Environmental Policy Update 2012: Development Strategies and Environmental Policy in East Africa

The seven chapters that comprise this report explore ways to integrate sustainability goals and objectives into Ethiopia's current development strategies

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY HARMONIZATION

Environmental Economics and Policy,

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY HARMONIZATION: COMMENT

Environmental Economics and Policy,

Europe Sustainable Development Report 2019 : towards a strategy for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in the European Union: Includes the SDG Index and Dashboards for the European Union and member states

Resumen: Este Informe de Desarrollo Sostenible en Europa identifica las prioridades políticas de la Unión Europea (UE) para alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible e implementar El Acuerdo sobre el Clima de París. El informe compara la actuación de la UE y sus 28 estados miembros en relación a los 17 ODS y proporciona perfiles detallados de los países cruzando diversas fuentes de datos. La evaluación se basa en la metodología desarrollada desde 2016 por la Red de soluciones para el Desarrollo Sostenible (SDSN)y el Bertelsmann Stiftung

Inequality and environmental policy

A positive theory of mitigation of environmental degradation is discussed in order to understand the formation of environmental policy. When an environmental problem is not mitigated, this is because those affected don't know it is happening, cannot locate the cause, don't have the resources to abate the problem if they are its producers, or don't have the political power to influence policy to stop the problem if they are not its producers. The last is related to inequalities in political power and its implications are examined further. These include implications for the spatial spread of unmitigated pollutants produced by the powerful as opposed to the poor, and the implications of political structure for the overall level of pollution. These and related hypotheses are examined with reference to examples, and, where possible, with representative data. It is shown that there is an important sense in which the "Environmental Kuznets Curve" does not exist.

Environmental policy and 'the identity problem'

Since Antiquity philosophy has abounded with provocative arguments in which what appear to be relatively simple and indisputable assumptions lead to unexpected and often baffling conclusions. Zeno's paradoxical arguments against the existence of motion (e.g. Achilles will never catch up the tortoise), or the Liar Paradox which undermines our belief that propositions must be either true or false, or Berkeley's argument against the existence of matter, are just a few examples. In contemporary discussion of the terms of intergenerational justice, which arises out of our concern with environmental problems and our sense of obligation to leave the world to our succesors in an inhabitable state, we encounter one particular argument which - very much like those time-honoured arguments mentioned above - appears to reach highly paradoxical conclusions. From rather simple assumptions, which we might be inclined to accept, we unexpectedly arrive at conclusions which most of us would be inclined to reject since they seem to violate deeply engrained convictions, or common sense, or our moral intuitions. Several authors have discoverd this particular argument, which is now known in the literature as the Identity Problem, or the Non-Identity Problem (both names come from Parfit), or as the Paradox of the Future Individuals (as Kavka calls it).2 The Identity Problem leads to the conclusion that, whatever policy we adopt towards the future, we are not harming future people. Therefore, we have no moral obligations towards them and we are free to choose any policy we like. Whatever choice we make, future generations would have no grounds for complaint even if we left them a very depleted world or exposed them to risks, such as the risks of nuclear radiation. There is no need to emphasize the possible practical significance of this conclusion if we were to accept it and to allow it to provide moral guidance. Much of the environmental debate involving economists, philosophers, politicians, and environmental activists would become pointless. It would no longer be morally relevant whether we leave to our successors enough natural resources and a clean and safe environment. Most of the major environmental questions (including the question of our moral obligations to future generations) discussed today would seem a waste of time. In a sense, therefore, the Paradox of Future Individuals is a prior problem as regards the problem of inter-generational justice. Only if it can be circumvented is there much point in pursuing further other aspects of inter-generational justice - e.g. whether one should adopt a Rawlsian framework, or a Utilitarian framework, or whatever. One of the most interesting apects of the apparently morally inadmissable Paradox of Future Individuals is that it does not follow from any assumptions about our selfishness, or our lack of concern about the future , or even from a belief in the priority of the needs of the present generations over those of future ones. Rather it claims to follow logically from certain assumptions concerning the concept of harm and the concept of personal identity . It is the purpose of this paper to discuss these assumptions and to argue that they do not, in fact, lead to the conclusion that we have no obligations to the future generations

Law, environmental policy and Kantian philosophy

Are Kantian philosophy and its principle of respect for persons inadequate to the protection of environmental values? This paper answers this question by elucidating how Kantian ethics can take environmental values seriously. In the period that starts with the Critique of Judgment in 1790 and ends with the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797, the subject would have been approached by Kant in a different manner; although the respect that we may owe to non-human nature is still grounded in our duties to mankind, the basis for such respect stems from nature’s aesthetic properties, and the duty to preserve nature lies in our duties to ourselves. Compared to the “market paradigm”, as it is called by Gillroy (the reference is to a conception of a public policy based on a criterion of economic efficiency or utility), Kantian philosophy can offer a better explanation of the relationship between environmental policy and the theory of justice. Kantian justice defines the “just state” as the one that protects the moral capacities of its “active” citizens, as presented in the first Part of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Kantian paradigm, the environmental risk becomes a “public” concern. That means it is not subsumed under an individual decision, based on a calculus

Pollution, mortality and optimal environmental policy

We study an overlapping generations economy in which environmental degradation results from economic activity and affects agents' uncertain lifetimes. Life expectancy depends positively on economic activity and negatively on the stock of pollution. This can make the growth-survival relationship convex over some region and lead to two non-trivial steady states, with one a poverty trap. Uniform abatement taxes can cause the poverty trap to widen while increasing incomes at the high steady state. We also study the properties and dynamics of an optimal second-best abatement tax. It is non-homogeneous and increasing in the capital stock, and leads to a variety of dynamic possibilities, including non-existence and multiplicity of steady states, and cycles around some of the steady states, where there were none under exogenous taxes. Thus, optimal taxes can be an independent source of non-linearities