Affluence Is The Greatest Friend of Environment

In their mission to go green, real estate developers in India are now increasingly willing to spend on plants and trees. Developers are even willing to recruit landscape specialists to transplant trees, and import exotic trees from faraway countries. However, this is something one sees in premium residential projects in cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai. The proportion of cost that goes into landscaping in India is about one per cent of the total project cost, compared with five per cent in developed countries.

Most people who buy houses in such projects are high-networth individuals (HNIs). This indicates that when societies become wealthier, people are willing to pay a premium for a better environment.

Why?

In developing countries, the struggle for survival is so draining and time-consuming that thinking about higher ideals like living in a better environment is a matter of least concern. When a society becomes more prosperous, people have the time and means to pursue nobler ideals. Today, food, raw materials, energy and everything that human beings need are available at a much lower cost. Relative to personal incomes, the cost has fallen over the past few centuries. So, we are living in an age of abundance where people are freer to pursue the lives they so want.

Long ago, when population was rising and technology was improving, living standards in cities were comparatively low. This is because density and industrialisation had some downsides. For example, over a hundred years ago, life expectancy in New York was lower than in other parts of the US; it is a few years higher today. This is because population growth and technological progress have led to a better environment. When population grew further and technology improved, people found ways to improve the environment. For example, the quality of water supply improved throughout the world. There is better sanitation today than at any point in history.

Better technology allowed governments and local authorities to build cleaner roads. It is true that cars lead to pollution, but cars polluting less also hit the roads every year. Better cars pollute less. Long ago, when people travelled in horse carts, roads were even more polluted because of horse manure, weeds and other pollutants; technology changed everything. Cars do pollute roads. But, when compared to horse carts, are they so bad? No. Are today's cars worse than the cars of the 1970s? No.

Real estate developers, for example, noticed that home buyers were not willing to wait for trees to grow. So, they hired landscape specialists to transplant trees from faraway countries. Without such technology, this would not have been possible.