"Examines what Cuba must do to ensure energy sustainability and self-sufficiency in order to secure its future, including advancing relationships with its neighbors, and discusses ways the island nation might seek greater cooperation with the United States in these endeavors"--Provided by publisher.

This book deals with a pivotal issue often marginalized by sociological analysis: the relationship between energy and society, with different contributions from several European scholars. The articles cover a series of topics concerning energy policies, risk communication, and sustainable development. The increasingly complex social organization emerging from the energy shifts of the last two centuries, incorporates an increasing quantity of expert knowledge. Quite paradoxically, when the expert systems seem to be realizing the dream of total control on the uncertainty of the events, any occasional accident reveals to be a check for them contributes to undermining their credibility. Following the idea of a post-democratic turn, this kind of mistrust can be considered a different face of political elites and politics in general, in the frame of a radical change concerning political culture in the last several decades. This change is clear in areas such as risk communication, governance, and energy policies.

It is beyond doubt that the interconnectedness between food, energy, water security and environmental sustainability exists and is getting amplified with increased globalization. It has been recognized that efforts to address only one part of a systemic problem by neglecting other inherently interlinked aspects may not lead to desirable and sustainable outcomes. In this perspective, policy- and decision- making requires a nexus approach that reduces trade-offs and builds synergies across sectors, and helps to reduce costs and increase benefits for humans and nature compared to independent approaches to the management of water, energy, food and the environment. In the past, work related to the Nexus has looked at the interactions between water and food or water and energy, but there has been a reluctance to bring forward a broader systematic perspective that captures the multiple sectors and resource dependencies while understanding its cost to the environment if we neglect these linkages. This book is a compilation of thirteen papers published previously as a special issue of Water International, contains significant pieces of work on the W-E-F nexus focusing on relevant tools, solutions and governance at local and broader human scales.

Since 1994, the European Conferences of Product and Process Modelling (www.ecppm.org) have provided a review of research, development and industrial implementation of product and process model technology in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facilities Management (AEC/FM) industry. Product/Building Information Modelling has matured sig

This book evaluates the impact of 20 years of urban policies in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. It argues that evaluating the fulfillment of past commitments is essential for framing and meeting the new commitments that were taken in Habitat III over the next 20 years. Taken as a whole, the book provides a critical assessment of the economic, social and environmental consequences of urban interventions during Habitat II. The country-level chapters have been written by recognized experts in urban issues, with first-hand knowledge of the Habitat process, and deep familiarity with the problems, statistics, actors and political contexts of their nations. The latter part of the volume considers wider topics such as the Habitat Commitment Index, the New Urban Agenda and the regional and global-scale lessons that can be extracted from this group of countries. Urban Policy in Latin America will be of interest to advanced students, researchers and policymakers across development economics, urban studies and Latin American studies.