SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Nuances and Perspectives Fredrik Hedenus Martin Persson Frances Sprei
Original title: Hållbar utveckling – nyanser och tolkningar, second edition © The authors and Studentlitteratur 2022
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Art. No 40168 ISBN 978-91-44-16119-8 Second edition 2:1 © The authors and Studentlitteratur 2022 studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Translation: Paulina Essunger Photo back cover: Photographer Anna-Lena Lundqvist Cover design: Francisco Ortega Cover illustration: Shutterstock.com Printed by Eurographic Group, 2022
Contents
Preface 7
1 Sustainable development: Through the lens of environmental history 11 Environmental impact of hunter-gatherers 12 The rise of agriculture —and its environmental impact 13 From womb to machine: environmental degradation and views on nature 15 From the Industrial Revolution to the Anthropocene 17 A brief history of the concept of “sustainable development” 18 Review 27 Reflect 27 Suggested reading 28
2 Sustainable development: Definition and interpretations 29 How is sustainable development defined? 30 Human needs 30 The three dimensions as preconditions for sustainable development 32 The ecological dimension 34 The economic dimension 38 The social dimension 40 How do the three dimensions fit together? 43 Preserving or developing? 48 Review 49 Reflect 50 Suggested reading 51 Contents 3
3 Strong and weak sustainability 53 Sustainable development and economic growth 54 Economic growth and strong versus weak sustainability 56 Substitutability, technological development, and critical natural capital 58 Substitutability and preferences 60 Development—more than material growth 61 The precautionary principle vs. the proactionary principle 63 Review 65 Reflect 66 Suggested reading 67
4 Sustainable development from an ethical point of view 69 Hume’s Law and the importance of distinguishing between facts and values 70 Sustainable development and justice 71 Fairness—more than just resource allocation 72 Justice, rights and moral philosophy 73 Moral standing and the expanding circle of concern 76 Humankind at the center: anthropocentrism 78 From humans to other animals: zoocentrism 80 From animals to all life: biocentrism 82 From the individual to the collective: ecocentrism 83 Review 86 Reflect 87 Suggested reading 88
5 The many faces of sustainability 89 Pairs of opposites related to perspectives on sustainable development 91 Anthropocentrism—ecocentrism 92 High substitutability—low substitutability 92 Pairs of opposites related to perspectives on solutions to sustainability problems 93
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Efficiency—sufficiency 93 Technology—lifestyle changes 95 Individual solutions—political solutions 97 Reformism—radicalism 98 Sustainable development —the landscape of opinions 100 Is everything sustainable? 104 Review 107 Reflect 107 Suggested reading 109
6 Sustainability in practice 111 From Agenda 21 to Agenda 2030 112 Nation states 113 Example: Bhutan and the Gross National Happiness 117 Cities 118 Example: Bogotá—a transportation system built on fairness 120 Civil society 121 Example: the Mine Ban Treaty 124 Industry 125 Example: Riksbyggen—residential real estate management and development 127 Universities and the scientific community 128 Example: the IPCC 130 Integration in practice—within organizations and among actors 131 Final thoughts 133 Review 133 Reflect 134 Suggested reading 134
7 Sustainable development: A professional responsibility? 137 Engineers and the social side of technology 138 Professional ethics and sustainable development 141 Wicked problems 144
Contents 5
Sustainable development and the need for broader expertise 146 Review 149 Reflect 149 Suggested reading 150 Acknowledgments 151
6 Contents
CHAPTER 3
Strong and weak sustainability Key points in this chapter: ■ Economic growth and sustainable development are not necessarily in conflict. The impact that economic growth has on the environment depends on the nature of that growth. ■ Weak sustainability is defined as requiring that the sum of natural and human-made capital does not decline over time, while strong sustainability is defined as requiring that neither natural nor human-made capital decline. ■ The point of contention between strong and weak sustainability is the possibility of substituting human-made capital for natural capital. ■ The possibilities for such substitutions change over time, due to technological development and changes in people’s preferences. ■ The precautionary principle and the proactionary principle are two different approaches to making decisions about how society should manage new technologies with uncertain risks and benefits.
