In the age of corporate responsibility, green technology and sustainability continue to grip the consciousness of business and academic institutions. However, development of appropriate business-driven green applications requires an awareness of best practices of the green agenda. Green Technology Applications for Enterprise and Academic Innovation addresses the importance of green technology and sustainability for technology, enterprise, and academic innovation in energy management, renewable energy, and carbon reduction strategies. This book acts as the bridge for practitioners, academia, businesses, industrialists, governmental executives, and students seeking research in this emerging area.

This book provides a platform for discussing the challenges that organizations face in order to implement sustainability, ethics, and effective corporate governance, all of which are important elements of "standing out" from other companies. Examining the background of the New European Consensus on development with the new guiding motto 'Our World, Our Dignity, Our Future', the authors explore how this new legislation on sustainability issues around the world is forcing companies to deal directly with sustainability issues. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda), adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, is the international community's response to global challenges and trends in connection with sustainable development. With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at its core, the 2030 Agenda is a transformative political framework designed to eradicate poverty and achieve sustainable development globally. It balances the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, including the key issues of governance and peaceful and inclusive societies, and recognizes the essential interlinkages between its goals and targets, i.e., that they must be implemented as a whole and not selectively. The respective chapters in this volume raise a number of questions regarding companies' ability to implement sustainability, ethics, and effective corporate governance. Simultaneously, they explore how organizations must adapt to sustainability-related developments.

This book provides professionals, as well as students, with the understanding that Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are now core business principles for sustainably. It encourages social entrepreneurs in their role as forerunners, in creating new business models that develop, facilitate or implement constructive solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues. At the same time, this book views corporate social responsibility as a means of challenging existing entities to realize and modify prior unsustainable and predatory business models; and to increase social, cultural and environmental accountability. By linking these two concepts, this book prompts a paradigmatic awakening, whereby the foundational driver of business creation and management no longer rests on profit maximization, but on improvement of the quality of life for society.

Biodiversity of Pantepui: The Pristine "Lost World" of the Neotropical Guiana Highlands provides the most updated and comprehensive knowledge on the biota, origin, and evolution of the Pantepui biogeographical province. It synthesizes historical information and recent discoveries, covering the main biogeographic patterns, evolutionary trends, and conservational efforts. Written by international experts on the biodiversity of this pristine land, this book explores what makes Pantepui a unique natural laboratory to study the origin and evolution of Neotropical biodiversity under the influence of only natural drivers. It discusses the organisms living in Pentepui, including algae, plants, several groups of invertebrates, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. The latter portion of the book delves into the effects of human activity and global warming on Pantepui, and current conservational efforts to combat these threats. Biodiversity of Pantepui is an important resource for researchers in ecology, biogeography, evolution, and conservation, who want to understand the biodiversity and natural history of this region, and how to help conserve and protect the Guiana Highlands from environmental and human damages.

This book delivers stimulating input for a broad range of researchers, from geographers and ecologists to psychologists interested in spatial perception and physicists researching in complex systems. How can one decide whether one surface or spatial object is more complex than another? What does it require to measure the spatial complexity of small maps, and why does this matter for nature, science and technology? Drawing from algorithmics, geometry, topology, probability and informatics, and with examples from everyday life, the reader is invited to cross the borders into the bewildering realm of spatial complexity, as it emerges from the study of geographic maps, landscapes, surfaces, knots, 3D and 4D objects. The mathematical and cartographic experiments described in this book lead to hypotheses and enigmas with ramifications in aesthetics and epistemology.

This book addresses the dilemma that firms face in engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) while maintaining a financially sustainable business model in the era of digital transformation. Several strategies that firms have taken to integrate CSR within the business model are also highlighted. To explicate the problems involved, the book primarily focuses on entrepreneurial ventures, given their nascent business model that best illustrates how business leaders can embed the social mission in the firm at the beginning of organizational founding. In this age, sustainability is an innovation's new frontier. For sustainable competitive advantage, the book argues for how companies can build more sustainable products, processes, and practices that benefit the firm and society through maintaining an entrepreneurial philosophy. The target readership consists of academics, students, and practitioners in the areas of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, organizational theory, and strategic management. This book clarifies the critical practices of sustainability-oriented innovative firms and creative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Through a review of recent trends in CSR, the authors emphasize that CSR is no longer a "bolt-on" or some kind of window-dressing to satisfy public relations (PR) needs. Credible CSR is critical to business legitimacy and sustainability. Aware of the public's increasing scrutiny, companies are increasingly ramping up their focus on social responsibility, whether by championing women's rights, protecting the environment, or attempting to obliterate poverty, on local, national, or global levels. Simultaneously, more firms face accusations of "greenwashing" - backlash due to consumer mistrust in the intentions behind their CSR practices. While numerous works have highlighted this dilemma and how companies fall short in their prosocial goals or financial objectives (or both), there is a lack of understanding of the ingredients and crucial processes required for the successful implementation of CSR in entrepreneurial enterprises. This book serves to fill that gap.

