Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Production of
energy-efficient
fuel-cell cars
Underground CO
2
storage using
abandoned oil wells
Forest
conservation
High-speed trains
No-till
cultivation
Deep-sea
CO
2
storage
Solar-cell
fields
Bicycling
Wind farms
Cluster
housing
development
Communities of
passive solar homes
Landfill
Recycling
plant
Water
conservation
Recycling, reuse,
and composting
Figure 18-5
Solutions:
Some components of the more environmentally sustainable economic development
favored by ecological economists, environmental economists, and environmental scientists. The goal is to have
economic systems that put more emphasis on conserving and sustaining the air, water, soil, biodiversity, and
other natural resources that sustain all life and all economies.
Environmental and ecological economists and en-
vironmental scientists call for the development and
adoption of new indicators to help monitor environ-
mental quality and human well-being. One approach
is to develop indicators that
add
to the GDP the costs of
things not counted in the marketplace that enhance en-
vironmental quality and human well-being. They
would also
subtract
from the GDP the costs of things
that lead to a lower quality of life and deplete natural
resources.
One such indicator is the
genuine progress indicator
(GPI),
introduced in 1995 by Redefining Progress, a
nonprofit organization that develops economics and
policy tools to help evaluate and promote sustainabil-
ity. (The same group developed the concept of ecologi-
cal footprints, Figure 1-7, p. 11) Within the GPI, the es-
timated value of beneficial transactions that meet basic
needs, but in which no money changes hands, are
18-2 USING ECONOMICS TO IMPROVE
ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
Environmental and Economic Indicators
We need new indicators that reflect changing levels of
environmental quality and human health.
Gross domestic product (GDP)
and
per capita GDP
indica-
tors provide a standardized and useful method for
measuring and comparing the economic outputs of
nations. The GDP is deliberately designed to measure
the annual economic value of all goods and services
produced within a country without attempting to dis-
tinguish between those goods and services that are en-
vironmentally or socially beneficial and those that are
harmful. Economists who developed the GDP many
decades ago never intended it to be used for measur-
ing environmental quality or human well-being.