This chapter picks up where the last one ended, discussing the connections between the different dimensions of sustainable development. We will mainly focus on balancing the economic and the
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Sustainable development and economic growth In order to understand the relation between economic growth and sustainability, we first have to understand what economic growth is. Economic growth is a measure of the increase in the total value of the goods and services produced in a country, generally referred to as the gross domestic product, or GDP. To simplify, we can think of the causes of economic growth as two-fold: on the one hand, increased access to labor, capital, and other inputs, and on the other, increased productivity. The former is achieved by saving and by investing in, for example, infrastructure, factories, machines, or education, or by increasing inputs of labor, energy, raw materials, natural capital (e.g., agricultural land or water), or ecosystem services. Increased productivity is instead achieved through technological and organi zational development (consider the assembly line) enabling a more efficient production of goods and services, so that fewer inputs (labor, capital, and resources) are required for each unit produced. An analysis of the driving forces behind economic growth in the last century shows that technological developments have been much more important than increased access to inputs. 54 Chapter 3
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ecological dimensions. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, sustainable development can be understood as an attempted compromise between two goals: fighting poverty through economic development and protecting the environment. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that one of the most hotly debated issues in sustainable development is the relation between economic growth and environmental protection. Where some assert that there is a fundamental conflict between a steadily growing economy and sustainability, others assert the opposite, that economic growth is a pre-condition for sustainability. These discussions illuminate differing conceptions and interpretations of sustainability. This chapter seeks to clarify those different conceptions and the arguments related to them.
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The relation between economic growth and the environment thus depends on whether growth is driven by increased inputs or increased productivity. The common assertion that we cannot have infinite resource-based growth on a finite planet is in some sense trivial: If growth is solely driven by an increased use of finite and renewable resources, and an increased demand for nature’s ecosystem services, growth will obviously have major negative environmental consequences. But if growth is instead entirely driven by increased productivity, it could have a positive environmental impact, provided the increased productivity translates into easing the demands placed on nature and its resources. Therefore, there is no inherent conflict between economic growth and sustainable development. As Thomas Sterner, professor of environmental economics, puts it: If musicians create better music, authors write better books, and directors make better movies that we are all prepared to pay more to hear, read, and watch, we can have exponential economic growth for the foreseeable future, despite the physical limits of our planet. But even if, in theory, there is no conflict between growth and sustainability, the important question is what the situation looks like in practical terms. Growth advocates typically promote a transformation of our economies toward green growth driven by environ mentally friendly technology. Growth critics, however, rightly point to the increased use of and pressure on natural resources resulting from the enormous growth we have experienced since the Industrial Revolution, despite this growth having mainly been driven by productivity gains. That is, even if increased efficiency results in less resource use per dollar, this improvement tends to be cancelled precisely by the absolute economic growth caused by those productivity gains. The 19th-century British economist William Stanley Jevons was the first to highlight this relationship, noting that the technological progress that yielded efficiency gains in the use of coal in English industry led to an increase in the use of coal, not a decrease. IneffiStrong and weak sustainability 55
Economic growth and strong versus weak sustainability Although economic growth thus generally increases the demand for natural resources, further impacting the environment, the question arises whether this should be considered unsustainable if it contributes to meeting important human needs. Put differently, is growth that consumes natural resources and replaces them with greater economic prosperity sustainable? The philosopher Bryan Norton pinpoints the issue at stake: 56 Chapter 3
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cient steam engines required a lot of coal, but they added little value and therefore had few uses. As the engines grew more efficient, new uses were invented, and the new demand thereby created vastly outweighed the efficiency gains. A similar development can be seen for lighting. Despite the enormous difference in efficiency between kerosene lamps and LEDs, the UK per capita consumption of lighting is 20,000 times greater now than in the 1700s. Differences in beliefs about what drives growth and about the possibility of decoupling growth and increased pressure on natural resources in the future are thus a major reason underlying differences in views on the relationship between economic growth and sustainability. If the economy grows faster than environmental impacts, this is known as relative decoupling. The economy affects the environment less per dollar generated, but if the economy continues to grow, the impact on the environment would continue to increase. Absolute decoupling is instead when the impact on the environment is constant or diminishes even though the economy is growing. For example, greenhouse gas emissions have decreased in Sweden since the nineties even though the economy has grown, and although most of the emissions caused by our consumption take place in other countries, these emissions have also decreased somewhat, recently (albeit much less than what’s needed for us to reach stringent climate targets).
