SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The term “sustainable development” was first used by World Conservation

Strategy presented by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature
and Natural Resources in 1980. It was commonly used and defined for the first
time by the Brundtland Report, entitled Our Common Future, of the World
Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.
The Brundtland Report defines sustainable development as “meeting the needs
of the present generation without compromising the needs of future
generations”. It means that development should ‘keep going’. It is a situation in
which economic development does not decrease over time. Sustainable
development is development that is ever lasting and contributes to the quality of
life through improvement in natural environment. Natural environment, in turn,
supply utility to individual inputs to economic process and services that support
life. As pointed out by Pearce and Warforth, “sustainable development
describes a process in which natural resource base is not allowed to deteriorate.
It emphasizes the hitherto unappreciated role of environmental quality and
environmental inputs in the process of raising real income and quality of life”.
Objectives
The main objectives of sustainable development are stated as under
1. Creation of sustainable improvements in the quality of life for all people.
2. Increasing economic growth through meeting basic needs I.e. raising the
standard of living.
3. Providing chance to anticipate in public life and helping to clean environment.
4. Promoting inter generational equity.
5. Aiming at maximising the benefits of economic development subject to
maintaining the stock of all environmental and natural resources assets.
6. Aiming at accelerating economic development in order to conserve and
enhance the stock of environmental, human and physical capital without making
future generations worse off.
7. Aiming to require strong sustainability that the natural capital stock should
not decline. Moreover, weak sustainability needs that total value o physical,
human and natural capital stock should cot decrease.
Indicators/measures of sustainable development
1.PEARCE ATKINSON MEASURE OF ‘WEAK SUSTAINABILITY’
An empirical (observed or experimental) application of the Hartwick-Solow
rule, that natural resources exhaustion must be translated in the flows of income
that are invested into other forms of capital (i.e., human capital). It is also
referred to as the ‘genuine savings’ measure. According to this test, whether a
country is following the Hartwick rule by comparing the saving rate with the
sum o depreciation of natural and man- made capital, all expressed as a fraction
of national income? If all savings are invested in natural and human capital,
aggregate capital stock will not decline and consumption of the resources can be
maintained.

Where, S is savings, Y is income, δm is depreciation of man-made capital (Km)

and δn is depreciation in natural capital (Kn).
The genuine savings measure is referred to as weak sustainability measure since
no special conditions are placed on the level of natural capital (Kn). It can be
allowed to decline so long as man-made capital (Km) is built up on
compensation. This follows from the sustainability assumption made in that Kn
and Km are essentially regarded as identical in their ability to produce welfare.
Criticism of PAM:
1. It is difficult to measure depreciation of natural capital empirically.
2. It pays no attention to measures of intra-generational fairness in the
distribution of income.
3. Since the measure of resource changes in genuine savings is a money
measure, changes in resource prices may mark changes in physical stocks
in either a more or less sustainable direction.

2. THE INDEX OF SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC WELFARE (ISEW)

Formulated by Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb Jr. in their book For the
Common Good (1989) with the objective to widen the determinants of welfare
as seen to be necessary and thus to create a combined indicator of welfare and
sustainability.
ISEW = [C(adj) + P+ G + W] – [D + E + N]
where,
 C(adj : consumer expenditure adjusted to include income distribution.
P: Non-defensive public expenditure
G: growth in capital and net change in international position
W: estimate of non-monetised contributions to welfare
D: defensive private expenditure
E: costs of environmental degradation
N: depreciation of natural capital
A rising value of ISEW (in monetary terms) indicates higher level of
sustainability. Cobb also formulated the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) to
reflect the position of the health of the economy by making an estimation of the
net production of services (in terms of natural and human capital). GPI is
similar to ISEW but excludes both public and private defense expenditures on
health and education and includes deductions of monetary cost evaluation of
leisure time, underemployment and deforestation.
CRITICISMS
ISEW has been criticised on the grounds that by adding and subtracting
different forms of capital, it is technically an expression of the notion of weak
sustainability, according to which the task is only to preserve the total capital
stock, not necessarily natural capital per se. (Neumayer)
Neumayer also argues that it is not possible to combine an indicator of current
welfare with an indicator of sustainability, indeed, ‘what affects current well-
being need not affect sustainability and vice versa.’ For example, the depletion
of non-renewable sources is a key determinant of sustainability, because the
available stock of natural capital is diminished for future generations. On the
other hand, it makes little difference to current welfare.
Both measures are based on current flows (measurement over an interval of
time) rather than stocks (measure at a particular period of time) and thus ignores
the maintenance of capacity as an important criterion of sustainability.
3 ENVIRONMENTAL SPACE MEASURE (ESM)

The ESM is ssociated with the pioneer work of F Schmidt-Bleek titled Eco-
restructuring Economies, 1992. It is concerned with the equitable or fair use of
resources in any country relative to the world average use of resources.
In this method, the per capita consumption of a particular resource is compared
with the global average or mean use of that resource.
Resources analysed generally include non-renewable resources – arable land,
forests and water resources, which are used for production.
The Life Cycle Hypothesis is used to estimate total consumption of resources.
Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a method used to evaluate the environmental
impact of a product through its life cycle encompassing extraction and
processing of the raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, use, recycling, and
final disposal.

CRITICISMS

Difficulty in specifying maximum and minimum permissible use rates for

resources.
The selection of resources to be included is arbitrary (random).
Measurement units differ from one resource to another. Taking a total or
aggregate use of the resources in general can be misleading if not impractical.
Resources can be used more than once and there is a chance of double-counting
in the analysis.
Policy matter of the measurement is unrealistic.

4 ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTS MEASURE (EFM)

EFM was developed by William Rees and Wackernagel in the book, Our
Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (1996).
The ecological footprint (EF) estimates the biologically productive land and sea
area (land and water resources) needed to provide the renewable resources that a
population consumes and to absorb the wastes it generates, using existing
technology and resource-management practices—rather than trying to
determine how many people a given land area or the entire planet can support.
“How much do people take compared to what Earth can regenerate?”
It implies how much of land is occupied by man, which he uses for various
economic activities, and how much land is required to absorb the pollution or
emissions generated from such activities (biocapacity).
The EFM compares human demands in a country for consumption of resources
with the supply that can be met given the availability of the resources. Given the
population figures, this can then be compared with the available land area
(available resource/supply), excluding unproductive land, and a country’s
ecological footprint can then be determined.
In this method, a positive ecological footprint indicates an unsustainable use of
resources (also referred to as biocapacity deficit). It implies either that a country
is depleting its resource base or it is imposing its footprint on other countries
through the excessive import of resources.
Renewable resources are the only sustainable source of energy, the misuse of
which can be corrected in the long-run.
Changes in EF depends on population pressure and per capita consumption
levels.
CRITICISMS

Does not capture other sustainability issues such as welfare and environmental
quality.
The regeneration of an ecosystem is the result or outcome of the current state of
soils, water availability, biodiversity and many other factors. Ecological
Footprint accounts do not provide specific metrics for these sustainability
factors.
Ecological Footprint accounts only keep track of actual activities. They simply
record inputs and outputs as they are and provide no extrapolation as to how
much biocapacity might be depleted by human activities in the future.
Ecological Footprints accounts for countries are strictly based on United
Nations statistics. These statistics may not include all consumption items, and
biocapacity data based on those statistics may overstate long-term productivity,
since the impact of deforestation, soil depletion or water scarcity on future
productivity is not captured.