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Assess Sustainability and Environmental Impact
- 2. Significant ideas • Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. • Environmental indicators and ecological footprints can be used to assess sustainability. • Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) play an important role in sustainable development.
- 3. Knowledge and understanding • Sustainability: exploiting resources in a fashion which allows their full natural regeneration. • Sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Brudtland Commission UN 1987) • Natural Capital: sustainable resources – of goods and services. • Natural Income: yield obtained from natural resources. • Ecological footprint: area needed to supply resources at the same rate of consumption.
- 4. Arguments • Cornucopian & Capitalist versions often append “without damaging economic growth”. • Deep ecologists would argue that sustainability should be decoupled from economics.
- 5. Ecological overshoot + ecological footprints CARBON CROPLAND FOREST GRAZING LAND BUIT-UP LAND FISHING GROUNDS
- 6. If we don’t rapidly reduce our ecological footprint, in 2050 we will have the need to have 3 planets – which obviously won’t be possible!
- 7. Why is this happening? Some reasons might be: • Inertia: when changing what we do seems too difficult. • The result of ‘tragedy of the commons’ – when many individuals act in their own self-interest to harvest a resource but destroy the long term future of that resource so there is none for anyone.
- 8. Sustainability indicators (both ecological and socio-economic) (from local-global) • Air quality • Environmental vulnerability • Water poverty • Life expectancy • Gender parity
- 9. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) Def: a report prepared before a development project to change the use of land. • Weighs up the relative advantages or disadvantages of the development. • It is necessary to establish how the abiotic environment and biotic community would change if a development scheme went ahead. • EIA will try to quantify changes to microclimate, biodiversity, scenic and amenity value resulting from the proposed development. These measures represent the production of a baseline study.
- 10. What are EIAs used for and what does an EIA need in it?? What are EIAs used for? What does an EIA need in it? Major new road networks. Qualifies the ‘value’ before development. Airport and port developments. Identifying impacts (scoping). Building power stations. Predicting the scale of potential impacts. Building dams and reservoirs. Limiting the effects of impacts to acceptable limits (mitigation). Quarrying. Large-scale housing projects.
- 11. Example MEA – Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2001-2005) • More than half of Earths ecosystem “degraded”. • ¼ Earth’s land under cultivation. • Freshwater abstraction doubled in past 40 years. • ¼ fish stocks overharvested. • Mangrove swamps reduced by 1/3 since 1980. • 20% coral lost. • Eutrophication killing coastal life. • Extinctions escalating.
- 12. Weaknesses of EIAs • Hard to compare them - different standards. • Hard to determine where the boundary of the investigation should be. • How large an area, how many variables, how much does the EIA cost? • Very hard/difficult to consider all indirect impacts of a development so some may be missed.