Environment And Human Development

Environment and Human Development (A summary of different articles on the environment and human development) Summarized by Preetam Pandey Civil Engineer

Environment versus human activity today can be called one of today’s dilemmas. On the one hand, the humanity is concerned with all those environmental problems that we face today. Global warming, greenhouse effect, air pollution, and so on – all these are the results of human activity. Human behavior lies at the root of both conservation and environmental damage. Environment is not always protected by the humans who are rated as poor or nor they are protected by those who are rated rich. Changes or the degradation of the environment has been caused due to the human response or the interaction in complex ways between them. The assumption that environment or nature will always accommodate human needs is a clear misunderstanding of natural forces. The first Human Development Reports have not explicitly considered the role of the natural environment in enhancing people’s choices but in more recent editions, the environment and more broadly sustainable development have been progressively introduced (UNDP, 1996). In the year 2000, the definition of the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations definitively recognized the full integration of human development and the environment as mutually reinforcing development goals.

For too many of the world’s people, environmental degradation eclipses the hopes of meeting even the most basic human needs. The world’s poor depend disproportionately on ecosystem services, and are highly vulnerable to their disruption. With few alternative income sources, their survival and livelihoods are based on small scale agriculture, grazing, harvesting and hunting or fishing. In developing countries, one person in five lakhs access to safe water, 1.0 billion people live in dry land damaged by soil degradation and 1.2 billion live on less than $ 1 a day (Don Melnick, 2005). Environmental sustainability must be viewed not only as an issue

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for the poor. In fact, considerable evidence suggests that the greatest threats to environmental sustainability derive from actions taken in the rich countries of the world. Deforestation, for example, is only partly caused by local demand for agricultural land or construction materials. It is even more fundamentally driven by the industrialized world’s demand for timber and growing international trade in forest products. Fisheries, mineral deposits, energy supplies, and bio-diversity resources are harvested in developed and developing countries alike; however, the preferences and demands of the world’s richest countries largely determine the scale and intensity of resource exploitation.

Technology and human knowledge may reduce particular conditions or scarcity and other consequences, but as long as human survival demands air, water, food produced on the basis of natural resources, including biodiversity, nature will always have the upper hand. There is also a clear understanding that with or without human hands upto a point, the environment is changing in its natural way because environment possesses in-built regulating processes. The question is upto what extent, significant changes will take place and many of them unfriendly to human societies. It is therefore upto us (human) to decide how we wish to interact with the environment – antagonistically or harmoniously. It is also a well known fact that human dimension towards natural resources has now reached dangerous global proportions.

Environmental impacts are being seen almost everywhere on the planet. The world’s developed countries have largely driven global climate change, which threatens human wellbeing, ecosystem and biodiversity. Although developed countries represent only 20 percent of the world’s population, they have generated 80 percent of historical GHG emission (Don Melnick, 2005). Increase in green house gases (GHGs), pollution of water bodies, increased dependence on pesticides and many other problems now pose dilemmas of most countries. Human development is leading the environment with significant changes in the ecosystem and the change in ecosystem cannot be compensated which is leading the planet to a number of major global problems that did not exist before or were not recognized as such.

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Agriculture and industrial revolutions aimed at increasing the production of materials and providing services. Demands for agricultural land has compelled many societies to cultivate marginal areas, thereby increasing soil erosion, deforestation, and a number of other environmental degradation. The rapid increase in population is likely to outstrip the capacity of natural systems to support human needs. Today’s industrial economies consume unsustainable quantities of energy and raw materials and produce large volumes of wastes and polluting emission. However, these revolutions has improved the living standard of the people and contributed to make economic growth faster. These increased resource consumption and changes in patterns, enhanced employment generation, and meet the essential human needs of food, cloth, energy, medicine, education, water and sanitation. Rapid population growth, economic development and international economic integration have intensified resource use; in every region of the world, human actions have directly or indirectly increased pressure on the natural environment due to the increase in demand.

Unregulated human activities accelerated unsustainable use of natural resources and increased pollution level. High level of pollutants than the assimilative capacity of the receiver (medium such as water and air) is making human life uncomfortable and many people are suffering from increased pollution load and depletion of natural resources. Physical and biological resources are greatly affected and human being is continuously suffering due to their own involvement and act leading the environmental disturbances. Environmental change is cited as one of the six major factors leading to the emergence or resurgence of many of malaria, dengue and mosquito- borne encephalitis diseases

Income, a basic indicator for human development, is increasing rapidly and human’s consumption of natural resources has substantially increased. With increase in income people are willing to pay for all sorts of resources from different parts of the world. In many cases the problems created by one part of the world do not take place in the areas where these resources

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are consumed. Abundant use of fossil fuels is raising the earth’s surface temperature. Global warming caused by emission of Green House Gases is one of the consequences. Conventional energy production and consumption are closely linked to environmental degradation that threaten human health and quality of life and affect ecological balance and biological diversity. Carbon dioxide is the main contributor responsile for 80% of emissions from industrialized countries. Other GHGs coming from a range of industrial and agricultural activities are methane, nitrous oxide, hydroflurocarbon, perfluron carbon and sulphur hexafluoride. Human developed refrigerators and air conditioners which are the main contributors for the depletion of stratospheric ozone layers and global warming. The global warming is causing the Glaciers and the snows to melt rapidly and this is devastating the natural phenomenon of the planet.

