ECON371/UBCO2024WT1/Reflections/InesChami
Reflection 1:
Reflecting on this course so far, I can say I initially thought economic models were sufficient to addressing environmental issues. However, I found that the more complex the environmental issue is, the more diverse your approach needs to be to reach an effective solution. In addition, sustainability and environmental conservation has always felt important to me. Despite never taking a course focusing on sustainability specifically, I have always had interest in this area. To elaborate, in my last two years of high school, I decided to leave my home country, Morocco, to pursue an education at a higher learning institution in the Netherlands. I attended the United World College (UWC), a group of 18 schools from around the world. UWC’s mission statement is: “UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future”. Their mission resonated with me and my personal values. One of the highlights of my time at UWC was when I had the opportunity to attend conferences focused on peace and sustainability, namely the Environmental Action Group (EAG).
Prof: I hope you enjoyed your time in The Netherlands. I have not been to Morocco, but I am guessing that the way people have organized their societies is quite different from both the Netherlands and here in Canada. I expect that these diverse experiences will be valuable throughout your future.
Fast forward to my fourth year of university, I decided to enroll in a course focusing on the environment: ECON371, Economics of the Environment. Although I have always been aware of the growing concerns of environmental issues, such as global warming. I never had the opportunity to link economic concepts to those issues. So far in this course, I have learned key economic tools and concepts such as externalities, efficiency, and cost benefit analyses to name a few. These tools and concepts allowed me to understand environmental issues clearer. Economic models have a clear structure to them, allowing me to see environmental issues more clearly. For example, understanding negative externalities helped me understand the full impacts of a firm’s emissions on the environment and third parties. On the other hand, overconsumption of open access resources is also a cause that led to the degradation of the environment. These tools have clarified ow individual choices impact the environment, and how important it is to implement regulations to preserve resources before impacting them forever.
Moreover, due to my personal values, and my background from UWC, one of my goals in this course was to really figure out what sustainability means. Because in my experience a lot of companies misuse the term sustainability to gain a competitive advantage even when their business operations are not very sustainable at all. Hence, I really enjoyed the concept of strong sustainability that we explored in the course. Strong sustainability focuses on ensuring resource demands are met for individuals today, and for the next generations, through preserving all forms of capital: human, social, manufacturing, and natural capital.
I have also noticed a trend today where climate activists, politicians and other public figures demand we take action in order to “save the environment”, however, I noticed that those people often rush to propose a solution without really considering the root cause of the problem. Moreover, political leaders tend to have ulterior motives, using current issues such as global warming to gain additional votes for their campaign for example.
The concept of planetary boundaries introduced in this course has also expanded my understanding of the scope of the environmental degradation. Learning that six out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed in 2023 was shocking. It is clear now that we must stop debating whether climate change is real, but rather start creating targeted solutions to mitigate the risks of freshwater depletion, biodiversity loss and more.
However, as much as the frameworks learned in class are useful, there are a handful of limitations. For example, concepts like “willingness to pay” (WTP) and “willingness to accept” (WTA) often fails to capture what is the true value people have of a good or service when it comes to environmental issues. In fact, WTP surveys are usually skewed by people who overstate their value to ensure a policy change, and others might understate their values due to free riding. This makes WTP and WTA incomplete measures as they do not always reflect the authentic commitment of society on particular environmental issues.
Prof: WTP surveys do need to be well designed to reduce the likelihood that people do overstate or understate their values, and the statistical analysis of the results needs to incorporate adjustments to correct for these potential problems. However, comparisons between stated preference (surveys) and revealed preference (travel cost, hedonic pricing) studies do show that the bias can be contained. They are far from perfect though, and should only be part of the decision process.
To conclude, this course has significantly increased my understanding of how we can implement economic concepts to understand and solve environmental issues. While I used to believe that economic models were sufficient to address these issues, I now understand the complexity of the environmental changes required in the next few years, to ensure that we can mitigate the risks of resource depletion, biodiversity loss, climate change and more, while also promoting a sustainable future for future generations.
Reflection 2:
Living in Morocco most of my life, I have first-hand seen how Morocco developed itself throughout the yeras. From transitioning from a poor country to a lower middle-income country, I have noticed how economic growth often came as a trade-off of environmental protection and social equity. Throughout this course, my perspective on how different countries deal with addressing environmental issues while focusing on their economy has evolved.
The class discussions and more particularly Chapter 20, provided me with valuable insights on how low-income countries navigate challenges and implement environmental policies. Morocco has recently moved from a low-income country to a middle-income country as stated before but many of the findings and concepts learned in class still apply. In fact, inequalities in Morocco are seen as few elite people control most industries. For example, being a country whose economy is primarily based on agriculture, disparities in the amount of subsidies offered to different agricultures were seen. In fact, the government will prioritize those agricultures who exported internationally, rather than locally.
Moreover, while the economic models learned in class such as the Kuznets Curve Model, discussed in Chapter 19, explain that countries that are developing tend to pollute more in the short run due to the growth in new industries opening, this pollution is expected to decrease as the country gets wealthier. This can also be because elite members in these countries will care more about their health prioritizing clean air and water. While it might be true, this framework is incomplete as it does not account for factors such as political corruption, unequal wealth distribution, and a high rate of illiteracy, which can prevent people from advocating for their rights to a clean environment access, which is the case in Morocco. This will therefore slow down the improvement that is explained by the Kuznets Curve Model.
Moreover, cities such as Rabat, Casablanca, and Tangier have seen over the last 5 years an increase in cleaner technology use and new infrastructures in the city centers. Moreover, Morocco is seen as the renewable and clean energy leader in Africa as solar panels were implemented in Ouarzazate. This demonstrated that Morocco is committed to clean energy showcasing how innovation can lead to change.
Moreover, another concept learned in class after the midterm break was the prisoner dilemma. Even though I have already learned about this concept in another class in Australia, we never explored its application to real-life examples. Therefore, seeing it applied to international relations was enriching, as it illustrates how different countries might fail to cooperate, though cooperation would have led to better outcomes for all. However, this model is a simplification of reality. For example, some countries hold positions of power such as Veto nations that can block certain agreements even though most of the countries are for the agreement. Moreover, this framework is incomplete because international negotiations are not one-time decisions like the prisoner dilemma let us think. Rather, it involved a series of interactions and long-term relationships fostering trust.
To conclude, reflecting on these topics and this course, ECON 371, I have learned a great deal of information throughout the semester. I have gained a deeper understanding of market-based tools, clean technologies, efficiency levels, and how the prisoner dilemma can explain the challenges of cooperation between different countries when dealing with environmental issues. On top of that, this course has helped me understand and analyze how my country, Morocco, deals with its environmental and economic challenges. Overall, ECON 371 has been a transformative experience and I hope to take more courses focused on sustainability in the near future.
Prof: Thanks sharing, particularly the many ways you see the simple stories told in class as being incomplete. You are of course right, and I like how you use your experience in Morocco in these reflections. Hopefully the tools we have covered in the class, while not providing a complete picture, provide a perspective on some aspects of these more complex situations.