The goal of sustainable development is an outcome achieved through joint effort among several interrelated parameters and requiring coordination at both vertical and horizontal levels. There exists dynamic triangular relationship among three key: Environmental, Economic and Social parameters. The people centred social parameter form the broad base of triangle as active public participation holds an instrumental role. The interrelationship between population, environment and development is complex. Besides key factors, efficient manpower capacity building, institutional strengthening, including strong political will and effective implementation/monitoring mechanism play equally important roles for successful outcome of the sustainable development.
Particularly, these can be dealt as environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, social sustainability, and institutional sustainability.
Concept of Carrying Capacity
The term “Carrying Capacity” originates from ecology, where it is used to define the maximum stable population of a species that can be supported within an area in the long-term. An increase in the population exceeding the carrying capacity of an area typically leads to environmental deterioration as a result of increased demands on habitat and resource, causing the population to eventually fall. The concept, when applied to human populations, is used to denote, the maximum population, given a certain amount of resource consumption and waste generation that can be supported within a given area, without any adverse environmental effects or without compromising the quality of life of the people living there. This basic definition also relates to the concept of sustainable development, or ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. If the population of an area consumes resources faster than they can be replenished, the environmental degradation that occurs will reduce the availability of resources in the future. Such resource scarcity is associated with increasing costs due to rising demand, which can lead to a fall in living standards as people have less disposable income. In particular, it means that poor people can suffer disproportionately if carrying capacity is exceeded, because they are less capable of adjusting to price rises in basic commodities. Carrying capacity relates therefore, to the ability of an area to support the population living there. In practice this encompasses the resources available there or those that can be realistically imported from elsewhere, the infrastructure that exists to enable a basic standard of living for the population; and the environmental condition of the area which may deteriorate due to resource exploitation or the generation of waste and pollution. Aspects that must be considered in an investigation into the carrying capacity of a region therefore include water supply, sanitation, housing provision, energy provision and environmental quality. Analysis of such issues helps identify and prioritise future planning and policy goals required to ensure that the needs of the population can be met.
Inter-generational Equity and Justice (Global, Regional and Country Levels)
Inter-generational equity is a concept that says that humans ‘hold the natural and cultural environment of the Earth in common both with other members of the present generation and with other generations, past and future’. It means that we inherit the earth from previous generations and have an obligation to pass it on in reasonable condition to future generations.
The idea behind not reducing the ability of future generations to meet their needs is that, although future generations might gain from economic progress, those gains might be more than offset by environmental deterioration. Most people would acknowledge a moral obligation to future generations, particularly as people who are not yet born can have no say in decisions taken today that may affect them.
There are two different ways of looking at the need to ensure that future generations can supply their needs. One is to view the environment in terms of the natural resources or natural capital that is available for wealth creation, and to say that future generations should have the same ability to create wealth as we have. Therefore, future generations will be adequately compensated for any loss of environmental amenity by having alternative sources of wealth creation. This is referred to as ‘weak sustainability’.
The government’s ESD working groups have argued that, unless substantial change occurs, the present generation may not be able to pass on an equivalent stock of environmental goods to the next generation. This would be due to three factors:
Firstly, the rates of loss of animal and plant species, arable land, water quality, tropical forests and cultural heritage are especially serious. Secondly, and perhaps more widely recognised, is the fact that we will not pass on to future generations the ozone layer or global climate system that the current generation inherited. A third factor that contributes overwhelmingly to the anxieties about the first two is the prospective impact of continuing population growth and the environmental consequences if rising standards of material income around the world produce the same sorts of consumption patterns that are characteristic of the currently industrialised countries.
Firstly, the rates of loss of animal and plant species, arable land, water quality, tropical forests and cultural heritage are especially serious. Secondly, and perhaps more widely recognised, is the fact that we will not pass on to future generations the ozone layer or global climate system that the current generation inherited. A third factor that contributes overwhelmingly to the anxieties about the first two is the prospective impact of continuing population growth and the environmental consequences if rising standards of material income around the world produce the same sorts of consumption patterns that are characteristic of the currently industrialised countries.
The other way is to view the environment as offering more than just economic potential that cannot be replaced by man-made wealth and to argue that future generations should not inherit a degraded environment, no matter how many extra sources of wealth are available to them. This is referred to as ‘strong sustainability’.
International law has been fundamentally concerned with questions of fairness. It addresses the normative dimension that economic instruments implement. If we are going to achieve intergenerational equity, it is essential to analyse this normative relationship between generations. International law has always been concerned with justice, but usually between states in their present or past relationships with each other. Concern with intergenerational equity requires attention to the normative relationship between present and future generations.
