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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Environmental economics > Sustainability
This volume addresses the dynamics of sustainable development in the healthcare industry, covering all major aspects, including R&D, manufacturing, regulation, market access, commercialization, and general management. Healthcare markets are evolving under demographic and economic pressures. In mature markets, patients navigate complex systems with limited control on healthcare quality and outcomes, while in developing markets, patients have limited awareness, access, and ability to pay for healthcare. The industry needs to identify which business targets are genuinely attractive for major or new investments. At the same time, development of new products and services must be tackled within the context of environmental sustainability. Rather than focusing on the traditional issues of innovation, cost management, and commercial effectiveness associated with growth, the authors explore such emerging topics as: The mutations of innovation management The need to foster patient-centricity along the entire value chain of the healthcare industry and company-wide Issues related to improving healthcare access and disease management The allocation of educational resources focused on the patient to increase the effectiveness of disease management The preservation of natural resources and the environmental effect of pollution and hazards created by the handling of pharmaceutical products Issues related to the size of medical need and/or market demand The private-public partnerships necessary to address the full spectrum of public health issues, from basic patient access to care to managing global health crises The required organizational and governance evolutions for the healthcare industry to maintain profitability and sustainable growth. Featuring contributions from leading academics and industry insiders with emphasis on environmental, economically, and socially sustainable practices, the authors present a unique, multi-faceted set of perspectives on this vital and rapidly evolving field.
The Mekong Delta of Vietnam is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. The Mekong River fans out over an area of about 40,000 sq kilometers and over the course of many millennia has produced a region of fertile alluvial soils and constant flows of energy. Today about a fourth of the Delta is under rice cultivation, making this area one of the premier rice granaries in the world. The Delta has always proven a difficult environment to manipulate, however, and because of population pressures, increasing acidification of soils, and changes in the Mekong's flow, environmental problems have intensified. The changing way in which the region has been linked to larger flows of commodities and capital over time has also had an impact on the region: For example, its re-emergence in recent decades as a major rice-exporting area has linked it inextricably to global markets and their vicissitudes. And most recently, the potential for sea level increases because of global warming has added a new threat. Because most of the region is on average only a few meters above sea level and because any increase of sea level will change the complex relationship between tides and down-river water flow, the Mekong Delta is one of the areas in the world most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. How governmental policy and resident populations have in the past and will in coming decades adapt to climate change as well as several other emerging or ongoing environmental and economic problems is the focus of this collection.
This book discusses the recent advances in aircraft design methodologies. It provides an overview of topics such as shape optimization, robust design and aeroelasticity, focusing on fluid-structure numerical methodologies to address static and dynamic aeroelastic problems. It demonstrates that the capability to evaluate the interaction between aerodynamics, inertia and elastic forces is important to avoid drag penalties, control system efficiency loss and generation of potentially dangerous phenomena, such as divergence, control reversal and flutter. The book particularly highlights the advances in "high fidelity" CFD-CSM coupling, describing the latest experimental research to validate the numerical fluid-structure interaction analysis methodologies resulting from the EU-funded RBF4AERO and RIBES projects.
Although every country is distinguished by its history, culture and language as well as its unique economic, environmental and social conditions, it can be expected that international operating companies will exhibit common patterns since sustainability challenges do not stop at national borders. Building on original data based on results of the International Corporate Sustainability Barometer survey, this book depicts and analyzes the current state of corporate sustainability management and corporate social responsibility. Part I describe the approach and summarizes the broad results, outlining the methodology and offering an overview of results of the ICSB survey. Part II presents specific findings for each of eleven countries surveyed: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA. Part III provides a comparative analysis and highlights broad patterns in the international results. Most strikingly, the book reveals surprisingly widespread similarities among the sustainability management practices of large companies in economically developed countries all over the world. All the survey results are analyzed according to the same Triple-I approach: Intention - Why do companies manage sustainability?;Integration - To what extent do companies embed sustainability in their core business and in their organization? And Implementation - How is corporate sustainability operationalized? Based on this structure the analysis serves not only to make comparisons and to investigate national characteristics; it also builds a foundation for examining whether there truly is a world-spanning common state of the art of corporate sustainability. Distinguished authors who were involved in the International Corporate Sustainability Barometer project offer their insights, identifying and discussing national and international patterns that can provide the basis for further ideas and inspiration to practitioners and researchers worldwide who are engaged in corporate sustainability."
