No dig organic gardening saves time and work. It requires an annual dressing of compost to help accelerate the improvement in soil structure and leads to higher fertility and less weeds. No dig experts, Charles Dowding and Stephanie Hafferty, explain how to set up a no dig garden. They describe how to: Make compost, enrich soil, harvest and prepare food and make natural beauty and clean ing products and garden preparations. These approaches work as well in small spaces as in large gardens. The Authors' combined experience gives you ways of growing, preparing and storing the plants you grow for many uses, including delicious vegetable feasts and many recipes and ideas for increasing self reliance, saving money, living sustainably and enjoying the pleasure of growing your own food, year round. Charles' advice is distilled from 35 years of growing vegetables intensively and efficiently; he is the acknowledged no dig guru and salad expert both in the UK and internationally. Stephanie, a kitchen gardener, grows in her small, productive home garden and allotment, and creates no dig gardens for restaurants and private estates.She presents truly delicious seasonal recipes, made from the vegetables anyone can grow. She also explains how to use common plants you can grow and forage for to make handmade preparation for the home and garden.

Eco-Resorts is a design guide for low impact, environmentally friendly tourist resorts in the tropics. The book is the first to offer architects practical, detailed guidance in developing resort buildings that work with a tropical climate and meet the needs and expectations of the client and building inhabitants. The book includes both architectural design and material solutions, supported by theoretical principles, to present a sustainable approach to resort design. It demonstrates that tropical resort buildings do not necessarily require large energy input, in compliance with green building standards. Case studies show how principles of sustainable design have been successfully applied in tropical environments. written by an industry insider with practical design experience, knowledge and expertise demonstrates design practices related to site planning and layout, and re-assesses best practices for a tropical environment, allowing architects to apply design principles to their own projects includes international case studies from several countries to illustrate best practice from a variety of tropical climate destinations around the world.

There are many reasons why strategic intelligence is required to support policy decisions. These primarily stem from the nature of today's kno- edge society with two contrasting trends. On the one hand, there is a trend of increasing human intelligence in the economic, social and political s- tems. On the other hand, there is a trend towards dissolving certainties about the problems and solutions of today's society. Clearly, more inf- mation does not necessary imply more certainties on how to act. What is more, the same facts are often interpreted in markedly different ways: the same policy relevant information can - and often does - results in confli- ing framing of a problem by different stakeholders. This is mainly due to competing assumptions, rather then because of inconsistent facts. The- fore, it is not surprising that policy-makers are calling for strategic intel- gence to support their understanding of today's challenges, including the relevant aspects of science and technology, their impact and their possible future developments. Over the last 15 years, Europe has rapidly adopted the practice of dev- oping and using Impact Assessment (IA) tools to support decision-making. Formal procedures and guidance for IA are well established within the European Commission and in most EU Member States. The adoption of IA procedures alone, however, does not guarantee that every policy domain is actually using the full potential of these assessment tools in the preparation of policies and legislation.

This two-volume work is a testament to the increasing interest in the role of microbes in sustainable agriculture and food security. Advances in microbial technologies are explored in chapters dealing with topics such as plant-microbe interactions, rhizoremediation and cyanoremediation, and bio-immobilization. Volume II is a collection of research findings that invites readers to examine the application of microbes in pollution reduction, decontamination of agro- and aquatic ecosystems, and remediation of various toxic compounds. Highly readable entries attempt to close the knowledge gap between soil microbial associations and sustainable agriculture. Traditional agricultural management techniques have relied heavily on application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and recent land use change practices have led to over exploitation of natural resources. Strategies outlined here simplify a complicated picture of the way microbial communities can improve the quality of environment and eliminate food scarcity in the coming generations. This work is a significant contribution to research in this increasingly important discipline of soil sciences, and will appeal to researchers in microbiology, agriculture, environmental sciences, and soil and crop sciences.

Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment describes the relationship of agriculture, society, nature and the environment, sustainable agriculture and sustainable development goals, management of biophysical resources for sustainable food and environment, traditional knowledge and innovative options, and social and policy aspects of sustainable agriculture. The book presents both environmental and economic principles, helping readers in the development and application of robust policy and good institutional systems that execute on sustainable agriculture practices for a healthy environment and to combat climate resilience.

Previous books on growth management in the United States favor balanced growth, which suggests that growth and environmental protection represent equally legitimate objectives. Taking issue with the balanced growth position, this book argues that further growth is unsustainable and that growth management must focus on ensuring ecological sustainability. The book opens with the arguments supporting current global limits to growth, and then shows that the growth management movement in the United States represents an institutionalized form of ongoing growth accommodation, which is incongruous with sustainable behavior.

