Fenech Adam, Foster Jay, Hamilton Kirk, Hansell Roger
Meteorological Service, Downsview, Ontario, Canada.
Environ Monit Assess. 2003 Jul-Aug;86(1-2):3-17. doi: 10.1023/a:1024046400185.
The Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Although the idea of sustainable development has been widely accepted, it has proved difficult to identify and implement policies and practices that promote sustainable economic growth. Some economists, environmental scientists and policy analysts believe that they can transform the consensus about sustainability into manageable practices. They propose to accomplish this feat with a set of new ideas about the relationships between the economy and the environment offered under the banner of 'natural capital'. An ideal account of natural capital would be one or more standard measures or models that would allow the direct comparison of environmental goods, like forests, fresh water and clean air, with economic goods, like money, capital and productivity. By bringing economic science and environmental science to an objective common ground, a natural capital model has the potential to provide a concrete means of comparing the economic and ecological costs and benefits of particular policies and programmes. This paper offers a survey and analysis of several new contributions to the formation of the natural capital concept from economists, ecologists, policy analysts, biometricians, foresters and a philosopher. The paper concludes that existing microeconomic theory may be 'ungreenable', if it is not reformulated. While macroeconomic approaches to natural capital have beenmore successful, they share the limitation that ecosystems and species are valued solely in monetary terms. These problems are taken to suggest that the development of a successful natural capital model may require economic theory to be recast to include non-monetary social preferences and values.
布伦特兰委员会的报告《我们共同的未来》将可持续发展定义为：在不损害后代满足其自身需求能力的前提下，满足当代人需求的发展。尽管可持续发展的理念已被广泛接受，但事实证明，要确定并实施促进可持续经济增长的政策和实践并非易事。一些经济学家、环境科学家和政策分析师认为，他们能够将关于可持续性的共识转化为可管理的实践。他们提议借助一系列以“自然资本”之名提出的关于经济与环境关系的新观点来实现这一目标。理想的自然资本描述应是一种或多种标准度量或模型，能够直接将森林、淡水和清洁空气等环境商品与货币、资本和生产力等经济商品进行比较。通过将经济科学和环境科学置于客观的共同基础之上，自然资本模型有可能提供一种具体手段，用以比较特定政策和计划的经济与生态成本及效益。本文对经济学家、生态学家、政策分析师、生物统计学家、林务员和一位哲学家在自然资本概念形成方面的若干新贡献进行了综述与分析。本文得出结论：如果不重新制定，现有的微观经济理论可能“无法绿化”。虽然宏观层面的自然资本方法更为成功，但它们都存在一个局限性，即仅以货币价值来衡量生态系统和物种。这些问题表明，成功的自然资本模型的发展可能需要重塑经济理论，以纳入非货币的社会偏好和价值观。
