Search

Wereview impacts of climate change, energy scarcity, and economic frameworks on sustainability of natural and human systems in coastal zones, areas of high biodiversity, productivity, population density, and economic activity. More than 50% of the global population lives within 200 km of a coast, mostly in tropical developing countries. These systems developed during stable Holocene conditions. Changes in global forcings are threatening sustainability of coastal ecosystems and populations. During the Holocene, the earth warmed and became wetter and more productive. Climate changes are impacting coastal systems via sea level rise, stronger tropical cyclones, changes in basin inputs, and extreme weather events. These impacts are passing tipping points as the fossil fuel-powered industrial-technological-agricultural revolution has overwhelmed the source-sink functions of the biosphere and degraded natural systems. The current status of industrialized society is primarily the result of fossil fuel (FF) use. FFs provided more than 80%of global primary energy and are projected to decline to 50% by mid-century. This has profound implications for societal energy requirements, including the transition to a renewable economy. The development of the industrial economy allowed coastal social systems to become spatially separated from their dominant energy and food sources. This will becomemore difficult tomaintain with the fading of cheap energy. It seems inevitable that past growth in energy use, resource consumption, and economic growth cannot be sustained, and coastal areas are in the forefront of these challenges. Rapid planning and cooperation are necessary tominimize impacts of the changes associated with the coming transition. There is an urgent need for a new economic framework to guide society through the transition as mainstream neoclassical economics is not based on natural sciences and does not adequately consider either the importance of energy or the work of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewed sociological interest in neo-liberalism is important for the development of Human-Centered Sustainable Economic and Social systems for the 21st century. This paper explores whether the critical enquiry of knowledge production in social science is suggesting a return to a form of enquiry which does not rely on the abstraction of the economy from society, history and polity. The paper suggests that the Cambridge School of classic political economy and its focus on embedding the economy into society, the fair distribution of economic surpluses and the pursuit of human well-being should form the conceptual basis of the alternative social and economic systems required to transition to sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most important and urgent topics requiring economic analysis and policy advice are the problems of climate change and environmental sustainability, and what can be done to alter corporate and individual behaviour to deal with these issues. Neoclassical economists tend to focus on market solutions such as carbon trading, drawing on ideas of perfect rationality of actors and the appropriateness of ‘marginal’ analysis. To link such policies to the whole range of potential actions, from legislative and regulatory to changing individual behaviours, requires the economy and society to be analysed in its full complexity, recognising that ‘marginal’ analysis can be not just irrelevant but positively harmful when the need is for systemic shifts in economic and social trajectories. This article draws upon a seminar series on complexity economics to consider how heterodox economic analysis can be brought to bear on the issue of the environment, to develop a realistic policy agenda for change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different professional associations. However, we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective. This paper presents empirical results from a German case study on how economists and others involved in sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics, how they group around these issues, how they feel about the current scientific divide, and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research. We analyze the data using cluster analysis. Based on a literature survey, we generated forty sustainability economics-related statements and asked 196 sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements. In evaluating our survey results, we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do—or do not—represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics. We also propose some fields of research that can help to bridge the gaps amongst sustainability economics researchers while clearly marking others that are more suitable for a scientific ‘competition of ideas’. Key results of the study are: We identify two primary scientific clusters, one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological-economics school of thought, and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view. Yet, there are some surprising exceptions: Both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological, societal and economic dimensions (‘three pillar concept’) and is geared at preserving the development potentials of society. We also find a shared critique of ‘pure economic growth’ strategies in our sample. These shared opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought. Also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability economics research. Yet, the research agenda of the ecological-economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics, primarily related to social, distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development. Strong divides between the clusters that seem to be more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas are primarily related to the question of how to achieve sustainability, including appropriate environmental policies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper builds up from a review of some expected, but other quite surprising results regarding country estimates for the year 2000 of genuine saving, a sustainability indicator developed by a World Bank research team. We examine this indicator, founded on neoclassical welfare theory, and discuss one of its major problems. Theoretical developments from ecological economics are then considered, together with insights from Georgescu-Roegen's approach to the production process, in search for an alternative approach. A model with potentially fruitful contributions in this direction is reviewed; it points the course efforts could take enable sustainability evaluations based on a more realistic set of interrelated monetary and biophysical indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]