Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new 'frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.

Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation

Business & Money

Barbier, Edward

Economics

Cambridge University Press

In a world of growing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, ensuring a safe Anthropocene for humankind is essential. Managing an increasingly "fragile" planet requires new thinking on markets, institutions and governance built on five principles: ending the underpricing of nature, fostering collective action, accepting absolute limits, attaining sustainability, and promoting inclusivity. Rethinking economics and policies in this way can help to overcome the global challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity, and deteriorating marine and coastal habitats. It requires decoupling wealth creation from environmental degradation through business, policy and financial actions aimed at better stewardship of the biosphere. In this book, renowned environmental economist Edward Barbier offers a blueprint for a greener and more inclusive economy, and outlines the steps we must take now to build a post-COVID world that limits environmental threats while sustaining per capita welfare.

Economics for a Fragile Planet

Economics for a Fragile Planet: Rethinking Markets, Institutions and Governance

Nature and Wealth: Overcoming Environmental Scarcity and Inequality

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, this book argues that growing environmental degradation and wealth inequality are linked to how nature is exploited to create economic wealth. Ending the under-pricing of natural capital and insufficient human capital accumulation is essential to overcoming structural imbalance in modern economies.

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Sustainable Development: Economics and Environment in the Third World

Blueprint for a Green Economy put the economics of the environment onto the public agenda. Its authors have now widened the issue by applying the principles of their earlier, ground-breaking work to the tangled issue of sustainable Third World development. They offer a definition of sustainable development in terms of not depleting natural resources and then examine its economic implications. The bulk of the book contains six lively case-studies of major developmental issues, from the watersheds of Java to the drylands of the Sudan; from Amazonia to Africa, all of which show the crucial importance of incorporating the economics of sustainable development into our thinking.

Sustainable Development

Markandya, Anil

Pearce, David

Reference

Routledge

Our wellbeing-even our existence-depends on ecological systems and biological diversity. Ecologists and economists alike recognise that loss of biodiversity is one of the most serious problems the world faces yet their narrow, conventional approaches often fail to grasp all the implications of the problem. New, interdisciplinary thinking is required to safeguard both us and the biosphere from the effects of species extinction. Paradise Lost, the outcome of a unique collaboration between economists and ecologists initiated by the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, shows how an integrated approach can understand and tackle the issue: Part 1 provides an overview of the causes of the problem, and of previous approaches to dealing with it; Part 2 examines the effects of biodiversity loss on specific natural systems and the limits to our current knowledge; Part 3 looks at the policy implications discussing the ecological limits to economic activity and the management institutions needed to make an integrated approach effective and Part 4 presents the conclusions: the future research needed and the policy challenges which have to be confronted. Stimulating and clearly written, this book provides a comprehensive account for those academically or professionally involved, and for anyone wanting to know what is at stake and what can be done.

Paradise Lost: The ecological economics of biodiversity

Folke, Carl

Burgess, Joanne

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