Biological Integrity as a Prerequisite for Sustainable Development: A Bioeconomic Perspective

The present paper argues that the operational conditions for Ecologically Sustainable Economic Development (ESED) may be described by a traditional welfare criterion: ESED refers to a process of economic processes that ensure the environmental prerequisites for an efficient evolution of intergenerational welfare. Under the premise of an unknown and unknowable structure of future generations’ welfare, the only sustainable development trajectories are those that preserve the long-run potential for the efficiency of economic systems. The paper focuses on the dependence of intergenerational efficiency on the biological-ecological infrastructure bequeathed to future generations. The efficiency criterion in an intergenerational context requires the preservation of the ecological necessities for future generations; in other words, the biological integrity of ecosystems should be preserved over the course of time. In order to make this idea operational, our study proposes the preservation of at least the Biologically Crucial Levels (BCL) of biological-ecological functions, environmental elements, and species. By preserving ecosystem health and biological integrity, BCLs bequeath to future generations the ecological infrastructure necessary to allow biological health, environmentally unconstrained shaping of preferences, and the enjoyment of welfare. BCLs represent an observable, measurable entity, which allows an operational design of policy for long-run sustainability, given our limited knowledge of the functioning of ecosystems. BCLs are an operational conservation concept inspired by contemporary trends in biological conservation.