Towards a roadmap for sustainable land use in Europe

Regional Environmental Change -     

The idea of sustainable development

In this lecture, I demonstrate how very different macroeconomic history begins to look if Nature is included as a capital asset in production activities. The tentative conclusions I draw from the evidence are: (1) high population growth in the world’s poorest regions (South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa) has been an obstacle to the achievement of sustainable economic development there; relatedly, (2) when population growth is taken into account, the accumulation of manufactured capital, knowledge, and human capital (health and education) has not compensated for the degradation of natural capital in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and, in all probability, even in the UK and the US; (3) China is possibly an exception to (1) and (2). This article is based on the Keynote Lecture delivered at the international symposium on “Sustainability in an Unequal World”, held in Tokyo on November 24, 2006. The exposition relies on my book, Economics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. The author is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge.     

Inefficient cooking systems a challenge for sustainable development: a case of rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa

Environment, Development and Sustainability - The use of low efficient cookstoves has several severe negative impacts. Burning solid fuels kills about 4 million people every year, a number which is...     

Way for sustainable development of energy in China

The report of Chinese Communist Party's 18th National Congress clearly stated that the construction of ecological civilization needs to join hands with the overall layout of the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics,and the greatest obstacle to achieving ecological civilization is the energy structure in China.Currently,the third industrial revolution—marked by green technology and cloud computing technology—is happening,and it will have a huge impact on future energy development.The fundamental way to solve the problem of energy resource constraints is developing the renewable energy,and the fundamental approach for renewable energy is developing distributed energy and services.The important factors to achieving China's energy production and consumption revolution are accelerating the construction of distributed energy system and overall energy structure adjustment in China.     

Climate change,sustainable water management and institutional adaptation in rural sub-Saharan Africa

Much current work on climate adaptation options vis-à-vis water management in rural sub-Saharan Africa has tended to focus more on technological and infrastructural alternatives and less on institutional alternatives. Yet, vulnerability to climate variability and change in these contexts is a function not just of biophysical outcomes but also of institutional factors that can vary significantly at relatively finer scales. This paper seeks to contribute towards closing this gap by examining institutional options for sustainable water management in rural SSA in the context of climate change and variability. It explores challenges for transforming water-related institutions and puts forward institutional alternatives towards adapting to increasingly complex conditions created by climate change and variability. The paper suggests revisiting the Integrated Water Resources Management approach which has dominated water institutional debates and reforms in Africa over the recent past, towards actively adopting resilience and adaptive management lenses in crafting water institutional development initiatives.     

Evaluation of stakeholder participation in monitoring regional sustainable development

This paper presents a theoretical framework that can be used to discuss the question of how context, time and different participatory process designs influence the results of participatory monitoring projects in terms of concrete outputs (such as sustainability indicators) and the more intangible social outcomes (such as learning and stakeholder relations). We will discuss and compare four different cases of participatory monitoring of provincial sustainable development in the Netherlands. The results show sustainability issues selected by the stakeholders reflect the socio-economic and ecological structural characteristics of their region. In a different context, stakeholders not only assign different weights to the same set of issues, but more importantly they select a completely different set of regional aims altogether. Since these regional structural characteristics only change slowly over time, the influence of time on stakeholder preferences is shown to be only of minor importance. However, the dissipation of learning effects is shown to be a fundamental challenge for the cyclical nature of participatory monitoring, especially when its goal is shared agenda building. Another important conclusion is that, in the design of participatory processes, more attention should be devoted to providing stakeholders with the opportunity to comment on an ‘intermediate’ product.     

Problems of sustainable development and ecological indication in radioactively contaminated areas

Lands that have become unusable because of contamination with long-lived artificial radionuclides require special measures aimed at their monitoring and rehabilitation. In such areas, specific processes in the biota are associated with the direct effect of ionizing radiation on some species, secondary changes depending on the ecology of organisms trophically connected with these species, and side effects explained by the regime of isolation established in radiation reserves. The dynamics of floras and faunas in radiation reserves are determined by successional changes in plant communities, migration of radionuclides, and the protective status of these territories.     

The role of the engineering community in sustainable development

Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability assessment is an important part of the decision process in organisations. Sustainability is difficult to define or measure because it is a complex concept. To assess the sustainability level of an organisation, a unique attempt has been made using fuzzy-based Kano model based on the stakeholders' satisfaction. The Kano model is a customer satisfaction assessment tool that must be precise, and it is incorporated with fuzzy logic because it has the capability to replicate the human perceptions. In this context, the approach is used to assess the sustainability by using the stakeholders' satisfaction for different criteria and it provides information regarding improvement in sustainability.     

Towards more sustainable future: assessment of sustainability literacy among the future managers in India

The present study attempts to assess the literacy levels of future managers of India in social, economic, and environment sustainability issues both at national and global levels among the students from Management Education Institutions (MEIs) located in Bengaluru, Chandigarh, and New Delhi. Additionally, a comparative study between the MEIs situated in Bengaluru, Chandigarh, and New Delhi, India, is undertaken. Interestingly, participants of the study specified more professional importance and personal relevance of sustainability. The study's outcome shows a higher level of sustainability knowledge among future managers from MEIs in New Delhi and Bengaluru. Future managers based out in New Delhi and Bengaluru are more aware of social and economic sustainability and having less awareness of environmental issues. Sustainability knowledge and awareness of the future managers are the first steps to engage them in building a sustainable future. It compels them to remain fully dedicated to creating a prosperous society and encourages them to make knowledgeable and successful choices to that end. The study's findings indicate a difference found in the levels of sustainability literacy among the Postgraduate students of Business Administration based in India's three metropolitan cities, including Chandigarh: Bengaluru and Delhi. The awareness about the local, national, or global eco-system, pollution, and other problems concerned with the environment was low among students based in Chandigarh, moderate among Delhi students, and high among the Bengaluru students.