This book is a collection of extended papers based on presentations given during the ICEC 2018 conference, held in Caen, France, in August 2018. It explores both the limitations and advantages of current models, and highlights the latest developments concerning new numerical schemes, high-performance computing, multi-physics and multi-scale methods, and better interaction with field or scale model data. Accordingly, it addresses the interests of practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, and engineers active in this field.

Healthy environment is important for any kind of biota on earth. It provides the basic elements of life such as clean water, fresh air, fertile soil and supports ecosystem of the food chain. Pollution drastically alters quality of the environment by changing the physico-chemical and biological aspects of these components. Accordingly, toxic metals, combustible and putrescible substances, hazardous wastes, explosives and petroleum products are all examples of inorganic and organic compounds that cause contaminations. Specifically, pollution of toxic and heavy metal in the environment is a growing problem worldwide, currently at an alarming rate. Toxic metals threaten the aquatic ecosystems, agriculture and ultimately human health. Traditional treatment techniques offer certain advantages such as rapid processing, ease of operation and control and flexibility. But, they could not maintain the quality of the environment due to the high operational costs of chemicals used, high energy consumption and handling costs for sludge disposal and overburden of chemical substances which irreversibly affect and destroy biodiversity, which ultimately render the soil useless as a medium for plant growth. Therefore, bioremediation and biotechnology, carried out by living assets to clean up, stabilize and restore contaminated ecosystems, have emerged as promising, environmental friendly and affordable approaches. Furthermore, the use of microbes, algae, transgenic plants and weeds adapted to stressful environments could be employed to enhance accumulation efficiency. Hence, sustainable and inexpensive processes are fast emerging as a viable alternative to conventional remediation methods, and will be most suitable for developing countries. In the current volume, we discuss pollution remediation challenges and how living organisms and the latest biotechnological techniques could be helpful in remediating the pollution in ecofriendly and sustainable ways.

This book explores a range of important theoretical and practical issues in the field of computational network application tools, while also presenting the latest advances and innovations using intelligent technology approaches. The main focus is on detecting and diagnosing complex application performance problems so that an optimal and expected level of system service can be attained and maintained. The book discusses challenging issues like enhancing system efficiency, performance, and assurance management, and blends the concept of system modeling and optimization techniques with soft computing, neural network, and sensor network approaches. In addition, it presents certain metrics and measurements that can be translated into business value. These metrics and measurements can also help to establish an empirical performance baseline for various applications, which can be used to identify changes in system performance. By presenting various intelligent technologies, the book provides readers with compact but insightful information on several broad and rapidly growing areas in the computation network application domain. The book's twenty-two chapters examine and address current and future research topics in areas like neural networks, soft computing, nature-inspired computing, fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation, machine learning, smart security, and wireless networking, and cover a wide range of applications from pattern recognition and system modeling, to intelligent control problems and biomedical applications. The book was written to serve a broad readership, including engineers, computer scientists, management professionals, and mathematicians interested in studying tools and techniques for computational intelligence and applications for performance analysis. Featuring theoretical concepts and best practices in computational network applications, it will also be helpful for researchers, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in the fields of soft computing, neural networks, machine learning, sensor networks, smart security, etc.

This book provides a broad understanding of whether law plays a role in influencing patterns of sustainable consumption and, if so, how. Bringing together legal scholars from the Global South and the Global North, it examines these questions in the context of national, transnational and international law, within single and plural legal systems, and across a range of sector-specific issue areas. The chapters identify how traditional legal disciplines (e.g. constitutional law, consumer law, public procurement, international public law), sector-related regulation (e.g. energy, water, waste), and legal rules in specific areas (e.g. eco-labelling and packing) engage with the concept of sustainable consumption. A number of the contributions describe this relationship by isolating a national legal system, while others approach it from the vantage point of legal pluralism, exploring the conflicts and convergences of rules between multiple international treaties (or guidelines) and those between the rules of international and transnational law (or both) vis-a-vis national legal systems. While sustainable consumption is recognised as an important field of interdisciplinary research linking virtually all social science disciplines, legal scholarship, in contrast, has neglected the importance of the field of sustainable consumption to the law. This book fills the gap.

