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Lectures Economics and Sustainable Development
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LECTURESEconomics and sustainable development – 2023
1
,TABLE OF CONTENT
Lecture 1: Introduction; sustainability: what and why?..............................................................3
Lecture 2: Weak VS Strong sustainability..................................................................................6
Lecture 3: How to value nature?...............................................................................................11
Lecture 4: The limits of economic growth as we know it.........................................................14
Lecture 5: Alternatives for the future........................................................................................20
Lecture 6: Impacting individual behaviors...............................................................................24
Lecture 7: Engaging citizens.....................................................................................................27
Lecture 8: Transnational policies..............................................................................................31
Lecture 9: Innovation policy and the energy sector..................................................................35
Lecture 10: Circular economy...................................................................................................40
Lecture 11: Business Models....................................................................................................42
Lecture 12 – Climate, finance and the role of banks.................................................................45
Lecture 13: Money and green finance across the world...........................................................50
Lecture 14: Conclusions............................................................................................................53
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,Lecture 1: Introduction; sustainability: what and why?
IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change): scientists who work together to get all
literature and knowledge to understand reality and what might happen with climate change.
They make a report out of this, which can be used by others. They don’t research themselves,
but they bring all literature and knowledge together in a report.
The world population is growing every year, more and more. The population is growing too
fast, to be sustainable. But it is about the way we consume and produce; the lifestyle. It is way
more complicated than just the size of the population.
- We have grown richer in human history. Our GDP (gross domestic product) per capita
increased a lot. The GDP is the main indicator when we want to measure the wealth. It
measures the economy outputting the society; all the specific goods and services
produced. The GDP per capita makes some comparison between very different
countries, because you want to see how much wealth is produced per country per
capita.
o But the fact that we have grown richer, is not everywhere. We, in the west,
have a welfare state and have the wealth t be able to give services for also a
better life expectancy. Poorer countries do not have access to for instance
healthcare.
o Money is important to switch to sustainability. Therefore, it is important to
look at the welfare of countries to search for opportunities.
- As we grow richer, we also need more energy. In the history we have used a lot of
nonrenewable energy. We are using a lot of energy, and we do not have enough
capacity for now for renewable energy. Plus, not everyone has access to energy; more
pressure on the environment because we are going to need even more energy.
o Material footprint; how much natural resources we need to extract to be able
to produce everything we consume in society.
Earth Overshoot Day: the day in the year we have
used more nature, than they can renew.
Planetary boundaries; if you stay in the safe
operating space (green), then humanity can continue
to develop for future generations. If you go to the red
zone, it can increase on large scale the irreversibility.
It shows that the problem is not only climate change,
but many things in the environment; land-system
change (pressure we put on land), fresh water and use
(less availability of fresh water), biological chemical
flows (everything we reject in nature), ocean
acidification (nature that is leaving in the ocean),
novel entities (plastic) etc. This image is from 2009,
and we are now also overshooting freshwater use.
3
, Environmental pressure
- Each doubling of wealth leads to 80% more environmental pressures.
- The global economy is almost already 5 times the size it was half a century ago; we
grew drastically. But there was also a degradation of 60% of the worlds’ ecosystems.
A lot of scientists will talk about the new extinction.
o Impacts of the environmental pressure: change in rainfall patterns, frequency
of extreme events impacts jobs, lives and migration patterns.
The number of migrants is going to grow, because of the climate
matters. Climate migration mostly happens inside continents.
For an economy you need: labor, capital and land. But now we live in a very specific
economic system. The economic system (capitalism) is characterized by:
- Most of means of production (labor, land & money) are privately owned; this is done
by die influence of market powers. If you have more money, you have more market
power.
- Production for markets, including fictitious commodities as labor, land and money.
- Profit motive; profit is the main motivation when
we produce something.
- Price mechanism (under free-regulated markets) to
allocate and distribute resources.
- Mass production, but also mass consumption.
A lot of policies, focus only on carbon emissions. Climate
change is the most urgent problem, but we need to focus
not only on this when we talk about sustainability. It is
also about biodiversity loss, inequality etc.
In brief
- Economic and the environment are not separated.
It is all dependent on each other.
- Many constraints; environmental, but also social.
- We need a sustainable development; development.
The origins of sustainable development
- Club of Rome (1972): Limits to Growth
o ‘a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the
future and capable of satisfying the basic material needs of people’
- Goldsmith (1972): A blueprint for Survival
o ‘a stable society that could be sustained indefinitely while giving optimum
satisfaction to its members’
- Brundtland’s World Commission on Environment and Development (1987)
o ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs’
4
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