Well-being Of Future Generations Research Articles

Legislating for the health and well-being of future generations in Wales

Legislating for the health and well-being of future generations in Wales

Business Professionals’ Attitudes toward Sustainable Business Practices

<p>Maintaining the sustainability of our planet is an important issue as it affects the wellbeing of future generations. Businesses can potentially play an instrumental role in addressing global warming and maintaining the ecological equilibrium of nature. Attitudes held by business executives and professionals regarding sustainable business practices can help determine the outcome of this battle. A survey instrument was administered to 166 business professionals in the Midwest United States to assess these attitudes. In general, we found that the surveyed business professionals have positive attitudes toward sustainable business practices. These attitudes were correlated with utilitarianism ethics and new business opportunities hypothesis, but not with the cost factor or a belief in a free market economy. Several background variables were found to explain the variation of the subjects’ overall attitudes toward sustainability: age, religious affiliation, political affiliation, and education.</p>

Born in Bradford's Better Start: an experimental birth cohort study to evaluate the impact of early life interventions.

BackgroundEarly interventions are recognised as key to improving life chances for children and reducing inequalities in health and well-being, however there is a paucity of high quality research into the effectiveness of interventions to address childhood health and development outcomes. Planning and implementing standalone RCTs for multiple, individual interventions would be slow, cumbersome and expensive. This paper describes the protocol for an innovative experimental birth cohort: Born in Bradford’s Better Start (BiBBS) that will simultaneously evaluate the impact of multiple early life interventions using efficient study designs. Better Start Bradford (BSB) has been allocated £49 million from the Big Lottery Fund to implement 22 interventions to improve outcomes for children aged 0–3 in three key areas: social and emotional development; communication and language development; and nutrition and obesity. The interventions will be implemented in three deprived and ethnically diverse inner city areas of Bradford.MethodThe BiBBS study aims to recruit 5000 babies, their mothers and their mothers’ partners over 5 years from January 2016-December 2020. Demographic and socioeconomic information, physical and mental health, lifestyle factors and biological samples will be collected during pregnancy. Parents and children will be linked to their routine health and local authority (including education) data throughout the children’s lives. Their participation in BSB interventions will also be tracked. BiBBS will test interventions using the Trials within Cohorts (TwiCs) approach and other quasi-experimental designs where TwiCs are neither feasible nor ethical, to evaluate these early life interventions. The effects of single interventions, and the cumulative effects of stacked (multiple) interventions on health and social outcomes during the critical early years will be measured.DiscussionThe focus of the BiBBS cohort is on intervention impact rather than observation. As far as we are aware BiBBS is the world’s first such experimental birth cohort study. While some risk factors for adverse health and social outcomes are increasingly well described, the solutions to tackling them remain elusive. The novel design of BiBBS can contribute much needed evidence to inform policy makers and practitioners about effective approaches to improve health and well-being for future generations.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-016-3318-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Sustainable management of fossil fuels: A dynamic stochastic optimization approach with jump-diffusion

This paper deals with a relevant aspect of energy modeling, i.e. fossil fuels management. The issue is faced by using purely operational research techniques, which are suitable in this context. In particular, a dynamic stochastic optimization model is developed to optimally determine use and stock of resources to be employed in consumption and investments, in a wide economic sense: human and physical capital, R&D, etc. It is assumed that a sustainability criterion drives the optimality rules, i.e. decisions are also grounded on the well-being of future generations. The policymaker maximizes an aggregated intergenerational expected utility under the dilemma of present consumption/conservation of natural resources for the future. In reference to standard environmental economic theory, jump-diffusion dynamics for the stock of natural resources and infinite time horizon are assumed. Extensive numerical experiments complete the analysis and contribute to determine fossil fuels management policies, showing that long-term investments make the difference for the well-being of present and future generations.

Planting seeds for the future of food.

