This book presents the results of studies that determine the most effective ways for human development, ensuring a decent life, and preserving natural resources within the framework of the defined issues. Russia is a participant of the United Nations Global Agreement on implementing sustainable development, adopted in 2015. Russia is a large country, both in terms of population and territory, that can significantly influence the achievement of sustainable development goals. Russia is actively promoting social responsibility practices and sustainable development among scientists, specialists, and students. The presented articles highlight the main problems in ecology, economy, education, and law; and analyses the opportunities and prospects in achieving sustainable development goals in the context of modern conditions.

A succinct examination of the concept of sustainable development: what it means; how it is impacted by globalisation, production and consumption; how it can be measured; and what can be done to promote it.

After a period of relative silence, recent years have been marked by an upswing of interest in environmental issues. The publication of the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development on 'Our Common Future' (1987) has acted as a catalyst for a revival of the environmental awareness, not only regarding local and daily pollution problems, but also -and in particular- regarding global environmental decay and threats to a sustainable development. In a recent study by W.M. Stigliani et al., on 'Future Environments for Europe' (Executive Rep~rt 15, IIASA, Laxenburg, 1989) the environmental implications of various alternative socioeconomic development pathways with respect to eleven environmental issues that could become major problems in the future are analysed. These issues include: Managing water resources in an era of climate change. Acidification of soils and lakes in Europe. Long-term forestry management and the possibility of a future shortfall in wood supply. Areas of Europe marginalized by mainstream economic and agricultural development. Sea level rise. Chemical pollution of coastal waters. Toxic materials buildup and the potential for chemical time bombs. Non-point-source emissions of potentially toxic substances. Transportation growth versus air quality. Decreasing multi-functionally of land owing to urban and suburban land development. Increasing summer demand for electricity, and the impact on air quality.

This book presents the results of studies that determine the most effective ways for human development, ensuring a decent life, and preserving natural resources within the framework of the defined issues. Russia is a participant of the United Nations Global Agreement on implementing sustainable development, adopted in 2015. Russia is a large country, both in terms of population and territory, that can significantly influence the achievement of sustainable development goals. Russia is actively promoting social responsibility practices and sustainable development among scientists, specialists, and students. The presented articles highlight the main problems in ecology, economy, education, and law; and analyses the opportunities and prospects in achieving sustainable development goals in the context of modern conditions.

Embracing the reality of biophysical limits to growth, this volume uses the technical tools from ecological economics to recast the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as Ecological Livelihood Goals – policy agendas and trajectories that seek to reconcile the social and spatial mobility and liberty of individuals, with both material security and ecological integrity. Since the 1970s, mainstream approaches to sustainable development have sought to reconcile ecological constraints with modernization through much vaunted and seldom demonstrated strategies of ‘decoupling’ and ‘dematerialization’. In this context, the UN SDGs have become the orchestrating drivers of sustainability governance. However, biophysical limits are not so easily sidestepped. Building on an ecological- economic critique of mainstream economics and a historical- sociological understanding of state formation, this book explores the implications of ecological limits for modern progressive politics. Each chapter outlines leverage points for municipal engagement in local and regional contexts. Systems theory and community development perspectives are used to explore under- appreciated avenues for the kind of social and cultural change that would be necessary for any accommodation between modernity and ecological limits. Drawing on ideas from H.T. Odum, Herman Daly, Zigmunt Bauman, and many others, this book provides guiding research for a convergence between North and South that is bottom-up, household-centred, and predicated on a re- emerging domain of Livelihood. In each chapter, the authors provide recommendations for reconfiguring the UN’s SDGs as Ecological Livelihood Goals – a framework for sustainable development in an era of limits. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecological economics, socio- ecological systems, political economy, international and community development, global governance, and sustainable development.

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. This book argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice.

Environment and Sustainable Development answers the need for an introductory, comprehensive, yet critical, book that explores the challenges involved in the implementation of sustainable development.

The world has changed dramatically. We no longer live in a world relatively empty of humans and their artifacts. We now live in the “Anthropocene,” era in a full world where humans are dramatically altering our ecological life-support system. Our traditional economic concepts and models were developed in an empty world. If we are to create sustainable prosperity, if we seek “improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities,” we are going to need a new vision of the economy and its relationship to the rest of the world that is better adapted to the new conditions we face. We are going to need an economics that respects planetary boundaries, that recognizes the dependence of human well-being on social relations and fairness, and that recognizes that the ultimate goal is real, sustainable human well-being, not merely growth of material consumption. This new economics recognizes that the economy is embedded in a society and culture that are themselves embedded in an ecological life-support system, and that the economy cannot grow forever on this finite planet. In this report, we discuss the need to focus more directly on the goal of sustainable human well-being rather than merely GDP growth. This includes protecting and restoring nature, achieving social and intergenerational fairness (including poverty alleviation), stabilizing population, and recognizing the significant nonmarket contributions to human well-being from natural and social capital. To do this, we need to develop better measures of progress that go well beyond GDP and begin to measure human well-being and its sustainability more directly.

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