Environmental Policy

Jane Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136908521
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Evidence of climate change, resource shortages and biodiversity loss is growing in significance year by year. This second edition of Environmental Policy explains how policy can respond and bring about greater sustainability in individual lifestyles, corporate strategies, national policies and international relations. The book discusses the interaction between environmental and human systems, proposing environmental policy as a way to steer human systems to function within environmental constraints.

The second edition has been completely updated to reflect advances in scholarship (for example developments in governance theory) and the increasing primacy of climate policy within environmental policy as a whole. Key political, social and economic concepts are used to explain how effective environmental policies can be designed, implemented and evaluated. Environmental problems, the role of human beings in creating them and sustainable development are all introduced. Environmental policy formulation, implementation and evaluation are discussed within three specific contexts: the firm, the nation state and at an international level. The book reviews the relationship of economics, science and technology to environmental policy. It ends by reflecting upon the predicament of humankind in the twenty-first century and the potential of achieve sustainability through the use of the environmental policy 'toolbox'.

Environmental Policy is an accessible text with a multi-disciplinary perspective. Lively case studies drawn from a range of international examples – and completely updated for this second edition – illustrate issues such as climate change, international trade, tourism and human rights. It includes chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and links to relevant web resources.

1
So, what’s the problem?

This chapter will:

• introduce the concepts of environmental capital and environmental services;

• use the issues of resources, waste and pollution, population growth, biodiversity and quality of life to illustrate these concepts;

• propose a definition of ‘environmental problem’ and discuss its application;

• discuss the relative roles of natural and human factors in causing environmental problems;

• introduce the potential of environmental policy to prevent, diminish or solve environmental problems.

Why the environment matters

The human race is utterly dependent on the natural environment. All the things that we can see, touch, need or desire are either part of the environment or have been produced from resources that were extracted from the environment. Without an environment capable of providing air, water and food, human beings could not even have evolved, and our evolution has been shaped by the environment and environmental change. The global economy, which at the time this book was published was sustaining almost seven billion human beings, is utterly dependent upon a stream of raw materials. Whether these are animal, vegetable or mineral in nature, their origin is environmental.

However, resource provision is only one aspect of the environment on which humankind is dependent. Air, water and land act as sinks for the wastes that are the inevitable products of the processes that demand resources. People use the environment to procure shelter, safety, aesthetic pleasure and spiritual sustenance. Each of these uses can be thought of as an environmental service: a service that the environment provides for the individuals who comprise the human race.

Conceptualising the environment in terms of its ability to service the human race is an approach increasingly used by environmental policy makers. Attributes of the environment can be thought of as environmental capital capable of providing services which people can use. Thus a river is environmental capital to the extent that it provides environmental services, for example, water for irrigation and fish to be eaten. Other environment services the river might supply are to receive and carry away storm water and sewage from human habitations, and as a recreational and leisure resource – a pleasant place for people to enjoy.

Environmental capital and services are concepts borrowed from economics, where financial capital is money that has been invested to produce a stream of income from interest or dividends. The concepts are useful in the definition and characterisation of environmental problems and are therefore used to underpin the analysis in this (and later) chapters of some of the key environmental issues which are perplexing policy makers during the early decades of the twenty-first century: resources; pollution and waste; population growth; biodiversity; and quality of life.

Resources

The term ‘resource’ is used to describe:

material resources of use to individuals and society;

flows of energy which can be harnessed for useful purposes;

other attributes of the environment that contribute something of value.

Usefulness and value are therefore key in the definition of resources and these concepts are culturally determined. Even the ways in which the basic resource needs for food, water and materials to construct shelter and warm clothing are met vary between cultural groups.

Examples of material resources are minerals, such as metal ores or stone for buildings; or agricultural or forestry products. Usually, when the term resources is used, it will be a reference to material resources such as these, which have clear economic value and can be accounted for in terms of weight or volume. When coal or uranium is extracted from the ground, this is an example of a mineral resource being mined in order to provide energy. In this case, the primary resource we are concerned with is a material substance.