The health and wellbeing of future generations will depend on humankind's ability to deliver sufficient nutritious food to a world population in excess of 9 billion. Feeding this many people by 2050 will require science-based solutions that address sustainable agricultural productivity and enable healthful dietary patterns in a more globally equitable way. This topic was the focus of a multi-disciplinary international conference hosted by Nestle in June 2015, and provides the inspiration for the present article. The conference brought together a diverse range of expertise and organisations from the developing and industrialised world, all with a common interest in safeguarding the future of food. This article provides a snapshot of three of the recurring topics that were discussed during this conference: soil health, plant science and the future of farming practice. Crop plants and their cultivation are the fundamental building blocks for a food secure world. Whether these are grown for food or feed for livestock, they are the foundation of food and nutrient security. Many of the challenges for the future of food will be faced where the crops are grown: on the farm. Farmers need to plant the right crops and create the right conditions to maximise productivity (yield) and quality (e.g. nutritional content), whilst maintaining the environment, and earning a living. New advances in science and technology can provide the tools and know-how that will, together with a more entrepreneurial approach, help farmers to meet the inexorable demand for the sustainable production of nutritious foods for future generations.

The role of generativity and attitudes on employees home and workplace water and energy saving behaviours

Building on prior studies in environmental behaviour and employee micro level CSR, this paper examines the role of generativity, encompassing thoughts towards the well-being of future generations and contribution to future society, and specific environmental attitudes on environmental behaviour in the home and workplace. The paper examines the relationships between these variables, including assessing spillover effects between home and workplace environmental behaviour via a quantitative survey methodology, within the hospitality industry in Iran. Analysis using PLS found generativity to be important in determining attitudes and, in turn, environmental behaviour both in the workplace and the home. However, a spillover effect between home and workplace behaviours was not found. Thus, this research adds to the limited literature on CSR at the micro employee level in tourism studies and highlights the effects of generativity on home and workplace behaviours, as well as potential directions for internal social marketing campaigns within tourism organisations.

Fostering Global Citizenship – tree planting as a connective practice

Education for Global Citizenship is about living as though the future mattered. This evaluates learner reactions to a tree-planting exercise that invites reflection upon hopes for the world, personal responsibilities and acting locally while thinking globally. Participant hopes concerned: environmental sustainability, peace on earth, then the welfare of future generations and personal wellbeing. Global citizenship concerns included sustainability, social justice, interdependencies and personal responsibilities. Some participants envisaged exercise outcomes to be mainly practical, others personal, such as reflection on lifestyle choices. Off-campus sessions generated higher grades, more concern for giving back to/defining a role in nature and volunteering.

Planting seeds for the future of food

The health and wellbeing of future generations will depend on humankind's ability to deliver sufficient nutritious food to a world population in excess of 9 billion. Feeding this many people by 2050 will require science‐based solutions that address sustainable agricultural productivity and enable healthful dietary patterns in a more globally equitable way. This topic was the focus of a multi‐disciplinary international conference hosted by Nestlé in June 2015, and provides the inspiration for the present article. The conference brought together a diverse range of expertise and organisations from the developing and industrialised world, all with a common interest in safeguarding the future of food. This article provides a snapshot of three of the recurring topics that were discussed during this conference: soil health, plant science and the future of farming practice. Crop plants and their cultivation are the fundamental building blocks for a food secure world. Whether these are grown for food or feed for livestock, they are the foundation of food and nutrient security. Many of the challenges for the future of food will be faced where the crops are grown: on the farm. Farmers need to plant the right crops and create the right conditions to maximise productivity (yield) and quality (e.g. nutritional content), whilst maintaining the environment, and earning a living. New advances in science and technology can provide the tools and know‐how that will, together with a more entrepreneurial approach, help farmers to meet the inexorable demand for the sustainable production of nutritious foods for future generations. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Creation of land fund for the purpose of land management in the Republic of Serbia

This paper presents the activities carried out by the authorities of the Republic of Serbia in order to properly manage agricultural land. It is well known that land, as a scarce resource in any country, must be managed in a proper way. The government is in charge of land management, land legislation and land policies that have a major influence on land development. The Republic of Serbia is currently in transition from fully state owned land to private ownership, but this path is fraught with numerous obstacles. While the experiences of other countries may help avoid some common pitfalls, each country faces a unique set of challenges not found elsewhere. To be able to properly choose the right direction of land management, it is essential to consider multiple potential scenarios of good land stewardship. A land fund is an example of a good international practice that countries like Serbia should follow, implement and adapt in a way which reflects its national heritage and current circumstances. The real estate market is turbulent and changes over time, but it must be and remain transparent, open and without restrictions in order to assure the wellbeing of future generations and development of the country.