This book focuses on recent advances in our understanding of wild edible mycorrhizal fungi, truffle and mushrooms and their cultivation. In addition to providing fresh insights into various topics, e.g. taxonomy, ecology, cultivation and environmental impact, it also demonstrates the clear but fragile link between wild edible mushrooms and human societies. Comprising 17 chapters written by 41 experts from 13 countries on four continents, it enables readers to grasp the importance of protecting this unique, invaluable, renewable resource in the context of climate change and unprecedented biodiversity loss. The book inspires professionals and encourages young researchers to enter this field to develop the sustainable use of wild edible mushrooms using modern tools and approaches. It also highlights the importance of protecting forested environments, saving species from extinction and generating a significant income for local populations, while keeping alive and renewing the link between humans and wild edible mushrooms so that in the future, the sustainable farming and use of edible mycorrhizal mushrooms will play a predominant role in the management and preservation of forested lands.

This volume comprehensively reviews recent advances in our understanding of the diversity of microbes in various types of terrestrial ecosystems, such as caves, deserts and cultivated fields. It is written by leading experts, and highlights the culturable microbes identified using conventional approaches, as well as non-culturable ones unveiled with metagenomic and microbiomic approaches. It discusses the role of microbes in ecosystem sustainability and their potential biotechnological applications. The book further discusses the diversity and utility of ectomycorrhizal and entomopathogenic fungi and yeasts that dwell on grapes, it examines the biotechnological applications of specific microbes such as lichens, xylan- and cellulose-saccharifying bacteria and archaea, chitinolytic bacteria, methanogenic archaea and pathogenic yeasts.

John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. In John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching to shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence. Interrogating Cage's 'green-Zen' in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural critique as well as his own later turn towards anarchist politics, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics provides readers with a critically performative site for the Zen-inspired "nothing" which resides at the heart of Cage's poetics, and which so clearly intersects with his ecological writing.

This book offers a fresh and innovative account of the history of environmentalism in the United States, challenging the dominant narrative in the field. In the widely-held version of events, the US environmental movement was born with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and was driven by the increased leisure and wealth of an educated middle class. Chad Montrie's telling moves the origins of environmentalism much further back in time and attributes the growth of environmental awareness to working people and their families. From the antebellum era to the end of the twentieth century, ordinary Americans have been at the forefront of organizing to save themselves and their communities from environmental harm. This interpretation is nothing short of a substantial recasting of the past, giving a more accurate picture of what happened, when, and why at the beginnings of the environmental movement. >

This book translates the latest theoretical perspectives on the emerging field of Planetary Health Studies into the practical reality of global political decision makers. It builds on the scientific data on the impacts of environmental change on human health to propose practical methods for operationalizing planetary health. The book maps opportunities for decision makers to break institutional silos and engage with bottom-up approaches that can transform planetary health from a global idea into a local reality. The analysis frames human health in the Anthropocene, an era in which humans have become the most powerful force affecting global ecosystems, and reveals new existential risks for humankind.Departing from ongoing multilateral efforts to promote sustainability, the author's analysis places the agenda of planetary health on the desk of political decision makers, still underrepresented at planetary health gatherings. Given the pressing need to implement sustainable development policies, the book presents planetary health as an overarching framework for global policy targets, notably the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the post-2020 biodiversity framework under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The book is timely in offering a concrete road map for practitioners and researchers interested in transforming the concept of planetary health into reality. With a collection of success stories, the analysis dwells on tools for community engagement, opportunities for health professionals training, gender empowerment, digital health, and innovative ways to enhance human well-being on a changing planet.

Intertidal mudflats are distinct, highly-productive marine habitats which provide important ecosystem services to the land-sea interface. In contrast to other marine habitats, and despite a large body of primary scientific literature, no comprehensive synthesis exists, such that the scattered knowledge base lacks an integrated conceptual framework. We attempt to provide this synthesis by pulling together and contextualizing the different disciplines, tools, and approaches used in the study of intertidal mudflats. The editor pays particular attention to relationships between the various components of the synthesis, both at the conceptual and the operational levels, validating these relationships through close interaction with the various authors.

This book provides insights into recent trends and innovation of technologies aiming to provide sustainable and energy efficient computing. The authors discuss approaches to provide solutions to real life societal issues and problems using sustainable and energy efficient computing approaches. The book gathers research and state of the art reviews on solutions for societal benefits by using sustainable approaches of computing. The book also intends to provide use-cases for certain real life societal problems. The book can be used by researchers of similar areas, technologists, environmentalists, educationists, research scholars and UG/PG Students as well.

Nowhere on Earth is the challenge for ecological understanding greater, and yet more urgent, than in those parts of the globe where human activity is most intense - cities. People need to understand how cities work as ecological systems so they can take control of the vital links between human actions and environmental quality, and work for an ecologically and economically sustainable future. An ecosystem approach integrates biological, physical and social factors and embraces historical and geographical dimensions, providing our best hope for coping with the complexity of cities. This book is the first of its kind to bring together leaders in the biological, physical and social dimensions of urban ecosystem research with leading education researchers, administrators and practitioners, to show how an understanding of urban ecosystems is vital for urban dwellers to grasp the fundamentals of ecological and environmental science, and to understand their own environment.