Sustainability Science Chapter 1 PDF

Sustainability Science An Introduction CHAPTER 1 Sustainable Earth: Human Intervention Earth, our home planet, has been around for 4.5 billion years. 248 million years ago, a major extinction event wiped out 90% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life. Surviving spe...

Sustainability Science An Introduction CHAPTER 1 Sustainable Earth: Human Intervention Earth, our home planet, has been around for 4.5 billion years. 248 million years ago, a major extinction event wiped out 90% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life. Surviving species evolved, and life on Earth flourished once more. Dinosaurs and mammals emerged 225 million years ago. Then, 65 million years ago, Dinosaurs went extinct. Over 130,000 years ago, homo sapiens made our grand entrance. Just 70,000 years ago, we started painting caves, the first signs of consciousness. To put it in perspective, if Earth's history was a year old, our act started just 15 minutes ago. Course Outline/Outcome The student should be able to explain about - - - the Principle, Concepts & Context the brief History - - - of sustainability. Planet Earth Our world is now understood to be planetary in scale, to be changing very fast, and to be situated either at: the threshold of a planetary disaster of unprecedented magnitude or at the beginning of a sustainable new era. Definition, Concept & Context Science in Sustainability Definition Sustainability Sustainability means enduring into the long-term future; it refers to systems and processes that are able to operate and persist on their own over long periods. Definition Emergence The German equivalent, Nachhaltigkeit, first appeared in the 1713 forestry book Sylvicultura Oeconomica written by Hans Carl von Carlowitz Carlowitz described how through sustainable management of this renewable resource, forests could supply timber indefinitely. Definition Sustainability - Attributes We are part of linked systems of humans and nature. A key attribute of the field is a recognition of 3 interrelated dimensions: ecological, economic, and social. Definition Sustainability - Attributes Those three key attributes, was the foundation of Sustainable Development (coined in the IUCN report 1980) It was made popular in the report Our Common Future (aka. Brundtland report, 1987) which explicitly points to the connection between environment, economics, and equity. Definition Sustainability Development Sustainable Development “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987, 43). Definition Sustainability in Fields To an Ecologist To an Economist To a Sociologist The ability of The ability of the market The ability of individuals ecosystems, such as the to optimally allocate and communities to lake ecosystem, to scarce resources, send maintain good health maintain their structure appropriate price signals, physically, mentally, and function while provide a mechanism for emotionally, and remaining resilient to investment, and spiritually while ensuring continue giving and maintain a healthy equity among and supporting life labour market between generations Definition Natural Capital Natural capital consists of the resources and services provided by ecosystems. Natural Resources Natural Services Definition Natural Capital Renewable Resources can support human activities indefinitely as long as we do not use them more rapidly than they can regenerate. Ecosystem Services, are the biological functions that support life, including the provision of materials and food, regulating seed dispersal, pollination, purification of air and water, and climate, supporting nutrient recycling, photosynthesis, assimilation of wastes, cultural tourism, and recreation. Concepts & Context Resilience Resilience science originated in the field of ecology and is based on the understanding that life is not static, and that change is inevitable. Resilience is the capacity of a system to accommodate disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure; it is the capacity to cope with change. Concepts & Context Resilience Sustainability and resilience are not synonymous but are interrelated concepts. They provide complementary frameworks that are employed toward the same goal: to enable social-ecological systems to continue into the long-term future. ‘Sustainability prioritizes outcomes; resilience prioritizes process” (Redman 2014, 37). Concepts & Context System Thinking The study of sustainability is the study of systems. A system is a coherently organized set of interconnected elements that constitute a whole, where the identity of the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. The properties of the whole cannot be predicted by examining the parts; they are emergent properties, arising from the relationships and interactions of the parts. Concepts & Context System Thinking The field known as systems science was popularized in 1972. The researchers analyzed in detail: How economic growth, consumption, and population growth would cause humans to exceed the limits of Earth’s carrying capacity and lead to a condition of overshoot. Concepts & Context System Thinking The many systems that make up the larger Earth system are known as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Complexity