| Abstrakt: |
The article focuses on issues related to economic growth and environmental sustainability. Many of the environmental functions that contribute to the economy or directly to human welfare are unpriced or underpriced, are provided by open access resources or are otherwise difficult to accommodate within normal processes of economic and other decision making. Concerning many of the functions of ecosystems and fundamental processes of life on Earth there remains profound uncertainty coupled with the knowledge that loss of these functions, or changes in the processes, may be irreversible. Yet it is clear that, over the last fifty years, the combination of exponential population growth, exponential increases in economic activity and the development of technologies that are at best foreign to, and at worst destructive of, normal ecological cycles, is resulting in the loss of environmental functions, the loss or degradation of ecosystems and the generation of global environmental change on an unprecedented scale. Barring catastrophe there is much more population growth to come. |
