China
Africa
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Risk, Resilience, and System Dynamics
Published in John C. Ayers, Sustainability, 2017
The physical limits to growth include resources, environment, space, and food, while the traditional approaches to solving growth-related stress include migration, expansion, economic growth, and technology (Myrtveit 2005). However, these traditional approaches are no longer effective at relieving growth-related stress. The associated social problems seem intractable; no political approaches seem to solve them. If the world system stays in ecological overshoot too long and the magnitude of the overshoot becomes too great, it will eventually collapse. An alternative, new approach is needed to return the world system to sustainability; we must apply self-restraining policies that switch the development from growth to equilibrium, that is, we must change to a steady-state economy. In a steady state economy, the physical throughput (mass of resources consumed and mass of waste produced) is constant, but wealth measured as total and per capita GDP are allowed to increase.
Engineering the transition to sustainability
Published in Australian Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering, 2020
The former World Bank economist and founding member of the school of ecological economics Herman Daly introduced the concept of a steady-state economy more than thirty years ago (Daly 1974). “A steady-state economy is defined by constant stocks of physical wealth (artifacts) and a constant population, each maintained at some chosen, desirable level by a low rate of throughput-i.e., by low birth rates equal to low death rates and by low physical production rates equal to low physical depreciation rates, so that longevity of people and durability of physical stocks are high.”
Human settlements arranged as networks of regenerative villages with nature-based infrastructure ecosystems
Published in Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 2022
Steven Liaros, Nilmini De Silva
Daly provides a succinct statement of the goal of a steady state economy as one that is able ‘to sustain a constant, sufficient stock of real wealth and people for a long time’ (Daly 2010, 21). Unfortunately, this raises at least two significant issues: (a) the population problem – how to stop population growth and maintain a constant population; and (b) what population can be sustained by the environment?