commodities down. However, these innovations have done much less to reduce depletion of environmental common property resources.

# **_1.1  The complexities of managing environmental common property resources_**

More recently, widespread concern over environmental common property resources has again raised issues of sustainable development.

A driving need for continuing adaptation and innovation is generated by the world’s growing consumption needs, with increases in consumption levels per capita and population growth. Technological progress has certainly increased production, but this has not been without negative ramifications. Common property resources are under pressure from activity to meet rising consumption requirements. For example, agricultural intensification has been very effective at raising food production, but has increased fertilizer runoff, creating low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ in coastal oceans (Map 1).

While market forces and ingenuity can find ways to better manage the use of nonrenewable resources that are clearly priced, it is proving more difficult to conserve resources that are unpriced or underpriced, such as oceans and the atmosphere. Even to understand the intricacies of environmental change is a challenging task for scientists ― and organizing collective action to avert negative consequences is a challenging task for political leaders even at local levels, let alone national and global levels.

These factors combine to create a daunting list of needed adaptations and innovations, which are complex to develop as well as to implement. The World Development Report 2010 summarizes some of the measures needed just for sustainable food production (World Bank 2010). To manage land and water resources to feed growing populations and protect natural systems, they point to the need for politically daunting measures, such as:

- building flexible international agreements

- pricing carbon, food and energy

- redirecting agricultural subsidies

- strengthening the policy environment for natural resource management.

Conventional estimates of GDP growth are misleading on the sustainability of production possibilities, because they ignore the depreciation of natural capital (Arrow et al 2004, Dasgupta 2010).

‘Since GDP is the total value of the final goods and services an economy produces, it does not deduct the depreciation of capital that accompanies production—in particular, it does not deduct the depreciation of natural capital. In the quantitative models that appear in leading economics journals and textbooks, nature is taken to be a fixed, indestructible factor of production. The problem with the assumption is that it is wrong: nature consists of degradable resources. Agricultural land, forests, watersheds, fisheries, fresh water sources, river estuaries and the atmosphere are capital assets that are self-regenerative, but suffer from depletion or deterioration when they are over-used.... To assume away the physical depreciation of capital assets is to draw a wrong picture of future production and consumption possibilities that are open to a society.’ (Dasgupta 2010:6) Moreover, ‘property rights to natural capital are frequently unprotected or ill-specified....(which) typically leads to their overexploitation, and so to waste and inequity’ (Dasgupta 2010: 6).

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