This volume bridges the gap between the global promotion of the Green Economy and the manifestation of this new development strategy at the urban level. Green cities are an imperative solution, not only in meeting global environmental challenges but also in helping to ensure socio-economic prosperity at the local level.

Abstract This chapter defines food security as the condition reached when a nation's population has access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet its dietary needs and food preferences. It stresses China's importance to global food security because of its population size. The chapter introduces the contents of the volume and then treats briefly food security in ancient and dynastic (211 bc-1912) China. It examines environmental stressors, such as population growth, natural disasters, and insect pests as well as imperial responses (for example, irrigation, flood control, storage and transportation systems). The chapter also briefly int- duces the Republican era (1912-1949) and compares environmental stressors and government responses then to those of the imperial period. Keywords Food system * Food security * Food production regions * Environmental stressors (Population growth * Natural disasters * Insect pests and Plant diseases * Deforestation * Climate change) * Irrigation systems * Flood control * Grand Canal 1. 1 The Problem of Food Security and Environmental Change Food is the material basis to human survival, and in each nation-state, providing a system for the development, production, and distribution of food and its security is a primary national objective. Many forces have influenced the food security of peoples since ancient times, with particular challenges from natural disasters (floods, famines, drought, and pestilence) and growing populations globally.

Exploring the important role of education in both pursuing and implementing sustainable development, this timely Handbook highlights how teaching methods at schools and universities can impact the future. It looks at ways not only to inform students about matters related to sustainable development, but also to empower them to adopt behaviours and actions that lead to more sustainable lifestyles. Chapters from an international team of contributors present and analyse experiences of different learning processes and methods, showcasing the impact of curriculum-related issues and teacher training. Using different pedagogical approaches, case studies and interdisciplinary initiatives, the Handbook explores a broad range of technological approaches and tools to foster better teaching and learning for sustainable development. It provides key insights into the implementation of teaching initiatives in helping to promote sustainable development and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This Handbook will be crucial reading for those investigating curriculum policies and issues, and looking to enhance students' understanding of sustainability in schools and universities.

This 32-chapter volume represents the core of several oral and poster presentations made at the conference. In addition to Introduction and Conclusion sections, the book is thematically divided into 7 sections, namely, 1) Land Use and Farming Systems, 2) Effects of Climate Change on Crop Yield, 3) Soil Nutrient and Water Management for Carbon Sequestration, 4) Rehabilitation of Degraded Lands through Forestry and Agroforestry, 5) Management of Animal Production for Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 6) Smallholder Adaptation to Climate Change, and 7) Economic, Social and Policy Issues. It addresses these themes in the context of sustainable intensification (SI). It implies increasing agronomic production from the existing land while improving/restoring its quality and decreasing the C or environmental footprint. Simply put, SI means producing more from less.

This book highlights the concept of environmental water footprint in the energy (bioenergy & hydropower) sector and the building/construction sector, focusing on a case study in Iran. It argues and demonstrates that water conservation is one of the most essential elements every industry has to take into account in its sustainability strategy.

This book highlights a number of social sustainability issues at different stages of the supply chain, and demonstrates how these issues can be addressed by adopting social sustainability practices in the manufacturing supply chain. In the wake of emerging social issues in developing countries, research on social sustainability has gained importance for academics and practitioners alike. The three distinguishable social sustainability dimensions in manufacturing that emerge as a result of this research provide insights for supply chain managers and practitioners who might otherwise be unaware of what constitutes social sustainability. A better understanding allows supply chain managers to address these issues more appropriately to increase their supply chain competitiveness in the market. The book presents a social sustainability scale that can be used by practitioners to measure supply chain social sustainability to benchmark their supply chains globally. The research also helps academicians to gain an understanding of the social issues related to the manufacturing supply chain, while the social measures developed serve as reference material for policy-makers and sustainability experts in emerging economies.

