Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
18.4.2 Role of International Coordinating Institutes ................................................... 374
18.4.2.1 Facilitating Knowledge and Experience Transfer .............................. 374
18.4.2.2 Assisting in Provision of Realistic Technological,
Socioeconomic, and Environmental Assessments ............................. 374
18.4.2.3 Facilitating Funding and Commercialization of Promising
Solutions ................................................................................................... 374
18.4.2.4 Coordinating and Monitoring Regulation and Ethical Aspects ...... 375
18.5 Conclusions ......................................................................................................................... 375
References ..................................................................................................................................... 375
18.1 Introduction
Several investigations have been conducted to disclose the relationship between environ-
mental degradation, economic growth, technology advancement, and political and insti-
tutional factors (Kuznets, 1955; Grossman and Krueger, 1995; Jordan, 2010). For instance,
according to B.R. Jordan (2010), the following equation has been introduced:
Impact = Population × Afluence × Technology
On the basis of this equation, the environmental impact (negative) increases proportionally
with an income per capita (afluence) increment. However, there are aspects not seen in the
above equation such as the fact that economic growth does not always correlate with envi-
ronmental degradation. It is also possible that technological improvement reduces negative
impacts from population and economic growth. Given the complexity of solving a multivari-
able equation between the environment and various affecting determinants, one approach is
to consider the relationship between two selected variables and investigate the effect of others
on the mentioned link. A useful contribution in this direction was Grossman and Krueger's
(1995) work focusing on the relationship between environmental degradation and economic
growth represented by income per capita (gross domestic production [GDP]) trends. The
result was named an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) after the name of Simon Kuznets
(1955), who irst used this approach to focus on the relationship between national income per
capita and inequality (Kuznets curve [KC]). The EKC is an extension of the KC concept.
The main goal of this chapter is to characterize the role of nanotechnology in preventing
or mitigating environmental degradation in developing countries. The result of the analysis
will help in the development of better technology policy for those countries. The EKC has
been used as a framework to pursue the aforementioned goal. We may provide a few rea-
sons to justify using the intermediary variable of economic growth (represented by GDP)
in our study. First, incorporating GDP will link our analysis to the rich context of economic
growth, which is quite familiar for policy makers. As a result, effective methods in compari-
son, assessment, and goal setting may be adopted. Second, the results of the analysis can
be quantiied both in time and GDP dimensions and, third, the proposed approach can be
integrated with common environmental cost-beneit analysis and broaden its scope, which
leads to a better decision-making practice. On the other hand, we will try to identify the con-
ditions and factors that may affect the elasticity of the EKC to nanotechnology advancement.
In this chapter, the special case of application of nanotechnology in water and waste-
water is considered. Water pollution and scarcity are very important examples of current
global environmental challenges. First, we revisit the EKC as an empirical framework for