[S]uppose that our generation converts all natural wilder ness areas and natural communities into productive mines, farmland, production forests, or shopping centres, and suppose that we do so efficiently, and that we are careful to save a portion of the profits, and invest them wisely, leaving the future far more wealthy than we are. Does it not make sense to claim that, in doing so, we harmed future people…?
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F R O M D O B S O N ( E D .) , FA I R N E S S & F U T U R I T Y (1 9 9 9)
Let us put this question in terms of how our total capital changes over time: Is it possible to replace natural capital (i.e., finite and renewable natural resources, which, in a variety of ways, supply us with raw materials, energy, and other ecosystem services) with human-made capital (i.e., something we have produced ourselves, such as infrastructure, machines, and knowledge)? Those who say “Yes” are called advocates of weak sustainability, while those who say “No” are advocates of strong sustainability. According to weak sustainability, there is no difference in kind in the utility provided by different types of capital. The important thing, from a sustainability perspective, is that the total sum of natural and human-made capital does not decline over time. According to weak sustainability, natural capital can be depleted sustainably, if investments are simultaneously made to increase human-made capital to compensate for that loss. Let us consider the example of the hydropower dam from the previous chapter. A proponent of weak sustainability would consider building the dam as sustainable so long as the increase in human-made capital equaled (or exceeded) the loss in natural capital. The two types of capital are fungible or substitutable. Strong sustainability instead assumes that natural capital cannot be replaced by human-made capital (substitutability is zero). Sustain able development therefore requires that neither natural nor humanmade capital decline over time. In the hydropower example, strong sustainability prohibits building the plant no matter how much Strong and weak sustainability 57
human-made capital would be gained, since this will inevitably result in a loss of natural capital. The concept of substitutability turns out to be at the core of the conflict between weak and strong sustainability.
Substitutability, technological development, and critical natural capital
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The fact that some environmental services can be replaced by human-made capital is obvious. This very substitutability is the basis for much of the economic growth we have seen since the Industrial Revolution. Consider agriculture: Modern agriculture replaces work performed by people and animals—whether plowing or sowing or harvesting—with tractors, combine harvesters, and other machines; the nitrogen fertilization that nitrogen-fixing plants or animal manure previously provided now comes from synthetic fertilizers produced by fixing nitrogen from the air. Meanwhile, agriculture illustrates our fundamental dependence on some ecosystem services; we are still far from being able to manufacture human nutrition through artificial photosynthesis, which would sever our reliance on biomass and produce provided by plants and crops. Ecosystem service thus range in substitutability, from those that we can readily replace with current technology (e.g., LEDs rather than campfires, email rather than carrier pigeons), to those that are hard or expensive to replace (e.g., manual pollination of fruit trees, compared with the services bees and other insects provide), to those fundamental ecosystem services that it is hard to even imagine replacing (e.g., formation of new topsoil that we can farm, or clean air for us to breathe). This leads us to two conclusions: (1) the possibility of substituting natural capital for human-made capital depends on the technologies available (or, as we will see, on the preferences we have), and (2) there are some kinds of natural capital that we cannot do without, i.e., critical natural capital, such as topsoil and clean air.