Discount rates for long-term projects: the cost of capital and social discount rate compared

Research on the cost of capital and on the social discount rate (SDR) has developed largely along separate paths. This paper offers an overview and comparison of both concepts. The consumption-based theory of discount rates is common to both, but there are striking differences in how the cost of capital and SDR are estimated. A project's cost of capital is inferred in practice from market data, by a well-established package of techniques, and project risk makes a large difference. In contrast, the SDR is estimated by applying judgement about the welfare of future generations, in the setting of consumption-based theory. Project risk has tended to be ignored under the SDR approach.

The worth of land use: A GIS–emergy evaluation of natural and human-made capital

Natural systems make their natural capital and ecosystem services available to human economy. A careful analysis of the interplay between natural and human-made capital is needed to prevent natural capital being overexploited for present economic benefits, affecting lifestyles and wellbeing of future generations. In this study, the emergy synthesis is used to evaluate the natural and the human-made capital of Campania region (southern Italy) by accounting for the environmental support directly and indirectly provided by nature to resource generation. Furthermore, geographic information system (GIS) models are integrated with the emergy accounting procedure to generate maps of the spatial patterns of both natural and human-made capital distribution. Regional storages of natural and human-made capital are identified and evaluated in emergy units (seJ). The human-made capital of the Campania region (6.29E+24seJ) results to be about 11 times higher than the natural capital (5.69E+23seJ) due to the past and present exploitation of the natural resources needed to generate it over time.Moreover, by overlaying the total natural capital map and the total human-made capital map with a map of the protected areas within the region, only the 19% of the regional natural capital appears to be concentrated within protected areas, while most of it (81%) is concentrated outside. These findings suggest that the conservation of natural resources is also necessary outside protected areas by means of suitable policies, directives and investments. The human-made capital is mainly concentrated (88%) inside non-protected areas and interacts with the local natural capital. A management of the interactions between the two categories of wealth is crucial to prevent that the growth of human-made storages degrades the natural ecosystems and the environment. The proposed emergy–GIS framework reveals to be a useful tool for environmental planning and resource management aimed to conserve and protect the regional environmental heritage.

Bridging conceptual “silos”: bringing together health promotion and sustainability governance for practitioners at the landscape scale

Environmental health issues are examples of “wicked problems” that require cross-sectoral collaboration at the community level, yet health practitioners and environmental stakeholders find it challenging to see how and why they could be working together. Supportive organisations have been identified as the most vital enabler for individual professionals to participate actively in cross-sectoral initiatives. Ability to justify inter-professional cooperation makes it easier for practitioners to gain the necessary approvals within their institutional mandates. This paper introduces a new conceptual framework that bridges health promotion and sustainability governance to facilitate practical cross-sectoral collaboration that targets complex health-related environmental and social-ecological challenges. The proposed framework integrates six concrete overlapping themes linking health promotion and sustainability governance. The framework also highlights examples of areas where the fields could benefit from one another. Moreover, children's environmental health is proposed as a desirable overall outcome and an attractive venue for potential collaboration, because of its critical role in the public health and well-being of future generations. As a determinant of adult health, children's environmental health emphasises the vital interdependencies between health and the environment.