Human activities do not take into account the true environmental cost for many reasons, including government subsidies, lack of knowledge about environmental impacts. The absence of laws and regulations to control environmental damage, undefined access right to natural resources, poorly developed markets for environmental goods and services and a lopsided development system that forces large numbers of people to depend on scarce natural resources for their livelihoods. In many instances, current market system are unable to proce the outputs or impacts of activities. Disposal of waste, dumping of toxic substances in water bodies and pollution of atmosphere are some examples of human activities when leading toward their development and attempting for a luxurious life.

Economic and environmental groups began to think strongly and started publicly airing the dangers of these consequences. Kyoto Protocal, Montreal Protocal, Stockholm Conference etc are some examples of human participation to think and act for environmental protection. Today we have United Nations Environment Programme which inscribes environmental issues on the international agenda and debates on whether environmental protection could ethically or practically be indertaken at the expense of economic growth, especially in poor countries.

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In the present context we talk about sustainable development to bring environment and development together. Rather than growth and no growth debate about environment and development, the central issue is what kind of growth. The challenge of Sustainable development is to find out new production process and technologies which are environmentally friendly while they deliver the things we want. It also presumed that sustainable uses of resource by utilizing them to a extent to their capacity for growth and renewal. Sustainable human development is the human capability to fulfil people’s requirements without damaging the environment. World Commission and Environment and Development (WCED) has been continuously supporting for sustainable development. The WECD defines integrated environment and development: “Development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the need of the future generation”. The WCED definition highlights equity.

Environmental degradation is affecting the poverty. The relationship between poverty and the environment is complex. Many rural societies have developed highly sophisticated community based conservation efforts; others have denuded hillsides and degraded watersheds. It’s because their reach for basic demand is different. Priorities for the future should be decided by each society. There should be clear understanding of the effect of how poverty is affecting the different environmental condition and again how they, in turn, affect poverty.

Mahbub ul Haq identified the four pillars of human development as equity, sustainability, productivity and empowerment.

Any discussion of environmental issues in

relation to human development must examine them with regard to each of these pillars. Equity requires improvements in access to environmental assets and their distribution as far as possible. Sustainability is what we can define as, the satisfaction level of the future generation in the well being as of the present. Human development requires sustaining physical, human, financial and environmental capital, and depleting any one of these will compromise the

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potential of sustainable development. Productivity focuses on economic growth as well as the enabling environment that promotes human productivity. Some has confused human development with mainly improvements in the skills of human resources but not on the overall factors contributing towards being a physically, mentally and environmentally sound being. Empowerment, which deals primarily with participation, requires improving opportunities for decision- making about environmental matters by every citizen of a country at different levels and ensuring that they are sufficiently aware and informed.

Finally, we maintain that natural resource endowment could be a source of low economic growth rates if the institutions in a country do not have the ability to manage the resources in the right way. Therefore, investment policies geared towards human capital formation (education and high skilled labor forces) are to be considered the most effective actions for reaching a higher development level. At the same time, during the first stages of the development process, a large consumption of natural resources without appropriate investment policies to replace depleted resources or the exploitation of natural resources could produce a development path that is not sustainable in the long run. Human development should be the first objective of international development policies whereas an increase in human well-being is necessary to provide a sustainability path. Active participation of industrialized countries, following the general framework of the Millennium Development Goals, is one of the necessary conditions for development. Globalization process could be a source of great advantage even for developing countries, under the necessary condition that they have adequate instruments to manage this process in a positive direction, enhancing human capabilities with higher levels of health and education. A higher technological level would transform such resource-intensive economies into knowledge-intensive ones reducing depletion and degradation of natural resources and reinforcing the virtuous cycle of economic growth and human development.

References

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Banskota, M. (n.d.). The environmental perspective on sustainable human development. Readings in Human Development , 191 - 212. Melinick, D. (2005). Environment and human well- being: a practical strategy. UN Millennium Project: Task Force on Environmental Sustainability .

Mukherjee, S and Chakraborty, D (2007). Environment, Human Development and Economic Growth after Liberalisation: An Analysis of Indian States Costantini, V. et al (2006). Environment, Human Development and Economic development. Milano. UNDP, Linking Environment to Human Development: A Deliberate choice. Uganda Human Development Report 2005.

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