Product Description: Urban tree management is the key basis for greener cities of the future. It is a practical discipline which includes tree selection, planting, care and protection and the overall management of trees as a collective resource. Urban Tree Management aims to raise awareness for the positive impacts and benefits of city trees and for their importance to city dwellers...read more

Product Description: Destination competitiveness and sustainability are important issues for many stakeholders within the tourism industry. In recent years, destinations have faced some challenges with respect to maintaining sustainability; they must be cleaner, greener and safer in order to safeguard the life quality of holidaymakers and local residents...read more

Product Description: Forests are under tremendous pressure from human uses of all kinds, and one of the most significant threats to their sustainability comes from commercial interests. This book presents a comprehensive examination of the interactions between the forest products sector and the sustainability of forests...read more

The UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress toward economic development that could be sustained without depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Written by an international group of politicians, civil servants and experts on the environment and development, the Brundtland Report changed sustainable development from a physical notion to one based on social, economic and environmental issues.  This book positions the Brundtland Commission as a key event within a longer series of international reactions to pressing problems of global poverty and environmental degradation. It shows that its report, "Our Common Future", published in 1987, covered much more than its definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" for which it became best known. It also addressed a long list of issues which remain unresolved today. The book explores how the work of the Commission juggled contradictory expectations and world views, which existed within the Commission and beyond, and drew on the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile profound differences. The result was both an immense success and disappointment. Coining an irresistibly simple definition enabled the Brundtland Commission to place sustainability firmly on the international agenda. This definition gained acceptability for a potentially divisive concept, but it also diverted attention from underlying demands for fundamental political and social changes. Meanwhile, the central message of the Commission – the need to make inconvenient sustainability considerations a part of global politics as much as of everyday life – has been side-lined. The book thus assesses to what extent the Brundtland Commission represented an immense step forward or a missed opportunity.

Sustainable development is the central challenge of the 21st Century yet it is poorly understood. It is commonly thought of as conservation of the natural systems that human society depends on. Capitalism is the problem because it feeds our self-interest so governments must regulate our behavior to prevent us consuming nature. This book shows that there is a more enjoyable path to sustainable development. What is missing in most discussions of sustainable development is the task of improving human lives. It is commonly presumed that this means increasing national income. Yet research has shown that in the rich countries the relationship between income and happiness is weak, that consumption does not make us happy, and that occasional bouts of happiness do not add up to an enjoyable life. The rich are only marginally happier than the middle-classes because we all have been trained by modern capitalism to seek happiness through excessive consumption on a happiness treadmill. Only constant fixes of more and more 'stuff' can make us happy and then only temporarily; we always need more. And the perpetual pursuit of - and constant failure to find - happiness through working and spending is consuming the planet. So we are told we must be forced to consume better or less to sustain development.Because human systems are complex and unpredictable, governments cannot do this. They cannot solve much simpler social problems and prevent recessions and depressions, eradicate hunger or poverty, guarantee employment or affordable health care, or ensure peace and security. Using theories of complex adaptive systems developed from the natural sciences, this book explains why sustainable development - increasing human enjoyment while conserving the environment - cannot be created by governments from the top-down. Sustainability is not just another policy problem; it is a matter of changing the social paradigm from the bottom up.  For this everyone needs to learn the most valuable lesson of capitalism: to seek their personal self-interest, what is good for them. But this is not the self-interest that you indulge in the mall with shopping therapy. Positive psychology has shown that a truly enjoyable life comes from the pursuit of well-being that is a complete engagement with life by developing as far as possible our personal talents and abilities. Our psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are laid waste by 'getting and spending' in a competitive society. And an enjoyable life needs less consumption. Two questions remain. First, how might it be possible to teach people how to find true enjoyment in the pursuit of well-being? This book shows how this might emerge with a social marketing campaign that uses progressive commitments within small social groups to enforce positive deviances from normal patterns of consumption. We can begin to learn how to manage our lives for enjoyment rather than accumulation by gaining financial management skills, avoiding most debts, and knowing the difference between needs - that we must have - and the unnecessary wants that marketers try to make us indulge.If these lessons were well learned and people consumed much less as they enjoyed their lives in the pursuit of well-being, what would become of modern capitalism that thrives on constant economic growth driven by consumerism? Would it collapse into a permanent depression of falling demand and deflation? Because society is a complex system, no prediction is reliable and chaotic changes may always intrude. However, this book argues that if business and government react intelligently to the public's changing demands, capitalism may be sustained but in a modified form. Capitalism could continue and sustain development if most of us pursued our personal well-being.

Product Description: Public institutions, academic researchers and financial analysts among others hail nanotechnologies as one of the most promising sectors of social and economic development. Calculations predict that it will become a trillion euro industry by 2015 and that it will bring about economic change of at least the same magnitude as the industrial revolution...read more

Though development researchers have proven that the participation of women is necessary for effective sustainable development, development practitioners still largely lack culturally appropriate, gender-sensitive tools for including women, especially women living in poverty. Current tools used in the development approach often favour the skill set of the development practitioner and are a mismatch with the traditional, gendered knowledge and skills many women who are living in poverty do have. This study explores three case studies from India, Ethiopia, and the Guatemala that have successfully used applied theatre for women’s participation in sustainable development. This interdisciplinary book has the opportunity to be the first to bring together the theory, scholarship and practice of theatre for women’s participation in sustainable development in an international context. This work will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners in a wide variety of fields who are looking for creative solutions for utilizing the contributions of women for solving our global goals to live in a sustainable way on this one planet in a just and equitable manner.