The book also documents the historical pro-growth tendency of the planning profession and contends that this bias is impeding the necessary transition to a sustainable future. In addition, it presents the standards courts use to decide the legality of growth management programs and suggests that those standards do not present insurmountable obstacles to stopping future growth. In conclusion, this book presents operational measures of ecological sustainability and argues that the growth imperative currently driving the growth management movement must be replaced by the imperative of ecological sustainability.

This book summarizes the key findings of a five-year interdisciplinary research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF). It serves as a typical case study for a rapidly growing and developing urban center - Da Nang City, which is surrounded by remote areas characterized by increasing migration and limited development. A number of German and Vietnamese universities and international institutions participated in the project, contributing their particular expertise to assess the data-scarce region under study, two provinces in central Vietnam with a combined area of ca. 12,000 km(2).

This clear and concise directory provides all the essential information readers need to grow, use, and store a wide selection of flavor-enhancing herbs and spices. Some herbs are annuals, some are perennials, and some can be grown indoors-but all of those highlighted here can be grown either in pots or directly in the soil. Each individual plant profile includes detailed growing advice. Home and garden expert Linda Gray tells how to prepare the soil, when to sow and plant out, and when to harvest and gather. Linda also examines the culinary uses of each herb and spice, and explores other uses from medicinal remedies to insect repellents and sleep remedies. Tips on container growing and hints on how to store the harvest make Self Sufficiency: Herbs and Spices an indispensable guide.

This book calls for the conditions of transition to sustainability: How to take into consideration new global phenomena such as and of the dimension of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, financial crises, demographic dynamics, global urbanization, migrations and mobility, while bearing in mind short-term or local place-based issues, such as social justice or quality of life? Meeting this challenge requires an inclusive approach of sustainability. It is a matter of designing a new social contract: Sustainability requires more than developing the right markets, institutions and metrics, it requires social momentum. To do so, many issues need a clear and complete answer: How to link social justice with sustainability policies? What governance tools to do so? What linkage between one decision-making level and the other? These are major issues to design sound transitions to sustainability.

How should regional cities develop regional development strategies for their sustainable future? How can such strategies work effectively? Regional cities are now at a crossroads: will they decline or be regenerated under the impacts of globalization? Their sustainable regeneration as creative regional centers will play a decisive role in their sustainable development as a whole, but only with viable regional spatial strategies that strengthen the network of cities and their hinterlands. The concern here lies in urban regeneration and strategic spatial planning at the city-region level. This book records observations of 12 dynamically changing regional cities in Asia, Europe and the United States. The form of the city region, urban regeneration and strategic spatial planning as well as the local and regional governance of each city are examined. Through this empirical and comparative analysis, essential lessons are drawn, which will add a new perspective to discussions on the sustainable future of regional cities in an age of globalization.

This book looks into the increasing conflict between the demand of economic growth and the already fragile ecological system condition in China. The prolonged urbanization process has escalated the erosion of natural environments and is increasing energy consumption. China's role as a "world plant" is also demanding more and more resource supply as well as energy consumption. This book argues that to correctly respond to these emerging issues, apart from upgrading industry and improves environmental protection techniques, China needs to establish an "ecological civilization" that provides an ideological basis for the construction of a green low-carbon model of economic growth.

The liberalization of U.S. and European electric power markets presents a critical challenge for renewable sources of energy. Edinger and Kaul survey the technological state-of-the-art and economic aspects of renewable electricity generation, and outline the role of other renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and micro-hydroelectric technologies. Offering an empirical and theoretical assessment of these technologies and their assets and liabilities, the book shows how it is possible to restructure our electric power systems and reorient them toward sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives.

International climate conferences such as those in Rio de Janeiro and Kyoto have proclaimed the need for environmentally hospitable technologies. A new electricity system, based on renewable resources and small-scale power technologies, is needed badly; their economics and other efficiencies over conventional central power generation with fossil fuels is clear. Edinger and Kaul assess the rewards and risks associated with renewable technologies and outline a feasible path toward a more environmentally friendly, and reasonable, use of limited natural resources and the global ecosystem. One promising approach for industrialized countries is the decentralization of our current public grid systems. This offers an opportunity for developing countries to leapfrog the stage of fossil fuel, held responsible now for environmental pollution, resource depletion and possibly global climate change. The authors present theoretical analyses and empirical evidence to buttress their contentions, mainly, that electric power systems founded on renewable resources are vital prerequisites if we are to achieve the United Nations' target of globally sustained development.

