Tutorial Ticket (Week 11)
1) In 150 words, describe how an aspect of sustainability could be improved using an example from your discipline.
2) Based on the reading Dovers et al. ['Uncertainty, Complexity and the Environment', in Gabriele Bammer and Michael Smithson (eds.), Uncertainty and Risk: multidisciplinary perspectives, Earthscan Publications, 2008: 245-260], discuss the most important consideration in constructing sustainability policy.
1) The world population has recently hit 7 billion. This milestone has been achieved in a time when our global carbon footprint is many times that which the Earth can sustain. However, our concerns are nothing new. Throughout history many communities have been forced to address the unsustainable phenomenon of overpopulation. Most of the past policies that come to mind are inhumane or authoritarian, from the Nazis’ extermination policies to China’s strict one child policy.
Dealing with overpopulation is difficult because most strategies that you can think of involve ‘stick’ or regulatory measures. No-one likes having an intervention forced upon them, particularly when it involves a government telling you what size your family can be. At the level of individual nations, it can seem more palatable to push the regulation onto people you don’t know, for example by limiting immigration intakes.
The overpopulation issue might be best addressed by re-examining the problems that we believe need to be solved. This might involve opening an educative debate about whether a ‘Big Australia’ would work. It should also entail communities addressing their current rates of resource consumption rather than blaming the problem on population growth.
2) The Dovers reading suggests that the most important consideration in constructing sustainability policy is an acknowledgment of the uncertainty in the systems which the policy attempts to control. This is not to say that uncertainty is a problem which must be solved, as it is the awareness that counts. This means that policymakers can expect the unexpected and make their policies flexible enough to accommodate change.
Interestingly, the issue of uncertainty in sustainability policy ties back to the adaptive nature of ecosystems and of human-ecological interactions. Not only are there a complex range of actors with different priorities, but ecological balances can often be quite delicate and will change dramatically in response to the many human actions to which they are subject. In turn, this leads back to the idea of integration in the Dovers reading. If many different human factors will impact upon the subject of your policy, it is important to consider those factors back at the stage of policy development.
Dealing with overpopulation is difficult because most strategies that you can think of involve ‘stick’ or regulatory measures. No-one likes having an intervention forced upon them, particularly when it involves a government telling you what size your family can be. At the level of individual nations, it can seem more palatable to push the regulation onto people you don’t know, for example by limiting immigration intakes.
The overpopulation issue might be best addressed by re-examining the problems that we believe need to be solved. This might involve opening an educative debate about whether a ‘Big Australia’ would work. It should also entail communities addressing their current rates of resource consumption rather than blaming the problem on population growth.
2) The Dovers reading suggests that the most important consideration in constructing sustainability policy is an acknowledgment of the uncertainty in the systems which the policy attempts to control. This is not to say that uncertainty is a problem which must be solved, as it is the awareness that counts. This means that policymakers can expect the unexpected and make their policies flexible enough to accommodate change.
Interestingly, the issue of uncertainty in sustainability policy ties back to the adaptive nature of ecosystems and of human-ecological interactions. Not only are there a complex range of actors with different priorities, but ecological balances can often be quite delicate and will change dramatically in response to the many human actions to which they are subject. In turn, this leads back to the idea of integration in the Dovers reading. If many different human factors will impact upon the subject of your policy, it is important to consider those factors back at the stage of policy development.