Download or read book Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability written by Jiří Jaromír Klemeš and published by Butterworth-Heinemann. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability answers the question “what are the available methodologies to assess the environmental sustainability of a product, system or process?” Multiple well-known authors share their expertise in order to give a broad perspective of this issue from a chemical and environmental engineering perspective. This mathematical, quantitative book includes many case studies to assist with the practical application of environmental and sustainability methods. Readers learn how to efficiently assess and use these methods. This book summarizes all relevant environmental methodologies to assess the sustainability of a product and tools, in order to develop more green products or processes. With life cycle assessment as its main methodology, this book speaks to engineers interested in environmental impact and sustainability. Helps engineers to assess, evaluate, and measure sustainability in industry Provides workable approaches to environmental and sustainability assessment Readers learn tools to assess the sustainability of a process or product and to design it in an environmentally friendly way

Download or read book A Sustainable World written by Thaddeus C. Trzyna and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Defining and Measuring Economic Resilience from a Societal Environmental and Security Perspective written by Adam Rose and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents an economic framework for the analysis of resilience in relation to societal, environmental, and personal security perspectives. It offers a rigorous definition of economic resilience and an operational metric, and it shows how they can be applied to measuring and applying the concept to private and public decision making. Major dimensions of resilience and their implications for human development are explored. Resilience is emphasized as a coping mechanism for dealing with short-term crises, such as natural disasters and acts of terrorism. As well, the author shows how lessons learned in the short-run out of necessity and through the application of human ingenuity can be incorporated into long-run sustainability practices. In part, this opportunity stems from viewing resilience as a process, one that enhances individual and societal competencies. The book links economic resilience to several other disciplines and examines the relationship between resilience and various other key concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, and sustainability. It scrutinizes the measurement of economic resilience in terms of temporal, spatial, and scale dimensions. It examines the time-path of resilience and relates it to the recovery process.This work also looks closely at progress on the formulation of resilience indices and stresses the importance of actionable variables. It presents a risk-management framework, including aspects of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis. Additionally, it explores the role of resilience in relation to the co-benefits of disaster risk management.

Download or read book Sustainability Indicators written by Simon Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: 'This book should be of interest to anyone interested in sustainable development, and especially sustainability indicators. Bell and Morse easily succeed in exposing the fundamental paradoxes of these concepts and, more importantly, they offer us a way forward. Readers ... will find their practical recommendations for those attempting to do sustainability analysis in the field most welcome, which is also the book's greatest strength.' Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 'This book makes a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of using indicators for sustainability. It introduces systems ideas and a range of tools and techniques that have the potential to broaden and deepen our understanding of a whole range of complex situations. Well worth a closer look.' Christine Blackmore, Open University 'This is a book that explores new ways of thinking about how to measure sustainability... It offers stimulating food for thought for environmental educators and researchers.' Environmental Education Research 'This book tells me, as an SI 'practitioner', where I have been and why, and more importantly how I should be thinking in order to effectively present to and empower the local community in the years ahead.' David Ellis, Principal Pollution Monitoring Officer, Norwich City Council 'A practical guide to the development of sustainability indicators which offers a systemic and participative way to use them at local scale. Our preliminary results are highly positive and the approach is applicable in many contexts.' Elisabeth Coudert, Programme Officer Prospective and Regional Development, Blue Plan The groundbreaking first edition of Sustainability Indicators reviewed the development and value of sustainability indicators and discussed the advantage of taking a holistic and qualitative approach rather than focusing on strictly quantitative measures. In the new edition the authors bring the literature up to date and show that the basic requirement for a systemic approach is now well grounded in the evidence. They examine the origins and development of Systemic Sustainability Analysis (SSA) as a theoretical approach to sustainability which has been developed in practice in a number of countries on an array of projects since the first edition. They look at how SSA has evolved into the practical approaches of Systemic Prospective Sustainability Analysis (SPSA) and IMAGINE, and, in particular, how a wide range of participatory methodologies have been adopted over the years. They also provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of projects that undertake work in the general field of sustainable development.

Download or read book Sustainable Finance written by Molly Scott Cato and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a detailed yet succinct overview of sustainable finance, with a specific focus on its origins, its policy focus and the practitioner dimension. With fossil fuel companies still attracting investment and subsidy across the world, the book describes how we can reverse these incentives, using the power of finance to tackle the climate and ecological crises. The world of finance is moving beyond the era of ethical investment and into a future where all financial companies will have to report the climate impact of their investments. This is the first stage towards full-scale ESG reporting (Environmental, Social and Governance). Since financial reporting depends on information provided by companies who receive investment, this has huge implications for non-financial reporting by all large companies. The timeline for these legal changes is short for what will be a transformation of financial accounting and investment. The book also covers the related issues of climate finance and the role of central and public banks in funding the transition to sustainability, and how we can ensure accountability for countries bearing the brunt of the impact from those with the largest responsibility for historic emissions. This book will enable those working in these fields to update their knowledge and skills, and brings together the author’s practical experience as an MEP with her academic insight as the first professor of green economics.

