The rising awareness about the hazards of environmental crisis has made various countries sit up and take notice about the unavoidable requirement for environment friendly prospects for boosting their economy. This is where ‘environmental economics’ steps in.
Loosely defined, environmental economics is the study of environmental policies around the world, and their effects on their respective economies around the world. In the latter half of the 20th century, people realised that the world could face a possible environmental crisis. Contributing to their speculation, a nuclear mishap, an oil spill fouling an entire shoreline, and other such events convinced the people of the onset of an environmental crisis. A glaring example of such a crisis is Cleveland’s Cuhayoga river. The river was so contaminated with industrial waste, that it self-ignited on June 22nd, burning on for four days.
The environment and the economy are inter related and inter dependent – both affecting each other adversely. A detailed description states that the study of environmental economics depends on :
- The nature and scope of environmental crisis
- The range of economic and political possibilities
Households and firms are connected to the environment, and they are interconnected too. Households and firms depend on nature for resources. They send out a fair share of consumption and production residuals in the environment.
Thankfully, nature has the power to assimilate all forms of waste. But this power is conditional. The earth can clean up the natural wastes, just as long as it is not disturbed by excess amounts of waste. If and when the Earth fails to respond to the 3 R’s (Recovery, Recycling and Reuse), the symptoms of environmental damage appear. Thus, a rhythm exists in the use and reuse of the resources for man and by man. Earth cannot respond properly to man-made or artificial wastes. Man-made waste is piling up around us, and the extent of damage to the environment has been on the rise. All the accumulated waste cannot be cleaned up by the Earth, like a makeshift sink. The Earth has reached it’s saturation point regarding this process. It is helpless in cleaning up several types of waste, finally resulting in major environmental issues the world over.
Environmental Economics thrives to solve the problem of the environmental crisis all around the world, and so it was necessary to highlight the issue of environmental crisis on a global platform. And so the 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Doha, from 26th November to 8th December.
The UN chief Christina Figueres published the following statement during the conference
“The necessary technology and policy tools are available to governments and societies, but time is very short — only 36 months to reach a universal agreement before 2015. What we now need is to urgently implement the decisions that have been taken at the inter-governmental level and to further strengthen actions already under way”
– Utsav Gagwani.
(Research, Writing & Photography)
Gnaritas 2014 