Rights of nature is an idea that has come of age. In recent years, a diverse range of countries and jurisdictions have adopted these norms, which involve granting legal rights to nature or natural objects, such as rivers, forests, or ecosystems. This book critically examines the idea of natural objects as right-holders and analyzes legal cases, policies, and philosophical issues relating to this development. Drawing on contributions from a range of experts in the field, Rights of Nature: A Re-examination investigates the potential for this innovative idea to revolutionize the concepts of rights, standing, and recognition as traditionally understood in many legal systems. Taking as its starting point Stone's influential 1972 article "Should Trees Have Standing?," the book examines the progress rights of nature have made since that time, by identifying central themes, unifying principles, and key distinctions in how rights of nature discourse has been operationalized in the disciplines of law, philosophy, and the social sciences. These themes and principles are illustrated through a wide variety of examples, including ecosystem services, indigenous thinking, and ecological restoration, demonstrating how the relationship between humanity and the natural world may be transforming. Taking a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and policy, environmental ethics, and philosophy.

The first book to chronicle how innovation in laboratory designs for botanical research energized the emergence of physiological plant ecology as a vibrant subdiscipline   Laboratory innovation since the mid-twentieth century has powered advances in the study of plant adaptation, evolution, and ecosystem function. The phytotron, an integrated complex of controlled-environment greenhouse and laboratory spaces, invented by Frits W. Went in the 1950s, set off a worldwide laboratory movement and transformed the plant sciences. Sharon Kingsland explores this revolution through a comparative study of work in the United States, France, Australia, Israel, the USSR, and Hungary.   These advances in botanical research energized physiological plant ecology. Case studies explore the development of phytotron spinoffs such as mobile laboratories, rhizotrons, and ecotrons. Scientific problems include the significance of plant emissions of volatile organic compounds, symbiosis between plants and soil fungi, and the discovery of new pathways for photosynthesis as an adaptation to hot, dry climates. The advancement of knowledge through synthesis is a running theme: linking disciplines, combining laboratory and field research, and moving across ecological scales from leaf to ecosystem. The book also charts the history of modern scientific responses to the emerging crisis of food insecurity in the era of global warming.

Ecotones, or boundary zones between land and inland waters (such as lakes, streams and rivers), are the principal routes for transport of organic matter and nutrients across landscapes via physical and biological vectors. The ecotone is the place of cumulation and transformation of in situ production as well as of allochthonous material from adjacent aquatic and terrestrial systems. The ecotype functions as an important barrier or filter for principal nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, responsible for the eutrophication and degradation of surface waters. Intensive forest cutting, agriculture, pollution and bank regulation, urbanization and hydrotechnical constructions seriously endanger the ecotone systems and damage their protective function. It is vital to develop a scientific understanding of the behaviour of phosphorus and nitrogen in these transitional boundary habitats. Such an understanding is important for the rational protection, management and restoration of ecotones connected with lakes and rivers. The importance of nutrient cycling and retention is discussed from the point of view of ecotone function, management and reconstruction in order to sustain its protective role for water bodies. Various types of land/water transitory zones are discussed: wetlands, lake littoral systems, riparian zones of rivers, streams and brooks, the contact zones between groundwater and surface waters of lakes and rivers, air--water interfaces, and patch/ecotone structures in watersheds.

Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures explores how our dominant carbon and nuclear energy assemblages shape conceptions of participation, risk, and in/securities, and how they might be reengineered to deliver justice and democratic participation in transitioning energy systems. Chapters assess the economies, geographies and politics of current and future energy landscapes, exposing how dominant assemblages (composed of technologies, strategies, knowledge and authorities) change our understanding of security and risk, and how they these shared understandings are often enacted uncritically in policy. Contributors address integral relationships across the production and government of material and human energies and the opportunities for sustainable and democratic governance. In addition, the book explores how interest groups advance idealized energy futures and energy imaginaries. The work delves into the role that states, market organizations and civil society play in envisioned energy change. It assesses how risks and security are formulated in relation to economics, politics, ecology, and human health. It concludes by integrating the relationships between alternative energies and governance strategies, including issues of centralization and decentralization, suggesting approaches to engineer democracy into decision-making about energy assemblages.