This timely book offers revealing insights into the changing role of China in world governance as exemplified by the Silk Road Initiative, the People's Republic's first published major initiative for external affairs. Focusing on various aspects of the Silk Road Initiative, particularly those that are largely neglected in current discussions, including culture and philosophy, finance and investment, environmental protection and social responsibility, judiciary and lawyers, the authors explore a wide range of contexts in which China's role as an emerging power in international relations and international law is examined. In the current era of ever-increasing populism, protectionism and challenges to globalization, the authors explore the Chinese philosophy underpinning Chinese norms of regional and international development. Bearing in mind the political and economic uncertainties hampering the establishment of such norms, the authors offer crucial insights into how the Silk Road Initiative could or should be developed and regulated.Given its depth of coverage, the book is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the Initiative and its social-legal implications.
Stakeholders show a growing interest for organic food and farming (OF&F), which becomes a societal component. Rather than questioning whether OF&F outperforms conventional agriculture or not, the main question addressed in this book is how, and in what conditions, OF&F may be considered as a prototype towards sustainable agricultures. The book gathers 25 papers introduced in a first chapter. The first section investigates OF&F production processes and its capacity to benefit from the systems functioning to achieve higher self-sufficiency. The second one proposes an overview of organic performances providing commodities and public goods. The third one focuses on organics development pathways within agri-food systems and territories. As well asa strong theoretical component, this book provides an overview of the new challenges for research and development. It questions the benefits as well as knowledge gaps with a particular emphasis on bottlenecks and lock-in effects at various levels."
This book lays out the principles and practices of transformative sustainability education using a relational way of thinking and being. Elizabeth A. Lange advocates for a new approach to environmental and sustainability education, that of rethinking the Western way of knowing and being and engendering a frank discussion about the societal elements that are generating climate, environmental, economic and social issues. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous and lifegiving cultures, the book covers educational theory, transformation stories of adult learners, social and economic critique and visions of changemakers. Each chapter also has a strong pedagogical element, with entry points for learners, embodied practices and examples of taking action at micro/meso/macro levels woven throughout. Overall, this book enacts a relational approach to transformative sustainability education that draws from post humanist theory, process thought, relational ontology, decolonization theory, Indigenous philosophy and a spirituality that builds a sense of sacred toward the living world. Written in an imaginative, storytelling manner, this book will be a great resource for formal and nonformal environmental and sustainability educators.
The experience developed by Ian McHarg represents the first attempt to base environmental planning on more objective methods. In particular, he supposed that the real world can be considered as a layer cake and each layer represents a sectoral analysis. This metaphor represents the fundamental of overlay mapping. At the beginning, these principles have been applied only by hand, just considering the degree of darkness, produced by layer transparency, as a negative impact. In the following years, this craftmade approach, has been adopted for data organization in Geographical Information Systems producing analyses with a high level of quality and rigour. Nowadays, great part of studies in environmental planning field have been developed using GIS. The next step relative to the simple use of geographic information in supporting environmental planning is the adoption of spatial simulation models, which can predict the evolution of phenomena. As the use of spatial information has definitely improved the quality of data sets on which basing decision-making process, the use of Geostatistics, spatial simulation and, more generally, geocomputation methods allows the possibility of basing the decision-making process on predicted future scenarios. It is very strange that a discipline such as planning which programs the territory for the future years in great part of cases is not based on simulation models. Sectoral analyses, often based on surveys, are not enough to highlight dynamics of an area. Better knowing urban and environmental changes occurred in the past, it is possible to provide better simulations to predict possible tendencies. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the main methods and techniques adopted in the field of environmental geocomputation in order to produce a more sustainable development.
This book is aimed at providing a comprehensive overview of recent developments in sustainability science and engineering. The book focuses on principles and practices and presents 18 interwoven chapters on four major themes: design for sustainability; sustainability metrics and analysis; sustainable energy; and sustainable supply/value. Significant, state-of-the-art work, methodologies, practices and plans are presented by researchers, technology developers and industry leaders. Topics discussed include: life cycle assessment; product end-of-life options; practical approaches to sustainability; environmental footprint assessment; biofuels; and sustainable supply chain management.