Fiscal incentives promoting REEE measures in Trinidad and Tobago

Purpose – Dependence on foreign energy supplies have resulted in some islands successfully harnessing alternative and renewable energy (RE) sources in order to provide a small degree of self-sufficiency. However, the development of Trinidad and Tobago's (T&T's) RE industry has stagnated largely due to the existence of substantial energy subsidies, which present cheap fuel and electricity prices thus providing a disincentive to RE investment. The purpose of this paper is to seek to re-enforce the necessity for an indissoluble government intervention in the establishment of well-designed, coordinated and innovative public-private partnerships for a successful RE industry in T&T. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a review of relevant social and economic literary sources; the research topic has been meticulously investigated. Findings – Initial outcomes indicate that the principal facilitators of RE proliferation in the Caribbean, and more so T&T, will require: gradual reduction of the energy subsidy; declining project costs via fiscal incentives and grant financing; expectation of beneficial rates of return on investment through the guarantee of optimal prices for renewable electricity or the revenue gained from the sale of carbon credits; and capacity building, institutional strengthening and implementation of appropriate legislative and regulatory instruments which provide open access to the national grid. Research limitations/implications – With the exception of T&T, Caribbean nations are heavily dependent on oil and gas imports to meet their primary energy requirements. The investigation conducted has limited documentation on cases of a similar nature within the region. The outcome of the steps identified above are based on conjecture using information gained from international situations. Practical implications – The study helps clarify the crucial role of T&T's government in the successful development of the RE industry. Resources and earnings should be used to develop T&T's infant RE industry and hence reduce the carbon footprint of the nation. Originality/value – Past attempts by the government to promote RE an energy efficiency in T&T have been passive and prevaricated. In addition to outlining the existing fiscal initiatives available to the population, this paper provides short-, medium- and long-term recommendations for the sustainability of RE in T&T. While subsidy reform, among others, poses a challenge it is nonetheless imperative if T&T is to move forward. With the abundance of solar, wind and waste-to-energy resources there is great potential for a successful RE industry in T&T. More than just policy will be required to drive change; greater commitment by the government to ensure the sustainability and economic viability of T&T while also attempting to alter the mindset of the citizenry to act as effective stewards of the island's resources for the well-being of future generations.

Cooperating with the future.

Overexploitation of renewable resources today has a high cost on the welfare of future generations. Unlike in other public goods games, however, future generations cannot reciprocate actions made today. What mechanisms can maintain cooperation with the future? To answer this question, we devise a new experimental paradigm, the 'Intergenerational Goods Game'. A line-up of successive groups (generations) can each either extract a resource to exhaustion or leave something for the next group. Exhausting the resource maximizes the payoff for the present generation, but leaves all future generations empty-handed. Here we show that the resource is almost always destroyed if extraction decisions are made individually. This failure to cooperate with the future is driven primarily by a minority of individuals who extract far more than what is sustainable. In contrast, when extractions are democratically decided by vote, the resource is consistently sustained. Voting is effective for two reasons. First, it allows a majority of cooperators to restrain defectors. Second, it reassures conditional cooperators that their efforts are not futile. Voting, however, only promotes sustainability if it is binding for all involved. Our results have implications for policy interventions designed to sustain intergenerational public goods.

Taking the Well-Being of Future Generations Seriously: Do People Contribute More to Intra-Temporal or Inter-Temporal Public Goods?

We investigate the dynamics of cooperation in public good games when contributions to the public good are immediately redistributed across contributors (intra-temporal transfers) and when contributions to the public good by the current group are transferred over time to a future group (inter-temporal transfers). We show that people are more cooperative in inter-temporal contexts than in intra-temporal contexts. We also find that subjects invest more on average in public goods when they know in advance their inheritance from the past.

The Ethics of Payment for Ecosystem Services

The Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an economic tool that has emerged in recent years as a mechanism to promote conservation of natural resources, as well as that of various goods and services commonly used. However, its application in practice raises a number of ethical concerns that this study seeks to discuss. The concept and benefits of PES are discussed, emphasizing its neoclassical economic nature background and how the initial anthropogenic position has evolved into a more holistic ecosystem vision. The paper examines some of the relationships between ethics and ecosystem services as well as the natural conflicts emerging from the opposition of utilitarian economic values versus moral arguments and deontological ethical systems. Then, a justification for ethics in payment for ecosystem services is provided as an attempt to solve perceived conflicts between conservation and human welfare. Later, the right to benefit from natural resources and PES is discussed. The conflict between natural resources as public goods whose use is a universal right for all human beings and the property rights, either legal or ancestral, of indigenous and originary people is stressed. Finally, the future of ethics and ecosystem services on issues such as the well-being of future generations and the search of an efficient integration based on land planning and conservation management strategies is discussed. In conclusion, the paper emphasizes the need for a better, integrated accounting of the benefits and costs of nature conservation, which will probably only occur when teams of natural and social scientists work together.

