Weak Versus Strong Sustainabilty Exploring the Limits of Two Opposing Paradigms

About this book

Neumayer (environment and development, London School of Economics and Political Science) assesses whether science can unambiguously endorse either the weak approach, which argues that capital generated by humans can be substituted for natural capital and still maintain long-term sustainability, and the strong approach that it cannot. He argues that neither paradigm is universally correct and that certain forms of natural capital are non sustainable; explores the extent to which, at what cost, certain forms of natural capital should be preserved; and inquires whether sustainability can be measured at all and doubts a monetary measure will suffice.

Contents

Part 1 Introduction and overview. Part 2 Conceptual, ethical and paradigmatic issues of sustainable development. Part 3 Resources, the environment and economic growth - why both paradigms of sustainability are non-falsifiable. Part 4 Preserving natural capital in a world of risk, uncertainty and ignorance. Part 5 Can sustainability be measured?. appendices: how present value maximization can lead to extinction; the Hotelling-rule and Ramsey-rule in a simple general equilibrium model; the Hotelling-rule and the Ramsey-rule for the model gNNP; proof of Hartwick's rule for a model of gNNP; the structure of data underlying World Bank (1997a); alphabetical list of countries in World Bank (1997a); grouping of countries in World Bank (1997a); frequency of negative extended genuine saving II rates in World Bank (1997a); sources of data for computing user costs according to the "El Serafy"-method.

Customer Reviews