Challenges to Sustainable Management of Resources

Hi! the three of us discussed this question posted to us as well. feel free to share with us your comments and how the situation is like in Australia! :D

Identify the challenges that will confront the global community, nations, and communities, in sustainable managing resources.

In the tragedy of the commons, it is said that resources that are shared, or commonly held, such as oceans, rivers, air are highly susceptible to massive degradation. This is due to the theory of self interest. A metaphor was raised in Hardin's article imagine a group of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons), on which they are all entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's view, it is in each herder's interest to put as many cows as possible onto the land, even if the commons is damaged as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from the additional cows, however he only bears a fraction of the cost of overgrazing as the damage is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this supposedly ‘rational’ decision, the commons is destroyed and all herders suffer. Thus Hardin concluded that “freedom in the commons bring ruin to all”.

In our opinion, most of the commons in the global context has a fluid form. The open air and water is the most obvious examples. There are also static territorial resources such as forests which though cannot be seen as a common, as it is located within a geographical boundary of a country and technically not shared, the relationship between the management of these static resources and fluid resources cannot be neglected. For example, the huge amount of carbon we are emitting into the air, which eventually leads to the degradation of another resource, which is our current climate through global warming, is directly affected by more static resources such as forests (which acts as carbon sinks).

One major challenge in sustainable resource management when static resources come into play, is that there are many scales in which we have to look at. On different scales, there are many different communities involved, be it global, national or regional, there are very different and often conflicting views on what is considered sustainable management of resources. For example, one type of resource often talked about especially in the light of the global warming controversy, will be forests. Acting as a carbon sink, forests reduces the amount of carbon in the air, hence slowing global warming. On a global scale, sustainable resource management in this case will be to preserve the forests, maintaining a high level of carbon sink potential. However, on a national scale, the state’s priority may not be to preserve these forests, but to cut down these forests for several reasons, such as agricultural purposes, that can spur economic development, or to solve social problems such as starvation. There are many examples of these conflicting views. Most often, it is a conflict between environmental sustainability, and economic development. At the Amazon, governor Blairo Maggi, leading pioneer on Brazilian frontier once said that he’d rather feed a child than save a tree. As Upton Sinclour said in ‘the inconvenient truth’, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. These conflicting goals and what communities at different scales view as more pertinent and important will be a challenge in sustainable managing resources.

Another challenge will be human activities. As we enter another period in Earth’s history which many term the “Anthropocene”, we cannot ignore the impact that human culture and social norms play on the usage of our resources. For example, the demand for different types of food, determines land usage in terms of agriculture and farming. In the US, with a food culture that is leaning heavily towards a meat diet, especially beef, which is a major contributor to global warming (belching of cows, releasing methane into the common air). Such food cultures is definitely not sustainable at the moment in terms of solving social problems in other countries such as starvation (80% of the corn grown and 95% of the oats in the US are fed to livestock not people), nor is it sustainable in temporal terms due to the Greenhouse Gases released, encouraging global warming. Another example will be the increasing number of cars on the roads, for example in China. However, we have to also applaud some relatively newer emerging human culture, that encourages sustainability, such as “Earth Day”, introduced first in Australia which eventually spread to many other areas, where entire cities shut down their power for an hour to show their support towards energy conservation.