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The first conclusion implies that technological developments will affect what natural capital is necessary for us to maintain a good standard of living for coming generations. The problem is that it is very hard to predict how future technological developments will affect the possibility of replacing natural capital with humanmade capital (see Box 3.1 for an illustrative example). A more optimistic perspective on these opportunities leads to a position more aligned with weak sustainability. Uncertainty about future opportunities for substitution is one of the main arguments put forward by advocates for a stronger version of sustainability. They hold that an important difference between
BOX 3.1 Visingsö—an example of how substitutability changes over time After the Napoleonic Wars in the first decades of the 1800s, Sweden lost Pomerania in northern Germany. Pomerania had bountiful oak forests, which had supplied the Swedish navy with lumber for war ships. To ensure future access to timber, the king ordered the planting of a large oak forest of several hundred hectares, on Visingsö, an island in the lake Vättern. From 1830 to 1850, more than 300,000 oaks were planted on the island. In the 1970s, the oaks were ready for delivery, and the head of the Swedish navy was notified. In the intervening 150 years, major changes had taken place in ship construction, and the navy understandably declined the offer to use the oaks to build ships. This example illustrates the difficulty in predicting future generations’ need for natural capital and how technological devel opments may change it. For what it is worth, while the navy had no need for the oak timber, it has come in handy in restoring the royal warship Wasa, building the East Indiaman Götheborg, and making whiskey barrels for the distillery Mackmyra. The forest is also a popular tourist destination because of the unique landscape, and the rich birdlife attracts ornithologists. Technologies change over time, but so do human interests and preferences.
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natural and human-made capital is that loss of natural capital is often irreversible; it cannot be recreated. We cannot currently bring back to life a species that has been lost, nor can we resurrect a fishery that has collapsed entirely, but factories, roads, and other human-made capital can be replaced much more easily (so long as the knowledge has not been lost). This combination of natural capital that cannot be regenerated and major uncertainties about how important natural capital may be for our well-being is what makes advocates of strong sustainability argue that natural capital that may be critical for future generations should be better protected.
Thus far, this discussion about substitutability has centered on the extent to which we can replace natural capital with human-made capital in producing goods and services. But nature does not just contribute to human well-being by being a means of production in the economy. We also benefit from nature directly by being in it. Using nature for pleasure, deriving aesthetic satisfaction from it, and using nature for religious or spiritual experiences or knowledge constitute cultural or social ecosystem services. To what extent can we replace these with goods and services produced by humans? Even if, as in Bryan Norton’s thought experiment, we could sustain high economic growth despite (or by) exploiting natural resources to the point where there is little nature left for future generations, would we have deprived them of experiences that reduce their well-being compared to what it would have been? Our answer will depend in part on our preferences; different people simply have different ideas about how important nature and nature experiences are for their well-being. A long-distance skater would presumably not agree that the experience of skating outdoors on a lake can be replaced by skating indoors; a hockey player or a curling player would presumably much prefer the artificial ice to the rough lake ice. In part it will depend on the purpose. Consider 60 Chapter 3
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Substitutability and preferences
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one of the substitutions mentioned above: Even though the LED is superior to the campfire for most everyday purposes, the campfire can provide an entirely different kind of well-being. Although the question of whether the social and cultural values nature provides to us can be replaced depends on personal preferences, a substantial (and growing) body of research demonstrates that there are real and measurable effects on human health and well-being from time spent in natural environments. A series of studies has shown a positive impact of nature on mental health, stress levels, blood pressure, recovery after disease, and other indicators. For example, patients who have had surgery recover faster if they spend time in, or can see, natural environments; this holds for children exposed to stress, too. Even if these studies demonstrate the value of nature for certain aspects of human welfare irrespective of human preferences, they also prompt the question of what type of nature is most important for people. If we limit ourselves to effects on health, there are compelling reasons to preserve nature close to where people live, but less so for remote areas of, say, the Amazon. Can a landscaped park have the same (or greater) positive effects as a species-rich—but very dense—old growth forest? More speculatively, could more advanced virtual, or computer-simulated, reality eventually replace natural nature?
