The Route Towards Global Sustainability

This volume discusses topics of global sustainability involving sustainability indicators, stakeholders' participation, and technological and strategic advances with the goal of "thinking locally to act globally". Scientists, academics, policymakers, and planners are currently focused on escalating global socioeconomic and ecological issues, such as rising inequality, adverse anthropogenic impacts on the environment, and deficiencies in natural resources. These variables are pushing the earth system's resistance capacity past its breaking point, with additional pressures incurred by a global pandemic. Therefore, this book looks to impart knowledge on participatory learning action research for human and environmental health and well-being. Sustainable development planning and management are needed in these pressing circumstances, and they necessitate an analytical interpretation of ongoing processes, current and future challenges, and an understanding of available tools and technologies. The main sections of the book focus on challenges and management practices for global sustainability, promoting educational values, smart initiatives in urban contexts, and integrating emerging sustainability dimensions in policies and legislation. The primary audience for the work is policy makers, urban planners, social scientists, economists, NGOs, and students, researchers, and educators engaged in environmental social science and sustainability management.

This study develops a new indicator for national and global sustainability. The main components of the EIIW-vita indicator are: the share of renewable energy, the genuine savings rate and the relative "green export" position of the respective countries; it is in line with OECD requirements on composite indicators. As green exports are related to technological progress and environmental-friendly products, there is also a Schumpeterian perspective of this indicator. An extended version furthermore looks at water productivity. The analysis highlights the BRIICS countries as well as the US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Japan. Moreover the special challenges and dynamics of ASEAN countries and Asia are discussed. The book derives key implications for economic and environmental policy and shows that the new global sustainability indicator is not only relevant for green progress, but also useful as a signal for international investors. The construction of the EIIW-vita global sustainability indicator is such that investors, citizens and governments can easily interpret the results. Correlation analysis of the new sustainability indicator with the human development index indicates complementarity, so that a new hybrid superindicator can be constructed. Sustainability rhetoric dominates environmental policy. This fresh assessment of key "pillars" of sustainable economic performance and growth is a valuable contribution to greening the economy, the leitmotiv of the latest Rio Earth Summit. The book places the discussion of sustainability on solid data. The rather surprising results of its new sustainability index should make policy makers rethink their environmental and economic strategies. Prof. Dr. Peter Bartelmus Columbia University, New York Many people put the economy first when sustainability concerns are raised, while environmental indicators are often developed without a sense of socio-economic performance. This important new book bridges the gap. It sheds light on crucial indicators such as renewable energies, exporting green goods and services, genuine savings, and water productivity. And it helps to observe the impressive changes at a global scale and in countries such as China. A must read for all experts interested in those issues. Prof. Dr. Raimund Bleischwitz University College London

Progressive increases in consumer demands along with aggressive industrial consumption led the world to proximate resource depletion, weather changes, soil and air degradation and water quality deterioration. We now know that the paradigm of production at the expense of human condition is not sustainable. This book briefly explains how we reached this situation and offers suggestions as to what can be done to overcome it. It invites the best entrepreneurial talent and scientific and technological know-how to develop a sustainable economy around sustainable communities, services, and sectors. A major obstacle previously identified by involved parties was the ability of accommodating for the emerging economic growth without causing harm to the environment, especially with resource depletion. This book provides the solution by creating a need to bring on a new revolution that preserves the rights of next generations to live in a healthy environment This Sustainability Revolution requires the integration of economic, environmental, and social factor as well as the practical aspects of implementing sustainability through green activities, which are discussed throughout the book. In this book, a globalization is proposed that encourages creativity and innovation towards sustainability. With this global sustainability approach (real globalization) both rich and poor will benefit from the global sustainability approach. This will close the gap between rich and poor. Developing countries could reap the benefit of current technology without undergoing many of the growing pains associated with development of these technologies. Governments are able to better work together towards common goals now that there is an advantage in cooperation, an improved ability to interact and coordinate, and a global awareness of issues. The book presents a sustainability roadmap to bring together various concepts, that have been dealt with independently by previous authors, and link them to establish the fundamental practical steps. The flow path and the direction for successful implementation of a sustainability roadmap are also discussed in detail in the book. For the first time, the authors use sustainable communities to create a better quality of life for residents while minimizing the use of the resources to meet current needs and ensure adequate resources for future generations. These green communities create new industries for the local economy and improve public health, which offers more hope for their citizens. Sustainable transportation, renewable energy, recycling, clean water, and urban forests help to make a more livable community and help to control the global climate change. They involve all citizens and incorporate local values into decision-making.

The book takes a holistic approach to sustainability. Acknowledging the Brundtland definition, that sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, the book is specifically concerned with the ethics of contemporary social and environmental sustainability activity and thinking. It is concerned with the role of institutions–both local and global in achieving sustainability initiatives. All twelve chapters extend sustainability–conceptually, empirically and theoretically, and in doing so provide insights into linking local and global sustainability. The book refocuses sustainability as a series of interwoven and dynamic relationships, backed by just ethical decision-making, which begin locally, and reach out to impact the global level.

This book is an introduction to the many challenges of sustainability. The first half of the book develops a framework for sustainability thinking. The second half considers application areas and personal and corporate responses to sustainability challenges. Basic facts, figures, and information related to sustainability are presented in a way that should convey to readers a sense of scale for the many sustainability challenges we face. Throughout, the end-of-chapter projects and discussion questions focus on tradeoffs among competing goods and the ethical and social implications of decisions related to sustainability. This book was written for a university seminar course on sustainability but could be used in other small-group discussion settings. It is intended to be easy to read but hard to digest.

The journey towards a sustainable world is our greatest challenge. This book includes reports, analysis, and discussion of cutting-edge approaches to incorporating sustainability importantly in the mix of organizational strategic elements. It includes examples of “zero-footprint” production facilities, leveraging environmental and social opportunities by projects, examining theories of excellence in sustainability through appreciative inquiry, social entrepreneurship, closed-loop supply chain management including reverse flows of products returned by end users, using triple bottom-line measures of success implemented in various societal and political contexts, implementing environmentally positive green technologies, new visions for making sustainability sustainable, and innovations in diffusing learning throughout an organization’s web of stakeholders and admirers. Examples and cases are drawn from business, government, and not-for-profit sectors and intra and inter-sectoral partnerships in the US, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and Spain. Notable focal cases include the airline industry, with its emerging space-rich aerotropolises as potentially sustainable communities and higher education. These are at times supported by interviews that bring into focus positive learning experiences and high-point stories.

This concise and informative text provides a critical history of the concept of sustainability and the various institutional measures taken to promote, implement and enforce sustainable development, proposing new organizational solutions to deal with the crisis of sustainability. Crisis of Global Sustainability provides for the first time a compact insider description of the evolution and impact of the Club of Rome, a global think tank that produced a groundbreaking 1972 study "The Limits to Growth" which highlighted the dangers of unrestrained economic growth and possible collapse of global economy during the first decades of the 21st century. With recent research confirming the validity of these concerns, Kanninen asks whether our overarching concept of thinking on world development today should continue to be "global sustainability", which implies that we still have enough time to make adjustments in our future policies and action. Or should the main paradigm of our thinking shift to "global survivability", a concept that stresses the absolute necessity of immediate and drastic change both in institutions and policies? Many environmentalists, green politicians and think tanks are speaking today more loudly than ever about the necessity for a major policy, institutional and paradigm change and this work is essential reading for students and scholars alike.