Seventy percent of the oil America uses each year goes to transportation. That means that the national oil addiction and all its consequences, from climate change to disastrous spills to dependence on foreign markets, can be greatly reduced by changing the way we move. In Transport Beyond Oil, leading experts in transportation, planning, development, and policy show how to achieve this fundamental shift.The authors demonstrate that smarter development and land-use decision...

Winner of the Planning Institute of Australia's 2015 Cutting Edge Research and Teaching Award!Australians from all walks of life have begun to realise the nation’s cities cannot sustain profligate growth indefinitely. Dwindling water supplies, failing food bowls, increased energy costs, more severe bushfires, severe storms, flooding, coastal erosion, rising transport expenses, housing shortages and environmental pollution are now daily news headlines. Australia’s c...

Thepast decade has been one of the most volatile periods in global petroleum markets in living memory, and future oil supply security and price levels remain highly uncertain. This poses many questions for the professional activities of planners and urbanists because contemporary cities are highly dependent on petroleum as a transport fuel. How will oil dependent cities respond, and adapt to, the changing pattern of petroleum supplies? What key strategies should planners and policy makers ...

Urbanization is occurring at an unprecedented rate; by 2050 three quarters of the world’s people will live in urban environments. The cars we drive, products we consume, houses we live in and technology we use will all determine how sustainable our cities will be. Bridging the increasing divide between cross-disciplinary academic insights and the latest practical innovations, Resilient Sustainable Cities provides an integrated approach for long term future planning within ...

According to many authorities the impact of humanity on the earth is already overshooting the earth’s capacity to supply humanity’s needs. This is an unsustainable position. This book does not focus on the problem but on the solution, by showing what it is like to live within a fair earth share ecological footprint.The authors describe numerical methods used to calculate this, concentrating on low or no cost behaviour change, rather than on potentially expensive technological innov...

In countries such as the UK, the energy used in constructing, occupying and operating buildings represents approximately fifty percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Pressure to improve the environmental performance of buildings during both construction and occupancy, particularly to reduce carbon emissions from buildings, has become intense.Understandably, legislation and regulation are driving green development and compliance. And this is happening in a wide variety of ways. This r...

Our economy has spiralled out of control with too much focus on the quantity of production. The way to reduce this wasteful overproduction of goods and services is to increase their quality. In this groundbreaking book, industrial designer Herb Bentz explains how to fix the economy and break the environment versus economy deadlock. Bentz tells us how the use of good design can improve the quality of what we produce and how a beneficial growth in quality can substitute for the destructive incr...

New twenty-first century economic, social and environmental changes have challenged and reshaped rural Australia. They range from ageing populations, youth out-migration, immigration policies (that seek to place skilled migrants in rural Australia), tree changers, agricultural restructuring and new relationships with indigenous populations. Challenges also exist around the 'patchwork economy' and the wealth that the mining boom offers some areas, while threatening regional economic decline...

Sustainability has become the key challenge for urban planners, housing and infrastructure policy makers. Citizens are increasingly encouraged to live more compactly; in denser urban developments, to use less water and other natural resources and to choose public transport. While councils, government agencies and private business invest in a broad range of promotions offering discounts on sustainable products and services, uptake has been slow and the impacts marginal at a time when enviro...

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to drop, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable, natural limits. Richard Heinberg's latest landmark work goes to the heart of the ongoing financial crisis, explaining how ...

Reshaping Environments: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability in a Complex World draws together a team of specialist authors from disciplines including urban planning, social sciences, engineering and environmental science to examine the diverse influences humans have upon the natural environment. This interdisciplinary approach presents multifaceted responses for complex environmental issues. The book explores current environmental science theories to provide a solid foundation ...

Human beings and industrial-based society are changing the composition of our planet’s atmosphere and causing it to warm at an unnatural and oftentimes astonishingly rapid rate. Much of that warmth is being absorbed by water, which as a result is moving through the global hydrological cycle faster and in unprecedented ways. A warmer atmosphere carries more water vapour, which means that as temperatures continue to rise, storms will become more intense, last longer and cause more damage to ...