Sustainability Assessment: Applications and opportunities

ISBN-13: 9781138802742 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 282 str.

Robert Gibson

Opis

Current and expanding human activities are moving us towards ever deeper unsustainability. While there is no single, simple means of reversing the invidious biophysical trends and redirecting the distribution of benefits, one necessary step is to approach every new and renewed undertaking as an opportunity to deliver maximum multiple, mutually reinforcing, fairly distributed and lasting gains. Finding the best options for enhancing such gains by comparing alternatives, addressing all the key requirements for progress towards sustainability and avoiding significant adverse effects, is the essential purpose of sustainability assessment.

This book addresses the theory and practice of sustainability assessment applications, drawing from experiences globally in a variety of sectors and presenting lessons learned. Diverse international case studies from professionals and academics demonstrate progress so far in exploring openings, testing approaches to application and establishing best practice. The book illustrates means of specifying generic sustainability criteria for the context of particular applications, reports on the resulting insights, and examines the barriers and opportunities for further advances.

This book is an important resource for students, academics and professionals in the areas of Governance, Environmental Assessment, Planning and Policy Making, Corporate Social Responsibility and Applied Sustainability.

Spis treści

1. Introduction  2. Application needs and opportunities  3. From criteria and processes to applications  4. Applications Bridge: an introduction to chapters five to fifteen  5. The Mackenzie Gas project in Canada’s Northwest Territories  6. Peanut shells and national energy/agricultural policy in Senegal  7. Sugarcane ethanol in Brazil  8. Ontario energy planning and the Ontario Power Authority’s Integrated Power System Plan  9. Infrastructure projects in Portugal  10. Water governance and urban sustainability in Arizona  11. Water Corporation’s Yarragadee water project in Western Australia  12. Lower Churchill hydropower project review  13. Community sustainability planning in Canada  14. Post-tsunami and reactor failure recovery planning in Japan  15. Sustainability assessment and mining legacies in Canada  16. Lessons and ways forward

O autorze

Robert B. Gibson is a Professor at the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo, Canada. He has been involved with environmental policy issues and broader sustainability imperatives as a practitioner, advisor and academic since the mid-1970s. His initial book on sustainability assessment, focused on criteria and processes, was published by Earthscan in 2005.