Accounting for "land-grabbing" from a biocapacity viewpoint

Biocapacity convergence clubs in Latin America: an analysis of their determining factors using quantile regressions

Latin America experiences an increasing urban primacy index and a rapid expansion of the financial system, putting direct pressure on the demand for resources to satisfy the consumption of large cities. We investigate the convergence of per capita biocapacity in 16 Latin America countries and evaluate the factors that influence its evolution over time. Specifically, we analyze the impact of the urban primacy index, economic progress, and the financial globalization index on the convergence of per capita biocapacity. We use the methodological framework developed by Phillips and Sul Econometrica 75:1771-1855, (2007) to analyze the convergence and the formation of convergence clubs of biocapacity during 1970-2017. The findings indicate that the countries of the region do not share a common trend of biocapacity, although they are grouped into five converging clubs. Biocapacity transition analysis reveals that countries have heterogeneous transition pathways between them. Using marginal effects, we find that the urban primacy index and economic progress reduce the biocapacity. The effect of the financial globalization index on biocapacity is not conclusive. The quantile regressions reveal that quantiles' impact of the urban primacy index and financial globalization on per capita biocapacity is heterogeneous. However, the effect of economic progress on biocapacity that predominates among quantiles is positive. The adoption of common policies among the countries that form the converging clubs could improve the effectiveness of pro-environmental policies and promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals related to environmental quality.

Ecological Suitability of Island Development Based on Ecosystem Services Value, Biocapacity and Ecological Footprint: A Case Study of Pingtan Island, Fujian, China

The ecological environment and resource endowment of an island are more vulnerable compared to the mainland, and special assessment and measurement of the ecological suitability for development are significant. Pingtan Island (Fujian, China) was taken as a case study. Changes in ecosystem services value and the profit-and-loss balance between ecological footprint and biocapacity were assessed using land use/cover changes based on remote-sensing images taken in 2009, 2014 and 2017, and the ecological suitability of development was measured. Results show that island development led to a decrease in the ecosystem services value and an increase in ecological footprint and biocapacity. The key ecological factors restricting the scale of island development are topography, vegetation with special functions and freshwater. Biocapacity of islands can increase not only by changing from lower-yield land types to higher-yield construction land types but also by external investment. A new measurement framework was proposed that simply and clearly reveals the ecological suitability of island development and the underlying key constraints.

A drain or drench on biocapacity? Environmental account of fertility, marriage, and ICT in the USA and Canada

In either case of ecological and biocapacity surplus or deficit, the precautionary effort toward optimizing the natural capital posits a potential framework for environmental sustainability. In studying the environmental account of fertility, marriage, and technological advancement in the USA and Canada, the autoregressive distributed lad-bound testing is employed over the experimental period 1990-2014. Importantly, the study revealed that the interaction of fertility and marriage exerts a significant and negative impact of biocapacity in both the USA and Canada and in short run and long run. Moreover, while the impact of energy use in both countries is significant and positive in both the short and long run, the magnitude of the impact is almost negligible. Similarly, an improvement in technological advancement in the countries is empirically observed to cause a decline in the biocapacity in both the long and short term. These posit that both energy use and technological advancement in Canada and the USA do not necessarily improve the productive capacity of the countries ecosystems. In general, the study provides policy frameworks for stakeholders toward addressing the environmental peculiarity of the USA (a biocapacity debtor) and Canada (a biocapacity creditor).

Biocapacity—Premise of Sustainable Development in the European Space

The contemporary lifestyle, based on unsustainable consumption patterns, leads to an orientation of the society towards the development and application of sustainable development strategies and policies. The comparative analysis of the ecological footprint and biocapacity allows one to study the interaction between human activities and environment, through the biocapacity reserve or deficit. In this context, this article carries out a complex analysis of the biocapacity reserve/deficit, as a latent variable that quantifies sustainability, viewed through a selection of determinants, from which three main components have been extracted: A component of education and social exclusion, a component of economic development, innovation, and environment, and a demographic component. These were transformed—through a multiple linear regression model—into exogenous variables with high explanatory power over the variation of the biocapacity reserve/deficit and constituted the tools in identifying behavioral patterns of the European countries and a set of measures leading to the sustainability of the ecological reserve.

