EEB215H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Genuine Progress Indicator, Environmental Performance Index, Whooping Crane
15 Dec 2016
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Chapter 3
- Biodiversity is essential to human existence
- Tragedy of the commons
o The value of the open-access resource is gradually lost to all of society
▪ Ex. Unregulated dumping of sewage into a river
Ecological and Environmental Economics
- Natural resources have been undervalued
- Cost of environmental damage has been ignored, depletion of natural resource stocks
disregarded and future value of resources discounted
- Environmental economics
o Places a value on components of the environment
- Ecological economics
o Seeks to integrate thinking of ecologists and economists into a transdiscipline
aimed at developing a sustainable world
- Cost-benefit analysis
o Environmental impact assessment
▪ Consider the present and future effects of projects on the environment
o Cost-benefit analysis
▪ Compares the values gained against the costs of a project or resource use
▪ Difficult to calculate accurately because benefits and costs change over
time and are difficult to measure
o Precautionary principle
▪ It may be better not to approve a project that has risk associated with it
and to err on the side of doing no harm to the environment, rather than
doing harm unintentionally or unexpectedly
o Perverse subsidies
▪ Environment damaging economic activities that appear to be profitable
when they are actually losing money because governments subsidize the
industries involved in them with tax breaks, direct payments, etc.
o GPI – Genuine Progress Indicator
▪ Suggests that modern economies are achieving their growth only through
unsustainable consumption of natural resources and environmental
degradation
▪ As these resources run out and humans suffer effects of pollution, true
economic situation will continue to deteriorate
o EPI – Environmental Performance Index
▪ Ranks countries according to the health of, and threats to, their
ecosystems; the vulnerability of their human population to adverse
environmental conditions; the ability of their society to protect the
environment; and their participation in global environmental protection
efforts
▪ Environmental sustainability is not linked to economic competitiveness
- Financing conservation
o Intervention can be expensive
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
o Whooping crane is a success story, but there are many other less charismatic
species that have less financial support than they need
o Cost-effectiveness analysis
▪ Important to do in addition to cost-benefit analysis
▪ Where do we get the most for the money we spend on conservation?
o Conservation financed in many ways
▪ Hunting (ex. Namibia)
• Controversial
• Utilitarian approach
o Assumes that species and their habitats will be conserved if
people find them valuable
• Argued that hunting as foundation for conservation biology is
morally wrong and will inevitably lead to poaching and decreased
biodiversity
- What are species worth
o No universally accepted framework for assigning value to biodiversity
o Use values
▪ Direct use values
• Assigned to products harvested by people
▪ Indirect use values
• Assigned to benefits provided by biodiversity that do not involve
harvesting or destroying the resource
• Provide current benefits to people
o Recreation, education, etc.
o Include benefits of ecosystem services
▪ Option value
• Determined by the prospect for possible future benefits for human
society
o Ex. Medicines, future food, etc.
o Non-use value
▪ Existence value
• Can be assigned to biodiversity
o Ex. Economists can attempt to measure how much people
are willing to pay to protect a species from going extinct or
an ecosystem from being destroyed
- Ecosystem services
o Many and varied environmental benefits provided by biodiversity and ecosystems
to humans
▪ Provisioning services
• Material or energy outputs of an ecosystem
o Ex. Food, water, raw materials
▪ Regulating services
• Regulators of the quality of the air and soil
o Forests provide many of these by regulating local climate,
removing pollutants from the atmosphere, and holding soil
with roots
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
