1. Reducing Risk: Sustainability and Sustainable Development
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2. Session Objectives
Identify key linkages between environmental processes and conditions and disaster vulnerability
Understand alternative conceptualizations of sustainability
Understand key issues in the political ecology of development and underdevelopment
Identify key linkages between development and environment
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3. Environmental Processes and Conditions
Water Quality and Quantity
Hydrological Cycle
Climate
Air Quality
Slope and Topography
Soil Texture, Fertility,
Toxicity, Stability
Biodiversity
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4. Linking Environmental Processes and Disaster Vulnerability
Environment can be experienced as both resource and hazard
Environmental conditions can protect humans and buffer extreme events
Human activity can cause or exaggerate the effects of extreme natural events
Human land use decisions can put settlements and groups of people at risk
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5. Typical Definition of “To Sustain”
To keep in existence
To maintain or prolong
To continue or last
Problems with Definition
Inherent contradictions
Extreme cases
Boundaries over what is being “maintained” or “prolonged”
For how long?
Who should manage?
Lack of perfect knowledge may make it hard to “manage” in the right direction
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6. Typical Definitions of “Sustainable Development”
Human activity that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 8)
“A strategy for improving the quality of life while preserving the environmental potential for the future, of living off interest rather than consuming natural capital” (Natl. Commission on the Environment, 1993, cited in Beatley, 1998, pp )
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7. How do Gender, Ethnic, and Caste Differences Affect Life Chances, Human and Economic Development?
Land tenure systems
Water rights and “tree tenure”
Labor relations and labor law
Biases in the education system
Biases in access to financial credit
Biases in access to technical assistance and advice
Geographical isolation
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8. Differences Between Economic Development and Human Development
Concerns increase of production of goods and services
Measure in money and mediated through markets
Human Development
Concerns increase in satisfaction of basic needs
Concerns increase in autonomy
Measured by more than money
Requires public investment and not just resource allocation provided by unregulated markets
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9. Views of Sustainability
Strong View
No consideration of financial costs
Key concept is ‘ecological sustainability’
Focuses primarily on the environment
Reliance on physical measures of things
Weak View
Consideration of financial costs
Benefit/cost analysis often used to evaluate ‘trade-offs’
Key concept is ‘economic sustainability’
Reliance on measurements of financial value and relationship between resource allocation and level of consumption
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10. “Traps” Produced by Underdevelopment
Lack of
political influence
Low income
Physical weakness
due to disease and undernutrition
Spatial
isolation
Access to poor,
difficult land
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