Download or read book A New Systems Thinking Approach to Sustainable Resource Management written by Kok Siew Ng and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Systems Thinking Approach to Sustainable Resource Management: Principles and Applications introduces an innovative approach to exploring systems holistically and understanding complex interconnected dynamics effectively among technical systems, natural systems, and human activities to address challenges in resource management. This book covers the fundamental principles of “systems” and ”sustainability”, and introduces the methodology of “new systems thinking,” which comprises system modeling, mapping, integration, analysis, and sustainability assessment. The application of this new systems thinking approach is demonstrated through practical case studies, including waste management systems, food-energy-water nexus, and biorefinery systems. This is an excellent reference for academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students, professional engineers, and policymakers across various disciplines including: chemical and process engineering, environmental science, environmental engineering, and environmental management. • Introduces the “new systems thinking” approach and explains the core principles of system modeling, mapping, integration, analysis, and sustainability assessment • Guides readers through methodologies with step-by-step instructions, illustrated with example problems • Includes practical case studies to equip readers for real-world projects related to sustainable resource management, embracing the new systems thinking approach

Download or read book Systems Thinking for Sustainable Development written by Edward Saja Sanneh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-29 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a systems thinking approach in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals for sustainable national development in vulnerable countries. Systems thinking is a process for understanding the interrelationships among the key components of a system; this book illustrates sustainable development as a system. Key environmental issues are discussed showing their relationship to socioeconomic aspects of development, in the light of increased climate threats and environmental disasters.

Download or read book A Systems Thinking Approach to Corruption and Natural Resources in the Context of Sustainability written by Johanna Gisladottir and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Systems Practice How to Act in a Climate Change World written by Ray Ison and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now accepted that humans are changing the climate of the Earth and this is the most compelling amongst a long litany of reasons as to why, collectively, we have to change our ways of thinking and acting. Most people now recognise that we have to be capable of adapting quickly as new and uncertain circumstances emerge: this capability will need to exist at personal, group, community, regional, national and international levels, all at the same time. Systems Practice is structured into four parts. Part I introduces the societal need to move towards a more systemic and adaptive governance against the backdrop of human-induced climate change. Part II unpacks what is involved in systems practice by means of a juggler metaphor; examining situations where systems thinking offers useful understanding and opportunities for change. Part III identifies the main factors that constrain the uptake of systems practice and makes the case for innovation in practice by means of systemic inquiry, systemic action research and systemic intervention. The book concludes with Part IV, which critically examines how systems practice is, or might be, utilised at different levels from the personal to the societal. The development of our capabilities to think and act systemically is an urgent priority and Systems Practice aims to show how to do systems thinking and translate that thinking into praxis (theory informed practical action) which will be welcomed by those managing in situations of complexity and uncertainty across all domains of professional and personal concern.

Download or read book Education for Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems written by Will Focht and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems (SHES) education is to prepare students to facilitate social learning in communities that builds knowledge of, capacity for, and commitment to sustainability to facilitate the emergence of sustainable societies. The SHES approach to sustainability education relies on complexity-based systems thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries. This book provides a comprehensive guide to the SHES approach, including its rationale and theoretical foundation, its pedagogy and practical applications in curricula, and ways to support the approach through institutional administration. This book will be of great interest to academics and students of education, environmental sciences and studies, sustainability and sustainable development, natural resource management, conservation, environmental policy, environmental planning, and related fields in higher education. Educators can use this book as a guide to SHES pedagogy, curriculum design, sustainability, environmental studies, sustainable development, and sustainable well-being. Administrators will find the book useful in establishing, evaluating, staffing, and promoting programs based on the SHES approach.

Download or read book Sustainable Resource Management written by Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2021-06-20 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable Resource Management: Modern Approaches and Contexts presents the application of the current concept of sustainability to the management of natural resources, such as water, land, minerals and metals using theoretical field knowledge and illustrative real-world examples. Initially, the book defines sustainability, detailing its evolution and how it has been adapted to each of the contexts in which it is used. Furthermore, sustainability is made up of three main areas of science—environmental, social and economic—which are rarely considered together. This book is a complete reference guide to sustainability of natural resources for academics, researchers, practitioners and postgraduate-level students, and more. As sustainability is an interdisciplinary field, linked to most sciences, it is also of use to all fields of science that need to maintain sustainable practices and specific details on the methodologies and techniques needed for sustainable resource management. Provides an integrated approach for modern tools, methodologies and indicators for sustainable resource management Evaluates emerging trends and advanced approaches in sustainable resource management, detailing the most up-to-date research and management considerations Describes advanced sustainable resource management technologies and presents case studies where applicable

Download or read book Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment LCSA written by Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (ELCA) that was developed about three decades ago demands a broadening of its scope to include lifecycle costing and social aspects of life cycle assessment as well, drawing on the three-pillar or ‘triple bottom line’ model of sustainability, which is the result of the development of the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). LCSA refers to the evaluation of all environmental, social and economic negative impacts and benefits in decision-making processes towards more sustainable products throughout their life cycle. Combination of environmental and social life cycle assessments along with life cycle costing leads to life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). This book highlights various aspects of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA).

Download or read book Learning Strategies for Sustainable Organisations written by Bryan Hopkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-04 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - Contains 100 black and white line drawings and illustrations - Provides a thorough grounding in the principles of systems thinking and tools which can be used to help implement sustainability-focused learning strategies - A practical guide to how to facilitate sustainability education and development for organisations, with learning resources including chapter summaries, illustrations, reflection points, mind maps and further reading - Written by an independent performance and learning consultant with extensive experience working with international organisations.

