establish self-governing rules to reduce the risk of the tragedy of the commons.
Public goods and non-rivalry: Public goods are another type of market failure, in which the market price does not capture the social benefits of its provision. For example, protection from the risks of climate change is a public good since its provision is both non-rival and non-excludable. Non-rival means climate protection provided to one country does not reduce the level of protection to another country; non-excludable means it is too costly to exclude any one from receiving climate protection. A country's incentive to invest in carbon abatement is reduced because it can "free ride" off the efforts of other countries. Over a century ago, Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (1896) first discussed how public goods can be under-provided by the market because people might conceal their preferences for the good, but still enjoy the benefits without paying for them.
Ecological economics - Wikipedia
Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research that aims to address the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems over time and space. It is distinguished from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment, by its treatment of the economy as a subsystem of the ecosystem and its emphasis upon preserving natural capital. One survey of German economists found that ecological and environmental economics are different schools of economic thought, with ecological economists emphasizing "strong" sustainability and rejecting the proposition that natural capital can be substituted for human-made capital.
Ecological economics was founded in the works of Kenneth E. Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, and others. The related field of green economics is, in general, a more politically applied form of the subject.
The identity of ecological economics as a field has been described as fragile, with no generally accepted theoretical framework and a knowledge structure which is not clearly defined. According to ecological economist Malte Faber, ecological economics is defined by its focus on nature, justice, and time. Issues of intergenerational equity, irreversibility of environmental change, uncertainty of long-term outcomes, and sustainable development guide ecological economic analysis and valuation. Ecological economists have questioned fundamental mainstream economic approaches such as cost-benefit analysis, and the separability of economic values from scientific research, contending that economics is unavoidably normative rather than positive (empirical). Positional analysis, which attempts to incorporate time and justice issues, is proposed as an alternative.
Ecological economics includes the study of the metabolism of society, that is, the study of the flows of energy and materials that enter and exit the economic system. This subfield is also called biophysical economics, sometimes referred to also as bioeconomics. It is based on a conceptual model of the economy connected to, and sustained by, a flow of energy, materials, and ecosystem services. Analysts from a variety of disciplines have conducted research on the economy-environment relationship, with concern for energy and material flows and sustainability, environmental quality, and economic development.
UNEP: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (pdf, 4.8 MB, New window)
"Countries, companies and individuals need to understand the real costs of using the Earth’s natural capital and the consequences that policies and actions, individual or collective, have on the resilience and sustainability of natural ecosystems. We believe that policies which better reflect the true value of biodiversity and natural ecosystems will contribute to sustainable development by helping to secure the delivery of ecosystem goods and services, particularly food and water, in a transparent and socially equitable way.This will not only protect biodiversity, ecosystems and the associated ecosystem services, but will also improve the well-being of our present generation and the generations to come."
"The ultimate aim of our work is to provide policy makers with the tools they need to incorporate the true value of ecosystem services into their decisions. So in Chapter 3 – since ecosystem economics is still a developing discipline – we describe the key challenges in developing and applying suitable methodologies. In particular, there are ethical choices to be made between present and future generations and between peoples in different parts of the world and at different stages of development. Without taking these aspects into account, the Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved."
Human Development
The United Nations Development Programme has defined Human Development in the Reports.
Human Devlopment report 1990
"Human development is a process of enlarging people's choices. The most critical of these wide-ranging choices are to live a long and healthy life, to be educated and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. Additional choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and personal self-respect.
Development enables people to have these choices. No one can guarantee human happiness, and the choices people make are their own concern. But the process of development should at least create a conducive environment for people, individually and collectively, to develop their full potential and to have a reasonable chance of leading productive and creative lives in accord with their needs and interests.
Human development thus concerns more than the formation of human capabilities, such as improved health or knowledge. It also concerns the use of these capabilities, be it for work, leisure or political and cultural activities. And if the scales of human development fail to balance the formation and use of human capabilities, much human potential will be frustrated.
Human freedom is vital for human development. People must be free to exercise their choices in properly functioning markets, and they must have a decisive voice in shaping their political frameworks.
Starting with this perspective, human development is measured in this Report not by the yardstick of income alone but by a more comprehensive index - called the human development index - reflecting life expectancy, literacy and command over the resources to enjoy a decent standard of living. At this stage, the index is an approximation for capturing the many dimensions of human choices. It also carries some of the same shortcomings as income measures. Its national averages conceal regional and local distribution. And a quantitative measure of human freedom has yet to be designed.
The index does, however, have the virtue of incorporating human choices other than income, and consequentlyis a move in the right direction. It also has the potential for refinement as more aspects of human choice and development are quantified. This Report lays out a concrete priority agenda for better data collection that will enable the human development index to be used increasingly as a more genuine measure of socio-economic progress.
The Report analyses the record of human development for the last three decades and the experience of 14 countries in managing economic growth and human development. Several policy conclusions from this experience underpin a detailed analysis of human development strategies during the 1990s. The Report ends with a special focus on the problems of human development in an increasingly urban setting. The orientation of the Report is practical, looking not just at what is to be done - but also at how
Ecosystems and Drivers of Change
earthmodal's point of view is that we are a people living in the world while transcending it. Most of us (Greek-anthropos) live at home (Greek - oikos) and depend upon the land and waters (systems) for our sustenance (sustain-ance). Thus we would like to master anthropo-eco-system sustainability in order live as best we can, now and in the future. That is to say we want a fully developed anthropo-eco-systema-dynamos or global sustainability dynamics framework which is based on ecosystem-ology (environment), economics, and anthropology (knowledge of humanity) maintained in the human sphere by the five-layer sustainability yoke (components of a culture of sustainability).
There are three primary aims of sustainability and the first is to maintain the productivity of the land and/or waters and its measure viz-a-viz population. Food and (potable) water per capita, along with clothing, shelter and energy (at least for cooking and/or heating) are the prime measures of subsistence. This level applies to the village, the rural, the aboriginal and to the three hundred million indigenous peoples of the world.
The second is concerned more with urban development and what is usually known as economics. It measures trade, employment, social indicators, and industrial environmental factors. It encompasses the developed world and its activities and the social results. In its purview is climate change, global air and water pollution, the state of the oceans and biodiversity as well as other indicators.
The third is to measure the flow of renewable and non-renewable goods and to limit entropy or dispersion of these resources. This means to, in an elementary sense, limit pollution and also to fasten on recycling efficiency, to prevent agricultural and social degeneration. Here is where a measure is taken of total population and climate change as well as ocean science. This is the sigma six of human life in relation to all life on the planet, its current and future well-being.
Understanding ecosystems depends on ecology which in turns depends on biology: both sciences are very advanced. Here is where we must understand the relation between a people's activity and its consonance with the environment. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) has studied the way ecosystems change and have constructed a schema of drivers of change to these ecosystems. This enables new models of ecosystem centered three pillar sustainability dynamics to which earthmodal is committed.