The effort factor: Evaluating the increasing marginal impact of resource extraction over time |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada;2. Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Canada;1. School of Physics & Electrical Information Engineering, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, China;2. Ningxia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing for Desert Information, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, China;1. Department of Civil Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, 11155-9313 Tehran, Iran;2. Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Sharif University of Technology, 11155-9161 Tehran, Iran;1. Division of Non-communicable Disease Control and Community Health, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China;2. Academy of Preventive Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan 250012, Shandong, China;3. Shandong Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Jinan 250014, Shandong, China;4. Ewha Womans University, Seoul 999007, Korea;5. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health-Bloomignton, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA;6. National Center for Chronic and Non-communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 100050, China;7. The George Institute for Global Heath, Camperdown NSW 2050 Australia;8. University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia;9. National Institute for Nutrition and Health, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 100050, China;10. Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China;1. School of Physical Electronics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China;2. Key Lab. of Information Materials of Sichuan Province, College of Electrical & Information Engineering, Southwest University for Nationalities, Chengdu 610041, China;1. Scottish Centre for Respiratory Research, Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, UK;2. Division of Allergy and Immunology, Department of Medicine, College of Medicine Tucson, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz |
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| Abstract: | Concern for the increasing impact of human activities on Earth's ecosystems has generated a growing effort to monitor those impacts and measure the success, if any, of mitigation measures. This contribution argues that ecological impact assessments that tend to rely primarily on the volume of natural resources produced and subsequently consumed overlook the degree to which ecological impact can vary significantly independently of production volumes, due to the varying impact that results from production effort. Production effort, in turn, is directly linked to the quality of raw materials, which inevitably tends to decrease over time. As a result, unless technological improvements were able to compensate for the resource quality decline indefinitely, we face a future of increasing marginal ecological impact over time. This is demonstrated here based on three resource extraction systems, coal mining in the UK, grain production in China, and global marine fisheries. |
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| Keywords: | Ecological impact analysis IPAT Natural resource depletion |
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