Promoting Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in Small Island Developing States (SIDS)

A sustainable development path is critical to most small island developing states, which are often environmentally fragile and have little natural resources. For decades, the small Grenadine islands in the Eastern Caribbean have depended on rainwater harvesting (RWH) for water supply. The RWH systems have improved from the use of household drums and communal cisterns to individual cisterns such that water per capita use at some households is at a similar level to that of developed countries. This improvement was brought about through self-financed projects and the use of local construction know-how. A small project to promote RWH in Green St. Vincent was reviewed to procure an appreciation of the diffusion process. The RWH experiences in these islands as they relate to quality, design, and cost can be relevant to the regional efforts of promoting RWH. The chapter proposes a framework for enhancing the promotion of RWH. The chapter recognizes the importance of RWH in disaster management in the islands.

Indicators of Land Degradation Vulnerability due to Anthropic Factors

Land degradation is one of the most impacting phenomena on natural resource availability, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. In order to provide efficient tools for territorial sustainable management in areas affected by land degradation, it is important to define suitable models and indicators able to identify exposed areas and their vulnerability level, so as to provide an effective support for decision makers in identifying intervention priorities and planning mitigation/adaptation strategies. This work is focused on the evaluation at high spatial detail of land degradation vulnerability due to anthropic factors, which is a crucial issue in areas devoted to farming practices. Vulnerability is evaluated by integrating a new indicator of the mechanization level the authors recently developed, with a set of census based indicators of land management. The new indicator is independent of census data being based on land cover data; thus, it can provide a better spatial characterization and a more frequent updating compared to commonly adopted indices that are evaluated at municipal scale. By analyzing data for the whole Southern Italy, such an indicator was integrated for the first time at full spatial resolution to obtain a final vulnerability index of land management. This comprehensive index enabled a more accurate estimation of the land degradation vulnerability due to anthropic factors allowing the discrimination of priority areas within the municipal areas.

A Paradigm of Constructing Industrial Symbiosis and Coupling in China’s County-Region Economic Sustainable Development

This chapter introduces the sustainable development of county-region economy under the constraint of natural resources and environment in China when parts of classic industries along the south-eastern coast are shifting to the poorer mountain areas and middle-western areas. It argues that the county regional economic development at the stage should focus on the agricultural growing and breeding their processing sectors, natural resource exploitation and its processing, manufacturing, tourism, and ecological industrial (shift) park, according to the resource endowment. The local government should guide the scientific planning of county-region industries’ layout, structure, symbiosis, and coupling relationships. By means of environmental cost internalization, region industries’ symbiosis and coupling size, roles of social network, cultivation of innovative culture, guidance of government subsidy, pressure from public monitoring, the market mechanism, and economic incentives will play roles in resource allocation. In practice, the local government or industrial authority can design the “lack in” value chain parts and package them into some feasible and profitable projects open to the market investors, encourage firms to participate regional industrial symbiosis and coupling, and construct a complete industrial chain or network, in order to realize the integration of closed-circuit industry, higher value-added ecological agriculture, tourism and related service sectors, creative economic industrial park, urbanization, and ecological environment. This will avoid the heavy-damage from traditional industrialization and urbanization on county-regional ecological environment, and then realize the harmony development of county-regional recycle economy, society, and environment.

The Effect of Farmer Capacities, Farm Business Resources and Perceived Support of Family, Friends and Associational Networks on Intentions to Invest in Renewable Energy Ventures in the UK

The specific role of farmers and their actual or potential involvement with RE adoption and the wider community is potentially important but has not been addressed by research. This research carried out a postal survey of 2000 (response rate of 20.1%) farmers in the West Midlands region of the UK to investigate some of the factors affecting farmers’ intentions to invest in RE production and associated enterprises. Multivariate linear regressions showed that the farmer’s level of education, level of farm diversification, land tenancy status and farm business turnovers were the most important factors affecting intentions. It also emerged that perceived support of family, friends and associational networks was a significant positive influence on farmer’s investment intentions. The policy implications for these results are discussed.