It is possible to analyse the use of material resources and production of wastes in human economies by looking at the complete life cycle of a resource, from its environmental cradle to its environmental grave. Such a system is called a resource cycle.

Consider the resource cycles depicted in Figures 1.1 and 1.2. Note that primary resources are those extracted directly from the environment, whilst secondary resources are obtained from materials which have already entered the resource cycle, e.g. by recycling. It can be seen that the components of these systems are:

extraction of the primary resource from the environment;

concentration, refining and purification of the resource;

use of the resource to manufacture economically useful goods;

use of the goods within the human economy;

designation of the goods, or their by-products, as wastes at the end of their usefulness;

possible recovery of secondary resources, i.e. materials or energy, from the waste materials;

disposal of the waste materials;

assimilation of the waste materials into environmental sinks.

Note that the resource cycle diagrams give no information about the relative locations of the component processes, nor their timescales. Also missing from the diagram are the other resources which are needed to extract, use and dispose of the resource and resultant waste materials – for example the resources needed to produce energy to power these processes.

Energy flows can also be regarded as resources. When devices or buildings are designed to capture energy from the environment, for example wind turbines or houses designed for passive solar gains, the primary resources are forms of energy, not materials.

The word resource is also used to describe attributes of the environment. The term ‘land resource’ is used to describe the hectarage of land available for a particular purpose, for example arable crops, grassland for grazing or moorland for recreation. Rivers and oceans are also resources, providing fish and other foodstuffs. Whereas some resources of this type are of direct economic use because they are the source, for example, of inputs to agriculture or manufacturing, other environmental attributes have value of a different kind. For example, local communities often conceive open space within a city as a resource, yet it creates no tangible economic outputs. The contribution that this type of environmental service makes to the quality of life is discussed later in this chapter.

Figure 1.1 The fish resource cycle

Figure 1.2 The copper resource cycle

Flow and stock resources

Resources can be classified into renewable (or flow) resources and non-renewable (or stock) resources. For renewable resources the rate at which natural cycles produce the resource is of the same order, or faster than, the rate at which the resource is consumed, thus maintaining environmental capital. For non-renewable resources the rate of production of the resource is much slower than the rate at which the resource is consumed, so that environmental capital is inevitably depleted.

Table 1.1 gives examples of renewable and non-renewable resources. For some resources the distinction is clear. Fossil fuels (such as oil, coal and natural gas) were formed by biological and geological processes that have taken place since the Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago. Given this extremely long cycle of generation, fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. Similarly, some resources are clearly renewable. Energy from the Sun falls upon the Earth at a rate of 173 million million kilowatts. It is clearly impossible to ‘use up’ this resource as human activity can have only a minor effect on its rate of arrival (although see Box 4.2).

Table 1.1 Renewable and non-renewable resources in Great Britain

For some other resources the boundary between renewable and non-renewable is less distinct, as Table 1.1 shows. Paper is made from wood pulp, which is a renewable resource – but only if forestry is managed so that timber is regenerated at the same rate that it is harvested (see Box 3.2). In this case, renewability becomes dependent on environmental management – maintaining a balance between the rate of usage and the rate of regeneration. If this does not occur then the resource becomes depleted, as is the case with some fish populations which have become depleted through over-exploitation, for example those of the North West Atlantic (MacGarvin 2002; see also Box 7.2).

Sometimes it is not just the quantity, but also the quality of a resource that is important. Water is a good example here. Water as a chemical (H₂O) is abundant on the Earth – 71 per cent of the g...

Table of contents

• Routledge Introductions to Environment Series
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Boxes
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 So, what’s the problem?
• 2 The roots of environmental problems
• 3 Sustainable development and the goals of environmental policy
• 4 Science and technology
• 5 Environmental policy making in organisations
• 6 Environmental policy making in government
• 7 International environmental policy
• 8 Environmental economics
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index