This book investigates the new urban geographies of "smart" metropolitan regionalism across the Greater Seattle area and examines the relationship between smart growth planning strategies and spaces of work, home, and mobility. The book specifically explores Seattle within the wider space-economy and multi-scaled policy regime of the Puget Sound region as a whole, 'jumping up' from questions of city politics to concerns with what the book interprets as the "intercurrence" of city-regional "ordering." These theoretical terms capture the state-progressive effort to promote smarter forms of regional development but also the societal/institutional tensions and outright contradictions that such urban development invariably entails, particularly around problems of social equity. Key organizing themes in the text include: the historical path-dependencies of uneven economic and social development, particularly between Tacoma-Pierce County and Seattle-King County; current patterns of high-wage, medium-wage, and low-wage jobs; the emerging spatial and social structure of recent residential changes, especially with respect to class and race composition; and, finally, transit trends and new urban spaces associated with policy efforts to mitigate highway congestion and car-dependency. Greater Seattle, then, is mapped as a key US urban region inscribed spatially by the uneven search for a more sustainable order. Historically-sensitive, theoretically-informed and empirically topical, this book is of interest to scholars and students at all levels in regional planning, urban geography, political science, sustainability studies, urban sociology and public policy.

The present study is a slightly revised version of my PhD thesis which was accepted at the Economics Department of Dresden University of Technology in July 2008. It has a long and a short history. For it began, as suggested theme, as a fundamental evaluation of evolutionary economics for ecological economics, asking, especially, for what the two ?elds actually constitutes and, eventually, relates. In several years of unfruitful dwelling, however, neither of these two young, non-mainstream ?elds proved as constituted at a fundamental level as yet. Rather, ecological economics, founded at the end of the 1980s as an attempt to combine social and natural s- ence approaches(in particular economics and ecology) to study especially long-run environmental problems in an encompassing manner, has mainly developed into an interdisciplinary research forum on environmental-economicissues. Particularly uni?edbycertainnormativestances sharedwithinits community, it constitutes, well understood, a new discpline of its own right, distinct from economics, with its own scienti?c standards, questions, methodologies and institutions (Baumgartner ] and Becker 2005). Modern evolutionaryeconomicson the other hand has been a quarter of a century after its inception with Nelson and Winter (1982) still a mainly h- erogeneousendeavor, linked by a (rather amorphous) common interest in economic "evolution" and a critical stance towards neoclassical mainstream economics, with a certain strength in applied studies on industrial dynamics (Heinzel 2004, 2006)."

Government regulation is necessary to the economic life of all developed countries. However the costs of regulation, in particular the cost estimates employed in the policy-making process, are often hotly debated. Drawing on recent case studies from Europe, this innovative and thoroughly accessible book examines the accuracy of regulatory cost estimates and explores in detail how these costs are calculated, the apparent relationship between ex post and ex ante calculations and why this might be.This is an objective contribution to a debate often characterised by polemic and unfounded claims. With a firm empirical basis, a wide range of case studies are presented to test theories of cost estimation which cover a diverse range of regulation in the areas of air quality and energy, industrial processes and products and agriculture and food. It will be of great interest to academics and researchers of the economics of environmental regulation and public policy. Practical suggestions for improving the accuracy of regulatory cost estimates will be of interest to a variety of economists grappling with regulatory and other impact assessments. The rationale for regulation, outlined in the book, provides a knowledge of the ideas that underpin regulation that will help non-economists (for example from regulated industries and NGOs) to engage in the wider debate about environmental regulation.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This critical review of sustainable tourism, from its beginnings in the late 1980s to the present, examines the pressing challenges posed by the effects of global warming and the persistence of deep poverty and social unrest in many regions. David Weaver explores the convergence of mass and 'alternative' tourism as a dominant theme. Originally perceived as two incompatible forms of tourism, they are positioned in this book through enlightened mass tourism as unified components of a single global 'tourisystem' with the power to achieve sustainable tourism. Key features include: a global systems perspective the presentation of enlightened mass tourism as an aspirational outcome discussion of climate change, resilience and smart tourism as major challenges for sustainable tourism. Offering a concise introduction to the topic, tourism students will appreciate the clear look into the benefits and challenges of sustainable tourism. This will also be an insightful read for destination managers and tourism officials responsible for implementing sustainable outcomes.

This book introduces readers to the concepts of sustainability and philosophy of slowness for the management of public entities such as cities or regions. While many urban communities face economic challenges that clearly show the limitations of growth and ever-increasing speed, this book explores an alternative, thought-provoking standpoint in five chapters. The first chapter explains the importance and essence of slowness, smallness and sustainability for public organizations, while the second addresses the concept of "slow life" in an emotional society. Chapter three examines the issue of "slow management" and presents arguments for the value of small businesses as the true foundation of the economy. Chapter four rounds out the coverage with a focus on agriculture. Finally, in chapter five, the authors discuss the overall benefits of a "slow and curvy" management style in order to provide happiness, economic and social sustainability.