Download or read book Defining and Measuring Sustainability written by Mohan Munasinghe and published by Washington, D.C. : Published for the United Nations University by the World Bank. This book was released on 1995 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introdução à definição e medição de sustentabilidade biogeofísica compreendo os artigos de background, estudos de casos e ecossistemas gerenciados.

Download or read book Measuring and Controlling Sustainability written by Adam Lindgreen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Efforts to establish the measurement and control of sustainability have produced notable tools, but those instruments lack applicability in practice. Increasing the level of standardization of such tools also seems difficult to achieve, because the contexts surrounding the focal organizations differ considerably. Therefore, what we need is a systematic, interdisciplinary assessment of how to measure and control sustainability, so that we can establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. Measuring and Controlling Sustainability attempts to provide such an assessment in 17 chapters, organized into four main topic sections: (a) organizations and social value creation: concepts, responsibilities, and barriers; (b) accounting, measurement, performance, and diffusion of social value; (c) practical and managerial insights from real-life cases; and (d) choices, incentives, guidance, and ethics. This research anthology provides a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge theories and research that will further the development and advancement of measuring and controlling sustainable efforts in theory and managerial practice.

Download or read book Defining and Measuring Sustainability written by Michiel J.F. Pelt and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sustainability Indicators written by Tomás Hák and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the concept of sustainability has been widely embraced, it has been only vaguely defined and is exceedingly difficult to measure. Sustainability indicators are critical to making the broad concept of sustainability operational by providing specific measures by which decision makers and the public can judge progress. Sustainability Indicators defines the present state of the art in indicator development. It presents a comprehensive assessment of the science behind various indicators, while placing special emphasis on their use as communications tools. The contributors draw on their experience as academics and practitioners to describe the conceptual challenges to measuring something as complex as sustainability at local, regional, national, and global scales. The book also reviews existing indicators to assess how they could be better employed, considering which indicators are overused and which have been underutilized. Sustainability Indicators will help planners and policy makers find indicators that are ready for application and relevant to their needs, and will help researchers identify the unresolved issues where progress is most urgently needed. All readers will find advice as to the most effective ways to use indicators to support decision making.

Download or read book Fuzzy Measurement of Sustainability written by Yannis A. Phillis and published by . This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People from many disciplines talk about sustainable development (SD) without having a concrete definition or idea of what it is. Politicians and decision-makers, biologists and environmentalists, engineers and scientists, philosophers and sociologists often mean different things when they mention SD. To take an extreme example, a neoclassical economist might define SD as continual economic growth without regard to the environmental situation, whereas at the other end of the spectrum, a deep ecologist might define it as the preservation and restoration of the ecosystem, ignoring the effect on the economy completely. It has become clear throughout the last few decades leading up to the time this book was written that our society is facing environmental problems of global magnitude such as species extinction, population explosion, global warming, water shortages, exhaustion of fisheries, and deforestation, among others, which have economic and social repercussions. Many people doubt that the world we shall bequeath to our descendants will be all healthy, supportive, and beautiful as the one we inherited from our parents. The fundamental questions then of the SD discussion are: Can we continue our present course without destroying part or most of our environment and society? And if we have to change course (which is currently the consensus opinion) how we do it? This book addresses one of the most fundamental questions of SD: How do we define and measure in the mathematical sense sustainability? In effect it summarises our research in this field for the last 15 years. The mathematical model which we use to evaluate sustainability serves both as a definition and as a measuring scheme. This is done with the help of fuzzy logic, which is well suited to perform reasoning in fields where concrete mathematical models do not exist and concepts such as sustainability are multifaceted and often subjective. Fuzzy reasoning, in some respects, emulates human thinking and relies on expert opinion and knowledge as well as subjective evaluations. This multistage model is developed step-by-step, in the end providing sustainability assessments of various aspects of a society on a scale from zero to one, such as the environmental or societal situation of a country. All nations of the world for which reliable data exist are then ranked according to their sustainability as measured by the model. A sensitivity analysis reveals the most important components of sustainability for each country. The book is intended for undergraduate students, graduate students, and practitioners working in the field of sustainability. It is based on a course Yannis Phillis has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Technical University of Crete (TUC) at the senior/graduate level. The mathematical knowledge needed to follow the book is minimal and is all contained in the text. Computational guidance is provided for those who would like to write their own model.

Download or read book Measuring Sustainability written by Simon Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ' Measuring the sustainability of development is crucial to achieving it, and is one of the most actively studied issues in the area. To date, most studies of measurements or indicators have been largely theoretical. However, this book, a follow-on to Bell and Morse's highly influential Sustainability Indicators (1999), presents valuable practical advice on how to develop measurements that will work in real-life development contexts. It describes and analyses how to derive, validate and apply indicators in the course of an actual development project - in this case the Mediterranean Action Plan in Malta. The authors explain the trade-offs and constraints involved and how it is possible to combine the open-ended and flexible perspectives of sustainability with the more linear processes and fixed targets of specific projects through the use of pragmatic and reflective methodologies.