Development—more than material growth While there is strong support for natural environments being able to contribute directly to human welfare and well-being, the links between economic prosperity, as measured by GDP, and well-being or happiness are far from clear. In 1974, professor of economics Richard Easterlin showed that despite decades of economic growth in industrialized nations, self-reported well-being had not increased (see a graph for Sweden, below), even though studies also show that within nations wealthy people tend to be happier than poor people. Strong and weak sustainability 61
1.6
Household expenditures (relative to 1995) Life satisfaction (relative to 1995)
1.4
1.2
1.0
0.8 1995
2000
2005
2010
Being richer than your neighbors is thus more important to your sense of satisfaction than is your absolute level of wealth. Subsequent studies have shown similar relations for larger groups of countries. If we consider poor nations over time, the people grow happier as their nations experience economic growth. In rich nations that become even richer, the link is not as clear; that is, it’s not evident that the population grows happier due to the increased wealth, and researchers do not agree on this issue. They do agree that increasing the GDP has a diminishing effect on happiness—the question is how strong this effect is. Either way, this serves as a reminder to consider development broadly and not just focus on economic growth. Already in the 1990s, the discourse on sustainable development led to the idea of human development, based on the research of, among others, the economist and Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen. The concept is based on the notion that development has to do with expanding human opportunity and highlights the significance of education and health, alongside material welfare (cf. the discussion on human needs in the preceding chapter). These ideas have been 62 Chapter 3
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Sources: The SOM institute, University of Gothenburg (life satisfaction); SCB (expenditures)
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summarized in an alternative metric for measuring welfare: the Human Development Index (HDI), which is not just based on GDP per capita but also life expectancy and access to education. This broader approach to what counts as development can also be said to permeate the UN Global Sustainability Goals: development is not exclusively about economic growth; other aspects also matter. However, there is a strong link between GDP per capita and both education and average lifespan, and therefore also HDI. This is related to the need for financial resources in order to have a good education system and to the opportunity to eat better and live a healthier life that a higher income affords. That said, the link is not absolute, and variations among nations also show that it matters how financial resources are used. The average lifespan in the U.S. is, for instance, the same as in Lebanon, although the GDP per capita in the latter is only one-sixth that of the U.S.
The precautionary principle vs. the proactionary principle If the central idea of sustainable development is to make possible human development and meet human needs, now and in the future, the question arises: How do we know what future generations need? In this chapter, we have focused on a certain aspect of this question, namely, how important nature is for the well-being of future generations. Weak and strong sustainability represent opposing approaches to answering that question. However, weak and strong sustainability should not be considered binary opposites, but rather extremes on a continuous scale. Depending on how unique we consider natural capital to be, or how optimistic we are regarding technological substitutability options going forward, we will end up closer to one extreme or the other. Furthermore, we need to understand that science can only provide part of the answer to substitutability questions. Even if scientific research provides more information about how unique ecosystem Strong and weak sustainability 63
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services are in the role they play in economic growth and our welfare, we will never have complete knowledge of how important different kinds of nature will be for future generations. The problem we face is thus how to make decisions about allowing or limiting new technologies or new businesses when we are not certain what consequences our decisions will have for the environment or future generations. One approach to this fundamental uncertainty is called the precautionary principle, included in the Rio Declaration of 1992. According to the precautionary principle, safety measures may be called for even if there is no scientific evidence that an activity is dangerous to humans or to the environment. This principle has been included in EU legislation, providing, for example, the basis for regulations that limit the use of new chemicals, a context in which the full consequences for the environment are rarely known but in which the uninhibited use and spread of chemicals could have major negative consequences. It has also been leveraged in the wider environmental debate, for example, as an argument to stop the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and nuclear power. From the perspective of stronger sustainability, there is good reason to be careful not to do things that potentially can harm natural capital. But there are other reasons for caution, too: People tend to attach greater significance to loss than to profits that do not materialize, and public opinion on new technologies in general can turn more wary if unexpected problems arise. However, the precautionary principle has also been questioned based on a variety of perspectives. The most important, perhaps, is the charge that the principle does not assign value to uncertain positives in the same way that it does to uncertain negatives. New technologies entail risks, of course, but they also entail potential benefits. Imagine if the introduction of synthetic fertilizers had been stopped based on the precautionary principle—in that case we would probably not have been able to feed today’s global population. Critics of the precautionary principle thus hold that we need a more
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balanced assessment of uncertain positives and uncertain negatives, not just a focus on avoiding harm. If natural capital and human-made capital are taken to be highly substitutable, another principle will seem appropriate: the proactionary principle. According to this principle, good reasons are required for introducing limits on new technologies. If the nega tives associated with the technology clearly outweigh the positives, implementation should of course be limited or stopped, but the burden of proof here is on those who want to limit implementation. Advocates of the principle claim that this is the more reasonable approach, given that, overall, new technology has served humanity well in the past two hundred years. Like strong and weak sustainability, the precautionary and proactionary principles should be considered two extremes on a spectrum of approaches, not binary options. We can be either more or less careful about how we introduce new, untested technology. The precautionary principle suffers from the difficulty of testing the full consequences, positive as well as negative, in a lab environment. Assessment often requires implementation in society. Limiting a technology too much too early on means missing out on important learning. The problem facing the proactionary principle is the opposite: Once a technology has been released into society and proven problematic it will often be hard to limit or completely prohibit its use.
