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This multidisciplinary book provides new insights and hope for sustainable prosperity given recent developments in economics – but only if swift and strong actions consistent with Earth’s biophysical limits and principles of justice are universally taken. It is one thing to put limits on resource throughput and waste generation to conform with the ecosphere’s biocapacity. It is another thing to efficiently allocate a sustainable rate of resource throughput and ensure it is equitably distributed in the form of final goods and services. While the separate but interdependent decisions regarding throughput, distribution, and allocation are the essence of ecological economics, dealing with them in a world that needs to cure its growth addiction requires a realistic understanding of macroeconomics and the fiscal capacity of currency-issuing central governments. Sustainable prosperity demands that we harness this understanding to carefully regulate the rate of resource throughput and manipulate macroeconomic outcomes to facilitate human flourishing. The book begins by outlining humanity’s current predicament of gross ecological overshoot and laments the half-century of missed opportunities since The Limits to Growth (1972). What was once economic growth has become, in many high-income countries, uneconomic growth (additional costs exceeding additional benefits), which is no longer advancing wellbeing. Meanwhile, low-income nations need a dose of efficient and equitable growth to escape poverty while protecting their environments and the global commons. The book argues for a synthesis of our increasing knowledge of the ecosphere’s limited carrying capacity and the power of governments to harness, transform, and distribute resources for the common good. Central to this synthesis must be a correct understanding of the difference between financial constraints and real resource constraints. While the latter apply to everyone, the former do not apply to currency-issuing central governments, which have much more capacity for corrective action than mainstream thinking perceives. The book joins the growing chorus of authoritative voices calling for a complete overhaul of the dominant economic system. We conclude with policy recommendations based on a new economics that, if implemented, would come close to guaranteeing a sustainable and prosperous future. Upon reading this book, at least one thing should be crystal clear: business as usual is not a viable option.
The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book's multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals. Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. Case studies showcase successful strategies from around the world, such as taxing foods with a high carbon footprint, financing ecosystems mapping and conservation to meet scientific targets for healthy biomes permanency, subsidizing sustainable land and sea farming, reforming health systems to move away from sick care to preventive, nutrition-based care, and providing schools with matching funds to purchase local organic produce.--Amazon.
This textbook provides an overview of economic perspectives on sustainability. It synthesises economic, ecological and interdisciplinary sustainability research and by applying an integrated social-ecological and economic framework, demonstrates how this research can be improved and implemented in practice. Split into three parts, the book begins by introducing a range of topics forming the basis of knowledge needed to understand the varying sustainability discourses in economics, ecology and interdisciplinary sustainability research. Chapters cover the political context of sustainability; the history of sustainability in European environmental discourses dating back to the seventeenth century; as well as various problems and forms of interdisciplinary knowledge integration and synthesis in the sustainability process. Part II reviews the core economic themes relevant to sustainable development including natural resource management, environmental economics and ecological economics. Also highlighted are often neglected issues such as conflicts, disasters and interrelated crises on the way towards sustainability. The chapters in Part III discuss the future of the sustainability process. They argue for the necessity of overhauling the relationship between science and practice; explore failures and the unforeseen difficulties of sustainability transformation; and discuss how to enable a long term sustainability process that reaches into the distant future. An innovative resource for a broad range of interdisciplinary programmes on sustainability. The book will be an invaluable reference for master and PhD students, instructors, researchers and practitioners in sustainability governance.
Before the late 1980s, when the ideas of sustainability and sustainable development to the forefront of public debate, conventional, neo-classical economic thinking about development and growth had rarely given any consideration to the needs of future generations, or the sustainability of natural resource use. Defining sustainability broadly as intergenerational fairness in the long-term decision making of a whole society, and using established economic concepts, this selection of refereed journal articles brings a famously ill-defined concept into sharp focus, providing academics at all levels with a formidable research tool. Spanning thirty years of the most important philosophical, theoretical and empirical contributions from both critics and defenders of neo-classical assumptions and methods of economic analysis, this focused collection of papers constitutes a unique, balanced resource on the full range of intellectual debates surrounding the economics of sustainability.
