ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY

How does economic analysis need to change if it is to properly address the issue of sustainability in environmental policy response?

How does economic analysis need to change if it is to properly address the issue of sustainability in environmental policy response?

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development is a new concept of public interest, applied to the economic growth and global reconsidered to take into account the environmental aspects of a general globalized world. Sustainable development is: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations”, two concepts are inherent in this notion:

The concept of "needs" is particularly the essential needs of the poor, who should be given the highest priority.

In time: we have the right to use the resources of the Earth, but the duty to ensure its sustainability for future generations;

In the area: every human has the same right to the resources of the Earth (the principle of the universal destination of goods).

All sectors are concerned with sustainable development: the agriculture, the industry, the home, family organization, but also a service (finance, tourism) which, contrary to popular opinion sometimes, is not that consequential (Sharma, 2007, pp.85-89).

Issues and sustainable development goals

Ecological crisis and social

The Industrial Revolution of the Nineteen Century brought growth criteria mainly economic, easily measurable primary criterion: thus the gross domestic product whose origin dates back to the 1930s often seen as the indicator of the wealth of a country. Corrections were made in the second half of the Nineteen Century the social, with significant social advances. The term "economic and social" is from part of the vocabulary. Developed countries have realized since the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 that their material prosperity was based on extensive use of natural resources finite, and, therefore, in addition to the economic and, social, a third aspect had been neglected : the environment. (Ruffing, 2007, 222)

Some analysts, the model of industrial development are not sustainable or environmentally sustainable because it does not allow a "development" that will last. The crucial points for this assertion are the depletion of natural resources (raw materials, fossil fuels to humans), the destruction and fragmentation of ecosystems, including deforestation, which is manifested by the destruction of tropical forests (Amazon, Congo Basin forest, forest in Indonesia), and the reduction of biodiversity which reduce the resilience of the planet or the climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases and pollution in general due to human activities (Alcamo, 1990, 44).

The problem of sustainability is still a human mind to adapt. This is, in addition to an equity issue: the poor suffer the most ecological crisis and climate, and it feared that the growing interest in under-developed countries (often called the South) to a similar state of prosperity, built on similar principles, implies an even greater degradation and accelerated human habitat and perhaps the biosphere. So if, all states of the world adopted the American Way of Life (which consumes about 25% of the Earth's resources for 5% of the population) should ...