The book aims to capture, describe and convey the current significance, the values and potentials of urban biodiversity and ecosystem services to scientists and professionals in the context of sustainable urban development and ongoing urbanization processes. Current developments, different approaches and future challenges in the competition of green spaces and urban land consumption in China and Germany are elaborated, discussed and illustrated within case studies and good practice examples. The strategic goal is a long-term appreciation of the potentials and increased consideration of urban green spaces in city planning and development. This book provides tangible recommendations for urban planners, politicians and stakeholders in the fields of green infrastructure at the interface of environment and urban landscape.

This important new book develops an ecological-economics perspective on sustainability at the regional, national and international level. It explores prospects for sustainable development using methods firmly grounded in empirical reality, as well as emphasizing scientific, economic and socio-political concerns.This approach is based on the construction of non-monetary indicators for sustainability, and the application of cost-effectiveness analyses to identify robust alternatives for the achievement of specified policy norms. In calculating the requirements for sustainability the contributors attach importance to multiple criteria decision aid (MCDA) methods of analysis to evaluate the key components of sustainability and help assess the sustainability of aregional or national economic development trajectory. Case studies of water pollutants in the Bretagne region in France and greenhouse gas reduction in Europe are used to investigate resource allocation from this perspective. The contributors utilize the M3ED model - a structural economy-environment simulation model which gives a multi-sectoral representation of a national economy's production, final consumption and environmental pressures - to explore feasible economic futures. It is applied to scenarios in France to demonstrate ways that prospects for sustainability can be investigated at a national level. The contributors compare and contrast these models with the aims of more typical neoclassical modelling in their search for the most effective approaches to defining operational measures for sustainability. This book will be of great interest to academics in the field of ecological and environmental economics and to policymakers and planners in government and industry.

This book is a collection of chapters concerning the use of biomass for the sustainable production of energy and chemicals-an important goal that will help decrease the production of greenhouse gases to help mitigate global warming, provide energy security in the face of dwindling petroleum reserves, improve balance of payment problems and spur local economic development. Clearly there are ways to save energy that need to be encouraged more. These include more use of energy sources such as, among others, manure in anaerobic digesters, waste wood in forests as fuel or feedstock for cellulosic ethanol, and conservation reserve program (CRP) land crops that are presently unused in the US. The use of biofuels is not new; Rudolf Diesel used peanut oil as fuel in the ?rst engines he developed (Chap. 8), and ethanol was used in the early 1900s in the US as automobile fuel [Songstad et al. (2009) Historical perspective of biofuels: learning from the past to rediscover the future. In Vitro Cell Dev Biol Plant 45:189-192). Brazil now produces enough sugar cane ethanol to make up about 50% of its transportation fuel needs (Chap. 4). The next big thing will be cellulosic ethanol. At present, there is also the use of Miscanthus x giganteous as fuel for power plants in the UK (Chap. 2), bagasse (sugar cane waste) to power sugar cane mills (Chap. 4), and waste wood and sawdust to power sawmills (Chap. 7).

A number of arguments are made by an international group of authors in this though provoking book about an understudied and socially important context. A future in which financial wealth transfers across the North-South divide from richer to poorer countries is far from sufficient for the relief of poverty and the pursuit of sustainability. Caution must be taken when growth is achieved through the liquidation of the natural wealth of poorer nations, in order to maintain a global economic status quo. Neither poverty reduction nor sustainability will ultimately be achieved. The financial collapse and social upheaval that might result will make the most recent economic downturn look trivial by comparison. What is more urgently needed instead, as argued in this book, is collaboration for sustainability and innovation in the global South, especially building on models originally developed in the South that are transferable to the North. In pursuit of a sustainable and more equitable future, the book examines such topics as Cross-Border Innovation in South-North Fair Trade Supply Chains; Potential Pollution Prevention Programs in Bangladesh; Digital Literacy and Social Inclusion in the South through Collective Storytelling and Eco-innovation at the 'Bottom of the Pyramid'. Many of these stories and have not been told and need greater visibility. The book contributes in a meaningfully to the discussion of how innovation and sustainability science can benefit both sides in South-North innovation collaborations. It provides useful introduction to the topics, as well as valuable critiques and best practices. This back-and-forth flow of ideas and innovation is itself new and promising in the modern pursuit of a fair and sustainable future for all regions of our planet.

Energy technologies in the future will need to be based on renewable sources of energy and will, ultimately, need to be sustainable. This book provides insight into unintended, negative impacts and how they can be avoided. In order to steer away from the pitfalls and unintended effects, it is essential that the necessary knowledge is available to the developers and decision makers engaged in renewable energy. The value of this book lies in its presentation of the unintended health and environmental impacts from renewable energies.

