How Can It Beã¢â‚¬â€¹ Avoided? The Tragedy of the Commons Can Be Avoided by

1 might wonder if there is a need for any kind of government regulation in order to curb emissions of carbon dioxide. Some people are of the opinion that at that place is already as well much regulation and that these kinds of problems tin can merely take care of themselves. Isn't it enough that we all recognize that to avoid the damages from climate change, we need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases?

The problem here is a lack of economic incentive in dealing with an entity like the global atmosphere that is shared by all and owned by none. This problem has been recognized for a long time, merely was first made popular past an ecologist, Garrett Hardin, in 1968 and is usually known equally "The tragedy of the eatables." Here is a nice video that describes the essence of this idea. Hardin'south concept is adequately simple, and he illustrated it with a kind of parable, as described in the video.  Suppose in that location is a common piece of grassland in a village — the commons — and it is owned by no one only is available for all to use. These commons however exist in many areas, such as the village of Comberton in England:

Comberton Village Dark-green

Credit: Work found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comberton_village_green.jpg / CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

In almost cases, the use of the commons is regulated by the community, just in this instance, nosotros'll pretend in that location are no regulations. People start to graze their sheep on this squeamish grass and they benefit from that. Based on the size of the field and the rate of grass growth, there is a carrying capacity for the field — the maximum number of sheep the field tin support in a sustainable manner. If you put more sheep on the land than the carrying capacity, the resource volition dwindle and eventually disappear altogether and at that point information technology will be of no use to anyone. But equally long every bit at that place is any grass at all, it is to each individual'southward do good to continue to identify new sheep in the field. So, overgrazing is inevitable in this case and the common resource is depleted. There are many documented examples of this kind of occurrence, and they all are related to cases where there an open-access resource available to everyone.

How tin this tragedy of the eatables be avoided? One way would be for the community to impose a cap-and-trade system on grazing. Here is how information technology could work. The community studies the trouble and figures out what the carrying chapters of the field is in terms of number of sheep. Then they allocate grazing share equally to everyone in the community. Community members can buy and sell these shares so that if someone does not want to bargain with sheep, they tin still benefit from the common resource past selling their shares to someone who is willing to graze more sheep. The shares would be re-allocated each year in case the conveying capacity inverse. Another approach might exist for the community to sell the state to individuals and then let each individual farmer manage their own plot of state, in which case they would have an economic incentive to manage their land in the best fashion possible, fugitive the over-grazing problem. The community might place some restrictions on what the owners could exercise with the state, like preventing them from putting upwardly flat buildings or a feedlot; this would effectively be like the zoning regulations that near communities take.

The indicate to accept away from this is that when yous have a commonly held resource with open admission, everyone has to act together in a coordinated, regulated manner in social club to avoid depleting or damaging the resource and ensuring that the resource serves the best interests of everyone affected past the resource. In the instance of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, the best interests of everyone tin can merely be served if there is some class of a regulatory plan, otherwise we will succumb to the tragedy of the commons. Furthermore, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions has to be coordinated then that each state has confidence that if they practice their part, the other countries will do their parts and the global concentration of COii will stabilize or even become lower. This has in main already been done and agreed upon by most of the countries of the world through the Kyoto Protocol — the U.s.a. is the only significant holdout.

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Source: https://personal.ems.psu.edu/~dmb53/Earth_System_Models/Tragedy_of_the_Commons.html