Sustainable National Income - Environmental Functions

Environmental Functions

Central to the sustainable national income (SNI) is the concept of environmental function. Environmental functions are defined as the possible uses of our non-human made physical surroundings, on which humanity is entirely dependent in all its doings, whether they be producing, consuming, breathing or recreating. When use of one function is at the expense of another or the same function or threatens to be so in the future, there is competition of functions. As an illustration, once water pollutant thresholds have been exceeded, use of the function ‘dumping ground for waste’ may come to compete with the function ‘drinking water’. Competing functions are by definition scarce and consequently economic goods. Today most of the functions of our physical surroundings, which once were free goods, have become scarce goods.