Temperature affects everything. It influences all aspects of the physical environment and governs any process that involves a flow of energy, setting boundaries on what an organism can or cannot do. This novel textbook reveals the key principles behind the complex relationship between organisms and temperature, namely the science of thermal ecology. It starts by providing a rigorous framework for understanding the flow of energy in and out of the organism, before describing the influence of temperature on what organisms can do and how fast they can do it. With these fundamental principles covered, the bulk of the book explores thermal ecology itself, incorporating the important extra dimension of interactions with other organisms. An entire chapter is devoted to the crucially important subject of how organisms are responding to climate change. Indeed, the threat of rapid climatic change on a global scale is a stark reminder of the challenges that remain for evolutionary thermal biologists, and adds a sense of urgency to this book's mission.

'A hymn of love to the world ... A journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

The idea for this book arose in 1993, after the Free State of Bavaria through its Bayrisches Staatsministerium rur Landesentwicklung und Umweltfragen (Bavarian Ministry of Regional Development and the Environment) decided to discontinue both the Bavarian project management (PBWU) for forest decline research and the multidisciplinary field research on the Wank Mountain in the Alps near Garmisch. Forest decline through the action of ozone and other photooxidants was a main topic of the supported re search in the Alps and will be a topic of new investigations in the Bavarian Forest. Many interesting results were obtained, but the researchers involved have not had sufficient time to allow reliable conclusions to be drawn. It was therefore decided to ask inter national experts for contributions in order to summarize the best available evidence of a possible link between ozone and forest decline - a topic which has been studied in the USA since the late 1950s and in Europe since the early 1980s. The original idea of Waldsterben as an irreversible large-scale dieback of forests in Germany was soon recognized to be wrong (Forschungsbeirat 1989). However, the new criteria used for the official German and European damage inventories (loss or yel lowing of needles or leaves, tree morphology) indicate that per sistently high percentages of damaged spruce and pine remain, and there is an increasing percentage of damaged beech and oak, with a high proportion of biotic disease (Forschungsbeirat 1989; UN-ECE 1995).

Sun, wind and water draining from the land interact with the morphological features of a water body to create the environment experienced by freshwater plants and animals. The result of this interaction can be considered as the freshwater hydro climate and this plays the same role as that of conventional climate in terrestrial ecology. Agriculture, for example, has long been supported by specialist meteorological services which not only provide farmers with a sound interpretation of weather and climate without excessive technicality but which also consider relations between climate and the growth of crops and stock. There is a need for a similar service in freshwater ecology and applied biology. This book is the result of a number of years devoted to developing part of that service. It concentrates on the influence of all forms of water movement on the ecology of fresh waters. Water movement implies interest in both the quantity of water moving through river basins which reflects the climate of the catch ment as well as the nature of the fluid motion within the rivers and lakes of the basin. The book is not so much a review of recent research as an attempt to establish a logic-how knowledge of water movement can contribute to understanding the ecology of fresh waters. Two points follow directly.

Over the last two decades, the field of public administration has witnessed theoretical and practical changes that have innovated the relationships between public administration and performance management. Dealing with the rising complexity of performance regimes in contemporary public administration requires that policy-makers and their organizations are able to face unpredictable problems impacting on a community's quality of life. Complex policy issues - such as immigration, pandemics, societal aging, crime, unemployment, and financial crises - cannot be easily solved by quick fixes that are focused only on a short-term and bounded vision of their causes. They rather require "robust" methods to support policy analysis and to affect sustainable community outcomes in cross-boundary settings. As illustrated in this book, Dynamic Performance Management provides a methodological framework enabling policy-makers to outline the causal relationships among policy outcomes, performance drivers, and related strategic resources. Such a modeling approach helps stakeholders to broaden the investigated system boundaries so to balance short- and long-term performance under different result domains. This approach blends performance management and System Dynamics modeling. Several examples and case studies are discussed to enable scholars and practitioners to appreciate the practical implications related to the use of such an approach.

