The Global Politics of Environment

Environment degradation brings about as much ethical problems as an ecological one. Present day economic activities including careless fast consumption living habits and waste producing ignorant life styles exploits resources unsustainably across space and across time. Shifting the experience of environmental harm which occurs - across time by which future generation will suffer the environmental effects of today’s mad life styles - as well as across space - that is the physical transportation or unintended consequences of polluting other parts of the world.

The conceptualization of ecological foot prints and shadow ecologies also refers to the exploitation of the renewable and non renewable resources and environmental services. The foot print is a conservative measure of how much productive land and water an individual, city, country or humanity requires to produce all resources it consumes and to absorb all the wastes it generates (Wackernagel et al. 2002, p.12). Globally, humanity is outstripping biospheric capacity. It should be noted that not all harm is intentional and deliberate. Rather harm done through unintended consequences and negligence or the failure to take reasonable precautions to prevent the risk of harm to others and future generation.

There seem to be growing commitment to the proposition that humankind is bound together as an ecological community of fate which establishes the basis for moral obligation. The biophysical complexities of the planetary ecosystem help to define it as global commons and a public good, extending the bounds of those with whom we are connected, to whom we owe obligations and against whom we might claim rights. The two themes of obligations and rights are concepts that are central to understanding ethical concerns in global politics.


Sovereign rights for states over resources and environmental policy have been central to the development of international environmental law. Yet a normative framework for state obligations is essential for better environmental governance. So far states have paid less attention to their obligations than to their rights. Along with responsibility and liability comes the issue of whether states have an obligation to inform and consult other states and their citizens with respect to detrimental impact of their activities

Principle about liability or compensation that has comes under the Polluter Pays Principle PPP programme is designed to prevent public subsidization of environmental repair or preventive action. In other words, all costs should be borne by the polluter, so that polluters should not otherwise have an unfair commercial or competitive advantage.

There has also been new concepts such as the common heritage of humankind, intergenerational equity, prior informed consent and environmental rights that must be incorporated into international law, both as principles and as specific provisions designed to give effect to those principles.


The conventional wisdom in the world of business is that consumers have not and will not pay extra for environmental benefits. The consumers are entangled in deeper values related to consumer sovereignty, collective choice behavior, and concern for environmental quality that varies across regions, social groups and even nations. For example vehicle buyers have rarely been offered the choice between products differentiated only by levels of performance on environmental measures. Little is understood and attention paid by car producers about consumer demand for environmental attributes of vehicles.

Hence new norm of behaviour and changes in attitudes, social values and aspirations is necessary to provide conditions for achieving sustainable development - sustainable development requires:
A political system that secures effective citizen participation… an economic system that is able to generate surpluses and technical knowledge on a self reliant and sustained basis, a social system that provides for solutions for the tensions arising from disharmonious development, a production system that respects the obligation to preserve the ecological base for development, a technological system that can search continuously for new solutions, an international system that fosters sustainable patterns of trade and finance and an administrative system that is flexible and has the ;capacity for self correction (WCED, 1987, p. 65).

However there is an argument that poverty cannot be ended by overall economic growth because the costs of growth how approximate or exceed its benefits and because it overlooks social equity (Daly 2002, p. 47).

Poverty reduction is expected to increase people’s ability to invest in environmentally sustainable activities and decrease their propensity to engage in environmentally destructive patterns of behaviour. Self interested reasons are offered for the world’s richer countries to support poverty alleviation because in the global village, someone else’s poverty very soon becomes one’s own problem. Lack of markets for one’s products, illegal immigration, pollution, contagious disease, insecurity, fanaticism, and most important terrorism. (UNGA, 2001, p.13).

References:

Morrison, Z., 2003, Cultural justice and addressing social exclusion - Urban Renaissance? Geo forum, vol 34

Wackeragel, M., 2002, Ecological foot print of nations; Nov 2002

WCED (world commission on environment and development), 1987, our common future, Oxford: Oxford university Press

UNGA (United Nation General Assembly), report of the high level panel on financing for development