Dr JOHN WILLIAMS: Tel. 2404:
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Environmental management means different things to different disciplines; this unit will take a broad look at the techniques, issues and technical aspects associated with the subject.
Texts:
Kieley, Environmental Engineering
Development of the Sustainable Development Concept
1. Environmental Management
1.1. Overview and History
Humankind has been practising environmental management since pre-historic times, since people began felling trees and planting seeds. Traditionally environmental management has been concerned oiiwith maximising production of goods from the environment. However, it is only relatively recently that it has become more associated with environmentalism and the new concepts such as sustainability.
1962 – Silent Spring - Rachael Carson-
1968 - Paul Ehrlich publishes book "Population Bomb" on the connection between human population, resource exploitation and the environment.
1969 - Friends of the Earth
1969 - USA passes the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) creating the first national agency for environmental protection - the EPA.
1971 - Greenpeace starts up in Canada
1972 - United Nations Conference on Human Environment held in Stockholm under the leadership of Maurice Strong. The conference is rooted in the regional pollution and acid rain problems of northern Europe. The Group of 77 and the Eastern bloc opposes this eco-agenda. Nevertheless, it provides the first international recognition of environmental issues. The concept of sustainable development is cohesively argued to present a satisfactory resolution to the environmental vs. development dilemma. The conference leads to the establishment of numerous national environmental protection agencies and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
1974 - Rowland and Molina release seminal work on CFCs in Nature magazine. They calculated that if human use of CFC gases were to continue at an unaltered rate the ozone layer would be depleted by many percent after some decades.
Late 1970s - Environmental catastrophes capture public attention. Eg. Amoco Cadiz oil spill and Three Mile Island nuclear reactor leak. 80’s: Chernobyl, Bhopal
1979 - Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution is adopted.
1982 - The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is adopted. It establishes material rules concerning environmental standards as well as enforcement provisions dealing with pollution of the marine environment.
1983 - World Commission on Environment and Development forms. Chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the commission works for three years to weave together a report on social, economic, cultural, and environmental issues.
1985 - antarctic ozone hole discovered by British and American scientists.
1987 - "Our Common Future" (Brundtland Report) published. It ties problems together and, for the first time, gives some direction for comprehensive global solutions. It also popularizes the term "sustainable development".
1987 - Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer is adopted.
1992 - U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro. It results in the publication the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Rio Declaration, and a statement of non-binding Forest Principles. The parallel NGO Forum signs a full set of alternative treaties.
It also results in Agenda 21, a 300-page plan for achieving sustainable development in the 21st century. The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was created in December 1992 to ensure effective follow-up of UNCED;
This conference was attended by 110 world leaders + 43 other country representatives, 2,500 NGOs, 8,000 journalists + 30,000 others.
1997. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol
2000: In a specially commissioned survey for UNEP's Global Environment Outlook 2000 (GEO-2000), 200 scientists from 50 countries, identified water as the most pressing environmental issue for the next century. Although climate change (51%) was the leading single issue, taken together, freshwater scarcity (29%) and freshwater pollution (28%) ranked higher.
2002: U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development: Johannesburg (Rio+10) (also known as World Summit on SD (WSSD)).
WHAT DOES SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT MEAN TO YOU?
Thinking that SD is a good idea is easy but defining it is very difficult, there are many levels to consider.
1. SCALES OF SD
Global: here the picture is striking. A quarter of the world's people have to survive on incomes of less than US$1 a day. A fifth have no access to health care. This is obviously unsustainable, as poor people have often no choice but to use natural resources in an unsustainable ways. E.g. Unstaianable deforestation for domestic fuel in Africa (UK before IR)
The average American consumes about fifty-three times more goods and services than someone from China. The United States contains 5 percent of the world’s population but accounts for 22 percent of fossil fuel consumption, 24 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, and 33 percent of paper and plastic use. A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil. He or she will drain as many resources as thirty-five natives of India
National: National Governments (like the UK) have recognised that SD is vital for their future and the timescale extends beyond usual government lifetimes.
“All countries should “Encourage and promote the development of a 10 year framework of programmes in support of regional and national initiatives to accelerate the shift towards sustainable consumption and production to promote social and economic development within the carrying capacity of ecosystems...”
Local: local communities can be more or less sustainable depending on their infrastructure for food, transport etc. A compact town like Portsmouth (with people using Public Transport, bicycles etc) has more chance of being sustainable than a sprawling spread out new town with poor public transport.
One of the main outcomes of Rio was Agenda 21, a 40 chapter report on what was wrong with the world and what should be done to correct it.
Agenda 21 is effectively a long term plan to integrate environment and development and requires governments and local authorities to develop sustainable development strategies. Examples of successful national campaigns include the UK's Voluntary Local Agenda 21 campaign, which recruited 60% of local governments to Local Agenda 21 planning in just three years. Sweden, where every local government has or is in the process of adopting a Local Agenda 21
Professional: Many professions have developed a code of conduct for the ethics of SD. More Later
Individual: We are all responsible for more than average consumption. For example, the UK is currently fifteenth in the top twenty consuming nations, and UK personal consumption is eleventh in the top twenty consuming nations. Western Europe as a whole is second in consumption pressure out of the seven regions of the world. And each of the 60.2 million inhabitants of the UK currently has a consumer footprint (the amount of land required to feed, clothe, house and generally support them) of 5.3 hectares. To be sustainable this must be reduced to 1.6 hectares. See http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/livingplanet2002.pdf for more information abut Ecological Footprints.
The concept of ‘voluntary simplicity’ is promoted by pressure groups and some people are responding. However, ideology, inequalities and residual poverty in developed countries mean that Governments are not inclined to introduce legal restrictions on consumption.
THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY
These factors of course intertwined
1.1. Economic, Social and Environmental (and Technical) Factors
Therefore it is not only environmental indicators that are important but also economic, social and technical issues.
Conventional Economics: Economics is not a thing in itself – just a means of placing a value we place on social and environmental goods. Incluidng SD in economic decisonmaking requires some way of placing vale on the goods and services of the environment.
Social: social inclusion is important in establishing sustaianable societies. Inequalities (international e.g. economic refugees and national) create unsustainability.
Technical: if the LDC continue to develop using the polluting technologies used by the DC, there is potential for worsening environmental conditions. That is why technology transfer is important.
We will encounter these later when we consider the UK response to SD.
Some comentators also consider that several other factors made the US and Europe Industrial Revoloutions sucessful but not SD:
Resources and Development – Europe IR on Resources Overseas Colonies
Protectionism and Economics – Europe IR with import duties and interest rates 0.25%
Patents – Europe IR no real patent enforcement
Pollution – Europe IR no real pollution control – Whol ‘Public Health in Victorian Britian’
1.2. Environmental Management and Sustainability:
There are some people who would prefer the word ‘DEVELOPMENT’ to be removed from SD as it has assocaitions with ‘ECONOMIC GROWTH’ (e.g. anti-capilaist and anti-globalisation protesters). Most governements and people are
There are hundreds of definitions of sustainable development. However, the starting point for most people has been the definition prepared by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) in its report Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987):
"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:
the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs."
There are various models to show the interaction of society, economy and the environment. One model shows a Venn diagram:
A simpler version was shown at an ICE seminar I attended earlier in the year:
All models stress the importance of not just Environmental Factors, but Economic and Social ones too.
The definitions and predictions of what a sustainable society would be like, one vision presented at a conference I attended had calculated that a communal house, a shared fridge and one trip in a bus to the next town per month was sustainable.
The progress towards sustainability will require transfer of technology to enable the poor to establish sustainable livelihoods and adjustment of the pricing system for resources.
2. PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS?
There are many environmental problems facing the world, many of which we will encounter during the course. However there are some major issues of a more general nature, which are at the cutting edge of the Sustainability Debate.
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html
The CIA has identified the worlds problems as: ‘large areas subject to overpopulation, industrial disasters, pollution (air, water, acid rain, toxic substances), loss of vegetation (overgrazing, deforestation, desertification), loss of wildlife, soil degradation, soil depletion, erosion‘)
2.1. GLOBAL ISSUES
2.1.1 Population
Population expansion, and the technologies and resources required by this population, is the underlying cause of the major environmental problems facing the world.
Global population has risen from about 2.5bn at the middle of the century to about 6.2bn today. The rate of growth has also been increasing especially in the less developed countries (LDCs) whereas in the developed countries populations have stabilised. Approximately 4/5 of the total population of the world live in LDCs where the high rates of infant mortality and malnutrition mean that people are understandably more concerned with survival than environmental pollution. In Africa as a whole the UN estimates that infant mortality is 20% and 33% of the population are malnourished.
Homo sapiens as a species evolved about 100,000 years ago.
For most of this time a steady population
12 000 –10 000 BP environmental management by agriculture began
This has lead to an exponential increase in population
General form for an exponential population growth is:
Xt = population at time t
X0 = starting population
e = base of natural logarithms
t = time
r = constant expressing the intrinsic rate of increase
This can be applied to any organism undergoing exponential population increase e.g. bacteria, rabbits or humans.
If we consider the graph of human population against time:
The increases can be dramatically seen:
Bn Year Years to add 1bn.
1 1800 100,000y
2 1930 130
3 1960 30
4 1975 15
5 1987 12
6 2000 12
The model of exponential population growth;
i) Based on the patterns of human population growth over the last 200 years solve this equation to find r.
ii) Predict the population in (i) 50 and (ii) 100 years time if this rate of growth continues (i.e. same value of r).
Predicted world population growth over the next 100 years
The main worry is that the carrying capacity of the world will be exceeded. In microbiological cultures exhaustion of food stocks results in a population crash, this was predicted as early as 1798 by Malthus. However, despite the malnutrition in many parts of the world it has been predicted that the world can feed a population of 10bn so the limits may not be food but environmental degradation, with pollution limiting life expectancy.
The impact of poverty on the environment can be seen in an analysis carried out by the World Bank comparing environmental indicators with income levels around the world.
However the per capita environmental impact of populations in the developed countries is higher due to higher energy consumption of more than 10x LDCs. The role of human population on environmental change has been summarised as:
I=PAT
where:
I = impact on the environment
P = size of population
A= per capita affluence or consumption
T = technologies used to supply each unit of consumption
As P increases so too does T as resources must be obtained from less accessible sources, either further away or deeper ores etc.
The per capita use of energy is increasing in LDCs at a rate of 0.035% per annum so the pressures will increase. However the rate of growth per capita in energy consumption in developed countries is more than twice this rate, so although the P is not increasing AT is.
The growth of population over the next century has been predicted by the UN under several scenarios of fertility. The high fertility model of 2.5 children per couple would see a quadrupling of population over the next 100 years.
Environmental indicators at different income levels (US $) (1Bn people live on less than $1 /day
The main problem is therefore managing population. People only tend to move towards smaller families when they are economically confident in the future and they do not require children to care for them in old age. It will require significant effort and investment from developed countries to help the extremely poor.
The issue of population was the main issue at the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The objectives of the Programme of Action from the conference recognise the link between population control and development. It is recognised that people only move towards smaller families when they feel economically secure. The goals are: sustained economic growth in the context of sustainable development; education, especially for girls; gender equity and equality; infant, child and maternal mortality reduction; and the provision of universal access to reproductive health services, including family planning and sexual health. The overall aim is to stabilise population to 7.8 billion by 2050.