This book focuses mainly on strategic decision making at a global level, which is rarely considered in approaches to sustainability. This book makes a unique contribution as the work looks at global consequences of mineral exhaustion and steps that can be taken to alleviate the impending problems. This book highlights how sustainability has become one of the most important issues for businesses, governments and society at large. This book explores the topic of sustainability as one that is under much debate as to what it actually is and how it can be achieved, but it is completely evident that the resources of the planet are fixed in quantity, and once used, cannot be reused except through being reused in one form or another. This is particularly true of the mineral resources of the planet. These are finite in quantity, and once fully extracted, extra quantities are no longer available for future use. This book argues and presents evidence that the remaining mineral resources are diminishing significantly and heading towards exhaustion. Once mined and consumed, they are no longer available for future use other than what can be recycled and reused. This book demonstrates that future scarcity means that best use must be made of what exists, as sustainability depends upon this, and best use is defined as utility rather than economic value, which must be considered at a global level rather than a national level. Moreover, sustainability depends upon both availability in the present and in the future, so the use of resources requires attention to the future as well as to the present. This book investigates the alternative methods of achieving the global distribution of these mineral resources and proposes an optimum solution. This book adds to the discourse through the understanding of the importance of the depletion and finiteness of raw materials and their use for the present and the future, in order to achieve and maintain sustainability.

This open access edited volume critically examines a coherence building opportunity between Climate Change Adaptation, the Sustainable Development Goals and Disaster Risk Reduction agendas through presenting best practice approaches, and supporting Irish and international case studies. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted existing global inequalities and demonstrated the scope and scale of cascading socio-ecological impacts. The impacts of climate change on our global communities will likely dwarf the disruption brought on by the pandemic, and moreover, these impacts will be more diffuse and pervasive over a longer timeframe. This edited volume considers opportunities to address global challenges in the context of developing resilience as an integrated development continuum instead of through independent and siloed agendas.

Developing an innovative approach to understanding how organized crime groups diversify into the illegal trade in natural resources, this book looks at the convergence between environmental crime and other serious crimes. In Organized Environmental Crime, Daan van Uhm breaks new ground by rejecting the classic image of organized crime as specializing in one kind of criminal activity. Instead, he develops an innovative approach to understanding how organized crime groups diversify into the illegal trade in natural resources by looking at the convergence between environmental crime and other serious crimes. Personal stories from informants directly involved in organized crime networks offer unique insights into the black markets in gold, wildlife, and timber in three environmental crime hotspots: the Darién Gap, a remote swath of jungle on the Colombia-Panama border in Latin America; the Golden Triangle, a notorious opium epicenter in Southeast Asia; and the eastern edge of the Congo basin, an important conflict area in Central Africa. The proliferation of organized environmental crime exacerbates the global destruction of ancient rainforests; the mass extinction of species; and the pollution of the atmosphere, land, and water, negatively affecting planet Earth. By uncovering its incentives, features, and harms, this book is crucial to understanding organized environmental crime in a rapidly changing world.

This book is a compilation of selected papers from the Fifth International Conference on Natural Resources and Sustainable Environmental Management held in Near East University, November 2021. It provides intellectual guidance and scientific evidence on the challenges of global warming and climate change based on a humanistic and critical thinking approach, promoting research and education to build equality in the global community and more sustainable societies. This book also addresses the current challenges of bridging the gap between government policymakers and providers of science and solutions with innovative ideas and new visions to help resolve the challenges facing us in the area of natural resources (water, energy), and environment.

Millions of hectares of temperate woodland and billions of trees have been cleared from Australia's agricultural landscapes. This has allowed land to be developed for cropping and grazing livestock but has also had significant environmental impacts, including erosion, salinity and loss of native plant and animal species. Restoring Farm Woodlands for Wildlife focuses on why restoration is important and describes best practice approaches to restore farm woodlands for birds, mammals and reptiles. Based on 19 years of long-term research in temperate agricultural south-eastern Australia, this book addresses practical questions such as what, where and how much to plant, ways to manage plantings and how plantings change over time. It will be a key reference for farmers, natural resource management professionals and policy-makers concerned with revegetation and conservation.