Climate change and the pressures of escalating human demands on the environment have had increasing impacts on landscapes across the world. In this book, world-class scholars discuss current and pressing issues regarding the landscape, landscape ecology, social and economic development, and adaptive management. Topics include the interaction between landscapes and ecological processes, landscape modeling, the application of landscape ecology in understanding cultural landscapes, biodiversity, climate change, landscape services, landscape planning, and adaptive management to provide a comprehensive view that allows readers to form their own opinions. Professor Bojie Fu is an Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chair of scientific committee at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Professor K. Bruce Jones is the Executive Director for Earth and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Desert Research Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA.
Climate change is a cause for concern both globally and locally. In order for it to be tackled holistically, its governance is an important topic needing scientific and practical consideration. Climate change governance is an emerging area, and one which is closely related to state and public administrative systems and the behaviour of private actors, including the business sector, as well as the civil society and non-governmental organisations. Questions of climate change governance deal both with mitigation and adaptation whilst at the same time trying to devise effective ways of managing the consequences of these measures across the different sectors. Many books have been produced on general matters related to climate change, such as climate modelling, temperature variations, sea level rise, but, to date, very few publications have addressed the political, economic and social elements of climate change and their links with governance. This book will address this gap. Furthermore, a particular feature of this book is that it not only presents different perspectives on climate change governance, but it also introduces theoretical approaches and brings these together with practical examples which show how main principles may be implemented in practice.
'There are few scholarly books about climate change that take the issue of the distribution of its costs, and of the costs and benefits of its mitigation, as seriously as their absolute value. This is probably the best of those books that I have come across. Rigorously rooted in Gough's earlier work on theories of human need, the book is relentless in its pursuit of equity in respect of climate change and responses to it. Not everyone will agree with all its conclusions - for example that ''green capitalism merits the term contradiction'' - but they are unfailingly thought-provoking, as all good scholarship should be. Highly recommended.' - Paul Ekins, UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, UK 'Gough applies his trademark scholarship on universal human needs to the urgent question of social policy for the transition to a de-carbonised world. Based on a clear-eyed analysis of a wide swathe of the social science literature, and an eco-social political economy perspective, his approach is both pragmatic and deeply rooted in ethics and social justice. Highly recommended and suitable for teaching at all levels.' - Juliet B. Schor, Boston College This exceptional book considers how far catastrophic global warming can be averted in an economic system that is greedy for growth, without worsening deprivation and inequality. The satisfaction of human needs - as opposed to wants - is the only viable measure for negotiating trade-offs between climate change, capitalism and human wellbeing, now and in the future. The author critically examines the political economy of capitalism and offers a long-term, interdisciplinary analysis of the prospects for keeping the rise in global temperatures below two degrees, while also improving equity and social justice. A three-stage transition is proposed with useful practical policies. First, 'green growth': cut carbon emissions from production across the world. Second, 'recompose' patterns of consumption in the rich world, cutting high-energy luxuries in favour of low-energy routes to meeting basic needs. Third, because the first two are perilously insufficient, move towards an economy that flourishes without growth. Heat, Greed and Human Need is vital for researchers and students of the environment, public and social policy, economics, political theory and development studies. For those advocating political, social and environmental reform this book presents excellent practical eco-social policies to achieve both sustainable consumption and social justice.
Biophilic and Bioclimatic Architecture is a guide to innovative architectural design for architects, engineers and other specialists who are working with biophilic and bioclimatic architectural concepts. Biophilic and Bioclimatic Architecture has three parts:
Through the lens of sensory affect, this book offers a new way of thinking about day-to-day teaching and student engagement within learning spaces in design education. The book examines the definitions, concepts, ideas and overlaps of a repertoire of learning spaces prevalent in higher education and addresses the pedagogical gap that exists between broader learning structures and spaces, and the requirements of specialist design education. Recognising that mainstream teaching environments impact upon design studio learning and student engagement, the book positions creative learning spaces at the heart of practice-based learning. It defines the underlying pedagogical philosophy of a creative learning space in design education and reports on how practical strategies incorporating sensory affect may be implemented by educators to foster better student engagement in these spaces within higher education. Bringing much needed attention to specialist design teaching and learning spaces in higher education, this book will be of interest to educators, researchers and post graduate students immersed in design education, pedagogy and learning spaces more broadly.
