When optimization for governing human-environment tipping elements is neither sustainable nor safe

Optimizing economic welfare in environmental governance has been criticized for delivering short-term gains at the expense of long-term environmental degradation. Different from economic optimization, the concepts of sustainability and the more recent safe operating space have been used to derive po...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2018-06, Vol.9 (1), p.2354-10, Article 2354
Main Authors: Barfuss, Wolfram, Donges, Jonathan F., Lade, Steven J., Kurths, Jürgen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/705/1041
704/844/685
Agricultural economics
Decision making
Discount rates
Economics
Environmental degradation
Environmental governance
Environmental policy
Fisheries
Humanities and Social Sciences
multidisciplinary
Natural resource management
Optimization
Paradigms
Present value
Problem solving
Prosperity
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Sustainability
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Summary:Optimizing economic welfare in environmental governance has been criticized for delivering short-term gains at the expense of long-term environmental degradation. Different from economic optimization, the concepts of sustainability and the more recent safe operating space have been used to derive policies in environmental governance. However, a formal comparison between these three policy paradigms is still missing, leaving policy makers uncertain which paradigm to apply. Here, we develop a better understanding of their interrelationships, using a stylized model of human-environment tipping elements. We find that no paradigm guarantees fulfilling requirements imposed by another paradigm and derive simple heuristics for the conditions under which these trade-offs occur. We show that the absence of such a master paradigm is of special relevance for governing real-world tipping systems such as climate, fisheries, and farming, which may reside in a parameter regime where economic optimization is neither sustainable nor safe. Economic optimization in environmental governance was criticized for delivering short-term gains at the expense of long-term environmental degradation. Here, the authors use a stylized model of human-environment tipping elements to show no paradigm guarantees fulfilling another paradigm.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-04738-z