Topic 1 Foundation

At the end of this subtopic 1.1 you should understand:

• A perspective is how a particular situation is viewed and understood by an individual. It is based on a mix of personal and collective assumptions, values, and beliefs. (1.1.1)

• Values are qualities or principles that people feel have worth and importance in life. (1.1.3)

• The values that underpin our perspectives can be seen in our communication and actions with the wider community. The values held by organizations can be seen through advertisements, media, policies, and actions. (1.1.4)

• Worldviews are the lenses shared by groups of people through which they perceive, make sense of and act within their environment. Worldviews shape people's values and perspectives through culture, philosophy, ideology, religion, and politics. (1.1.6)

• Perspectives are informed and justified by sociocultural norms, scientific understandings, laws, religion, economic conditions, local and global events, and lived experience, among other factors. (1.1.2)

• Perspectives and the beliefs that underpin them change over time in all societies. This can be influenced by government or non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigns or through social and demographic change. (1.1.9)

• An environmental value system is a model that shows the inputs affecting our perspectives (and worldviews) and the outputs resulting from our perspectives (and worldviews). (1.1.7)

• Environmental perspectives (worldviews) can be classified into the broad categories of technocentric, anthropocentric and ecocentric. (1.1.8)

• Values surveys can be used to investigate the perspectives shown by a particular social group towards environmental issues. (1.1.5)

• The development of the environmental movement has been influenced by individuals, literature, the media, major environmental disasters, international agreements, new technologies and scientific discoveries. (1.1.10)

At the end of this subtopic 1.2 you should understand:

• A model is a simplified representation of reality; it can be used to understand how a system works and to predict how it will respond to change. (1.2.13)

• Simplification of a model involves approximation and, therefore, loss of accuracy. (1.2.14)

• Systems are sets of interacting or interdependent components. (1.2.1)

• Interactions between components in systems can generate emergent properties. (1.2.15)

• The concept of a system can be applied at a range of scales. (1.2.7)

• A systems approach is a holistic way of visualizing a complex set of interactions, and these can be applied to ecological or societal situations. (1.2.2)

• Systems can be open or closed. (1.2.5)

• The Earth is a single integrated system encompassing the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the geosphere, the atmosphere, and the anthroposphere. (1.2.6)

• In system diagrams, storages are usually represented as rectangular boxes and flows as arrows, with the direction of each arrow indicating the direction of each flow. (1.2.3)

• Flows are processes that may be either transfers or transformations. (1.2.4)

• As an open system, an ecosystem will normally exist in a stable equilibrium, either in a steady-state equilibrium or in one developing over time (for example, succession), and will be maintained by stabilizing negative feedback loops. (1.2.9)

• Negative feedback loops occur when the output of a process inhibits or reverses the operation of the same process in such a way as to reduce change. They are stabilizing as they counteract deviation. (1.2.8)

• Positive feedback loops occur when a disturbance leads to an amplification of that disturbance, destabilizing the system and driving it away from its equilibrium. (1.2.10)

• Positive feedback loops will tend to drive the system towards a tipping point. (1.2.11)

• Tipping points can exist within a system where a small alteration in one component can produce large overall changes, resulting in a shift in equilibrium. (1.2.12)

• How to draw and interpret diagrams representing examples of negative feedback. (1.2.8)

• How to draw and interpret diagrams representing examples of positive feedback. (1.2.10)

• The resilience of a system, ecological or social, refers to its tendency to avoid tipping points and maintain stability. (1.2.16)

• Diversity and the size of storages within systems can contribute to their resilience and affect their speed of response to change (time lags). (1.2.17)

• Humans can affect the resilience of systems through reducing these storages and diversity. (1.2.18)

At the end of this subtopic 1.3 you should understand:

• Sustainability is a measure of the extent to which practices allow for the long-term viability of a system. It is generally used to refer to the responsible maintenance of socio-ecological systems such that there is no diminishment of conditions for future generations. (1.3.1)

• Sustainability is comprised of environmental, social and economic domains. (1.3.2)

• Environmental sustainability is the use and management of natural resources that allows replacement of the resources, and recovery and regeneration of ecosystems. (1.3.3)

• Unsustainable use of natural resources can lead to ecosystem collapse. (1.3.7)

• Social sustainability focuses on creating the structures and systems that support human wellbeing, including health, education, equity, community and other social factors. (1.3.4)

• Economic sustainability focuses on creating the economic structures and systems to support production and consumption of goods and services that will support human needs into the future. (1.3.5)

• Inequalities in income, race, gender and cultural identity within and between different societies lead to disparities in access to water, food and energy. (1.3.10)

• Environmental justice refers to the right of all people to live in a pollution-free environment, and to have equitable access to natural resources, regardless of issues such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, nationality. (1.3.9)

• Sustainability and environmental justice can be applied from the individual to the global scale. (1.3.11)

• Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development applies the concept of sustainability to our social and economic development. (1.3.6)

• Common indicators of economic development, such as gross domestic product (GDP), neglect the value of natural systems and may lead to unsustainable development. (1.3.8)

• Sustainability indicators include quantitative measures of biodiversity, pollution, human population, climate change, material and carbon footprints, and others. These indicators can be applied on a range of scales, from local to global. (1.3.12)

• The concept of ecological footprints can be used to measure sustainability. If these footprints are greater than the area or resources available to the population, this indicates unsustainability. (1.3.13)

• Biocapacity is the capacity of a given biologically productive area to generate an ongoing supply of renewable resources and to absorb its resulting wastes. (1.3.15)

• The carbon footprint measures the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents (in tonnes). The water footprint measures water use (in cubic metres per year). (1.3.14)

• Citizen science plays a role in monitoring Earth systems and whether resources are being used sustainably. (1.3.16)

• There are a range of frameworks and models that support our understanding of sustainability, each with uses and limitations. (1.3.17)

• The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of social and environmental goals and targets to guide action on sustainability and environmental justice. (1.3.18)

• The planetary boundaries model describes the nine processes and systems that have regulated the stability and resilience of the Earth system in the Holocene epoch. The model also identifies the limits of human disturbance to those systems, and proposes that crossing those limits increases the risk of abrupt and irreversible changes to Earth systems. (1.3.19)

• The Doughnut Economics model is a framework for creating a regenerative and distributive economy in order to meet the needs of all people within the means of the planet. (1.3.20)

• The circular economy is a model that promotes decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources. It has three principles: eliminating waste and pollution, circulating products and materials, and regenerating nature. (1.3.21)