1 / 14

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development. Every generation should leave water, air and soil resources as pure and unpolluted as when it came on earth. Each generation should leave undiminished all the species of animals it found existing on earth.

lbernice
Download Presentation

Sustainable Development

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Sustainable Development • Every generation should leave water, air and soil resources as pure and unpolluted as when it came on earth. Each generation should leave undiminished all the species of animals it found existing on earth. • Or not leave the world as we found it in detail, but rather to leave the option or the capacity for the next generation to be as well off as we are. • We've been borrowing from the future ecologically and economically. When will the debt come due?

  2. Projected (2100) Projected levels of atmospheric CO2 during the next 100 years would be higher than at anytime in the last 440,000 yrs CO2 Concentration (ppmv) Current (2001) (BP 1950)

  3. How can we decouple economic growth from population growth? How many new houses do we need? The lost generation (economic) in Japan.

  4. Are we going to crown every other species off the planet?

  5. Mahatma Gandhi asked 50 years ago • God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. It took Britain half the plantet’s resources to achieve this prosperity. How many planets will a country like India require? • Grinding poverty, it turns out is pretty sustainable. Do we have to live in poverty to be sustainable?

  6. Unsustainable • Plan B, Lester Brown of Worldwatch Inst. • By 2031 per-capita income in China will equal that of the USA if current growth rates continue. With a population of 1.4 billion, China will

  7. By 2031 China alone will • Burn 99 million barrels of oil a day, 18% more than current global production. • Consume 2/3 of the worlds current grain harvest • Use twice as much paper as the world currently uses. • Drive 1.1 billion cars-- currently 800 million on earth • Pave roads highways and parking lots equal to the area it now plants in rice

  8. What are we going to do? • Worldwide Poverty? • War? • Disease?

  9. Ecosystem services • Provide raw materials: coal, pulp, iron • Absorb waste and dilute or decompose • Half of all jobs worldwide are in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Output from those three commodity business dominate the economies of ¼ of the worlds contries.

  10. Do humans have to have economic prosperity before they protect their environment? • Is environmental consciousness only a priority for wealthy societies?

  11. Can we recognize the rights of other things besides people? Does a stream have a right to be unpolluted? • Do animal and plant species have a right to exist?

  12. Is economic growth the only way to help the poor? • Or does environmental degradation associated with growth harm them even more?

  13. Miracles do happen • CFC’s banned, ozone hole showing signs of recovery • Malthus was wrong, scarcity of resources have not snuffed out growth. • Dynamic dance of development, scarcity, degradation, innovation and substitution.

More Related