Download or read book Sustainability Assessment written by Alan James Bond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Currently the writing on the subject is limited and comprises, for the most part, guidance documents and completed assessments.

Download or read book Sustainability in the Built Environment written by Carol Atkinson and published by Bre Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report brings together current thinking on defining and measuring sustainability. It sets out concisely the key issues in this large and complex area.

Download or read book Methods in Sustainability Science written by Jingzheng Ren and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Methods in Sustainability Science: Assessment, Prioritization, Improvement, Design and Optimization presents cutting edge, detailed methodologies needed to create sustainable growth in any field or industry, including life cycle assessments, building design, and energy systems. The book utilized a systematic structured approach to each of the methodologies described in an interdisciplinary way to ensure the methodologies are applicable in the real world, including case studies to demonstrate the methods. The chapters are written by a global team of authors in a variety of sustainability related fields. Methods in Sustainability Science: Assessment, Prioritization, Improvement, Design and Optimization will provide academics, researchers and practitioners in sustainability, especially environmental science and environmental engineering, with the most recent methodologies needed to maintain a sustainable future. It is also a necessary read for postgraduates in sustainability, as well as academics and researchers in energy and chemical engineering who need to ensure their industrial methodologies are sustainable. Provides a comprehensive overview of the most recent methodologies in sustainability assessment, prioritization, improvement, design and optimization Sections are organized in a systematic and logical way to clearly present the most recent methodologies for sustainability and the chapters utilize an interdisciplinary approach that covers all considerations of sustainability Includes detailed case studies demonstrating the efficacies of the described methods

Download or read book Sustainability Indicators written by Simon Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: 'This book should be of interest to anyone interested in sustainable development, and especially sustainability indicators. Bell and Morse easily succeed in exposing the fundamental paradoxes of these concepts and, more importantly, they offer us a way forward. Readers ... will find their practical recommendations for those attempting to do sustainability analysis in the field most welcome, which is also the book's greatest strength.' Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 'This book makes a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of using indicators for sustainability. It introduces systems ideas and a range of tools and techniques that have the potential to broaden and deepen our understanding of a whole range of complex situations. Well worth a closer look.' Christine Blackmore, Open University 'This is a book that explores new ways of thinking about how to measure sustainability... It offers stimulating food for thought for environmental educators and researchers.' Environmental Education Research 'This book tells me, as an SI 'practitioner', where I have been and why, and more importantly how I should be thinking in order to effectively present to and empower the local community in the years ahead.' David Ellis, Principal Pollution Monitoring Officer, Norwich City Council 'A practical guide to the development of sustainability indicators which offers a systemic and participative way to use them at local scale. Our preliminary results are highly positive and the approach is applicable in many contexts.' Elisabeth Coudert, Programme Officer Prospective and Regional Development, Blue Plan The groundbreaking first edition of Sustainability Indicators reviewed the development and value of sustainability indicators and discussed the advantage of taking a holistic and qualitative approach rather than focusing on strictly quantitative measures. In the new edition the authors bring the literature up to date and show that the basic requirement for a systemic approach is now well grounded in the evidence. They examine the origins and development of Systemic Sustainability Analysis (SSA) as a theoretical approach to sustainability which has been developed in practice in a number of countries on an array of projects since the first edition. They look at how SSA has evolved into the practical approaches of Systemic Prospective Sustainability Analysis (SPSA) and IMAGINE, and, in particular, how a wide range of participatory methodologies have been adopted over the years. They also provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of projects that undertake work in the general field of sustainable development.

Download or read book Measuring and Controlling Sustainability written by Adam Lindgreen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Efforts to establish the measurement and control of sustainability have produced notable tools, but those instruments lack applicability in practice. Increasing the level of standardization of such tools also seems difficult to achieve, because the contexts surrounding the focal organizations differ considerably. Therefore, what we need is a systematic, interdisciplinary assessment of how to measure and control sustainability, so that we can establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. Measuring and Controlling Sustainability attempts to provide such an assessment in 17 chapters, organized into four main topic sections: (a) organizations and social value creation: concepts, responsibilities, and barriers; (b) accounting, measurement, performance, and diffusion of social value; (c) practical and managerial insights from real-life cases; and (d) choices, incentives, guidance, and ethics. This research anthology provides a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge theories and research that will further the development and advancement of measuring and controlling sustainable efforts in theory and managerial practice.

Download or read book Measuring Sustainability and Decoupling written by Nordic Council of Ministers and published by Nordic Council of Ministers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is growing interest among policymakers for the prospects of decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation, in order to achieve improved environmental quality without compromising economic growth. However, whilst decoupling indicators give a reasonably good measure for potential or progress towards sustainability, decoupling is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for sustainability. Decoupling indicators, unlike many other statistical efforts related to the environment, are not meant to summarise the general state of the environment, but rather to measure countries' progress towards mitigating or alleviating particular environmental pressures from relevant driving forces.