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World Conference on Science: Science for the Twenty-First Century - A New Commitment
Ana María Cetto
Unesco, 31 Jul 2000 - Science - 544 pages
Technological development and the environment
Economists are tempted not to take economics seriously when their political predisposition or personal ambition assumes centre stage. The examples I have just presented illustrate the kinds of fault policy prescriptions contain when economics is abandoned. There may be parallels in the practice of science. But the examples don’t illuminate why the young scientists are suspicious of the enterprise called science. I suggest that their disquiet has to do with the fact that science and technology are not working in tandem with best-practice economics. Let me illustrate this by another example taken from humanity’s use of environmental natural resources. I believe the choice is apt, because the young scientists spoke frequently of contemporary environmental degradation and the inability (possibly even unwillingness) of scientists and technologists to prevent it from happening.
As you know, in recent years ecologists and economists have been urging governments and international agencies to make funds available for the purpose of estimating the values of ecosystem services. The question arises, why? Why is there a special need to value those services? Why can we not rely on market prices to guide decisions on the use of global and local ecosystem services, in the way we do for so many other goods and services? Or, to put the matter in another way, why aren’t markets an adequate set of institutions for protecting the environment?
The reason is that, for many environmental resources, markets simply do not exist. In some cases they do not exist because the costs of negotiation and monitoring the use of these resources are too high. One class of examples is provided by economic activities that are affected by ecological interactions involving great geographical distances (as in the previous example of the effects of upland deforestation on downstream activities hundreds of miles away); another, by large temporal distances (e.g. the effect of carbon emission on climate in the distant future, in a world where forward markets are non-existent because future generations are not present today to negotiate with us). Then there are cases (e.g. the atmosphere, aquifers and the open seas) where the nature of the physical situation (namely, the migratory nature of the resource) makes private property rights impractical and so keeps markets from existing; while in others, ill-specified or unprotected property rights prevent their existence, or make markets function wrongly even when they do exist (e.g. biodiversity; see Perrings et al., 1994, 1995). In short, environmental problems are often caused by market failure.
Since markets cannot be relied upon to provide us with prices which would signal true environmental scarcities, there is a need for techniques which would enable us to determine their scarcity values. A great deal of work in environmental and resource economics has been directed at discovering methods for estimating notional prices, often called accounting prices by economists, which reflect the true social scarcities of natural resource stocks and of the services they provide. The problem is that, for the most part, practical methods have been developed for estimating the accounting prices of ‘amenities’ (e.g. places of scenic beauty or recreation sites) and relatively few for the multitude of ecosystem services which constitute our life-support system. There is a great deal that remains to be done on the development of techniques for estimating the accounting prices of different categories of resources in different institutional settings.
However, this much is clear. Indicators of social well-being in frequent use (e.g. gross national product (GNP) per head, life expectancy at birth, infant survival rate and literacy) do not reflect the impact of economic activities on the environment. Such indices of the standard of living as GNP per head pertain to commodity production. So they don’t fully take into account the use of natural capital in the production process. Statistics on past movements of GNP tell us nothing about the resource stocks which remain. Such statistics do not make clear, for example, whether increases in GNP per head are being realized by means of a depletion of the resource base (e.g. if increases in agricultural production are not being achieved by ‘mining’ the soil). Over the years, environmental and resource economists have shown how national accounting systems need to be revised to include the value of the changes in the environmental resource base that occur each year due to human activities (Lutz, 1993; Vincent et al., 1997; Dasgupta and Mäler, 2000). We should be in a position to determine whether resource degradation in various locations of the world has yet to reach the stage where current economic activities are unsustainable. But the practice of national income accounting has lagged so far behind its theory that we have little idea of what the facts have been. It is possible that time trends in such commonly used socio-economic indicators as GNP per head, life expectancy at birth, infant survival rate and literacy give us a singularly misleading picture of movements of the true standard of living.
rc一篇gnp不是一个衡量wellbeing的很好的指标，然后说了另外一种resource intensive之类的methods，但是这些methods也有缺点，有句话，social loss are greater than Profits it actually produce, 记得后面还考了，忘记选啥了
To state the matter succinctly, current-day estimates of socio-economic indicators are biased because the accounting value of changes in the stocks of natural capital are not taken into account. Because their accounting prices are not available, environmental resources on-site are frequently regarded as having no value. This amounts to regarding the depreciation of natural capital as being of no consequence. But as these resources are scarce goods, their accounting prices are positive. So, if they depreciate, there is a social loss. It means that profits attributed to economic activities which degrade the environment are frequently greater than the social profits they generate. Commercial rates of return on investment are higher than the true rates of return on investment. In short, resource-intensive projects appear to be better than they actually are. Wrong investment projects get chosen in both the private and public sectors. We may conclude that investment projects earning high rates of commercial return could well be contributing to a reduction in the social wealth of nations (Dasgupta and Mäler, 2000). It should come as no surprise then that installed technologies are often unfriendly towards the environment and, thereby, towards those whose lives depend directly on the local natural resource base. This is likely to be especially true in poor countries, where environmental legislation is usually neither strong nor effectively enforced. The installation of modern technology can harm the poorest in ways that are often not reflected in commercial costs.
The above account explains why ‘modern technology’ isn’t necessarily ‘appropriate technology’ and why the poorest of the poor in poor countries have, when they have been permitted to, been known to protest against the installation of modern technology. The transfer of technology from advanced countries can be inappropriate even when that same body of technology is appropriate in the country of original adoption. This is because the structure of accounting prices, most especially that of the local natural resource base, varies from country to country. A project design which is socially profitable in one country may not be socially profitable in another. Our analysis helps explain why environmental groups in poor countries frequently appear to be backward looking, unearthing as they try to do on occasion traditional technologies for soil conservation, water management, and so forth (see, for example, Agarwal and Narain, 1996).
The extent to which inappropriate technology is adopted varies from case to case, and from country to country. But it can be substantial. In their work on the depreciation of natural resources in Costa Rica, Solorzano et al. (1991) estimated that in 1989 the depreciation of three resources – forests, soil and fisheries – amounted to about 10% of gross domestic product (GDP) and over one-third of gross capital accumulation.
然后就是这些methods对investment in research and development有害，很可能direct against environment ，就是可能对环境可能有害。
So far I have talked about biases in the adoption of established technology and thus about biases in technology transfer. One can go further: the bias towards wrong technology extends to the prior stage of research and development. When environmental natural resources are underpriced (in the extreme, when they are not priced at all), there is little incentive on anyone’s part to develop technologies which would economize their use. So technological research and technological change are systematically directed against the environment. Often enough, environmental ‘cures’ are sought once it is perceived that past choices have been damaging to the environment, whereas ‘prevention’, or input reduction, would have been the better choice. To give an example, Chichilnisky and Heal (1998) compared the costs of restoring the ecological functioning of the Catskill Watershed ecosystem in New York State with the costs of replacing the natural water purification and filtration services the ecosystem has provided in the past by building a water purification plant costing US$ 8 billion. They have shown the overwhelming economic advantages of preservation over construction: independent of the other services the Catskill watershed provides, and ignoring the annual running costs of US$ 300 million for a filtration plant, the capital costs alone showed a more than sixfold advantage for investing in the natural capital base. Their investigation offers a rough estimate of the social worth (or accounting price) of the watershed itself.
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