refers to systems that have outcomes that are indeterminate and cannot be predicted; their behavior is nonlinear. Their elements are interconnected, and it is not possible to change one component of a complex adaptive system without affecting other parts of the system, often in unpredictable ways. Concepts & Context System Thinking Humans have already overshot Earth’s carrying capacity and are living by depleting its natural capital and overfilling its waste sinks. Overshoot: the condition in which human demands exceed the regenerative capacities of the biosphere. Carrying capacity: the maximum number of individuals a given environment can support indefinitely. Concepts & Context System Thinking In 2010, Earth was operated at 140% of its capacity and is on track to be operating at 200% by the 2030s. Its inverse is the Ecological Footprint, the demand placed on nature for resources consumed and wastes absorbed, expressed as land area. Concepts & Context System Thinking – Avoiding overshoot Ecological economist Herman Daly (1990) identified four conditions for avoiding overshoot: To maintain the health of ecosystems (our life-support systems); To use renewable resources at a rate no faster than they can be regenerated; To use nonrenewable resources at a rate no faster than they can be replaced by the discovery of renewable substitutes; and To emit wastes and pollutants at a rate no faster than the rate at which they can be safely assimilated. Concepts & Context System Thinking – Tipping points Natural systems have “tipping points” or critical thresholds at which seemingly small changes cause a system to shift abruptly and irreversibly into a new state. One potential tipping point is global temperature, where a small increase in average temperature may trigger abrupt, large-scale, and irreversible changes in the global climate system. Concepts & Context Living in The Anthropocene The Holocene was the 10,000-year epoch spanning all of written human history until now. These extraordinarily stable conditions made it possible for the population to expand, agriculture to appear, and human cultures to arise and flourish. A new geological epoch is known as the Anthropocene, a time in which human activity has become such a powerful force that it has a major planet-scale impact. Concepts & Context Living in The Anthropocene A group of scientists (2009) undertook a collaborative research effort to define the crucial processes and global boundary conditions that could ensure that the planet remains stable. A Holocene-like state, called a “safe operating space” within which human society could continue to develop. Concepts & Context Living in The Anthropocene Researchers defined planetary boundaries for nine interdependent areas of the global commons: 1. Climate change 2. Biosphere Integrity (Biodiversity loss) 3. Land-system (use) change 4. Freshwater consumption 5. Biogeochemical Flow (Excess nitrogen and phosphorus production) 6. Ocean acidification 7. Atmospheric Aerosol Loading (Air pollution) 8. Stratospheric ozone depletion 9. Novel Entities (Chemical pollution) https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html Concepts & Context Living in The Anthropocene Many of these issues are what are known as wicked problems, problems that are difficult to solve because they are complex, interconnected, and continually evolving. Behind them all lie two fundamental drivers of consumption: economic growth model human population growth Concepts & Context Living in The Anthropocene Humans have gone through several major transitions in their history: 1. the discovery of fire 2. the development of language 3. the development of agriculture and civilization 4. the Industrial Revolution. Today we live on the threshold of what has been called the “fifth great turning”, a turn away from a fossil fuel-powered, climate-destabilizing, growth-based industrial economy and toward a sustainable, regenerative society. Context The question is not whether we will change, but how, and what form the transition will take. We will need not just technological adaptations, but social and political ones as well. We will need strong communities, networks of all kinds, and participatory governance at multiple scales, as we build the foundations for a thriving, sustainable human civilization and biosphere. Brief History Science in Sustainability  Las of t 200 con ideas Years cep & ts Ear Con ly ser vat ion Con Eco serva log t y ion - Env Mo ironm vem ent ent Le g isla tion Ideas, concepts & adaptions evolution Glo bal Sca le History T. Malthus 1798 G. P. Marsh 1864 J. Muir 1890 The Last 200 Years Population Cycle Man & Nature Yosemite N.Park 1798 Thomas Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population - Malthusian cycle Henry David Thoreau - Life in the Woods 1864 George Perkins Marsh, a US diplomat and historian, published Man and Nature 1890 John Muir - championed the idea of national parks - Yosemite National Park. Two years later, in 1892, he founded the Sierra Club 1908 Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius – first warning about climate change History J. Lacey 1900 T. Roosevelt Jr 1903 G. Pinchot 1905 Early Conservation Lacey Act National Park Sustainable Forest US congressman John Lacey, alarmed at the slaughter of birds to decorate hats, sponsored the Lacey Act of 1900 which made the interstate transport of illegally killed wildlife a federal offense. 