The book presents results from cross-disciplinary research on the implementation of alternative fuels in the transport sector, namely hydrogen, electricity and biodiesel. This is followed by an assessment of environmental impacts from the production of solar cells. Critical reviews on the use of nanotechnology and nanomaterials in the energy technologies is then provided, with the formation of nanoparticles during combustion of bio-blended diesel and their toxic effects, discussed in detail."

This book reports on cutting-edge technologies that have been fostering sustainable development in a variety of fields, including built and natural environments, structures, energy, advanced mechanical technologies as well as electronics and communication technologies. It reports on the applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Internet-of-Things, predictive maintenance, as well as modeling and control techniques to reduce the environmental impacts of buildings, enhance their environmental contribution and positively impact the social equity. The different chapters, selected on the basis of their timeliness and relevance for an audience of engineers and professionals, describe the major trends in the field of sustainable engineering research, providing them with a snapshot of current issues together with important technical information for their daily work, as well as an interesting source of new ideas for their future research. The works included in this book were selected among the contributions to the BUE ACE1, the first event, held in Cairo, Egypt, on 8-9 November 2016, of a series of Annual Conferences & Exhibitions (ACE) organized by the British University in Egypt (BUE).

Prefaced by Bj rn Stigson, President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, this book is one of the few that treats this topic by putting representatives of industry at centre stage. The book systematically addresses the drivers, the tools, and sector-specific elements that play a role in this process. The five chapters in Part I are devoted to a general introduction to eco-efficiency and the related challenges to industry in its implementation. Part II contains 23 case studies, almost all written by industrial experts who tell how they deal with the challenge: what the motivators are, what tools can be used and how they can be implemented, and what are the specific elements in sectors like building, electronics and packaging. These contributions come from multinationals like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Akzo Nobel, Philips and Ciba-Geigy, as well as small and medium sized enterprises from such sectors as the building and furniture trades.

With the enlargement of the European Union, the accession countries are coming under pressure to develop and meet EU standards for environmental protection and sustainable development. In this ongoing process, global economic liberalization, regulatory policy, conservation, and lifestyle issues are all involved, and creative solutions will have to be found. Historians, geographers, economists, ecologists, business management experts, public policy specialists, and community organizers have come together in this volume and examine, for the first time, environmental issues ranging from national and regional policy and macroeconomics to local studies in community regeneration. The evidence suggests that, far from being mere passive recipients of instruction and assistance from outside, the people of Central and East Central Europe have been engaged actively in working out solutions to these problems. Several promising cases illustrate opportunities to overcome crisis situations and offer examples of good practices, while others pose warnings. The experiences of these countries in wrestling with issues of sustainability continue to be of importance to policy development within the EU and may serve also as examples for both developed and developing countries worldwide. Zbigniew Bochniarz, is affiliated to the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington in Seattle. He spent over twenty years at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute where he founded a Center for Nations in Transition. The Center became an international leader in delivering foreign assistance for Central and Eastern Europe. His work focuses on economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainability of transforming economies. He is the author, co-author and/or editor of over 100 publications. Gary B. Cohen, has been director of the Center for Austrian Studies and professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, since 2001. He teaches and publishes on modern Central European social and political history. He is the author of numerous articles and essays as well as two books, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (first edition, Princeton Univ. Press,1981; rev. 2nd ed., Purdue Univ. Press, 2005) and Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 (Purdue Univ. Press, 1996).

This book discusses the dynamics and resource management qualities of the peri-urban interface to address climate change consequences, focusing on the peri-urban region of the global city of Bengalaru. In 5 chapters, the authors document the unique challenges experienced in peri-urban areas, including soil-water vegetation dynamics, local and regional impacts on water bodies (surface and groundwater), food production issues, and the inhibited adaptive capacity of local communities. The book also provides knowledge on implementations of environmental management by local institutions, government interventions that have acted as catalysts in promoting community based adaptation strategies, and the physical, social and economic aspects of rural-urban dynamics. The book not only adds to the scarce existing literature on peri-urban contexts, but also addresses the role of culture in protecting ecological landscapes and how traditions play an important role in coping with climate change. Furthermore, the authors expand on these climate change coping mechanisms in peri-urban areas, taking into account local cultural factors and interesting governance interventions in the context of health. The book will be of interest to planners, policy makers, and students and researchers engaged in rural-urban dynamics and climate change adaptation.

This book collects a selection of the best articles presented at the CUPUM (Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management) conference, held in the second week of July 2013 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The articles included were selected by external reviewers using a double blind process.