Toward environmental sustainability: a comparative analysis between Brazil and India
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Aalborg University
Abstract
This article performs a comparative analysis between Brazil and India in terms of
environmental sustainability over the period 1970 to 2008. To do so, we employed the
following selected indicators: the domestic material consumption, the material intensity,
the metabolic rate, the ecological footprint and bio-capacity, the ecological deficit/surplus
and the adjusted net savings. Prior to this comparison exercise, we briefly describe the
socioeconomic performance over the study period, indicating important changes in the
economic and social dimensions in both countries, which certainly affected the
environmental domain. The indicators utilised in this study suggest that India is
performing better than Brazil in a sustainability point of view, with the ecological
deficit/surplus indicator as an exception. We also performed a statistical analysis to
measure the correlation between economic growth and the selected sustainability
indicators. The results revalidate the fact that there is a major compromise, across
economies, between economic development and sustainability of an economy. Although
through some detailed intra-economic analysis it is shown that Brazil’s economy is
decarbonizing in the study period, however on a comparative scale Brazil’s economy is
leaving more externality of its environment. It is also highlighted that policy shifts do not
reflect to that extent in sustainability indicators as the stage of development of an
economy does. Finally a projection based analysis revealed that India will be achieving
the same level of human development as Brazil at a much lower cost of environmental
externality. From this it can be established that Indian economy is more sustainable that
Brazil’s one. As final remarks, some policy recommendations are emphasized in the light
of this analysis.
Description
Student paper
Keywords
Sustainability, Indicators, Ecological scale, Brazil and India, Development, Social metabolism, Material flow accounting