Chapter 1 in: Anna Szelągowska, Aneta Pluta-Zaremba (ed.), The Economics of Sustainable Transformation, London: Routledge 2021
Annotation This book contains six essays based on presentations made at the 40th Annual Werner Sichel Economics Lecture Series sponsored by the Department of Economics, Western Michigan University, during the academic year 2003-3004. The Series was made possible through the financial support of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Western Michigan University.
The book is a concise introduction to an emerging field within economics. Drawing on numerous disciplines, including environmental science, environmental and ecological economics and optimal growth theory, sustainability remains a hazy and complex subject. The author set out with two objectives: one, to bring some order into the proliferating measures, models and management of sustainability; and two, to facilitate access to a complex inter-disciplinary subject area. The book points to practical ways of assessing and enhancing the long-term environmental and economic sustainability of our economies. The result is a fully international study that should bridge the gap between disciplines and prove to be an essential guide to anyone interested in one of the most important concepts in the social sciences.
"Daly is turning economics inside out by putting the earth and its diminishing natural resources at the center of the field . . . a kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics." --Utne Reader "Considered by most to be the dean of ecological economics, Herman E. Daly elegantly topples many shibboleths in Beyond Growth. Daly challenges the conventional notion that growth is always good, and he bucks environmentalist orthodoxy, arguing that the current focus on 'sustainable development' is misguided and that the phrase itself has become meaningless." --Mother Jones "In Beyond Growth, . . . [Daly] derides the concept of 'sustainable growth' as an oxymoron. . . . Calling Mr. Daly 'an unsung hero,' Robert Goodland, the World Bank's top environmental adviser, says, 'He has been a voice crying in the wilderness.'" --G. Pascal Zachary, The Wall Street Journal "A new book by that most far-seeing and heretical of economists, Herman Daly. For 25 years now, Daly has been thinking through a new economics that accounts for the wealth of nature, the value of community and the necessity for morality." --Donella H. Meadows, Los Angeles Times "For clarity of vision and ecological wisdom Herman Daly has no peer among contemporary economists. . . . Beyond Growth is essential reading." --David W. Orr, Oberlin College "There is no more basic ethical question than the one Herman Daly is asking." --Hal Kahn, The San Jose Mercury News "Daly's critiques of economic orthodoxy . . . deliver a powerful and much-needed jolt to conventional thinking." --Karen Pennar, Business Week Named one of a hundred "visionaries who could change your life" by the Utne Reader,Herman Daly is the recipient of many awards, including a Grawemeyer Award, the Heineken Prize for environmental science, and the "Alternative Nobel Prize," the Right Livelihood Award. He is professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, and coauthor with John Cobb, Jr., of For the Common Good.
This book applies rigorous economic analysis to the question of sustainable development. It considers the inter-relationship between growth and sustainability showing that one does not necessarily exist to the detriment of the other. Sustainability may be measured and defined in national accounting terms and the contributors explore a potentially powerful theoretical definition. Case studies on Morocco and China examine some of the domestic policy requirements of sustainability, revealing the desirability of quite complex combinations of policies. International policy aspects of sustainability are considered, such as technology transfers and the establishment of workable agreements to reduce global pollution. The volume demonstrates the need to build the sustainability debate on sound economic foundations, and the ability of economists to provide such foundations.
In a concise and crisp manner, this book presents the state of the art in ecological economics, an interdisciplinary field focused on the analysis of sustainability of global, national and regional economic systems. An elegant guide, the book offers a range of cutting edge methods used in sustainability research including multicriteria decision aid (MCDA), input-output analysis, and life cycle analysis. This book is packed with references for students with some background in economics, environmental science or mathematics who aim to develop the analytical skills required for redirecting our development path towards sustainability in government, international organisations, academia, non-profit sector and business. As such, the book is primarily aimed at MSc and first year PhD students reading for degrees in Environmental Change and Management, Ecological Economics, Environmental Management, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and those taking part in similar programmes. The book strives to develop the idea that a significant adjustment of the current economic theories is required, an idea supported by the emerged world economic crisis, the climatic and biodiversity crisis the world is currently facing and the enormously slow progress that has been made in the field of reorientation of the global economy towards sustainability. The practical case studies provided focus on the most pressing topics of today, and the book adopts a positive approach for problem solving and strategic development, which is aimed at educating the future decision makers and business leaders.