A pollution haven may arise if environmental stringency differs between countries, when capital is mobile, and when trade rules allow firms to relocate and still sell their products to the same customers. This cohesive volume analyzes how country characteristics determine environmental rules, how those rules affect production costs, trade, and investment flows, how those flows affect pollution, prices, and incomes, and finally how all of these last considerations feed back into environmental rules. The sixteen papers collected here represent the most recent and significant advancements of knowledge on the subject. The contributors, all well-known scholars in the area, investigate how polluter location decisions respond to pollution policies, how local environmental rules respond to those location decisions, and how trade liberalization affects the incentives of governments to regulate dirty industries. The volume begins with a comprehensive overview by M. Scott Taylor and goes on to explore how the usual effects of pollution havens can be reversed. Also covered are the ways in which managed trade and trade liberalization, the regulation of multinationals, political stability and emissions controls impact pollution havens. Written for a multidisciplinary audience, The Economics of Pollution Havens will be of interest to those working in the areas of economics, international trade, political science, public policy, and environmental studies.

This book, the second volume, highlights 7 out of a total of about 36 megacities in the World which by definition have 10 million inhabitants. The cities/chapters presented in this book are based on recent advance such as the wide use of ICT, IOT, e-Governance, e-Democracy, smart economy and flattening and acceleration of the world that is taking place in recent times as reported by 3 times Pulitzer Prize Winner Thomas Friedman. It therefor departs from other ideologies where only a certain megacity qualifies for the title of smart global megacities while in reality every megacity can, and presents how smart global megacities can be created.

Governments are setting challenging targets to increase the production of energy and transport fuel from sustainable sources. The emphasis is increasingly on renewable sources including wind, solar, geothermal, biomass based biofuel, photovoltaics or energy recovery from waste. What are the environmental consequences of adopting these other sources? How do these various sources compare to each other? Life Cycle Assessment of Renewable Energy Sources tries to answer these questions based on the universally adopted method of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This book introduces the concept and importance of LCA in the framework of renewable energy sources and discusses the key issues in conducting their LCA. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of LCA for some of the most common bioenergy sources such as agricultural production systems for biogas and bioethanol, biogas from grass, biodiesel from palm oil, biodiesel from used cooking oil and animal fat, Jatropha biodiesel, lignocellulosic bioethanol, ethanol from cassava and sugarcane molasses, residential photovoltaic systems, wind energy, microalgal biodiesel, biohydrogen and biomethane. Through real examples, the versatility of LCA is well emphasized. Written by experts all over the globe, the book is a cornucopia of information on LCA of bioenergy systems and provides a platform for stimulation of new ideas and thoughts. The book is targeted at practitioners of LCA and will become a useful tool for researchers working on different aspects of bioenergy.

A unique feature of this book is its strong practice-oriented nature: it contains a wide range of papers dealing with the social, economic and political aspects of climate change, exemplifying the diversity of approaches to climate change management taking place all over the world, in a way never seen before. In addition, the book describes a number of projects and other initiatives happening in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin American and the Australasian region, providing a profile of the diversity of works taking place today.

This book explores the Arctic as a rapidly evolving phenomenon in international affairs of a rising number of stakeholders. For decades, Arctic studies used to be an affair of a relatively narrow group of experts from northern countries. This time is over due to a new Chinese Arctic policy, as well as growing regional interests from South Korea, Singapore, India and Japan. Contributors reflect on new roles for the Arctic region: both as a playground for the old school nation state competition and even confrontation, and a new source for international cooperation in energy, logistics and natural sciences. Climate change, political tensions and economic competition make Arctic a hotter venue of international relations. This new Arctic fever, studied through a comparative analysis of different regional agendas, especially with a focus on the US-China-Russia triangle, represents the main subject of our book, which will be of interest to scholars of geopolitics, of climate change, and of 21st century energy economics.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art assessment of the Earth's climate system in Siberia and relationships between climate, ecosystems and people in that region. Changes in climatic variables and land cover in Siberia are among the earliest indicators of the Earth's response to climate warming. The volume is a compilation of results from studies on climate, land-cover and land-use changes and their interactions with biogeochemical and water cycles, atmospheric aerosol, and human and wildlife populations in Siberia. Regional changes in Siberia are predicted to affect climate and people on a global scale. NASA, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and several European institutions have supported these studies. The primary supporter of the projects that produced the results compiled in this volume is the NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program, hence most studies use remote sensing in their research. The chapters in this volume were written by an international team of scientists from the USA, Europe and Russia under the auspices of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI). This book will be of interest to those involved in studying recent and ongoing changes in Siberia, be they senior scientists, early career scientists or students.