1903 - First National Wildlife Refuge at Pelican Island in Florida for the protection of endangered brown pelicans 1906 - Antiquities Act, to protect the Grand Canyon and other areas that became national parks (Theodore Roosevelt) Gifford Pinchot – Chief US Forest Service in 1905 - public forest lands should be managed scientifically History E. Haekal C. Elton F. Clement A. Tansley Transformation 1860 1927 1916 1935 From Conservation to Ecology Ecology Food Web Ecological Succession Ecosystem “German biologist Ernst Haeckel began using the term “ecology” in his books and articles in the 1860s (Merchant 2007, 180). He wrote that biologists had overlooked “the relations of the organism to the environment, the place each organism takes in the household of nature, in the economy of all nature” The concept of the food web and food pyramid, outlined by zoologist Charles Elton in 1927, helped to put the human position in the natural world into a different perspective.  E. Haekal C. Elton F. Clement A. Tansley 1860 1927 1916 1935 Ecological Ecology Food Web Succession Ecosystem Frederic Clements was a central figure in the emerging field of ecology known for his theories about ecological succession in plant communities, a process that he believed led to the stable equilibrium of climax vegetation (Merchant 2007, 182). The view he laid out in his 1916 book Plant Succession is called the organismic approach to ecology because for him a plant community was like a complex living organism. An economic approach to ecology developed as a kind of alternative to organismic ecology. British ecologist Arthur Tansley first introduced the term ecosystem in a 1935 paper.  A few years later, in 1942, ecologist Raymond Lindeman re-introduced the concept of the “food chain” or trophic levels. This branch of ecology was expanded during the 1960s by ecologist Eugene Odum, who argued that the economic approach that works for maximizing the productivity of ecosystems can lead to degraded ecosystems. He proposed applying science and ethical principles to repair damaged ecosystems. Chaos theory and complexity theory, a branch of mathematics that developed in the 1970s and 1980s, influenced the study of ecology. In their 1985 book The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics, ecologists S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White described ecosystems as dynamic rather than homogeneous stable systems of successional climax communities. History R. Carson P. Ehlrich The Beginning of 1962 1968 Environment Movement Silent Spring Population Bomb Books, conferences, and college classes on environmental topics first began to appear in the early 1970s. The movement was heralded by the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. The Population Bomb, published by biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968, was another influential best seller in the 1960s that raised awareness of environmental issues. presaged in 1948 by the influential bestseller Road to Survival by ecologist William Vogt  The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 In 1973 conflict in the Middle East led to an Arab oil embargo and a fuel shortage known as the “oil crisis.” At the same time as the energy crisis, in 1973, British economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.  Love Canal was a pleasant community near the iconic Niagara Falls whose homes and schools were built on the former waste site of a chemical company. As mothers of school children talked to each other they discovered an unexpected and alarming pattern of miscarriages, birth defects, and childhood cancer. One of the mothers, Lois Gibbs, organized a community group whose members educated themselves about hazardous waste and put pressure on the state and the federal government. In 1978 President Carter declared a State of Emergency. The Love Canal disaster led to the passage of legislation in 1980 that became known as Superfund, establishing a system for identifying and cleaning up hazardous waste sites. History Legislation in The 1970s (US) The year 1970 began with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) being signed into law by President Nixon on January 1 with great fanfare. NEPA resulted in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) It was established to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfil the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.  Clean Air Act during 1970 The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act established standards for contaminants in public water supplies. The Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 – amendment from an earlier act It required that all navigable waters in the US be “fishable and swimmable” by 1983 and prohibited all discharge of pollutants into navigable waters without a permit by 1985. The Act also regulated the potential filling of wetlands. Energy conservation was promoted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975.  In 1972 the use of DDT was banned and the Federal Pesticide Control Act, an amendment of the earlier Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, was passed. