Economic Growth Or Environmental Stability ?

ECONOMIC GROWTH OR ENVIRONMENTAL STABILITY?

The most debated conflict of our times is undisputedly between Economic growth and Environmental stability. Climate change which was earlier perceived as a prediction of a faraway future  is very clearly manifesting and has become a reality of today. The most recent example being the Australian and the Amazon Rainforest  Wildfires. In Australia 11 million hectares of bush, forests and parks were burnt  with the average temperature soaring  to 105 degrees. The reason of the wildfire was attributed mainly to extreme heat, prolonged drought and strong winds. In the Amazon wildfires which gripped countries like Peru, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay over 906 thousand hectares of forest was lost to the fires. In 2019, Brazil reported 80,000 wildfires all across the country (mainly due to slash and burn methods which are used to facilitate Agriculture, Livestock, Logging and Mining resulting in wide scale deforestation). On our Earth 390 billion tons of snow and ice melts each year and since 1961 we have lost 10.6 trillion tons of ice.  The fall of past civilisations like the Mayan has  also  been  related to  causes  like drought, change in pattern of precipitation etc. Talking about the present, the Carbon footprint of China  in 2017 was 9.8  billion metric tons  (with USA and India following by 5.3 billion metric tones and 2.5 billion metric tons respectively). There is no denying the fact that Climate Change is real but a  question arises: can we afford to decelerate Economic growth for its sake? It might be a choice for the developed nations but what about the third world countries where dark clouds of hunger and poverty still linger over and the  lack of electricity, water,  education, medical facilities and poor sanitation are daily problems. In India, 21% of the population sleeps hungry every day, 41.6% of the people live below $1.25 per day, 75.6% below $2 a day and 40% of the students drop out of Secondary school due to economic & social factors. In El Salvador, 50% of the people live in extreme poverty and 25% of the children under five years of age suffer from chronic malnutrition. For these Asian and African countries the development of infrastructure, industries and factories is very understandably necessary. Costly transfer of Intellectual Property Rights of latest technologies sometimes becomes unaffordable for the  less developed nations. Economic growth also comprises  of the growth in productivity which requires large scale industries and infrastructure (the development of which certainly harms the environment).

The major challenge before our world in moving towards a sustainable future is the development of environment friendly technologies and making them affordable for all.