From the peat bogs and woodlands that help to secure our water supply, to the bees and soils that produce most of the food we eat, Britain is rich in 'natural capital'. Yet we take supplies of clean water and secure food for granted, rarely considering the free work nature does for Britain. In fact for years we have damaged the systems that sustain us under the illusion that we are keeping prices down, through intensive farming, drainage of bogs, clearing forests and turning rivers into canals. As Tony Juniper's new analysis shows, however, the ways in which we meet our needs often doesn't make economic sense. Through vivid first hand accounts and inspirational examples of how the damage is being repaired, Juniper takes readers on a journey to a different Britain from the one many assume we inhabit, not a country where nature is worthless or an impediment to progress, but the real Britain, the one where we are supported by nature, wildlife and natural systems at almost every turn.

Free Enterprise Environmentalism argues that laissez capitalism can address climate change more effectively than socialism and government regulation. The contributors support the role of markets, free enterprise, limited government, and private property rights in service of environmental protections. Covering topics such as extinction, overpopulation, pollution, and resources exhaustion, the contributors offer alternate solutions to environmental degradation than have been proposed by the political left.

Fostering inclusive green growth in Africa means addressing existing and emerging development challenges, while efficiently managing Africa's natural capital and building resilience to environmental, social and economic risks. Although this new paradigm for development has the potential to create tremendous business opportunities, there are also challenges. This book provides empirical evidence on the conditions for the emergence of green businesses in Africa. It includes 13 case studies, which identify the determinants of small and medium-size enterprises' engagement in inclusive and sustainable growth in rural Africa, and the factors that hinder eco-innovation in business and entrepreneurial activities. Furthermore it discusses appropriate regulations and policies to stimulate the development of green business in Africa. Offering insights into the relationship between eco-innovation, labor productivity and business competitiveness in rural Africa, this book appeals to scholars, policy makers and practitioners interested in a green economy for Africa.

Humankind's ever-expanding activities have caused environmental changes that reach beyond localities and regions to become global in scope. Disturbances to the atmosphere, oceans, and land produce changes in the living parts of the planet, while, at the same time, alterations in the biosphere modify the atmosphere, oceans, and land. Understanding this complex web of interactions poses unprecedented intellectual challenges. The atmospheric concentrations of natural trace gases-carbon dioxide (C0 ), methane (CH. ), nitrous oxide (N0), and lower-atmosphere ozone 2 2 (Os)-have increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Industrial gases such as the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are not part of the natural global ecosystem, are increasing at much greater rates than are the naturally occurring trace gases. All these gases absorb and emit infrared radiation and thus have the potential for altering global climate. The major terrestrial biomes are also changing. Although world attention has focused on deforestation, particularly in tropical areas, the development of agriculture, the diversion of water resources, and urbanization have all modified terrestrial ecosystems in both obvious and subtle ways. The terrestrial biosphere, by taking up atmospheric carbon dioxide, acts as a primary determinant of the overall carbon balance of the global ecosystem. Although the ways in which the biosphere absorbs carbon are, as yet, poorly understood, the destruction (and regrowth) of forests certainly alter this process.

This book discusses corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility and business ethics across Africa generally, and Botswana specifically. It begins by contextualizing Botswana within the broader context of Africa, using nine other countries - Angola, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe - to provide a comparative perspective, examining the common factor: that weak legalization makes it challenging for corporate social responsibility to be actualized.From this background, the book then discusses Botswana as a key study. Botswana has been described as 'Africa's economic miracle' due to its growing economy since independence This puts it in a unique position for the implementation and study of corporate social responsibility. The interdisciplinary team of authors employ various research methods to examine the complex relationship between business, society, corporations and social justice issues.This book will be valuable reading for any academic working on corporate social responsibility in Africa, and will present an interesting insight to an often neglected area of study. France Maphosa is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Botswana. His research interests include migration and transnationalism, the sociology of entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, urban and rural livelihoods, labour studies and alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Langtone Maunganidze is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. His research interests include industrial sociology, business and society, rural livelihoods and sustainable development, and entrepreneurship.

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 edited collection collates the most up-to-date and important research within the area of operations and logistics management. Boasting the combined expertise of one of the largest logistics and operations management academic teams in Europe, it provides both depth and diversity in a balanced portfolio. The first two sections are concerned with key contemporary issues in the subject area, providing a current and up-to-date overview of the field. Section three presents a selection of important cross-cutting themes that impinge upon and inform teaching, research and practice, while the final section includes a celebration of research highlights and showcases cutting-edge applications from leaders in the field. Invaluable to students, researchers and academics alike, this book is compulsory reading for those active within operations and logistics research.

Agroforestry has significantly impacted our forests, but an often-overlooked issue is the effect of harvesting on soils and root systems. Soil and Root Damage in Forestry explains how soil and roots might be damaged through logging activities or silvicultural activities, how resulting root diseases impact the root and soil systems, and the impacts of chemical applications on the soil and root system. This book goes beyond the 'why' to also provide methods to reduce the impacts of machines on soils and offers solutions to minimize the impacts of machines on soils. Soil and Root Damage in Forestry serves as a valuable resource not only for those already working in soil science and forest ecology, but also provides insights for advanced students seeking an entrance to the "hidden half" of the planet.