Indigenous People and Nature: Insights for Social, Ecological, and Technological Sustainability examines today's environmental challenges in light of traditional knowledge, linking insights from geography, population, and environment from a wide range of regions around the globe. Organized in four parts, the book describes the foundations of human geography and its current research challenges, the intersections between environment and cultural diversity, addressing various type of ecosystem services and their interaction with the environment, the impacts of sustainability practices used by indigenous culture on the ecosystem, and conservation ecology and environment management. Using theoretical and applied insights from local communities around the world, this book helps geographers, demographers, environmentalists, economists, sociologists and urban planners tackle today's environmental problems from new perspectives.
Biodiversity, sometimes simply understood as "diversity of species," is a specific quality of life on our planet, the dimensions and importance of which have just lately been fully realized. Today we know that "biological diversity is a global asset of incalculable value to present and future generations" (Kofi Annan). Biodiversity is spread unequally over the world: in fact, the main share of biological resources worldwide is harboured predominantly by the so-called developing countries in the tropics and sub tropics. Therefore, Biodiversity - A Challenge for Development Research and Policy was chosen as the title for an international conference which was held in Bonn in 1997 as one of the first major events organized by the then newly established North-South Centre for Development Research (ZEF) at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn (Germany). Since the ZEF, founded by the Senate of the University of Bonn in 1995, has played a central role in turning Bonn into a centre for international cooperation and North-South dialogue. The Centre is a product of the Bonn Berlin agreement of July 1994 which was adopted to offset the effects caused by the Parliament and much of the Government moving to Berlin. It fits in well with the double strategy to strengthen Bonn's position as an interna tional science arena and as an eminent place for development policy and the national and supranational agencies dealing with this issue."
Lakes are an essential element of some of the world's most popular tourism destinations. However, increased pressure from visitors and the tourism industry as well as from other, sometimes competing, land and water uses has made the sustainable development of lakes increasingly problematic. This book represents the first attempt to bring together some of the key elements of lake tourism within a single volume in order to present the urgent need for an integrated approach to lacustrine tourism systems management.The book presents comprehensive overviews of lake tourism including branding and marketing, visitor management and planning, historical and cultural dimensions, and environmental quality. The volume is international in scope with cases from Europe, North America and Oceania. The book concludes by noting that tourism needs to be established as a complimentary land and water use at a time when lakes and their watersheds are facing challenges in the form of climate and environmental change, increasing numbers of visitors as well as an overall increase in competing demands for water.
Regional disparity is one of the current pressing social issues. Many countries lack basic infrastructures of establishing a new business or industrial cluster. The book argues that existing arguments which have mostly focused on macroscopic view of economy of society or industries may be misguided. The book delivers a refreshing insight from microscopic view of enterprise/business management and how businesses can achieve sustainable development at enterprise level. The book includes case studies of concrete examples to illustrate how a successful model can be put in place to effect sustainable development at enterprise level. The implementation of sustainable development is also a closely connected knowledge management. This knowledge management looks at intangible assets such as tacit knowledge, social capital, ecological resources, art and so forth. It is also tightly related to regional issues. This book bridges the relationship between knowledge management and regional issues from the standpoint of sustainable development and illustrates how they can be integrated to overcome the constraints to grow. The clarity and well-founded research of the book makes it a useful reference for students, researchers and businesses.
Presently, peri-urbanisation is one of the most pervasive processes of land use change in Europe with strong impacts on both the environment and quality of life. It is a matter of great urgency to determine strategies and tools in support of sustainable development. The book synthesizes the results of PLUREL, a large European Commission funded research project (2007-2010). Tools and strategies of PLUREL address main challenges of managing land use in peri-urban areas. These results are presented and illustrated by means of 7 case studies which are at the core of the book. This volume presents a novel, future oriented approach to the planning and management of peri-urban areas with a main focus on scenarios and sustainability impact analysis. The research is unique in that it focuses on the future by linking quantitative scenario modeling and sustainability impact analysis with qualitative and in-depth analysis of regional strategies, as well as including a study at European level with case study work also involving a Chinese case study.