Urban Environmental Applications of GIScience

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer-based systems used to store and manipulate geographical data, and perform spatial analysis. These systems serve to reveal the patterns, relationships, and anomalies, or sometimes invisible characteristics of the geographical data in various applications. While the term “GIS” indicates an object or tool, GIScience, the acronym for Geographic Information Science, covers a broader context of methodologies behind spatial data analysis. Among different application areas of GIS, “environmental monitoring and modeling” plays a significant role in the development of the very first GIS in the world-The Canada Geographic Information Systems (CGIS) in the mid-1960s. After almost 40 years of history, significant changes and challenges took place in the geographic information research agenda. This chapter will point out some of the vital tools and methods used in GIScience (including GIS, remote sensing and 3D modeling) to grasp issues of our urban environments. With recent technological advances that facilitate our understanding of the environment; it is more evident that the vision of more “livable” cities is not too far but not easy as well.

Earth Building Materials, Production, and Construction Techniques

Building materials and construction technology are strongly interrelated with the pillars for sustainable development (e.g. environment, society economy, culture and politics). Earth Building, an 11,000-year-old practice of building using sustainable and earth materials, is practiced worldwide. Earth has been used to construct walls, floors, roofs, and even furniture. Today it is estimated that between 33-50%of the world's population is housed in earth homes. This chapter reviews the two-year process of earth buildings and earth architecture carried out by the Department of Architecture Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering at National University of Malaysia (UKM). The current research emphasis is on the types, construction methods, and architectural aspects of earth buildings and earth architecture. The current manuscript compares type of earth buildings and their properties and applications based on building materials and architectural aspects in construction.

Approaches for Measuring Sustainability

The environment provides the economy with resources (e.g., water, air, fuels, food, metals, minerals, and drugs), services (e.g., the cycles of H2O, C, CO2, N, O2; photosynthesis, and soil formation), and mechanisms to absorb waste. Economic growth is based on these three services, and since the global ecosystem does not grow, economic growth cannot continue indefinitely. The concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have received much attention among policy-makers and scientists as a result of the existence of limits to growth and the dramatic environmental changes of the last decades. Sustainability integrates environmental, economic, and societal aspects. It also covers different geographical scales: ecosystems, regions, countries, and the globe. In this chapter, the authors review various models of sustainability assessment. Since there is no universally accepted definition and measuring technique of sustainability, these different models lead to different assessments. They also present a discussion of the sustainability indicators, aggregation tools, and data imputation techniques used in each approach.

Environmental Rationality

Renovating our thinking as humankind (rethinking nature, culture and development) is an imperative to approach the challenges of environmental crisis and to orient the social construction of a sustainable world. If environmental crisis is a predicament of knowledge, beyond the task of reinventing science, innovating technology and managing information, we must face the challenge of inventing new ways of thinking, organizing and acting in the world; of reorienting our ethical principles, modes of production and social practices for the construction of a sustainable civilization. Innovation for sustainability is drawn by alternative rationalities. I will argue that rationality of modernity has limited capacities to reestablish the ecological balance of the planet, while environmental rationality opens new perspectives to sustainability: the construction of a new economic paradigm based on neguentropic productivity, a politics of difference and an ethic of otherness. Paramount to this purpose is the contribution of Latin American Environmental Thinking.

Purchasing Green Transport and Logistics Services

Environmental sustainability is an area of increasing importance for third party logistics (3PL) companies. As the design and implementation of services requires interaction between buyer and 3PL, the 3PLs are in a critical position to support the efforts towards greening operations of different supply chain participants. However the literature in this field reflects a gap between the perspectives of buyers and 3PLs. This chapter attempts to fill this void through an explorative case study analysis on the environmental attitude of 3PLs in order to derive implications for buyers’ behavior. The results indicate that the buyer’s role is critical in different ways in the development of green initiatives among 3PLs. An increased orientation towards longer-term contracts and joint development would likely enhance the level of green initiatives. Indirectly, the buyer has the opportunity to influence its 3PLs through interaction with employees on different levels in the company, including top management.

The Sustainable Waterfront

This chapter discusses how a methodology for the development of a sustainable waterfront might be shaped through an understanding and consideration of environmental remediation technologies. The chapter begins by considering the history of waterfront development in Europe and America and how this model has become codified into a generic real estate process. The author develops a critique of this model from an environmental perspective. The use of sustainability as an ideology to provide a framework for critique but also strategies and techniques for moving towards a new model of waterfront development are explored. The development of a possible hypothesis for the design of a sustainable waterfront is developed, followed by a speculative case study of a waterfront project that explores how the design hypotheses might be tested. The chapter concludes by speculating on the ways in which a study of urban ecology, in particular urban biodiversity, could enhance the finding of the case study towards the development of a waterfront design process that could contribute to the ecological health of the 21st century city.