Sustaining Welfare for Future Generations: A Review Note on the Capital Approach to the Measurement of Sustainable Development

Measuring sustainable development based on analytical models of growth and development and modern methods of growth accounting is an economic approach—often called the capital approach – to establishing sustainable development indicators (SDIs). Ecological approaches may be combined with the capital approach, but there are also other approaches to establishing sustainable development indicators—for example the so-called integrated approach. A recent survey of the various approaches is provided in UNECE, OECD and Eurostat [1]. This review note is not intended to be another survey of the various approaches. Rather the objective of this paper is twofold: to present an update on an economic approach to measuring sustainable development—the capital approach—and how this approach may be combined with the ecological approach; to show how this approach is actually used as a basis for longer-term policies to enhance sustainable development in Norway—a country that relies heavily on non-renewable natural resources. We give a brief review of recent literature and set out a model of development based on produced, human, natural and social capital, and the level of technology. Natural capital is divided into two parts—natural capital produced and sold in markets (oil and gas)—and non-market natural capital such as clean air and biodiversity. Weak sustainable development is defined as non-declining welfare per capita if the total stock of a nation's capital is maintained. Strong sustainable development is if none of the capital stocks, notably non-market natural capital, is reduced below critical or irreversible levels. Within such a framework, and based on Norwegian experience and statistical work, monetary indexes of national wealth and its individual components including real capital, human capital and market natural capital are presented. Limits to this framework and to these calculations are then discussed, and we argue that such monetary indexes should be sustainable development indicators (SDIs) of non-market natural capital, and physical SDIs, health capital and social capital. Thus we agree with the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission [2] that monetary indexes of capital should be combined with physical SDIs of capital that have no market prices. We then illustrate the policy relevance of this framework, and how it is actually being used in long term policy making in Norway—a country that relies heavily on non-renewable resources like oil and gas. A key sustainability rule for Norwegian policies is to maintain the total future capital stocks per capita in real terms as the country draws down its stocks of non-renewable natural capital —applying a fiscal guideline akin to the Hartwick rule.

Environmental Impact Assessments from a Business Perspective: Extending Knowledge and Guiding Business Practice

Economic growth and development remain embedded in the very core of our current international economic system and the so called “material economy”. However, depleting natural resources and environmental degradation, which now threaten the well-being of future generations, has challenged this premise, and placed sustainable development as a necessary objective of business activity and expansion. Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) have emerged as a key tool for governments, businesses, and NGOs to manage the negative impact of their activities on the environment. Businesses in particular play a key role in averting or mitigating current environmental trends given that the economic growth they have stimulated has serious consequences for both the environment and social well-being. However, research on the use of EIAs has been conducted mostly from a governmental perspective producing a clear gap between research development and business (corporate) practice. To bridge this gap in knowledge, we develop a new EIA process tailored to real world business constraints and provide a range of propositions which we hope will stimulate future research efforts toward understanding and guiding how businesses integrate environmental issues into their decision-making processes.

The tobacco-free generation proposal

The tobacco-free generation proposal advocates legislation precluding the sale and supply of tobacco to individuals born after a certain year. The measure is aimed at overcoming defects with current youth...

Modeling international climate change negotiations more responsibly: Can highly simplified game theory models provide reliable policy insights?

In a recent article in this journal entitled “Game Theory and Climate Diplomacy”, DeCanio and Fremstad (2013) provide an interesting treatment of a range of simple game theoretic characterizations of international climate negotiations. The authors use the Nash and Maxi-min stability definitions to analyze 25 two-by-two ordinal games, which they recognize as “possible game-theoretic characterizations of climate negotiations between two players (e.g., Great Powers or coalitions of states)”. The authors' main conclusion that the Prisoner's Dilemma might not be the best description of climate negotiations game is consistent with the findings of others who have studied two-by-two conflicts over natural commons (Bardhan, 1993; Madani, 2010; Sandler, 1992; Taylor, 1987). Nevertheless, given the importance of the climate change issue, as well as the potential effects of our actions on the state of the environment and the well-being of future generations, I would like to address some gaps in their analysis, which result in it having limited usefulness for policy purposes. Of course, all models are simplified representations of reality, full of limitations. “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box and Draper, 1987). So, “the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful” (Box and Draper, 1987). Models' limitations need to be carefully considered when interpreting them or applying their results to policy but some models are too simple to provide useful policy advice.