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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Applied ecology > General
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 interdisciplinary book challenges current approaches to "environmental problems" that perpetuate flawed but deeply embedded cultural beliefs about the role of science and technology in society. The authors elucidate and interrogate a cultural history of solutionism that typifies expectations that science can, should, and will reduce risk to people and property by containing and controlling biophysical phenomena. Using historical analysis, eco-evolutionary principles, and case studies on floods, radioactive waste, and epidemics, the authors show that perceived solutions to "environmental problems" generate new problems, leading to problem-solution cycles of increasing scope and complexity. The authors encourage readers to challenge the ideology of solutionism by considering the potential of language, social action and new paradigms of sustainability to shape management systems. This book will appeal to scholars in multi- and interdisciplinary fields such as Environment Studies, Environmental Science, Environmental Policy, and Science, Technology, and Society Studies.
In this handbook social science researchers who focus on sustainability present and discuss their findings, including empirical work, case studies, teaching and learning innovations, and applied projects. As such, the book offers a basis for the dissemination of information, ideas and experiences acquired in the execution of research projects, especially initiatives which have influenced behavior, decision-making, or policy. Furthermore, it introduces methodological approaches and projects which aim to offer a better understanding of sustainability across society and economic sectors. This multidisciplinary overview presents the work of researchers from across the spectrum of the social sciences. It stimulates innovative thinking on how social sciences influence sustainable development and vice-versa.
This professional book examines the concept of engaged leadership. Specifically, it focuses on the need for leaders in personal and professional realms, for-profit and non-profit, to understand the importance of engagement in order to achieve enhanced satisfaction and motivation among stakeholders (including employees, shareholders, investors, supporters, customers, suppliers, the community, competitors, family, and partners), and hence, an augmented level of designed thinking, which leads to increased innovation and on-going leadership development. Divided into three sections-engaged leadership development at the personal level, implementation at the organizational level, and manifestation in practice-this book provides professionals, practitioners and policy makers as well as students with the tools and skills to lead actively and conscientiously and help them understand the importance of creativity and compassion for development. Engaged leadership operates on the fundamental principle that leaders have to first and foremost perceive themselves as leaders, and then engage in design thinking, as they will need to develop strategies to reach, encourage, and positively appeal to these stakeholder groups. Leadership is neither limited to those holding formal managerial position, nor to any particular setting. Leaders can be found everywhere, in all layers of society. Leadership is only possible, however, if one dares to perceive and define oneself as a leader. And only when leadership is adopted as a reality within one's personal perception, can engaged leadership be applied. Featuring contributions from academics, scholars, and professionals from around the world, each providing cases, interactive questions and reflective notes, this book will be of interest to professionals, practitioners, policy makers, students and scholars interested in creative leadership, management, organizational behavior, and governance.
Dating back to the nineteenth-century transplantation of a latex-producing tree from the Amazon to Southeast Asia, rubber production has wrought monumental changes worldwide. During a turbulent Vietnamese past, rubber transcended capitalism and socialism, colonization and decolonization, becoming a key commodity around which life and history have revolved. In this pathbreaking study, Michitake Aso narrates how rubber plantations came to dominate the material and symbolic landscape of Vietnam and its neighbors, structuring the region's environment of conflict and violence. Tracing the stories of agronomists, medical doctors, laborers, and leaders of independence movements, Aso demonstrates how postcolonial socialist visions of agriculture and medicine were informed by their colonial and capitalist predecessors in important ways. As rubber cultivation funded infrastructural improvements and the creation of a skilled labor force, private and state-run plantations became landscapes of oppression, resistance, and modernity. Synthesizing archival material in English, French, and Vietnamese, Aso uses rubber plantations as a lens to examine the entanglements of nature, culture, and politics and demonstrates how the demand for rubber has impacted nearly a century of war and, at best, uneasy peace in Vietnam.
The volume focuses on the ecological functioning of rivers, which has received less attention than functioning of lakes and reservoirs. The selected papers cover a large range of topics relating to aquatic communities, eutrophication, nutrient dynamics and organic pollution, erosion and sediment transport, and fate of micropollutants at the basin scale. Integrated approaches developed in order to study the ecological functioning of fluvial systems perturbed by human activity are presented. This functioning is analysed from the point of view of fundamental research, but insights into system management are not neglected. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of aquatic ecology, river system functioning, and water surface pollution, to postgraduate students, to the institutions involved in water resource management, and to the drinking water and waste water treatment industries. It draws information from many large river systems in the world.
