Tools and Strategies Toward Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals

摘要: In the early 1970s at the dawning of the modern environmental movement, three eminent scientists battled over what became known as the IPAT identity. The work of Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren resulted in an equation to express the key drivers of environmental impact (I) as a product of population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T)(Chertow 2000). Each of these factors underlies aspects of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) with concern for demography, poverty and quality of life, and human development through technological and policy innovation (Table 8.1). The equation itself has an interesting and rich history that pitted Ehrlich’s conviction that population (P) has the greatest impact against the involvement of a third prominent scientist, Barry Commoner, who embraced technology (T) as the most significant factor. It is important to note that the technology term was first depicted as a key driver of dramatic increases in environmental degradation (Chertow 2000). By the 1990s, however, the creation of a new systems science, industrial ecology—referred to early on as “the marriage of technology and ecology”—had transformed the more pessimistic views of technology toward an understanding that the T term could be the most influential in reducing environmental impact. In 1995, the first textbook in the field declared an IPAT variant as the “Master Equation” of industrial ecology, operationalized as follows (Graedel and Allenby 1995; 2002):