Review These questions test your understanding of the chapter. The answers can be found in the text. 1. What determines whether economic growth is negative for the environment? 2. How are weak and strong sustainability defined?
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3. What does the concept “substitutability” mean and how is it related to the definitions of weak and strong sustainability? 4. Which two factors determine the possibility of substituting human-made capital for natural capital? How can these change over time? 5. What is critical natural capital? How does what is included in this concept affect perspectives on weak and strong sustainability? 6. What is the difference between the precautionary principle and the proactionary principle?
These questions help you reflect on the issues discussed in this chapter. Try to reflect on your own, but also take the time to discuss these issues with a classmate, friend, or colleague who is reading the book. 1. How would you respond to Bryan Norton’s thought experiment (see p. 57)? 2. A range of different definitions of sustainable development can be found online – perform a search and read through some of the results to see if you can find any that clearly argue for or against sustainability in terms of high or low substitutability. 3. Give some examples of natural capital or ecosystem services that you think have high, medium, and low substitutability. Try to think of examples where natural capital or ecosystem services contribute to the production of goods and services as well as examples where we use or consume nature directly (e.g., for recreation). 4. Consider the examples you came up with above and ask yourself whether substitutability has changed over time
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Reflect
(has it always been high or low)? What, if anything, could make it change in the future? 5. What arguments do you think advocates of the precautionary principle and the proactionary principle might use in conversations about new technologies, e.g., GMOs, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), or carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)?
Suggested reading Frumkin, H., Bratman, G. N., Breslow, S. J., Cochran, B., Kahn Jr, P. H., Lawler, © T h e au t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r at u r
J. J., … Wood, S. A. (2017). Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda. Environmental Health Perspectives, 125(7): 075001. Holbrook, J.B. & Briggle, A. (2013). Knowing and acting: The precautionary and proactionary principles in relation to policy making. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2 (5): 15–37. Neumayer, E. (2003). Weak versus strong sustainability: exploring the limits of two opposing paradigms. Camberley: Edward Elgar Publishing. Norton, B. (1999). Ecology and opportunity: intergenerational equity and sustainable options. I: Andrew Dobson (Ed.), Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sterner, T. (2003). Growth and the environment. SIDA. https://www.sida.se/en/ publications/growth-and-the-environment
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Professor Fredrik Hedenus has mainly researched strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy and food production. Professor Martin Persson investigates sustainable land use, with a focus on the drivers of tropical deforestation and the measures that can protect tropical forests. Associate Professor Frances Sprei conducts research on sustainable mobility with a focus on electric cars, new mobility services, and self-driving cars. All of the authors teach and do research at the Division for Physical Resource Theory, in the Department of Space, Earth & Environment at Chalmers University of Technology. They have extensive experience teaching sustainable development at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Nuances and Perspectives Sustainability is a buzzword, a term almost everyone uses, but it seems to be able to signify anything and everything. What does sustainable development really mean? This book provides an introduction to the concept of sustainable development, in all its nuances and interpretations. Starting from the historical process leading up to the Brundtland Report and the Rio Summit, we describe the idea of sustainable development and the main dividing lines in how the concept is understood and used. We also provide an overview of how different actors are working on sustainable development and consider what responsibilities we have to promote sustainable development in our professional capacities. The book is written for anyone who is curious about sustainable development and wants to learn more about what the concept means. We hope that the book will offer you a better understanding of the diverse perspectives included in discussions on sustainable development and give you an opportunity to reflect on your own ideas about what sustainable development requires of us, as individuals and as a society. Second Edition Art.no 40168
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