Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
considered reversible depends upon the time period over which one considers revers-
ibility should be assessed, and whether the capital and labour will exist in future to
reclaim the land.
While there will be some adverse effect on large-scale environmental systems,
waiting for posited thresholds of irreversibility would be neither precautious nor
wise. Yet land-take for built infrastructure continues across economic sectors, of which
aviation is, of course, only one among many. It is this growth in the
scale
of the human
economy that has long been identified as potentially problematic environmentally
(Daly, 1977, 1992), and which regulators may now also be identifying as a key cause
of continuing environmental problems (EEA, 2001a, 2001b). At the heart of envi-
ronmental and sustainability debate are differences in perception and response to
this growth in economic scale.
UK government sustainability objectives
Use of an even wider set of sustainability principles complicates the decision process
and makes the opportunity for disagreement more explicit. The UK government, for
example, has defined four broad objectives of sustainable development that it con-
siders should be met at the same time, in the UK and the world as a whole (DETR,
1999):
•
social progress that recognizes the needs of everyone;
•
effective protection of the environment;
•
prudent use of natural resources; and
•
maintenance of high and stable levels of economic growth and employment.
These objectives are patently much broader in scope than the environmentally focused
OECD principles discussed above. Most importantly, they are neither necessarily
commensurate or compatible. In the first case, they are different in nature, and in
the second they are interrelated in such a way that the advancement of one is possi-
ble at the expense of another. In particular, inclusive social progress, environmental
protection and prudent use of natural resources may not only be sacrificed to high
and stable levels of economic growth and employment, but the latter may actually
require that sacrifice to the extent that material usage and inequity are not de-linked
from GDP growth. Perhaps a more critical issue is the extent to which high and sta-
ble levels of employment require continuously high levels of economic growth as a
result of productivity increases (Fleming, 1996). It is arguably the competitive drive
for the latter at a corporate and national level that is fuelling growth in environmen-
tal impact.
The ATAG/INFRAS approach to sustainable aviation
While aviation could be considered in terms of further sets of sustainability principles,
there is a particular study that merits reference here, namely the report
Sustainable
Aviation
by INFRAS (2000) for the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG). ATAG is
an industry lobby group and
Sustainable Aviation
is a collation and analysis of some
of the evidence that one might consider when relating sustainability to aviation.