Proceedings of a Workshop held at Stevenage, May 25-26, 1982
During the summer of 1987, a series of discussions I was held at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (nASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, to plan a study of global vegetation change. The work was aimed at promoting the Interna tional Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), sponsored by the International Council of Scientific Unions (lCSU), of which nASA is a member. Our study was designed to provide initial guidance in the choice of approaches, data sets and objectives for constructing global models of the terrestrial biosphere. We hoped to provide substantive and concrete assistance in formulating the working plans of IGBP by involving program planners in the development and application of models which were assembled from available data sets and modeling ap proaches. Recent acceptance of the "nASA model" as the starting point for endeavors of the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems Core Project of the IGBP suggests we were successful in that aim. The objective was implemented by our initiation of a mathematical model of global vegetation, including agriculture, as defined by the forces which control and change vegetation. The model was to illustrate the geographical consequences to vegetation structure and functioning of changing climate and land use, based on plant responses to environmental variables. The completed model was also expected to be useful for examining international environmental policy responses to global change, as well as for studying the validity of IIASA's experimental approaches to environmental policy development.
The Link between Company Environmental & Financial Performance, first published in 1998, is a detailed investigation into the effects of environmental performance - resource efficiency, regulatory compliance, new product and service opportunities - on corporate financial performance. This report makes essential reading for company management, investors and other stakeholders. It demonstrates the quantitative links between environmental and financial performance for the UK's best and worst environmental performers across a range of business sectors. It shows that there is no financial penalty for being environmentally proactive, and confirms US findings that good environmental performance improves a company's financial performance.
This volume challenges global leaders and citizenry to do more in order to resource the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (AfSD) and its 17 interwoven Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Starting from the concept 'we cannot manage what we cannot measure', the book presents some cases showing how to draw national level baselines for the domestication and localisation of the SDGs seeking to provide a clear roadmap towards achieving the 2030 AfSD. Scaling up SDGs Implementation is targeted at the United Nations, national and state governments, sub-national governments, the corporate sector and civil society, including higher education institutes, labour groups, non-governmental organisations and youth movements. The book is cognizant of these institutions' common, but differentiated responsibilities and capabilities within their socio-political, environmental and economic conditions. The book presents case studies of how the corporate sector has been scaling up SDGs implementation, from the tourism sector, insurance, to the aviation and agricultural sectors. To make sure that no one is left behind, the volume includes cases on solutions for pressing environmental and socio-economic problems ranging from cooperatives in Brazil to the conservation of springs in Zimbabwe. The matter of finding synergies between the climate SDG and the Paris Agreement's Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) is elaborated at length. Lastly, the book discusses how institutions of higher education remain critical pillars in SDGs scaling up, with cases of curriculum re-orientation in South Africa to the rolling out of the Women's University in Africa. In this context, this volume challenges every global citizen and organization to invest every effort into making the implementation of the SDGs a success as we welcome the second four to five year segment down the road to the year 2030.
The Nature and Dynamics of Forest-Savanna Boundaries addresses many themes and links with a great number of the interest groups concerned with current ecological and environmental research in the humid tropics. It should form part of the reading of all concerned with the fate of tropical forest and savanna regions of the world.
Insect Chemical Ecology provides a comprehensive view of how natural selection acts upon interacting organisms and how particular physical and biological properties of chemical compounds act as constraints upon which natural selection may act. Individual chapters raise specific questions as to the nature of these interactions. The first part contains reviews on antagonistic and mutualistic chemical interactions, the raw materials' of chemical evolution, the economics of offensive and defensive chemicals, and neurobiology. The second part discusses particular problems such as the evolution of resistance, insect pollination, learning, pheromones, sequestration of semiochemicals, the role of microorganisms, sex attractants, the evolution of host races and biotypes, and the role of semiochemicals and the evolution of sociality of insects. The last chapter discusses the role of chemical-based pest management programs in an ecological and evolutionary framework.
In 2020, the world was rocked by the sudden and indiscriminate spread of COVID-19. But for all the damage caused - lives lost, economies roiled and jobs eradicated - it also created opportunities for individuals and businesses to pause and reflect. Bushido Capitalism explores the ways in which this forced interlude has allowed us to reflect on the effects of a Great Acceleration of the last two decades and to critically evaluate where we should go next. Guided by updated values of Bushido, which have long been enshrined in Japanese culture but are rarely referenced in the West, this book presents ways in which we can use this current inflection point to become more responsible, ethical and sustainably minded citizens and business leaders. It underscores the importance of collaboration, humility and realism, but also of confidence, ambition and creativity. It demonstrates that businesses, particularly in a complex and polarized world, can be a force for the common good of society - if run the right way.
