.png){kind=icon}
返回
On Intergenerational Commitment, Weak Sustainability, and Safety
.png){kind=icon}
OA
AI
DOI：10.3390/su12135381.png)
.png){kind=icon}
.png){kind=icon}
分享.png){kind=icon}
收藏
摘要
En 中文
This article examines sustainability from a policy perspective rooted in environmental economics and environmental ethics. Endorsing the Brundtland Commission stance that each generation should have undiminished opportunity to meet its own needs, I emphasize the foundational status of the intergenerational commitment. The standard concepts of weak and strong sustainability, WS and SS, are sketched and critiqued simply and intuitively, along with the more recent concept of WS-plus. A recently proposed model of a society dependent on a renewable but vulnerable resource (Barfuss et al. 2018) is introduced as an expositional tool, as its authors intended, and used as a platform for thought experiments exploring the role of risk management tools in reducing the need for safety. Key conclusions include: (i) Safety, in this case, the elimination of risk in uncertain production systems, comes at an opportunity cost that is often non-trivial. (ii) Welfare shocks can be cushioned by savings and diversification, which are enhanced by scale. Scale increases with geographic area, diversity of production, organizational complexity, and openness to trade and human migration. (iii) Increasing scale enables enhancement of sustainable welfare via local and regional specialization, and the need for safety and its attendant opportunity costs is reduced. (iv) When generational welfare is stochastic, the intergenerational commitment should not be abandoned but may need to be adapted to uncertainty, e.g., by expecting less from hard-luck generations and correspondingly more from more fortunate ones. (v) Intergenerational commitments must be resolved in the context of intragenerational obligations to each other in the here and now, and compensation of those asked to make sacrifices for sustainability has both ethical and pragmatic virtue. (vi) Finally, the normative domains of sustainability and safety can be distinguished-sustainability always, but safety only when facing daunting threats.
Keyword:
sustainability
intergenerational commitment
weak sustainability
strong sustainability
safety
risk management
organizational scale
intragenerational obligations
AI总结
对已上传原文的论文进行重点信息的提取，主要内容包括：简要概述、研究摘要、背景介绍、关键亮点、图文解析、展望与总结。
期刊
IF:
3.3
论文数:
10.7W
被引数:
28.4W
机构
引用论文
.png){kind=icon}
分享收藏分享收藏分享收藏
查看更多内容