ABSTRACT
Part I explained the nature of ‘the global commons’, resources which are threatened by human activity and on which we all depend in ways that require scientific analysis to explain. Part II was devoted to an understanding of why these resources are being degraded. Causal explanations are complex. Unquestionably, population growth is at the heart of much of the problem through the role that population growth plays in expanding the demand for activities which give rise to land and coastal zone conversion. While conventionally popular, other explanations are not real explanations of resource degradation, as with the ‘overconsumption’ hypothesis addressed in Chapter 8. Yet other explanations turn out to be more complex than the popular literature suggests, as with ‘poverty’ and ‘indebtedness’. Much of the explanation lies with economic failure, the failure of local and global economic systems to ‘internalize’ the costs of environmental degradation. In the global context three elements of this economic failure stand out: market failure at the local and national level, the failure of governments to understand that their actions in various spheres have detrimental economic consequences, and the failure of global markets to function. Chapter 5 dealt with local market failure and government failure. It also showed how ‘missing markets’ in the global context also explain resource degradation. This chapter looks at how we can exploit the global missing markets phenomenon and create markets in global environmental goods.
