86
5 Understanding the Complementarities of Environmental …
indicate the degree to which the functioning of Earth’s life-supporting systems has
been maintained or crossed. The suggested F–B ESA framework, in this sense, opens
the way for a straightforward assessment of environmental sustainability—a nonnegotiable prerequisite for the economic and social pillars of sustainable development
(Goodland and Daly 1996).
The growing sustainability gaps between numerous types of environmental burden
and the Earth’s finite carrying capacity call for a shift from EIA—which may not be
informative for policy makers as well as consumers—to ESA, but also from focusing
issues in isolation to addressing them simultaneously from an integrated perspective.
Today’s environmental unsustainability worldwide underpins the need for setting
more practical and tangible policy targets for adaptation and mitigation, rather than
for unrealistically preventing the overshoot of the Earth’s capacity to regenerate
resources and assimilate wastes. An example of this is the renegotiation of the “2 °C
target” (Parry et al. 2009). Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the environment,
a major challenge is how to make trade-offs among various sustainability gaps in
support of optimal adaptation strategies in the context of global unsustainability.
We consider this to be a scale problem more than a substitution problem. The quantifications of both boundaries and footprints appear to be strongly scale-dependent
(Hughes et al. 2013; Moran et al. 2008; Wiedmann and Lenzen 2007). This is one
reason to take the scale dimension into account when evaluating trade-offs between
policy options with consequences for environmental sustainability. Another reason is
that the non-transgression of one planetary boundary does not necessarily guarantee
a sustainable society, because regional or local boundary exceedance may still give
rise to irreversible environmental degradation that is detrimental or even disastrous
to the population.
This is particularly true when it comes to aggregated issues that are spatially
heterogeneous and local-to-regional in scale. The development of measurable local
and regional boundaries is therefore needed. It could serve as a basis for ESA applied
to the allocation of environmental responsibility for creating sustainable societies at
multiple scales. Lessons can be learned from current methodological choices of
environmental footprints. Even for systemic issues, which are believed to have a true
global threshold effect, partitioning their planetary boundaries into national or subnational shares still makes sense. This, however, might be more challenging because
of the political attribute of implementing a top-down process that is possibly based
on population, GDP, or area, rather than on real regional thresholds.
While the idea of relating descriptive indicators to capacity thresholds is actually not new, this chapter provides concrete discussions of how to bring together
the two emerging research fields (environmental footprints and planetary boundaries) as a novel approach for ESA, thus contributing to the ever-developing sustainability discourse. Admittedly, there remain many gaps in our knowledge that may
compromise the credibility and applicability of the F–B ESA framework proposed
in the book. We have therefore gone on at length formulating a research agenda for
the global community to continuously improve the performance of the F–B ESA
framework on transparency and robustness. This requires a large research effort with
contributions from a vast range of fields such as ecology, environmental science, earth
5 Understanding the Complementarities of Environmental …
indicate the degree to which the functioning of Earth’s life-supporting systems has
been maintained or crossed. The suggested F–B ESA framework, in this sense, opens
the way for a straightforward assessment of environmental sustainability—a nonnegotiable prerequisite for the economic and social pillars of sustainable development
(Goodland and Daly 1996).
The growing sustainability gaps between numerous types of environmental burden
and the Earth’s finite carrying capacity call for a shift from EIA—which may not be
informative for policy makers as well as consumers—to ESA, but also from focusing
issues in isolation to addressing them simultaneously from an integrated perspective.
Today’s environmental unsustainability worldwide underpins the need for setting
more practical and tangible policy targets for adaptation and mitigation, rather than
for unrealistically preventing the overshoot of the Earth’s capacity to regenerate
resources and assimilate wastes. An example of this is the renegotiation of the “2 °C
target” (Parry et al. 2009). Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the environment,
a major challenge is how to make trade-offs among various sustainability gaps in
support of optimal adaptation strategies in the context of global unsustainability.
We consider this to be a scale problem more than a substitution problem. The quantifications of both boundaries and footprints appear to be strongly scale-dependent
(Hughes et al. 2013; Moran et al. 2008; Wiedmann and Lenzen 2007). This is one
reason to take the scale dimension into account when evaluating trade-offs between
policy options with consequences for environmental sustainability. Another reason is
that the non-transgression of one planetary boundary does not necessarily guarantee
a sustainable society, because regional or local boundary exceedance may still give
rise to irreversible environmental degradation that is detrimental or even disastrous
to the population.
This is particularly true when it comes to aggregated issues that are spatially
heterogeneous and local-to-regional in scale. The development of measurable local
and regional boundaries is therefore needed. It could serve as a basis for ESA applied
to the allocation of environmental responsibility for creating sustainable societies at
multiple scales. Lessons can be learned from current methodological choices of
environmental footprints. Even for systemic issues, which are believed to have a true
global threshold effect, partitioning their planetary boundaries into national or subnational shares still makes sense. This, however, might be more challenging because
of the political attribute of implementing a top-down process that is possibly based
on population, GDP, or area, rather than on real regional thresholds.
While the idea of relating descriptive indicators to capacity thresholds is actually not new, this chapter provides concrete discussions of how to bring together
the two emerging research fields (environmental footprints and planetary boundaries) as a novel approach for ESA, thus contributing to the ever-developing sustainability discourse. Admittedly, there remain many gaps in our knowledge that may
compromise the credibility and applicability of the F–B ESA framework proposed
in the book. We have therefore gone on at length formulating a research agenda for
the global community to continuously improve the performance of the F–B ESA
framework on transparency and robustness. This requires a large research effort with
contributions from a vast range of fields such as ecology, environmental science, earth