In the past states have made general claims for intergenerational justice in few areas: the debates over a new international economic order and the negotiations for the Law of the Sea Convention regarding exploitation of seabed minerals Intergenerational issues have recently surfaced in debates over responsibility for paying for mitigation of anticipated global environmental change, such as climate change or ozone depletion, resulting from countries' past and present industrial activities.
In the context of global climate change, implementation of these principles of intergenerational equity calls for measures to prevent rapid changes in climate, measures to prevent or mitigate damage from climate change, and measures to assist countries in adapting to climate change.
A strategy to prevent rapid climate change has been discussed by others. It includes such components as controlling the use of fuels rich in carbon, preventing deforestation and the misuse of soils, controlling the release of fluorochlorocarbons and other elements which destroy the ozone layer, and monitoring nitrogen fertilizer use. To fulfil our obligation to future generations, we need to evaluate these strategies against the normative goals of ensuring that our descendants have access to a planet with diversity and quality comparable to prior generations.
We must recognize that global climate change caused in part by human activities raises serious problems of justice between our generation and future generations, and among communities within these future generations.
To fulfil our responsibility to future generations we must respect principles of intergenerational equity. We need a Global Strategy for Climate Change, which reflects principles of intergenerational equity. The strategy should include measures to slow the rate of change, to minimize direct damage from change, and to transfer the resources and tools necessary to adapt to climate change. Elements of such a strategy must be translated into enforceable norms at the international, national, and local levels. As an initial step, we should consider a Declaration of Planetary Rights and Obligations addressed to issues of global change. Only by addressing issues of intergenerational equity now can we ensure that we are passing a planetary legacy to future a generation which is no worse than we received it.
Intra-generational Equity and Justice (Global, Regional and Country Levels)
Intergenerational equity is concerned with equity between people of the same generation. This is separate from intergenerational equity, which is about equity between present and future generations. Intragenerational equity includes considerations of distribution of resources and justice between nations. It also includes considerations of what is fair for people within any one nation.
Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such as the international Kyoto Protocol, Post-Kyoto negotiations, regional initiatives, and unilateral actions. Although most studies on climate change policies in economics have considered efficiency aspects, there is a growing literature on equity and justice. Climate change policy has important dimensions of distributive justice, both within and across generations, but in this paper we survey only studies on the intragenerational aspect, i.e. within a generation. We cover several domains including the international, regional, national, sectoral and inter-personal, and examine aspects such as the distribution of burdens from climate change, climate change policy negotiations in general, implementation of climate agreements using tradable emission permits and the uncertainty of alternatives to emission reductions.
There are various conventions for dividing up the world into groups of nations of similar wealth and degrees of industrialisation. None of them are particularly satisfactory. One way is to speak of the first world (high-income, industrialised nations with a capitalist economy), the second world (communist nations) and the third world (low-income nations). While much of the so-called second world no longer fits this category, the term ‘third world’ is still widely used. Some people divide the world into developed nations and developing nations, depending on how advanced they are towards the goal of industrialisation. But since development can have a variety of meanings, and since industrialisation is not the only possible goal of development, these terms are somewhat inadequate.
An attempt to use terms that are less political and less value-laden has involved the division of the world into north and south. Most of the affluent countries are in the northern part of the globe, including Japan, the USA, Canada and the countries that make up Europe; and most low-income countries are south of them, including those in Asia, Africa and South America. While Australia is geographically located in the southern hemisphere, it is considered to be a part of the 'north', which makes the division confusing.
The Greenhouse problem raises many equity issues, including the unfair distribution of the impacts of global warming, the question of which countries should remedy the situation and the distribution of impacts arising from measures taken to reduce greenhouse emissions. Even the elevation of the greenhouse warming problem above other environmental problems has come under criticism for being a manifestation of how the interests of affluent people dominate those of low-income nations. Third-world activists argue that desertification and resulting famines in Africa are neglected issues because they do not impact upon people in high-income countries the way greenhouse warming might:
“The millions of deaths in dozens of countries did not make the tragedy global, because it took place in the Third World. It remained ‘local’. Thermometers registering a few degrees more in the United States, however, succeeded in turning climatic change into a ‘global’ issue for all the governments of the industrialised North and the entire scientific community was immediately mobilised.” More importantly, people in the less industrialised low-income countries do not feel that they should share in the costs of reducing greenhouse emissions when they have played such a minor role in creating them. Ironically, it could be some of the poorest nations that suffer the worst consequences of doing nothing.
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