Download or read book SYNERGORS A Systems Approach to Synergistic Utilisation of Secondary Organic Streams Final Project Report written by Kok Siew Ng and published by University of Oxford. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SYNERGORS project (“A systems approach to synergistic utilisation of secondary organic streams”) was funded by the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), running from 2018 to 2021. The project aimed to develop new systems approaches for promoting resource recovery from secondary organic waste streams including food waste, residual biomass and municipal solid waste.

Download or read book Thinking in Systems written by Donella Meadows and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Download or read book Walking the Nexus Talk written by Alessandro Flammini and published by Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO). This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Due to global transformational trends, such as population growth, economic development and climate change, energy, water, land and human resources are increasingly under pressure to support societal development and to maintain necessary services. Decision makers need improved tools in order to be better informed about trade-offs and synergies between different development and management choices, and to help them identify options on how to sustainably manage resources. This report proposes a way to carry out a water-energy-food nexus assessment approach in order to: a) understand the interactions between water, energy and food systems in a given context, and b) evaluate the performance of a technical or policy intervention in this given context. The ultimate goal of the nexus assessment is to inform nexus related responses in terms of strategies, policy measures, planning and institutional set-up or interventions.

Download or read book Systems Thinking For Social Change written by David Peter Stroh and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning—for everyone! Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like: ending homelessness improving public health strengthening education designing a system for early childhood development protecting child welfare developing rural economies facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society resolving identity-based conflicts and more! The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.

Download or read book Systems Thinking and Sustainable Healthcare Delivery written by Ben Y.F. Fong and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-27 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sustainable Development Goal 3 seeks to ensure health and well-being for all at every stage of life. This book discusses how to strengthen our healthcare systems and ensure sustainable community healthcare delivery by using systems thinking, an approach to understanding complex interactions of individual system elements in nature. Financing and manpower planning are integral processes to achieve health for all in the world. Adopting the Framework for Action of the World Health Organization for Strengthening Health Systems to Improve Health Outcomes, this book reviews and discusses, illustrated by case examples, the building blocks of healthcare systems, namely financing, human resources, management strategies and leadership and governance in the context of accessibility, coverage, quality and safety of community health services to achieve selected targets in SDG 3 in the context of global health. This book will be of interest to those who are researching sustainable healthcare systems, as well as policymakers and healthcare professionals.

Download or read book Complexity Approach To Sustainability A Theory And Application Second Edition written by Angela Espinosa and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business sustainability and sustainable development are of great importance in modern-day socio-economic study. Despite this, the impact of recent contributions from systems and complexity sciences in addressing these issues has not yet filtered down into effective practice. This book argues that there is a need for urgency in the application of analytical tools which embody the principles of complexity management in sustainability research, in particular in the context of the global climate change. The approach presented is based on the concept of clusters of whole systems coming together through collaboration, in order to create larger wholes capable of dealing with the issues facing our socio-economic environmental systems.In this updated second edition, the authors further clarify the viability and sustainability (V&S) approach, and the criteria and framework needed for sustainable governance. It includes a more detailed perspective on the implications of the V&S approach to businesses and networks towards changes in structure, strategy and processes, inspired by specific case studies. Key additions include a criteria for designing more viable and sustainable self-governed organizations, the methodologies and tools to design and implement self-transformations towards sustainability, and how these tools support sustainability management individually and globally, for businesses and society.

Download or read book Complexity Approach To Sustainability A Theory And Application written by Angela Espinosa and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011-04-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major challenge of our times is to understand and manage the increasing complexity of socio-economic reality. This has immediate relevance for sustainable development. The impact of recent contributions from systems and complexity sciences in addressing this issue has not filtered down into effective practice — notably, there remain problems caused by the legacy of competing paradigms and the application of their associated methodologies. This book argues the urgency for the application of analytical tools that embody the principles of complexity management. The authors describe a theoretical framework based on complexity science with a focus on organisational and second order cybernetics, one that presents a powerful new insight into the concept of sustainability. The book also describes actual applications of the ideas in the area of organisational, societal and environmental management, and reflects upon the impact of such an approach on current practice.

Download or read book Integrating Landscape Approaches and Multi Resource Analysis into Natural Resource Management written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The responsible management of natural resources for present-day needs and future generations requires integrated approaches that are place-based, embrace systems thinking, and incorporate the social, economic, and environmental considerations of sustainability. Landscape-scale analysis takes this holistic view by focusing on the spatial scales most appropriate for the resource types and values being managed. Landscape-scale analysis involves assessing landscape features in relation to a group of influencing factors such as land use change, hydrologic changes or other disturbances, topography, and historical vegetation conditions. As such, different types of data and multiple disciplines may be required for landscape analysis, depending on the question of interest and scale of analysis. Multi-resource analysis (MRA) is an approach to landscape-scale analysis that integrates information among multiple natural resources, including ecosystem services, and is designed to evaluate impacts and tradeoffs between development and conservation at landscape scales to inform public resource managers. This approach implicitly addresses social, economic, and ecological functional relationships; for example, actions to realize the benefits of one type of natural resource (e.g., minerals, oil, and gas) may influence behavior and potential benefits related to other types of natural resources (e.g., recreational opportunities). In June 2015, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop on using landscape-based approaches and MRA to better inform federal decision making for the sustainable management of natural resources. Participants discussed knowledge gaps and priority areas for research and presentations of case studies of approaches that have been used to effectively integrate landscape-based approaches and MRA into practice. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Download or read book Resilience Thinking written by Brian Walker and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.