From their largely descriptive beginnings about a half century ago, studies on the ecology of small mammals have mushroomed in number, scope, content and complexity. Yet strangely, or perhaps not so strangely if one considers the extent and complexity of ecological interactions, the main problems for which the early workers sought answers still defy complete analysis, and basic hypotheses remain untested if not even untestable. The same holds true for so many branches of animal ecology that it seems to be the complexity of the concepts that frustrates efforts rather than the subject species. Like all branches of science, small mammal ecology has been subject to a series of fashionable approaches, one following another as tech nology penetrates previously impregnable regions. Doubtless the future development of our science will be punctuated by wave upon wave of new endeavour in whole fields that are perhaps even yet unidentified. Answers to the complex questions which ecologists ask do not come easily. Increasingly though, they arise in direct proportion to the efforts expended upon their elucidation. Many studies have achieved such a high level of elegance, in terms of manpower and apparatus, that there is a feeling that questions asked when such resources are unavailable are not worth asking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many a complex model has failed fully to explain the phenomenon for which it was construc ted because of a lack of basic field data on the species' natural h story."
International concern in scientific, industrial, and governmental communi ties over traces of xenobiotics in foods and in both abiotic and biotic envi ronments has justified the present triumvirate of specialized publications in and this field: comprehensive reviews, rapidly published research papers progress reports, and archival documentations. These three international publications are integrated and scheduled to provide the coherency essential for nonduplicative and current progress in a field as dynamic and complex as environmental contamination and toxicology. This series is reserved ex clusively for the diversified literature on "toxic" chemicals in our food, our feeds, our homes, recreational and working surroundings, our domestic animals, our wildlife and ourselves. Tremendous efforts worldwide have been mobilized to evaluate the nature, presence, magnitude, fate, and toxi cology of the chemicals loosed upon the earth. Among the sequelae of this broad new emphasis is an undeniable need for an articulated set of authoritative publications, where one can find the latest important world literature produced by these emerging areas of science together with docu mentation of pertinent ancillary legislation. Research directors and legislative or administrative advisers do not have the time to scan the escalating number of technical publications that may contain articles important to current responsibility. Rather, these individu als need the background provided by detailed reviews and the assurance that the latest information is made available to them, all with minimal literature searching.
Heavy metal pollution is a serious threat to living organisms. Industrial development has aggravated multifaceted problems in the environment requiring a comprehensive solution. Appraisal of Metal(loids) in the Ecosystem addresses this need and provides a basic introduction of different heavy metals. Presented in a consistent and comprehensive manner, each chapter highlights the background level, occurrence, speciation, bioavailability, uptake detoxification mechanisms, and management of each metal in polluted soils. It provides the latest up-to-date information about different aspects of As, Hg, Si, Cu, Co, Ni, Mn, Cd, Cr, etc. in single source. This book provides scientists and researchers with the most current source of information on the topic. Written by a global and diverse group of experts, Appraisal of Metal(loids) in the Ecosystem also covers the many field applications associated with phytoremediation and extraction and provides guidance on decision making when selecting advanced techniques.
Eco-innovations are crucial for reducing the environmental damages arising from economic activities, and are one of the main drivers of a successful transition towards sustainable development and remedying essential climate change problems. This book provides an overview of recent advances in the rapidly growing field of eco-innovation research, adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and outlines the main future developmental trends. A broad range of topics are addressed, including a bibliometric analysis of eco-innovation research, the relationship between eco-innovation and corporate sustainability, eco-innovation system analysis, new evidence on the economic effects of eco-innovation, and the relevance of policy and policy mixes for eco-innovation activities. The book is dedicated to Klaus Rennings, one of the most important representatives of this field, who unexpectedly passed away in September 2015.
For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions about intertwined and evolving concepts of population, resources, and the natural environment from early contexts in the sixteenth century through to the present day. Edited and introduced by Robert J. Mayhew, a noted biographer of Thomas Robert Malthus-whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), excerpted here, is an influential and controversial take on the topic-this volume explores themes including evolution, eugenics, war, social justice, birth control, environmental Armageddon, and climate change. Other responses to the idea of new "population bombs" are represented here by radical feminist work, by Indigenous views of the population-environment nexus, and by intersectional race-gender approaches. By learning the patterns of this discourse, students will be better able to critically evaluate historical conversations and contemporary debates.
