Environmental Sustainability (Grade 12 NSC Matric Economics): Revision Notes

Measures to Ensure Sustainability

Understanding how to protect our environment while maintaining economic growth is crucial for sustainable development. Governments and international organisations use various approaches to ensure that businesses and individuals act responsibly towards the environment. There are five main controlling mechanisms that work together to promote sustainability.

The MICMA approach to sustainability

Market mechanisms

Markets are driven by profit-seeking behaviour, which can sometimes conflict with environmental protection. In theory, free markets can promote sustainability when resource prices increase as materials become scarce, encouraging businesses to develop environmentally-friendly technologies. However, this approach has significant limitations.

Why markets fail to protect the environment

Markets often fail to ensure environmental sustainability for several key reasons:

Market-based solutions

When market forces work effectively, they can encourage environmental protection by ensuring all costs and benefits are included in pricing decisions. This approach aims for social efficiency by incorporating environmental costs into market prices. However, this rarely happens naturally, which is why government intervention becomes necessary.

Public sector intervention

Government intervention aims to achieve social efficiency by making sure environmental costs are properly accounted for in economic decisions. This happens through several approaches.

Granting property rights

The conservationist effect occurs when people take better care of resources they own. Governments can:

• Grant property rights to prevent species extinction by giving landowners incentives to preserve wildlife
• Extend property rights to common resources like clean air
• Use international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, where developed countries compensate developing nations for their right to pollute

Environmental pricing strategies

Charging for environmental use: Governments impose fees for waste production and environmental damage. In South Africa, local authorities charge for rubbish collection and sewage disposal, with the most effective results achieved when charges are proportional to the amount of waste produced.

Environmental taxes (green taxes): These are taxes placed on goods and services that cause environmental harm. Examples include:

• Taxes on carbon dioxide emissions from wineries and vehicle tyres
• Tax rates set equal to the marginal external cost of the pollution

Environmental subsidies: Governments provide financial incentives to businesses that reduce environmental damage, such as subsidising energy-saving technologies like efficient light bulbs or solar panels.

Marketable permits: The government issues licences allowing businesses to pollute up to a certain level. Companies can trade these permits with each other, creating a market-based approach to pollution control. In South Africa, these permits are managed by the Department of Minerals and Energy.

Public sector control

When market-based approaches aren't sufficient, governments implement direct control measures through regulations and enforcement.

Command and Control (CAC) systems

Government agencies enforce environmental policies by setting maximum pollution levels and creating regulations for air and water quality. There are three main approaches:

Voluntary agreements and education

Voluntary agreements: Governments work with businesses to create pollution reduction plans on a voluntary basis, encouraging cooperation rather than forcing compliance.

Education programmes: Governments try to change people's attitudes towards environmental protection through awareness campaigns and innovative approaches like community wildlife reserves, particularly in developing regions.

International measures for global problems

Environmental challenges cross national boundaries, requiring coordinated international responses. Pollution from one country can affect neighbouring nations, making global cooperation essential.

Key global environmental challenges

Biodiversity loss: When species become extinct, this damage cannot be reversed. Modern techniques like gene preservation can help limit species loss, while international agreements like CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) regulate trade in threatened species.

Chemical waste management: Chemical waste poses serious health risks, causing infertility or death. The Stockholm Protocol provides a United Nations framework for limiting chemical waste and preventing groundwater contamination.

Hazardous waste disposal: Highly toxic waste, especially radioactive material from nuclear power plants, remains dangerous for extremely long periods. The Basel Convention helps manage nuclear waste internationally, with South Africa as a signatory.

Climate change response: Global warming requires international cooperation through information sharing, pollution limits, and restrictions on harmful chemicals that damage the ozone layer. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 attempted to limit greenhouse gas production, though voluntary carbon dioxide reductions proved insufficient.

Preserving indigenous knowledge: Indigenous communities possess valuable traditional knowledge about sustainable living and natural resource management. Local capacity-building programmes help indigenous people maintain their traditional lifestyles while contributing to global environmental sustainability.

Major international agreements

Since the 1990s, the United Nations has organised global summits to address environmental challenges through international cooperation.

Key environmental summets

Rio de Janeiro Summit (UNCED, 1992): Focused on sustainable development with outcomes including environmental protection as part of development planning, ecosystem conservation, and the principle that polluters should pay for environmental damage.

Johannesburg Summit (WSSD, 2002): Addressed sustainable development with emphasis on poverty reduction, changing unsustainable consumption patterns, globalisation impacts, and health and environmental connections.

Rio +20 Summit: Held in Brazil, this conference promoted sustainable growth and poverty reduction without environmental damage, establishing the green economy as a tool for sustainable development and setting environmental goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals from 2013.

Kyoto Protocol (1997): Created legally binding commitments for industrialised countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, specifically targeting six types of greenhouse gases.

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 17, Durban): Made key decisions including commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, establishment of a Green Climate Fund to help developing countries access clean energy, and creation of an adaptation committee to help vulnerable countries respond to climate change.

Millennium Development Goals

These goals recognise that healthy ecosystems are essential for human survival and prosperity, including targets for extreme poverty eradication, universal primary education, gender equality, child mortality reduction, maternal health improvement, disease prevention, and global development partnerships.