The Value of The Environment

Scott was giving his lecture on Thursday on the values that affect our consideration on the environment. We currently are living in the era of consequences where all the works and development of the previous generation have turn it's back on us, leaving us with natural disasters, resources depletion and environmental degradation. However, there are still no sense of urgency to take care and repair the damages that we have done on the environment. According to the Copenhagen Consensus, the challenges of global warming are still at the bottom of the list and several others environmental issues are also listed in the bottom half of the list. Unfortunately, the environmental damages that have been done and are currently going on right now are much more rapid than our response. Ironically, we knew the threat but human-kind are slow to response to this threat. All of this can be related to human systems which have different values on their priorities which include the culture, politics and economy.

In terms of the culture, there are several aspects that can be related to the environmental issues. The first one is the Abrahamic religion (including Islam, Christianity, Judaism.etc) which believes in one God who has created the world. The God has sent human-kind to the world which suppose to be the super-beings on earth that can think and become the steward on the earth. However, human-kind has misused their brain and try to alter everything on earth with the believe that we can do everything as long as we can think, and forget the responsibility that has been given to us by the Creator. Second is the detachment from the environment. Traditional cultures have a close relationship with their surroundings and the environment. As we progress and become modernised, we are getting farther away from these values and tend to forget it. Nowadays, several cultures including the Hawaiian are in their rennaisance age to reconnect their life to the traditional values. Can we re-acquire the treaditional knowledge? How to remind the people of the connection remains the challenge especially at the countries that had left their values for a long time, but if the Hawaiian can, why not us. Third is the pre-cautionary principle as oppose to pro-cautionary principle. Pre-cautionary principle is to prove that something is safe first before proceed to do it, while pro-cautionary principle is to proceed first than look at the consequences before finding solutions to the problems arising. Our strengths can also be our weaknesses. One good example is the strength to think. We do think that we can think of everything and repair whatever damages that have been done. But, each solution usually bring us to other problems which need solutions as well, and it will continue in that way.

The second human system is the politics. Politics have divided the earth with borders. However, many environmental issues are cross-border for example the haze in South East Asia and the global warming. Thus, there are always limitations in getting consensus and implementing solutions for those issues. Centralisation of administration has also been proven to be more ecological damage than decentralisation. This is due to the differences and the variety of environmental surrounding at each area which need local solutions and not general policies as a whole. It is also harder for central government to identify all the issues and threats that are happening at the locality because their area of jurisdiction is too big. Other than that, it is also hard to turn on environment consensus into political will. The politics is much more influenced by the economy rather than other aspect of environment or social. The blame game is also a common scene in politics. For example, the haze in South East Asia. All the affected countries blamed it on Indonesia. While it is true that a large proportion of the haze source was originated from Indonesia, they failed to come into sense that the other proportion of the haze came from domestic sources. Unfortunate enough they do little on their domestic sources and keep on focussing how to prevent Indonesia from burning their forest. The time for change remains a mystery. When are we going to change? Is it now, or a decade, or within century or do we want to wait until there is a major hardship on the earth.

Economics remain the most tricky when it comes into the environment. How do we value the nature? Some people are starting to work on valuing the rain forest, for example the ecological accounting. However, ecological accounting is to complex and depends on what criteria that is being considered. For example, the value of watershed to provide water, the cost of damages if natural disaster struck as a result of deforestation, the habitat for wildlife and others. There are also commodity price issues. The commodity price is volatile in short-term annd long-term declining. The volatility of the commodity price while have and adverse effect to the environment as well. Third is the discount rate which means the value of your savings in the future. It can be related to the environmental problems as well for example China who says that they wanted to get rich first before dealing with the problems. The other aspect is the scale which include individual to collective or long-term and short-term. What is our scale of environmental stewardship? Is it enough to bring on change? If it is not, we better work more on it as if tragedy struck, it is a tragedy of common. All of us will be included even those who work for the environment. Externalities is often get excluded in the consideration of economy. There are different externalities which include spatial, temporal and informational. Economics are often focussed on the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and the externalities is put outside the CBA. Unfortunate enough the externalities are often damaging to the environment. Finally is the hazards. For economic purposes we often put ourself at hazardous places to settle for example the volcano because the land is fertile. We also know the long-term consequences but we often made decisions based on the current time-frame. For example the tsunami that strucked Acheh. We do know that there are cases of Tsunami before and the earth quake is a 100-year event. But we still built on our settlement on that area as we do not even consider the 100-years consequences to come.

Thus, there are 5 pathways to mitigation which include:
1. Improving insight.
2. Enhancing information flow.
3. Refocussing incentives.
4. Improving investments.
5. Implementing through institutions.