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What Are The Most Important Conceptual Foundations Of Weak Sustainability

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1. Describe the most important conceptual foundations of weak sustainability. The position of weak sustainability holds that resource depletion and environmental degradation will not constrain human consumption possibilities in the future. What is the basis for this optimism?

Weak sustainability is defined as the sustainability of a society that can utilize manufactured and human capital instead of natural capital. This observation is constructed by three conceptual foundations. The first foundation of weak sustainability is the economic growth with exhaustible resources that is displayed with a Cobb-Douglass Production Function. This function to illustrating the relationship of manufactured capital and natural capital to the total capital …show more content…

The rule states that if value of manufactured capital and nonrenewable resources is constant, the constant per capita consumption is possible. This value illustrates that the values of the individual capital are not essential and can be interchangeable. Both resources are important for a constant consumption, but the value of both are not. Through this assumption, the consumption of natural capital is irrelevant to sustainability and the future generations of humanity could have less natural capital because manufactured capital can substitute it. Based on this understanding, the importance of manufactured capital and nonrenewable resources are regarded as the same in the development of a sustainable …show more content…

With changes in the global temperature and weather, the understanding of the stability of society is necessary to allow us to develop to an environment that is able to resist any disturbance to our ecosystem. This understanding will allow us to build infrastructure in our services and funds to resist these changes and continue to provide a sustainable flow of goods to society. When changes to our ecosystem occur, humanity needs to be prepared to deal with these changes. Also understanding the human impact on the environment allows us to determine what actions have caused a negative impact on the ecosystem and develop a society were humanity can minimize their effect on these impacts. As humanity moves towards the future, the human impact on the environment will be more prevalent and cause changes in our services and capital of resources. A resilient system can predict the disturbances on society and allow for our infrastructure that can return its stable position. The development of a stable system is necessary for sustainability to deal with any issues with income of

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