Embedding climate resilient development principles in planning, urban design, and architecture means ensuring that transformation of the built environment helps achieve carbon neutrality, effective adaptation, and well-being for people and nature. Planners, urban designers, and architects are called to bridge the domains of research and practice and evolve their agency and capacity, developing methods and tools consistent across spatial scales to ensure the convergence of outcomes towards ...

A unified framework for analyzing urban sustainability in terms of cities' inflows and outflows of matter and energy.Urbanization and globalization have shaped the last hundred years. These two dominant trends are mutually reinforcing: globalization links countries through the networked communications of urban hubs. The urban population now generates more than eighty percent of global GDP. Cities account for enormous flows of energy and materials—inflows of goods a...

Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it's not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents. In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world's economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis....

Every day, we are presented with a range of “sustainable” products and activities—from “green” cleaning supplies to carbon offsets—but with so much labeled as “sustainable,” the term has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative. Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best pr...

Nanotechnology! Genetic engineering! Miracle Drugs! We are promised that new technological developments will magically save us from the dire consequences of the 300-year fossil-fueled binge known as modern industrial civilization, without demanding any fundamental changes in our behavior. There is a pervasive belief that technological innovation will enable us to continue our current lifestyle indefinitely and will prevent social, economic and environmental collapse.Techno-Fix

How ideas in complexity can be used to develop more effective public policyComplexity science—made possible by modern analytical and computational advances—is changing the way we think about social systems and social theory. Unfortunately, economists' policy models have not kept up and are stuck in either a market fundamentalist or government control narrative. While these standard narratives are useful in some cases, they are damaging in others, directing thinking...

Sustainable development is becoming the guiding principle for the twenty-first century. This textbook - based on the author's course and rigorously class-tested by his students - provides an introduction into patterns of past and present (un)sustainable development and into the emergence of the notion of sustainable development. It systematically surveys the key concepts, models and findings of the various scientific disciplines with respect to the major sustainability issues: energy, natu...

Global warming is changing the world as we know it. Climate change can have catastrophic impacts in numerous cities across the world. It is time for us to react – quickly and effectively. The European Community (EC) has been leading the fight against climate change, making it one of its top priorities. We have introduced the most ambitious targets of their kind, known as the “20/20/20 by 2020” initiative within the “Climate Action and Renewable Energy Package.” As a result, European Member...

"Daly is turning economics inside out by putting the earth and its diminishing natural resources at the center of the field . . . a kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics."--Utne Reader"Considered by most to be the dean of ecological economics, Herman E. Daly elegantly topples many shibboleths in Beyond Growth. Daly challenges the conventional notion that growth is always good, and he bucks environmentalist orthodoxy, arguing that the current fo...

Environmental governance encompasses our relations to nature, spanning institutions and policies in fields such as biodiversity loss, climate change, land use and pollution. This book offers tools for the study of environmental conflicts, analyzes the current status of environmental policies and discusses why we are so far from resolving many of the issues we face. It also offers alternative directions for future environmental governance.Key features include:an interd...

It is vitally important for businesses to have a holistic understanding of the many issues surrounding and shaping sustainability, from competitors to government and political factors, to economics and ecological science. This integrated textbook for MBA and senior-level undergraduates offers a comprehensive overview of the issues of sustainability as they relate to business and influence corporate strategy. It also features a wide range of cases and an extensive discussion of tools to inc...

Climate change has had a significant impact globally, predominantly for those vulnerable to its influence. The first book of its kind, The Climate Resilient Organization assesses the issues that have mounted for decision-makers in the field, while providing strategies to tackle them.With a particular focus on building climate-resilient pathways for private sector organizations, the expert authors offer practical tools and decision-making criteria for evaluating adaptation ...