This volume deals with the multifaceted and interdependent impacts of climate change on society from the perspective of a broad set of disciplines. The main objective of the book is to assess public and private cost of climate change as far as quantifiable, while taking into account the high degree of uncertainty. It offers new insights for the economic assessment of a broad range of climate change impact chains at a national scale. The framework presented in the book allows consistent evaluation including mutual interdependencies and macroeconomic feedback. This book develops a toolbox that can be used across the many areas of climate impact and applies it to one particular country: Austria.

This unique book examines the problem of global warming from the perspective of Asian Pacific countries. The unprecedented economic and demographic growth over the past two decades has increased the importance of the Asian Pacific region. It has become both a very large source of greenhouse gases as well as an important site to measure climate change impacts. Complex economic tools including computable general equilibrium models, international input-output models and engineering-economic models are used to assess the baseline emission levels and abatement costs for the economies examined. All outcomes suggest that abatement is possible, but will be expensive. The studies also suggest that the more energy efficient the economy, the higher the costs of further abatement. The book reveals how Asian countries in the tropics are more likely to be harmed than those in the temperate zone. Alternative strategies to mitigate carbon emissions such as energy conservation, emission permit trading, carbon tax, and carbon sequestration are examined to tackle the difficult problem of establishing effective policy tools to control warming in the Asian Pacific and the globe. While no single author provides a complete answer to this complex problem, all authors provide vital information and new ideas with which to fashion workable international and regional policies. Global Warming and the Asian Pacific is likely to be read by scholars and researchers of Asian studies, environmental and resource economics, as well as policymakers and those specifically involved in global warming research and policy.

Alongside other factors, cultural values and identities help to explain different regulatory frameworks for genetically modified organisms. This book uses insights from environmental history and sociology to illuminate the cultural politics of regulation in the US and the EU, with particular attention to public opinion and anti-GMO activism.

This volume of 18 chapters is the work of more than 30 authors, many of whom are natives of the Central Asian region or are researchers who have dedicated a large part of their working lives to studying the development dynamics in this vast and fascinating region. The work focuses on the 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. But it also traces the attitudes of land users to the land dating from before the late 19th century, when Russian conquest and colonization occurred, and through the upheavals caused by Soviet-style collectivization and sedentarization. The book is rich with new data presented in 68 easy to understand charts/graphs (many in color) and 50 Tables. Information was generated for this book by experts working in-country. It presents for the first time in English a digest of plethora of previously inaccessible Russian reports and scientific literature that will be invaluable for development agencies, including UN, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Bank as well as to students of this vast and fascinating region who seek up to date and authoritive information."

This book explains how in moving towards Cleaner Production, the Lean Production Philosophy can be applied to reduce carbon emissions in prefabrication - one major source of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions which contribute to global climate change. This book examines theories and principles in the Lean Production Philosophy to develop situation-based carbon reduction strategies for precast concrete manufacturers and contractors in terms of Site layout, Supply Chain, Production, Stocks and Installation Management. It presents the empirical findings of surveys and case studies with managers and professionals working for precasters and contractors in Singapore, findings which provide good practical guidance for precast concrete manufacturers and contractors to achieve low carbon emissions and to perform better in many sustainability-based rating systems, such as the Singapore Green Labelling Scheme and the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) Green Mark Scheme.

Presenting a comprehensive analysis of the use of alternative sources of energy and technologies to produce fuels and power, this book describes the energy value chain from harvesting the raw material, (i.e solar, wind, biomass or shale gas) followed by analysis of the processing steps into power, fuels and/or chemicals and finally the distribution of the products. Featuring an examination of the techno-economic processes and integration opportunities which can add value to by-products or promote the use of different sources of energy within the same facility, this book looks at the tools that can make this integration possible as well as utilising a real world case study. The case study of the operation of "El hierro" island is used as an example of the current effort towards more efficient use of the resources available. Tackling head on the open challenges of the supply, the variability of the source and its prediction, the description of novel processes that are being developed and evaluated for their transformation as well as how we can distribute them to the consumer and how we can integrate the new chemicals, fuels and power within the current system and infrastructure, the book takes a process based perspective with such an approach able to help us in the use and integration of these sources of energy and novel technologies.