Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Characterizing global environmental risks
Risks manifest themselves on many spatial levels. Global environmental risks may
be characterized in two ways:
1
Risks, like climate change, that are essentially
systemic
- environmental change
at any locale can affect the environment elsewhere and even the global system
itself.
2
Risks that are essentially
cumulative
- for example degradation of ecosystems,
continuing deforestation, water contamination and industrial toxic pollutants.
Jeanne Kasperson and Roger Kasperson conceptualize both systemic and cumulative
risk as induced by human action, arguing that many risks remain hidden from public
view by ideology, competing societal priorities - for example, economic development
or poverty eradication - political marginality and cultural bias. Global environmental
risk analysis calls into question current approaches to knowledge, knowledge
management and knowledge generation. As Kasperson and Kasperson write:
The idea that the future is negotiable, and that affected parties are now dif-
ferentially involved (or not involved) in the negotiations, brings forward
considerations of power, equity and social justice - and equitable outcomes and
equitable processes for getting to those outcomes. The obstacles to broad public
participation in creating global futures are many, ranging from lack of access
to information and expertise all the way to brute exclusionary force. Equity and
the future are linked not just through reference to 'responsibilities for future
generations' but by questions of who controls access to the future and who
chooses the trajectories of change. Those who live in the present live, after all,
in the layered remnants of a series of failed former utopias - concretized versions
of earlier visions of how things might be.
(2001: 7)
Kasperson and Kasperson identify five important elements in understanding
contemporary global environmental risks:
•
Global environmental risk is the ultimate threat.
•
Uncertainty is a persistent feature both of understanding process and causation
and of predicting outcomes.
•
Global environmental risk manifests itself in different ways at different spatial
scales.
•
Vulnerability is a function of variability and distribution in physical and
socio-economic systems, the limited human ability to cope with additional
and sometimes accumulating hazards, and the social and economic constraints
that limit these abilities.
•
Futures are not given, they must be negotiated.
(2001: 4-5)
Kasperson and Kasperson schematically represent the processes involved in societal
response to global environmental risk, identifying cyclical and iterative feedback
