Environmental management since world war II

This background report to the IVA project “Environmental Foresight” presents how environmental problems and their management have evolved since World War II divided into five time periods: 1945-1971, 1972-1981, 1982-1991, 1992-2001, and 2002 and beyond. For each time period, the report recapitulates some of the most important socioeconomic and geopolitical trends internationally and nationally as well as the environmental debate. It presents a selection of environmental issues that received a lot of attention, including, inter alia, how and at what administrative level the issues under consideration were managed and what types of political interventions were used. In the first period we give three examples of issues that were essential in the environmental discourse at the time: 1) Global food supply, which illustrates that environmental issues always have contained a global dimension. 2) Struggles over the expansion of water power, shows another aspect of the controversies that follow exploitation of natural resources. 3) The spreading of mercury, represents the growing awareness that economic activities affected the environment and the growing concerns about pollution that arose at that time. In the second time period 1972-1981, the first example involves the efforts to link economic development and environmental consideration at UN level and in which Swedish diplomacy played a key role. The second example concerns an issue that has remained essential, namely the supply of energy, particularly the two oil crises and the fate of nuclear power. In the 1980s, and certain environmental problems were framed and more or less successfully handled in this new context. The report provides three examples of the increased emphasis on transboundary framing and handling of environmental degradation in the 1980s: 1) Acidification, which was managed rapidly at national level in Sweden wheras international regulation took almost two more decades. 2) The ozone hole, which inter alia illustrates the role of science in detecting environmental issues. Emblematic for the period 1992-2001 are the revival of the attempts to link economic growth and environmental consideration and the controversies surrounding of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Today we see an increasing emphasis on linkages between environmental issues, not the least climate, and trade. Another topical issue today is the Baltic Sea, which is a common regional resource that provides a multitude of ecological services and faces a number of environmental challenges. Globalisation and social, technological, cultural and economic modernisation processes influence two fundamental processes that characterize the period cover in this report: an unprecedented global environmental change, a dramatic shift in social organisation vis-à-vis the environment. The report concludes that although history do not repeat itself, we can conclude that hitherto chances of a successful management of an environmental issues has increased with a combination of political will/ambition as well as windows of opportunities in geopolitical, socioeconomic and technological respects. Consequently, reflexive and adaptive institutions have an advantage in coping with the inherent uncertainties of future conditions in economy, technology, politics and society