Reducing Risk: Sustainability and Sustainable Development

1. Reducing Risk: Sustainability and Sustainable Development Session 39

2. Session Objectives • Identify key linkages between environmental processes and conditions and disaster vulnerability • Understand alternative conceptualizations of sustainability • Understand key issues in the political ecology of development and underdevelopment • Identify key linkages between development and environment

3. Environmental Processes and Conditions Water Quality and Quantity Hydrological Cycle Climate Air Quality Slope and Topography Soil Texture, Fertility, Toxicity, Stability Biodiversity

4. Linking Environmental Processes and Disaster Vulnerability • Environment can be experienced as both resource and hazard • Environmental conditions can protect humans and buffer extreme events • Human activity can cause or exaggerate the effects of extreme natural events • Human land use decisions can put settlements and groups of people at risk

5. To keep in existence To maintain or prolong To continue or last Problems with Definition Inherent contradictions Extreme cases Boundaries over what is being “maintained” or “prolonged” For how long? Who should manage? Lack of perfect knowledge may make it hard to “manage” in the right direction Typical Definition of “To Sustain”

6. Typical Definitions of “Sustainable Development” • Human activity that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 8) • “A strategy for improving the quality of life while preserving the environmental potential for the future, of living off interest rather than consuming natural capital” (Natl. Commission on the Environment, 1993, cited in Beatley, 1998, pp. 235-36)

7. How do Gender, Ethnic, and Caste Differences Affect Life Chances, Human and Economic Development? • Land tenure systems • Water rights and “tree tenure” • Labor relations and labor law • Biases in the education system • Biases in access to financial credit • Biases in access to technical assistance and advice • Geographical isolation

8. Economic Development Concerns increase of production of goods and services Measure in money and mediated through markets Human Development Concerns increase in satisfaction of basic needs Concerns increase in autonomy Measured by more than money Requires public investment and not just resource allocation provided by unregulated markets Differences Between Economic Development and Human Development

9. Strong View No consideration of financial costs Key concept is ‘ecological sustainability’ Focuses primarily on the environment Reliance on physical measures of things Weak View Consideration of financial costs Benefit/cost analysis often used to evaluate ‘trade-offs’ Key concept is ‘economic sustainability’ Reliance on measurements of financial value and relationship between resource allocation and level of consumption Views of Sustainability

10. “Traps” Produced by Underdevelopment Lack of political influence Low income Physical weakness due to disease and undernutrition Spatial isolation Access to poor, difficult land