Science
19 Apr 2013
Vol 340, Issue 6130
pp. 324-328
Sticky Responses
A textbook example of an unaccounted-for consequence (externality) of commercial or industrial activity is the production of pollutants where neither the producer nor the buyer bears the cost of using common environmental resources. Dasgupta and Ehrlich (p. 324) offer a theoretical analysis of externalities in two other areas of modern life—human fertility and material consumption. For example, when fertility decline lags mortality decline, the consequence could be environmental crash, the likelihood of which is greater if the environmental effects of consumption or population growth are external to the market.
Abstract
Growing concerns that contemporary patterns of economic development are unsustainable have given rise to an extensive empirical literature on population growth, consumption increases, and our growing use of nature’s products and services. However, far less has been done to reach a theoretical understanding of the socio-ecological processes at work at the population-consumption-environment nexus. In this Research Article, we highlight the ubiquity of externalities (which are the unaccounted for consequences for others, including future people) of decisions made by each of us on reproduction, consumption, and the use of our natural environment. Externalities, of which the “tragedy of the commons” remains the most widely discussed illustration, are a cause of inefficiency in the allocation of resources across space, time, and contingencies; in many situations, externalities accentuate inequity as well. Here, we identify and classify externalities in consumption and reproductive decisions and use of the natural environment so as to construct a unified theoretical framework for the study of data drawn from the nexus. We show that externalities at the nexus are not self-correcting in the marketplace. We also show that fundamental nonlinearities, built into several categories of externalities, amplify the socio-ecological processes operating at the nexus. Eliminating the externalities would, therefore, require urgent collective action at both local and global levels.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Science
Volume 340 | Issue 6130
19 April 2013
Copyright
Copyright © 2013, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 14 May 2012
Accepted: 28 February 2013
Published in print: 19 April 2013
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Acknowledgments
We thank K. Arrow, M. Campbell, G. Daily, A. Dasgupta, N. Diamond-Smith, A. Ehrlich, L. Goulder, D. Karp, D. Kennedy, M. Potts, A. Ulph, and, most especially, the editors and three anonymous referees for their comments. P.R.E. thanks the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Winslow Foundation, and P. Bing and H. Bing for their support.
Authors
Affiliations
Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DD, UK.
Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Centre for Conservation Biology, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
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