This is the first book that employs economics to develop and apply an analytical framework for assessing progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors explore the historical context for the underlying sustainability concept, develop an economics-based analytical framework for assessing progress towards the SDGs, and discuss the implications for sustainability policy and future research. Economics is concerned with analysing the trade-offs in allocating scarce means to achieve various ends. Thus, economic methods are ideally suited to assessing how progress towards one or more SDGs may come at the expense of achieving other goals. Such interactions are inevitable in meeting the 2030 Agenda over the next decade, given that the SDGs include different economic, social, and environmental elements. Although it may be possible to make progress across all 17 goals by 2030, it is more likely that improvement toward all goals will be mixed. For example, we may have reduced poverty or hunger over recent years, but the way in which this progress has been achieved - e.g. through economic expansion and industrial growth - may have come at the cost in achieving some environmental or social goals. On the other hand, progress in reducing poverty is likely to go hand-in-hand with other important goals, such as eliminating hunger, improving clean water and sanitation, and ensuring good health and well-being. Assessing these interactions is essential for guiding policy, so that countries and the international community can begin implementing the right set of environmental, social and economic policies to achieve more sustainable and inclusive global development.

Double carbon targets have been one of the most motivations and targets for China's social and economic development. Building is one of the most important sectors to achieve energy savings and emission reductions. This book focuses on China's building energy usage and CO2 emissions, discusses the status quo of China's building energy of four categories, their characteristics and technologies to improve energy efficiency and achieve zero-carbon emissions. Specifically, this book in 2021 discussed the pathways to achieve carbon neutrality targets for China's building sector. This book also analyzed the energy mix, energy intensity, and technology perspectives to implement energy and carbon targets in urban residential building areas. This book consists of large-scale survey data, monitoring data and case studies. The discussion on technologies and policies is supported by a variety of evidence and continuous research for more than ten years. The information, data and policy suggestions will interest readers all around the world who work in energy, climate change, engineering and building science areas.

Advances in Marine Biology, Volume 92 highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on topics including A Review of Coral Reef Rehabilitation Efforts in the Coral Triangle. Each chapter in this series is written by an international board of authors.

Advances in Agronomy, Volume 176, the latest release in this leading reference on agronomy, contains a variety of updates and highlights new advances in the field. Each chapter is written by an international board of authors.

This book examines the recent intersection of national security and public health regarding biological threats to the U.S. populace and proposes improvements to the executive and legislative development of U.S. policy addressing biological threat mitigation. Over the last 20 years, the national security community has engaged with disease-related issues that have traditionally been the scope of public health agencies. The federal government's response has been to create a single national biodefense strategy, which has been largely ineffective in improving conditions due to poor terminology, a lack of leadership, and a failure to assess government programs. Applying a public policy framework, Albert J. Mauroni examines how the government addresses biological threats-including disease prevention, bioterrorism response, military biodefense, biosurety, and agricultural biosecurity and food safety. He proposes a new approach to countering biological threats, arguing that lead agencies should focus on implementing discrete portfolios with annual assessments against clear and achievable objectives. Examines each of the five biological threat sectors and identifies who develops and executes the policy for those sectors, what funding they receive, how each policy area's objectives are implemented, what congressional committees are involved, and who advocates for them Covers policy evolution since the beginning of the 21st century and identifies the major milestones in biological threat mitigation Unveils the real issues behind public health challenges, such as funding for disease prevention programs Clarifies commonly misunderstood terminology, such as health security, biosecurity, and biodefense

Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology publishes authoritative reviews on the occurrence, effects, and fate of pesticide residues and other environmental contaminants. It will keep you informed of the latest significant issues by providing in-depth information in the areas of analytical chemistry, agricultural microbiology, biochemistry, human and veterinary medicine, toxicology, and food technology.