Dynamic Analysis of the Coupling Coordination Relationship between Urbanization and Water Resource Security and Its Obstacle Factor

Water resource security is an important condition for socio-economic development. Recently, the process of urbanization brings increasing pressures on water resources. Thus, a good understanding of harmonious development of urbanization and water resource security (WRS) systems is necessary. This paper examined the coordination state between urbanization and WRS and its obstacle factors in Beijing city, utilizing the improved coupling coordination degree (ICCD) model, obstacle degree model, and indicator data from 2008 to 2017. Results indicated that: (1) The coupling coordination degree between WRS and urbanization displayed an overall upward tendency during the 2008-2017 period; the coupling coordination state has changed from an imbalanced state into a good coordination state, experiencing from a high-speed development stage (2008-2010), through a steady growth stage (2010-2014), towards a low-speed growth (2014-2017). (2) In urbanization system, both the social and spatial urbanizations have the greatest obstruction to the development of urbanization-WRS system. The subsystems of pressure and state are the domain obstacle subsystems in WRS system. These results can provide important support for urban planning and water resource protection in the future, and hold great significance for urban sustainable development.

Overcoming the Myths of Mainstream Economics to Enable a New Wellbeing Economy

Increasingly, empirical evidence refutes many of the theoretical pillars of mainstream economics. These theories have persisted despite the fact that they support unsustainable and undesirable environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Continuing to embrace them puts at risk the possibility of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and overcoming other global challenges. We discuss a selection of paradoxes and delusions surrounding mainstream economic theories related to: (1) efficiency and resource use, (2) wealth and wellbeing, (3) economic growth, and (4) the distribution of wealth within and between rich and poor nations. We describe a wellbeing economy as an alternative for guiding policy development. In 2018, a network of Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo), (supported by, but distinct from, the larger Wellbeing Economy Alliance—WEAll) promoting new forms of governance that diverge from the ones on which the G7 and G20 are based, has been launched and is now a living project. Members of WEGo aim at advancing the three key principles of a wellbeing economy: Live within planetary ecological boundaries, ensure equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity, and efficiently allocate resources (including environmental and social public goods), bringing wellbeing to the heart of policymaking, and in particular economic policymaking. This network has potential to fundamentally re-shape current global leadership still anchored to old economic paradigms that give primacy to economic growth over environmental and social wealth and wellbeing.

Estimating global ecosystem service values and its response to land surface dynamics during 1995-2015

Changes in land use due to the industrial revolution, increasing population, ever-increasing desire for economic growth is a global concern. The aforementioned changes can have a significant impact on global and regional ecosystem services which are indispensable for human well-being and their subsistence. This study identifies several approaches (Costanza et al., de Groot et al., and Xie et al.) to estimate the value of global terrestrial ecosystem services. High resolution (300 m) land use products provided by European Space Agency-Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) were used to quantify the global ecosystem service values (ESV) for 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015 respectively. The coefficient of elasticity (CE) and coefficient of sensitivity (CS) was calculated to compute the response of ESV's corresponding to land use land cover (LULC) change. The results estimated the mean global ESV's (Trillion US$ year^-1) to be 58.97 in 1995 and 57.76 in 2015, indicating a net loss of ESV (1.21 Trillion US$ year^-1) during the analysis period (1995-2015) due to depletion of forest cover and wetland/water surface. The overall ESV (Trillion US$ year^-1) increased in cropland (4.8 in 1995 to 4.9 in 2015) and urban coverage (0.3 in 1995 to 0.59 in 2015) whereas, it reduced substantially in forests (17.59 in 1995 to 17.42 in 2015), grasslands (9.1 in 1995 to 8.9 in 2015), wetland (22.19 in 1995 to 21.11 in 2015) and water bodies (5.29 in 1995 to 5.27). The forestland, wetland, and water bodies are the highest sensitive eco-regions defined by all valuation methods. The current research provides a way to quantify the overall economic loss or gain due to changes in the past, present, and future land use. This will bridge the gap between economic evaluations of current assets concerning the changes in land use. It will also help planners to provide an in-depth thought to the changes in the overall economic value of a particular land use in future (keeping biodiversity in mind) while validating long-term policies concerning to ecological conservation of a country.