Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 446

Sustainability and policy

8

Having an understanding of climate change is one thing, but relating it to real-world
development is another. In the latter half of the 20th century it became apparent to
politicians that human impacts on the environment were sufficiently detrimental that
they undermined the sustainability of human well-being, and hence environmental
quality. 'Human well-being' is a catch-all term relating to material and cultural
standards as well as quality of life.
Many of these terms, while having a clear meaning to Western politicians and
policy-makers, have no strict definition or individual basis of quantitative indexing in
the strict scientific sense, although in some instances attempts have been made. Other
terms have been used so much by the media that they are often used in policy-making,
although human ecologists are often more precise. For example, 'carbon footprint' is
misleading as it generally does not include biofuels (which are carbon-based) and it
also seemingly relates to the spatial concept of ecological footprint as opposed to a
quantitative dimension of carbon mass. Academic comment on misleading terms and
usage has reached the highest impact-factor journals (for example, see Hammond,
2007). A better term is fossil carbon burden, or fossil burden for short. Indeed some
terms (such as medieval climatic optimum, climate tipping point and fertility that
were discussed in earlier chapters, and zero carbon, which will be mentioned in
section 8.5.1) are not only misleading but mean different things to different people.
In 2009, with regards to the term 'carbon neutral' the UK government's Department
of Energy and Climate Change even held a formal consultation on the term's usage
(Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2009).
'Sustainability' itself, as we shall see, does have a specific definition that is
enshrined in international agreements, and sustainability is affected by climate
change. The history of what politicians mean by sustainability, and how current
climate change issues affect it, are central to developing climate change and human
ecology from topics of academic interest to those of application. The history of
sustainability and climate change also provides a valuable lesson as to how long it
takes to recognise a problem scientifically and to get it into policy discussions, before
generating legislation and international agreements and then achieving a policy goal
with tangible results.

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