Abstract
With 1.3 billion populaces on the commencement of the twenty-first century, India is currently impending toward upholding a subtle equilibrium between persisting social development and well-being without depleting existing biophysical resources at the national level or surpassing global average per capita obtainability. In this paper, we have structured a top-down per capita framework to explore national “safe and just operating space” (NSJOS) to apprehend not only past fluctuations that bring about the present conditions but also the plausible future consequences, with India as a case study. We have analyzed 17 indicators, related to 8 dimensions of biophysical or environmental “safe space” (planetary boundaries) (viz., climate change, freshwater use, land use, nitrogen use, phosphorus use, material footprint, ecological footprint, and atmospheric pollution), and 20 indicators related to 12 dimensions of socio-economic “just space” (doughnut economy) (viz. education, energy, food, gender equality, health, housing, income and work, networks, peace and justice, political voice, social equity, water and sanitation). Coalescing 37 indicators, pertaining to almost all of the Sustainable Development Goals (except SDG 17), accompanied by their corresponding environmental boundaries or preferred social thresholds, present study probes into both biophysical (for environmental stress) and socioeconomic development (for social deficit) attributes of India. Using tendencies of past variations, we have projected future biophysical consumption in India according to three conditions (lowest, highest, and recent or BAU, business-as-usual rate of consumption) as per six scenarios (five shared socioeconomic pathways, SSPs and one projection of UN) up to 2050. Adaptations in national policy are indispensable if India wants to accomplish sufficiency in biophysical resources while bestowing social equity in access and exploitation of those resources toward the continuance of social developments in the forthcoming times.
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This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
We would like to thank Sk. Rohan Tanvir, The Institution of Engineers (India) for his assistance during the preparation of Figure 5 and Bishal Ghosh, Department of Economics, Presidency University for his valuable suggestions.
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Roy, A., Pramanick, K. (2020). Safe and Just Operating Space for India. In: Hussain, C. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Materials Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58538-3_210-1
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