Environmental Ethics, Sustainability and Decisions: Literature Problems and Suggested Solutions

This book provides a summary of the main concepts involved in environmental ethics, sustainability, and the related decisions. It can be read to discover the main cases and references for these three concepts, or as a consistent sequence of environmental ethics, sustainability, and decisions that reveals the tight linkages among these three concepts. In particular, I focus on feasibility (whether realistic parameter values exist that would let a decision achieve its goal) rather than on reliability (whether a tight statistical relationship exists between a decision and its goal). Moreover, I refer to real policies (taxes, standards, subsidies, permits, national laws and regulations, bilateral and multilateral agreements) and projects (e.g., case studies) rather than to experimental or hypothetical decisions. Finally, I use a quantitative approach that analytically formalizes ethics, sustainability, and the related decisions and demonstrates the approach using numerical exercises. The approach can be implemented either at an individual level or a country level if we assume rationality (a consistent set of informed decisions) within a normative analysis (which decision should be taken) rather than within a positive analysis (which decision has been taken). Since environmental sustainability implies seeking a compromise between economic and ecological criteria (environmental sustainability is an opportunity cost) based on specified ethical principles, the suggested decisions will fall along a spectrum between a more economic and a more ecological decision. In particular, I identify the main approaches applied to sustainable decisions (alternative objectives and contexts for policies, alternative methodologies and contexts for projects) by referring to more than 200 theoretical papers within the English-language sustainability literature from the late 1980s to 2020 in the Scopus database. In addition, I highlight the main mistakes (missed objectives) and concerns (inadequate policies and methodologies) related to the application of these policies and methodologies, by performing statistical analyses of more than 800 empirical studies. Moreover, I suggest several approaches to avoid: these include applying marginal and monetary assessments for social and ecological interdependencies; disregarding equity in the case of environmental interactions; disregarding equity in the case of economic inefficiency; and using monetary or non-monetary flow assessments to take decisions about environmental stocks. Finally, I suggest what to do in principle: set priorities, constraints, assumptions, objectives, scales, metrics, and indicators, then choose policy instruments or decision-making tools to measure and implement sustainability. I also suggest what to do in practice: in the context of inefficiency or interactions for policies, promote equity; in the context of environmental stocks for projects, choose dynamic models. This analysis is based on my 25 English empirical articles in sustainability science. Thus, this book supports efforts to achieve consistency between the chosen ethics, the adopted paradigm of sustainability, and the suggested decisions; these include market-based policies and agreements in cost-benefit analysis for weak sustainability and command-and-control policies and agreements in multi-criteria analysis for strong sustainability. I also consider the transparency of the chosen ethics behind the adopted paradigm of sustainability and the suggested decisions, such as substitution between forms of capital for weak sustainability or efforts to maintain the environmental status quo for strong sustainability.