The conversation about zoning has meandered its way through issues ranging from housing affordability to economic growth to segregation, expanding in the process from a public policy backwater to one of the most discussed policy issues of the day. In his pioneering 1972 study, Land Use Without Zoning, Bernard Siegan first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective: Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban growth and separating incompatible uses, but also drives housing costs up and competition down. In no uncertain terms, Siegan concludes, "Zoning has been a failure and should be eliminated!" Drawing on the unique example of Houston-America's fourth largest city, and its lone dissenter on zoning-Siegan demonstrates how land use will naturally regulate itself in a nonzoned environment. For the most part, Siegan says, markets in Houston manage growth and separate incompatible uses not from the top down, like most zoning regimes, but from the bottom up. This approach yields a result that sets Houston apart from zoned cities: its greater availability of multifamily housing. Indeed, it would seem that the main contribution of zoning is to limit housing production while adding an element of permit chaos to the process. Land Use Without Zoning reports in detail the effects of current exclusionary zoning practices and outlines the benefits that would accrue to cities that forgo municipally imposed zoning laws. Yet the book's program isn't merely destructive: beyond a critique of zoning, Siegan sets out a bold new vision for how land-use regulation might work in the United States. Released nearly a half century after the book's initial publication, this new edition recontextualizes Siegan's work for our current housing affordability challenes. It includes a new preface by law professor David Schleicher, which explains the book's role as a foundational text in the law and economics of urban land use and describes how it has informed more recent scholarship. Additionally, it includes a new afterword by urban planner Nolan Gray, which includes new data on Houston's evolution and land use relative to its peer cities.

More than ten years after the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, this book critically reviews the achievements, limits and next frontiers of business and human rights following the 'protect, respect, remedy' trichotomy. The UN Guiding Principles acted as a catalyst for hitherto unprecedented regulatory and judicial developments. The monograph by Macchi proposes a functionalist reading of the state's duty to regulate the transnational activities of corporations in order to protect human rights and adopts a holistic approach to the corporate responsibility to respect, arguing that environmental and climate due diligence are inherent dimensions of human rights due diligence. In the volume emerging legislations are assessed on mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence, as well as the potential and limitations of a binding international treaty on business and human rights. The book also reviews groundbreaking litigation against transnational corporations, such as Lungowe v. Vedanta or Milieudefensie v. Shell, for their human rights and climate change impacts. The book is primarily targeted at academic and non-academic legal experts, as well as at researchers and students looking at business and human rights issues through the lenses of legal studies (particularly international law and European law), political sciences, business ethics, and management. Additionally, it should also find a readership among practitioners working in the public or private sector (consultants, CSR officers, legal officers, etc.) willing to familiarize themselves with the expanding areas of liability, financial and reputational risks connected to the social and environmental impacts of global supply chains. Chiara Macchi is currently Lecturer in Law at Wageningen University & Research in The Netherlands.

This book introduces the Chinese boletes, including the history, ecological and economic values, as well as the geographical distribution patterns with a highlight on the Tylopilus species. Species in Tylopilus s.l. are not only of important ecological values but also of scientific interests. They are very diverse in morphology, complex in structure and wide in ecological niches. China is one of the diverse hotspots of boletes, and many boletes were traditionally treated as members of Tylopilus based on hymenophore or spore-print colour. The studies revealed that the traditionally defined Tylopilus is polyphyletic. This book aims to elucidate the phylogenetic relationships among the genera treated in Tylopilus s.l. previously; to delimit and recognize the taxa, and finally to reveal the diversity of the genera and species of Tylopilus s.l. in China. The book is intended to be a reference for biologists who conduct investigations of biological resources and biodiversity; university and college teachers and students carrying out studies in related fields; mycologists and amateur mycologists, or people who interested in mushrooms taxonomy and systematics; and workers in the development of non-timber forest products.

This open access edited volume explores the past, present, and future of artificiality and sustainability in entrepreneurship - the unforeseen consequences and ways to advance to a sustainable future. In particular, it connects artificiality, sustainability and entrepreneurship, intertwining artificial with the specific phenomenon of those novel digital technologies that provoke continuous and significant change in our lives and business. Unlike digital entrepreneurship research, which focuses on digital technology development and management, this book covers processes and mechanisms of sustainable adaptability of entrepreneurs, the business logic of start-ups, and the collaborative behaviours under the mass digital transformation, including the prevalence of artificial intelligence. Some of the questions that this book answers are as follows: How has entrepreneurship reacted to such challenges previously? What lessons have been learned and need to be carried forward? How can entrepreneurship and the artefacts of entrepreneurship respond to current challenges? What should be the mindset of the entrepreneur to assure sustainable adaptation? How to embrace and embed the new business logic?