Some people outside my professional and academic sphere asks me what is my job about. They are surprised when I talk them that I am an economist working on sustainability issues. For some reason, they just link economics with stock markets, accounting, wall street, GDP and with splitting the check in a restaurant. Mixing economics with the environment is something weird for many people.
Economics is a social science. It is about society and its relationships with the available resources. the study of economics has historically forgotten the basis of all economies (of humankind actually): natural resources and environment. Serious analyses in this sense only started when we got aware that natural resources are scarce, and that damaging the environment was harming us.
Media usually perpetuate this misunderstanding. Economists on TV are just to comment stock markets, employment and GDP growth. These are important, but just a part of what the discipline is. Economic systems impact fragile ecological equilibriums, which at the same time impact economic systems. For instance, more economic activity means more transport and industries, so more CO2 emissions, more global warming, more climate change, more frequency and intensity of natural hazards, more negative economic impacts if a hurricane impacts our region, and so on.
Understanding the complex relationships between societies and the environment is key to be able to provide effective solutions to the serious environmental problems we face. This is why social sciences are so important in science-policy interface. It essential but not enough to know how CO2 hurts us and our economic systems, we also need to understand how society work in order to provide solutions.
See you around,
Jaume