Human well-being requires, at the very minimum, an acceptable level of safe food, clean
air and drinking water, safe shelter (housing) and protection from diseases. Among the
large and interconnected problems believed to be facing humanity in this century are
poverty and global change. It is believed that nearly half of the world population lives in
poverty (less than $2.00 per day; Shah 2008). At the same time, the high level of use of
total resources and energy are leading to global changes that threaten the life-support
system of the planet (Cairns 2010). Increasing the material well-being of people in
developing countries is considered to be a global priority, yet bringing the entire world
population to levels of consumption prevalent in developed countries, given current
technology, does not appear to be sustainable (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1989).
Key issues for sustainable development involve precise definitions of human well-
being, how “natural capital” contributes to human well-being, how human actions impact
natural capital, the nature of multiple tradeoffs among “ecosystem services” and other
components of human well-being, as well as the role of human institutions, technology
and knowledge in impacting the natural environment and promoting sustainable
development. Finding precise definitions of these concepts is a key challenge for the
mathematical sciences, since a fundamental feature of mathematics is its ability to make
imprecise concepts precise. A related key challenge is to develop, analyze, and test
mathematical models involving these concepts as basic parameters. In this report, we
present illustrative (but by no means comprehensive) examples of areas which address
the relationship between human well-being and the natural environment that can be
advanced by research in the mathematical sciences and provide sample research
challenges for the mathematical sciences.
- Overview
In this section we provide a brief general overview of sample areas at the interface
of the natural environment and human well-being, and the inherent challenges of
sustainability in these areas, giving a few examples of mathematical sciences
approaches in each case. We provide more detailed examples of a few specific cases in
Section 3.
Human beings depend on ecosystem services for their well-being: clean and
sufficiently abundant water, clean air to breathe, building material for shelter, fuel to
power their machines, etc. Most theories of environmental impact assume that
exploitation of the environment provides benefits to human well-being. However, this
assumption has not been subject to rigorous empirical study and there is much work to
be done to make such theories precise through mathematical models. In one
mathematical approach, Dietz et al. 2009 model human well-being as a function of
physical, natural and human capital. Using data from 135 nations, they find that
controlling for physical and human capital, exploitation of the environment has no net
effect on well-being. This suggests that improvements in well-being may be attainable
without adverse effects on the environment. The model accounts for trade-offs between
human and natural capital, but it does not address the important problem of non-
renewable resources such as coal, oil and minerals.
At the interface between the natural environment and human well-being is the
issue of climate change. One challenge here is a consideration of the effects of rising
temperatures on the spread of disease. Climate change may adversely affect a number