Projects

Dynamic Consequences of Environmental Change for Well-being

DPhil Overview: My DPhil research focusses on understanding the dynamic effects of environmental change on people’s well-being via looking into people’s perceptual and cognitive processes.

Outline of research:

As dense agglomeration increases productivity, countries have been encouraged to urbanise quickly to enhance economic development, and the trend of urbanisation is likely to continue for decades. According to one United Nations’ estimation, by 2050, 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas, indicating there would be 2.5 billion more people living in cities. Though urbanisation has led to a global transition from poverty to prosperity, it has also brought enormous challenges. One of the direct impacts of urban land conversion for developments is on the natural environment, bringing about massive losses of natural habitat and biodiversity. To counterbalance development impacts and to preserve or improve the natural environment, compensatory conservation has become a globally used instrument, including the ‘compensatory mitigation’ of the US, the ‘biodiversity offset’ of the UK and Australia, and the ‘conservation offset’ of Canada.

Following the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the relationships between the natural environment and human well-being have been increasingly highlighted by the environmental and conservation sector, and scientists and practitioners have been looking more closely into such cross-disciplinary issues as the social impacts of environmental interventions. Meanwhile, from the early 21st century, mainstream economists have also started to recognise GDP as a flawed measure of human development and welfare, and politics and policy have been called upon to focus directly on well-being. In this way, human well-being has gradually become one of the main targets of policy and practice for both economic development and environmental conservation. In terms of compensatory conservation schemes, practical guidelines have also proposed a ‘no-worse-off’ principle that people’s well-being components affected by both development and compensation activities should be at least as good as they would have been in the absence of the development and compensation.

There are many ways to define human well-being in different disciplines. One of the most impactful approaches is the capability approach proposed by Amartya Sen, the recipient of Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. It is a normative approach to well-being that focuses on people’s actual capabilities rather than merely on their rights and freedom (Robeyns, 2016). It posits that well-being consists of: (i) objective means, (ii) subjective ends, and (iii) agency and opportunity. It involves understanding: (i) the resources people have, (ii) the functionings and states into which they convert the resources, and (iii) people’s capabilities, meaning the functionings and states into which they can convert their resources. The capability approach has contributed to many other normative theories, such as social justice or accounts of development ethics, international and national policies, such as the development of the United Nation’s SDGs, as well as academic frameworks for well-being research, such as the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) framework.

Objectives:

Development and its associated ecological compensation have caused massive environmental change globally on land and in rivers and seas. However, the dynamic relationship between this change and human well-being is still understudied. This study thus aims to investigate the dynamic consequences of environmental change for people’s well-being under the broad application of compensatory conservation schemes for economic development.

Given China’s fast environmental change, induced by its urbanisation, infrastructure boom and compensation activities during the past four decades, along with its significant institutional change and population movements (especially from rural to urban areas), it is a suitable and interesting setting to investigate the dynamic relationship between environmental change and people’s well- being, considering well-being as a multi-level concept with objective, subjective and relational dimensions.

The research aim is addressed through the following objectives:

• To describe how China’s compensatory mechanism works and evaluate its implementation against international best practice principles for compensation;
• To investigate the dynamics of people’s perceptions of environmental change at a site that underwent massive environmental change induced by development activities and compensatory actions, both reactive and proactive, decades ago;
• To uncover well-being in the local context, and then explore how diverse factors (e.g. age, year of migration, and socio-economic features) affect people’s perceptions of environmental change and its relationship to changes in their well-being;
• To explore a way to internalise the social impact of developments into China’s compensatory mechanism, using a case study site as an example.

The context of China

China’s fast urbanisation, industrialisation and modernisation, after market reforms from 1978, has fuelled an approximately thirtyfold increase in GDP per capita and pulled 850 million people out of poverty, but it has also brought tremendous costs for the natural environment. During the past decades, developments have occupied a great number of natural habitats, including forests, grasslands and wetlands, resulting in massive environmental changes. As a developing country, China has for decades prioritised economic development and followed a “pollute first, fix later” approach, until the emergence of some severe environmental events including floods and sandstorms in the 1990s. Since then, China started to be aware of the environmental and social costs that developments have brought about and has gradually attached importance to environmental issues, during which the term ‘ecological compensation’ has started to be used. In the early 21st century, ecological compensation became China’s national strategy, after which development and compensation activities have induced major environmental changes in China, including infrastructure development and urban expansion, as well as losses and gains in natural habitats.

China is an environmental authoritarian state where grassroots activism, lobbying, and public participation during land planning and decision-making are rare, or even absent, meaning massive changes in China’s environment have taken place largely based on top-down decisions without proper bottom-up approaches. Some academics argue that China’s unaccountable, electorally unresponsive, top-down political system is ill-suited to respond to environmental issues since a rich and influential literature has stressed the importance of market forces or/and democracy to enable such responses. However, others argue that a stronger use of command-and-control regulation implemented by powerful state actors might deliver effective and efficient environmental outcomes if the regulations are well designed. Also, though authoritarian regimes are typically thought of as centralised, China’s actually combines administrative centralisation with lower-level governments that are required to follow the principles, goals, and general requirements set by the upper-level governments, with regional decentralisation that allows lower-level governments to have autonomy to raise revenue and develop their own management and governance considering the local context.

Publications:

Journal articles

[1] Gao, S., Bull, J. W., Wu, Z., Qiao, R., Xia, L., & Lim, M. K. (2022). China’s restoration fees require transparency. Science, 377(6604), 379-380. DOI: 10.1126/science.add5125

Industrial reports:

Project on biodiversity net gain and people’s wellbeing with Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM) and Balfour Beatty (https://cieem.net/i-am/current-projects/biodiversity-net-gain/biodiversity-net-gain-and-peoples-wellbeing/):

[2] Defining and Assessing Human Wellbeing: What The Science Says: https://cieem.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/What-Science-Says-FINAL-compressed-Oct2021.pdf

[3] How Do Governments and Organisations Define Wellbeing: https://cieem.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Government-Definitions-FINAL-Oct2021-1.pdf

[4] A Review of Regional and Local Planning Policies within England: https://cieem.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Planning-Policy-Wellbeing-FINAL-Oct2021.pdf

[5] Should Good Practice for Biodiversity Net Gain Incorporate People’s Wellbeing?: https://cieem.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Wellbeing-Consultations-FINAL-compressed-Oct2021.pdf

[6] How Can Good Practice for Biodiversity Net Gain Incorporate People’s Wellbeing? Core Messages & Recommendations: https://cieem.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Core-Messages-FINAL-compressed-Oct2021.pdf

Collaborators: Dr. Sophus zu Ermgassen (Kent & Copenhagen) and Dr. Catalina Munteanu (Humboldt).