'A very powerful, well-researched and thoughtful argument in support of the ecological versus the economic way of thinking and acting. Paul Nieuwenhuis is no 'Fachidiot' but sees clearly the bigger picture. His book takes you on a fascinating journey through the worlds of philosophy and ecology to an in-depth understanding of the evolution of car manufacturing, its past and future. A fascinating read even for a 'tree-hugger' and public transportation fan like me.'- Georgios Kostakos, Independent Consultant on global challenges and sustainability, governance and UN affairsIf we are part of nature, then so is everything we make. This unique book explores this notion using the example of the car, how it is made and used and especially how we relate to it, with a view to creating a more sustainable automobility.We have been trying to make cars cleaner and more efficient, but has this really made them more sustainable? This book argues, within the context of sustainable consumption and production, that we should see the car as a natural system, subject to natural laws and processes. As part of this new perspective we need to change our attitude to cars, building more durable relationships and co-evolving with them. Revolutionary, perhaps; but if we get it right, this approach will allow us to enjoy motoring - albeit in modified form - into the future. The book draws on a range of disciplines, including industrial ecology, engineering, philosophy, anthropology, consumer psychology and object-oriented ontology, as well as providing industry examples to support its innovative case.This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics of sustainability, socio-technical transition, management of change, engineering, biomimicry and business. It will also be of interest to automotive consultancies and those working in the car and oil industries. Paul Nieuwenhuis' innovative suggestions will certainly be of interest to government workers in industry, business and the environment, as well as various environmental NGOs.Contents: 1. Introduction - A Natural History of the Car 2. The Problem with Cars is… 3. What is Sustainability and what is Sustainable? 4. The History of the Car and the History of Car Production 5. A Changing Industry 6. Regulating the Car to Save our Environment; Emptying the Ashtrays on the Titanic? 7. Supply Chains…, or Loops, Tiers, Webs, or Flows? 8. Freedom to Tinker: The True Ownership Model 9. Consumers: SCP and Sustainable Car Use; Learning to Love your Car 10. How Does Change Happen? 11. The Ecological Model of Business 12. Automotive Evolution - the Car of the Future; a Future for the Car? 13. The Automotive Industry; an Ecosystem Perspective 14. Making the Transition; Ecodiversity at the Sector Level; Industry as Ecosystem 15. Concluding Remarks References

Product Description: The International Handbook of Political Ecology features chapters by leading scholars from around the world in a unique collection exploring the multi-disciplinary field of political ecology. This landmark volume canvasses key developments, topics, issues, debates and concepts showcasing how political ecologists today address pressing social and environmental concerns...read more

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability. This has on the whole been met with limited success because health care as a non-trivial and multifaceted system differs significantly from most traditional industries. In order to allow health care systems to perform as expected and required, it is necessary to have concepts and methods that are able to cope with this complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capacity because its focus is on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. Resilience engineering’s unique approach emphasises the usefulness of performance variability, and that successes and failures have the same aetiology. This book contains contributions from acknowledged international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce or eliminate the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase and improve the number of things that go right. Just as the WHO argues that health is more than the absence of illness, so does Resilient Health Care argue that safety is more than the absence of risk and accidents. This can be achieved by making use of the concrete experiences of resilience engineering, both conceptually (ways of thinking) and practically (ways of acting).

Product Description: Business and environmental sustainability are not natural bedfellows. Business is about making money; sustainability is about protecting the planet. Business is measured in months and quarters; sustainability often requires significant short term costs to secure a sometimes uncertain long-term benefit...read more

Product Description: Exit from Globalization moves from theory to practice: from questions of where incorrigible knowledge of substantive economic life derives and how that knowledge is put towards making a progressive, redistributive, eco-sustainable future of human flourishing...read more

Product Description: Many believe economic growth is incompatible with ecological preservation. Green Capital challenges this argument by shifting our focus away from the scarcity of raw materials and toward the deterioration of the great natural regulatory functions (such as the climate system, the water cycle, and biodiversity)...read more

The indexes used by local, national, and international governments to monitor progress toward sustainability do not adequately align with their ethical priorities and have a limited ability to monitor and promote sustainability. This book gives a theoretical and practical demonstration of how ethics and technical considerations can aid the development of sustainability indexes to overcome this division in the literature and aid sustainability initiatives. Measuring and Evaluating Sustainability develops and illustrates methods of linking technical and normative concerns during the development of sustainability indexes. Specifically, guidelines for index development are combined with a pragmatic theory of ethics that enables ethical collaboration among people of diverse ethical systems. Using the resulting method of index development, the book takes a unique applied turn as it ethically evaluates multiple sustainability indexes developed and used by the European Commission, researchers, and local communities and suggests ways to improve the indexes. The book emphasizes justice as it is the most prevalent ethical principle in the sustainability literature and most neglected in index development. In addition to the ethical principles common to international sustainability initiatives, the book also employs a variety of religious and philosophical traditions to ensure that the ethical evaluations performed in the text align with the ideals of the communities using the indexes and foster cross-cultural ethical dialogue.  This volume is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and professionals working on sustainability indicators and sustainability policy-making as well as interdisciplinary areas including environmental ethics; environmental philosophy; environmental or social justice; ecological economics; businesses sustainability programs; international development and environmental policy-making.

Product Description: The world needs a new economy. In spite of tremendous and growing material prosperity, inequality is on the rise and the current organization of the Earth’s natural resources has failed to address the basic human needs of billions of people...read more