12. Sustainable Development
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People
need food, water and air for their growth, sustenance of
their bodies and procreation. Production, in its turn, needs energy,
water and air as well as huge amounts of minerals, chemicals and
biological material to produce goods, to
facilitate human life, to
maintain the system of production and ensure its increase. In accord-
ance with fundamental laws, people – and plant-consumed materials
and energy do not vanish. Materials can be recycled, or they turn
into waste and pollution, whereas energy is dispersed as heat.
Materials and energy consumed by population and capital are
extracted from the Earth, returning waste and heat to the Earth
instead. There is a constant flow from the global sources of energy
and materials via economy to the environ ment,
where waste and
pollution are accumulated. However, there are definite limits to the
increase rate of the use of materials and energy and the resultant
production of waste, so that it would not harm people, economy or
the Earth’s absorption processes, regeneration and self-regulation.
All resources that people use – food, water, iron, phosphorus, oil
and thousands of others – are limited in terms of both their sources
and resulting emissions. These limits are complex, since both the
sources and emissions constitute part of a dynamic, interrelated and
single system – the Earth. There are short-term limits, for example,
the amount of oil in a reservoir stored for a specific purpose; there
are
also long-term limits, for example, the amount of oil in the
Earth. Sources and discharges can interact, while the planet can,
through natural processes, influence both the sources and pollutant
emissions. Thus, soil can be both a source for food production and
a recipient of acidic precipitations resulting from air pollution. The
capability of soil to perform a particular function largely depends on
the performance of other functions.
To introduce some clarity in this complexity and to define
long-term or equilibrium
limits to development, the World Bank
economist Herman Daly has offered three simple regularities:
1) for renewable resources – soil, water, forests, fish – the rate of
long-term use must not exceed that of their regeneration. For
example, catch of fish is viable if the fishing rate is in balance
with the reproduction of the remaining fish population;
2) for non-renewable resources – fossil fuels, high-concentration
mineral ores, natural underground water – the rate of their
balanced use must not exceed that of the use of renewable
resources to replace the non-renewable resources. For
example, the use of oil fields would be balanced if part of
profits were systematically invested in the production of
solar panels or planting trees. This means that when oil
reserves are exhausted, the flow of renewable energy will be
sustained;
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ENVIRONMENT, POLLUTION, DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF UZBEKISTAN
3) the rate of pollutant emissions must not exceed the rate of
ab sorp tion of pollution or the rate
of rendering it harmless
to the en vi ronment. For example, a discharge of wastewater
into a lake or a river is admissible only if the rate of
discharge corresponds to the ecosystem’s natural capability
of self-purification.
There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that development
and growth take place at the expense of irreversible depletion or
degradation of the existing resources.
The nature of human development demonstrates that people
do not use the Earth’s resources and possibilities of development
in a balanced way. Soil, surface waters and groundwater, wetlands,
nature and the environ ment are degrading.
Even in the places where
renewable resources seem to be plenty (for example, North American
forests or European soils), the quality and diversity of these resources
and their potential of survival can be questioned. Mineral and fossil
fuel resources are running out. Moreover, there is no plan and no
satisfactory capital investment programme to sustain industry when
fossil fuel will have run out. Pollution is accumulating – pollution
emission has started to overtake the flow of substances in their
biogeochemical cycles, and the chemical composition of the atmo-
sphere is changing.
If only a single resource or several resources run out while there is
sufficient amount of others, we might presume that growth will con-
tinue by replacing one resource with another (although there are limits
even to such replacement). However, if
many sources are depleted
and pollution flows are overloaded, there is no doubt that human
consumption of materials and energy has gone too far. Humanity will
have overstepped the limits of sustainable development.
These limits apply to the amount of raw materials that has been
used up over a given period of time. Humanity has accelerated the
consumption of resources not only in terms of space, rate of flows or
limits; this is also true concerning human population growth.
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