Dynamic Sedimentary Environments of Mangrove Coasts provides knowledge on the importance of sedimentary dynamics in managing mangrove forests. In the first part of the book, the editors seamlessly offer a general introduction of mangrove sedimentary dynamics. This leads into more in-depth information on soil surface elevation change, sea level rise, and the importance of sedimentary dynamics in the loss or gain of blue carbon. The book concludes the discussion of mangrove sedimentary dynamics by addressing the issues of climate change (e.g. sea level rise and blue carbon) on mangrove restoration and sediment. This book will assist coastal managers and academics in addressing the gaps in mangrove restoration and coastal management. As such, it will be a valuable reference for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, academics in the field of coastal restoration, and coastal management practitioners.

This book highlights cutting-edge ecodesign research, covering product and service design, smart manufacturing, and social perspectives in ecodesign. Featuring selected papers presented at EcoDesign 2019: 11th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, it also includes diverse, interdisciplinary approaches to foster ecodesign research and activities. In the context of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it addresses the need for the manufacturing industry to design innovations for sustainable value creation, taking into account technological developments, legislation, and consumer lifestyles. Further, the book discusses the concept of circular economy, which originated in Europe and aims to increase resource efficiency by shifting away from the linear economy. Focusing on product life cycle design and management, smart manufacturing, circular economy, and business strategies, and providing useful approaches and solutions to these emerging concepts, this book is intended for both researchers and practitioners working in the broad field of ecodesign and sustainability.

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 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 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.

Ecotourism A Sustainable Option? Edited by Erlet Cater University of Reading, UK and Gwen Lowman Royal Geographical Society, UK Recent years have witnessed growing public and professional concern with environmental issues, including the fields of tourism and leisure. The adverse impacts of conventional mass tourism have led to demands for more environmentally sensitive approaches to tourist and leisure development. Increasing environmental awareness has also led to a rise in travel to destinations offering a wealth of unspoiled nature. These trends, broadly defined as "ecotourism", have produced one of the fastest growing and most hotly debated sectors in the tourism industry. This well-balanced and wide-ranging book provides the first overview of this key area, providing definitions, theoretical perspectives and detailed case studies, contributed by researchers, professionals and activists. This is an essential introduction to a dynamic and central topic in contemporary tourism.

Developing the Global Bioeconomy: Technical, Market, and Environmental Lessons from Bioenergy brings together expertise from three IEA-Bioenergy subtasks on pyrolysis, international trade, and biorefineries to review the bioenergy sector and draw useful lessons for the full deployment of the bioeconomy. Despite the vast amount of politically driven strategies, there is little understanding on how current markets will transition towards a global bioeconomy. The question is not only how the bioeconomy can be developed, but also how it can be developed sustainably in terms of economic and environmental concerns. To answer this question, this book's expert chapter authors seek to identify the types of biorefineries that are expected to be implemented and the types of feedstock that may be used. They also provide historical analysis of the developments of biopower and biofuel markets, integration opportunities into existing supply chains, and the conditions that would need to be created and enhanced to achieve a global biomass trade system that could support a global bioeconomy. As expectations that a future bioeconomy will rely on a series of tradable commodities, this book provides a central accounting of the state of the discussion in a multidisciplinary approach that is ideal for research and academic experts, and analysts in all areas of the bioenergy, biofuels, and bioeconomy sectors, as well as those interested in energy policy and economics.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR), examining economic sciences and managements to show the complexity of the contemporary perception and development of CSR in Poland. It considers well-being of workers, the importance of the common good and social innovations in relation to profit. It addresses consumers and organizations, underlining the role and importance of small and medium sized enterprises. This book shows the possibility of improvement management systems by using CSR in business operations. It is valuable reading for academics working in corporate social responsibility, business ethics and in Polish management more generally.

There is growing recognition and awareness that nature can help provide viable solutions to reduce vulnerability and generate value deploying the properties of ecosystems and the services they provide. Investing in nature can lead to substantial environmental, social and economic benefits by reducing pollution, decreasing energy costs, improving health and well-being and increasing resilience to climate change and natural disasters. Nature-Based Solutions for More Sustainable Cities makes a clear case of performances, impacts, and benefits generated by NBS in cities providing a comprehensive framework approach to understand the real and full potential of NBS at the urban level taking into account several aspects, from design and planning to socio-economic evaluation and financial issues. Given the multifunctionality of NBS, the book collects contributions from several international experts ensuring the interaction between different disciplines contributing to enrich and to disseminate knowledge about NBS.

Advances in Agronomy, Volume 161, continues to be recognized as a leading reference and first-rate source for the latest research in agronomy. Each volume contains an eclectic group of reviews by leading scientists throughout the world. As always, the subjects covered are rich, varied and exemplary of the abundant subject matter addressed by this long-running serial.

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.

This book assesses recent developments in the analysis of agricultural policy and water resource management, and highlights the utility and theoretical rigor of quantitative methods for modeling agricultural production, market dynamics, and natural resource management. In diverse case studies of the intersection between agriculture, environmental quality and natural resource sustainability, the authors analyze economic behavior - both at aggregate as well as at individual agent-level - in order to highlight the practical implications for decision-markers dealing with environmental and agricultural policy. The volume also addresses the challenges of doing robust analysis with limited data, and discusses the appropriate empirical approaches that can be employed. The studies in this book were inspired by the work of Richard E. Howitt, Emeritus Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of California at Davis, USA, whose career has focused on the application of robust empirical methods to address concrete policy problems.