This article provides two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development, and characterises the welfare criterion that they imply. It presents a formal theory of sustainable development, created by the author (Chichilnisky, 1996a, 1997). The axioms require that neither the present nor...

To tackle the high rate of deforestation in Indonesia's production forests, a new type of licence was introduced in 2004 known as an Ecosystem Restoration Concession (ERC) or IUPHHK-RE by the Indonesian Government. For the first time, production forests could be managed for the purpose of...

New physical constraints emerged in the 20th century and are changing the decision criteria used until now. Two optimisation problems are equivalent: (1) maximising discounted utility with a long-run survival constraint and (2) maximising a new type of utility that treats the present and future...