What should take priority, economic or environment development?
Sacrifice to the
environment due to economic development will lead to negative impacts on the
environment in the future. In fact, the purpose of the development is to meet
the needs of life in the form of welfare that extend to a variety of social
problems such as poverty, unemployment and inequality without harming future generations
as stated by the Brundtland Commission in 1987: "development that meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs ".
Old paradigm about economic
development said that development is identified with efforts to increase the
per capita income through investment and land industrialization. The increase
in per capita income is expected to solve the issues. The paradigm leads the
people and even the government to increase per capita national income in
various ways, even without taking concern into long-term effects on the
environment.
Development is closely
related to the conversion of the farmland to industrial land. The economic
development would cause a negative impact on the environment. The negative
impact on the environment: losing of 195 square kilometers of tropical rain
forest every day, changing 98 square kilometers of fertile land into desert,
disposing 1.5 tons of toxic industrial wastes and extinction of 100 species of
plants and animals due to deforestation.
The main goal of
development is fixing the social problems of poverty, unemployment and social
inequality. But in fact, the current economic development is quite the
opposite. Social inequality between the rich and the poor is widening.
Construction of luxury hotels, hospitals magnificent, luxurious shopping malls,
can only be enjoyed by rich people. On the opposite side, the poor live in the
midst of squalor and had to work hard just to meet their hunger.
The fast economic
development provide emissions either from industry or from vehicles. Beside of
making air contamination the emission makes a green-house effect that leads the
increasing of temperature. It makes rising up the sea water as a result of
glacier melting in the pole. Flood became inevitable thing again, until
submerging field farms that owned by poor farming community. The poorest people
will be hit earliest and hardest by climate change, even though they have
contributed little to causing the problem.
Time by time fertile lands
are increasingly changed into industrial land. The farming community lost
farmland, then they do forest fires to their new farmland. Beside of that, they
use bad farming methods conducted perfunctory due to lack of attention from the
government in the agricultural sector. The impact is the fertility period on
the land is very short and after that the land could not be cultivated again.
Inevitably, these farmers have to burn more new forests for new farmland.
The economic development leads
to environmental degradation .Thus, is important to revolutionized economic
development that makes priority to preserve the environment. At least three
main solutions to make environmentally friendly of economic sustainable
development: 1) Proper resource pricing, 2) Control of industrial waste, 3)
Debt-for-nature swaps.
During this time, the
existing pricing policy actually squandering the use of scarce natural
resources and encourage the industry unsustainable methods. In fact, the
government subsidies is enjoyed most by those with the highest earning. For
that we need to discriminate the resource price based on their earnings. So
that, the government subsidy costs is minimized and can be allocated for
environmental improvement.
Controlling of industrial
waste has also become another important factor in the green economic
development. Governments have an important role in making policy-related
restrictions on pollution from industrial sectors. These measures could include
the taxing the wastes for handling the environmental damage, limitation the
maximum quota of waste that can be disposed, and standardization of waste that
can be disposed into the environment. Thus the destruction of the environment
due to industrial wastes can be minimized.
Third World Country has an
abundance of natural resources and has a green environment that still allows it
to be preserved. Unfortunately, these countries have relatively large debts to
the country's foreign exchange earnings. Government-owned funds that use for
the preservation of the environment it paid for the due debt. Therefore
debt-for-nature swaps needs to be implemented namely the purchase of Third
World Countries IOUs by private organizations such as the Rainforest Alliance
environmentalists based in the United States. IOUs is then exchanged for bonds
that have a longer repayment term. So that the costs can be used for the
preservation of the environment.
Anyway, economic
development ruled out environmental conservation will only damage his own nation,
both now even worse in the future. maz
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