In 2050, the billions of people living on Earth have found a way to manage the planetary system effectively. Everyone has access to adequate food, shelter, and clean water. Human health is no longer considered outside of the health of the ecosystems in which people live. Ecological awareness is an integral part of education. People respond effectively to social and environmental hazards, and societies care for the most vulnerable amongst them. The economy, too, has shifted. Carbon dioxide management is under control, and energy efficiency is the norm. The remaining rainforests have been preserved. Coral reefs are recovering. Fish stocks are thriving. Is any of this really possible? How can our complex social and economic systems interact with a complex planetary system undergoing rapid change to create a future we all want? This book is a contextualised collation of ideas articulated by the 50 participants of the Planet 2050 workshop held in Lund in October 2008, as part of The Planet in 2050, an interdisciplinary Fast Track Initiative of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Participants were selected from academia and the sustainability practice community to give a wide-ranging, multi-cultural, trans-disciplinary set of perspectives. This collection explores four broad sectoral themes: energy and technologies; development, economies and culture; environment; and land use change. By doing so, this book emphasises the importance of a social dialogue on our collective future, and our responsibility to the Earth. It makes strong statements about what needs to happen to the global economy for a sustainable future and documents a new kind of scholarly discussion, engaging people from diverse knowledge communities in a spirit of exploration and reflexivity. The book provides a focus for dialogue and further study for postgraduates and researchers interested in global change as a multi-faceted, socio-environmental phenomenon, and as the book is written in an accessible scholarly style, assuming no prior specialist knowledge, it is also suitable for those involved in sustainability initiatives and policy.
This book presents a number of innovative uses of fly ash. Fly ash is a fine powder that is a byproduct of burning pulverized coal in thermal power plants. It is a pozzolan - a substance containing aluminous and siliceous material that when mixed with lime and water forms a compound similar to Portland cement. Though fly ash was a problem in terms of its disposal, it now has a variety of uses, such as a prime material in blocks, bricks, and PCC paving, and further applications are being investigated. As such, the recovery and reuse of fly ash wastes plays an important role in the implementation of the circular economy concept. Featuring selected, high-quality research papers presented at IconSWM 2018, the book provides valuable insights for the recycling industries, power plants, researchers, and governments.
Traditional studies of the property market have tended to focus solely on commercial and legal issues, but the growing importance of the issue of sustainability means that a different approach is needed. This new textbook provides an overview of property within a market context, examining the complex nature of property rights and issues related to both investors and occupiers. At the same time it assesses property from the perspective of financial, social and environment sustainability. Topics covered range from the characteristics of property and depreciation, to ownership and development through to investments and sustainability reporting. The book concludes with key skills in sustainable knowledge needed by those working in the real estate industry. Written by an author team of experienced property professionals, this essential introductory textbook is well suited for property, planning and architecture students on undergraduate, graduate and conversion courses, as well as those on CPD and training programmes in related areas.
Harnessing technology for a better future Looking into the future is always difficult and often problematic-but sometimes it's useful to imagine what innovations might resolve today's problems and make tomorrow better. In this book, 15 distinguished international experts examine how technology will affect the human condition and natural world within the next ten years. Their stories reflect major ambitions for what the future could bring and offer a glimpse into the possibilities for achieving the UN's ambitious Sustainable Development Goals. The authors were asked to envision future success in their respective fields, given the current state of technology and potential progress over the next decade. The central question driving their research: What are likely technological advances that could contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals at major scale, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people or substantial geographies around the globe. One overall takeaway is that gradualist approaches will not achieve those goals by 2030. Breakthroughs will be necessary in science, in the development of new products and services, and in institutional systems. Each of the experts responded with stories that reflect big ambitions for what the future may bring. Their stories are not projections or forecasts as to what will happen; they are reasoned and reasonable conjectures about what could happen. The editors' intent is to provide a glimpse into the possibilities for the future of sustainable development. At a time when many people worry about stalled progress on the economic, social, and environmental challenges of sustainable development, Breakthrough is a reminder that the promise of a better future is within our grasp, across a range of domains. It will interest anyone who wonders about the world's economic, social, and environmental future.
This textbook provides an introduction to the concept of sustainability in the context of transportation planning, management, and decision-making. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, indicators and frameworks for measuring sustainable development in the transportation sector are developed. In the second, the authors analyze actual planning and decision-making in transportation agencies in a variety of governance settings. This analysis of real-world case studies demonstrates the benefits and limitations of current approaches to sustainable development in transportation. The book concludes with a discussion on how to make sustainability count in transportation decision-making and practice. |
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