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was passed in 1976; it regulated manufacture, sale, use, and disposal to prevent unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), also passed in 1976, regulated the generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous wastes as necessary to protect human health and the environment. History Legislation Earlier laws, with their roots in the nineteenth century, had focused on using and exploiting natural resources. The new laws focused on conservation and preservation.  Endangered Species Act of 1973, protected species and “the ecosystems upon which they depend.” The ESA is administered by the US FWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). In addition to preventing extinction, the ESA is also intended to help threatened or endangered species recover. Once a species has gone through a listing process and has been listed as threatened or endangered, FWS and NMFS are required to create a detailed recovery plan. A 1978 amendment to the ESA noted that the goal of the law is to make itself unnecessary, and recovery plans are a means toward that goal. However, the existence of this law has not prevented species from going extinct at an accelerating rate, both in the US and worldwide. History Expanding to The Global Scale On December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission sent astronauts around the moon. The astronauts entered the lunar orbit planning to take photos of the moon’s surface. They looked up to see the Earth rising over the moon’s horizon; amazed, they grabbed a camera and took an unplanned picture. When the photograph of “Earthrise” reached Earth in a live broadcast, people saw a tiny blue and white planet floating in the black void of space. People began to use the term “spaceship Earth” as a reminder that this world in which we live is finite and the only home we have. Galen Rowell, a photographer for Life and National Geographic magazines, called Earthrise “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”. Expanding to The Global Scale United Nations (UN), a union of countries worldwide that by definition is global in scope, organized the first-ever global environment summit, the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, Sweden. establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 1980 - World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), commissioned by UNEP. Expanding to The Global Scale The Worldwatch Institute was founded by Lester Brown in 1973 to measure worldwide progress toward sustainability. However, it ceased in 2017. The Worldwatch Institute released its first annual State of the World report in 1984. The report made a clear connection between economic development and the environment. An overview chapter observed, “We are living beyond our means, largely by borrowing against the future” Expanding to The Global Scale In 1983, the UN created the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway. In 1983 the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences published reports connecting the buildup of greenhouse gases and rising temperatures The Commission’s 1987 report Our Common Future, often called “the Brundtland report” By 1988 the UNEP acknowledged the magnitude of the issue and, together with the World Meteorological Organization, established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Expanding to The Global Scale 1992 - Delegates from 180 countries agreed to a set of 27 principles in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, often called simply the Rio Declaration. They adopted Agenda 21, a “comprehensive blueprint for a global partnership [that] strives to reconcile the twin requirements of a high-quality environment and a healthy economy for all people of the world” Expanding to The Global Scale The Kyoto Protocol - was signed in 1997 and went into effect in 2005. It was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries by 5% from their 1990 levels by 2012. In 2000, members of the United Nations ushered in the new millennium at a special Millennium Conference, where they adopted a set of goals aimed at halving extreme poverty in all its forms, including hunger, illiteracy, and disease, by 2015 The Millennium Declaration established a set of 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) SDG Goals 2012 - The UN Conference on Sustainable Development, often referred to as Rio+20, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its outcome document, “The Future We Want”. In 2013, the General Assembly set up a 30-member Open Working Group to develop a proposal on the SDGs. 2015 - The General Assembly began the negotiation process on the post-2015 development agenda. The process culminated in the subsequent adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.  2015 was a landmark year for multilateralism and international policy shaping, with the adoption of several major agreements: Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (March 2015) Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development (July 2015) Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 SDGs was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York (September 2015) Paris Agreement on Climate Change (December 2015) Questions?