Environmental Protection And Sustainability

Environmental protection and sustainability

Prepared by

Islam Abdelnaser Abdelhafeez Student number:1791033

Environmental Protection

Increasingly, environmental protection is being incorporated more broadly into all human actions and into the process of development. Meeting our needs while protecting the environment is called sustainable development. Environmental protection has evolved from piecemeal local efforts to a much more comprehensive global strategy involving high levels of cooperation among states and nations covering a wide assortment of environmental problems (1).

All environmental problems result from the fact that human systems such as energy production and agriculture are unsustainable. They are inefficient in their use

In indicator development, the main emphasis has been on the production of new indicators. Various kinds of sustainable development indicators and indicator sets have been developed to describe and assess key trends at local, national and global level (7). Indicators are intrinsically and unavoidably normative and political. The proposal to approach the indicator that it reflects, and can further clarify and help to achieve, an important aspect of sustainable development.

Many discussions of sustainability, including Custance and Hillier (1998), invoke the idea that sustainable development is about the inter section of social, environmental and economic goals. This model, three-ring circus, is a great advance on treating social goals as dependent on or identical with economic goals, and environmental outcomes as residuals, or simply ignoring these two realms altogether. But it does not go sufficiently far for two reasons. First, the environment is a precondition for the other two. Without the planet's basic environmental life-support systems there can be no economy or society. Secondly, `the economy' is not an end in itself or a force of nature. It is a social construct. It only works as it does because human societies have created the institutions and inculcated the assumptions, expectations and behaviors which make it so. The only reason for keeping

the atmosphere’s ability to assimilate greenhouse gases or depletion of non-renewable resources, turn out to be the most difficult to put numbers to because of (for example) the notorious complexity and unpredictability of the climate system. Conversely, the environmental limits which can most easily be measured, such as a local habitat's ability to tolerate pollution or resource extraction without some dramatic `step' change, do not so obviously and unambiguously deserve to be treated as absolute constraints on policy. As Jacobs (1997) has argued, even where the science of environmental limits is clear, its interpretation and application in policy are unavoidably political and judgmental. Moreover, many invocations of environmental limits, for example in resisting new housing developments, are not really about the environment’s capacity but about the preferences of people who are already succulently lucky to live in desirable area (11).

The second is the `environmental footprint' (Wackernagel and Rees, 1995). This goes a step further, by trying to bring all ecological impacts down to a single common measure, the area of productive land needed to grow the necessary raw materials (or renewable substitutes for them) and/or to assimilate the relevant wastes. (The `land equivalent' of fossil fuel burning, for example, is the area needed to grow enough biomass crop to replace the fossil fuel, or to mop up the carbon