With the rapidly growing importance of sustainability and corporate responsibility in a globalised world, management schools are increasingly integrating long-term economic, environmental and social issues into their teaching and research. Climate change, poverty, labour standards and human rights are among the many topics that future decision-makers will need to face in their careers. Business education needs to reflect this new reality and provide a broadened understanding of value creation in order to create economic capital while developing social and preserving natural capital. Case studies can be important tools for creating learning processes on different levels - students are forced to struggle with exactly the kinds of decisions and dilemmas managers confront every day. In this reflection of reality, the values and goals of the student are systematically challenged. This can be especially valuable in the context of sustainability management - organisations are now continually forced to value the different aspects of sustainability and their interrelations: How do social issues impact the economic bottom line? How can an environmentally sound strategy create a positive impact on employee motivation and thus have measurable impact on economic performance? What comes first and why? This third collection of oikos case studies is based on the winning cases from the 2010 to 2013 annual case competition. So what makes an excellent case in sustainability management? These cases have been highly praised because they provide excellent learning opportunities, tell engaging stories, deal with recent situations, include quotations from key actors, are thought-provoking and controversial, require decision-making and provide clear take-aways. These cases are clustered in three different sections: "Large Corporations and Corporate Sustainability Dilemmas", "Managing Stakeholder Relations" and "Sustainability as a Source of Differentiation Strategies". Case Studies in Sustainability Management will be an essential purchase for educators and is likely to be a widely used as a course textbook at all levels of management education. Online Teaching Notes to accompany each chapter are available on request with the purchase of the book.
This book critically engages with how the conservation of tropical coral reefs is financed. Beginning with the context of tropical coral reef degradation and loss, alongside an overview of tropical ecology, global environmental policy and finance, the book reviews several conservation financing instruments. These include ecotourism, debt-for-nature swaps, impact investments, and government domestic budgetary expenditures. From the Great Barrier Reef, to the Coral Triangle, to the Mesoamerican Reef, tropical coral reef degradation and loss are serious global environmental issues, contributing to loss revenue and food insecurity for coastal communities, and species extinction. Yet, many leading companies, individuals, and governments are making a positive impact on tropical coral reef conservation through the use of conservation finance. Conservation of Tropical Coral Reefs, using 30 case studies which span 23 countries and 6 continents, tells the history of international conservation finance and provides a variety of options for individuals, businesses, and governments to support conservation financing projects.
Change is a part of any organization, but in order to compete in the globally connected business environment, organizations also need to incorporate an entrepreneurial focus. This book investigates how successful organizations have intelligently responded to change by utilizing creative, innovative and dynamic solutions. Pursuing a complexity theory approach, it analyzes the changes currently taking place, and discusses the optimal use of organizational resources. This provides the reader with a more cohesive way to assess the current and potential future challenges faced by organizations as they respond to environmental, social and economic changes.
The book presents an integration of existing ecosystem theories in
such a comprehensive way as to enable a full ecological and
theoretical pattern to be presented. It shows that ecosystems and
their reactions may be understood, provided that all basic systems
ecology is applied to different aspects of the properties of
ecosystems. Since the publication of the previous two editions of
this book, ongoing research and discussions on an international
scale have greatly clarified and enhanced this pattern. This
progress is presented as Chapter 16 in this new, third edition. It
is shown that the integrated ecosystem theory presented can be
applied to explain various ecological observations and rules.
One of the main outcomes of the eleven meetings of the Working Party was the recognition of the importance of interdisciplinary studies linking regional geochemistry with plant, animal and human health. The effects of major element deficiencies or excesses on plant health are well known; this is not the case for trace elements. In fact, rapid and reliable analytical methods for determining trace element abundances have only recently become available, and it is to be expected that important new information on trace element levels will be forthcoming. This, however, is only part of the problem because other factors such as element speciation, uptake and transmission may be more significant than total concentration. The pathways of elements from crops to animals are relatively well defined, but the aetiology of diseases attributable to elemental inadequacies or excesses is generally quite complex. Nevertheless, there is good evidence for diseases in livestock in the British Isles induced by deficiencies of Cu, Se and Co and Mo excess. On a world scale there is also convincing data on the effect of Na, P and I deficiencies and F excess on animal health. What is generally lacking, however, is adequate interaction between geochemists and biochemists, veterinary scientists and other concerned with animal health. Interpretation of geochemical data is complex as are connections between elemental abundances and the health of animals. |
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