Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors under-pinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. This article is a summary of a report prepared on behalf of the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 26 August 4 September 2002. We use the concept of resilience—the capacity to buffer change, learn and develop—as a framework for understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of rapid transformations. Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are structured scenarios and active adaptive management. These tools require and facilitate a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.

https://bioone.org/journals/AMBIO-A-Journal-of-the-Human-Environment/volume-31/issue-5/0044-7447-31.5.437/Resilience-and-Sustainable-Development--Building-Adaptive-Capacity-in-a/10.1579/0044-7447-31.5.437.pdf

Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations

https://mimoza.marmara.edu.tr/~mtekce/Dinda_2004.pdf

Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis: A Survey

(2002). Modelling Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 97, No. 457, pp. 360-360.

Modelling Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance

Will the world be able to sustain economic growth indefinitely without running into resource constraints or despoiling the environment beyond repair? What is the relationship between steadily increasing incomes and environmental quality? This paper builds on the author's earlier work (1993), in which he argued that the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality – whether inverse or direct -- is not fixed along a country's development path. Indeed, he hypothesized, it may change as a country reaches a level of income at which people can demand and afford a more efficient infrastructure and a cleaner environment. This implied inverted-U relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth came to be known as the "Environmental Kuznets Curve," by analogy with the income-inequality relationship postulated by Kuznets (1965, 1966). The objective of this paper is to critically review, synthesize and interpret the literature on the relationship between economic growth and environment. This literature has followed two distinct but related strands of research: an empirical strand of ad hoc specifications and estimations of a reduced form equation, relating an environmental impact indicator to income per capita; and a theoretical strand of macroeconomic models of interaction between environmental degradation and economic growth, including optimal growth, endogenous growth and overlapping generations models. The author concludes that the macroeconomic models generally support the empirical findings of the Environmental Kuznets Curve literature. He suggests further empirical investigation related to the assumption of additive separability, as well as development of additional macroeconomic models that allow for a more realistic role for government.

Economic Growth and the Environment

For the last ten years environmentalists and the trade policy community have engaged in a heated debate over the environmental consequences of liberalized trade. The debate was originally fueled by negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations, both of which occurred at a time when concerns over global warming, species extinction and industrial pollution were rising. Recently it has been intensified by the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and proposals for future rounds of trade negotiations. The debate has often been unproductive. It has been hampered by the lack of a common language and also suffered from little recourse to economic theory and empirical evidence. The purpose of this essay is set out what we currently know about the environmental consequences of economic growth and international trade. We critically review both theory and empirical work to answer three basic questions. What do we know about the relationship between international trade, economic growth and the environment? How can this evidence help us evaluate ongoing policy debates? Where do we go from here?

Trade, Growth and the Environment

A generalization of the theorem of V. Bargmann concerning unitary and ray representations is obtained and is applied to the general problem of lifting group actions associated to the extension of structure of a bundle. In particular this is applied to the Poincare group 'P' of a Lorentz manifold 'M'. It is shown that the topological restrictions needed to lift an action in 'P' are more stringent than for actions in the proper Poincare group 'P'. Similar results hold for the Euclidean group of a Riemannian manifold.

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/7906/1/MPRA_paper_7906.pdf

Group Actions on Spin Manifolds

A problem of existence and characterization of solutions of optimal growthmodels in many sector economies is studied. The social utility to he optimizedis a generalized form of a preference depending additively on consumption atthe different dates of the planning period. The optimization is restricted to a setof admissible growth paths defined by production-investment-consumptionrelations described by n system of differential equations. Sufficient conditionsare given for existence of a solution in a Hilbert space of paths, without convexityassumptions on either the utilities or the technology, using techniques ofnonlinear functional analysis. A characterization is given of the utilities whichare continuous with respect to the Hilbert space norm. Under convexityassumptions A characterization is also given of optimal and efficient solutionsby competitive prices. .

/pdf/nonlinear-functional-analysis-and-optimal-economic-growth-480azochbi.pdf

Nonlinear Functional Analysis and Optimal Economic Growth

On the existence and the structure of the pseudo-equilibrium manifold

/pdf/arbitrage-gains-from-trade-and-social-diversity-a-unified-2ved90x9hg.pdf

Arbitrage, Gains from Trade and Social Diversity: A Unified Perspective on Resource Allocation

Political economy views economic issues through the lens of political organisation. In today's world, it must focus on the roles of markets and of democracy, two concepts which are driving revolutionary changes in the political organisation of both Europe and Asia. There are two main paradigms for the analysis of markets and democracy, both of which have been mathematically advanced over a number of years: the general equilibrium theory of markets, and social choice theory, which examines practical aspects of democracy. While it is true that political economy has made sornc limited use of thc latter in order to examine political-economic: issues of democracy, it has made little use of the former, the theory of market behaviour.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1370696_code1007978.pdf?abstractid=1370696&mirid=4

Graciela Chichilnisky

Papers

Group Actions on Spin Manifolds

Nonlinear Functional Analysis and Optimal Economic Growth

On the existence and the structure of the pseudo-equilibrium manifold

Arbitrage, Gains from Trade and Social Diversity: A Unified Perspective on Resource Allocation

On the Mathematical Foundations of Political Economy