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From forests and fish to water and fossil fuels, we harvest and degrade our renewable resources faster than they can regenerate; we create pollution, waste, and greenhouse gases more quickly than they can be rendered harmless or sequestered; and we are overwhelmingly dependent on nonrenewable resources.
Human society has exceeded sustainable limits for greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, and other critical resources and ecosystems upon which our health, prosperity, and lives depend. At the same time, the United Nations projects world population will grow by more than two billion by the year and four billion by , while consumption per capita continues to grow exponentially UN DESA This is where the opportunity lies.
To address this challenge, we need to invent sustainable means to meet our needs for food, energy, materials, health, and access to these resources. To succeed—and to avoid unintended harmful consequences—new technologies must be grounded in rigorous scientific research. But the invention of promising new technologies alone is not sufficient.
What is sustainability and what are some of the challenges to becoming sustainable? In , the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defined it this. Challenges in Sustainability (CiS; ISSN ) is an international, open access, academic, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the publication of.
These inventions must move affordably and appropriately from the lab to the world. Their implementation requires support for entrepreneurship and commercialization, for learning and change in existing enterprises, and for public policies to speed regulatory change and support the adoption of sustainable technologies.
Finally, we need transformation. Innovation and implementation are essential but by themselves are insufficient.
As long as everyone wants more—a higher income, more consumption, a larger gross domestic product, more than last year, more than others—innovations that ease scarcity or environmental degradation will simply enable more growth until new problems and limits arise. New technologies alone cannot create a sustainable economy and society.
This raises uncomfortable questions. The world must make the transition to sustainability, yet it is unclear how to accomplish this with fairness and equity so that we can build a society in which all will thrive. Challenges in Sustainability CiS; ISSN is an international, open access, academic, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the publication of high-quality research articles and review papers on all aspects of global environmental and transformational change toward sustainability.
Research articles, reviews, communications or short notes and films are welcomed. Manuscripts must be prepared in English; they will undergo a rigorous peer review process, and they will appear online immediately after final acceptance.
In the next years, NBS will form micro-communities of researchers and practitioners to tackle sustainability challenges like those contained in this report. Their implementation requires support for entrepreneurship and commercialization, for learning and change in existing enterprises, and for public policies to speed regulatory change and support the adoption of sustainable technologies. Businesses need a way to reconcile short-term and long-term perspectives Respecting biodiversity also means choosing and recognising seasonal fruits and vegetables. It is the report's 10th anniversary, and it will be NBS's last report of this kind. More about Challenges in Sustainability. Leave a Comment Cancel reply.
We especially encourage submissions from early stage researchers. The objective of the journal is to be a front-runner for original science that stimulates the development of sustainability solutions in an era of global environmental change. CiS defines its place at the interface between natural, socio-economic, and the humanistic sciences, creating a unique platform to disseminate analyses on challenges related to global environmental change, associated solutions, and trade-offs.
The journal helps to further the field of sustainability science by bridging gaps between disciplines, science and societal stakeholders while not neglecting scientific rigor and excellence. The journal promotes science-based insights of societal dynamics, and is open for innovative and critical approaches that stimulate scientific and societal debates. More about Challenges in Sustainability. To reduce the consumption of firewood for cooking and to realise recycling-driven soil fertility management, three projects in Northwest Tanzania aim to provide the local smallholder community with cooking and sanitation alternatives.
The present study proposes an integrated approach to assess the sustainability of the small-scale cooking and sanitation technologies. Based on the multi-criteria decision support approach MC D A , we developed a decision-specific, locally adapted, and participatory assessment tool: Pre-testing of the tailored tool was set up with representatives of Tanzanian and German partners of case study projects.
From a methodological perspective, we conclude that the MCTA uses a set of relevant criteria to realise a transparent and replicable computational Excel-tool. The combination of MC D A for structuring the assessment with analytical methods, such as Material Flow Analysis, for describing the performance of alternatives is a promising path for designing integrated approaches to sustainability assessments of technologies. Pre-testing of the tool served as a proof-of-concept for the general design of the method.
Future applications and adjustments of the MCTA require the inclusion of end-users, a reasonable and participatory reduction of criteria, and an increase of feedback loops and group discussions between participants and the facilitator to support a common learning about the technologies and thorough understanding of the perspectives of participants.
Barry Ness Contact http: Examples of topics to be covered by this journal include, but are not limited to: Environment and resource science Governance for sustainability Transition experiments and pathway studies Education for sustainability Future and anticipatory studies Transdisciplinarity Sustainable urban systems Sustainable energy Place-based sustainability studies Resource exploitation Impact assessment and integrated modeling Carbon accounting and compensation Remote sensing and geoinformation.
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Livability is a concept being applied to cities, even though it is vague. Worldwide, there are several livable city ranking schemes in use, which compare the livability of cities by making use of standardized indicator sets.
The research presented here recognizes, as a point of departure, that each city is unique, implying that comparisons of cities by standardized categories only does not adequately reflect the reality of each city. Through interviews, nine context-specific categories were identified and visualized. The findings of the study demonstrate that a qualitative approach enables a more in-depth description of livability categories because it can capture and illustrate relationships among the categories.