Environment and Society Development

People are arguing that the environment has to be sacrificed for a society to develop. I don't agree with this assumption because society development and environment are both important for a city. We need to balance the two of them.

Environment and society development are the impacts affecting the livability. Livability refers to the degree of environmental comfort and suitability for living. According to the information from the Mercer LLC of the US in 2009, Hong Kong is the 70th livable city in the world. Hong Kong was graded satisfactorily in different aspects. But as severe air pollution problems lower the average score, Hong Kong always ranks behind Singapore, Tokyo and some other Asian cities. This shows that environment is as important as society development. If a city's environment is bad, it will lower its international image. Therefore, environment should not be neglected.

Secondly, developing society should be about improving things but not making them worse. Maintaining a good living environment is important to a society. Environmental problems have physical and psychological health implications on the residents. That means there will be fewer benefits to the city as citizens cannot make money when they have health problems. It may give burden to the medical expenditure of the government. Besides, if the environment is polluted, tourists may not visit there and the revenue from tourism is decreased.

People choose to ignore the environment as they are more concerned with developing society and making money. If we sacrifice the environment for society development, there may be effects caused by pollution such as climate changes, landslide, flooding etc. We have to put lots of efforts and money to prevent or reduce loss. If we continue to pollute the environment, we may destroy the food chain and there will be insufficient food supply. With the disasters and lack of food supply, how can we develop the society well?

In conclusion, the environment should not be sacrificed for a society to develop because environment pollution lowers the profit, livability and international image of a city, worsen the health of citizens, increases the risk of having natural disasters and destroy the food chain. Therefore, we should lessen environmental damage but not sacrifice environment while developing the society.