     

Philosophy of sustainable development: understanding public health

Environment, Development and Sustainability - Health has been a focal point in sustainable development policies. Seventeen new goals of sustainable development contribute directly or indirectly to...     

Control of industrial air pollution through sustainable development

The environmental issue has become a major subject in the last few decades affecting science and technology throughout the world due to the serious environmental impacts caused by industrial air pollution. Consequently, pulse jet filtration has become the preferred choice all around the world. Researchers are continuously striving for new concepts of more energy-efficient and compact particulate collector which can meet future emission limits and operating requirements. The system can also satisfy stringent emission norms and if required, it can be embedded with new technique for simultaneous control of particulate and gaseous pollutants. In the recent past, stress is also being given to having control over the source to reduce or eliminate waste, and finally, on waste management. Prevention is frequently more cost-effective than control. The paper discusses all these methodology toward sustainability in the perspective of effective control of industrial air pollution.     

Towards deliberative coastal governance: insights from South Africa and the Mississippi Delta

Coastal sustainability is elusive in South Africa and the Mississippi delta. These case studies and convergent literatures demonstrate the merits of reconceptualising coastal management as a transformative practice of deliberative governance. A normative framework is presented that focuses attention on underpinning deliberative outcomes to enable governance actors and networks to build cognitive, democratic, sociopolitical and institutional capacity to transform unsustainable and maladaptive coastal practices. But operationalising such intentions is complex and contested and requires a volte-face in thinking and practice. The South African and Mississippi delta experiences provide insights about how to develop a deliberative praxis of coastal governance based on consideration of the choice of process, timeliness, quality of process, equity and representation, connections to the policy cycle, impact, implementation and institutionalisation.     

Monitoring and guiding development in rural Egypt: local sustainable development indicators and local Human Development Indices

This paper puts forward sustainable development indicators and an index appropriate for monitoring and guiding development planning in the villages of rural Egypt, as an improvement on the current approach which is informed by locally calculated Human Development Indices (HDI). This has two principal weaknesses. Firstly many of the issues of importance to villagers are not covered by the economic and social scope of the HDI. Secondly the HDI, along with international sustainable development indicator sets, fails to identify problems which are of importance in specific national or sub-national contexts. We have therefore worked from a simplified but holistic model of the socio-economic-environmental system of a rural Egyptian village, informed by the outputs of a participatory planning process. An indicator set based on a one-to-one correspondence between system components and indicators was created. This comprehensive set is detailed but consequently rather unwieldy, and a core set is selected and compared with the HDI indicators for a sample of villages to demonstrate the impact of considering environmental and institutional factors on establishing priority areas for government intervention. We conclude that a combination of a locally relevant index and an easily comprehended diagrammatic approach to presenting a small indicator set offers advantages to decision makers in comparison to local application of the HDI.     

The advancement of a mathematical model of sustainable development

Earth System Analysis was postulated as a theory by Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber in 1998 as a way to characterise the Earth System—the coupled relationship between the environment and humans. Within this theory is the notion of Geocybernetics—management of the Earth System in order to achieve strategies and mechanisms of co-evolution between the environment and humans. This is regarded as the concept and application of sustainable development. However, whilst fundamental definitions in Earth System Analysis are presented for the coupled relationship between the environment and humans, no such definitions exist for sustainable development within the Earth System context. Consequently, this paper presents a mathematical model of sustainable development that provides for the fundamental abstraction of the key concepts and parameters necessary for sustainable development to occur. The model utilises basic mathematics to detail these concepts and parameters, as well as the conditions required for sustainable development to occur. The model presented is, in some regards, a work in progress, and further refinements will be made given the nature of the research performed to this point, i.e. the fundamental mathematical definition of sustainable development and its application. However, the research conducted thus far has made it reasonable to communicate the findings made up to the present point. The paper also provides a brief example of the application of the model to an environmental impact assessment of a metro rail scheme in India, for the purpose of evaluating the level of sustainable development (if appropriate) for the project under consideration.     

Integration and implementation of sustainable ICT-based education in developing countries: low-cost,en masse methodology in Kenya

The quality of education in Kenya’s public elementary schools has continued to drop, which is an ironic outcome in the wake of the introduction of tuition-exempt primary education. This removal of tuition costs led to a surge in primary education enrollment that overwhelmed the existing educational infrastructure. Overcapacity in classrooms led to frustrated teachers and mediocre delivery of content amid the overstretched resources and limited education budget. To remedy this situation, the government has begun introducing various information and communication technologies (ICTs) in schools to supplement current resources. This comes with mixed results. This paper aims to demonstrate effective strategies for integrating low-cost ICT-based materials in schools in developing countries through a community of practice. Three schools were used to illustrate integration of sustainable ICT-based education in a style of classroom characteristic in developing schools. Development and use of prerecorded DVD-based content was proposed as an effective solution. A comparative study was undertaken to evaluate the differences in student comprehension and educator delivery of education involving a digital, ICT-integrated classroom and a traditional, analog-type teaching method classroom to underscore the empirical evidence of the effectiveness of introducing a low-cost ICT-based program. This study also shows that teachers are better positioned to lead the design and development of appropriate and innovative materials. Furthermore, to cope with the immense amount of materials that need developing to correspond with the curriculum, it shows that with the emergence of a community of practice of teachers, many suitable low-cost materials can be developed. This takes place through an iterative collaboration as opposed to traditional top-down approaches, which have a proven record of failure.