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On Intergenerational Commitment, Weak Sustainability, and Safety

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  • Alan Randall

    (Sustainability Institute and Department of Agricultural, Environmental & Development Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA)

Abstract

This article examines sustainability from a policy perspective rooted in environmental economics and environmental ethics. Endorsing the Brundtland Commission stance that each generation should have undiminished opportunity to meet its own needs, I emphasize the foundational status of the intergenerational commitment. The standard concepts of weak and strong sustainability, WS and SS, are sketched and critiqued simply and intuitively, along with the more recent concept of WS-plus. A recently proposed model of a society dependent on a renewable but vulnerable resource (Barfuss et al. 2018) is introduced as an expositional tool, as its authors intended, and used as a platform for thought experiments exploring the role of risk management tools in reducing the need for safety. Key conclusions include: (i) Safety, in this case, the elimination of risk in uncertain production systems, comes at an opportunity cost that is often non-trivial. (ii) Welfare shocks can be cushioned by savings and diversification, which are enhanced by scale. Scale increases with geographic area, diversity of production, organizational complexity, and openness to trade and human migration. (iii) Increasing scale enables enhancement of sustainable welfare via local and regional specialization, and the need for safety and its attendant opportunity costs is reduced. (iv) When generational welfare is stochastic, the intergenerational commitment should not be abandoned but may need to be adapted to uncertainty, e.g., by expecting less from hard-luck generations and correspondingly more from more fortunate ones. (v) Intergenerational commitments must be resolved in the context of intragenerational obligations to each other in the here and now, and compensation of those asked to make sacrifices for sustainability has both ethical and pragmatic virtue. (vi) Finally, the normative domains of sustainability and safety can be distinguished—sustainability always, but safety only when facing daunting threats.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan Randall, 2020. "On Intergenerational Commitment, Weak Sustainability, and Safety," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(13), pages 1-18, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:13:p:5381-:d:379813
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    3. Alan Randall, 2021. "Resource Scarcity and Sustainability—The Shapes Have Shifted but the Stakes Keep Rising," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(10), pages 1-16, May.
    4. Phoebe Koundouri & Georgios I. Papayiannis & Athanasios Yannacopoulos, 2022. "Optimal Control Approaches to Sustainability under Uncertainty," DEOS Working Papers 2215, Athens University of Economics and Business.
    5. Jason Phillips, 2024. "Quantifying the levels, nature, and dynamics of sustainability for the UK 2000–2018 from a Brundtland perspective," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 26(7), pages 17905-17939, July.
    6. Alan Randall, 2022. "How Strong Sustainability Became Safety," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(8), pages 1-17, April.
    7. Alan Randall, 2021. "Monitoring Sustainability and Targeting Interventions: Indicators, Planetary Boundaries, Benefits and Costs," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(6), pages 1-19, March.

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