Sustainable Carrying Capacity for New Zealand
March 22, 2013 • Protection of Species, Daily Email Recap
Sustainable Carrying Capacity for New Zealand
See: http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/media/Sustainable-Carrying-Capacity-v3.0-Final.pdf
Sustainable carrying capacity has a simple definition from an ecological perspective – it is the number of a species
that can be supported in a particular area indefinitely, given that area’s endowment of water, food, and other
necessities. However, for human beings in New Zealand, the expectations of being supported involves far more
than mere survival, and through our food exports, the majority of the people we support are overseas. What
then can be said about New Zealand’s carrying capacity given our reliance on our environment to achieve human
well-being? This paper explores the thinking around sustainability in a national context, and the implications
when looking to build this concept into policy making.
Defining well-being, sustainability and carrying capacity
Well-being includes not just our biological needs or our psychological desires, but the opportunities and freedoms
to address those desires in a secure and cohesive society.1 It can be measured by, for instance, the United Nations’
Human Development Index which includes income, life expectancy, and literacy.2 More detailed measures should
include environmental responsibility, economic efficiency, and social cohesion.3,4
For sustainability, the Brundtland Commission’s statement
“sustainable development is development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs” is now
twenty-five years old and, as a definition, it appears to be
durable. A recent attempt to define sustainable carrying
capacity in a New Zealand local context resulted in: “The
Human Carrying Capacity (HCC) is the measure of a
specified area’s ability to sustainably support human
activity given aggregate lifestyle and development choices
and the means used to achieve these, and is expressed in
terms of number of people.”5 This statement does need
the caveat that the needs of future generations will be
different from our current needs so we should preserve
the opportunities and choices that future generations may
value more highly than us. Overall progress towards
sustainability has been insufficient with the Royal Society
of London, amongst others, calling for urgent action to
radically transform unsustainable consumption.6
Much of the discussion around sustainable carrying
capacity has come from dialogues between ecologists and
economists with the aim of jointly developing approaches
that deliver both economic and environmental goals. The
overall concept provides a framework for discussing
ecological resilience in the context of trade, economic
growth, and changes in human behaviour and
technologies. Its attractiveness may lie in the notion that a
population or activity can be sustained at a stable and
optimal level, avoiding crashes or over-exploitation.
However, human societies are always changing and our
current global wealth is characterised by ever-increasing
rates of change in behaviour, technologies, and resource
use. In this dynamic state, a quasi-equilibrium tool like
sustainable carrying capacity is flawed, but it remains a
useful conceptual tool for considering the scale and
intensity of our relationship with the environment.
To read the full paper, please click here: http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/media/Sustainable-Carrying-Capacity-v3.0-Final.pdf
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